The episode begins with Elliot saying "Hello friend", to his imaginary friend, the audience. He tells them that what he is about to say is top secret, a conspiracy about the top 1%. He thinks that they are following him. He sees two men dressed in black talking and looking at him. He thinks that they are following him because of what he did the previous night. He thinks that he should have gone to Angela's birthday party.
A flashback shows him at Ron's Coffee Shop. Elliot approaches the owner, Rohit "Ron" Mehta, who has just entered the shop. Elliot informs Ron that after observing the traffic on Ron's network, Elliot decided to hack him. Elliot discovered that Ron had been running a child p*rnography website, and had been using Tor to keep the servers anonymous. Ron seems shocked, and is noticeably shaken by the confrontation. Ron thinks that Elliot is trying to blackmail him and refuses to give any money, thinking that Elliot would keep asking for more and eventually tell the police anyway. After Elliot tells him that he has anonymously tipped off the police about Ron, Ron attempts to pay him off, but Elliot refuses by telling him that he doesn't care about money.
At the subway a man asks him what's happening, which Elliot ignores. The man then says "Exciting time in the world right now. Exciting time".
Elliot enters the Allsafe Cybersecurity offices, where he works as a cybersecurity engineer. Before he can reach his desk, Gideon Goddard calls him into his office, where Elliot meets with Angela. One of their employees, E-Corp, has been attacked again, and they are sending a group to hear exactly what happened during the attack.
After leaving the office, Angela confronts Elliot about him not going to her birthday party, saying that he promised he would try to. A flashback shows Elliot at the door of the location of her birthday party, but then Angela brings him back, saying "Stop thinking about something else when I'm talking to you". Eventually the conversation deescalates when Ollie appears, and Elliot leaves them.
At his therapist's office, Elliot tells his imaginary friend on how easy it is to hack Krista. He discovers that she is divorced, looking for a partner online, and is currently dating Michael Hensen, who Elliot finds little about. She asks him "What is it about society that disappoints you so much?" and Elliot explains, though only in his head, his anti-capitalism views and how he thinks that social media, celebrities and movies are mostly a method of sedation. After sitting quiet for a while, Elliot tells her not to be frustrated, because she at least understands what it's like to feel alone, that she wants to protect people from it and that's what he respects about her. When Krista asks him why he thinks she understands (since he discovered it by hacking her), he says that he doesn't know how.
Back at Allsafe, Ollie asks Elliot if he wants to have lunch with him. Elliot tells him that he already has plans. Ollie tries to tell Elliot that he feels things have been awkward between them, and that he wants them to get along. Elliot simultaneously tells his imaginary friend about Ollie: amongst his Facebook likes, Elliot finds George W Bush's Decision Points, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and the music of Josh Groban. Elliot thinks that that's enough not to like Ollie, but then adds that after hacking Ollie he found that Ollie had cheated on Angela multiple times with Stella B. Elliot says that he thought about telling Angela about this but he is not ready to see what "comes after". Back in their conversation, Ollie says that he likes Elliot and wants him to like him too. Elliot responds that he will try harder.
Elliot thinks that he shouldn't really hate Ollie, because he is not that bad, he is, rather, too dumb to be bad. Elliot says that when he thinks about the really bad people. That's when people from E-Corp arrive, he thinks about "Evil Corp". This is how Elliot has "reprogrammed" his mind to hear, see or read their name when they appear.
After E-Corp staff pass by him, Elliot thinks that Terry Colby, E-Corp's CTO (Chief Technology Officer) is a moron, an arrogant moron and unqualified for his job, using a Blackberry as his phone. Here Tyrell Wellick meets Elliot. He notices Elliot's use of Gnome, a desktop environment for Linux. Tyrell says that personally he uses another, KDE, what might seem unusual since he is an executive, but as he says "old habits, they die hard". He leaves Elliot after saying that "it's gonna be fun working with you".
After work, at Elliot's apartment, we learn that he's depressed and uses morphine to handle his life. He says that he keeps his usage lower than 30 mg (milligrams) per day while taking suboxone, a drug for patients on withdrawal or used for treating opiate addiction. He notices his stock of the latter has ended and calls his next-door neighbor Shayla for more. She offers it for free but he refuses. She asks if he wants to do molly (ecstasy) with him and the next scene shows them naked in bed, Shayla sleeping and he smoking. He gets an alert from Krista's Instagram that she is in Pierre Loti with Michael.
