Tyranny is about a young artist and mathematician, Daniel McCarthy, who, after volunteering in a brain mapping experiment, begins seeing puzzling images he believes are visions of future events. Several years of repeated experiments cause his wife to leave him as he decends further into a maddening obsession to fit together pieces of a major global crisis about to occur. Eleven years and many crises later, he travels across the globe, leading a group of revolutionaries, known as the Strawman Underground, on a mission to out-maneuver the conspirators before they gain total control of the people.