V.I.R.U.S. agents Val Siouxx and Levis Coak are desperate to develop a narrative that will keep their clandestine organization in lock-step with the American zeitgeist. In 1964, the spooks track down hermetic newbie novelist Thomas Ruggles Pynchon to his Mexico footlocker hideout to coerce him into writing a burn-book about Vito Paulekas, the Cold War-era F.B.I. asset-gone-rogue-turned-artist who has raised and radicalized a loyal troupe of dancing Freaks in his Hollywood, CA, basement studio. So, like, what gives, man? Will Pynchon accept the federal freelance gig? Will the paranoid pothead unearth the plot points connecting the Freak King to Tinsel Town, Theosophy, and the Black Dahlia/Manson Family/Zodiac Killer psyops?