I originally came up with Rei's character randomly about a year ago. I was doodling and thought it was a nice design and kept her on file. When I finally decided to use her character in a story, I envisioned a large-scale story involving a dark retro-ish setting. The result of this idea was AI. The chapter that Black Egg has published is basically the final chapter. The real story emphasis is what happened before this chapter, Rei's origin (is she an angel or just a delusional machine?) and several supporting characters that influence her story (not shown in this chapter).

The title AI is symbolic of Rei's machine side (Artificial Intelligence) as well as her kindness (ai is the Japanese word for love) towards those who cannot tolerate or understand her existence. For those of you wondering why the story was written weird (the mother grabbed its child) I chose to use this style of writing to make the reader feel how Rei would see her surroundings, alien and out of touch.

The symbolism of the story revolves around my concern that humanity is beginning to put too much faith in the technology we have created and our inability to exist without it. The reason people wanted to kill Rei in the story is representative of humanity's fear of the unknown and unexplained. I believe there is more to life than what science can explain and I reflect that belief in many of my works.

I hope you have enjoyed AI. Let me know what you think of the story and if you would like to see more (my web pages are http://home.earthlink.net/~egserk and www.egserk.com). Please continue to support Black Egg Syndicate, the best in online comics!! - Matt Kresge (9-9-98)