In the year 2154, Henry VIII, dead for over five centuries, sits on a television stage in San Francisco talking about his life to Robert Delacroix, a real live interviewer. Henry is the first of several fascinating historical characters created from information fed to a mysterious machine called MONTY. Its ability to process the information is not fully understood by the inventors, but the result is an apparently real person who can talk, think, laugh, scream invective, and pound the walls of the cubicle enclosing it. At the end of each interview, the subject returns to MONTY as digital information, and Robert returns to the real world and his own struggles with life. Once a month, he mounts the stage for another interview. Then, suddenly, the world changes. The action moves from San Francisco to Asia, as the story veers in a different direction.