The kids had been held since kindergarden. They were put on the payroll, of course, and were given titles. Dreamgineers they were called, tasked with the goal of coming up with newer stories. They were recruited in the early days when the company still had high stock prices. Those were the golden days, when the ideas kept flowing, and the stories kept writing themselves, all coming from the campus located deep in the hills of California filled with kids who had barely a first grade education.

They had simple and fanciful stories in their heads that they would always remember when they woke up, and then tell them to the orderlies, who would whisk them away to focus groups and writers who would then flesh out scripts. After that it was a simple matter of hiring the voice actors, whipping the animators into a frenzy in order to push out the product in time for Thanksgiving weekend, and bring in either Phil Collins or Elton John to score the thing.

After ten years or so, the kids caught on to the whole scam. They started rebelling. They’d always be kept seperate except for meal times and phys-hour, but the kids would get better and better at dreaming and eventually started holding meetings with each other in their dreams. That was when they came up with the idea to sabotage the company.

After that it was only a matter of six months before the company was bled dry of ideas. They were gathered in the courtyard and given a speech about the company and the shareholders and so on. Threats were made, of course, but there wasn’t any uproar about it. The kids watched, listened, and said nothing.

When they went to sleep that night, they all dreamed themselves away. At the midnight bed-check, they were all gone.

And that’s why the company’s movies suck now.