William Gray Beyer 43 min read

The vast machine they call Urei, the Unified Reflexive Electronic Integrator, is developing a personality of its own, and men begin to fear it has woken, and can reach into human minds.

William Gray Beyer's 1951 story is a tense AI-and-hard-SF tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a classic story of a giant computer waking to sentience and menace, where the dawning fear of a machine that can invade thought drives a taut golden-age thriller about the perils of artificial intelligence.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

43 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).