The State of Michigan, 2094

Defense Attorney John Yurasov: Earlier you referred to this trial as a circus. Can you explain what you meant?

Defendant Michaela Xiao: I don’t mean it was corrupt. Though that’s very possible. I just mean that the conclusion was always foregone. You try a mass murderer in a lethal injection state, don’t be surprised when she’s sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Attorney for the Prosecution, Loren Mirvis (LM): Objection. Defendant is impugning the validity of the court.

Judge Emily Mandel: The trial’s over. The jury’s been excused. Nearly every bit of evidence was either hearsay or inadmissible. What we’ve all agreed to do right now is record a dying woman’s last words. I’ll allow it. What do you want to tell us, Ms. Xiao?

Xiao: It’s about Dream Collective.

Judge: I gathered.

Yurasov: Start with how it works.

Xiao: Sure. Say you have a flying dream. Those are so rare and great. Everyone wants flying dreams. I invented the technology that turns discrete dreams into uploadable files.

LM: Objection. We’ve established that the defendant’s work for Dream Collective is proprietary.

Judge: Council, this is a closed room comprised of four people sworn to secrecy. Because of your arguments, this testimony will be sealed for twenty years. You won. Have your beer. Let her have her say. To be honest, I’m starting to agree with the defense—maybe you really are on the payroll. Continue, Ms. Xiao.

Xiao: The technology’s what we call unidirectional—once we encode the dreams, they cease to exist within the dreamer. In other words, your flying dream’s gone. Not only that, you’ll never dream of flying again. The technology and its results call into question the nature of this reality—are we simulacrums? But that’s a question for another day.

Yurasov: Is it bad for the dreamer to lose their dreams?

Xiao: We didn’t think so. Dreamers tended to compensate. Instead of flying, they walked on water or swung through trees. We planned to study the phenomenon in clinical trials.

Yurasov: What happens to the customers who purchase the dreams?

Xiao: Supposedly, they get a rush. I’ve never tried it. There’s something about dreaming, especially good dreams, that heighten intelligence. In tests, Dream Tourist IQs increased ten to twenty points.

Yurasov: And this was in the ongoing clinical trial. You were gathering data for federal approval. Tell us what safeguards you implemented.

Xiao: Dream donators—we called them Dreamers—weren’t allowed to sell more than three dreams through the course of the study. We were supposed to follow up on their cognition and well-being. There were no rules for the customers who bought those dreams. We called them Dream Tourists.

Yurasov: Did you enjoy your work?

Xiao: I did. I loved it. The math was so elegant. I felt good about having created something. I’m socially awkward, obviously. People who look like me don’t go out a lot . . . I’d never had a purpose before.

My partner found investors and an old medical school for the study. Because of the nature of it, I worked nights. The Dreamers slept in rows of cots. There were usually about thirty of them, hooked up to visual monitors. The Dream Tourists viewed these from a rounded observation deck. I think it was a formal surgical amphitheater. They bid on what they wanted. I didn’t notice the money stuff or anything practical. I was busy encoding.

Yurasov: Go on.

Xiao: The volunteers were supposed to be retirees and college kids. That’s what the brochures said. People who needed a little extra cash. Nobody we were taking advantage of.

One night coming off my shift, I was disoriented. Coding is exhausting. I wound up in a basement hallway. All those people, those Dreamers who’d sold their dreams, they were there . . .

Dreamers are supposed to get rides home after donations. It’s policy. They’re expected to be woozy. They might even sleep all day.

I didn’t understand why they were all still there. That hallway wasn’t clean or well lit. They were curled up, sitting on the floors in their light blue scrubs, looking vacant. A woman in white stopped me. I guess she was a nurse? Or who knows. Maybe she had no medical degree. She told me I wasn’t allowed to be there. I invented the technology but I wasn’t allowed.

I left, but everything felt wrong after that.

I started to notice the Dream Tourists. I hadn’t before. Every night, they were the same people. Every time. Same faces. Nobody new, even though the waitlist was thousands of names long. They came in shaking. Sick shaking. When they watched the dreams on the monitors, they broke into cold sweats.

One time, instead of handing them off, I collected all the coded dreams and walked them to the Tourist area. I’d never been inside there. Three years and I’d never done it. They were luxuriating on leather chairs. I recognized some of them—the scions you hear about, who own publishing houses and banks. In the videos, they’re polished and charming. But here, they weren’t that. Not in the Dream Collective.

They’re supposed to wait. You call their names, hand them the vial they’ve paid for . . . and they just went nuts. I don’t know who got what or whether it was divided correctly.

They couldn’t wait for a nurse. They self-administered, injecting dreams directly under their skulls and into their amygdalae. You ever seen a junkie after they get their fix? It was like that. They were high on those dreams.

I got called out by my CEO for engaging them instead of leaving it to the nurses. By then he was the majority stakeholder. I asked him: Were the dreams addictive? He said he didn’t know. I asked if we were using the same dream donors over and over. He told me it was people nobody cared about, so why did I?

It’s a long story, but I figured out where the Dreamers were coming from. They weren’t college kids. They were people living under bridges. They were refugees and immigrants—the ones put on busses that no state wants. Some of them were underage. Some of them were . . . babies. A lot of them didn’t speak English or know what they were signing when they agreed to it.

No one else was paying attention, but I figured out that after about five dream donations, the Dreamers stopped compensating with new dreams. Their minds gave up. . . People can’t tolerate reality without dreams. Their bodies break down. They die.

Do the math. Over the course of the trial, that’s tens of thousands of dreams. Dream Collective owns land off Lake Michigan. It’s where they dumped bodies.

When I figured this out, I lost it. They’d corrupted this thing I’d made. It could have cured Parkinson’s. It could have reversed Rhett’s.

There’s this specific kind of nightmare. It’s not what you’d think—spiders or zombies. It’s subtle. In sleep, the brain rectifies. Imagine someone frowns at you. You see it but you can’t figure it out. So you dream in metaphor. Maybe you open the refrigerator, and you see yourself, looking back with a rage face. And you think any variety of things. You think: Oh, that person is mad! Or you think—they’re mad, but not at me! Or you think: Their resting face is weird! You think any of these things, and then the frown is gone. Right or wrong, you’ve categorized it. It’s over and you move on to all the other tiny little things that didn’t make sense during the day, all the things that need to be properly encoded.

The bad kind of dream happens when that encoding is interrupted. It skips like a corruption in a file. You can’t categorize the frown. What I found was that this corruption could be encoded like a virus. So I selected specifically for these toxic kinds of dreams. That’s what I delivered to the Dream Tourists, instead of the dreams they’d paid for. And now they’ve all gone insane.

Last count, twenty-nine out of thirty died by their own hands. I murdered twenty-nine of the richest people on earth.

Judge: Are you sorry for what you’ve done?

Xiao: My CEO was smart. He had a lobby, a deep bench of Tourists, and enough money to keep the trials going, despite my scandal. Dream Collective got federal approval last month. It’s opening stores all over the world.

I’ve told people, or tried to. But everything I said was suppressed. No one ever got any warrants to search the offices or the mass graves. As we speak, fresh refugees are filling cots; new addicts are born. I know I should feel bad for what I did. I know that. But I don’t.

Yurasov Why is that?

Xiao: I’ll sleep tonight. I’ve done everything I could do. But now you know. Now you have to keep a twenty-year secret while the world burns.

So, will you?