Builders

The thin one swung its head around ponderously. Its neck looked at risk of breaking, but, ignoring this, it swung its head over to the side. All the way over. It drooped now, like a wilted flower.

The stocky one swivelled up to look at the same thing. It had no neck, so it was forced to swivel its entire body. It swivelled so far it caught itself from falling on a thick, shiny arm with too many joints.

Then they variously swung and swivelled to look at one another.

There was a hole in the craft. It seeped dull purple fluid, shimmering, and awash with texture as its misbehaving control system sent it sporadic and meaningless shapeforming commands.

Inside the hole, a small, spherical ball of fur was busily gnawing its way inward. In a direction which could only be described as 'toward the drive coils'.

They had tinkered together long enough to have dispensed with communication, but this novelty warranted a break from their comfortable silence.

"I don't know what that is." The thin one looked quizzical, in sort of the same way a cat can look quizzical despite lacking very many facial muscles.

"I am still pretty sure that's holographic," the stocky one said. It had now fished some instrument out of its arm and was waving it cautiously in the hungry furball's direction.

"I'd agree, except for the-" the thin one was unceremoniously interrupted by a bit of routing tube coming free and slapping it across the face. "That sort of thing." 

"Hmm. So. This is why we're here, right? The problems which defy prediction."

"Well. Hmm. Yes. Of course."

"So."

"So."

"The problem is surely one of education. Does it know it's entropizing an irreplaceable artefact dating back two galactic rotations?"

"Yes! Exactly. I think we ought to tell it."

"Of course, it's unmapped, so we'd need to bootstrap communications from zero."

"Yes! Just what I was thinking. I'll fetch the projector and the storyteller."

Having finished devouring the second of the three drive coils, the ball of fur was beginning to lose interest in them. It scuttled back out its excavated warren a short way, and then set off munching in a new direction which tingled its sense organs in a less delicious but more electric fashion.

The pair had set up two fairly inscrutable bits of machinery on the floor outside the warren, which they now prodded to life. Rich soundscapes filled the space around it, which the creature had no way to hear. Photons dense with meaning-scaffolds poured up the hole in the craft, and were promptly absorbed by its fuzzy rear.

"Do you think it's working?"

"It's certainly taking longer than it usually does."

The thin one was peering at one of the control surfaces on the noisy piece of machinery and gently prodding it with a long, crooked appendage.

"Oh! I understand. The-"

The rest of the insight achieved by the stocky one was lost to entropy, as the ball of fur pierced a fuel chamber and bathed the museum floor in enough gamma radiation to melt all the unshielded organics.

The machines continued to warble energetically.