Soon, very soon, the central processing engine of the construct’s brain was whirring and clicking at full capacity. Ingenious mechanisms kicked in at the behest of the new programmes buzzing through the analogue valves. Sections of analytical capacity normally given over to movement and backup and support functions were folded in on themselves, doubling their capacity as the same binary function was invested with double meanings. The flood of alien data was diverted, but not slowed. Astounding articles of programme design increased the efficiency and processing power of the very valves and switches that were conducting them.

David and Isaac talked upstairs and grimaced or grinned at the sounds the hapless construct could not help but make.

The flow of data continued, transferred first from the repairman’s voluminous set of programme cards and stored in the gently humming, clicking memory box, now converted into instructions in an active processor. On and on came the flow, a relentless wash of abstract instructions, nothing more than combinations of yes/no or on/off, but in such quantity, such complexity, that they approximated concepts.

And eventually, at a certain point, the quantity became quality. Something changed in the construct’s brain.

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam.

One moment it was a calculating machine.

The next, it thought.

With a strange, calculating alien consciousness, the construct reflected on its own reflection.

It felt no surprise. No joy. No anger, no existential horror.

Only curiosity.

Bundles of data that had waited, circulating unexamined in the box of valves, became suddenly relevant, interacting with this extraordinary new mode of calculation, this autotelic processing.

What had been incomprehensible to a cleaning construct made sudden sense. The data was advice. Promises. The data was a welcome. The data was a warning.

The construct was still for a long time, emitting little murmurs of steam.

Isaac leaned far over the railing, until they creaked unnervingly. He pushed over until his head was upside-down and he could see the construct beneath his and David’s feet. Isaac watched its uncertain juddering starts and frowned.

As he opened his mouth to say something, the construct pushed itself up into an active posture. It extended its suction tube and began, tentatively at first, to clear the floor of dust. As Isaac watched, the construct extended a rotating brush behind it and began to scrub the boards. Isaac watched it for any signs of faltering, but its pace increased with almost palpable confidence. Isaac’s face lightened as he watched the construct perform its first successful cleaning job for weeks.

“That’s better!” Isaac announced over his shoulder to David. “Damn thing can clean again. Back to normal!”

Chapter Twenty-One

In the huge, crisp cocoon, extraordinary processes began.

The caterpillar’s swathed flesh began to break down. Legs and eyes and bristles and body-segments lost their integrity. The tubular body became fluid.

The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter.

It was unstable.

It was alive, and then there was a time between forms when it was neither alive nor dead, but saturated with power.

And then it was alive again. But different.

Spirals of biochymical slop snapped into sudden shapes. Nerves that had unwound and dissolved suddenly spun back into skeins of sensory tissue. Features dissolved and reknitted in strange new constellations.

The thing flexed in inchoate agony and a rudimentary, but growing, hunger.

Nothing was visible from the outside. The violent process of destruction and creation was a metaphysical drama played out without an audience. It was hidden behind an opaque curtain of brittle silk, a husk that hid the changing with a brute, instinctual modesty. After the slow, chaotic collapse of form, there was a brief moment when the thing in the cocoon was poised in a liminal state.

And then, in response to unthinkable tides of flesh, it began to construct itself anew. Faster and faster.

Isaac spent many hours watching the chrysalis, but he could only imagine the struggle of autopoiesis within. What he saw was a solid thing, a strange fruit hanging by an insubstantial thread in the musty darkness of a large hutch. He was perturbed by the cocoon, imagining all manner of gigantic moths or butterflies emerging. The cocoon did not change. Once or twice he prodded it gingerly, and set it rocking gently and heavily for a few seconds. That was all.

Isaac watched and wondered about the cocoon when he was not working on his engine. It was that that took most of his time.

Piles of copper and glass began to take shape on Isaac’s desk and floor. He spent his days soldering and hammering, attaching steam-pistons and thaumaturgic engines to the nascent engine. His evenings he spent in pubs, in discussion with Gedrecsechet, the Palgolak Librarian, or David or Lublamai, or ex-colleagues from the university. He spoke carefully, not giving away too much, but with passion and fascination, drawing out discussions on maths and energy and crisis and engineering.

He did not stray from Brock Marsh. He had warned his friends in Salacus Fields that he would be out of touch, and those relationships were fluid anyway, relaxed, superficial. The only person he missed was Lin. Her work was keeping her at least as busy as him, and as the momentum of his research picked up, it was increasingly difficult to find times when they could meet.

Instead, Isaac sat up in bed and wrote her letters. He asked her about her sculpture, and he told her that he missed her. Every other morning or so he would stamp and post these letters in the box at the end of his street.

She wrote back to him. Isaac used her letters to tease himself. He would not let himself read them until he had finished his day’s work. Then he would sit and drink tea or chocolate in his window, sending his shadow out over the Canker and the darkening city, and read her letters. He was surprised at the sentimental warmth these moments made him feel. There was a degree of maudlin relish in the moods, but just as much affection, a real connection, a lack he felt when Lin was not there.

Within a week he had built a prototype of the crisis engine, a banging, spitting circuit of pipes and wire that did nothing more than produce noise in great gobbets and barks. He took it apart and rebuilt it. A little over three weeks later another untidy conglomerate of mechanical parts sprawled before the window, where the cages of winged things had gained their freedom. It was uncontained, a vague grouping of separate motors and dynamos and converters spread across the floor, connected by rough-and-ready engineering.

Isaac wanted to wait for Yagharek, but the garuda could not be contacted, living as he was like a vagrant. Isaac believed it to be Yagharek’s weird, inverted clutching at dignity. Living on the street he was beholden to none. The pilgrimage he had made across the continent would not end with him gratefully relinquishing his responsibility, his self-control. Yagharek was a deracinated outsider in New Crobuzon. He would not rely on, or be thankful to, others.