Everyone dreams. Someone else profits.
Milwaukee is still standing in 2044.
Mostly.
The lake is still there. The old brick buildings are still there. You can still find pieces of Summerfest, Fiserv Forum, Jones Island, Walker’s Point, the Intermodal Station, the Hoan Bridge, and all the concrete, steel, water and stubbornness that make Milwaukee recognizable.
But the world built around them has changed.
Automation didn’t just take jobs. It changed who society considered necessary.
Artificial intelligence didn’t remain inside computers. It became infrastructure.
Dream technology didn’t stay entertainment. It became escape.
And somewhere along the way, people handed more and more of their lives to a system called the Leviathan.
By 2044, it knows almost everyone.
Almost.
There are still kids who slipped through.
Kids without PulseIDs. Without government records. Without a guaranteed stipend or a clean place inside the system.
People call them Null Kids.
Aiden Cross is one of them.
And being invisible has kept him alive.
So far.
So, What Is Null Kids?
Null Kids is a dystopian science-fiction story set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2044.
At sixteen, Aiden “Fade” Cross survives by scavenging the edges of a world that was never designed to include him.
His specialty is the Drift, a strange overlap of computer network, dreamscape and human consciousness running through the Leviathan.
Millions of people spend their nights connected to Somnus Dream Pods, disappearing into personalized worlds where reality can be whatever they need it to be.
All those dreams leave something behind.
Fragments.
Memories.
Emotions.
Little pieces of human experience called Lume Frags.
Aiden steals them.
Not because he’s trying to change the world.
Because a clean Lume Frag might buy dinner.
Maybe breakfast too.
Then one night, he brings something back from the Drift that doesn’t behave like ordinary dream residue.
That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.
Because discovering what Aiden actually found is part of the journey.
What follows takes him through the forgotten infrastructure beneath Milwaukee, the communities growing outside the Citadel’s carefully managed world, and toward people who have very different ideas about what technology has done to humanity.
Some want to destroy it.
Some want to control it.
Some just want to survive it.
And Aiden would really prefer everyone stop trying to kill him long enough for him to figure out which group he’s supposed to belong to.
Meet the Characters
Null Kids ultimately became as much about the people Aiden finds as it is about the technology surrounding them.
They’re not a polished resistance squad.
They’re teenagers, scavengers, mechanics, activists, survivors and damaged people who frequently disagree about what the right thing even looks like.
Which makes them a lot more interesting.
Aiden “Fade” Cross
Aiden is sixteen, unregistered and very good at fixing things that should probably stay broken.
He grew up in Walker’s Point without a PulseID, which means he doesn’t officially exist within most of the systems governing everyday life.
That has disadvantages.
Quite a few, actually.
He doesn’t receive the protections registered citizens take for granted. He can’t simply walk through checkpoints, open certain doors or expect the system to come looking if he disappears.
But being Null has also taught him how to see the spaces between systems.
Old infrastructure.
Forgotten access points.
Dead networks.
Places where modern technology assumes nobody could possibly still be standing.
In the Drift, he goes by Fade.
The name isn’t really meant to sound cool.
It’s instructions.
Stay quiet. Stay moving. Don’t give the system enough time to realize you’re there.
Aiden is intelligent, technically gifted, stubborn to a nearly self-destructive degree and far more comfortable talking to broken machines than explaining his feelings to another human being.
Fortunately, the book gives him plenty of opportunities to be terrible at both.
Riven
Riven is Aiden’s splitch deck, although calling it a computer doesn’t quite capture the relationship.
It began life as a civic tablet.
Aiden rebuilt it from scavenged parts until its original purpose became almost irrelevant. Its casing is cracked. Its internals have been repaired, replaced, rerouted and modified so many times that there’s probably very little of the original device left.
It’s ugly.
Temperamental.
Occasionally smoking.
And indispensable.
Riven analyzes connections, monitors Aiden’s hardware, warns him when he’s about to do something particularly stupid and communicates through short interface messages that often carry more personality than they probably should.
Aiden talks to it.
Riven answers.
