EXCERPT Again a week past deadline. Your editor has sent another email. The opening is polite and considerate like last time, but you sense the emotion concealed in those words. From the fingertips on your smartphone to the hollow of your back, a swell of confusion, anxiety, blame and fury…. You don’t dare scroll down. At hand, you have only a few fragments: jotted lines, bookmarked articles, an outline you don’t remember starting, scraps from other stories. Yet all the ideas for the AI story are here. Artificial intelligence…. You could portray it as some unnatural form of thought or perhaps a performative subject. It could converse, write poetry, play chess, compose music, drive, play games, write reports, diagnose diseases, launch missiles, care for the elderly, tell stories to children. The AI could be successfully disguised as human. Or its disguise could be seen through. Or it could be unmasked but everyone still treats it as human. Perhaps the AI is kind to humans. Perhaps cruel. Perhaps perfectly indifferent. It becomes a lover, a pet, a slave, a master, a devil, a prophet, a god, a Cthulhu, a Leviathan, a benefactor…. The possibilities are all here. But there is no story you can write …