You know how it is. One minute you’re happily cracking the problem of how to predict nematode worm behaviour, the next minute you’re being whisked off to the ultra-secret lair of your billionaire employer’s quantum computing firm and being shown technological possibilities so destabilising to everything on which you and humanity depend for life and sanity that you have to rush to the nearest futuristically designed loo as all your organs rebel. We’ve all been there.

And now, so has the brilliant Russian coder Sergei (Karl Glusman) in Devs (BBC Two). He is an artificial intelligence specialist working for Amaya – a fictional amalgamation of all the tech companies whose overt and covert tentacular reach currently control our lives to a degree that would terrify us if we could bear to think about it. After his nematodal success, he is recruited by the company’s enigmatic, all-powerful founder and CEO Forrest (Nick Offerman, putting his enormous, ambiguous presence and capacity for stillness to terrifying rather than comedic use this time). Sergei is a touch apprehensive about the move, but his girlfriend, Lily, is delighted for him. Sergei’s attitude turns out to be the wiser one.

So horrified is he by what he learns on his first day of the job that he attempts to leave with evidence of what he has seen in order to blow the whistle. Alas, he proves no match for the state-of-the-art surveillance with which Amaya’s inner sanctum has been laced and he is killed by Forrest’s right-hand man, Kenton (Zach Grenier, perhaps best known in the UK as the brilliantly unregenerate lawyer David Lee in The Good Wife). Lily is shown CCTV footage of her boyfriend self-immolating at the foot of the (sidebar – extraordinarily kitsch) commemorative statue of Forrest’s dead daughter, after whom the company is named. But Sergei’s lack of any kind of suicidal ideation before he disappeared and a suspicious locked app on his phone starts her off on a quest to discover What Really Happened. The game – replete with hackers, retro Russian handlers, icily malevolent blondes, hand-to-hand combat between opposing sides in underground car parks, questions of free will in deterministic universes and much more – is afoot.