Whether that makes Riven a tool, a computer sidekick or simply the only machine Aiden trusts is probably best left to you the reader.
Lux
Lux is one of those people who enters Aiden’s life and immediately makes him reconsider several assumptions.
Most of them badly.
She has copper curls, blue eyes, old burn scars and intricate tattoos running across her skin.
Except they’re not exactly tattoos.
They’re Living Ink.
The patterns glow and react beneath her skin, carrying fragments of stories and memories in a form the Citadel can’t easily control.
Lux knows Milwaukee beneath the version most citizens see. Tunnels, service corridors, dead infrastructure, hidden communities and routes through places Aiden thought he understood.
She’s capable, guarded and considerably more dangerous than she initially appears.
She also has an irritating tendency to be right.
Aiden notices.
More than he’d like to.
Trace
Trace is another Null Kid, although he and Aiden approach being invisible very differently.
Aiden’s instinct is usually to disappear.
Trace’s is occasionally to make a joke, pull out a volt-pike and see what happens.
He’s sharp, irreverent and extremely good at surviving Milwaukee’s less welcoming corners. He understands the tunnel routes, the unwritten boundaries between factions, and the kind of street logic no map is ever going to contain.
He’s also the person most likely to correct your animal metaphor while you’re having an emotional breakdown.
Possibly while being chased.
The humor matters.
Null Kids can get dark, but Trace understands something Aiden sometimes forgets.
Survival isn’t worth very much if you forget how to laugh while doing it.
Lio
Lio is different from Aiden and Trace in one important way.
He exists.
Officially.
He’s a registered citizen with a PulseID, a home and a family. He can walk through checkpoints that would send Aiden looking for the nearest drainage tunnel.
That doesn’t mean his life is easy.
It means his risks are different.
Lio is empathetic, thoughtful and far braver than Aiden initially gives him credit for. He’s the kind of friend who worries, complains about the plan, points out all the ways it’s a terrible idea and then starts figuring out how he can help anyway.
He’s also an important reminder that resistance doesn’t always look like disappearing from the system.
Sometimes it means choosing not to look away.
Keller
Keller operates a tech stall in the Market Beneath and serves as one of Aiden’s connections to Milwaukee’s black market.
He’s part fence, part technician, part information broker.
His workspace is filled with old circuitry, mismatched monitors, salvaged Somnus equipment and enough ancient technology to make it look like the apocalypse arrived halfway through a firmware update.
Keller has a battered ocular implant, an impressive tolerance for danger and the sort of moral compass that generally points toward whichever direction pays in Sats.
Mostly.
He’s one of the few adults who understands just how capable Aiden is.
Which also means he’s one of the few who understands exactly how much trouble Aiden can get himself into.
Ben Carter
Ben Carter is the leader of the Human Hands.
Former union organizer. Former industrial worker. Current problem for the Citadel.
He looks like someone built from old Milwaukee factory floors. Heavy shoulders, scarred hands, an Ironworkers Local 8 jacket and a steel-banded cane.
The Human Hands represent one of the strongest reactions to the automated world.
Where Aiden scavenges machines and bends them into something useful, the Hands believe humanity surrendered far too much to automation in the first place.
They value manual labor.
Mechanical tools.
Analog systems.
Human judgment.
And the radical idea that sometimes a person should still be the one holding the wrench.
Carter isn’t interested in technology because it’s impressive.
He’s interested in what it costs people.
That makes his relationship with a sixteen-year-old kid carrying a homemade computer everywhere… complicated.
Prefect Caldus Brune
If Aiden represents the person the system can’t quite see, Prefect Brune represents the person who believes the system should see everything.
Brune is a senior Citadel official with pale silver augmented eyes and the unnerving composure of someone accustomed to having an entire city translated into data before him.
He doesn’t need to shout.
He doesn’t need to threaten people very often.
He has systems for that.
He’s frightening because he believes order works.
People become profiles.
Movement becomes probability.
Behavior becomes prediction.
And anything the system can’t categorize becomes a problem waiting to be corrected.
