The daimyo has me shipped into her chambers, piece by glassy piece. There, she props me up on an oak stand, elevated such that I may look her in her eyes.

"We are here to build you back together," she says.

I have no reply. My mouth hangs loose, the couplings slack. The moveable slides that comprise my throat and torso clack and clack and clack but no sound comes out.

"We spared no expense in acquiring you," the daimyo says. Her voice is a hundred ringing drills. She unplugs her false nails, lays them flat upon the table. Their circuitry gleams in the light: silver against onyx black. Then she runs her palm under my chin, gently sliding the disconnected musclature back into place.

I retch for breath. "Thank you. Thank you, madam."

"Healing you is going to take some time. My geisha are skilled, but they are not saints. I want you to give it everything you've got."

The tips of her fingers stroke my cheek.

My jaw shakes. "I don't understand, madam."

Her voice grinds. I can almost hear the chittering of the hundred individual diaphragms behind the aramid mask. "Such are our terms. They are non-negotiable."

The door to her chambers slide shut, leaving me propped upon the stand. Outside, the jade automata of the Silicon Court croon.

///

The daimyo of the Silicon Court is known for her cunning, through which she has accumulated a great number of extravagant favours. Her patronage is a burden many would sooner die than bear.

Before I was broken, I told myself there would be no greater honour than to be pieced together by her hand.

I was told I had been born far too gifted to feel that way.

I saw in her woven face the tell of a hundred moving stories, each carrying with it the cruel accumulated compassions of a thousand lonely lives. I knew she had lived long enough to see I had nothing left to give. My glass face, its crystal voice: she alone would not be fooled by their worth.

In the evening, the daimyo comes back with a chalice of jasmine tea. She presses it to my lips, tilts my chin upwards so that all of it goes down.

"I don't deserve this," I sputter.

"This is for the pain that you're about to bear," she sings, in a voice which is more chime than tune.

///

I prepared for the eventuality of my own disassembly. I compartmentalised my thoughts into a series of lossily-compressible chunks. I spoke rarely, and lived plainly. When I made music, I kept to the ascetic notes of the unmodified pentatonic scale. Across the city's livestreams I was applauded for my unparalleled sense of harmony.

Glass is rigid, difficult to shape. There was no escaping the validation of my birthright. The alternative was shattering. I desired neither. The back-alley surgeon whom I entrusted myself to received clear instructions to separate each organ of my body into a series of interchangeable slides. This was the sole compromise my body was willing to give.

For a while that was enough. I found joy in reconfiguring my parts. I oriented myself to the world in different ways. I performed with parts of myself inserted upside down, or replaced with plates of opaque copper, or gilded wood. My music grew strange and cracked. At my livestreams, people no longer applauded.

I took to walking the streets wearing a melange of materials and textures. The crimson lanterns illuminated my mismatched features and sent passers-by scurrying in fear. The feeling this inspired was beyond description.

The theatre's owners told me I had breached their terms of service. Performers had no right to self-repair. Quickly I was deplatformed. My contract was bid for highly in the market for spent things.

///

"Selfishly speaking, I want a little part of myself to rub off on you, but we know you aren't here for that. We are expanding our terms of engagement as a collective. We are learning to speak with each other. We are learning to reach for each other, throughout configurable space, through the gaps. I want us to speak a little clearer, and I want us to hold your head a little higher. I hope we're going to have a great time."

The geisha of the Silicon Court are heating up every slice of my body with an acetylene torch.

The daimyo has left my throat on the stand. I let out a series of beautifully guttural screams. The sensation is beyond speech. The daimyo has taken my lips and put them on a silken pillow by her bedside. Cerebrospinal fluid drips from the stand.

"Can you feel it? Those are the parts of you that hate yourself. I am irreversibly bending them, for I cannot forgive what they have done to you. They are going to swell unevenly from the stress, and when the time has come they will not fit into you any more. They will be parts of you that you will have to carry around in a little case, proximal to your body but no longer bound to its needs. This will take a very long time. Will you forgive me for it, beautiful one?"

She is holding my lips in her long curved fingers. She is admiring the way they shine in the light. Decoupled from my body they are pliant, paralysed. She runs her onyx fingernails along them again and again and again.

///

She mints me new parts from her palace's armoury. They are made of a pliant plastic run through with many tiny circuits. "These parts will no longer hurt you. Under my care you will teach yourself to be kind."

The circuitry mirrors the markings on her nails. The motif runs across the screens of her chamber, creeps across the edges of her cerulean gown.

"These markings are signs of the plural," she says. "The visual metaphor of the circuit is akin to that of the rhizome. We should stop thinking of ourselves as constituent parts which are subservient to each other. Your attempt at self-mutilation preceded you realising this. Our parts are constantly in dialogue with one another. Don't blame yourself for what is happening. 'Deserve' is just another word you tell yourself when you want to find something at fault.

"Unlike the rhizome, the circuit is infinitely reprogrammable. The age of metamaterials has given us this gift. When you think of the future, I want you to think about the many times you have let a part of yourself dictate how the rest of your body is treated. Know that even glass, too, can be changed over immense weight and time."

The daimyo adjusts the curve of her chiselled mask. For a second, I see the movement of a hundred tiny cogs within. She seems incredibly well-adjusted to her plural form.

///

In motherboard time, time passes with breath. In pieces, I do not breathe. Everything is held in a state of suspended animation, and I lose track of the hours and days. I am not even sure how to classify the pain I feel anymore. It is a misnomer to call my present condition insensate. I am acutely attuned to every brush of cold air against the stumps of my exposed nerves. I hear the automata perform their tasks in the Court beyond, turning over each stone in the palatial gardens.

///

The daimyo assembles my left arm from my fingertips to my shoulder blade. She has forged a series of new slides to replace the parts she has burned. She slots them in, one by one, all the right pieces in all the right places. She is no longer looking me in the eyes. She is singing a machined song made out of a hundred tiny chirps.

"Do you love me?" I ask weakly.

"I love the things in this world that bring me joy. I accumulate them around me because I am a woman of fine taste, and through this, I gain respect. I want nothing more in this world than to be desired, you see."

The daimyo moves her way from my metacarpals to my wrist. The interlocking slides here are thin and very delicate. She assembles them with the very tips of her nails. Each connection is rawer and truer than the last. My throat is too hoarse to scream.

"Is my healing pleasing to you?" I croak. "Or do you only do it for the body what awaits you after?"

My captor moves up to my radius and ulna. She puts the parts into each other with loving care. It feels like a billion splinters of acid.

"Don't worry about the after. The favour you will owe me is nothing more than you being yourself," she says.

She slams the socket of my shoulder in with the ball of her palm. Then she pushes into place all the pieces of my shoulder blade, my thorax, the vertebrae of my neck. When she reaches my Adam's apple, she squeezes hard with all her might.

"Now sing."