Dreams are for Children: Book One of the Stasis Trilogy

Dreams are for Children is the story of Jinx Carver, a restless teenage girl with mismatched eyes, who wants more from life than society can give her. In 2176 A.D., the vast majority of adults are addicted to a pleasurable, life-prolonging technology called stasis that deadens the mind and eliminates dreams entirely. Everyone is expected to embrace the stasis lifestyle when they turn eighteen and Jinx' birthday is only days away on the summer solstice. She'll do anything to hold onto her dreams, but the pressure to conform is powerful and relentless. She's terrified of losing her courage and becoming dead inside like everyone else. Also, no one seems to care that more and more docile stasis addicts are becoming violently insane. After a century without dreams, an epidemic of insanity threatens to destroy humanity. Jinx and a small band of rebels on the Oregon coast believe stasis is the cause of the spreading psychosis and vow to stop it.

On the eve of Jinx’ high school graduation, her boyfriend Miles suffers a terrible accident that results in paraplegia. CEO Vaughn Whelan sees an opportunity to increase stasis tubes sales to the younger generation and offers Miles a free tube and indefinite warehousing until medical science can repair his broken body. Whelan makes the same offer to Jinx as a Romeo and Juliet marketing stunt, but she sabotages the charitable event to expose his lies about stasis and illegal genetic engineering for the corporate elite. During her escape from Whelan's Tubular Enterprises headquarters, she discovers a huge crystal pyramid looted from the Martian ruins of Cydonia that could be the source of her bizarre visions of ancient Egypt and a host of aliens from distant stars. Soon afterward, Jinx is captured and sentenced to twenty years in a Martian penal colony. Crazy inmates break her nose and almost kill her while she awaits exile. When Whelan humiliates Jinx during her last day on Earth, she instigates a prisoner riot and begins to dream of a better future on Mars.