Concentration camps in California? It has happened before and could happen again. The time is ten years in the future. Political turmoil and small wars are globally common. Plagues and famine are commonplace. Diseases are prevalent at all levels of society, especially sexually transmitted ones such as AIDS and the variations that have developed from it. Paranoia and distrust run high among people as the media spreads lies and fear. Due to our political system playing off that fear, the United States has established a total health system to a degree more invasive of human rights and more savagely enforced than could have been imagined during the plague of the Middle Ages.
We are entering our story shortly after the passage of a Federal health-protection law which provides for mandatory testing and reporting requirements, as well as penalties for infected persons and even minor dissenters of the system in addition to establishment of concentration camps and even, secretly, executions for the main spokesmen of the Resistance.
Bernie, who heads the Resistance, is arrested by Federal agents and taken to a concentration camp where both diseased inmates and anti-government resistance leaders are kept. When Rick learns of this, he appeals to his father to use his political connections to get Bernie out, totally unaware that his father is a strong supporter of the system that put him there.