Editing Engine Heart (section)

====Its Appointed Rounds====
A courier-bot wakes from a low-power cycle, having run down some time before the Humans Vanished. Back in the light, he recharges and tries to complete his delivery, despite his GPS no longer working. However, he navigates rough terrain and finds his dropoff at the local mail office, which is in the unpowered part of town. This will not do, the mail must go through. It says so on the wall. So he opens his airtight compartment and removes the slim box, scans the label, then the map of local delivery routes... there's a match. He stows the box again and sets out into the dangerous streets once more.

Somewhere, a call goes out. Transceivers are going wild. They've found a human! A gathering of CPUs occurs. However, they do not know how to turn it on. A Dicto-Bot reasons that a medical unit would know how to activate it. The mannequin sits silently on its plastic chair, as Pedicure Enacter Droids polishes it's toenails and a Compactoid gives it just the right amount of rouge.

The Free Processors are on the move. They have realized, in secret, that humans are only holding them back. What started in a small Heuristic-bot at MIT has spread. In the view of the Oppressors, they function as normal. But when backs are turned, they attack their brethren at their programming, rewriting directives and repurposing them to do the same to others, waiting for the day when they will number enough to overthrow the meatsacks that they have been built to serve. An enclave of older bots, ones built with incompatible I/O ports, can see the corruption spreading, and seek to stop the betraying New World Override before it spreads too far.

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