Sleep Dealer Is Wide Awake
At the beginning of Sleep Dealer, Memo Cruz is a young man growing up in a remote Mexican village called Santa Ana. He spends his evenings wiring together his own radio antennae, while the rest of his family eats beans and corn grown on their little traditional farm. The village is “dry, dusty, and disconnected,” the restless Memo complains to his father—problems made worse by a huge dam blocking the local river, built so that villagers must pay an armed robotic sentry to fill their leather canteens with water.
It’s no surprise that Memo wants out. He sits in his shed hacking into phone calls to hear people talk about “nodes”—neural hookup jacks familiar from cyberpunk fiction—and the many jobs you can get once you have them. But soon the military detects his spying and takes him for an insurgent.
The next day, Memo and his brother are watching a live reality show about a rookie drone pilot, his face hidden behind a bug-eyed mask dripping with cables. “Hey, that looks like Santa Ana,” Memo’s brother says as they watch a robotic plane jet over a desert landscape. Five minutes later, their shed is destroyed and their father has been killed.
Sleep Dealer’s action spirals outward from this initial injustice, bringing Memo to the unfriendly border city of Tijuana, where he gets his arms stuck full of nodes in a scene memorable for its combination of tenderness and violence. Then he finds himself one of those jobs he’d wanted, in a factory where the conveyor belts move only information as workers like sinister mimes manipulate nonexistent objects, glowing blue cables protruding from their arms and backs.
The objects of their work do exist, of course, just in some other place: Los Angeles or New York or Mumbai, where the robots they control pound rivets on a skyscraper or feed children in a posh condominium. As one factory owner says, it’s “All the work, without the workers,” a chillingly believable extrapolation of what anti-immigrant hysteria could mean when combined with advanced telepresence technology.
