Berkeley record store clerk Nick Brady (Jonathan Scarfe) begins to experience strange visions from an entity he calls VALIS that cause him to uproot his family and move to Los Angeles where he becomes a successful music company executive. With the help of best friend, science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick himself (Shea Whigam) and a mysterious woman named Silvia (Alanis Morissette), Nick finds himself drawn into a dangerous political-mystical conspiracy of cosmic proportions. The story is set in an alternate reality America circa 1985 under the authoritarian control of President Fremont, a Nixon-like clone (Scott Wilson).

A set of vipers has been taken by the scientists, and they've mutated them to make a cure for cancer, Then their experiment goes awry, and all these vipers escape into the woods, and they're not only biting people, they're actually killing people, in a little town.

At the dawn of World War 2, a Rabbi's daughter and a disenchanted German soldier fall in love and are separated by the war. They struggle on a perilous journey to find one another.