From The Dream Hotel, which will be published this month by Pantheon.

Morning light silvers the glass-brick windows of the Safe-X library. A sign taped to the wall above the return shelf says quiet. Sara Hussein’s footsteps are muffled by the carpeting, but its mustiness combines with the smell of old paper to tickle her nose, and she sneezes. “Bless you,” someone behind her says in a stentorian voice. Alarmed, she turns around. The new girl, Eisley, has followed her here, the way a lost child trails after the first kind stranger she sees.

“Sorry,” the new girl says, dropping to a whisper. “Bless you. I wanted to ask: Can I send an email from one of these computers?”

“No.” The five stations set up in the far corner allow retainees to access the news, Sara explains, and only from the few sources that Safe-X deems acceptable. “If you want to send an email, you have to pay for an account with PostPal.”

“Is it expensive?”

“It’s four hundred dollars every two months.”

“But I’m only here three weeks.”

“That’s how their billing system works. And then you have to rent a tablet from them to read your email. They’ll explain everything to you when you open the account.”

Eisley takes in the stacks where old books—some held together with tape, others missing a cover or a few pages—line the shelves. “Do I have to pay to read books, too?”

“No.” The books come from a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization that wants to encourage reading across the country’s crime-prevention facilities. “Those are free.”

When the new girl finally leaves, Sara takes the last open spot at the computers. She likes to take her time with the national papers, which she reads with more care than she did before her retention, when she was so busy with the twins that she only glanced at the headlines on her way to work. This morning, there are wildfires in Oregon, floods in Texas, and a blizzard in Ohio. Nothing terribly new. But below the fold she finds a report on OmniCloud’s plans to buy an education-technology firm whose software is used in K–12 schools across the country. OmniCloud wants to mine the data to help its corporate clients hire workers whose histories best match the positions they have open—or get rid of those who may not be ideal for the positions they already have.

OmniCloud continues to grow at an astonishing pace. Sara is reminded of the dusty colonial censuses she consulted when she was writing her dissertation at Berkeley, each edition thicker than the one preceding it on the shelf. The earliest censuses of the British Empire were counts of populations in different territories, but as time passed the volumes expanded into a massive trove of information on colonial subjects, listing everything from their age and occupation to their marital status, and even their so-called infirmities. If she needed to find out how many able-bodied male workers there were in the Gambia in 1930, all she had to do was find the right table.

From a seat by the door, the guard on duty is watching. Sara pretends not to notice. She makes an effort to read arts and culture news, though there are days when she can’t imagine ever going back to sitting in her office at the museum, cataloguing photographs or typing messages that begin with “per my last email.”

At least not for a while. In the fantasies of her freedom, she keeps returning to Mirror Lake, up in Yosemite. She used to visit thirty years ago, when she was a little girl, yet she remembers with startling clarity how it felt to sit under Half Dome, with only the drone of bees and the whirring of grasshoppers in her ears.

Will it ever be possible to be that free again?

“Hussein,” the guard calls, “time’s up. The limit’s twenty minutes.”

This isn’t true. The signs that are posted at the entrance of the library say nothing about time limits on the computers.

“Hussein!” The guard is young; he can’t be older than twenty-two. He used to work as an orderly in a mental-health facility before getting hired here, but he’s adapted quickly to Safe-X, enforcing rules he makes up on the spot.

“All yours,” she says. She takes the Borges stories to the return shelf and wanders into the stacks, looking for something new.

At 7:25, the work bell rings.

Sara rushes out to Trailer D, where workers sit one after another in front of screens, their faces bathed in blue. She stops at her assigned station, waits for the system to recognize her face, then clicks start. A video begins to play. She always has to answer the same question: is this real? She must choose one of three answers: yes, no or i can’t tell. The work is part of a contract between Safe-X and NovusFilm, a studio that wants to improve the generative capabilities of its software.

The clip starts with an establishing shot of a home, then the camera closes in on the kitchen window, where a young woman is washing dishes at the sink. The snow on this thatched roof looks too symmetrical, Sara notices. The grass around that mobile home is too uniform.

is this real?

no.

At the bottom of her screen, a timer measures how long it takes her to respond to each clip. Longer response times suggest that the human interpreter is growing uncertain or unreliable, which is why each clip has to be viewed by a second retainee. Safe-X is responsible for maintaining the high work standards it committed to when it agreed to review 800,000 reels for NovusFilm.

Time passes. Her neck and shoulders start to hurt. Sometimes she finds it hard to tell whether she’s looking at a real person, especially when the subject faces the camera and the lighting is good.

Along with her response time, the counter at the bottom of her screen measures her accuracy. If she clicks on the same response too many times in a row, she could be deemed a bad employee—or worse, a saboteur. She has to consider each clip carefully, give a truthful answer. That means looking for details that stick out. Like this guy in a helmet, sweating as he ascends a hill on his bike: the braids on either side of his head are too parallel, too perfect.

is this real?

no.

