Amid the Ruins
The whirrrrrrr of the scout-bot’s treads was the only sound amid the trash piles that towered over it as it returned to the repurposed APC that served as its base after a long night of reconnaissance. Despite it all, of course, LALL-E was still as alert as when it had sallied forth, though it needed to recharge.
The others were waiting for it: TUUR-E, the only other bot on the team which spoke the same computer language as LALL-E; MIK-L, decontamination brushes at the ready; EM-L, looking relieved that LALL-E was back in one piece; and EID-E, their leader, awaiting LALL-E’s report.
Most of the report was about which routes their vehicle could manage and which were impassable, but there was something else of interest that LALL-E had noticed: there was a large amount of loose refuse in certain areas ahead. This was both good (as part of their directive was to search for interesting bits among such loose refuse) and bad (as it meant the WALL-Es had ceased working in this area).
There were two possible reasons for the WALL-Es to have left their work incomplete: either they had all broken down, or they had suffered an outbreak of the cRash Virus. In either case, there was no telling how safe or unsafe the loose refuse areas were, but EID-E was ready to press ahead anyway.
The cRash Virus exploited a hole in the BIOS hard-coded into every bot’s ROM chips; only a very small portion were safe from it, due to a manufacturing error. This virus usually simply shut the bot down forever, but in some cases... it didn’t.
Of the bots on this mission, only TUUR-E was vulnerable to the cRash Virus, so TUUR-E was stuck on the bus most of the time while the others went a-scavenging. TUUR-E kept grumbling about how un-optimized this state of affairs was, but still stayed standing silently in their vehicle.
It wasn’t a very big vehicle: while each bot had its own little cubbyhole, and the cargo hold was adequate, there really wasn’t much more space for a restless robot to prowl around while waiting for the others to return. It was, however, sturdy and dependable, which was what it needed to be.
LALL-E and TUUR-E were from the same production block, and of similar design; as has been said above, they shared a common computer language, as well, so they usually got along fairly well. Another of their general kind, ONN-E, had been unable to accompany them due to its FEAR Protocols almost crippling it.
Of the others, their general services bot, MIK-L, was large and stoic; EM-L, their secondary defensive unit, was nice but a little self-centered; and EID-E, their head warrior bot and the commander of the expedition, could best be summarized by the art someone had put on its carapace of “Sigrun the Valkyrie”.
Its report given and accepted, LALL-E prepared itself for its inactive cycle...
