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Cambridge University, the year 2000. Lia, 19, a graduate student, is looking for a scoop for the college newspaper when she learns of an interesting meeting - a joint scientific venture to bring a state-of-the-art Virtual Reality suit from Cal Tech in California to Cambridge to be linked up to the Z93: the biggest, super-conductive computer in the world to assist in a study of the complexities of the human brain.

Heading the American team is the suit’s designer, Dr Joshua Mathers – Lia meets Mathers at the station and there is an immediate attraction between the red-haired student and the handsome physicist. Mathers’ counterpart is Dr. Victor Neuman, the main programmer for the Z93. Neuman is also an obsessive follower of the turn-of-the-century occultist, Aleister Crowley. He has reduced Crowley’s black magic ceremonies to a series of equations and is entering them into the Z93.

Dr. Neuman realises that the Virtual Reality suit is the ideal vehicle to perform an occult union between his computer programme and the human brain. His accomplice, Dr. Oliver Haddo, a classics lecturer and part time magician is coerced into the suit to perform this union.

After a few moments in the suit, Haddo collapses to the floor as the computer floods his brain with wild, occult images. Haddo breaks loose from the suit and escapes the laboratory, a changed man. Haddo ‘becomes’ Crowley and starts to live out Crowley’s wildest fantasies. Neuman begins to suspect that Haddo may indeed be a reincarnation of the dead magician.

To consolidate his form, Haddo plans to perform Crowley’s most powerful rite. The generation of Choronzon, the power that represents the sum total of negative energy from the abyss. To perform this rite Haddo requires his blood union with a scarlet woman in the ultimate occult ceremony. – the Chemical Wedding.

Dr. Mathers realises Haddo has targeted Lia as his ‘scarlet woman’. To save her he dons the Virtual Reality suit to confront Crowley’s magic with the modern magic of science. The conflict between ancient magic and modern science is classical but its outcome is astounding as Physics meets Metaphysics in the powerful medieval ritual of the Chemical Wedding