When Madeline's shuttle gets caught in a gravitationally-generated temporal anomaly, she is transported hundreds of years in the future... a future, it turns out, that only the intelligent machines are "alive" to experience. And now Madeline too, which is kind of unfortunate, because the machines now want to have her stand trial for all the terrible things that humanity has done. Or, to be more precise, to stand trial for all the terrible things that the woefully misled machines think humanity did.