a machine stop

The next planetfall we made was a machine world. A very ancient species had built a bit of an empire spanning five or six star systems, and then had started slowly selling off real estate, retreating towards their original home world.....they concentrated their remaining population, and then transcended in mass to a higher reality, leaving their faithful machine servants behind to oversee the preservation of the planet as a sort of museum or memorial to their race and it's history. I took the shuttle down with a tourist group, and went on the usual tour of impressive old buildings, elaborate gardens, holographic presentations of important past events, etc..... The thing I found most interesting was The Machine Shop.....a carefully preserved factory, where the First Generation machine population had been assembled. It's not often that you get to see the actual cradle of an existing culture, complete with tools and dies.....