Jonny is a prosthetics and SFX expert working in undertainment, the stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap television companies catering to the insatiable desires of the masses. Her job has been to make the extras, to save production companies money by filling crowds with mechanical heads and torsos, lifelike but not alive. Jonny is good at it, has made a name for herself. But she’s always wanted more, for her creations to be in the limelight, for her name to be accorded sufficient respect.

So, with the help of her lifelong friend Ted she builds Andle; from the ground-up a revolutionary design of android that can act as well as any human. Better, Jonny thinks. They teach it to walk, to talk, to laugh and to cry. Sometimes, it even sends Ted private messages.

They sell Andle to Omni-Opium, a film studio specialising in gaudy films and pornography. The two are torn, their relationship tense. Andle was like a child to Ted, but Jonny wants the money, the prestige, and besides the producer at Om-Op promised to respect her invention.

With the ability to be programmed to believe every role it plays, Andle is a breakout success, and Jonny can see the accolades on the horizon. But when Andle starts to get mistreated by its new owners, and the messages Ted gets only get more bizarre, Jonny finds that she cares far more about it than she’d believed.

As Jonny and strives to regain control over Andle, she discovers that she might have made a terrible mistake in creating it in the first place. Because there is a truth at the heart of Andle, one that even Ted doesn’t know, a truth that shows how far Jonny is willing to go to see her name in lights.