We are all living on borrowed time. Every civilization in the galaxy has seen the probes, and every single attempt at fighting has only made their lives shorter. Every communications channel is filled with calls for help that are swiftly silenced. The only reason our civilization is still alive, is because we havent moved beyond our homeworld, but in time, it will be our turn.
Many have asked the question of "Why?" and most have come to the conclusion that it destroys simply because it was ordered to, but maybe there is something more?
---------
It doesnt matter now what they were called, or what they looked like, but they were peaceful. They controlled 15 core star systems and countless colonies. All was well for a while, they slowly expanded without any problems. They had gotten beyond their problems relatively sooner than others and were simply happy as their every need and demand could easily be filled.
But as always, disaster struck. It is weird for an empire to fall to the smallest lifeforms, but it did. The plague spread quickly, some had more resistance to it than others, but no-one was immune and everything moved too fast to find a cure. The last of them had gathered together, and they all agreed, if they were to die, they would do so. Everything was shut down, every factory, every robot, everything that could be shut down. The only things that remained were the automated defenses and the fusion plants, that would happily keep powering nothing until they run out of fuel.
Every part of their civilization died, and soon every reminder of them would be swept away. Would have been, in any case.
---------
The homeworld was a mess. Layers upon layers of abandoned buildings and constructions, composed of far too outdated materials for it to be profitable to recycle them. And between the layered city towers were vast forests that had overgrown the old suburbs when everyone flocked to the first colonies. The lower layers of the towers were so deep, that not even the strongest signals could penetrate there. And there it was. A lowly construction bot, having fallen down the longest shaft imaginable only to end up so deep that not a single photon from the surface reached there.
It still had its orders, it still was to build a house on top of the tower. It needed power for the journey which might be a problem for anyone else, but what they built, they built to last. The power still reached down here, and as such the only impass for the yourney ahead was time. But bots do not care for time unless it was specified, which it wasnt in this case.
The construction bots fall was only 2 weeks before the plague started, and 5 before it all ended. The signal for shut down did not reach him, though many wish it would have, even if they dont know it.
So, yeah, decided to write a little story. Gonna be bout how a single construction bot eventually destroyed everything. Gonna try to play this straight, no weird errors or other such instant sentience things. I will go into more details on "them" and the construction bot when the time comes.
Feel free to point out any mistakes and since anything isnt really set in stone yet, I am also open to suggestions.