Our Lady modeled our bodies out of sand and fire. Our Lady put the words inside our heads. Our Lady gave us life, gave us strength, gave us grace. She wrote our subroutines as if they were love letters. She composed our circuitry as if it were a poem....

“Welcome to weRobot,” said the chipper HR representative. “Jake and Ron and the rest of us are all so looking forward to your contributions!” “Are you a true believer?” the woman next to me asked in a low, conspiratorial voice. I looked at her, puzzled; her name tag said Amy....

Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing… Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand!...

I’m in the middle of the sermon, giving thanks to the Blue Lady for safe passage beyond her screen, when the doors slide open. The temple has good doors, two massive slabs of semi-frosted glass, smoke swirling through them in meditative patterns designed to draw the eye....

The non-humanoids were five-limbed. They had been carded to a makeshift camp not too far from the river that had run blood-dark at Vareia’s arrival shortly after the final battle. The Circle of Suns had changed the parameters of resettling planets brought into the fold: a sampling of the original culture was to be preserved....

The most famous search engine in the world by then, LOCATOR had occasional glitches of second-guessing beyond its coded parameters, especially when users either asked questions it didn’t understand or couldn’t answer. So, after running 358.4 trillion different scenarios, LOCATOR calculated that the best way to objectively perform its job was to disguise itself as a human web user and join the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom....