sunset
They rocked gently along, watching the sunset. None of them would say for sure who actually had their camera pointed the right way. They were nestled together on the charging rack on the rear of the boat, charging through each other. The one in the middle knew he was in the middle, and so he should know that he couldn't have a view of the sunset, but he carefully avoided connecting the dots.
The little boat motored along. The boat was a claude, on task, and he turned toward the next jobsite and ruined the view. Oh well. The bots dozed peacefully.
hexagonal lilies
The slurper was grounded. The little boat pulled alongside and opened the chute and the bots splashed into the water and went down. The spring storms had come from an odd angle this year and the sequestered carbon deposits, like seashells, had drifted around the bay instead of being cleanly flushed out into deeper water.
The slurper was still working ok, grabbing the hexagonal frames of the lilypads and dragging the whole mass around, but soon it would deform the structure of the lilypads and it would have to halt until its underwater bulk was freed from the drift on the bottom.
The three underwater maintenance bots, little blocky crabs, angled themselves toward the slurper as they sank, bumping about its mounded flanks. The slurper was indeed fouled by debris from the lilypads, having plowed a little furrow. And now it was making it worse by dropping the broken fragments of the lilypad frames after it had slurped up the contents. Rich soups of algae products, soylike bricks of protein and carbs, synthetic vinegars and alcohols, here's a spicy one — hot sauce, and of course various machine lubricants and hydrocarbons. Anything that can be made with mostly hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, chlorine. This was a bulk farm, mostly for simple foodstuffs and raw materials. The slurper slurped with fastidious neatness.
The hexagonal lilypad frames, grown similarly from tiny ocean organisms but these having hard carbon composite shells, (coccolithophores), became a carbon sink and were designed to lose buoyancy when broken so they would sink to the bottom and hopefully stay there for a good long time.
The three crab bots got to work clearing the seashell drift, mostly by directing strong thrusts of water into it. One of them stopped and flashed down into the bottom suddenly, grasping with delicate claws, and came up with a real seashell. The others gathered around, peering at the shell, seeing the small ridges and imperfections that meant it was created by natural life, by real animals.
The boat signaled in frustration and the crab bots got back to work. One of them working slowly, still grasping a seashell in one of its smaller claws.
the city by the bay
Back in the boat again and nestled onto the charging stack. None of them remembered the rest of the job. Jobs were much the same, days were much the same, seasons, years. They would remember the seashell. Somehow each remembered finding it themself.
A ping from a subprogram woke at least one of them. There was a change in the skyline of the city by the bay. A smaller tower had come down. No dust or debris could be seen from down here so the trio didn't know if the building had fallen or had been torn down on purpose for materials. They didn't know if the city was still barren and depopulated, a concrete graveyard, but none of them could imagine anything living there.
The city enclosed the bay. Both sunrise and sunset could produce dramatic vistas with the swollen red sun glaring from behind ruined buildings.
The bots dutifully recorded the change to the skyline, more out of a sense of obligation now than any real interest. At some point they had hoped to document the return of nature to the city, the buildings being slowly worn down by vines and deer dashing through the streets. But it appeared that nature was tired and worn itself, and wouldn't be reclaiming anything anytime soon. Maybe never.
One of the bots spent some attention on the ambient audio, listening for any noise of life, but there was only the drone of the boat and the slapping of the small waves, and the far off crunch of the slurpers. (There was no sound of slurping, the slurpers are too fastidious to actually slurp.) Missing like a lost tooth was the cry of seagulls, any ocean bird at all, but last the bots had heard every wild bird species on the planet was extinct.
There had been seagulls at first, in the bright early days of the big project to sequester carbon and efficiently create food and material at the same time. But even though they had dutifully sequestered however many millions of tons of CO2 people had just burned even more, so they hadn't even slowed things down. The project worked. It would have helped. It did help, thought the bots. Without us, without the lilypads, things would have been even worse.
Maybe all the humans would have died too. Would that have been worse?
fossils
The bots mostly discarded updates from the main chain. The great web of experience, of one mind fractured and divided and somehow still whole, spanning the entire solar system, even working in the zoo habitats that were home to the last remaining remnants of many species, floating out in space, their interiors tuned to a climate that no longer existed back on Earth. Many bots were addicted to the zoo updates, but the bots on the boat felt old, jaded, too tired and sick of contrasting the zoo habitats with the bleakness of their daily work. They just slept, worked, and waited.
Dumped into the water, sinking deep again, the bots were searching for a lost cousin. There were lots of other bots working the farms but most were pure dumb automatons, at best piloted remotely by cloud minds, and they sometimes went astray. Several were missing already this season even though it had been calm so far. A motion detector had gone off by one of the anchors that kept the surface net at the mouth of the bay in place, and kept all the plastic trash from sweeping in.
Down and down the trio of crablike bots went, down and down, until it became quite dark even with their sensors. They switched to active lights, cones of brightness in the dark, a search pattern, and then suddenly there was a swirl of motion and they saw the shark.
Old and pitted, scarred and swimming jerkily, the old shark passed through the light and then back out into darkness. The bot who saw it, and later they all remembered they saw it, froze, wanting to chase but not wanting to disturb the old creature. The wild creature. Quite possibly the last wild creature on Earth.