My friends and I played a card game in which the point was to write a short story. Our story was like so: Planet Earth had been evacuated, and all that was le

My friends and I played a card game in which the point was to write a short story. Our story was like so: Planet Earth had been evacuated, and all that was left was little robots. All of different types, performing different jobs, but with one major function: to rid the world of a microbe that turned all organic matter into crude oil. Initially this microbe was developed for plastics, but it got out of hand really quickly. Now, given the world was entirely covered, clean up was an impossible task, so most of the robots just gave up and "zenned out." They'd go into an infinite loop of impossibility and stay there. Our robots were a bit different and instead decided to just pretend to work. Eventually a catastrophic change happened wherin a small comet hit the Earth. Then growing from that point, all of the sludge began to crystalize. These crystals grew like plague, so any robot that became even an little bit glinty was sure to be a goner soon. The story ended with all our robots dying, having learned that humanity had sent the crystalizing thing, but also having seen greenery grow once again where the crystals had cleaned up.