THE RAINDROP PRELUDE (83k words) is a humorous, heartwarming, intricately-crafted caper of classical music and artificial intelligence à la Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. With literary prose and an action-packed plot, this timely novel will unite readers of humor-filled commercial mysteries, introspective literary fiction and speculative thrillers alike. Written with a highly cinematic palette, it reads like a distillation of the movies Tár, Indiana Jones and The Minority Report. The recent stunning rise of generative artificial intelligence lends great prescience to an escapist adventure that may - for some - feel all too real.
Young stagehand Samuel Clermont leads legendary concert pianist Laszlo Farkas through the back corridors of Carnegie Hall before his world debut. Moments later, during a magisterial performance of the Chopin preludes, Laszlo is shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart. A hooded figure is lowered through an aperture in the ceiling and grabs Laszlo before he hits the floor. Both are raised back up through the hole in the ceiling, and are gone.
The next morning Magnus Aarden, a star researcher in generative artificial intelligence, finds himself setting out across the Atlantic ocean from Chelsea Piers aboard a two-hundred foot sailing yacht. He's been paid an absurd amount of money to leave his AI job in Amsterdam and commence work on a mysterious project about which all details have been thus far withheld.
Also in New York is Lysander Bennett, an art curator recently suspended from his job at the Frick. He's thrilled when Nesrin, the attractive Syrian server at his usual haunt, asks him to help her out one afternoon. However, his hopes of romance are dashed when Nesrin reveals that she has an intense history. Not too long ago she was directly involved in a special forces operation in Istanbul. Now, she's determined to secure the job of rescuing Laszlo. But she can't do it alone.
Laszlo awakens within a fever dream. The gears of memory take him on a journey back over the course of his life. Yet there's a glitch in the matrix. He's aware of being aboard a ship. Something dangerous is happening. And it may be up to him to stop it.
The Raindrop Crossing unfolds through three distinct narrative threads: Magnus' increasingly mysterious research for a less-than-stable billionaire; Nesrin, Lysander, and Samuel's rag-tag search and rescue mission; and the first-person bildungsroman of Laszlo Farkas that leads directly to his present-day predicament. The characters all converge in the perilous final chapters, forced to band together to prevent the creation of a new superintelligence that would threaten the eradication of human civilization.
