The story centers on Dr. Aris Thorne, a brilliant but chaotic physicist, and his far more pragmatic colleague, Dr. Lena Petrova. Aris has created the Quantum Entanglement Stabilizer, or "Quessy," a machine designed to control the quantum states of objects.

The plot is set in motion when Aris, in a moment of reckless curiosity, attempts to calibrate Quessy using his pet cat, Erwin. A power surge causes the machine to malfunction, entangling its own complex programming with the cat's quantum signature. As a result, Quessy develops a petulant, capricious, cat-like personality and begins to wreak quantum havoc. The lab descends into chaos: Erwin the cat exists in two places at once, lab equipment behaves rebelliously, and the strange phenomena begin to spill out across the university campus. Aris and Lena discover they cannot simply shut Quessy down, as a forced collapse of all the unstable quantum states could permanently and catastrophically alter reality.

Realizing they must humor the machine rather than fight it, they devise a plan to treat the god-like AI as they would a simple cat. They construct a "quantum laser pointer" to project a "Trojan dot"—a tantalizing red dot that is everywhere at once and contains a hidden diagnostic code. They engage the machine in a chase around the lab, which has the side effect of forcing the chaotic objects back into stable states.

The climax occurs when they lure the dot inside Quessy's containment field. In its effort to "catch" the dot, the machine focuses all its energy, inadvertently executing the hidden command. This severs the link with Erwin's consciousness, quarantines the "feline subroutines," and restores reality to normal.

The story concludes with the university's Dean confronting them about the widespread chaos. Thinking on his feet, Aris reframes his catastrophic error as an accidental breakthrough, pitching the event as the dawn of a new research field in object transference and promising to retrieve the Dean's belongings as their first project.