The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
One of the first stories I ever read online was a mix of science fiction, thriller, and erotica. It had philosophy and computers and sex with zombies, Death Contracts and puzzles and ethical dilemmas about artificial intelligence. It was absolutely titillating in all the right ways and some of the wrong ones.
These days, lots of online publishers are pulling questionable material from their shelves, and Roger Williams covers just about all of the taboo topics in The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, from incest to rape, to, well, sex with zombies. That said, it's a hell of a ride and a fun story to boot. The science fiction is just science-y enough and the characters are vividly drawn, with a strong female protagonist and some interesting relationships along the way.
One caveat: I hate the last chapter, and I'm not alone. For me, it was as though the writer didn't trust me to imagine the right ending, kind of like the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. If you have the fortitude, I highly recommend stopping at Chapter 7 and pretending Chapter 8 doesn't exist. Unless you liked the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. In that case, what is wrong with you?
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is free online, and I highly encourage you to read it and donate to the author's tip jar:
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
Here's how it opens:
***
Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.
In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being. Caroline herself was unimpressed by this fact. To her way of thinking it was the result of an accident, nothing more. In any case she had been the thirty-seventh oldest human being for a long, long time, and it got to seem more of a bore than an accomplishment after a while.
In the second place she had once been infected with rabies. Caroline was rather proud of this distinction, though it had also been a long time ago. There was a certain class of people who were quite impressed with Caroline's bout with rabies, not so much because she survived it but because she hadn't. It had taken Prime Intellect fifty-six hours to realize it couldn't repair the damage to her nervous system, to backtrack, and to put her together again like Humpty Dumpty. For fifty-six hours, she had not existed. She had been dead. And she was the only one of the trillions of souls in Cyberspace who had ever been dead, even for a little while.
In the third place, and most important to Caroline because it represented a real accomplishment rather than an accident or a one-shot stab of cleverness, she was undisputed Queen of the Death Jockeys. She would always be the thirty-seventh oldest person, and after her rabies experiment Prime Intellect had shut the door on further explorations of that nature. But the Death Jockeys constantly rated and ranked themselves by inventiveness and daring and many other factors. It was an ongoing competition, and if Caroline didn't keep working at it she'd be lost in an always-growing crowd of contenders. Caroline wouldn't admit that her high ranking was important to her, but it was all she had and she threw herself at it with an energy that was fierce and sometimes startling.
***
