Chapter One—Rachel returns to her home brothel of Luther's after some years as the house pet of a man for whom she harbored an unprofessional level of attachment and, therefore, the termination of her contract leaves her angry and miserable. While she wrestles with her own personal agonies, she is also faced with the fact that the brothel as a whole is struggling financially and has to contend both with the other girls' efforts to make her more productive and the extremely untalented new recruit she had been saddled with training.
The Whore of Her-Babylon---In the world of the distant future, after clawing itself back from the brink of oblivion due to a now mostly forgotten calamity, humanity has coalesced to live almost entirely within the bounds of a single mega-city. Although technology allows almost unlimited production of food and energy, at least on a basic level, artificial scarcity ensures material possessions remain important status symbols, highlighting the massive gap between the haves and the have nots. There is an extreme nostalgia for the past, an obsession with creating a facsimile of many of the aspects of life from before the collapse but this only enhances the social stratification because of commodities lik plants being incredibly rare, affordable by only the most wealthy. Woman all live in and work out of brothels and both they and their male counterparts are expected to make work and productivity their highest goal while emotions are considered dangerously deviant, to be suppressed with powerful pills. In this controlling and cut-throat environment, one woman dares to defy the system.
