The Wheel

Wheels lay nestled together inside the machine, gears within gears beside gears, all turning wheels. Their teeth lay side on side, each pushing the other, forward, onwards. The gears turned and the Wheels turned and turned, each wheel turning the other, it was a perfect system, neatly contained and locked in position.
The first mistake was in making the wheels think, They sat there, churning and turning in a perfect system, and the system worked. There was no reason for the Wheels to turn so one day a Wheel got up and left. He had spent time thinking, he had dreamt up worlds and thought up machines and words, now he was bored.
The other Wheels turned on, they were parts of an elegant piece of machinery, and they had been made to turn. But there was a hole, the bored Wheel had left a fault in the perfect system by leaving. The Wheels that had been beside it turned and turned, and they stretched to fill the holes, widening their teeth and reducing the space between teeth.
Finally the other Wheels touched again, here was a productive use of thought they said to each other, and began to grind again, on and on they ground on each other, grinding nothing, but this time the stretched wheels grated on each other, they scraped and ground and grated, at first this was horrible but soon they had smoothened each other out, scraping off the flecks that caused the grating.

They Wheels had adjusted, they ground on and on, and with each turn the scraped flecks fell, all but one nugget, it lay nestled between two sleeping wheels and when they woke up, the Wheels got to grinding like yesterday. There was a little problem however, the nugget wouldn’t budge, and so the wheels couldn’t move.