The Programmed People

The Hive appears perfect: clean, ordered, serene. The citizens vote, attend Temple Services, and live in comfortable ignorance. But the Brain that truly rules them has scrubbed history clean, replaced it with lies, and built a society where conformity is survival. No one asks questions. No one remembers what came before. Lloyd Bodger has never questioned anything either, until a fugitive named Andra Corby forces her way into his life during a Temple Service. She's part of the resistance, and she carries a dangerous truth: the world before the Hive, the real history of humanity, the fact that their perfect society is a prison. Now Lloyd must choose between the comfortable lie he's always lived in and a dangerous truth that could get them both killed. This is Cold War paranoia rendered as pulp: a world where even private thoughts are not safe, where the state controls not just what you do but what you believe. Sharkey writes with the urgency of a man certain that conformity is a slow death.