Sixteen

Over his time spent abiding in the forest, the Daemon Fyndraxis had become very interested in his radio. He could retreat inside himself, sit at his computer and listen to the goings on in the universe. Most of the time all that he heard was standard issue hissing radio noise. Some of that was evidence of the big bang, which was cool, but he wasn’t interested in the birth of the universe. He wanted relevant context clues pertaining to his current situation
A couple of times a day, if things lined up right and he was extremely lucky, he would hear a different sort of hiss. This hiss had a driving rhythm that you could almost dance to. Almost. In all honesty it sounded a bit like a smoke detector was going off while somebody was enthusiastically refinishing a piece of furniture. What he was listening to was a weather satellite.
A weather satellite isn’t a simple machine by any means, but what it does is quite straightforward. It flies extremely high and incredibly fast, and looks down at the earth. While looking down at the earth it is constantly taking a picture. It needs to go fast to stay in orbit, it needs to be high to see the weather, and it needs a camera. It does not take discrete pictures though. What it does is hook its camera directly to its radio transmitter and screams this almost danceable beat to anyone who cares to listen.
Encoded in this beat is the information from its camera. To an observer on the ground with the correct equipment, this signal can be interpreted back into a picture. This picture will contain not only weather data, but also handy pictures of the ground that a clever person could use to figure out generally where they are.
One of these satellites can see a swath about 2500 kilometers wide. Cross referencing one of these pictures with the doppler shift, how its radio frequency is affected by its relative speed, of the incoming signal could give a very clever and patient person a general idea of where they are in the world. Fyndraxis spent most of his evening lamenting how not clever he was. He had been working on building an interpreter of this signal from scratch.
Usually when somebody tackles this sort of problem they have access to things that will help them along the way. Things like technical specifications or a helpful wiki. Normally he would have access to repositories of helpful code on the internet that would make this task rather trivial, say, something like github. Unfortunately, since the end of the world the internet had been a bit spotty.
It was during an intense bout of groaning and temple rubbing that Fyndraxis noticed a signal he hadn’t heard before. It was a bit higher up in the radio spectrum, around 915Mhz, and had a very short and distinct chirp. This chirp would repeat eight times or so and then pause for a while, and begin again. From its clarity and strength, he could tell that it was extremely close. It seemed to be in the room with him. He could tell this fact by observing how the signal hit different parts of his sheath and doing some mental math.
Where was this coming from? He left his sanctum and took a peek at the darkened room where he still lay on the table. After a while and mucking about with his vision a bit he noticed a very busy piece of dust. He was able to get a pretty good look at it from below while it was making its way up his sheath. It was an extremely small robot that looked suspiciously like a tardigrade. A bit like if a burrito had grown eight little stubby legs. At the front of the burrito was a rather intimidating maw.
Where a normal creature would have a mouth with jaws and teeth, this fellow had a series of concentric rotating rasps. The rasps themselves were made of something that looked very hard and durable. This machine seemed to be in the business of material removal. Apparently radio games as well. While what Fyndraxis could hear from his visitor didn’t make any sense, that didn’t really matter. He could record the signals and analyze them at his leisure . Perhaps if he was very clever and very patient he could figure out what this little fellow was trying to say.
It seemed that the end of the world was shaping up to be quite busier than he had first realized. For weather satellites to be up and running they either had to be extremely well made, or there was a ground crew somewhere making sure it didn’t deorbit onto a middle school. Also, for this tiny dust robot to be out and exploring made him think that somewhere out there were people with a rather impressive level of technology. He could have just wandered into some cultural backwater, or redneck apocalypse cult.
The Daemon Fyndraxis’ radio games and frustrated attempts at programming had taken up most of the evening, and he soon noticed the sun beginning to come up. He noticed this because of light coming through a crack under the door, because this cabin had no windows. As this faint glow began to brighten the room slightly, Bird started to stir in her bed.