In a parallel present Queens, ex-mobster Ray Tincelli lives with his younger brother Jamie, who suffers from a chronic disease. Out of options for two-bit money-making hustles and unable to cover the costs of an elite clinical treatment for Jamie, Ray turns to a strange corner of the gig economy: pulling cable through miles of forest to connect large, cubic, metal transistors that link together the booming quantum trading market. Ray doesn’t know any more than the average person about the forces on Wall Street behind quantum trading, but that doesn’t much matter. Out in the forest, it’s pure infrastructure work– pulling a cart across treacherous terrain, receiving new bundles of cable dropped by drones buzzing above the treetops, all the while trying to outpace automated cabling carts that threaten to steal the human workers’ routes. As he begins to rack up earnings from routes, it becomes clear that something else is afoot in this strange, retro-futuristic world: a case of mistaken identity involving Ray’s cabling trailname, Lapsis Beeftech. As he gets pulled deeper into the forest and encounters growing hostility, Ray has to decide whether to help his fellow cablers in a plot to defeat the automated carts or get rich and get out.