Complex Chronicles

By the spring of 2069, the last of the twenty-four Central Care Complexes had been completed. Scattered throughout that part of North America formerly known as the United States, each Complex occupied a large, highly-fortified section of what once had been a major metropolis; and all, contrary to their euphemistic names, had been established to serve but one purposethat of protecting those despots whose former political, bureaucratic and religious hide-outs could no longer be secured from the mad masses they had created. Each Complex was populated by a Director, several Deputy Directors and Charges, and as many captive Members as were able to survive the twenty hour work shifts, starvation rations and increasingly insane dictates of their overlords. Any infraction of any of the innumerable rules could meet, at the Directors discretion, with a sentence of injection or expulsion. Conditioned to fear the latter above all else, Members, given the choice, nearly always opted for a quick, relatively painless death within familiar confines, as opposed to the dreaded Outside. The compulsory indoctrination sessions which occupied most of the waking hours of the young were devoted, primarily, to demonizing human sexuality. Within the Complex, Members were forbidden to have sex with other humans, but were required to have sex, at specific intervals, with a machine--:the Master-Bator. And not too secondarily, the sessions were given to exaggerating conditions on the Outside that needed no exaggeration. Assured daily that there was no hope of survival outside the walls of the Complex, warned of the myriad tortures that would precede being eaten alive, with but a rare maverick exception, the Members docilely complied with all the Directives they could remember and settled into the weary, hungry, hobbled existence of being privileged to be enslaved. THE COMPLEX CHRONICLES, set in a not too distant future, is a Libertarians satirical dystopian extrapolation on present day society. Richard Condon said: The job of satire is to frighten and enlighten. The writer hopes she has done her job well and makes no apologies for the brutal nature of the book, except to say that she has never learned how to make future shining cities on a hill out of present dung-heaps.