Lewis is an aspiring 12-year-old inventor at an orphanage whose inventions have been scaring off potential parents. He works all night on a machine to scan his memory to locate his mother, who abandoned him at the orphanage when he was a baby. While taking the scanner to his school’s science fair, Lewis meets 13-year-old Wilbur Robinson, a mysterious boy claiming to be a time cop from the future. Wilbur needs to recover a time machine that a man wearing a bowler hat has stolen. Lewis tries to demonstrate the scanner, but it has been sabotaged and falls apart, throwing the science fair into chaos. Lewis leaves while the Bowler Hat Guy, with the help of a robotic bowler hat named Doris, repairs and steals the scanner.
