Am just finishing the last dregs of the bottle of Argentian Chardonnay I've been swilling back while watching the end of Vanilla Skies with the Concubine on our crackly portable aerial, and idly inspired to write. Or more inspired to think about a story which I want to write.

Problem with Vanilla Skies is... well, there's dozens of problems, but give me the luxury of a figure of speech.

There was a phrase which was dropped in the middle of one of Banks' Culture novels: Carbon Fascist. It's one that stuck with me. I still don't know if he knabbed it from someone else, or conjured it from his mental space, but it struck a certain truth. AI-rights are, for me, the single issue of the future which have been failed to be dealt with, to my satisfaction, in fiction.

This interest comes clearly from my whole videogame thing. Cassandra's main theme was the relation between Authority and the opressed, taken to the logical extreme of the relation between the Gamer and the universe. I remember being interviewed for some BBC show, and a question - entirely tangential to the issue we were actually talking about - came up, which was about the videogame experience altering human perception. And I ventured that videogames would be the first place which most of humanity would experience a life-like interaction which was not actually life itself - they're a device which intrinsically prepares us for the posthuman exercise. They are nothing but a bridge on the edge of human experience.

In other words, Unreality is getting more real every day. People like - say - Grant Morrison who hide the observation between metaphysical nu-magical extravagence are essentially foggying the issue. There's no need to hide this in fiction suits. This is a real issue which while /we/ won't have to deal with, our followers - assuming the continuance of the current society - will.

Suppose it come to this. If true AI sentient AI ever comes into existence, it will be capable of functioning precicely like a sentient being. However, legally, it won't have those rights. The gap between the point where AI exists and where AI is recognised as /really/ being AI is the place of the next mass slavery.

Christ: like many others, I distinctly remember my reaction to the Matrix being... well, the Machines are the good guys, yes?

The story in question exists only on file. It was the original thing I was going to write for Charity, until the far more suitable Busted Wonder downloaded into my headspace. I don't think it'd have suited, despite being an Apocalypse Romance of sorts, but... there's something there. Science Fictions job, or at least /one/ of its jobs, is to prepare us the issues which face will face us. I /think/ I have something to say.

We'll come back to it after the current projects are done with, I think.