In the near future, a young computer programmer finds her mother's body sprawled on the kitchen floor in Queens. Her unusual journey through grief begins when she decides to translate an old Tamil manuscript about a group of female medical students, surviving a drought at the edge of war, as they endeavor to save their town--and the world--through a vision of radical compassion. In the process, her story and the manuscript start to become entangled.

Living in a world powered by artificially intelligent systems--autonomous cars, carbon-footprint monitoring--where entertainment has merged with the military in the form of a popular reality TV show, she must question her own moral compass and ideas about goodness when she's faced with the arrival of a houseless veteran, a strange AI project at work, and the return of a childhood friend she hasn't spoken to in almost a decade. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world?