Mr. Zero, an unremarkable office clerk who has spent twenty-five years mechanically adding up numbers, is dismissed when he is replaced by an adding machine. In a fit of rage, he murders his boss and is sentenced to death. In the afterlife, he encounters his colleague Daisy, who took her own life because of her unrequited love for him, and they arrive in a heavenly garden filled with freedom and beauty. Zero, however, cannot live in such freedom. Obsessively returning to his old habits, he finds himself operating a giant adding machine even in heaven. In the end, he discovers that his soul has been recycled and sent back to Earth countless times, condemned to repeat the same alienated cycle because it is incapable of becoming anything better.