It took the best minds of a generation to beat junk advertising on the Internet and its successors. Unsolicited emails and advertisements nearly choked the computer networks to death, but the development of AIs that could evaluate and reject billions of messages every second eventually brought the problem under control. By then, of course, advertisers had a new and even more invasive method of delivery: advoids.
Minor miracles of engineering and materials science, advoids are hollow spheres of flexible silver plastic about the size of a basketball. They can move around and even jump by flexing their skin. Images can be displayed on an advoid's surface, and microscopic speakers give the robot a penetrating voice. Millions of advoids were made and deployed to roam around cities. The robots crept into houses and offices like synthetic vermin. Advoids were resilient and self-repairing, enough to last for centuries, and each one could display thousands of advertisements a day.
Advoids once only attacked in self-defense, but increasingly bored packs of advoids sometimes physically force travelers to pay attention to them by leaping up and smashing into them.
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This segment by Patrick O'Duffy:
In the last hours of the Time Before, a lot of people became very worried about the welfare of their sentient appliances. With Armageddon coming near, what would become of your computer/microwave oven/hologram projector, a device you thought of as a friend rather than a tool? The only solution was to set it free, to make a new life for itself. Many well-meaning idiots attached limbs, weapons and armor plating to their appliances, pumped them full of survival-enhancing software, and set them loose.
Three generations later, these misbegotten creations still exist, and they are a deadly plague upon the Gamma Age. To survive, these weak appliances had to fight, had to kill--and had to repair and rebuild themselves with jury-rigged tools. Their programming long since corrupted, these feral machines roam the wilds of the Gamma World, looking for new components and energy sources, ripping apart other machines for much needed supplies.
Every feral machine is unique, a crazy amalgam of foreign parts and broken-down components. One might be a nest of rusty tentacles sprouting from a smashed television set, mounted upon some sort of miniature tank. Another is an array of hydraulic legs, video cameras and gun barrels, scuttling along inside the shell of a burned-out car like a hermit crab. No two feral machines are the same, except for their fierce determination to survive, their frenzied need for new parts, and their burning hatred of humanity.
Almost all feral machines possess some kind of manipulator appendages and a variety of internal tools, necessary for taking apart other machines and performing personal alterations. The machines are solitary, and will instantly try to destroy any other feral machines they meet for parts. At least, that's the accepted wisdom among humans who've encountered the creatures. Rumors that the feral machines are coming together into a society, bound by hate and indescribable robotic needs, are obviously nonsense.
Hopefully.
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Muse Devices are creative machines. In their memory banks, each one has the sum total of human art, from cave paintings to the Sistine Chapel, from the works of Shakespeare to the narrative labyrinths of the Gentrys, from impressionism to quantum illumination. Every artistic impulse humanity had ever had, encoded on to a handful of circuits together with the command "see all this; do something new."
It's unsure if the Muse Devices went mad or worked perfectly. Certainly, they skittered off into the blank canvass of the world, eagerly putting laser-torch and holograph to work in the service of art, guiding the subservient construction machines in accordance with their grand designs.
The art of the Muse Devices is incomprehensible on a conscious level, abstract and alien beyond any style or school of human art. However, their creations resonate with the human soul in inexpressible ways. There is no reason or precedent for a particular angle to perfectly sum up nostalgic grief, or for the shape of a corridor to inspire unreasoning fear, but the muse devices somehow accomplished it. They understood the human soul far better than anything else ever could, including humanity.
Their artistic response to the Final Wars was to hide themselves away and build monuments to the dead. In the secret places of the world, the Muse Devices are carving cenotaphs for billions of minds, incomprehensible artworks that blast the viewer's mind with personal grief and recollections of all that has been lost. If the observer's mind is strong enough, viewing a Muse Device can bring deep insights into the structure of the world as it was before the Wars, but most people are just driven mad and are lost deep within the infinite corridors of artistic meaning.
Muse Devices are difficult to describe. Their original design was minimalist, a boxy body with a dozen limbs and manipulators. In the intervening years, most Muses have reengineered themselves in accordance with artistic criteria, and may now resemble almost anything or nothing at all.
Most Muse Devices have hidden themselves away, but some emerge in search of students, an audience, or fresh materials for some gallery of horrors. Communication with these bizarre AIs is almost impossible, but when their artistic vision briefly aligns with human-level cognition, some level of interaction between man and Muse can occur.
