Meet Me in Mall World

By R.W. Bales

A LinkedIn ad: sleep study, $1,500, two nights. A decommissioned Navy building in Orlando. Show up, get wired with electrodes, sleep in an acoustic isolation chamber, leave.

Easy money.

When he wakes up, the dream doesn't fade.

It stays-complete, navigable. An office building he's never been to, but he knows it cold: the cubicles, the monitors, where Terminal Seven is, which breaker controls it. Pre-loaded. Like muscle memory for a place that shouldn't exist.

Then the remembering starts. Elementary school. The Gifted and Talented program. Getting pulled out of class for tests-headphones, geometric flashcards, a pink drink in a paper cup. Online, thousands of people remember the same things exactly. Same tests. Same drink. Same cards. Same feeling that something was done to them, and then sealed.

His friend works in tech, researching something called Mall World-a persistent dream-space thousands of people claim to access independently. Same layout every time. Same fountains. Same beige tile. Her predecessor vanished into the research. She's just been promoted into his position. And she might not be okay....

He's skeptical. This is conspiracy coping. Millennials metabolizing economic grief through shared nostalgia for fluorescent-lit spaces that used to mean something.

Then the second session. The dreams keep not fading. The researchers schedule him for Friday without asking. Tell him his brain shows "clean architecture." That he's processing stimuli "exactly as designed."

Central Florida. Disc golf. HOA violations. A girlfriend who needs him to stop pulling threads. The specific exhaustion of being promised your parents' life and landing somewhere smaller, stranger, and harder to name.

And underneath: the growing suspicion that the liminal spaces everyone dreams about-the malls, the airports, the empty hotels at 3 a.m.-aren't just nostalgia... they're infrastructure. Persistent architecture maintained by millions of people who got formatted without ever being asked.

For readers who grew up on Scholastic book fair paperbacks with holographic covers and spent their twenties connecting dots in the dark. Literary horror grounded in economic dread, careful observation, and the particular paranoia of people who were wired for something they were never told about.

The patterns keep rotating.
The office building stays accessible.
Friday's session is already scheduled....

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GPM12YKS
• ISBN13: 9798248845132
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"