Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Meet Me in Mall World

Meet Me in Mall World

Bales, R. W.

Paperback

Science FictionGeneral Fiction

ISBN13: 9798248845132
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 19 2026
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

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 too many nights connecting dots in the dark-Meet Me in Mall World is literary horror grounded in economic dread, careful observation, and the particular paranoia of people who were wired for something they were never told about.

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