The Damage Patrol Quartet — Michael Smith

Four surreal stories with bizarre underpinnings and uncanny twists. Roadblock features a feckless architectural school graduate who falls in with a sixteen-year-old's dubious trucking venture to the rural south, only to confront mystical construction strikers. In Randy and Laura, drug-addled Randy bemoans his fate as a slave employee in New Fascist Australia, working a gas station night-shift with Laura, who longs to escape both his insane delusions and a trauma Randy isn't equipped to understand. Perpetual Starlit Night explores an archeologist's arrival on a tiny artificial gravity platform in deep space to give a scholarly lecture to barbarian colonists who declare her a criminal like themselves. Finally, Damage Patrol describes how the Conscious Reach Corporation proposes to cure an entire city's mental illness, one tormented soul at a time.