Chekuskin dreamed he was in a factory sidling up the walkspace, besides some immense machine. But when he put his hand on it to steady himself, instead of cold metal the surface he felt was lively and warm. Little tremors ran through it, but not mechanical ones. The machine he saw was viley alive. Beneath a membrane of purpleish black, fluids were pulsing thickly from chamber to chamber. He stepped back, but his hand would not come free. It had stuck to the machine and now he realized there was no real palm to his hand anymore. He could no more pull away than he could pull his arm off. His arm, his whole body, were outgrowths of the machine. Just a siphon in a man’s shape through which the same fluid sluggishly circulated. But then the walls were gone, but the machine remained. It stretched away into snowy darkness. Somehow because he was part of it, he could feel its vastness. At its edges it was tirelessly eating whatever remained in the world that was not yet it. And it consumed its own wastes too. It was warm and poisonous, and it grew and grew and grew.

But in the morning. He felt much better. The dream washed away in a hot shower.

– Chekuskin’s dream from the end of Part IV of Red Plenty by Francis Spufford