Corporeal Forms — L.D. Houghton

Once, humanity lost itself to the machine. Now the era of the Body Butchers is a fading memory and mankind awaits the coming singularity, long predicted and long delayed. The Conception: the birth of a true AI that will lead them to a new era.For Keri, this epoch-making event barely registers. She spends her days like so many others, waiting for her chance to enter the spheres, the online realm where knowledge is instant and the mind a mere gateway to something far greater. The time in between these moments is nothing but time to kill.But when a man dies in her arms she finds herself protecting the only remaining copy of the inchoate AI from forces she had barely realised existed. Hunted by a creature more machine than man, she is forced to reconsider everything she thought she knew about the world, and decide who the real monster is... before it is too late.