Dreamers 2031

Marit Haas is sixty years old and she is the last person in America who dreams.

That is not a gift. It is a clause in her retirement. She built the compound that took dreaming away from everyone else, in Basel, when she was thirty-four and certain she was ending a suicide epidemic. She was right. For nineteen years the country has slept eight flat hours a night and woken calm, productive, and unable to say why it is sad.

Now the sleep traces are moving. Thousands of citizens, eyes shifting under closed lids, arrested as insomniacs and held for sedition. They are not awake. They are dreaming for the first time in their lives, and all of them are dreaming the same year.

The Bureau has ten days and two answers. Either Moscow altered her molecule when it bought the Basel plant, or she did, twenty years ago, and it has taken this long for the receptors to reply.

In a holding facility outside Washington, a girl born in 2031 is waiting to tell her what the corridor looked like.