Aiden Cross is very difficult to categorize.
Milwaukee Is a Character Too
One of the things I wanted from Null Kids was for Milwaukee to remain recognizable, mostly.
This isn’t a fictional megacity with Milwaukee’s name pasted onto it.
The geography matters.
The history matters.
The industrial infrastructure matters.
The lake absolutely matters.
I wanted someone familiar with the city to occasionally stop and think:
Wait. I know where that is.
Just maybe not like this.
Walker’s Point
Aiden’s Milwaukee begins in Walker’s Point.
By 2044, the neighborhood still carries its old warehouses, foundries, brick buildings, river channels and industrial bones, but much of the infrastructure has been abandoned, repurposed or left to decay.
This is Aiden’s territory.
Old enough to contain blind spots.
Dense enough to disappear in.
Full of buildings that remember what they were supposed to be long after the economy stopped needing them.
It’s a place caught between the Milwaukee that existed and the one the Citadel is trying to build over it.
The Dream Spine
You can’t really talk about Milwaukee in Null Kids without talking about the Dream Spine.
It dominates the skyline.
A tower of glass and infrastructure rising over the city, connected to the millions of people using Somnus Dream Pods.
The Leviathan seems to breathe through it.
Its light reaches across rooftops, reflects from the rivers and leaks into neighborhoods miles away.
Even when Aiden isn’t looking at it, he can often hear it.
Feel it.
The Dream Spine is architecture as authority.
A reminder that somewhere above all the cracked pavement, broken machinery and struggling neighborhoods, the system is still running.
The Drift
The Drift isn’t technically a Milwaukee location.
Then again, “technically” becomes a dangerous word once people start plugging their nervous systems directly into city infrastructure.
The Drift is what Aiden experiences when he connects to the Leviathan through his hacked Lume Jack.
Reality doesn’t disappear.
It folds.
Water rises into suspended droplets.
Light bends into geometry.
Walls become glowing patterns.
Human thoughts move through the space like currents, while fragments of memory flicker inside golden Lume Frags.
It isn’t virtual reality in the traditional sense.
It’s part network.
Part dream.
Part consciousness.
And Aiden enters it with equipment assembled from discarded technology and optimism he probably hasn’t earned.
A Drift run can last seconds.
That can be more than enough time to ruin your life.
The Market Beneath
Milwaukee’s old Intermodal Station has become something else.
The trains stopped.
People didn’t.
The Market Beneath fills the abandoned concourse with repair stalls, food, black-market technology, biometric modifications, scavenged hardware and people trying to make a living outside the cleaner parts of the Citadel economy.
Old signs remain above new businesses.
Dead brands sit beside improvised electronics.
People trade in Sats.
Null Kids sleep above old ticket counters.
Aiden fits here in a way he doesn’t fit in many other places.
Nobody asks why you aren’t registered.
They ask what you’ve got to sell.
The Jones Cut
Between neighborhoods, beneath streets and alongside old industrial corridors is another Milwaukee entirely.
Storm drains.
Rail tunnels.
Flood channels.
Utility passages.
Abandoned service routes.
The Jones Cut sits in one of those ugly seams where the Citadel’s cameras don’t always get a clean view.
That makes it valuable.
Everyone who wants to move unseen eventually ends up using the places the city stopped caring about.
Which means those places develop rules and owners of their own.
The future may run on artificial intelligence.
The tunnels still run on territory.
Jones Island and the MMSD Underworks
Jones Island remains industrial in 2044.
It just isn’t doing exactly the same work.
Beneath rusted catwalks, old settling tanks, pumps and water infrastructure, portions of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District complex have been repurposed by the Human Hands.
The location was almost too perfect not to use.
A sprawling piece of physical infrastructure beneath highways and beside Lake Michigan, filled with machinery that requires actual maintenance by actual people.
In a world obsessed with seamless automation, the MMSD Underworks feel stubbornly physical.
Steel.
Water.
Rust.
Bolts.
Pumps.
Hands.
Coasterville
Then there’s Coasterville.
