Taylor Pavlik

Grave-Digging Machine

The dirt from the empty graves had formed mounds. Piled loose and high, to the yawning rectangles of the graves the mounds were an antithesis. Their lack gave the graves definition, yet made them still incomplete, left them waiting to be filled, which they would never be.

The Grave-Digging Machine was not beautiful. It wasn’t designed to be. Its working parts—pistons and gears and drive shaft—stuck out and made noise. The machine often got hot, though there was no one to burn a hand upon touching it. It had many sharp edges. On most days, the thrum and growl of the machine’s engine and shovel could be heard for miles.
On this day there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun beamed down upon the green Earth. The Grave-Digging Machine chugged along, its solar cells drinking in the light. Sometimes, when rain clouds cast gray shadows, the machine would sit still and dead. It had no internal clock, no way of telling if it were shut down for a moment or a year while the clouds hovered overhead. When the sun returned, the Grave-Digging Machine would once again be brought to motion, its shovel digging into the Earth.

There was nothing alive about the Grave-Digging Machine. Its moving parts and the systematic way it dug the graves created the illusion of purpose, but they were merely the result of complex circuitry coupled with sensors that guided its shovel into the ground and back out again. The program its computer ran was simple—dig a hole roughly the size of a man, move a meter, and dig another, forming a grid—and it could be looped endlessly, which it was.

Rows and rows of empty graves stretched out for kilometers behind the machine. It did not keep count. When it reached a hill or a rock or a forest it would maneuver around the obstacle until it found a patch of land that was flat enough for a grave to be dug. The Grave-Digging Machine was designed to travel through shallow water. It was designed to climb gradients of up to 1.5 meters.

On a sunny day like this, with its cells fully charged, it took the machine twenty minutes to dig a grave and move on. Its average was thirty-five minutes. Near the end of the day it reached a section of land that was flatter and more solid than anything it had previously encountered. Its programming told it not to dig on surfaces greater than a certain density, and so it rolled along the hard ground, its treads running over any small obstacle, of which there were many. The larger obstacles, which were also many, it avoided. The Grave-Digging Machine did not think this was a strange place, as it did not have the capacity, but its sensors made an observation that could have been interpreted as such. Of course, they weren’t.

As dusk approached, the machine slowed, as if it were awed by the forest of steel and concrete it had wandered into, which it was not. It continued into the heart of the city, the buildings growing taller and denser. The street ran straight and the machine found little difficulty navigating it. There were a few instances when the machine encountered a cluster of the larger obstacles, monoliths of metal and plastic, that jammed the center of the road, but there was always a way around. Often the Grave-Digging Machine would merely have to climb up on the curb and make its way through the soft smaller obstacles that lay motionless in its path.

The Grave-Digging Machine did not technically have eyes. Its sensors could make out the shape and density of most objects around it in order to prevent collisions, but each object was forgotten as soon as the appropriate data was relayed to the navigational processors. It could not see as people would have seen, or as animals see, could not distinguish beyond size and shape. The machine could not smell; its designers saw no use for it and, considering the machine’s intended line of work, would have thought smell to even be a detriment to the thing’s efficiency. The machine was not designed to feel horror and so it felt none as it progressed through that silent place.

The sun returned and the Grave-Digging Machine’s sensors and moving parts powered up. A pigeon, fat and slow, had perched upon the machine’s frame. It fluttered off into the long shadows of skyscrapers as the Grave-Digging Machine lurched to a start. Its treads rumbled against the pavement. The machine had never before encountered a stretch of earth that was so unforgiving for such a great distance. It could dig no graves here.

The machine rolled for miles without finding ground to break. As it neared the heart of the city its progress became slower, impeded by the large obstacles clogging the road and the small obstacles that littered the sidewalks. Clouds drifted overhead, gathering density and gradually obscuring the sun. When the sun had vanished, the Grave-Digging Machine ceased its movement. The sound of a ribcage caving in under its tread was like the bow of a tree breaking, although the machine had no means of knowing this.

Rain came. It fell heavy from the sky and washed down the streets. It dripped down the sheer sides of the large obstacles and slid quick off the waterproof surfaces of the Grave-Digging Machine. The small obstacles became bloated with the rain, their fluids mixing with the runoff, which found its way to the storm drains, drifting somewhere dark and empty. When the sun returned, the machine would not know that there had been a storm as it had no means of collecting this data.

Other times after a rain, the machine would restart to find the ground soft and obedient. It would never think, as it could not think, that the rain that often came with the vanishing sun had made the Earth this way. It dug with ease and this was enough. Behind it, open graves would stretch across the landscape, pools of rainwater soaking into the loose soil. Some of the graves would collapse, but it made no difference. No one had thought to build a Burial Machine.

The rain had been hard, and as the Grave-Digging Machine restarted, it discovered something different nearby. In the middle of the sidewalk was a patch of soil, damp and soft from the rain, out of which grew a sickly tree. The concrete on the edge of this circle, weakened by the tree’s slow outward growth, gave way to the machine’s shovel. The shovel’s edge was designed to be sharp enough to slice through any roots it might find underground, and it did. As the sun grew in intensity and the clouds dissipated, the machine dug a grave. The tree crashed onto a large obstacle parked on the road beside it, crumpling the obstacle’s roof and scattering glass. The eroded concrete came out in chunks and piled behind the machine. Its shovel gained speed and soon a jagged hole stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A small obstacle, teetering on the edge, fell into the grave. Dirt fell after it as if cast by a hand, which it was not and could never be. The Grave-Digging Machine took no notice of this as it moved on in search of new ground to break.

It was a glorious day.

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