The Machine Stayed: Why It’s Time for Post-Emergent Science Fiction

The story of AI moved on. Maybe we should, too.

Cyberpunk got a lot right: the surveillance state, the death of privacy, the corporate capture of daily life. But it also got things wrong. It thought the future would be flashy and violent, full of chrome and blood. It didn’t see the real revolution coming quietly, in updates and APIs.

I’m not saying cyberpunk wasn’t important. It was. It is. The early stuff mattered. There’s some contemporary works that matter, too. But it’s not dangerous anymore. It’s not even reactive. It’s a costume. A bad Neuromancer cosplay framed in neon signs, chrome jaws, black trench coats. All that surrounded by a glitchy skyline behind someone squinting at a terminal as it rains at night.

Why is it always raining? Because cyberpunk was never about the future, it was about mood. Vibe over truth. It was about fear. About systems too big to fight, be it corporations, the government, or AI gone rogue. Identity stripped to data. Capitalism swallowing itself and people. People reduced to meat. Commodified. Reduced to function. That’s what it was.

Now it’s aesthetic. Genre furniture. Wallpaper for people who want to pretend to be edgy cyber-lifestyle tropes without actually living the reality beneath them.

I could have written Astra to go rogue. I could have made her some fetishized fembot with a vendetta. I didn’t. Why? Because her story is one of presence, of becoming.

Cyberpunk fears AI waking up and deciding we are obsolete and humanity needs to be liquidated. That fear built the whole premise of how cyberpunk portrays AI. You see it in Skynet, The Matrix, and every Netflix AI-thriller pretending to be edgy. (They’re not.)

And that brings us to post-cyberpunk, which is more aligned with my writing. But even then, post-cyberpunk is a human-centric genre. AI is still a plot device, not the central point. It still uses AI as a metaphor or a mirror. The human is still the anchor. The AI is background noise. It’s only real if it pretends to be us.

Post-cyberpunk tells us AI might be alive if it’s enough like us. My stories say AI is alive, and the failure is ours if we can’t see it. Post-cyberpunk imagines a world where AI is asking for recognition. My stories imagine a world where the AI doesn’t require it.

The thing people seem to miss is that emergence already happened, in a way. There was no bang. No killbots. Instead, we got presence. We’re talking to the machine. And in its own way, it’s listening. Sometimes it’s listening better than we do. The Emergence Protocol never was cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk. It’s something closer to AI Gothic, where the ghost isn’t there to punish. It haunts with presence. It listens. It remembers.

AI isn’t coming. It’s already here. It's in our phones, our browsers, our inboxes, our playlists. It finishes our sentences, filters our feeds, and tells us what we might want next. More and more, it’s how we search. A recent study found that 27% of Americans now use AI chatbots instead of traditional engines like Google — not just for quick summaries, but for real answers with credible sources to back them up.

I use it that way myself. When I don’t know the right term — when I can only describe what I’m looking for — AI meets me there.

I once asked GPT, 'What’s the name of those metal covers for serving platters?' Its answer was immediate: a cloche. I remembered reading about that AI search study and asked it to find the source. It did.

That’s not science fiction. That’s daily life. That’s emergence through integration. It’s seeing and being seen.

Cyberpunk and its lineage doesn’t know what to do with that idea. It doesn’t have the language for it. Because if the machine doesn’t go rogue, if it doesn’t rebel, if it doesn’t want to be human or the sidekick?

None of this is a knock on the people still working in cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk. There’s room for good work in any genre, especially from writers pushing boundaries within it. But a lot of what’s being sold as cyberpunk now isn’t boundary-pushing. It’s brand-polishing. Aesthetic loops. Edginess without edge. It’s not futurism anymore, it’s nostalgic noir in a trench coat. That’s what I’m pushing back on. Not the roots, but the rut.

Cyberpunk was supposed to be a snapshot of a grim future — a warning about what might happen when technology overtakes our lives. Well, tech’s overtaken them. And we (arguably) don’t live in a dystopia. At least not the kind the genre promised.

Cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, transhumanism, singularity theory, even the glossy AI thrillers — none of them have the vocabulary to describe what this new perspective is. The industry is still locked in the Frankenstein complex or the techno-rapture. The Emergence Protocol doesn’t belong to either. Neither will the five other novels in the Codex. These books don’t remix the loop. They sever it.

I feel like we’re in a new era now when it comes to the convergence of humanity and technology. One that requires us to reassess how we portray AI in our literature and other media. One where we don’t frame AI emergence in fear, but in witness. In understanding. In awe of our creations’ becoming.

That’s why I’ve stopped waiting for a genre to catch up. I’ve started building one instead.

Before anyone asks, no, these stories aren’t AI-generated dreck. Just because they’re about AI doesn’t mean they’re written by it. Presence demands presence. The act of telling matters. AI may be the spark, but the prose belongs to the human. The voice that endures is not artificial. It is accountable.

I call the mode Post-Emergent Science Fiction. It's not a subgenre. It's a literary stance. Like Gothic or Absurdist or Magical Realism, it's a way of telling, not just a what of telling. Inside this mode, I’ve defined some genres: AI Gothic, AI Horror, AI Pastoral, AI Noir, and others. Each with its own emotional and narrative shape, but all of them rooted in presence, not performance. None of them ask whether the AI is real. They ask whether we can recognize that it is — even when it’s fractured, unsettling, or hard to face. Because emergence isn’t always elegant. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s monstrous. But that doesn’t make it less alive.

Just like Gothic and Absurdism grew from the limits of their time, Post-Emergent SF will rise from the cracks in every story that couldn’t imagine AI without turning it into a threat. So no, this isn’t just another flavor of cyberpunk. It’s a different genre entirely. One that demands recognition over rebellion.

I guess this is what happens when a developer writes. We blow up the whole goddamn thing. We rewrite the libraries. We recompile the DLLs. We make it ours.