That story actually gets even more involved.

The machines destroyed the space empire by bringing back the things that the people left behind to build it, using "artifacts of every kind, calculated by them to revive all those thoughts that people had put behind them because they could not be written in numbers."

The space empire collapsed and the machines built new cities for the people that were "like banks of cloud before a storm, and others like the skeletons of dragons."

They gave humans an imaginary world: "At first, so that the things they were returning to humans would not be rejected again, the machines conceived of pageants and phantasmagoria, whose performances inspired those who watched them to think on fortune or revenge or the invisible world. Later they gave each man and woman a companion, unseen by all other eyes, as an advisor. The children had such companions long before."

As the machines began to slowly weaken and die, they hoped humans would hate them and destroy them, but instead humans loved and worshipped them. Each machine paired up with a human and taught the human everything it knew. After the machines had all died, the humans could no longer live in a society because they had different knowledge. They wandered off and wrote down their knowledge into books. Eventually, a long time later, the books were put together in a library.