[Mac Sirloin]

A week later, the company commissioned us to look for Saunter. It wasn't personal-most people would want to keep their distance from Homocidal Robots, but we could lose our jobs if we didn't look. There was one issue with looking for him, though; he'd fallen out of a window fifteen stories up, down into the trash abyss, an enormous chasm filled with slowly rotting machine carcasses that had acid pumped in to wash them away. The process could take years and was responsible for several human deaths. Saunter had fallen from such a distance that he could be anywhere or everywhere if he had hit an acid pool.
Grace, one of the Sec-Troopers and I all packed into a small scout airship and started out. Only two of us would come back up.

We made our way down through the murky violet haze that hung over the chasm. It was more like a thick fog than cloud, and a dull thumping could be heard from the purifier pods that hung in the air, sifting apart the haze needlessly. Eventually we began seeing the points of what appeard to by Radio towers, this signified that we were roughly 700 meters from the ground. Several of the towers had the impaled chassis' of robots clinging to them. Several appeared to have been bent by impact. The place was a tomb, an all pervading fucking graveyard, seeping into the land around it. A dull light flashed below as our ship neared the floor. I thought about the kids' autopsy.

His skin had been literally blackened, his limbs useless, but it revealed that his heart was still faintly, impossibly, pumping blood through him. He wasn't conscious, his body wasn't even alive, but somehow the blood kept flowing and his brain kept flickering. He was stuck in the most meaningless of existences, unable to interact or create. Only capable of repeating the same functions until his hardened shell of a body finally gave out. He was a vegetable. A machine. A robot.

We landed. A spindly robot with an unneeded filtration mask crept towards the ship. It shared some sort of banter with our guard and the door opened and even with the gas mask and airtight suit, somehow, the stench hit me. Decay. Age. The iron filled bloodlike aroma of the eponymous acids. We worked our way forward into a small shack. It looked more like an enormous cinderblock that someone had dropped from above the way it sunk into the goop. The door was sucked open and my chest clenched. Grace yelped and the Security trooper made a move to his gun. Saunter stared back at us ominously.