This novel is something like PARANOIA without the laughs. Its setting is in the Hive, an indestructible city with 10 million inhabitants: they also happen to be the only people on Earth.

The Hive is maintained by the Brain, a super-computer one cubic mile in size: its human agents are the Prime and Secondary Speaksters. They're served by a "police force" of a foot-tall robots called "Goons" (officially known as "Government Opposers of Neutrality").

The people of the Hive refer to themselves as the Kinsmen, and they carry Voteplates for instant identification. Voting is a very important activity in the Hive: a Kinsman is allowed to miss 3 Votes very 91 days, but a fourth non-vote within that period is cause for "Readjustment."

The Kinsmen are also devoutly religious: there are 10 Temple Days per quarter year, but each citizen has only one mandatory service to attend to during those 91 days. Of course, religion in the Hive is just more patriotic propaganda.

On a superficial level, the Hive is a democracy, but it's more like a dictatorship with Darwinist principles: "Readjustment" is nothing more than cremation, the standard procedure for dealing with injury and disease (the only real hospitalization and medical care avaiiable to Kinsmen is for childbirth).

As you might imagine, the Kinsmen lead highly regulated lives: to avoid traffic congestion, each person is assigned streets for walking or the proper bus to catch (while theatres and restaurants must be used on a reservation basis).

Readjustment is also the penalty for a "wrong" Vote (i.e. against the interests of the Prime Speaker). In the Hive, marriage is mandatory by the age of 25 and the draft age is about to be lowered to 15 (even though there's no one left to fight with, the Prime Speaker has declared that the Hive is at war). The draft still exists because most Kinsmen believe in the existence of other Hives.

While ULTIMATUM.... seems like it may have partially inspired PARANOIA, the Hive itself might be a more appropriate campaign setting for either generic or SF RPG systems: GURPS, the HERO System, TORG, RIFTS, et al.

ULTIMATUM IN 2050 A.D. was originally released as an ACE Double: the other novel was OUR MAN IN SPACE by Bruce W. Ronald, which could be useful reading for any GM who'd like to run an espionage campaign within an SF game.

On a more critical note, certain dated references within ULTIMATUM... provide some unintentional humor: for instance, Kansas City was destroyed by lightning in 1987.

And of course, by now we all know that computers have gotten more powerful by growing smaller: the Brain wouldn't necessarily have to be that large anymore.

Day/night cycles within the Hive are simulated through the use of "Light-of-Day" and "Ultrablack" other technological innovations include Proposition Screens (neon billboards which list the current issue), Snapper Beams (lethal neuro-weapons wielded by Goons), Feargas, Speaksters (robotic priests), and Tourgryps for restricted air travel beyond the Hive).

Readjustment is a death penalty because there's only so much room within the Hive: some sort of population control was deemed necessary after Worid War III in 2001 (it lasted 60 minutes, rendering the outside world uninhabitable).

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