He finds Michael's address by using social engineering on the taxi company, saying that he forgot his keys in a car. While he watches Michael and Krista from afar, he sees the men in black watching him from a table across the street. When Michael leaves, the man from the subway comes to the table where the men in black are sitting and asks for any spare change. When Elliot eventually meets with Michael, he asks him for his phone to "call his mother", when he actually calls himself to get Michael's number. Then, Elliot quickly deletes his number from Michael's call log.
He gets a call from Angela asking him to go to Allsafe because of what appeared to be just a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against E-Corp. Elliot arrives there and finds out, that the servers are infected with a malicious software that can do practically anything on the servers by that point. Elliot says, that the only way to fix it would be to shut down the servers, clean the infection, and turn them back up.
Gideon and Elliot fly to the Dulles server farm to clean the infection. Elliot starts to examine the infected server and then identifies a file labeled fsociety00.dat, along with a text file (readme.txt) reading "LEAVE ME HERE" referring to the malware, the dat file, or both. Elliot says to himself that he's going to shut them down anyway, but then, he hesitates, he asks himself "What's wrong with me", and enters "N" to cancel the deletion. He stopped the hack by reconfiguring the access to the "root directory" (main, head folder), so only he can use it. Elliot is sure that "No one will know".
After leaving the server farm, at the plane, Gideon reveals to Elliot that he is gay, saying that even though he doesn't like to talk about his sex life, his partner wants him to be more open about it. Gideon seems stressed about the hacks so Elliot tells him not to worry, and explains, that hackers have short attention spans and will eventually harass someone else. Gideon feels that his company would have to go out of business if E-Corp left them. Elliot promises that he will find the hackers.
At the subway, the mysterious man from before sits in front of Elliot. His jacket has a marking with "Mr. Robot" written on it. He says that Elliot should come with him, but only if he didn't delete "it", referring to the hack. On the station, the man tells Elliot about his father who was a thief, got arrested, and died five years later. He thought that his father was free by stealing but actually he was in a "prison", just like Elliot is now, he says. The man is confident he will break Elliot out. They go to Coney Island where "Mr. Robot" shows him the other hackers on his team but does not disclose the plan.
Elliot goes home by himself and meets Angela at his door. She invites him to get high and watch Elliot's favorite movie Back to the Future II. When they went inside, they found Shayla still sleeping naked in his bed. Angela leaves irritated and Elliot tells Shayla to leave as well. Elliot tries to find information about fsociety and Mr. Robot but finds very little. He then puts all of the found data in a white envelope as evidence for Gideon and E-Corp. Elliot goes to Coney Island and talks with Mr. Robot again. He tells Elliot that their plan is to destroy E-Corp's databases so that they can erase most of the world's consumer debt. Mr. Robot tells him to put Terry Colby's IP address on the .dat file to make him appear responsible for the hacks. At home Elliot researches the effects of debts and decides to create another envelope, a blue one, which then he puts in a backpack with the white one.
At Allsafe, Elliot meets with Angela, Gideon, the executives from E-Corp and agents from the FBI. He places the white envelope at the table. After Colby treats Angela rudely, Elliot changes the white envelope for the blue one, in which Tyrell notices and gives it to the FBI, saying that with that they can find whomever is guilty of the hacks. 19 days pass and there is still no news from the FBI. The team from fsociety are not in the Coney arcade anymore. He decides to continue his attempt of hacking Michael Hansen but again it results in nothing. He realizes that this isn't his real name. In the next scene Elliot confronts Michael saying that he learned that he cheated on his wife with 7 different women and that he has proof of this. He demands that Michael breaks up with Krista and tell her the truth, otherwise he will tell everything his wife and the police, for one of the women was 15 (though Elliot explains to his "friend" that this last part was a lie). Michael agrees and Elliot asks also for his dog to help him with his loneliness.
In his next meeting with Krista he can see that she has been crying and that this must be because Michael told her the truth and broke up with her. Elliot meets with Angela and while they are talking, there is a newsbreak about Terry Colby's arrest for his supposed involvement with the hacks. While Elliot cheers outside, some men dressed in black tell him to get into their car and take him to a conference room. There he sees Tyrell Wellick, who is accompanied by other business man. They look like the one percent of the top one percent, what scares Elliot. Tyrell greets him with "Bonsoir, Elliot" (good evening, Elliot).
Elliot asks his imaginary friend "Please tell me you're seeing this too".
