Editing Engine Heart (section)

====No More Stones Be Gathered====

Unit R35T trundled down the broken street, its thick treads helping to further crack and rend the decaying asphalt. Many charging cycles had passed since it was able to fulfill its primary purpose. There were simply no targets left. R35T and its brethren were nothing if not efficient, and even the tremendous workload of those first few months of the plague dwindled to little, then nothing.

The thoroughfare was silent save for R35T's own functions. Optical sensors scanned for biological remains. Some units had taken to scooping up birds or rats or the occasional bloated feline corpse, flyblown in the sun and processing them in their furnaces. But R35T never lowered itself to such things. Though it had no vocabulary for the concept, it found the greasy soot left from the animals distasteful, nothing like the pure ash it was meant to create from its primary purpose.

The programming its creators had blessed it with could not quite grasp other sensations either. Had it the words, R35T might talk of creeping desperation. Despair. Once it crossed paths with a malfunctioning unit, tipped onto its side, tracks spinning in useless frustration. The malfunctioning unit's engine screamed in protest but R35T left it there. It would shut down completely, one day. Never again to do its duty.

During another cycle, R35T saw two units scrambling to collect and process the same piece of biological matter. A single broken femur, tooth-marked and nearly dried to dust in the sun, had been unearthed by one of the mover-units. And the two collectors each tried to do their duty, neither wanting or able to back down. RE5T had to shut off its auditory circuits to silence the noise of metal thundering against metal, until one of the two units was silenced forever.

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