Astrophysicist Ainsley Grace has teamed up with her mother's former colleague at MIT to finish Project Cosmic Company, which her mother had been working on when she died. She gets an opportunity to pay off her mountain of college debt by writing stock-trading codes for a high-frequency trading firm, writing algorithms to make sure her firm's supercomputers are faster than any others on Wall Street. The difference between making a billion and losing a billion dollars could be less than a nanosecond. When Ainsley is framed and indicted for stealing Wall Street trade secrets, her personal life, her career dreams, and even her groundbreaking research at MIT are turned upside down.