U T O P I A

Chapter 1

The city seemed to sprawl across the entire planet's surface. It went on for miles, stretching out over a majority of the landscape. There were always skyscrapers on the horizon, no matter which way you looked. Billions of people bustled through the streets by day but every single one of them returned home at night, when the city lit up like a thousand fireflies. The city always glowed so brightly that you could never see the stars from where they hovered above, millions of light years away. Above all the haze from the light, the faint outlines of a pair of moons could be seen in the sky above.

But the people never looked up. They had no reason to, not when everything they needed or desired was down there, on the planet's surface. So the moons watched over the people, hoping one day that someone would look up and notice them. Maybe that person would begin to wonder what else was beyond the glow of their city skies and make an effort to clear the haze away, revealing the stars who had long since been forgotten. One day, the moons hoped. One day.

Just as the grey skies began to darken and the city lights turn on, the streets emptied themselves. Like animals running from a storm, the people began to scurry back into their homes. They weren't running from anything, just following their daily schedules. For some reason, they were always home before nightfall, although no one ever thought to question why. There were no night-time activities, no going out for dinner or walking along the streets, just the order of getting home and going to bed.

Except on this night, the fourth of September in the year 3408, something did not quite go to plan.

It was half past six when Lysa Connors slipped into her apartment. The automatic lights switched on, going from dim to bright in a matter of seconds and lighting up the apartment. Placing her bag by the front door, she walked through the apartment, making a brief stop in the kitchen to grab a bite to eat. Stepping into her bedroom, she headed straight for the metallic door at the other end of the room, completely ignoring the hovering bed and the moving image of mountains covering an entire glass wall.

She stood before the door and pressed her thumb to the digital panel in the wall beside it. For a second, she waited as it scanned her thumbprint and then went to her wardrobe menu. Her long, elegant fingers tapped the nightwear button and selected a set of cotton pyjamas. The wardrobe door slid open and she entered the small room, waiting in the centre as robotic arms pulled away from the walls and whirred around her, changing her clothes. She didn't bother to glance at herself in the mirror once they were done, instead ignoring the raven-haired reflection and walking straight back into her bedroom to wait as another robotic arm pulled back the covers on her bed for her. Lysa laid down on her bed as the arm dragged the covers back over her. The lights in the apartment dimmed and she closed her eyes as another robotic arm strapped a tiny device to her head, waiting for sleep to come.

For the people of the city, sleep did not mean dreams or nightmares, they never experienced anything of the sort. Sleep was nothing more than a black void in which the body slowed down, delta waves taking over the brain and keeping it in an unconscious state until it was time to wake up. Each stage of the sleeping process was controlled by that tiny device strapped to everyone's head as they fell asleep. The sleep control devices monitored a person's brainwaves as they slept and ensured that they were in a certain stage of sleep at various times throughout the night.

Just like everything else, the reason why these devices prevented rapid eye movement sleep went unquestioned. Perhaps it was simply so that there was never the chance that someone got a nightmare. Perhaps it was for another reason, one which wasn't quite so pleasant as preventing nightmare.

But this night, the sleep control device did something rather unexpected. It allowed Lysa to slip into rapid eye movement sleep and let her dream for the first time in her life.