A sci-fi story from my collection of short fiction called "Fronds". Requiem for the Watcher A bloated red sun filled half of the sky and scorched the landscape. The ground was covered with charred black dust and with rusted, corroded metal blocks and cords. The fetid air was still and hot and filled with an acrid, searing mist that further blotted the sunlight. The temperature would have killed a man, though it was not hot enough to melt the omnipresent iron and steel. The Watcher awoke. It gathered its consciousness. It surveyed its surroundings. It watched, it listened, it smelled and sensed, but detected no other presence except that forever background of light and pain — dimmer now — that it faintly remembered having hated. From somewhere inside its metallic body, a signal issued. An array of concepts, detectable by others of the Watcher’s kind as sounds or pictures. The Watcher folded up, its metallic joints creaking. It assumed a spherical shape, nestled back into...