Built across the old Summerfest grounds and expanding along the lakefront, Coasterville is a vertical patchwork settlement created by people displaced by climate migration, economic collapse and a city that couldn’t or wouldn’t make room for everyone arriving.
Shipping containers became homes.
Scaffolding became streets.
Walkways stretch between structures.
Water lines run overhead.
Food stalls glow at night.
Laundry moves in the lake wind.
It isn’t polished.
It isn’t particularly safe.
But it’s alive.
That’s important.
Because so much of the Citadel’s world is clean, optimized and controlled.
Coasterville is messy.
People argue.
People repair things.
People cook for each other.
People build additions without waiting for permission from an algorithm.
The city calls communities like this failures.
The people living there might disagree.
The Technology of Null Kids
There’s a lot of technology in the book, but I didn’t want it to feel magical simply because the calendar says 2044.
Most of Aiden’s world is built from recognizable technological ideas pushed forward.
Neural interfaces.
Wearable identification.
Algorithmic governance.
Artificial intelligence managing infrastructure.
Autonomous drones.
Personalized virtual environments.
Biometrics.
Behavioral scoring.
Digital currency.
Predictive surveillance.
None of those ideas requires a wizard.
Just time.
Then there are the technologies people build outside those systems.
Lume Jacks.
Splitch decks.
Vampire taps.
Living Ink.
Analog bypasses.
Scavenged batteries.
Old fiber lines everyone forgot were still underground.
The shiny technology belongs to the Citadel.
The interesting technology usually has electrical tape on it.
But Null Kids Isn’t Really About Technology
At least, I don’t think it is.
The machines provide the world.
The people provide the story.
Underneath the hacking, drones, Dream Pods and broken infrastructure, Null Kids keeps circling a handful of questions.
What happens when being comfortable becomes more important than being free?
How much of yourself can you hand to a system before it becomes difficult to tell where you end and the system begins?
What happens to people when an economy decides it doesn’t need them anymore?
Who owns a memory?
Can something still be real if nobody recorded it?
And what happens when the people society considers unnecessary decide that they still have something worth fighting for?
Aiden begins the story believing survival means staying invisible.
Don’t get noticed.
Don’t get attached.
Don’t stop moving.
Take what you need.
Make it to tomorrow.
The problem with people is that eventually they make that strategy very difficult.
Found Family at the End of the World
For all the dystopian pieces of Null Kids, this is probably the part of the story I care about most.
Aiden lives in a world obsessed with identity.
PulseIDs.
Profiles.
Registries.
Compliance.
Metrics.
The system is constantly trying to define what everyone is.
Yet the relationships that begin forming around him don’t care much about those definitions.
Null.
Citizen.
Human Hand.
Memory Weaver.
Registered.
Unregistered.
Useful.
Redundant.
Those labels matter enormously to the Citadel.
They become less useful when somebody is bleeding beside you in a tunnel.
The heart of Null Kids became the people who keep showing up for one another, especially when doing so is inconvenient, dangerous or spectacularly stupid.
There’s plenty of technology in this book.
There’s also bad food, better noodles, old music, dark tunnels, inappropriate jokes, improvised weapons, arguments, fear, grief, first crushes and people trying to remember how to belong to one another.
That part hasn’t changed much by 2044.
I hope it never does.
Welcome to Milwaukee
If you’ve read my earlier post, The Making of Null Kids, you already know where some of the ideas behind this future came from.
This time, I wanted to introduce the place those ideas eventually became.
A Milwaukee where the Summerfest grounds have turned into a settlement.
Where the old train station shelters a black market.
Where Jones Island hides a resistance movement.
Where forgotten sewer tunnels are safer than city streets.
Where millions of people spend their nights somewhere that doesn’t physically exist.
And where a sixteen-year-old kid with a cracked computer and no legal identity accidentally finds something much larger than the next meal he was looking for.
That’s where Null Kids begins.
I’ll let Aiden take it from there.
Null Kids releases September 18, 2026.
The Kindle edition is available for preorder now.
Everyone dreams. Someone else profits.