America. 2065. The National Productivity Continuity Act divided the population into Day workers and Night workers on staggered twelve-hour shifts. The Classification Inheritance Act made Night'er status heritable. There are now 1.4 billion Night'er-born people in the world. The biological consequences of two generations raised under managed light have been documented - and suppressed.
Marco Vasquez has been passing as Day'er Marc Valentine at the Columbus Policy Institute for five years. He has the pharmaceutical regimen, the contacts, the flat Midwestern English with no origin point. He has sixty days until the next screening. He also has the classified data that proves what the system has done to people like him, a researcher willing to publish it, and a name - his real name - that the work will have to carry into the world.
Inside the Light is a literary novel about identity, institutional complicity, and what it costs to put something true into the world under the name that belongs to it.