Is everything that happens around us reality or an endless dream that we see? Or maybe we ourselves are characters in someone’s dreams, puppets suspended on the strings of other people’s dreams? Then who is the puppeteer who makes us dance to his tune and changes the scenery whenever he pleases? Nonsense, someone will say. But the fate of Gennady Kalikhin, at first glance an ordinary unemployed man, one of the millions of residents of the metropolis, depends on the answers to these questions. Answering them means remembering his past, staying alive and getting out of the monstrous experiment that he himself once set up. Will it be possible?