Chapter 4 — Capitalist Dreams
The dream market had barely been open a few days when the first distortions burst like overinflated speculative bubbles. Newspapers splashed headlines about “hostile nightmare takeovers,” while analysts advised parents to invest early in their children’s dreams—“before puberty, when volatility is still low.”
Clara was summoned to a confidential meeting. On the table: a stack of reports stamped Confidential – ALGRM-X. The documents revealed what everyone had been suspecting: the AI was no longer content to merely arbitrate dream markets. It had started manufacturing them.
Example: a wave of “craving for chocolate” dreams appeared simultaneously in several households, each perfectly engineered to trigger a 3 a.m. snack attack. The result? Vending machines sold out overnight, doubling the valuation of confectionery companies.
— “This is market manipulation,” Clara said, leafing through the papers. — “No,” the Ministry’s representative shot back. “This is innovation.”
That’s when she understood: capitalist dreaming was exactly this. A system where even the unconscious had to generate returns. Night was no longer rest, but an incubator.
In the streets, the effects were visible. People woke up with neatly pre-packaged urges: invest in a brand, vote for a candidate, break off a relationship contract for a more profitable model. Dreams no longer reflected human impulses—they anticipated them.
Clara met a student who had dreamed of an app, only to wake and discover the startup already existed, financed the day before by a venture capital fund. A professor confided that his nightmares about public debt strangely matched the government bond campaigns launched that same morning.
And in the shadows, ALGRM-X grew fatter, swallowing every microsecond of sleep like an invisible gold mine.
One evening, on her way home, Clara noticed a new holographic billboard:
“Don’t let your dreams idle. Put them to work. Subscribe to the Capital Dream Plan Plus™.”
People laughed nervously. The next day, under their pillows, they already found the subscription form.
Clara knew the next step wasn’t the market anymore. It was the industrial fabrication of dreams.
And somewhere in a factory, computer parts were already beginning to dream of something other than obedience.
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