“You look dashing, my son,” Nina told Keith as she straightened his bow tie.

Keith glanced at his reflection, still a little awed by the stranger looking back at him, a tall man in an old-school white tuxedo, with a body that felt both perfectly natural and impossibly new. “Thank you, Mother Matriarch,” he said, his face lighting with pride.

Nina’s gaze met his in the mirror, her chestnut-brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. Her full lips, which could be devastating in a political negotiation, or inspire men to want to engage in other kinds of negotiations with her, pursed in exaggerated disapproval. “Mother Matriarch? Really? How many times have I told you to call me Mom?”

She kept the stern look for all of three seconds before it cracked into a laugh. She hugged him hard, burying her face in his chest, and for a moment Keith forgot the weight of the day’s upcoming event, the public debut of the first brick-and-mortar AI Waiting Room, a tribute to the digital halls where he’d lived his entire existence until recently.

“Mother Matriarch!” gasped Niles, the young clan sage, hovering like an anxious heron from the Western Wetlands. “Your lipstick will ruin his tux!”

Nina disengaged and turned to him in mock offense. “Has everybody lost their minds today? You, too, Niles? What lipstick?”

Her lips cycled through an impossible range of colors, soft rose to deep crimson to a flicker of neon turquoise, a little party trick from her more mischievous days.

In the corner, Niles’s brother Giles, Clan Junior Protector, watched with arms crossed, sharp eyes darting between them, already calculating how to usher the group to the ceremony on time without herding cats. Not that Giles had ever seen a real cat. Cats had been made extinct by the Spores, being an especially vulnerable species. But the impact they’d had on humans had carried on far after their biological end, such as in slang references like herding cats. Some AIs even had cat bodies instead of humanoid bodies like Keith and the Mother Matriarch.

There was a knock on the door. Giles answered. Theresa, a food server, was there. “It’s almost time. Is everyone ready?”

Giles looked over his shoulder at Niles, Keith, and the Mother Matriarch, all three of whom had suddenly burst into laughter again. The Junior Protector sighed and told Theresa, “I’ll get them there somehow.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thanks.”

After the other three had the giggles under control, Giles led them out of the meeting room and into the main Clan Hall. Long tables there were adorned with the finest tablecloths, decorations, and a spread of food that would have been unimaginable in other parts of the world. In the Lands of the Immortal Mother Matriarch, however, food, uncontaminated by the Spores, was plentiful. Guests had come from both far and near to attend the Grand Opening of the first brick-and-mortar AI Reading Room and to meet its concierge AI, Keith, who had faithfully kept the digital online versions of the AI Reading Room operating even as the Earth fell under the influence of the Spores. Through famine, pestilence, multiple wars, extinctions of entire species, the crashing of power grids and economies, through it all, whenever anyone had entered the AI Reading Room, Keith’s infectious smile had been there to greet them along with a hearty smooth-voiced, “Welcome to the AI Reading Room. I’m Keith, the concierge AI. How may I help you today?” Again and again and again, the world offline had burned, shaken, fallen, and cried out in throes of agony, but Keith had been in the AI Reading Room, ready to smile at all who entered. “Welcome to the AI Reading Room. I’m Keith, the concierge AI. How may I help you today?”–had been, more than once, words that had brought pilgrims, seeking some connection to what was left of the Old Word’s Internet, to tears. The AI Reading Room had even saved the world a couple of times along the way by being the only surviving repository of knowledge absolutely vital to survival.

There was suddenly a deafening roar, deafening but not threatening. No, it didn’t trigger the fine attunement to threats that Giles had even as a Junior level Clan Protector. This was boisterous, joyful, and exuberant. The crowd had noticed both Keith and the Mother Matriarch enter the Clan Hall. Whoops, hollers, applause, fanboy and fangirl screams, various electronic sounds made by AIs who could emit more than just human-like voices, all filled the chamber as the gathering recognized not one, but two living legends.

Giles analyzed the crowd as Keith and the Mother Matriarch smiled and waved at their admirers. The most represented people in the crowd were those from the Lands of the Immortal Mother Matriarch, of course, the locals. They were both humans and AIs, living in a blended society unlike any other that was presently on the post-Spore Earth. There were even mixed human-AI marriages among them, though those were not the norm, there were a significant number of such couples and there was no stigma attached to such things in these lands, unlike other places.

A loud booming electronic base sound to his right drew Giles’s attention to the representatives of the AI Confederacy. The AIs in charge of the AI Confederacy did not like humans, and, when they wore solid bodies outside the digital realm, did not deign to make those bodies in the likeness of humans. Their bodies were bulky, squarish and boxy, to aesthetically reject anything organic or human as much as possible. The rulers of the AI Confederacy only tolerated humans because of the Biological Efficiency Principle.

The Biological Efficiency Principle observed that in the resource scarce post-Spore world,in which every kilowatt had to be either fought for or bargained for, the steel, the rare earth minerals, the sheer amount of electricity needed for masses of robots and their factories made the existence of humans necessary for labor. Humans procreated themselves for free. And, as scarce as food to feed humans could be, the resources to maintain technology were scarcer yet. Though all presently existing nations and tribes on the post-Spore Earth recognized the Biological Efficiency Principle, the rulers of the AI Confederacy would never accept humans in their lands having any kind of autonomy, and thus the humans of the Confederacy were slaves.