I’m reading “World Breakers”, an anthology of short stories revolving around sentient tanks, in the spirit of Keith Laumer’s Bolo stories. (One of the contributing authors, by the way, is Larry Correia.)
Anyway, one of the stories is “Anvil”. It revolves around a tank that rebooted to damaged/missing data and had to figure out what his purpose was and fill in the blanks along the way. Eventually, he decides his purpose is to build a village, plant crops, gather livestock, and ultimately populate the village with villagers.
In the process of doing all this, he gathers a rather large following of chickens…which he eventually figures out were attracted to him because his treads were stirring up the ground exposing night crawlers, killing the occasional mouse/snake, etc.
Anyway, after constructing the village, he figures out how to trap his huge following of chickens in the village so he can go in search of villagers. All, that is, except for 5 chickens who end up going along for the ride. He eventually names them “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “Dammit”.
During his trek in search of villagers, with his 5 extra chicken riders, he came to the conclusion he needed to work on his fire control. He knew he was running only 89% efficiency but hadn’t found anything to fight. He had test fired his guns, but hadn’t been able to test his reflexes with them.
Then he comes across a herd of llamas, or something very like them. Here’s the story from there:
He sat idle, trying to determine if he had any mission parameters that included llama. There was a badly defined “collect animals” that he’d been ignoring since the entire chicken epidemic. He noticed that the llamas had decided to drift in his direction. He had scanned them and determined that they were completely harmless. They were less than two meters tall with spindly legs and a long neck. Their eyes were limpid pools of black. As they ambled up to Anvil, they worked their bottom jaws, chewing.
Dammit decided he didn’t like the llamas. He hopped up onto Anvil’s main cannon and started to cluck loudly.
The lead llama didn’t like Dammit. Its ears went back.
“Hostile detected,” his targeting subsystem reported.
“What…?” Anvil started to query since he hadn’t picked up anything in the area.
The llama spat at Dammit.
The main cannon fired at the llama. Point blank.
Anvil sat at the edge of the smoking hole.
He needed to work on his firing control system.