The Collector

In a grim post-nuclear near-future, Garrett is wealthy entrepreneur-engineer with a penchant for collecting. His deep-dug shelter overlooking the twisted and flash-burned Golden Gate Bridge contains everything the solitary man could ever desire—closed-loop recycling and mountains of vacuum-packed supplies, tools and spare parts for his restless tinkering, his library of old-fashioned printed books, his prized firearms…and a staggeringly wide selection of erotica, along with expensive high-end roboticized love dolls that can cater to his any and every whim.

The methodical, introspective Garrett is determined to survive in this poisoned, ruined world. He has always been driven to succeed, after all, in whatever the contest has been. Yet even as he tries to busy himself in puttering in his laboratories and his archives, when his armored, radio-controlled crawler crunches through a litter of bleached bones in his remote exploration of the eerily glowing ruins of hydrogen-bombed San Francisco, it is hard, so hard, to believe that life really means anything anymore.