Waiting in line at a government office is never pleasant: it’s a time sink, often humiliating, and devoid of empathy. In The Dream Hotel, 38-year-old museum archivist Sara Hussein is having such a moment, except that hers has stretched on for the better part of a whole year.

It is a few decades into the future, and America has instituted a program called the RAA: The Risk Assessment Administration. The RAA works off an algorithm that incorporates a staggering amount of data about each individual—everything from their social media posts to what the CCTVs at their workplace might have caught—into computing a risk score that quantifies each person’s likelihood to commit a crime in the near future. Suspected future offenders are detained and kept in facilities for observation until their risk score drops to a low enough value that they are no longer deemed a threat to society. These people are not prisoners. They are called retainees.

This in itself isn’t a particularly novel idea: the concept of future crime prevention has been around for quite a while in different forms, whether it’s done by literally seeing into the future in Minority Report, or by surveillance and language control as seen in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Laila Lalami injects a fresh, Black Mirror-esque twist into the equation by using contemporary data aggregation and analysis as the basis for the algorithm that decides who poses the greatest risk for future crime.

It’s unsettling because most of the technology that this requires already exists. Every day, we fuel similar algorithms through our phones and online habits.

The Dream Hotel goes one step further, though. Sara Hussein has been having some strange, violent dreams borne of a trauma suffered in her childhood, and these dreams have somehow made it into the algorithm’s dataset, further pushing her score into future criminal territory. The culprit is a device called a Dreamsaver: a neural implant designed to reduce the time a person needs for a full night’s sleep down to four hours. The fine print also allows the company that manufactures it to sell its sleep data to the RAA. In The Dream Hotel, your dreams can quite literally brand you as a future criminal. That’s a terrifying thought.

The book follows Sara’s experience as a retainee—not an inmate!—of Madison, the holding facility that most of the story is set in. Madison itself is also a sobering symbol of the state of Sara’s world, having been converted from an elementary school into a retention center.

What’s particularly disturbing, though, is how life seems to go on beyond Madison’s walls. Based on the few glimpses outside that the reader is given, life in Sara’s current year isn’t so different from our lives today: the same routine and the same activities, only with more AI-generated guidance and more consolidated data about your life and how you’re living it. The Dream Hotel posits the question of what kind of society would condone the actions of something like the RAA. In these glimpses, it also answers that question: one that’s very much like what we already have today.

While ultimately, The Dream Hotel is a very straightforward story about captivity, injustice, and the erosion of respect for human dignity, it’s the themes of corporate pragmatism and profit-orientedness that really hit hard. The real terror isn’t dystopian surveillance by a cartoonishly evil police state: it’s the willingness of corporate interests to turn human lives into data points in a cost-benefit analysis.

The plot and the characters of The Dream Hotel are serviceable, but the underlying message articulates a fear that we might have had brewing in our heads for a surprisingly long time. If you’ve ever wondered about where your data goes or what it says about you, The Dream Hotel is worth your time.