The Fifth Floor

Time Patrol

By: Bob Mayer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“We cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of." Julian Jaynes. The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. From the NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Atlantis, Nightstalker, Area 51 and Green Beret series.

"Before there was just me now, there was a bunch of other stuff that I don't remember. People keep telling me I should remember, but maybe if you can't remember there is a reason." Thus begins Lara’s story as she escapes from an apparent mental institution. Who is she? What reality should she believe? And did she escape in reality or just in her mind?

In a crowded marketplace in Haifa, Lukas’s body is wrapped in a bomb, his hand on the detonator. But then the young man has an awareness of all the lives of those around him, the possibilities, their hopes, their dreams and he doesn’t detonate the bomb. Whisked away to a black site, the interrogators brutally try to find out why. Only to discover he has identical DNA with a patient in a mental institution in the United States: Lara. But this is impossible.

A psychological thriller traveling into the intimate and infinite realm of time and parallel worlds, in the genre of Westworld. Is Lara’s reality the one where she’s holding a bloody knife and her family has been slaughtered? Is it the one where she’s in the institution against her will, being experimented upon? Is it the one where’s she working as a gardener for a woman who has secrets of her own?

There’s an even more frightening possibility with even more potential: That all of them are true. The powers-that-be think they can dig for the answer. By sending her to the Fourth Floor. That’s a mistake. Because there is a Fifth.

Portrayal of tricks of memory

I didn’t really appreciate the AI reading the story, but better than nothing. The story was engrossing and the ending rather rewarding.