The villainous software magnate here is Bill Gates clone Gary Winston, whose company, N.U.R.V., is developing a global satellite-communications system called SYNAPSE. SYNAPSE will merge the public's use of TVs, telephones, PCs, and other devices — and make N.U.R.V. a gazillion dollars in the process. Winston is a man of charm, power and paranoia. "Anybody working in a garage can put us out of business," he frets, and he's right.  In order to discourage his competitors, Winston has announced a release date for his new software while it is still being written--details like this are why the company seems a whole lot like Microsoft--and the mogul is therefore eager to recruit revolutionary programmers for the project.

Award-winners Milo Hoffman and his best friend Teddy Chin are just the wide-eyed garage-geeks who can provide the necessary software breakthrough. Winston invites them up for a tour of his company's campus in the Pacific Northwest. Teddy declines: he hates the mega-corporation and believes code should be freely distributed as open source or shareware. Milo accepts, and before he leaves, is visited by an agent from the Justice Department who is preparing an antitrust case against Winston. "If you see something up there that hits you the wrong way, do the right thing," the agent says, offering Milo--who stands on the brink of untold millions--a salary much higher than you can earn at McDonald's. Unfazed, Milo packs up with his artist girlfriend, Alice, heads for Oregon, and eagerly enters the professional world of cutting-edge software development.

Milo gets a tour of Winston's palatial high-tech lakeside home, which even includes computers that sense when you're in a room and play your favorite music while displaying your favorite art on the digital wall screens. "Bill Gates has a system like this," says Milo, just as we were thinking the exact same words. "Bill who?" says Winston. "His is primitive."  He is then shown around the software campus by cool young software dudes and a sexy software babe named Lisa, whose vibe suggests she likes him.

The loyal and steadfast Alice smells a rat in Lisa. And sure enough, the little software vixen gets her talons in Milo and begins to seduce him away from Lisa. But Milo is flattered by all the personal attention he gets from Winston, a friendly charmer who has a habit of dropping around even in the middle of the night. And whenever Milo is stuck, Winston hands him a disc with some code on it that "might help".  However, Milo's naïve devotion turns into suspicion after the coincidental deaths of several gifted software programmers--including Teddy--and damning evidence turns up suggesting that Gary is willing to do whatever it takes to make his optimistically scheduled launch date.

The team behind Antitrust went to some pricey lengths to construct both the N.U.R.V. office environment and that of an immeasurably wealthy tycoon like Winston. The N.U.R.V. campus features the industrial-meets-excess interior design sensibility so common to moneyed tech companies, with bank-breaking workstations and desktops full of electronic toys. Winston's modern lakeside castle is both costly and minimal in its style; the custom-made Dale Chihuly glass sculpture alone must have been a $30,000 prop.