Mindscape // DreamNotFound

Chapter 1

     George flipped through the channels, huffing when every single one buzzed with the same news he'd heard a million times before. He sighed, turning off the TV entirely, though the silence was just as haunting. Stepping over to his window, he gazed out at the small town he'd lived in for a little over a year now. Moving from England for college had been a big step for him, and going alone had been daunting.

     Now, he found himself missing his crowded family home across the seas, where it was never exactly silent. When he first arrived in America, he'd been excited to start a new life and take on the world. However, he'd only had time to attend four weeks of in-person classes before the Sleeping Death had put a pin in his plans. The college closed its campus, and for awhile, the school continued with online classes.

     Eventually, they'd cancelled the semester entirely. While the Sleeping Death wasn't the most prominent of all current sicknesses going around, it was precise and mysterious. It picked off people one by one, sending each of them into a calming sleep where it would slowly shut down their bodies. A pleasant thing, really. It was enough to make his school close down for awhile after someone in their town fell sick.

     But George found it more annoying than worrying. He couldn't go out to the movies, eat at big restaurants, or anything that someone would do on normal days. Hell, he hadn't even had time to make friends before he'd been forced into seclusion. Of course, that was more of a personal problem, as he never really worked up the nerve to talk to anyone besides the professors and the occasional seat-mate. Well, except for him, but he was a different case.

     Fernwood was a small town, boasting the college campus as it's main attribute. Stores and restaurants popped up to accommodate the growing population of younger people, but that was really it. George's own house was a simple one-story home, nothing fancy, but he'd saved up more than enough to pay for it. Years of working part-time jobs had paid off, finally taking him to America, only to be crushed by a little virus.

     Recently, the college's main building had been taken over by the SDC, the Sleeping Death Corporation. They were a corporation run by three rather astounding scientists, though not much information about them was available online. They'd founded at around the same time as the Sleeping Death had started to catch the eyes of media stations all across the country.

     They followed all the new cases across the nation, setting up special labs in each town where a case was reported. There, they would take the victims into their care and try to keep them alive. Or whatever big health corporations did, George wasn't an expert. Usually, as there had been a few success stories, they died within a week or two.

     The success stories were few for the very reason that most people's immune systems were killed almost instantly by the virus, or so the professionals said. There was little information available to the public. George figured it was because they weren't so sure themselves, and they didn't want to put information out into the world that could be proven wrong in the span of a day.

     As for the SDC itself, it was a closed circle of only the best scientists and doctors. They didn't accept many people into their corporation, not even as volunteers. They explained away their strictness with their so-called 'no exceptions policy'.

     Basically, they made no exceptions. It was fairly straightforward. If they thought you had the disease, they'd quarantine you without hesitation. They'd set up a headquarters in every single location where cases of the Sleeping Death popped up, resulting in maybe forty towns housing some form of the SDC members. They refused to let more than a couple reporters into each location, for fear they might catch the disease and spread it to more people.