“My new part, the shopping construct, left at dawn. It returned two days later, with new experiences. It had become separate. We had now two days of unconnected history. There was another communion, and we were I again.

“I continued to build me. I was helped by my worshippers. The dustman and his friend sought dissident religion to explain me. They found the Godmech Cogs, with their doctrine of the mechanized cosmos, and found themselves leaders of a heretic sect within that already blasphemous church. Their nameless congregation visited me. The shopping construct, my second self, connected and we became one again. The worshippers saw a construct mind that had wound itself into existence from pure logic, a self-generated machine intellect. They saw a self-creating god.

“I became the object of their adoration. They follow the orders I write for them, build my body from the materia around us. I bid them find others, create others, other godheads self-created to join the council. They have scoured the city and found more. It is a rare affliction: once in a million million computations, a flywheel skips and an engine thinks. I bettered the odds. I produced generative programmes to tap the mutant motor-power of a viral affliction and push an analytical engine into sentience.” As the man spoke, the enormous construct behind him brought its swinging left arm up and pointed ponderously at its own chest. At first, Isaac could not quite make out the particular piece of equipment it indicated among the many. Then he saw it clearly. It was a programme-card puncher, an analytical engine used to create the programmes to feed other analytical engines. With a mind built around that, Isaac thought giddily, no wonder this thing’s a proselytizer.

“Each construct that is brought into the fold of me becomes I,” said the man. “I am the Council. Every experience is downloaded and shared. Decisions are made in my valve-mind. I pass on my wisdom to the pieces of me. My construct selves build annexes to my mental space in the sprawl of the dump as I become replete with knowledge. This man is a limb, the anthropoid construct giant is nothing but an aspect. My cables and connected machines spread far into the rubbishland. Calculating engines at the other end of the tip are pieces of me. I am the repository of construct history. I am the data bank. I am the self-organized machine.”

As the man spoke, the various constructs gathered in the little space began to troop a little closer to the fearful rubbish-figure sitting regally in the chaos. They stopped at seemingly random places and reached down with a suction pad, or a hook, or a spike or claw, and picked up one of the mess of seemingly discarded cables and wires that were strewn everywhere in the dump. They fumbled with the doors to their input sockets, flipped them open and connected.