Labyrinth by A.G. Riddle

A.G. Riddle’s Labyrinth is a near‑future sci‑fi thriller about a widowed Marine veteran whose mysterious tinnitus episodes and visions of numbers pull him into a secretive experiment in virtual reality and AI that threatens his family and, ultimately, the wider world.

The featured character, Alan Norris, is a former Marine who lost part of his leg and developed tinnitus after an IED blast; he now teaches middle‑school history and is raising his young daughter alone after his wife’s death from cancer.

As the story opens, it is night, and Norris wakes up in an abandoned warehouse next to the bloody body of a soldier he knows, with what appear to be random numbers written on the floor. Norris has no memory of what happened.

Tinnitus plays a central role in the story as he encounters others who have tinnitus and see the same numbers.

Norris discovers an obscure website whose URL matches the number sequence he keeps seeing. There he finds a small group of strangers from around Raleigh, North Carolina, all of whom have tinnitus, experience similar blackouts, and see the same code.

As a side note, the book takes place in Raleigh, North Carolina. Riddle and I share a commonality in having earned physics degrees from NC State, in Raleigh. I had to smile at the oddities Riddle brought up. For example, most cities name their interstate bypass ‘beltway.’ In Raleigh, it is ‘beltline.’

The group believes the numbers are more than a hallucination and starts working together to decode them. As they dig, they uncover hints of a far‑reaching conspiracy and realize the sequence is a key to something that could alter not just their lives but global power and technology.

The book plays on Riddle’s favorite themes, time travel being one of them. At 736 pages, it is an investment in time, most of it being a sailing trip to the other side of the globe leaving the reader wondering “why?”

The question is eventually answered.

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