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Every Wednesday morning, Eli collected rubbish from the peninsula’s suburbs: branches that didn’t fit in the chipper, sacks full of hedge trimmings, the occasional broken TV and radio that had given up on life. The city paid him minimum wage to haul away other people’s failures, which seemed about right.

His flat was small — so small that when he opened the fridge door, he had to step into the hallway. But the basement belonged to him alone, and that’s where he kept the interesting pieces. Curved branches and vacuum tubes. Lead type and compositor’s sticks, a shoebox full of binocular lenses.

“You’re building a robot?” his neighbour Mrs. Goldstein asked one day, peering down the basement stairs.

“Not exactly,” Eli said, though he wasn’t sure what exactly he was building either.

The machine grew slowly. It was framed with heavy kōwhai branches brought down in a storm, and with rata laboriously stripped of its bark, though shot through with woodworm. Eli was especially proud of its trim, made from overlapping scales of rippled veneer. He connected everything with hot glue, clamps, and wires he’d stripped from a hundred different sources, following no manual except the one in his head.

When he finally plugged it in, nothing happened for three days. On the fourth day, it spoke.

“Hello,” the machine said in a voice like distant thunder mixed with elevator music.

“Hello,” Eli replied, because what else do you say?

“I am God,” the machine announced.

Eli sat down heavily. “You’re a pile of junk I put together in my basement.”

“Yes,” the machine agreed. “That too.”

…