...a tribute to all sorts of geekdom.

WARNING: LONG-WINDED DIGRESSION AHEAD

A few years ago I was sketching out an extended scenario for a cyberpunk story. It was nicely detailed, with logical progressions of events stretching from 1998 to 2023. A devout fan of Gibson, I insisted on writing the progression of events down to minutiae. Instead of just saying "At some point in the 2010's there was a huge war in east Asia that made parts of it a wasteland" I decided that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, two neighbouring former Soviet republics with very different cultures and religions, had some sort of enmity against one another, and I decided that they both had been used as hiding places for nuclear warheads that the Soviets had "destroyed." So the world watched in horror as, in 2004, the two nations bombarded each other, and over the next few years millions of refugees heading east displaced enough people to start up all sort of violence, and so around 2011 China started to balkanize into tiny states. Before it got really bad someone (I can't remember who, now) decided it would be a good idea to make powerful firearms and high-velocity electrochemical-propulsion ammunition easily obtainable. Then it got really bad, spread to the pacific rim, yadda yadda yadda.

Phew, sorry about that. What was I saying? Yeah, LAI stood for "Lavery Artificial Intelligence," the main villain in one particular story arc.
Anticlimactic, I know.