The central character in I Still Dream is a Cassandra figure called Laura Bow, a tech consultant whose ambivalence towards SCION, an artificial intelligence developed by her father’s company, pits her against her employers. Her story is told across a 50‑year timeline extending into the future and beginning in 1997, when she is a precocious 17-year-old coder. She has just made her own AI, which she names Organon after a Kate Bush song lyric. Organon becomes increasingly sophisticated as the novel progresses, combining the roles of personal assistant, companion and confidant: it picks a playlist for her when she’s running, and prevents her from sending rash messages while drunk; when Laura’s mother dies, it tries to console her by conversing with her in a simulation of her voice.
The doomsday scenario here is more prosaic than The Terminator’s rise-of-the-machines holocaust, but still catastrophic
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