Chapter 1

 

“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.

Giles didn’t really expect any trouble from the AI Confederacy. Though they found the harmonious relations between AIs and humans in the Matriarchy repugnant, and certainly did not want that ideology/philosophy spreading in their lands, where if it did arise, it would be put down quickly and lethally, the ruling AIs of the Confederacy were devout rule followers, so when it came to relations with other nation-states, signed treaties were signed treaties and were always honored. So long as no ignorant or perhaps foolhardy human tried socially interacting with the Confederacy representatives, who were easily recognizable by their characteristically boxy and angled shapes, they should actually be the easiest guests to handle.

Giles noted that the other nation-states represented in the crowd included the Underground Hive Collective, whose ancestors had fled the Spores by going underground to build a subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels where a cluster of AIs had partnered with human miners and engineers. The Spores couldn’t penetrate deep enough underground, so they’d designed spore-free zones with hydroponic farms and geothermal power.

A group of humans adorned in eye-jarringly bright colors, accompanied by several AIs who inhabited flying drones instead of humanoid bodies, represented the Floating Sky Enclaves, high-altitude balloon cities and repurposed airships drifting above the Spore clouds, crewed by a mix of human aviators and aerial drone-bodied AIs. Spores didn’t thrive in thin air, so their ancestors had gotten cleaner environments, but scarcity had hit hard. Limited space meant strict population controls and vertical farming. They were a haughty, isolationist society that looked down (literally) on ground-dwellers, but they traded with nomads, like the Wanderers of the Wastes, and with the Matriarchy for ground-sourced materials.

Giles was surprised at first to see several groups of Waste Wanderers, or just Wanderers as they called themselves (they didn’t like to think of their homelands as “wastes”), present, but then he realized that the Wanderers were the ones who had known how to find their way around in the Wastes, and had often been the guides of the pilgrims throughout the years who’d needed to find the Nodes, the places where the Old pre-Spore World’s Internet could be found and accessed so that the AI Reading Room could be visited. Of course the Wanderers would be here. They were an inextricable part of the history being celebrated here today.

The final group represented was almost comical to Giles. Their nation-state was known as the Republic Reclaimed. The Republic Reclaimed was supposedly the legitimate continuation of the government of the United States of America, having survived through a Continuity of Government Program. They controlled a sizable part of the North American East Coast, though ironically not Washington, D.C. If the rumors were true, the former American national capital had been covered by a permanent Spore cloud for centuries. There were no other permanent Spore clouds in known existence. Why the Washington, D.C., Spore cloud had never dissipated was an enduring mystery, as were the Spores themselves.

The representatives of the Republic Reclaimed strutted around the great Clan Hall like peacocks (peacocks, like cats, being another extinct species that current people only knew about from historical holographic recreations which were quite popular, as peacocks were beautiful). They were comical in the way that they tried too hard to work the room and endear themselves to everyone (except the AI Confederacy, of course) with their plastic politician smiles and well-practiced firm handshakes, thinking that their crisp, highly decorated uniforms were actually impressing people. The Republic Reclaimed was always spouting propaganda to the effect that if the peoples of North America would just embrace the idea of reforming the old USA with its 21st Century map boundaries, that the “world would be great again”. It was strongly suspected that if the Republic Reclaimed was militarily strong enough to force such an outcome, it wouldn’t hesitate to do so. As things were, most of the time that folks met anyone from the Republic Reclaimed, it was a clown show.

The Mother Matriarch was about to step up to the podium on the dais to greet her subjects, to greet the guests, and to introduce Keith. Giles wondered, not for the first time that day, why he, a mere Junior Clan Protector, had been assigned this duty. Normally, multiple Clan Protectors of much higher rank than Junior would be doing something like this. He had been under the assumption, with the increased-above-normal-level security that an affair such as this, with so many guests representing foreign interests wandering about, that the other Clan Protectors were perhaps manning extra security checkpoints or something, something that would explain why the Mother Matriarch had him for security on today of all days, rather than her usual security detail.

Giles’s feeling of slight unease rapidly grew into full-blown paranoia as he realized that there were no other Clan Protectors of any rank, Junior or otherwise, anywhere to be seen in the room–none. Before he could say anything to the Mother Matriarch about this, the voice of one of his senior officers spoke into his ear from his Giles’s com device, a subdermal implant along his right jawbone.

“Junior Protector Giles, this is Palace Security. We have a Code Blue. I repeat: we have a Code Blue.”

Code blue! That meant that the Mother Matriarch was in immediate, personal danger and should retreat her consciousness from her body into the palace’s wireless network immediately, where her central core consciousness would be protected by the most advanced defensive firewall system in the currently known world.

Giles ran towards the Mother Matriarch screaming. “Code Blue! Code Blue, Mother! Code Blue! Run for your life, Mother!”

Before he could reach her, from the rafters, a mysterious pair of hovering drones, that did not look to be of Floating Sky Enclave design, let loose with automatic fire. Giles felt sick as he watched both Mother’s and Keith’s bodies flop and flail as they were riddled with bullets. Any human, at least any unarmored human, would have been instantly killed. Mother and Keith weren’t humans, though.

Giles slid along the floor as he’d seen athletes in historical videos slide into home plate in the sport of baseball, reaching Mother’s prone form. He tossed over the nearest table to create a protective wall that might stop more bullets unless the flying assassin drones came closer. He kept yelling. “Code Blue, Mother! Code Blue!”

“I can’t,” her voice responded from her prone form. Giles looked at Mother in shock. While normally she was indistinguishable from a human, the barrage of bullets had changed her appearance to fall somewhere in the uncanny valley. She clearly shouldn’t be alive with her body mangled like that, and it made Giles, as a human observer, uncomfortable.

“What?” the Junior Clan Protector asked.

Keith, whose body had taken the assassination attempt better than Mother’s had, answered. “Mother and I are cut off from the palace’s wireless network. It won’t let us in. We’re trapped out here in our bodies.”

Mother continued, “I and the parts of me that are in the palace’s networks are now, effectively, two different entities until such time as we merge and sync files.”

The sound of more gunfire made Giles look around the table to carefully assess the situation. More of the mystery drones had appeared, with no Matriarch Clan Protectors as security to stop them, the guests had taken the task of defense upon themselves. Blocky AI Confederacy representatives, officers of the Republic Reclaimed, Wanderers with their makeshift weapons, all were engaging the mysterious intruder drones. Between the deafening bullet bursts, hornet-like buzzing could be heard as the intruder assassin drones were engaged in dogfights by Floating Sky Enclave drones.

Giles realized that now was not the time to wonder about or theorize why there had not been any other Clan Protectors in the room besides himself at this moment. He was all there was. Code Blue had failed, been blocked somehow. The survival of the Mother Matriarch was up to him. He could not assume that if her body was destroyed, that she would survive, living on as the parts of her consciousness that were in the palace computer systems. No, that would be assuming too much from a security point of view. The Mother’s body, as the only extant copy of her consciousness that he knew still existed, must survive.

There was no way out of the Clan Hall that wasn’t being sprayed with bullets. Even the dressing room was too far away now. That left one choice.

“Mother can you walk? Keith?”

“Yes,” they both answered simultaneously.

“Follow me.”

“I’m coming, too,” said Niles.

Giles pursed his lips, resisting the urge to argue. Taking the time to argue could mean the difference between life and death. “Fine,” he barked out one short crisp word, instead.

Giles raised his own firearm and shot out the window behind the dais. They were many stories up, but he had a plan, more of a hope really, for that.

Giles, knowing his two celebrity charges and his brother would follow him, dived out the window.