While searching for the USS Huxley, a starship missing for over ten years, the Enterprise stumbles across a forgotten colony of humans on a planet called Rampart - a world where fiction, speculation, and works of the imagination are considered the ultimate crime.

A survey team beams on board the Enterprise to search for "contraband" materials - and suddenly the crew find themselves plunged into the middle of a murderous civil war between a determined band of rebels and the planet's ruthless mind police. A civil war whose outcome will determine not only the future of the planet Rampart, but the life of Captain Jean-Luc Picard as well.