This is the second book that follows Dreamscape Conspiracy, where an accidental discovery in a dream capture research project transmits one person’s dreams into another. As exciting as that discovery was, it led to attempted suicide. Despite that initial negative outcome, closer examination revealed the significant positive potential to control the transmitted dream segments for therapeutic applications.
This refinement pointed to a potential breakthrough in treating mental health challenges like Bipolar, Anxiety Disorders, PTSD, and others. Elements of Big Pharma deemed the Dreamscape capability a threat to their revenue gravy train and attempted to destroy the technology and the research team in the first book. The research project and team survived despite the destruction of their lab, technology, and archives of three years of captured dream data. Their survival in this book proves that winning a battle does not win the war.
In this second book, Beyond Dreamscape Conspiracy, their first Big Pharma attacker mistakenly assumed the message by destruction to cease their research was delivered and taken to heart by the research team. It wasn’t, and neither were Pharma’s covert plans to end the research or as they described – eradicate them.
The attacks only made them more focused and motivated to continue the research and build a new version of Dreamscape. A new team member, Zachery Taylor, a distinguished software engineer, enhanced the new version of Dreamscape with Artificial Intelligence (AI). They pursued AI to track patterns critical to their research in high volumes that were not humanly possible to track and analyze. At the same time, an unknown fear lingered about how safe an AI capability could be that self-learned from those very patterns. What would happen if AI became intelligent enough to jump into other systems?
The story opens with an investigation of how deep the original conspiracy ran and who was behind it. Dr. Cara Williams, the research project lead and Clinical Psychologist, uncovers a complex shell game of big money, offshore accounts, and deep deception leading directly back to two Big Pharma companies and University leadership. One company, Androloc, was behind the attacks in Book One. Another attack was imminent when LoMedTech felt it necessary to thin the research team herd by eliminating Russ Carter, a research assistant and a dangerous former Marine Force Recon Scout Sniper.
Carter has PTSD from his experiences in Afghanistan. Still, his capability to protect Dr. Williams is intact, and a love interest grows despite his feelings of being unworthy because of all the killings in his past. Cara Williams also suffers from challenges of PTSD but from a different war, one of the memories and lingering scars of sexual abuse when she was a teenager, and has issues with giving or accepting intimacy. Russ and Cara feel the attraction, but neither is ready to embrace the consequences. Circumstances they face repeatedly cause them to question and re-examine their demons and struggle to remain safe in separate and familiar pains rather than risk letting go.
Things changed dramatically when the second Big Pharma company, LoMedTech, offered collaboration instead of destruction. Cara had always considered the Dreamscape technology symbiotic with Pharma research, so the offer was welcomed with open arms. Almost. Only a few team members were convinced, and it took much wrangling before reaching a shaky consensus to move forward, but only with strict guarantees.
The Big Pharma offer was sweetened with a sizable amount of cash that distracted attention away from Pharma’s convert plans to own the Dreamscape technology outright. Pharma’s logic was simple – owning a threat was better than fighting against one.
How far down that path would the research team go before recognizing wolves in sheep’s clothing?
Link to Amazon
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This second book was a surprise that pushed me forward with more of the story. It’s funny; the story has action sequences I love to write, but the characters developing before my eyes have me captivated. I love the person’s narrative point of view; getting into each head is where the story builds. As an author, I can be in a character’s head/heart. That’s where the real story unfolds. In “Fear the Jump,” the next book, my imprint on the characters’ minds will be joined with an imprint left by the research team AI – Artificial Intelligence Matrixed for Evolving Environments, also known as AIMEE. AIMEE does jump, but not where Cara feared she’d go…
G.