DreamState

At Aurora University, students learn while they sleep. They sync into a maintenance render every night and walk a campus that doesn't physically exist. Eighteen-year-old Aaliyah Boudreaux is one of twelve hundred Black and brown freshmen on full scholarship — and on Day Six of the inaugural trial year, she sees something in the sim she isn't supposed to see. A boy behind glass. Eyes locked. Mouth shaping a word no one else can hear. By Day Fourteen, Aaliyah has the journal her grandmother left her, a list of names that don't appear in any official record, and a quiet librarian in the Auburn Avenue Research Library who asks her one question: Did you make a copy? Aaliyah will spend the next twenty-six days learning what the system was actually built for — and what it costs to build something else in its place. DREAMSTATE is a near-future literary thriller about consciousness, kidnapping, and the long careful work of Black women in rooms nobody else has been able to fix. For readers of Blake Crouch's Recursion, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Jordan Peele's Get Out — a novel set in a Silicon Peach Atlanta about the bodies institutions don't think anyone is watching, and the grandmothers who taught their daughters to watch anyway. The protocol is older than the building. The grandmothers wrote it. The kitchen is open.