In the year 2018 A.D., Dr. John Denniel (Jeff Wincott) is a geneticist who is persuaded by Lt. Anna Pontaine (Maria Ford) to help with a government study of extraterrestrial viruses to be brought back to Earth on an upcoming space probe. John and Anna find their feelings are moving beyond professional courtesy, and they marry and are soon expecting a child. Their happiness is cut short when they receive word that the space probe has fallen out of orbit, crash landing in Africa while carrying a virus that could possibly kill billions of people. After Anna suffers a miscarriage, she becomes obsessively protective of a set of human embryos John has created, which have been engineered to be resistant to the virus; she wants to see them brought to term, while John wants to use them to create a vaccine that could save lives as the virus spreads. Meanwhile, John discovers the crash of the space probe was rigged by General Wallace (Stacy Keach), a psychotic racist who wants to wipe out humanity so he and his associates can repopulate the earth as a purely Aryan planet; John also finds Wallace has plans of his own for the embryos.