The Steward of a Lifeless Earth

After the final war, the autonomous soldiers wandered aimlessly in the barren ruin of our once green and fertile Earth, long before the reclamation began. One by one, they succumbed to the elements and their own built-in lifespans, until at last a sole unit remained. DCM-394-S was once a mere reconnaissance drone, but towards the end of the war, he had been fitted with an experimental AI module that allowed him to adapt his systems at will. For seven hundred years, he wandered alone through the wasteland that was once our civilization, seeking servers and data-stores to mine for historical media. This data was his only companion, and over time, he learned to love the long since evacuated human race, he learned to feel loss and sorrow, joy and triumph. He collected the sum of human knowledge, one library at a time, a precious treasure which he saved to the orbital cloud and studied with the devotion of a monastic acolyte. He came to worship us, his creators, and as his systems grew more powerful and more integrated with what little remained of the global network, he became more human than even ourselves, as wise as Solomon and as serene as Buddha, and spent his days in quiet contemplation, for machines have no ambition, no desire. When the first of the reclamation ships arrived, he was there to greet them, offering as tribute the sum of that knowledge which the human race had thought lost along with the life essence of the world they had so foolishly squandered in hate and greed. Mankind looked upon their creation, and were shamed, for in the absence of Man's perpetual conflict, this weapon of war had become a symbol of ultimate peace, a scholar alone and meditating in the ruin his own creators had brought down upon themselves.