And Not to Yield

Dear Cyborgs is a collection of interwoven vignettes that touch on community, politics, the technological interplay between both, the nature and forms of protest, what it means to be an outsider that serves the group and an insider that takes from it. The end left me gasping with tears. Favorite character: Ms. Mistelto, the so-called villainess of this potential future/alternate universe who calls to mind the freedom fighter/terrorist perspective coin-flip that pulled me so closely to Liber8 in Continuum , among others. Favorite quotes: "For the experience, I invite you to participate in city ghostliness. It's an odd sensation that quickly becomes almost comfortable, almost second nature. Now human exchange has been reduced to transaction. That's what makes the ghosting possible. We ever prefer it, at first. It's less energy to simply watch the numbers go up or down than try to confront a person's expression. And we don't realize until it's done that...

"Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn't care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new, to control them as well. City Hall, the collective of artificial intelligences, is a framework of programs constructed around a single, never explicitly stated purpose: to keep Money safe. What would it take to rival something so powerful? What kind of mind would be required to triumph over this monstrosity? What combination of technology and biology, hope and sickness? How can we who have nothing but the immense magnificent tiny powerless spark of our own singular Self harness that energy, magnify it, make it in something that can stand beside these invisible giants, these artificial intelligences, weighty legal words on parchment and the glimmering ones and zeros of code in a processor somewhere? You sco...