Mosaic

De: Evan Mandery

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

From Emmy and Peabody Award winner Evan Mandery, MOSAIC is a sci-fi murder/thriller that explores the implications of technology that’s just around the corner.

MOSAIC is a virtual-reality platform that allows participants to jointly relive past experiences. When Lindsey Rudin, is killed inside MOSAIC—and also dies in real life—her murder sends shockwaves into the real world and the simulation, in which she has lived for nearly three years.

MOSAIC is told from two characters’ perspectives: Lindsey Rudin and Mark Collins, a broken down, alcoholic police officer who, weeks before his retirement, is ordered to investigate the murder of Rudin, his high school classmate. Rudin has been living inside a simulation with 100 of their high school classmates, which began on the night of their high school prom in 1985, and has continued moving forward from that point. Collins is resistant, but a simulation can only be entered by someone who shares the original past experience. The chief of police orders Collins to enter the program.

The main suspect is Lindsey’s husband, Justin, one of the world’s richest men and, secretly, a financier of the company that created MOSAIC. Shortly before her death, Lindsey sent a message to her real-world children indicating her intention to leave the simulation and focusing suspicion on Justin, who appears to have a dark secret. But Mark’s intuition tells him that Justin would not have murdered his wife and, even after several attempts are made on Mark’s own life, his investigation turns to other suspects: Lindsey’s brother, Francis, who has been living inside the simulation to escape the effects of Huntington’s Disease; Richard and Nalena Jackson, who have given all their money to Justin Rudin to finance their continuation in the program; and Elliot Gottlieb, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author who lives in MOSAIC to escape writer’s block and reclaim his inspiration.

As Collins investigates Rudin’s murder, he is forced to confront episodes from his own past that led to his own undoing: his drunken shooting of an unarmed Black boy, whose parents live inside the simulation, and the end of his relationship with his high school girlfriend, the one and only love of his life.

Ultimately a story of sin and redemption, MOSAIC is a profound exploration of the lengths that humans will go to protect their own vitality and to avoid recognition of the destructive choices of their generation.