In the future, after a Third World War has decimated much of the Earth's population, a new nation arose. Believing human emotions and their expression were to blame for the failings of past societies, it is decreed that all citizens must take a daily dose of a drug which levels out the emotional landscape, and that all forms of creative expression are against the law. An elite law enforcement officer who tracks down and punishes "sense offenders" one day, accidentally, fails to take his drug, and for the first time begins experiencing emotions himself.