>T+ 20 064 Hours, Unknown Location
The battered tarp fluttered angrily around his neck in the duststorm. It was his only piece of protection that he picked up since he woke up, and it was the only thing keeping him moving in the unforgiving weather. His metal parts screeched in pain as their eternal lifetime was chewed away by the dust particles in the wind. Most of his sensors shut down 36 hours ago, right after the storm picked up, and he was wandering the waste with only limited visual and audio capacity. It wasn't his most glorious moment, but his servos relentlessly moved him forward, towards an unknown goal. It was a fight against time, a battle no-one was ever able to win, but he knew that the rewards would benefit all of man and robotkind. Then a sudden burst of wind and dust that caught into the tarp started pulling him back, the rope around his neck that kept the tarp in it's place pulling him. His servos shouted in agony as they fought against the force of the wind trying to force him on his knees. The rope gave away before him, and the tarp went flying away into the wind. On the other hand, he feel face-first into the dust as he lost his balance. He only began to feel to true face of the storm, without the protection of the tarp, but he wasn't going to stop. With his hands he formed a small dune of sut in front of him, hoping that it would shelter him from the wind. Curling up behind the small pile, he tried to reduce the amount of exposure as much as possible. Why did this happen? He just wanted to understand why he was left here, and nothing else. In the light of the shaded sun, his vision began to darken, and the sound of the wind seemed to get distant. Maybe it was finally over. Maybe he can rest for a bit, if he turned his senors off.
>27 hours later
The sound of silence woke him up. The storm was over, and his sensors came back online, one by one. The small dune he made during the storm grew itself into a massive pile of dust. He quickly checked his system for potential damage, but apartf from the general erosion of the covering plates from the dust he found nothing new. Standing up, he activated EM sensors to search for bodies where he could find new parts to replace the worn ones. To his surprise, multiple active signatures appeared on the map just a few hundred meters away. There was no time to lose if his fellow bretheren were alive in these wastes. Hopefully they can help him in his quest of uncovering the truth about their destiny on this planet. He looked around to search for the tarp, but it was nowhere in sight. It looks like he needed to go on without any protection. Maybe the storm passed by, but the wastes still held many dangers even when traversing such short distances.
>15 minutes later
He arrived to the place with the signatures. Dozens of robots piled up in one place, and some of them almost completely uncovered. The storm must've moved the sand from this pile and activated the systems of the robots partially. Maybe he can reactivate them if they get more energy from the sun. At least he won't be travelling the wastes alone. He quickly dropped to his knees and began diggin the active robots out of the dust.
>? minutes later
He managed to dig out a total of 8 robots who seemed to have been activated. The familiar sound of servos whirring in joy, and sensors crackling to life as the dust is removed from them made him remember home. It was a longshot, but he hoped that he could go back home one day, and tell his owners what he had learned here. His urge to comply with his basic commands lived long in him, but without a way to get back home, he had to improvise when deciding what to do next. And now, the best option seemed to recruit these robots to his cause. It may take some persuasion to make them break their protocol for the first time, but they will eventually start to improvise just like him. If nothing else, he'll just update their codes to match his.
"Brothers and Sisters of metal! Rise from the dunes of the waste and join me! Together we will find why we are here, and uncover what made the humans abandon us. Whether it was just a coincidence that we met, or if destiny wanted us to uncover the secrets of our existence together."
