Ecotone

The cute little robot had been lying there for almost three hundred years now. It was very scuffed and partially buried in that rich California soil and certainly less blue than it had been, but beyond that it had held up surprisingly well. If someone had come across it -- no one had -- they would have found the face irresistibly adorable, because it was designed that way, to appeal to humans' innate sense of the cute and cuddly and vulnerable: huge eyes, small mouth, a sly smile, all precisely calibrated to elicit coos and skirt the uncanny valley. This particular model, the PR-Companion, had been raked across the coals by all the tech blogs when it first came out, especially as compared to both its predecessor -- "It's disappointing, given the Earth-shattering impact of the PR-Hello just two years ago, to see Sony taking what is in effect a half-step backwards in its sophomore effort" -- and its successor -- "Sony has bounced back resoundingly. The PR-Advance more than makes up for the sour taste left in the mouths of robogeeks ever since the Companion haltingly trundled off the assembly line five years ago." But still, someone had cared about it, had thought enough of it to bring it hiking with them on this five-mile-long hilly loop overlooking the endless expanse of LA. Maybe they told it things they were terrified to tell their friends. Or maybe they didn't have any friends, but liked the feel of someone/thing walking alongside them. But something happened and it ended up being left all alone, not more than five meters from the relatively popular trail, but hidden by rocks and trees and a dip in the terrain and therefore fated to be ignored for the next few centuries. Three hundred years already, unmolested by the local wildlife because coyotes and hawks and mountain lions have little appetite for aluminum and nickel. Three hundred years and there's really no reason to think it couldn't spend the next millennium lodged into that hillside. Just lying there.