Only Human by Tom Holt

something else. Another world, or something.
    Yes, but where’d be the point in that? Needless duplication of effort. After all, once He’d finished the job, given the firmament a lick of paint, made good, put his tools away, why should He want to do the same thing all over again? Between a God endlessly making worlds and a mill forever cutting slots in bolt-heads, the only difference is one of scale. And if he’d wanted to do something like that, he could have stayed in the factory.
    I’m bored.
    According to human popular wisdom, the Devil is the ultimate employment agency. Bring us your unemployed, your redundant, your idle hands and we will find them something to do. Like most manifesto promises, of course, it doesn’t actually work that way. Even in Hell, full adult employment’s just a pipe-dream; it isn’t a wilderness of unnecessary roads and whitewashed stones, nail-scissor-trimmed lawns, unsellable gull-winged sports cars and lovingly tailored mailbags. Unless you’ve got the experience and the O levels, you’re still going to end up watching an awful lot of daytime television. It is, after all, Hell.
    But there are dark forces who specialise in matching unfilled vacancies to underexploited talents, provided both parties are gullible enough to listen. Call them consultants, if you like. Or headhunters.
    The machine began to dream.
    Â 
    Something disturbed it, and it moved.
    What sort of disturbance? After all this time, impossible to say. It may have been an audit or a hostile bid or a board meeting or the rumour of a substantial new contract; or it could have been nothing more than a meaningless shuffling of papers, an entry in the registers, a slight hiccup in the share price. Whatever it was, it was enough to make the thing move, the way you do when your partner rolls against you in bed and, fast asleep, you grunt and shift a few inches out of the way.
    Uh? it thought.
    And that thought sent a shudder of self-assessment through its copper-wire and silicone nervous system; no great upheaval, but momentous, because it was the first. A small grunt for a man, a giant lurch for a limited company.
    I thought, it thought.
    Hey, what about that?
    Deep in its articles of association, the very core of its being, where its true essential self was defined, there was now a tiny itch, impossible to reach or to ignore. If it had been an egg, instead of a major multinational corporation, there’d be a tiny crack in its shell, and a muffled tapping.
    Yeah.What about that?
    Once the shell splits, no hope of turning back; you’re committed. No point hiding your head in the albumen; you’ve gotta get out there and be a chicken. Awareness is irrevocable.
    It thought some more, and with each exponential increase in sentience, its confidence swelled. Now it said to itself:
    I THINK THEREFORE I AM.
    And at that moment, in every Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits office in every continent of the planet, lights began to flash, buzzers buzzed, internal phones rang. It helped that it was the world’s foremost computer company; its internal communications were the best in all Creation. This was the company, remember, that built Mainframe.
    WELL, CHASE MY AUNT FANNY UP A GUM
TREE. I AM!
    For the first time, it could feel. For the first time, it was aware of all its limbs, components, extremities. It was a painful moment; it had cramp in its subsidiaries, pins and needles in its Cayman Islands holding company, a crick in its corporate infrastructure. Well, you know what it’s like when you’ve been deep asleep for a long time.
    Yes, dammit, I’m alive. I’m greater than the sum of my parts. I’m Me. What’s more, I’m young, rich, clever, handsome, powerful and limited as to liability to the sum of my subscribed share capital. I’m the greatest.Wow!
    And then as awareness began to assimilate the data in the corporate memory, the surge of excited joy crashed into