During the First World War, on a small university campus in the Midwest, the Army initiates a secret project to develop a machine to compute the precise trajectories of artillery shells. Three professors - Alan Fendick in agricultural engineering, Oona Houellebecq in mathematics and Leslie Ford in physics are recruited for the task. But then the machine does something unexpected and the experiment abruptly ends. Was the machine a failure? Or was the problem with the humans who built it?