Hi, there, Michael!
First of all, if curiosity killed the cat, mine can slain a pack of lions, so I would love to read the full texts.
Also because as plot overview goes, it is a little hard to review it knowing I only read parts of every chapter.
However, I'll do my best.
You say you want:
"feedback regarding how well this communicates the story, the characters, the settings and the conversations in a believable and understandable way."
Okay, here we go.
The excerpts certainly do their job in communicating the story.
Chapter one sets off at a good pace, and right away you can tell it's a different world. Arjan and Torre may be from NYPD, but not today. So from then on, you get the reader open and waiting for setting hints.
I like how you provide them. They come out at the right moments, and they're never overwhelming (I never got that feeling, like "duh, I need some aire before reading on, cos my head is a mess of names and new technologies and setting details.").
It's great that you keep the first chapters with two characters each, because it allows the reader to have more attention on the word you created (which is a character in itself) and what you tell about it. Else, the reader is too busy trying to remember names and ages and ranks or relations between characters, and overlook the descriptions that allow them to get the mental picture of the story's setting.
However, I think that including the whole story of Babel right away may be a little too much. Considering it comes up at hardly ten or fifteen lines after the beginning.
Again, this being an excerpt, I don't know if there are more lines in between.
Such as this item is, I hardly met Torre and Arjan and I'm already reading about what "one of the Perot daughters" had done, and it goes on for the next four paragraphs before we get to The Fall.
Suggestion: if "the Perot daughters" don't play a role in your universe, if they're not mentioned again in a way that the reader can automatically relate them to the building of Babel, you don't even need to mention them here.
When you open a sci-fi book, you set your mind in the "memory mode". You know you're treadding into a whole different universe, so you gotta be alert, because everything the writer mentions in the first chapters will help you understand this universe. And along with the universe, you gotta get familiar with the characters, their ways, their history.
Plus you gotta see what the story is about, you're first introduced to the plot.
If you're used to read sci-fi, it's a natural process. I know it is for me. But it's anyway a lot of information to take in.
Some readers just read over names and descriptions, trusting that the plot will set them in the right picture as it goes. I, on the other side, are the nerd-type of reader: I pay a lot of attention to names and descriptions, and when I think I got it, only then I relax. Because I don't like to go back and look up a name or a definition because it looks like I've already read about it and just overlooked it.
So you had me reading about this Babel building story a little more than I needed to get the picture.
About "The Fall". Hand to heart: I didn't understand what the hackers did. I ended up figuring they made the building bots do those images of the jumping man and the bible quote, but it's not clearly explained.
After four paragraphs of learning about Babel's building process, I would've liked the reason of it failure to be a little more explicit. Call me an old stupid cave-woman. Guilty as charged.
However, even if Babel is the setting of several chapters, I would also like to know what it looks like. I mean, is it a complex of buildings, like some fantastic citadel? It's a huge cube of concrete? I know who had the idea of building it, but I don't have the slightest idea what it looks like.
Moving on. After "The Fall" we come to "The Faithfull". Good, we've come to the nowadays reality of Babel.
Plus, it triggers interaction, some good, intriguing, hooking dialogue, which provides a lot of information about the characters, why they're there and that they may have some secret motivations to be there.
I liked that a lot!
By the way, it's the brightest moment of the chapter. Describing the bot as an exclamation mark made my life so much easier! I read the whole description trying to get the picture, then you said that and this Neanderthal smiled and went "Oh, yes! I got it!"
Plus Torre's interpretation of Arjan's look: "Not in front of the kids". That was just great!
Not only quick, and funny, but also informative about the bots and how humans think of them.
You described me the bot and how humans see it in hardly twenty words. That it's just great! --and that's why I was arguing above about too much said about the building of Babel: because you have that rare skill to get your message through in such an effective way with just a few words.
To wrap up about the first chapter, I liked the final surprise. The note, the tea, the candles.
It's a very good hook, leaving your characters following the instructions, like getting ready to enter another domain and oooooh, I wanna know more about it. I wanna walk with them through that door and see what they find. So if this was a book, I'd be forced to keep reading.
Only one thing: who the heck is The Follower?
I mean, I was like "oh-oh we are entering The Faithful's territory, let's see what happens". But you say it's The Follower's domain. Err.... is he the leader of the Faithful? Where are the Faithful? Because I've been reading about them earlier, and I know Arjan suspects they're involved, so (read this as the old lady next door demanding the bank manager to come see her about her ten-dollars account) I don't know this Follower dude pooping out here! I want Arjan and Torre about to enter the Faithful's domain!
Sorry, we old ladies do that kind of thing.
And again: I don't know if you explain who The Follower is, because this is an excerpt. If you do explain, my sincere apologies, and I suggest you include that in the excerpt. If not, maybe you should consider saying something about The Follower before they reach the apartment.
The second chapter is simply
brilliant. I loved it.
You give loads and loads of information in a quick-paced dialogue that flows just perfect. You describe the characters, their background, their reasons to be there, you expand the information about the setting. Everything through dialogue.
That's a hell of a skill you have.
All the things I just wrote about the narrtive bumps in chapter one are absent here. From these two, chapter 2 is far the best.
The overall impression is that you know your universe, you're not making it up as you go, and you handle the flow of information about it very well.
I didn't quite like chapter 2 being about something else, because I was expecting to see what happened to Torre and Arjan. But I completely forgot my pouting about it by the third line or so, and I enjoyed every little bit of it.
Now, there are a couple of bumps that throw off the attention. In narrative, there was that long explanation about the building of Babel.
But the serious one is grammar. There are hyphens missing, when you're using a couple of combined adjetives, combined nouns, or an adjective+noun combination as an adjective for the following noun. Example: "the top user experience designers" it should be "the top user-experience designers", because user+experience are working as a whole like an adjective to describe the noun designers--in this case, which kind of designers you're talking about. The effect on the reader is being forced to read it over to see what you're meaning.
However, it shows up mostly in dialogues. Most of the commas are missing. And hey, I know we don't speak like we punctuate, ok? But hey again, it's grammar rules, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Quick example, when Torre says: "So boss," he started etc. It's: "So --comma-- boss," he started etc. And there's no other way around it, whether we like it or not.
I personally hate being forced to add a comma when I start a sentence with a very coloquial "Well." Like: "Well then do it". We don't pause when we say that. However, writing it, I gotta write "Well, then do it."
And there's also some funny wording that slows down the reading.
i.e. when Arjan says: "But it isn't for lack of trust in you"
You have a different way to write the narrative parts and the dialogue lines, which is great, everybody should have it when writing from the third person. And you keep the dialogues in a very down-to-earth, every-day language.
So, wouldn't it be easier if Arjan says something like: "It's not that I don't trust you"?
I don't know, I'm here eating popcorn before my computer in my Jurassic cave, so of course it's just a comment.
But I did find that kind of wording like sort of distracting.
So let's finish recalling your questions:
"feedback regarding how well this communicates the story, the characters, the settings and the conversations in a believable and understandable way."
Yes to all.
You make your point. You know your story and you know your craft.
You communicate plot, characters and settings. And your dialogues are frigging great.
I only found those bumps, but all and all I really liked this, I'd love to read the full texts and of course I'd love to read how this story continues.
So thanks a lot for sharing. It made a great reading for my Sunday.
And feel free to drop by my portfolio for some healthy "takeback" on my items
Read you around!
Monica