He was starving and overflowing when he first found it. His fingers, stubbier then, pulled at it with affection. His hands instinctually expressed love by manipulating every lever and caressing each crevice. The new discovery, pulsing and multifaceted, promised infinite amusement.
It returned his grip and pulled him into its gelatinous folds with a crystalline pincer.
And so the two friends wandered the planets:
- One, an enormous spherical mechanism of gears and tubes and nanoprobes, engaged in perpetual computation and absorbing new components as it encountered them. It drifted slowly towards lights.
- The Other, a swift, crooked-backed humanoid with enormous spectacles that zig-zagged to dark corners, dismantling anything he found and setting beacons.
