conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a plot for a book about Taverner, Alys, Hart entitled Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said: The novel is set in a dystopian version of 1988, following a Second Civil War which led to the collapse of the United States\' democratic institutions.\nThe National Guard ("nats") and US police force ("pols") reestablished social order through instituting a dictatorship, with a "Director" at the apex, and police marshals and generals as operational commanders in the field.\nResistance to the regime is largely confined to university campuses, where radicalized former university students eke out a desperate existence in subterranean kibbutzim.\nRecreational drug use is widespread, and the age of consent has been lowered to twelve.\nMost commuting is undertaken by personal aircraft, allowing great distances to be covered in little time.\nThe novel begins with the protagonist, Jason Taverner, a singer, hosting his weekly TV show which has an audience of 30 million viewers.\nHis special guest is his girlfriend Heather Hart, also a singer.\nBoth Hart and Taverner are "Sixes", members of an elite class of genetically engineered humans.\nWhile leaving the studio, Taverner is telephoned by a former lover, who asks him to pay her a visit.\nWhen Taverner arrives at her apartment, the former lover attacks him by throwing a parasitic life-form at him.\nAlthough he manages to remove most of the life-form, parts of it are left inside him.\nAfter being rescued by Hart, he is taken to a medical facility.\nWaking up the following day in a seedy hotel with no identification, Taverner becomes worried, as failure to produce identification at one of the numerous police checkpoints would lead to imprisonment in a forced labor camp.\nThrough a succession of phone calls made from the hotel to colleagues and friends who now claim not to know him, Taverner establishes that he is no longer recognized by the outside world.\nHe soon manages to bribe the hotel\'s clerk into taking him to Kathy Nelson, a forger of government documents.\nHowever, Kathy reveals that both she and the clerk are police informants, and that the lobby clerk has placed a microscopic tracking device on him.\nShe promises not to turn Taverner over to the police on the condition that he spend the night with her.\nAlthough he attempts to escape, Kathy confronts him again after he has successfully passed a police checkpoint using the forged identity cards.\nFeeling in her debt, he accompanies Kathy to her apartment block, where Inspector McNulty, Kathy\'s police handler, is waiting.\nMcNulty has located Taverner via the tracking device the hotel lobby clerk placed on him, and instructs Taverner to come with him to the 469th Precinct police station so that further biometric identity checks can be performed.\nAt the station, McNulty erroneously reports the man\'s name as Jason Tavern, revealing the identity of a Wyoming diesel engine mechanic.\nDuring questioning, Taverner goes along with McNulty\'s mistake, explaining that he no longer resembles Tavern due to extensive plastic surgery.\nMcNulty accepts this explanation and decides to release Taverner whilst lab checks are run on the rest of the documents.\nHe issues Taverner a seven-day police pass to ensure he can pass police checkpoints in the interim period.\nDeciding to lie low, Taverner heads to a Las Vegas bar in the hopes of meeting a woman with whom he can stay.\nInstead, he encounters a former lover, Ruth Gomen; although she no longer recognizes him, he succeeds in his bid to seduce her and is taken back to her apartment.\nOn the orders of Police General Felix Buckman, Gomen\'s apartment is raided and Taverner is taken into custody, being transported immediately to the Police Academy in Los Angeles.\nBuckman personally interrogates Taverner, soon reaching the conclusion that Taverner genuinely does not know why he no longer appears to exist.\nHowever, he suspects that Taverner may be part of a larger plot involving the Sixes.\nHe orders Taverner released, although ensuring that tracking devices are again placed on him.\nOutside the police academy, Taverner is approached by Alys Buckman, Felix\'s hypersexual sister and lover.\nAlys removes the tracking devices from Taverner and invites him to the home she shares with her brother.\nOn the way there, she tells Taverner that she knows he is a TV star and reveals copies of his records.\nAt the Buckmans\' home, Taverner takes Alys up on an offer of mescaline.\nWhen he has a bad reaction to the drug, Alys goes to find him a medicine to counteract it.\nWhen she does not return, Taverner goes to search for her, only to find her skeletal remains on the bathroom floor.\nFrightened and confused, he flees, unsuccessfully pursued by a private security guard.\nTo aid in his escape, he asks for the help of Mary Anne Dominic, a potter.\nHeading to a cafe with her, they find that one of his records is on the jukebox.\nWhen his song plays, people begin to recognize him as a celebrity.\nAfter parting with Dominic, Taverner goes to the apartment of his celebrity girlfriend Heather Hart.\nShe returns home, horrified, and shows Taverner a newspaper mentioning that he is wanted in connection with Alys Buckman\'s death, the motive believed to have been his jealousy over Alys\' purported relationship with Hart.\nAn autopsy reveals that Alys\' death was caused by an experimental reality-warping drug called KR-3.\nThe coroner explains to Felix that, as Alys was a fan of Taverner, her use of the drug caused Taverner to be transported to a parallel universe where he no longer existed.\nHer death then caused his return to his own universe.\nThe Police General decides to implicate Taverner in Alys\' death to distract attention from his incest.\nThe press are informed that Taverner is a suspect in the case and, wishing to clear his name, Taverner surrenders himself to the police.\nHeartbroken over the death of his sister, Felix returns home, suffering a nervous breakdown on the way.\nIn an epilogue, the final fates of the main characters are disclosed.\nBuckman retires to Borneo where he is assassinated soon after writing an exposé of the global police apparatus.\nTaverner is cleared of all charges and dies of old age, while Heather Hart abandons her celebrity career and becomes a recluse.\nDominic\'s pottery wins an international award and her works become of great value while she lives into her eighties.\nKR-3 test trials are deemed too destructive and the project is abandoned.\nUltimately, the revolutionary students give up and voluntarily enter forced-labor camps.\nThe detention camps later dwindle away and close down, the government no longer posing a threat.\nThough it is seemingly incidental, the epilogue ends with the word "loved", suddenly and cathartically closing all of the novel\'s thematic threads.