Dr. Emma Porlock and her colleagues, attempting to unlock the secrets of human memory for the Masdon drug empire, get a cryogenically stored 400-year-old human head to project its memories through virtual reality displays. But Porlock and her team are chronically under-funded, and she may have to go around Masdon to a media sleaze merchant to get the money she needs to maintain the project. But an even more complex world of secret police, RON (Reality-Or-Nothing) riots, and murder is going on outside the lab. And the deeper Porlock goes into the frozen memories of the writer Daniel Feeld, the more twisted the labyrinth of intrigue becomes.

Writer Daniel Feeld, first seen in Dennis Potter's Karaoke, returns three centuries later as a disembodied head. While technology has advanced in the 24th Century, global corporate control has brought about an austere, antiseptic way of life. In the year 2368, the terrorist organization RON (Reality or Nothing), seeks a return to the tranquility of earlier times. At the Masdon Science Center, a team of scientists led by Emma Porlock succeeds in extracting memories from Feeld's cryogenically preserved head - memories which are, in fact, scenes from Karaoke. Aging Martina Masdon, the tyrannical owner of the Science Center, and international media mogul David Siltz see the potential for the commercial exploitation of Feeld's memories. As Siltz puts it, "Who would want made-up stories from a hack when you can mainline into the real thing? At last, privacy has a true market value."