2025/137: The Dream Hotel — Laila Lalami

2025/137: The Dream Hotel — Laila Lalami

“I didn’t do anything.” In a whisper this time.
Lucy nods. “Right. But what’d they say you were going to do?” [loc. 400]

Historian Sara Hussein, returning from a conference in London and eager to see her husband and their two small children, is detained by authorities at LAX. Her risk score -- the likelihood of her committing a crime in the near future -- has been calculated as over 500, marking her as a potential threat to her family. She's sent to a retention centre ('not a prison or a jail') known as Madison, for 21 days of forensic observation.

Nearly a year later, she's still there.

There are several contributory factors to Sara's 'retention': she's Moroccan-American, and she was impatient with the airport security officers. Most significantly, though, she has a Dreamsaver implant, which improves sleep quality and depth (invaluable for a mother of young children) -- and also (as mentioned in the small print of the EULA) records the dreams of the user. That data is just one of the two hundred inputs to the Risk Assessment Administration's crime-prediction algorithm.( Read more... )