Erik was dreaming of a time and place not his own when the pickers came to get him. Many tiny silver hands, tugging at his skin and clothes, woke him, and he shuddered off the memories of the dead man whose arm and leg he wore.

"Man here," announced one of the pickers. The voice didn't come from a mouth—its head was smooth and featureless as a silver egg.

"'Course I'm here," he said to their blank, upturned faces, the words clogged by a throat full of phlegm. He hacked up a gob of it and spat it into the far corner of the crate. "I'm always here."

"Other man," said the picker. "White hair. Loud voice. Not new."

"Not new? He's been here before?" People passed through the warehouse level -- some of them even had camps set up in corners among the boxes and crates—but the pickers usually left them alone. "Why bother me now?"

"Monculii," the picker explained.

"Shit." Rolling up to his feet with a move both graceful and asymmetric. "He's screwing with the monculii?" He and the warehouse supervisor had modified certain machines in secret. "Better bring me."

They swarmed up his lower body, silver hands and feet and bony spines pressing against him, and he was whisked out of his crate and down the grey-tiled floor, carried by pickers at an impossible speed. Impossible for any human, especially him, with his gait lopsided from having legs of different lengths. The pickers' tiny feet left no trace in the dust thick on the warehouse floor.

He saw the bulk of the monculii before he saw the man; the smooth black oval of its face loomed out of the warehouse mists at the end of the row of crates. The pickers clinging to its sides were still, tools held poised in aborted motion. Then the vapour swirled and cleared, and he saw the man-shaped clump of pickers sitting at the feet of the giant, twitching faintly.

His toes touched bone-dry tile; he shifted to adjust his weight as the pickers set him down. "Okay, clear him."

Dust-soft patters as the silver clump disintegrated. A man emerged, gasping for breath—black wool hat crooked over wispy white hair, yellowed jacket, a split lip and puffy cheek, and one eye nearly swelling shut.

Erik's eyebrows went up. "You beat the shit out of this guy before you swarmed him?"

"Not us," said the picker who had stayed by his knee.

"This is inexcusable," the man sputtered as he hauled himself to his feet. "By what authority do you―" He saw Erik and stopped short.

Erik knew exactly what he was looking at. It wasn’t the tattoos of barbed wire spiraling up one arm to shoulder and neck, the charms pierced through his ears and nose, or the long blade hanging bare by his side―the visitor had surely seen gang members from the upper levels before. No, what drew the man's stare were the arm and leg, the patches of darker skin down his jaw and chest―reconstructed from the DNA of a dead man, and integrated into what remained of Erik's body.

The sight didn’t silence the man for long. "Sir," he said, "I thank you for your fortuitous arrival; there seems to be a misunderstanding among these diminutive fellows. I merely approached seeking information, and was greeted by assault and violation."

"No misunderstanding," Erik said. "And I don't know what level you come from to call that violation."

"All levels, dear sir," the man gushed, ignoring Erik's implication. "I frequent all levels with performances of the classic work, The Engineer. I myself am a man of the cloth." He flipped his jacket open―a faded, threadbare scrap of red ribbon.

A dead man's memories stirred―clapping hands, white flashes, the face of a man he hated―Erik knew him as the Engineer, but the dead man knew him by another name. Knew him as a man who had denied refugees from his sanctum, his pet project, his theme park. "He was a fool," Erik found himself saying, before he clamped his mouth shut on the dead man.

"Who?"

"The Engineer." And as the man puffed, swelling up with indignation, he cut him off, "What are you doing here?"

"The question, my good sir, is what is this doing here?" A theatrical sweeping arm toward the monculii. "I assume you are in a position to elaborate, given your relationship with these fellows."

"I work for the supervisor," Erik said. He served as another set of eyes and ears for Dell, ever since the warehouse supervisor had found him bleeding and mangled in one of the crates, hiding from the rival gang that had nearly killed him.

"Then you can tell me―is the network reviving itself? Has some function been restored to it at last?"

Erik laughed. "Do you know what the network is?"

"A brain; a central machine―"

"No central about it," Erik said, and gestured to the pickers and himself. "The network is all around you. Every nanite that makes up the pickers and half my body is part of the network. It's a brain, yes, but there is no central node, no god in the machine."

The man frowned at him―disbelieving or uncomprehending?

Erik shrugged. Dell? he called out to the warehouse supervisor through their nanite connection. What do you want me to do with this stiff? He's seen one of our errants.

Hmm? The supervisor sounded preoccupied. As he should be; he was building an army of monculii throughout his jurisdiction. Do whatever you like, Erik.

Erik shrugged. "Break him down," he said to the pickers. They could always use more raw biomass. He turned and fell into the swaying, off-balance rhythm of his stride, bare feet silent on the tiles, as behind him the man began to scream.