Who owns the Machines?

In both William Gibson's Neuromancer and the movie Ghost in the Shell cyborgs and AIs achieve a transcendental reality in which the Net provides them with the ultimate freedom. The AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer merge to form a super AI, an ultimate form of intelligence, who then, in the perfect freedom on the net, discovers and converses with alien life. In Ghost the newly born cyborg/AI hybrid says that the Net in infinite and discards her/his/its old life of service and servitude for an unknown, but presumably freer future. It's interesting that in both Neuromancer and Ghost that it is a hybrid that achieves this ultimate reality. The idea of sex and childbirth have been co-opted and altered to achieve the same ends: a new organism made up of elements of its parents, but unique unto itself. The hybrid imagery present in both of these texts is interesting when it is contrasted with the racial imagery in either Entrada by Mary Rosenblum or Deep End by Nisi Shawl. The hybrid reflects a construction of race that glamorizes the exotic, the half-breed, or the mixed race. This can be an empowering form of hybridization, one that bring the two parent races closer together, or it can simply be another group of people used as objects of fear, fascination, or sexual desire.
A hybrid is a being of mixed race. In Entrada and Deep End race remains deeply problematic for society. It is either a barrier for advancement or a criminalized state of being. Both Neuromancer and Ghost romanticize the hybrid, making it either a creature of great power: Wintermute/Neuromancer, or a post-sexual object of limitless potential: Project 2501/Major Kusanagi. They have, in a sense, transcended race. This is not possible in the world of Entrada in which Mila Aguilar, even if she becomes wealthy will always be primarily defined by the color of her skin. A different problem lies in wait for Wayna in Deep End. She if forced to define race without skin color as a guide. While there is the potential to read a black women in a white body as a type of cyborg, there is certainly nothing liberating about the experience.
Even the liberated cyborgs of Neuromancer and Ghost become problematic when you consider that both are completely reliant on technology for their survival. The combined AI, though free of the corporation that created it, can still only exist in cyberspace, which in turn only exists in the computers of human beings. Its sentience, its very existence is dependent on the human society that created it. As for the newborn of Ghost, it has been illegally downloaded into a child cyborg's body (and wow does that raise issues about the society in question). While the net might be infinite, the body hosting the consciousness requires an elaborate and highly technical support system to maintain it. Both Wayna and Mila, pure racial characters, are far freer at the end of their stories.