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 Mulder
and Scully have 24 hours to save Assistant Director Skinner from being killed -
but in order to do so, they must determine who wants him dead, and why.
A man is rushed into the emergency room near death. One
of the doctors tells the nurse to call Agent Scully because the
sick man works for the FBI. We assume that it is Agent Mulder;
only to find, however, that it is actually Assistant Director
Skinner.
Flashback twenty-four hours. Agent Mulder
finds A.D. Skinner in his office, not feeling well. He calls in
Scully who posits that Skinner may have been poisoned. When asked
to recall if anything out of the ordinary happened in his day,
Skinner remembers that a renowned physicist named Kenneth Orgel
stopped him in the hallway earlier in the day. Mulder and Skinner
pay a visit to Orgel, only to find him in the process of being
kidnapped. The kidnappers get away with Orgel; Mulder captures
one of the fleeing bad guys, but must release him when he
discovers that the man is a Tunisian with diplomatic immunity.
Scully, in the meantime, examines a vial of Skinner's blood. Upon
close levels of magnification, she finds miniscule foreign bodies that
seem to multiply uniformly and rapidly. These specks are forming
dams in Skinner's veins, cutting off his blood flow and building
a heart attack.
Mulder rifes
through Orgel's house and finds a connection to Senator Matheson.
Paying the Senator a visit, he finds out about Senate Resolution
819 - a health bill which will supply medical technology for
third world countries. Ripping apart Skinner's office, Mulder finds that
Skinner was doing a security check on the resolution and that,
somehow, his connection to the resolution is what got him poisoned.
He confronts Senator Matheson again and finds out that
nanotechnology - microscopic atom-sized machines that had been
previously thought of as only theoretical -- have been injected into
Skinner and someone is programming them to kill him.
Meanwhile, Skinner lies on a hospital bed, his pulse flatlines. The
orderly calls time of death. Moments later, Skinner gasps and comes
back to life. Weeks later, Scully reports that whatever infected
Skinner has gone into remission. Mulder asks for permission to
continue the investigation but Skinner closes the case.
At day's end, Skinner heads for his car. In the backseat, he
finds the man who had been driving the nanotechnology atoms -
Krycek. Krycek glares at Skinner - he's got Skinner under his
thumb and intends to keep him there.
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