Sudden StorySciFi "theOutpost"

The Machinery

Cooper sleeps, feeling the warmth of the huge bunk, far enough away from the mainframes. Suzi sleeps nearby, the coolness of the evening, soothing her solar cells still warm from the previous day. The inside of the lab quarters is roomy, a view of the forest tapers up the jungle valley. Suzi's olfactory senses the fragrances, the forest; her silence views the instant presentation of molecular structures on her screen; the old supply depot--with its history of camouflaged jackets, khaki greens of ancient times--surrounds them. 

As sheer beauty is unmistakeable, so supple, synthetic collagen stretched over high cheek bones of the purest titanium dioxide. Nature's design, it seems, never got it correct, and, Suzi isn't an immediate product of Nature's patterns (like the cellulose), never; she is beyond the last manifest--the most advanced leaves and plants--as machinery creates deep inside cells left by previous machinery left behind to protect massive structures yet to come. Events settled slow--four billion years in the making of this jungle. Suzi's data, even in sleep, continually indicate the rate as one increment above stupidity. Yes, she has arrived; her blue eyes peer into the forest, waiting, watching, her lasers computing. Her DNA patterns remain just outside the realm of human understanding.