Summary of Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream by Ju Chu
Clarkesworld #232 January 2026
“`Meng Wan is a “soulseller” in the city of Quancheng—someone who allows a TranceChip to be inserted into the back of his neck, giving up conscious control of his body while corporations use him for dangerous, degrading, or repetitive work. After three days of being rained on while working on a skyscraper’s curtain wall, his body reaches its limits. The foreman removes the chip, and Meng Wan regains control, earning three hundred yuan for thirty-six hours of work—reduced to two hundred after a penalty for a crooked bolt.
In this future society, androids have replaced most human labor, but soulsellers exist in a legal gray area. Companies once used them extensively until scandals and fatalities led to strict government controls. Now soulsellers live in the low-income district, subjected to daily inspections by “blackmasks” who ask if they’ve worked for illegal organizations. There’s a standing reward of one hundred thousand yuan for reporting illegal soulselling operations—enough money to buy an assembly line of androids and escape poverty.
Key Plot Points
- Meng Wan was trained by a “shifu” (mentor) who started him with degrading work like scooping trash from flooded sewers
- His shifu died from acute emphysema after overclocking while grinding drill bits—working beyond normal human limits
- Soulsellers can “overclock” by pushing their bodies harder while enTranced, earning more money but risking permanent damage
- A blackmask regularly pressures Meng Wan to pay him protection money—ten percent of earnings
- Meng Wan receives an interview invitation from an organization called “Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream”
At “Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream,” Meng Wan is taken through a mysterious facility with countless work categories. He’s assigned to “MICROSCOPIC INSPECTION,” where he must identify defects in metal samples—work that would cost millions for AI software, making exploited human labor cheaper. The interviewer explains they’ll overclock him, and before Meng Wan fully understands, the TranceChip is inserted. He wakes fifteen hours later in excruciating pain, particularly in his eyes and the neural pathways connecting them to his brain. Despite the agony, he’s earned seven hundred and fifty yuan—more than he’s ever made in one day.
Seduced by the money and supplied with medical treatments that rapidly heal his damaged body, Meng Wan continues working. He’s given advanced biorepair gels and medications, recovering completely by the next morning. For ten days, he works fifteen-hour overclocked shifts inspecting metal samples, earning unprecedented income. He begins to believe his shifu’s death was just bad luck and develops a philosophy of treating his body as a “pure tool.”
On the eleventh day, he’s transferred to “MANUAL ASSEMBLY,” where he must repeatedly screw in components with specific wrist rotations. The work causes severe forearm pain that worsens despite medication. After several days, his condition deteriorates, but his savings continue growing beyond anything he’s experienced. He becomes tempted by the thought of reporting the organization for the hundred-thousand-yuan reward, especially as his body shows signs of permanent damage.
In a desperate attempt to gather evidence, Meng Wan embeds a timer in his chip slot to eject it after eight hours, allowing him to wake while his coworkers remain enTranced. What he discovers is shocking: he follows the conveyor belt to the next room and finds workers disassembling everything that was just assembled—the entire operation is pointless busywork. He tests the “MICROSCOPIC INSPECTION” room and discovers the same metal samples circulating endlessly, being inspected over and over.
The horrifying truth emerges when he overhears supervisors discussing their work. The components, the samples, the tasks—none of it matters. The soulsellers themselves are the “workpieces” being processed. “Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream” isn’t producing anything; it’s refining and testing increasingly exploitative TranceChips on human subjects, pushing them to greater extremes of overclocking to develop better technology for exploiting soulsellers. The entire facility is an illegal human experimentation lab.
Meng Wan races back to report this to the blackmask, running through mud and shantytowns toward home, imagining his future with one hundred thousand yuan. But when he finds the blackmask entertaining important officials, his report is dismissed as the ravings of a money-crazed soulseller—the blackmask claims Meng Wan tries to make false reports several times a week. The officials decide Meng Wan is “perfect for sending over,” and he’s sedated.
The story concludes with devastating irony: Meng Wan wakes in a massive industrial building filled with sedated soulsellers on cots. A representative from “Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream” explains he’s been assigned to dock work for a twenty-year overclocked labor period. He’ll blink five times per minute, drink water once every five hours, eat once every ten hours, rest three hours daily, and receive medication weekly. After twenty years of unconscious labor, he’ll wake with seven hundred thousand yuan in his account.
As the TranceChip clicks into place, Meng Wan falls into twenty years of sleep and darkness. In his final conscious thoughts, he imagines himself on a conveyor belt spanning two decades, seeing ahead to a bright opening filled with the neon lights of the Upper City—the dream of wealth and escape that all soulsellers chase. The story ends with the haunting phrase “As long as he could wake up,” leaving uncertain whether he’ll survive the twenty-year experiment or if this is simply another form of death dressed up as opportunity.