Whenever I talk to Boston’s Patricia Cornwell, that Jack Kerouac line pops into my head. She never yawns or says a commonplace thing. Every quote burns, burns, burns like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. The bestselling novelist/helicopter pilot/licensed scuba diver has, in times past, regaled me with tales about Bigfoot, UFOs, an abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park, Jack the Ripper, her funding of an archaeological dig of historic Jamestown. At 69, she’s still got that childhood wonder in spades. It makes for epic stories and storytelling. That wonder is her bread and butter. When I reached Cornwell at her Boston home on a recent afternoon, even my simple “How are you?” elicits a colorful response: “We’re still here anyway, right? We haven’t been whisked up by the aliens and artificial intelligence hasn’t replaced us quite yet,” Cornwell says with a laugh. While aliens were a theme of a previous Scarpetta novel, AI and tech-gone-wrong is a central theme of her latest “Black Mirror”-esque installment. “Sharp Force,” the 29th Scarpetta novel, is a give-yourself-goosebumps chiller out in time for Halloween and the Boston Book Fest. Cornwell is the mystery keynote speaker Oct. 25. Like all Cornwell novels, she tells me, her inner 10-year-old gets excited about an idea, and her adult brain starts figuring out how it’s possible. “It’s like when you were a little kid. If you liked to draw, what did you look at when you went through the toy store? The biggest paint set, the biggest box of crayons. That’s what science [and technology] is to me. Something to play with and create a good story with,” she tells me. They’re the crayons in my box. An idea can be so bizarre that you go, ‘How on earth is that [possible]?’ I say, ‘I can figure that out!’”