Chem hadn’t seen a human for almost forty years, the day he came across the girl. He found her scavenging on the edge of the farm, digging for roots and grubs. She was using her hands, the humans had not reinvented tools yet, and it was her yelp as her fingers struck a hidden rock that alerted him. Chem’s hearing was acute enough to hear the petals of the plants in his garden unfold in the early morning sun, and the scream of a human was deafening by comparison.

Chem wondered if she knew what he was. Clearly, he was not an animal of any type. And plants, even in this new strange world that had grown from the corpse of the last, did not walk about on two legs. He thought perhaps that the human girl saw him for what he was; a slab of rock and clay, formed in a mould in a factory, and imbued with alchemical life my a process that had once been mystical, but that had become the property of scientists and industrialists. They hadn’t liked the word “Golum”, it wasn’t marketable. But that was what he was.

The girl had looked up at him, blonde hair matted with dirt and covering half her face, squinting in the sunlight, and held out her bloody hand. Chem had suspected that there were still humans, hiding underground. This was a young one, probably unschooled in their ways of evasion and cunning.

Chem’s own hand, eight fingered and two thumbed, dwarfed the girl’s as he reached down to her and crushed her head like a piece of overripe fruit. Blood and brains squired out from between his digits, splattering on the ground. The plants in the garden, despite their lack of legs, sensed the blood and shuffled anxiously.

“Always hungry,” said Chem, his voice a landslide of gravel, and smiled at his charges. He would have to hunt the other humans down, but for now there was the garden, and there was still so much work to do. It barely covered the continent, after all.

Whoever had replaced the golum’s instructions with the words “Save the Earth” clearly had no idea how big a job it really was.