Editing The Machine (section)

===Engineers on the Surface?===
Engineers, when removed from the Machine, do not actually stop working - they merely go dormant. If they are exposed to broken machinery, or if machinery is 'broken' nearby, they will immediately spring into action and try to 'fix' it. This occasionally results in carnage when an Engineer appears to be lacking the necessary parts for repairs and sets about either dismantling other nearby things (superstructures of buildings, for example) or even PEOPLE in search of some elusive component. 

Items that Engineers have 'repaired' always develop the same aesthetic as the machinery: analog not digital, and operating in accordance to arcane principles. They are not self-powered, but can be powered by hooking them up to a drive-shaft or something. They generally manage to fulfill their earlier function, but in strange ways (a broken flintlock might be repaired by replacing the powder-pan with a steam-compression chamber, for example). 

Some of these repaired items, however, retain no semblance of their original purpose and do something else entirely. Attempts to expose an Engineer to a nuclear power station in the hopes of having it create a kind of analog perpetual-motion machine resulted in it breaching the core and having the reactor go super critical.

This was in Chernobyl. People in the area suffering from fallout reported seeing bizarre mutations and anomalies, including the cogroach, filament grass, and people developing literal glass eyes.

Engineers have no affinity for digital or chemical technology, and therefore do not repair watches, computers, or batteries.