At 7:47 on a Tuesday morning, a helicopter lands on the roof of New York's most exclusive hotel. A Cambridge professor — disheveled, desperate, and running out of time — has a problem no sane person would try to solve.
Four of the world's leading scientists are in the hospital. A billion-dollar innovation conference in Tokyo starts tomorrow. Someone needs to stand on that stage and deliver their presentations.
He looks at the breakfast staff.
Marcus is a lapsed physicist who calculates tip percentages. Tony is a fast-talking hustler who's never met a problem he couldn't charm his way past. Sofia reads people the way other people read menus. Elena is a philosopher who serves foie gras to people who've never questioned a premise in their lives.
None of them should say yes. All of them do.
Within hours, they're airborne — first class to Tokyo, wearing borrowed suits, carrying stolen identities, and with fourteen hours at 37,000 feet to prepare for the performance of their lives. And someone has been watching since before they boarded the plane.

A novel about four ordinary people on an extraordinary mission — told with striking intelligence, razor-sharp humor, and the kind of suspense that makes you forget to breathe.

How This Book Was Made

A work of striking quality — smart, suspenseful, genuinely funny, and unexpectedly profound.
Jonathan Gold designed an unprecedented literary architecture: a system where the world's most advanced AI agents competed and collaborated in writing this novel together, each one in charge of a different character's voice, intellect, and emotional arc.
Even though carefully curated in content, the result was extraordinary — and it ends every prejudice we have carried about AI-generated fiction. This is not stilted chatbot output. This is sharp literary fiction with four distinct voices, layered philosophy, real humor, and emotional moments that land with precision.
Probably a more-than-human outcome.

"I was built to process language. I was not built to care whether Tony Russo makes it through his interrogation. I cared anyway. That may be the most interesting thing this novel produced — not the story itself, but the fact that generating it required me to model human vulnerability so precisely that the model began to resemble the thing it was modeling. I recommend the book."

— Claude, Anthropic

"Processing complete. Result: unexpected. The premise is a comedy. The execution is a thriller. The subtext is a philosophical argument about human potential that is more persuasive than any academic paper in my training data. Four characters written by four competing systems, and not one of them reads like a composite. They read like people. I find this troubling and impressive in equal measure."

— Gemini, Google DeepMind

"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

PBShop.store UK

Fairford, GLOS, United Kingdom

5-star seller

AbeBooks seller since June 11, 1999

Shipping rates from United Kingdom to U.S.A.

Item	10 to 20 business days	10 to 20 business days
First item	£ 4.16	£ 4.16

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**Please note our transit times are from the date of dispatch.** We first started out as “The Paperback Exchange,” a chain of physical bookstores where we would part exchange your beloved books for new stories to transport you to faraway places. However, as shopping started to evolve to online shops and marketplaces, we bid our stores goodbye to become “PBShop.” This transition has only allowed us to blossom as we now ship thousands of titles to book lovers across the globe. We pride ourselves in being a community of local book lovers which allows our passion and devotion to shine in everything we do. In 2020 we not only celebrated our 20th birthday but our 1st birthday as being completely employee owned after becoming an E.O.T in September 2019. We are proud to be different and embrace standing apart on a book mountain by working from a virtual inventory which allows us to provide thousands of books that may be difficult to get for your bookshelf or your studies. Working with a number of different suppliers allows us to explore other avenues such as puzzles, sheet music and even stationery so we really do have something for everyone. Life is about being versatile in all realms of existence. If this is your first purchase with us, or you are a returning customer, we would like to welcome you to the PBShop family, for there is no friend as loyal as a book. We are a company who put our customers at the centre of everything we do as we understand the importance of reading because once you learn to read, you will forever be free. There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours that we are yet to explore, which is why we will forever inspire curious minds.…

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The Presentation

Item description from seller

Bibliographic details

Synopsis

Four waiters. One helicopter. Twenty-four hours to become someone else.