Scavenger Hunt

 The robot—little more than a claw, some wires, a jerrybuilt scaffold—totters through the scrapyard, picking up pieces. It selects an antenna; it plugs in a circuit-board. It welds on some wheels, a piston, and cogs. The robot’s work is to construct its own form, but a form that may grow and evolve. The more it collects, the more discerning it becomes. It discards a few dials, a rickety leg piece, some outmoded parts. All its equipment is provisional: each version of it depends on the last fragment it’s culled, whatever half-functional doodad it’s just tossed aside. Its jerry-rigged configuration keeps changing. The thing it’s looking for next is conditioned by the proximate thing that it was. See, it keeps looping around, finding new bits, offloading spare parts, tinkering its modules. It hobbles forward with another wobbly step: uncertain, off-kilter. Bleep, bop, boop. Its purpose amounts to destroying its previous design. Replacing old programs, casting aside its cracked tabs and kinked tubes back on the junk heap, lurching toward a new, improved model. Sometimes a spring it rejected long ago works perfectly in a pinch for its current configuration. Now could we surmise this robot’s not unlike you—yes, you indeed, my dear reader—picking over these sentences, forgetting so much, a little unbalanced, still rummaging through the dump to assemble some sense of a self?