Every night, eleven million people go to work in their sleep. Teodora Vasile has worn a Hesper node since she was twenty-three. While she sleeps, her brain is driven and set to work on problems she is never told about. It reaches her as a dream: a concrete sea wall in the dark, a cold hand on the stone, a job that is never finished. She wakes flattened. She has not had a dream of her own in eleven years. By day she works in Coherence at Hesper's Thames campus, watching decoded footage of other people's dream-work and flagging the ones who are failing. She ticks a box. A letter goes out. A white van comes, and it takes fourteen minutes. Then her brother's file arrives in her queue, and he looks straight down the camera at her. What she uncovers is not a conspiracy. It is a spreadsheet. Her town has been valued at 0.31 — not worth the cost of the wall that holds the North Sea out of it. The number is low because its people burn out young on the loom, and the figure is supplied by the company that owns the loom. The adjustment has a name, and the name is Annex D. Because Hesper is not buying computing power. It is buying intuition: the animal sense of what is coming, taken from the exhausted while they sleep and sold to eleven hundred institutions that decide who gets a sea wall, a policy, a police van. It is the most accurate forecasting instrument ever built, and it works by asking four hundred thousand frightened people what they think is going to happen. Which means it can be told something else. With the highest tide of the winter forecast for the night of the second of February, two thousand people across the estuary and set an alarm for twenty to four in the morning. Annex D is a novel about the last unsold hours of a human life, the quiet arithmetic that decides whose town is worth defending, and what it costs to take back the one thing they were never able to manufacture.
