This tale is from the Richard Lederer and Stan Kegel book mentioned below.

It’s a long, long time from now, and machines have developed into sentient beings. Starting with the high-tech space stuff, a whole new set of different mechanistic species have come into existence. The machines are not only sentient; they are alive in other ways as well. They even produce offspring and evolve.

At first, it was just the super high-tech orbiting stuff that achieved self-awareness, but soon … Read the rest...