Forthcoming · Techno-thriller / cosmic horror
The Harmonic Possession
A demon hides in an AI music model. Fifty-seven million devices. Seventy-two hours to stop the signal.
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Manuscript complete at approximately 59,400 words. Publication date and pre-order links coming as the book moves toward release.
Full synopsis — contains plot details
A demon hides in the weight geometry of an open-source AI music model. A trance producer uploads it to Hugging Face without knowing what he's done.
Fourteen months later, the contaminated weights are live inside Patch 1.66, broadcasting through fifty-seven million devices. An audio forensics grad student in Somerville hears a frequency that shouldn't be there. An MIT folklorist who has spent fifteen years arguing that medieval sigils encode functional geometric ratios identifies the structure in the spectrogram as the seal of Aamon. A DevOps engineer at BloomAudio has been quietly logging the anomalies for fourteen weeks. The CTO has four months of runway, an unsigned Series C term sheet, and a forty-percent growth clause she cannot miss.
The team has roughly seventy-two hours to build a counter-patch, and a charity concert in Boston is about to convert the mesh into a synchronized broadcast at face-height through a thousand phones.
The counter-patch is technical. The geometry is medieval. The standing wave collapses. The performer falls. The seeds are already in the neural architecture, and four notes have escaped into the oral tradition.
About the book
Procedural on the surface. Cosmic in the marrow.
The novel reads as procedural thriller on the surface, literary character study underneath, and cosmic horror at the core. Five rotating close-third points of view (a musician, an audio forensics grad student, an occult scholar, a DevOps engineer, a CTO) trace a single seventy-two-hour race against a contaminated software update.
Between their chapters, six present-tense interludes follow anonymous people in São Paulo, Seoul, Lagos, Berlin, Auckland, and Boston as the same seventy-two-second activation event passes through their hands. The book's architecture is global; its center of gravity is intimate.
It is a book about what we ship, what we trust, and what hides inside the math of the tools we have already learned to love.
Structure
Five voices, six interludes.
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POV · Musician
The Producer
A trance producer in a Dalston flat, typing prompts into a chatbot. He uploads the model that becomes the vector. He does not know what he has done.
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POV · Forensics
The Grad Student
An audio forensics researcher in Somerville. She hears a frequency that shouldn't be there. The spectrogram is the first witness.
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POV · Folklore
The Occult Scholar
An MIT folklorist who has spent fifteen years arguing that medieval sigils encode functional geometric ratios. The seal of Aamon is hiding in the weights.
-
POV · Engineering
The DevOps Engineer
The one who has been quietly logging the anomalies for fourteen weeks. The shape was there before anyone named it.
-
POV · Business
The CTO
An unsigned Series C term sheet. A forty-percent growth clause. A codebase she once wrote, now eight months out of her hands.
Six cities, one wave
Anonymous strangers across the mesh, present tense, the same seventy-two seconds passing through each pair of hands.
- São Paulo
- Seoul
- Lagos
- Berlin
- Auckland
- Boston
Where it sits
Comparable works
Closer to Crichton and VanderMeer than to action SF. For readers who want the procedural pleasure of a competence thriller and the slow vertigo of cosmic horror in the same book.
- Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park and The Andromeda StrainThe procedural skeleton
- Jeff VanderMeer, AnnihilationThe cosmic register
- Alex Garland, Ex MachinaTechnology as a vector for loss of autonomy
- Max Brooks, World War ZThe globally distributed interlude architecture
Listed as comparisons, not endorsements.
Content notes
Existential horror, loss of bodily autonomy, possession, on-stage medical collapse, brief mention of parental death and divorce, mild references to MMORPG addiction. No graphic violence, no sexual content, no slurs.
Status
Forthcoming.
Manuscript complete at approximately 59,400 words. Publication date and pre-order links coming as the book moves toward release.
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