In 1816, Mary Shelley created a monster on the shores of Lake Geneva. Two hundred years later and a mile and a half away on the other side of that same lake, a team of neuroscientists at Project Cerebrum create a perfect electronic replica of the human brain. This juxtaposition of two realities sets in motion a switchback ride between fiction and fact as the past intersects with the present. After the original Cerebrum director dies in a skiing accident, neurobiologist Hana Robinson receives a surprise invitation from the director's successor to collaborate with him on a top-secret project to heal brain-damaged U.S. war veterans. Hana soon begins to suspect that their work is a cover for something more sinister. With the aid of her former lover, a journalist in Washington D.C., and the grieving widow of the deceased director, she eventually stumbles on a connection between what is going on at Cerebrum and what was really going on in Shelley's masterpiece when she learns of the astounding secret the author had divulged on her deathbed. As Hana and her companions delve deeper into these two intertwined worlds and more people associated with Cerebrum die by apparent accident, their own lives are put in jeopardy when they finally discover what the person who is actually pulling the strings at Cerebrum has been planning all along.