- When Kennex and Dorian investigate the simultaneous and sudden deaths of two genetically-enhanced - or "chrome" - children, a fatal dose of the perfect designer drug appears to be the cause. As the investigation unfolds and a recent drowning victim is mysteriously connected, the case takes an unexpected turn. Meanwhile, Kennex endures painful flashes from the past and pays a visit to the recollectionist.—Anonymous
- Out in the woods, a young girl marvels at her ability to see the world around her in graphs and mathematical equations.
Another young woman on a stage is able to see and compose music just by moving her arms through the air.
In the woods, the girl finds a bees nest but doesn't run, instead stands perfectly still as the bees swirl around her.
The music reaches a crescendo as the woman conducts, but suddenly both women collapse.
In his apartment, John wakes up from a dream about his ex-girlfriend Anna who led him into his ambush. He makes a note to himself that she had something to tell him.
Captain Maldonado calls about the two dead girls, both students at Mendel Academy.
John heads to the scene in the woods, annoyed at Dorian for telling Maldonado where he was -- after he turned off his locator chip.
They examine the girl under the bee's nest. She has giant pupils, just like Elinor, the conductor now in the morgue with Stahl.
John finds a sealed container in her pocket, but suddenly is thinking of Anna and chess pieces.
Both victims have the same container, which is only opened by their own DNA. But they're empty.
Back at the station, Maldonado tells Stahl the kids where "chromes" -- genetically engineered. She wants Stahl to talk to them, because Stahl is one of them.
The lab found an unidentified compound in their bloods -- and in the blood of Lila Hogan, a 15-year-old Mendel student who drowned five months ago.
John steps aside and thinks about his ex again. He pops a tiny red pill after his hand won't stop shaking. Dorian sees it, so, too, does Maldonado on video surveillance.
Dorian confronts John about the pills; he's required to report on John's physical state every 72 hours. John insists he needs the pills to help him remember Anna, even though they have bad side effects.
John and Dorian go talk to Lila's mother, Mrs. Hogan, who tells them her daughter wasn't genetically engineered. A PI she hired got recordings of her friends talking about being with Lila that night. The friends were Elinor Church and Scarlett Davis -- the two most recent victims.
Mrs. Hogan says she turned the recordings over to the police, but after Dorian finds no record of them, she says she was told they were accidentally erased. John finds that suspicious.
At Mendel Academy, Stahl talks to the only other "natural," who says she wasn't really friends with Lila. She can tell Stahl is a chrome and says Lila aspired to compete with the chromes.
After John arrives, two male students are evasive about drugs at the school and tell John he wouldn't understand.
Dorian finds another DNA-coded tube in Scarlett's dorm room.
Back at the station, they find the drug was designed specifically for Scarlett. It was made by a chemical printer, which are highly licensed.
Dorian finds one licensed to a man who died seven months ago, but who lived three miles from Mendel and whose son Julian Wollenberg was expelled from the school.
Dorian checks the cloud files of the chem printer and finds records of all the times it was used for Scarlett and Eleanor, dating back a year. Their most recent doses were 1,000 times stronger than normal.
As they're driving, John has another memory flash, but insists he's fine. Then he kinda blacks out and crashes the car, nearly decapitating Dorian in the process.
Dorian and John visit Julian, whose mother is elderly and non-communicative.
Julian says they got the printer for his dad when he was sick. He's twitchy and hyped up. "You don't believe me, now you see why I didn't come forward," he says.
John doesn't know what he's talking about, and Julian starts explaining that their conversation happened already and their words are in the air. Dorian can tell Julian is on the drug right now.
He says the drug "expands the mind" and "enables you to realize your full potential." Julian says he didn't mess with the doses and his machine was hacked.
John doesn't believe him. "Now you understand why I didn't come forward," Julian says, as the conversation ends up where he apparently knew it was going to.
Later, as police descend on Julian's house, John remembers a computer science student named Marshall at Mendel, who could be the hacker. He had classes with all three girls. Julian says only that "everybody knows Marshall."
John gets a text from Maldonado to talk to him after shift. He lets Dorian drive home.
At the station, they look into Marshall's background.
Stahl finds an online conversation between Scarlett and her father in which he tells her to keep quiet and he took care of "it." After that she cut off contact.
After work, John meets Maldonado for a drink. She's worried about the pills he's popping to remember and says he'll need to talk to Internal Affairs again if he's remembering.
Later, John goes to see a Recollectionist for the fifth day in a row to try to remember.
After, he heads home and takes apart the Russian nesting doll on his shelf. He pulls up his investigation notes, including something about a keynote at Oxford.
He takes the dolls to the lab and asks a tech to run a secret analysis on them.
John and Dorian visit Scarlett's father, who hologram-conferences in his attorney. When they tell him they think someone spiked the doses and the girls were murdered, he gets rid of the attorney.
He explains his daughter and Elinor took the drug with Lila the night she died, but he told Scarlett not to say anything because he didn't want her wrapped up in it. He also made sure the recordings Lila's mother got through the PI disappeared.
He mentions that Mrs. Hogan all said they'd pay for it. Mrs. Hogan never mentioned she talked to the other parents.
Paul calls John to report they found another vial in Julian's house, but it had an encrypted image stick in it.
Back at the station, John theorizes that Mrs. Hogan mom blackmailed him to overdose the other two girls. He says Lila's mom rode her really hard and she never felt good enough, but he loved her. He says he didn't want her to take the drug and it was the only thing they ever fought about.
The drug works differently for chromes and naturals. He plays Lila's video, her last words, saying she sees now that she'll never be good enough. Then she puts down the camera and walks into the water.
They play the video for her mother.
John suggests the drug didn't kill Lila, but her mother still insists it did. He asks if she hired the hacker to up the doses of those girls.
She wanted the families to feel what she felt. She goes on about what it's like to be consumed by rage and revenge, and John sees her investigation wall that's similar to his own.
Back at the station, Officer Reynolds from Internal Affairs arrives to talk to John (wearing Google Glass). They met when she rear ended up, which Reynolds suggests was an obvious set up.
"She infiltrated you, gave inSyndicate precinct files and there were consequences," he says. He suggests maybe John didn't follow procedure and has now conveniently forgotten.
John walks out.
Back home that night, John looks over his investigation into Anna but gets disgusted and clears his electronic files.
Just then, the lab tech calls -- they found a listening device in the doll and the last upload was seven hours ago.
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