In the near future, a man helps a woman named Lise upload her mind to the internet. She is effectively both dead and immortal, and has no need for money. Since they also produced an album together, he gets a large cut of the royalties. The man's father was also an audio engineer in the past, working with vinyl records. One of the man's best friends is named Rubin, a fellow producer who makes eclectic art and music machines, but doesn't consider himself an artist so much as a person just messing around. Rubin tells the man that Lise will call him, even though she's dead, soon enough.

The man first met Lise at one of Rubin's many extravagant parties. She was a cyborg and when he ignored her the first time they saw each other, she got mad and pressured him into taking her home. There they both connect into her dreams, using his sound mixing technology to do so. Jacking into dreams is a common enough practice, and most artists will take theirs out of their bodies and send along more polished versions to engineers like the protagonist to edit so they can sell the experience to people. But the protagonist had never jacked directly into someone else's dreams before, and the raw emotion of it was overwhelming. He makes a commercial cut of Lise's experience a few weeks later and shows it to his boss who loves it. They find some agents they can trust who will represent Lise and begin working on a full album/experience.

It is one of the best things ever created. The protagonist muses about how many artists there may have been over the centuries who were limited by disability or technological limitations of the times but had the artistry deep inside their psyches.

Lise begins to die due to her addiction to something called wizz and her chronic illness that put her in an exoskeleton since birth. The protagonist is confused about his feelings, but knows Lise only has rage for his pity. Rubin tries to talk the protagonist into going with him to Frankfurt for a vacation, since he definitely has the money after his cut of the royalties from Lise's album. And especially because, as Lise is the first person to be uploaded to the internet, she needs a lot more money to afford the space on her label's network so she'll be sending her editor, the protagonist, her next album which will be coming soon. And Rubin doesn't think the protagonist will be ready to handle it.