This has been waiting in my stack for too long. It is by LIN KA-MING (Magus Firecow). Kind of a Texas tale, don’t ya know.

A long, long time from now…

Machines have developed into sentient beings, starting with the high tech space stuff (Right Sputnik Overhead?) and a whole new set of different mechanistic species came to existence. The machines were not only sentient, but soon became alive in other ways as well. They began to produce offspring and evolve. At first, it was just the super high tech orbiting stuff that achieved self-awareness but soon more terrestrial devices gained intelligence.

Unfortunately the machines loathed each other and war broke out between orbiting and Earthly devices. Humankind had already moved out into space, but at the discovery that our original homeworld was in a crisis situation, we returned. By the time we reached Earth again, all the original machines had been destroyed. The descendants of those original devices were still battling, trying to obliterate each other — an ancient blood feud, where one planetary region wasn’t big enough for the two mechanical clans. The future humans had to make a decision that would end the war. But it was clear that humankind had been in space too long as there was no sympathy for the terrestrial machines. And that’s when we found ourselves…

“BACKING THE SATTELITE KIN.”