Antibodies

Antibodies by Charles Stross

This short story was first published in 2000, and later published in the compilation Toast: And Other Rusted Futures. A mathematician publishes a paper that solves the traveling salesman problem and transforms NP-complete problems to easily solvable ones. This seemingly breaks all cryptography. The story them picots to AIs gone amok. The AI has grown and taken on an identity of its own. It has started to consume all electronic resources and then goes on to inhabit the real world. A couple is trying to reach an "extraction point" where they can escape from this world. Alas, they are caught a little before escaping. Luckily, they appear to have "anitbodies" and are able to escape. There are a few interesting concepts in this story, but they don't quite come together.

The Ware Tetralogy

The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker

The four books of the series are available as a free download. They explore a near future world, but have different approaches. There are various cyborgs and androids. There are conflicts between the various degrees of artificial. Scientists are exploring new things. One drug is "merge" that allows beings to merge together. These can be different species or two of the same. In some cases they briefly go together before separating. In others they can be made more permanent. Regardless of these changes, people seem obsessed by sex from a very masculine, mechanical point of view. I guess this is male vs. female authorship.