The story is told in a form of multiple interview monologues that take place in different parts of the world in present day. Each chapter (28 in total) is a POV of a certain character from Russia – all of whom do their best to speak English to the interviewer. Some just tell their side of a story once and some – are given a chance to explain more, in numerous chapters. Characters sometimes contradict each other’s visions of past events and tell them as they’ve unfolded.

Dima is a struggling 35-year-old man who lives in Moscow and balances between low-paid jobs while his wife, Vika, is soon to give birth to their first child. Dima has no particular skills, only aspirations and envy towards rich people, especially his oligarch father-in-law who never helps the young family.

So, after another fruitless meeting with his rich relative, Dima turns on an Uber app to take a passenger who turns out to be an old lady that is travelling home from theatre. Only to her Dima finally confesses that he has not slept for more than a week and still feels good, physically even better then before. That very same lady askes Dima to change the route and lures him into a secluded area, lying that her son would pick her up. There, she attacks the driver and after a surprisingly long fight she is motionless, while her “son” begs Dima on the phone to wait for his arrival.

Dima runs away, but witnesses how the old lady is taken away by a group of trained men. He is struggling to cope with unfolding events and keeps his fears and uncertainty to himself. But slowly curiosity and survival instinct kick in and Dima starts looking into strange circumstances that surround him. This is how he figures out that his birthmark resembles a logo of a kindergarten in suburbs. There, he is once again attacked, this time by a group of misfits who also claim to be sleepless.

Slowly he gets to know them all – a leader Inga, her side-kick MMA fighter Sasha, older man who goes by the name “Ded” and Olga, an IT-girl that is in love with Inga. At first, Dima rejects help and doesn’t believe that something more than just a sequence of terrible coincidences happens to him. Even that fact that they all have same birthmarks, or rather – tags, doesn’t stop him from wondering out on his own as he is not used to trust anyone but himself. Eventually, after his father-in-law’s men try to kill him and his wife disappears – Dima comes back under the wing of a misfit group. He also tries to figure out his past and build a bridge with his absent mother that raised him alone and knows about the strange incident at the maternity home 35 years ago. This slowly leads to him figuring out what is going on. Dima is no longer escaping, as he decides to fight those people who want to capture him and torture at the lab. One of those people turns out to be his father-in-law.

Dima ends up in a mental institution in the US where he is interrogated on the account of murder of a Russian citizen with the same birthmark and with his DNA all over the body. He avoids the imprisonment and plans to return and fight those who made him sleepless. Mentally, he is a different person, he has a goal and reconciled with his mother.

The Senior Circle is the secret organization, or rather a closed group of family members, that are behind Dima’s troubles. It all started with an ambitious professor, who helmed a lab in the mid-eighties and worked on sleep deprivation program in Moscow. His main focus was on exposing individuals to a certain gas. He experimented on military personnel and later – on infants, all around the vast USSR. In mid-nineties program was closed and seemingly forgotten, but those infants, one by one, stopped sleeping, due to exposure to vapor and stage gasses, unknown triggers to scientists from the past. But along that, a few ex-military men also experienced sleep deprivation and slowly gained power in the country, becoming oligarchs and infiltrating the government. By the time when Dima stopped sleeping – they’ve brought back from obscurity the professor, organized a new lab and started looking for previous test subjects, such as Dima and his newfound friends, as a working formula was lost.

They are not a calculated evil. They make mistakes and are absorbed by vanity and thrust for power. They are vulnerable and can be defeated as they try to keep their operation under the rug – not willing to share the future success with anyone. Nonetheless, the Senior Circle have hundreds of people working for them. Some, like the lady that attacked Dima, were recruited in late nineties, on the ruins of Soviet Union from people who lost faith in the future and didn’t know how to navigate the present. They operate in plain sight, covering up with fake companies and legit businesses. They develop constantly failing tech that is supposed to extract gas from previous test subjects.

Among other characters that are given voices is Ded, who works closely with the group of sleepless people but is “normal” and betrays them when put under pressure. He wants to be respected as an elder, but he hasn’t achieved anything in his life and tries to put meaning to every tiny event. He witnesses a brutal death of one of the sleepless and takes a trip across the country with one of the executors of the Senior Circle who becomes disillusioned with the cause of the organization.

Another POV is from Olga, a bisexual woman who starts as a balanced and cautious member of a sleepless group that is in love with a group leader Inga, but slowly migrates into hatred of all pursuers that leads her on a dark path of revenge. But she has her reasons as she’s the one that goes through many physical obstacles in order to survive. Olga also tells the story of Vika, Dima’s wife, who has nothing to do with her dad’s involvement in Senior Circle, she just found another man and became pregnant by him.

The story is packed with action and also examines the unusual state of body and mind of those who can’t sleep but feel good about it, those who have extra 6 to 8 hours each day and how differently they use it. It provokes thoughts on what means be “uncommon” in the society while being chased and prosecuted for that. It also reflects and hints on present affairs that are unfolding in Russia, turning an enormous subject into a more comprehensive chain that can be digested in an entertaining form.

One of the main themes is about failed ideas that are still viciously perused by a certain powerful group that lead to unnecessary casualties. It’s about old-fashioned views on the world that collide with new ones – which are not necessarily better. And the succession that is different in words but similar in actions.