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When a group of rebels convicted as terrorists escapes execution by fleeing from the year 2077 to 2012, Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols), a future Vancouver law enforcement officer (called Protector), is involuntarily transported with them. In order to track them down and keep them from changing the past (and presumably future), Kiera joins the Vancouver Police Department and uses the skills of a young tech expert, Alec Sadler (Erik Knudsen). The future of 2077 is a dystopian one in which world governments have collapsed and corporations now dominate the planet, instituting a high-surveillance police state and removing many basic social freedoms. The moral dilemma this presents is that the group of eight from 2077 (who call themselves "Liber8"), while self-admittedly having killed tens of thousands of people as collateral, consider themselves to be freedom fighters against the Orwellian corporate regime that dominates their time.
After Kiera goes back in time, she finds that she can communicate with a young Alec Sadler using the wireless technology that Sadler became famous for inventing in her time. However, in sixty years' time, an elderly Alec Sadler is actually the head of the mega-corporation Sadtech, whose technology may (inadvertently or otherwise) have been used to send Kiera and the others back in time. Young Alec points out that there are essentially two possibilities. The first is that this is a time loop, and elderly Alec in 2077 had already met Kiera, remembered everything they did together, and was possibly even inspired to create cybernetic technology from encountering "his" future work in her implants. In this case, nothing can be changed, and the mega-corporations will still dominate the planet in 2077. The second possibility is that the time travel of the terrorists and Kiera has altered the pre-existing timeline, and due to their intervention it is no longer certain what 2077 will be like. The first possibility more closely matches the fact that the 2077 version of Alec Sadler was the only witness to the escape of the Liber8 who seemed totally unsurprised as events unfolded early in episode one. In episode ten, we discover more evidence that the first possibility is indeed correct: Sadler knew precisely what would happen in 2077 and purposefully sent both Kiera and Liber8 back in time, for reasons yet unknown.
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