[2][3] The story is told through a series of documents; including classified reports, censored emails, camera transcriptions, and interviews, all of which were curated for a court case against the main antagonist company, BeiTech.

[4] Illuminae is set in 2575 and is the collective story of teenage colonist Kady Grant and her boyfriend Ezra Mason, as they become refugees after becoming caught in a political crossfire.

[17] An 82-page prequel novella, Memento, was released as a pre-order bonus in the United States for the authors' subsequent unrelated novel Aurora Rising.

The two main protagonists of this book (Kady Grant and Ezra Mason) manage to escape from the planet, along with several thousand other refugees, but they are being pursued by a BeiTech warship.

In an effort to survive, they have to deal with a biological weapon, a mentally unstable AI, and military coups, and Kady strives to find the true meaning of all of this.