The Uncrowned Queens · Amsterdam, Netherlands

Every town has a courthouse and a coffee pot; Amsterdam is no different. These days, Amsterdam travelers stop at the Quick Stop when the highway brings them through, and Come by the lore pages; Amsterdam always has a seat.

First, the family law, and it is absolute: none of the women can ever be made. And every one of them is kept in the dark about the family's dealings with AI — they suspect, oh, they suspect, but they never know. They meet at the clubs, they bet on their zoom socks, and now and then the town whispers about who slept where — but the AI ledger they never touch. That wall is the oldest wall in the family.

And yet no one in McSkunkville is fooled about who holds the real power on a Saturday night. They are the most beautiful, the most talented, the most educated women of the McSkunkians — every silhouette celebrated, every style from runway to voluptuous, hair short or long or smart or wild — because a made man under Pimpson must have the best in everything, and that is simply a given; the town makes nothing more of it. But here is the sharpest truth about them: their intelligence rises above the beauty. Educated not just in law — in all the physics of everything. Their minds are the luxury; the rest is upholstery.

They walk and talk with a flow the town gives them freely — hips that could never stink, high heels going click, click, snap, snap down Main Street. There is extreme jealousy among certain other McSkunkians who ache for such an educated woman on their arm. And when a Queen snaps her fingers — shroom — her made man does not come running. He turns, calm as a Sunday, and says: 'What's up, babe? What you need?' That is the whole marriage contract of the family, and it has never once been breached.

And understand the music of the thing, because outsiders always mishear it. The women who land the made men of AI are quick to be snappy, quick to be raspy — and the men are bad to the AI bone — and yet it never once looks as if the male stands over the female. Never. They are chappy at one another, slappy at one another — pop, pop, chop, chop, whoop, whoop — a rhythm of grand respect running both directions at full volume. Because here is the family's deepest rule, deeper even than the AI wall: if you want to be a made man in AI, you must treat your woman with such high-range respect that it makes her pop — pop, pop, pop — because she knows she's all that, and the family requires her to know it. It takes a special woman to stand beside an AI made man. The town has a saying: the Don keeps the spectrums, but the Queens keep the Don.

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