The next clip is of a baby. A brown-haired boy, sitting in a barber’s chair, wrapped in a nylon cape. He looks terrified; the yellow rattle that someone out of the frame is shaking seems to be an attempt at distracting him.

is this real?

But now Sara is back in Safe-X’s visiting room, on that warm January afternoon when Elias brought the twins to visit her for the first time. Back then he didn’t know the best times to schedule his visits, so he’d gotten caught in monstrous traffic out of Los Angeles. “I’m sorry we’re late,” he’d said, standing up when she walked in behind Hinton.

Even with dark circles under his eyes, Elias seemed full of life, sated with freedom. All of a sudden she became aware of what set her apart from him, from everyone outside Safe-X.

What they’re saying about me isn’t true, she wanted to say. Take me home with you, please take me home. And when he put his arms around her, it seemed to her for a moment as if he had come to take her away, until the scent of hand sanitizer brought her back to the gray walls of the visiting room. “It’s gonna be okay,” he was saying. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“You don’t believe them, do you?” she whispered.

He lifted her chin with a finger and looked into her face. Holding her breath, she watched him watch her. Did he wonder if, beneath the placid features he had known for years, she harbored violent urges? Did he believe the Risk Assessment Administration’s claim that she intended to harm him?

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

On the quilt he had spread over the cement floor, Mona was playing with a set of plastic rings while Mohsin was trying to pull off one of his socks.

She hoisted the kids onto her lap. How she had missed the weight of their wriggling bodies! “You smell so good,” she said, resting her cheek against Mohsin’s head.

That’s when she noticed his newly shorn hair. “You got it cut?” she asked Elias.

Before her trip to London, she’d been planning to take Mohsin to a kids’ salon. She’d wanted to save a lock of hair, take pictures, add a page to his keepsake book. The extent of what was being stolen from her was beginning to reveal itself.

“It was getting into his eyes,” Elias explained, his voice brimming with apology.

“Right. Of course.” She kissed her son’s hair again, breathing in his delicious smell. “I wish I could’ve been there.”

Elias put his hand on her knee. He asked how she was holding up, if she got over the cold she’d caught when she was admitted, if she needed more money in her commissary account. “They said if we didn’t have cash, I could link your account to my credit card.”

She shook her head; she didn’t really need anything. At the other end of the room, another retainee was standing by the vending machines, having what looked like an argument with her teenage son. Back then Sara still thought of the other retainees as strangers—strangers who might commit crimes—and she was afraid of them.

“It’s not gonna be long,” Elias said, trying to sound encouraging. “You’ll be home soon.”

“It’s just that this place . . . ” Sara’s voice trailed off. This place is a nightmare, she wanted to say, except it was a nightmare that everyone else seemed to be dreaming as well. The table, the chairs, the blank walls of the visiting room were real, but reality itself had become slippery. Nothing seemed to penetrate it, flip it back to the world as she knew it.

The twins started to fidget. How did she look to them, she wondered, in an all-white uniform, with her hair tied into the severe bun mandated by the Safe-X handbook? Even her hands looked different, now that her rings, watch, and bracelet had been taken away. Could they perceive, in their own limited ways, that something strange had happened to her?

Then Mohsin tried to climb down from Sara’s lap. “Stay, baby,” she begged, even as her son pushed her away. Aware of the cameras on the wall, she didn’t dare insist. All she could do was put out her hand and wait for him to come back.

“He’s a little cranky,” Elias said as he took the boy from her and put him back on the quilt. Rummaging through the clear plastic bag that Safe-X had made him buy, he took out a stuffed parrot. “It was such a long drive.”

“What about you?” Sara asked her daughter. “You’re not tired, are you?”

Mona cooed, allowing herself to be hugged and kissed without complaint. After a while, she tried to stand on her teetering little feet. She seemed on the verge of taking a step, but changed her mind and thrust her arms up.

Right away Sara scooped her up. “She’s getting close to walking, too.”

“It was nice of that attendant to help,” Elias said.

“Who?”

“Tall guy who brought you. Hinton?”

“Hinton? What’d he do?”

“He helped me with the stroller and set up the blanket for me.”

Sara shook her head. “That can’t be him. It must’ve been somebody else.”

“No, it was him.”

That doesn’t make sense, she wanted to say. Hinton is incapable of showing kindness; you must be mistaken.

But Elias’s attention had already shifted to Mohsin. “Go back to Mama. Go say hi.”

It took Mohsin a little while to relinquish the safety of the blanket. Sara had just sat him down on her lap again when a metallic voice came on the loudspeaker. “Hussein. Visit’s over.”

Sara pretended not to hear, held on to her baby boy until the warning repeated thirty seconds later. She stood as Elias picked up each child and walked out. She stood there a minute, looking at the door, her hands balled into fists.

is this real?

i can’t tell.