Livers, earning votes via bread and circuses. Finally, the Sleepless are the source of just about all technological, genetic and scientific advances. Two new faces swiftly turn the tables. One arrives at Leisha's Susan Melling Foundation in New Mexico, a ten-year-old Liver named Drew Arlen. He is intent on enrolling in the Foundation, which (in Leisha's words) "asks beggars why they're beggars and provides funding for those who want to be something else." Drew has charisma and a harmless nature, but runs afoul of Eric Bevington-Watrous, second son of Jordan and Stella; a fistfight between the two leaves Drew paralyzed from the waist down. Attending various private schools, Drew finds a flair for artistic expression, but consistently fails or flunks out of each of them; by nineteen he has becomes a delinquent. Eric forces him into an experimental therapy in which the pathways between the limbic system and the neocortex are strengthened, supposedly forcing the brain to cope with its more primitive, bestial nature. In Drew, the treatment backfires, and he gains access to a sort of genetic collective unconscious, which he perceives in visual terms (in the next book, in which Arlen is a first-person narrator, he constantly describes people, things, concepts and emotions as having shape, texture, color and so on). Drew learns to project these shapes in holographic form and becomes the Lucid Dreamer, a performance artist who places his viewers in a waking dream, the contents of which are determined by the holograms. The other new face is born at Sanctuary Orbital: Miranda Serena Sharifi, the first of the "Superbrights." Her genemods cause her brain to operate at three or four times the speed of a standard Sleepless, at the cost of muscle control (she and all the other Supers, including her brother Tony, twitch, jerk and vibrate with "manic vitality"). Within the first few years of Miri's life, it becomes clear that she and all the other Supers think differently than do normal Sleepless; their thoughts take the form of "strings," which are entire piles of data arranged in geometric shapes and involving analogy and cross-reference. Her growth is set against a Sanctuary becoming even more careful and even more suspicious of the earth-bound Sleeper haters. Five children have been conceived that, through regression to the mean, lack the dominant Sleeplessness gene, and Jennifer is obsessed with declaring Sanctuary independent of America. To that end,