We're back with a fifth story for Clark's World magazine, issue 233 for February 26. My name is Kate Baker. I'm your host and narrator. We are diving into another story by Fiona Moore, the Iron Piper. And that is thanks to your ongoing support. If you've purchased a subscription, if you've made a donation, if you've gone to

patreon.com, forward slash Clark's World. Thank you, because you let me tell you these stories each and

every month. Now, Fiona Moore is a BSFA award-winning, WFA shortlisted writer, academic and critic,

author of management lessons from The Game of Thrones, and the Morag and Seamus series

of cozy post-apocalyptic stories. Her work has appeared in Clark's World Escape Pod and Interzone,

and she has published two novels. She makes miniatures and runs a blog about cooking food from the

franchise tie-in cookbooks. She lives in London with a snowshoe cat who's not

bothered about anything. And please, go back and look up Fiona more. This will be the sixth

work that we've published by Fiona, and they are fantastic. So my dear listener, I hope you can

sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

The kids had been right.

There was a robot in Kairnharvan.

Morag had been skeptical when Blodwin and Rain had come running to tell her.

Robots were scarce and becoming scarcer.

There were a small number of Farrow ones still roaming the hillsides,

but with no one to fix them, their lifespan was limited.

Seamus, the walkbot that had attached itself to Morag a few years back,

owed its continued survival to a combination of chance, luck, determination, and more recently,

Morag's own skill with a soldering iron, so the chances of another robot surviving were rather low. But there it was. It stood motionless in what was normally one of the fairground's

livestock paddocks looming twice as tall as a human. The robot's body was a verdigrous green

metal sphere, with what looked like a mirrored visor at the front. The robot's body was a verdigris green metal sphere with what looked like a mirrored visor at the front.

The robot had long copper arms with three-fingered grappers at the end.

...