Chengjia City relies on residents' dreams to predict tide disasters. The rich can pay to be exempted from "dreams", but lowland residents exchange sleep for rent, medicine coupons and water. Therefore, this system that claims to cover the whole city has only heard the nightmares of some people from the beginning.
Eight years ago, the Xiazhan embankment collapsed and claimed hundreds of lives. Mengpu corrector Wen Che was found guilty of deleting warnings without permission, and he became known as the "tide deleter" in the city. Eight years later, a girl who had been awake for 30 consecutive hours handed over an impossible dream sheet, predicting that the dry city far away from the coast would flood in forty-six minutes. Cheng Li, the deep water sluice inspector responsible for supervising Wen Che, is the younger brother of the deceased in the accident. He is also a man who will never be able to dream due to the sequelae of the rescue.
From abandoned pressure relief channels, failed air spectra to abnormal samples that were averaged out, the two approached the old case layer by layer. Wen Che was guilty, but not the one in the record; Cheng Li's brother had been involved in the mistake and tried to make amends at the last minute. Disaster comes from a system that once saved many people but later learned to attribute the deaths of a few people to error. As a larger complex storm approaches, they must choose between "forcing some people to sleep in exchange for accurate forecasts" and "a new rough, open plan that allows for withdrawal."
They must also answer the same personal question: love and protection, should they hide the unbearable truth for the other person, or should they give the complete truth back to him and accept his decision to leave?
Purpose: Any seemingly accurate and fair system allocates risks: whose experience is adopted and whose anomalies are regarded as noise, may bear the cost outside of statistics. Reliable public safety requires disclosing methods and costs, accommodating minority opinions, and returning the rights to know, refuse, and withdraw to those who bear risks.