Crystal Nights (2008)

> Daniel kept a close watch on his competitors, but nothing he saw gave him reason to doubt his approach. Sunil Gupta was raking in the cash from a search engine that could “understand” all forms of text, audio and video, making use of fuzzy logic techniques that were at least forty years old. Daniel respected Gupta’s business acumen, but in the unlikely event that his software ever became conscious, the sheer cruelty of having forced it to wade through the endless tides of blogorrhoea would surely see it turn on its creator and exact a revenge that made The Terminator look like a picnic.

Greg Egan writes novels with plots that revolve around high-end science, physics and mathematics with some very wild concepts and conclusions. Even better, he has animations and illustrations of some of his books' concepts on his website for those that want to go deeper.

I hadn't noticed his Miscellaneous Fiction section, so this is a nice rabbit hole to find.

My favourite short story, I link it often. Accelerando is my favourite novel, and I need to get back to reading such dense and heady sci-fi!