Echo Chamber is a kitchen-sink drama, a political satire, and an exposition on the futility and meaninglessness of post-industrial life in the West.

It begins with a reptilian holocaust. While excavating the remains of a seemingly highly-advanced civilization on the outskirts of Sanctum City, archaeologist Mario Zollinger stumbles upon a sealed cave, where dozens of amphibious and reptilian creatures had been living in a self-contained universe — that is, until the very moment that Mario opened the cave, inadvertently destroying their habitat and instantly killing every living thing inside.

As Mario and his team of grad students struggle to understand what they have uncovered in the desert, they slowly begin to realize that the archaeological site they are investigating may not be what it appears. With the help of a rag-tag group of activists, Mario finds that what lies buried on the outskirts of his hometown may not be an archaeological site at all, but rather the scars of a terrifying experiment with “time bombs” — weapons that literally accelerate time. As the archaeological team digs further, what they discover beggars the imagination: The ancient ruins of Sanctum, the very city they live in.

Nefarious political forces begin to converge on Mario and his students — military commanders want to silence him, activists spread rumors on the Internet, and the internal politics of Mario’s own university threaten his career, family and future.

Meanwhile, Mario’s home life is falling apart. Accused of rape by a student with whom he had been having an affair, Mario finds himself trying to hold together the pieces of his marriage to Julie, a level-headed carreer woman whose work as a speechwriter for a local politician running on the anti-obesity platform is threatened by Mario’s high-profile legal problems.

As Mario prepares for his trial, his sessions with a strange, obsessive-compulsive therapist lead him to uncover a “memory on the verge of being forgotten” — as a child, Mario had been sexually abused by a neighbor. Mario’s parents refuse to believe his claims of abuse, accusing him of re-writing history. The conflict with his parents leads Mario to doubt his own memories, and by extension, his very identity. But Mario’s doubts don’t stop his lawyer from presenting a unique defence: Mario had been suffering from “sexsomnia,” a condition by which he would attempt to have sex during his sleep.

As his trial — now a major media sensation — reaches a fever pitch, Mario watches the underpinnings of his life come apart, but he is hardly paying attention to the crucial details of his life, because, deep within the excavation site, he has found the ruined remains of his childhood home, where he spends his days and nights carrying out detailed experiments on fossilized toys and school essays, and comparing them to his own memories, in a futile attempt to find answers where no answers can be found.

Download a twenty-five page sample of Echo Chamber (pdf)