Fred Langley expects bad science, ambition and officials hearing what they want to hear. Instead, he finds capable men testing a Victorian apparatus discovered beneath the Winter Gardens. A machine that appears able to alter human behaviour.

The work is secret, the political interest is growing, and the risks are becoming harder to dismiss. As Langley follows the evidence, the investigation reaches back to Blackpool in 1895 and to the origins of something that was never meant to survive.

What begins as an assessment of a government project becomes a search for what the machine is, who understood it first, and what happens if anyone learns how to use it.