fydeo

A patter of wings followed me over my shoulder as I stepped onto the empty vehicle; it coughed, shuddered, and then slowly followed its autonomous course away from the dig site. I groaned and cracked my back, mind spinning and arms sore from the hours of careful scraping and brushing away in the dirt. Tea, meanwhile, flew over to my locker, keying in the combination with one of her tentacle-tails and sliding the artifact in with the others. I watched the diminutive robot perform her task, enthralled by the dusty, cracked sheets of stained fibers we’d recovered. A book, she’d called it. Unrestricted information. “Tea, explai