This Perfect Day

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

The book follows the struggles of Li RM35M4419 (or Chip, as he likes to call himself) to free himself from this tightly programmed and controlled world, in which all the inhabitants are genetically engineered and drugged into a calm state of mind.

It is set in a seemingly perfect global society whose genesis remains vague ("Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei led us to this perfect day" is what schoolchildren have to chant).

The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp which has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they can never realize their potential as free agents[?]. They are told where to live, what to eat and which job to take.

Everyone wears a bracelet with a scanner which tells them where they are allowed to go and what they are allowed to do. At 65, they receive a lethal injection.

Even opposition against such a life by those few who happen to be resistant to the drug and who consequently wake up to a day which for them turns out to be anything but perfect is dealt with by the programmers of UniComp who, in their underground hideaway, constitute the world government. Their ideology seems to be basically communist.

See also: World government

I was going to contrast this book to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and to Frank Tipler[?]'s "Omega Point Theory[?]", then I realized that it was too long ago when I had read the first, and I have yet to read the latter.