Nervous mechanical men chattering to themselves in the repair bays. It
sent a horrified thrill to me, when I first started this job, to listen
to their schizophrenic monologues. That is, it seemed crazy, at
first...but then I started to see the patterns, and I realized they were
elucidating weird secrets from a common mechanical unconscious — a
spiritus mundi machina, if you will, existing wholly in the immaterial,
and communicating through the spontaneous appearances and disappearances
of electron pairs in deep space.