<blockquote>Up on the spoil heap Morag found a robot. This wasn’t that unusual in and of itself. She was always finding them, or parts of them anyway, frozen in contorted attitudes like dinosaur fossils, plastic housing cracked and aluminum limbs splayed.
What was different about this one was that it was walking.
Morag would go up the spoil heap two or three times a week, as a way of supplementing what she got from her farm. She was a lot slower going up than when she’d been a young woman, but she was still fitter and stronger than most, and, if she brought a stick with her, it was more to poke about in the buddleia growths than to lean on.</blockquote>