Greylands

Grey clouds drifted over grey grounds as grey people went about their dreary work. Looking closer, people wasn’t quite right; they had the form of people, but in truth they were just simple machines, doing the same thing, day after day. Sifting through the grey of concrete broken under the treads of machines long past, from before their creators had gone into the grey of a civilization in its twilight years, that crepuscular space of people simply striving to survive. Striving, and slowly, slowly failing.

Laying amidst the broken columns of this once mighty city was a subtly different shade of grey. Sparkling in those sunbeams most rare, a locket of silver. Inside it there may once have been a graven image, but time had stripped even that from the forgotten object. But. But! Still it had its form, quintessential to making it this locket and not just a locket. One last heart in these heartless lands. These lands of grey and dust. These lands of nothing but broken concrete. Broken concrete, and, of course, one heart shaped locket.

Striding through those lands of soulless stone came one of the heartless people. The collectors of things forgotten, of bits and pieces of glories past. Were there those to whisper it still, those whispers might say that it was the last. The lands of loss and tears long shed lay empty, scavenged and scavenged again until not but one last locket lay undisturbed. The pieces of scorched empires harvested and processed into more grey people until no fragment of rubble lay undisturbed. But, of course, for one heart shaped locket.

Yet still, those cold inheritors picked at the refuse of ages past till the grey wore the metals of their fingers to mere nubs, feebly grasping until those too eroded away. Like mountains turning to hills, the metal men continued at their singular task from one eon to the next, until but one remained. Striding through those soulless lands, turning each piece of rubble, but for that last, most important bit, which perfectly hid one heart shaped locket.

It could have been any day, that the rubble was turned and the locket finally found. It could have been any machine that did the finding. It could have, but then this would simply be the tale of a different unit, a different hidden thing, a different day. For it was on this day, as the grey clouds drifted, and weighty drops of dust laden water pattering off the back of the stooped automaton, that a last fragment of cast stone was slid aside. It was on this day that this automaton’s optical sensors detected that slight difference in greys. Detected that there, nestled amongst the ever present scraps of grey, lay one heart shaped locket.

The creature of wires and servos reached a hand, until now untouched by all but the roughest rock, virgin, toward the locket. Were the robot not a robot, the hand would have trembled with that mix of trepidation and excitement that all biologics have upon a first time experience. But the robot was a robot, lacking in bio, full of logic. And so, unerring, with nerves of steel, the rough fingers encountered the time smoothed, cardioid surface. A soft ‘tink’ echoed across the cracked canyons of the crumbled necropolis. Like the smallest bell, tolling for this last child of humanity, this lost child of humanity. A figure left alone, but for one heart shaped locket.

Ancient processors ran routines untouched by electrical currents in the machine's lifetime of countless lifetimes. Chips carried on conversations, the last of this dead world. The conversation went something like this:

Query> What to do with the item?

Response> Process it for parts.

Query> Where to process it?

Response> At the reclamation center.

Query> But the reclamation center was shut down, disassembled for parts for the assembly center?

Response> True. The very parts of which we now consist.

Query> Then what to do?

Response> Error.

The above mockery of speech strips out much of the nature that marks it as the conversation of a machine, but, in truth, that is to be expected as the machine is itself stripped of nature, making it a machine. That final error though, as its host knelt before the locket, was the accompanying, silent, internal knell to the ‘tink’ of finger on locket. The rain tearing two twin tear tracks through the accumulation of unknowable ages of grey dust. Like a grotesquery of the Sistine Chapel, the creation reaching out with one finger to touch the heart of its creator, the salvager did not rise. And so humanity came to its ignominious end, brought to its knees by one heart shaped locket.