Synopsis

Setting

The Year 2025 in the United States, six years after a catastrophic financial collapse known as “Fisher’s Reckoning”: a mass deleveraging of debt bubbles and inflated assets coupled with an implosion of the shadow-banking system. The country is now under the control of a shadowy group of 30 families (loosely related) known as the “Ruling Clans” or the “Triantarchy.”

Plot Summary

Echoes kicks off with a Prologue scene in a Chicago subway car, in which two agents of an Underground Resistance group against the Ruling Clans are overwhelmed, along with other subway riders, by a terrifying unknown force. Before losing consciousness, one of the agents makes reference to an apocalyptic threat and a connection with a biomedical engineering professor who turns out to be the protagonist, Dr. Tim Shoemaker, of Dalton University in North Carolina. The action shifts to Tim’s home turf where he is toasting the successful thesis defense of his top protégé, Zach Choi, who nonetheless clashes with Tim over the bitter pill of Zach’s Blacklisting – for unknown reasons – by the Triantarchs, and his inability to support himself or his fiancée, Renee Tsai. Upset by the angry exchange with Zach and haunted by his recent past – particularly the wrenching loss of his wife Susan in an accident three years before – Tim is further shaken by an unexpected phone call from Rachel Bloom, another protégé with whom he lost contact two years before.

Tim is summoned out to Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, where Rachel is now a project chief, to help her decipher the roots of a bizarre psychotic syndrome among blinded war veterans receiving eye implants to restore their sight. The soldiers share a series of nightmarish delusions and hallucinations despite their isolation, and Rachel believes they may somehow be connected to the Simitalis, a neurological re-learning device stolen from Tim’s laboratory two years before. On the way to the Oak Ridge campus, Tim pays a visit to his cousin Ernie in Tennessee. Ernie tells him that his bitterly estranged uncle, Mitch Shoemaker, has urgently requested that Tim accept responsibility for a series of mysterious family heirlooms that the ailing Mitch has long had in his possession. Tim caustically refuses and heads off to join Rachel the next morning.

At Oak Ridge, Tim learns that the disturbances began with a Marine Lance Corporal, Pablo Acevedo, who became overwhelmed by visions of an unknown entity that he seems compelled to hand-draw in progressively greater detail. Tim also learns of a series of computer viruses that have recently been plaguing the campus and the surrounding region, and he detects altered files that trace back to February 5th, 2025 – “El Dia del Diablo,” the same day that Pablo first received his eye implants. Rachel and Tim are abruptly called to Pablo’s patient quarters, where he has used his own blood to smear a wall with cryptic messages, including a 5-digit number scrawled repeatedly: 46,117. Tim sneaks into Pablo’s recovery suite, where he glimpses Pablo’s drawings of an evolving entity with a malevolent, menacing central eye.

Unnerved by what he has seen and unable to explain it, Tim reluctantly returns to visit his cousin Ernie and accepts his uncle’s bequest of the family artifacts in hopes of soliciting Mitch’s help in tackling the Oak Ridge mystery. He picks them up at Pegasus Atlantic Bank in Charlotte, NC, where a recording from Tim’s uncle explains that the objects somehow represent an advanced sort of information technology developed, inexplicably, by a secretive guild of metalworkers in the 17th century. Tim is unsettled by the heirlooms, above all by a visually disturbing stone tablet, full of apocalyptic imagery and a cryptic warning about an unknown force that would somehow be awakened by the detonation of an atomic bomb in war. When Tim further examines the artifacts – including a helmet linked to a “mind-mimic” device known as the Cereceph – he loses consciousness and then wakes up nearly blind. As his sight returns, he is oddly compelled to sketch out a “dream vision” consisting of an otherworldly chamber sparsely marked by strange shapes and geometries.

Tim is alarmed upon suffering repeated episodes of the dream visions followed by compulsive sketches, with the enigmatic room gradually filling itself with more bizarre objects and shapes – including the demonic entity that seems to have been haunting Pablo and the other soldiers. Rachel reassures Tim that he is not suffering from the psychiatric syndrome besetting the Oak Ridge veterans, but Tim remains unconvinced. His mind is further rattled by a chance encounter with an old flame, which in turn brings the repressed memories of his wife Susan’s death back to the forefront. After waking from a vivid dream, Tim is shocked by a crude sketch of what appears to be Susan’s face on an idle computer monitor, which he promptly shuts off. Tim struggles to put his travails aside, further investigating the Shoemaker family artifacts by contacting Ezra Gordon, an associate of his Uncle Mitch’s. Ezra has traced the artifacts back to an unknown workshop in eastern Germany, with Mitch hoping that Tim will follow up and pinpoint their precise origin, a request he initially declines. However, he continues to be haunted by dream visions of both the otherworldly room and of Susan – crashing his car and injuring himself when Susan’s face is once again inexplicably sketched on a small LCD display on the dashboard. Now desperate for answers about the interlocking conundrums plaguing him since his trip to Oak Ridge, Tim agrees to videoconference with Rachel for a midnight meeting organized by the vision project’s leadership, consulting international experts to pin down the psychotic syndrome. Tim is shocked when an elderly Japanese physician notes an earlier, milder form of the disease that had taken root among survivors and US soldiers stationed in and around Hiroshima after 1945. Realizing the link to his own family artifacts, Tim further confers with Rachel. Together, they discover that the strange computer viruses, his dream visions, and the symbolism in the soldiers’ drawings also bear some kind of ancient, seemingly cosmic connection. Their attempts to decipher it are cut off when one of Rachel’s colleagues nearly loses an arm to a malfunctioning piece of equipment, failing for reasons that no one can explain.

Still haunted by the unexplained conundrums, Tim heads off to give a guest lecture at another university in North Carolina. Upon completing it, however, he is once again shocked by an image of Susan being drawn before his eyes on a projection screen – at which point he realizes that one of the bizarre family artifacts, the Cereceph, has been projecting his own mind’s-eye onto the screen. Baffled by its power, Tim finally makes contact with his estranged Uncle Mitch. Together, they deduce that the soldiers at Oak Ridge have been infected by a “Janus Virus,” a hypothetical wad of information that can overwhelm both human brains and informatics networks, and that the Simitalis (which Tim and his protégé Zach Choi had developed) had somehow linked the power of Tim’s heirlooms to the mysterious events at Oak Ridge. After signing off and glimpsing the portentous stone tablet again, Tim is overcome by yet another dream vision that grotesquely merges his memories of Susan with the demonic entity in the otherworldly chamber.

In an anguished epiphany, Tim finally grasps the fundamental connection among all the conundrums overwhelming him and Rachel of late: memory, in a Proustian sense, that has somehow been transformed into a physical force. The demonic entity himself represents a kind of manifesting memory and yet also draws his power from it (“He who remembers all” in Pablo’s words). As the novel concludes, Tim sets off determined to track down the origins of his family’s heirlooms in Europe, while a group of coal miners o Kentucky is overtaken by the same mysterious force that overwhelmed the subway riders in the Prologue.