The Future is Here, and She’s a Lovely Stranger Named Frankie

 Virginia Beach, VA.— Bringing work home can put stress on a marriage, especially when that “work” is a beautiful woman who seems too cozy with the husband. But in Bruce Deitrick Price’s genre-busting tragicomedy, Frankie, looks are deceiving.

Raymond Mason, an AI genius and college professor, brings Frankie, his latest, most human-like creation, to dinner. Raymond knows his wife will be impressed.

No way! Julia Mason feels competitive and threatened. For one thing, Raymond touches Frankie in a romantic way.

Julia is hostile and drinks too much. She passes out as Professor Mason runs upstairs to find a gun. An hour later, Julia wakes to find her husband dead and Frankie gone. Julia, semi-hysterical, races into the night to find the missing masterpiece.

Simon, a grad school drug dealer, falls in love with Frankie. He realizes he can build a cult around this spiritually evolved woman. First, he has to hide her.

For different reasons, many people search frantically for Frankie. Meanwhile, more unexplained deaths are reported. Panic sweeps the state of New Jersey. Some experts think that humanity is dealing with an alien invasion.

A pathologist says he has never seen so many beautiful corpses. Cause of death: unknown.

“Elon Musk believes that AI will destroy us. First there will be lots of misunderstandings, confusion, and paranoia,” Price says. “Frankie is a look into the future of AI. The smarter the robots, the more likely that strange, unanticipated things will happen.”

About the Author

Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, poet, artist and education reformer. He wrote his first article about robots around 1990. He was particularly curious about how machines and people would interact in the future. This long-time interest evolved into Frankie. In fact, four years ago, Price dreamed about a young woman walking beside a highway, alone and seeming adrift. Could she, he wondered, be a robot? On the lam? He woke up fascinated by the ambivalence and mystery of her situation. That was Frankie. He decided that moment he would write a book about her.

An Honors Graduate of Princeton in English Literature, Price served two years in the Army and then moved to Manhattan to be a writer and art director. He is the author of the erotic thriller Too Easy (still in print from Simon & Schuster), a novel hailed by Kinky Friedman as "the unwed mother of all page-turners." He also wrote American Dreams, an experimental novel and a true original. Price has more than 500 education articles on the internet, and his book Saving K-12 is the go-to guide for understanding the problems in our educational system.