“Shall we go through the door?” he asked.

“I can see your world…” Ludwig’s voice trailed away.

“Ludwig?” Justinian said. The universe was slipping away, the stars fading to grey. “Ludwig?” called Justinian again. There was no reply.

He began to run towards where he thought the door was, but he couldn’t move properly. His legs wouldn’t work.

“Ludwig!” he called. “Where are you?”

There was a faint whisper in the distance and Justinian raced to wake up. He was screaming…

“It committed suicide,” Justinian screamed from his flight chair. “I heard it dying! Even a dream AI looking into this world commits suicide! Hey, what the…” His brain suddenly registered what his body was trying to tell him. He looked down and saw why, in his dream, he couldn’t move around properly. A BVB had materialized around his legs while he had been sleeping, tightly binding him to the flight chair. He stared down at the slightly fuzzy black band, as wide as his wrist but with no depth, digging into the padded material of his passive suit. He pushed his hands down on the chair’s arms and tried to pull himself clear, but his legs were stuck.

“Leslie!” he called. “Get this thing off me!”

Leslie was already there, standing behind him, arms solid and well defined as he fingered the chair, trying to work out a pattern that would hold the BVB in place while giving Justinian enough of a gap to pull his legs out. The baby had crawled over and was now standing up, holding on to Justinian’s leg and looking up at his father, mouth stretching, tears filling his eyes as he picked up on Justinian’s distress.

“Get him away from that thing,” Justinian shouted in near panic. He reached out and pushed gently on his son’s warm little head. The child started to cry and clutched onto his father more tightly.

“It’s perfectly safe as long-” Leslie began in infuriatingly calm tones.

“Get my child away from that fucking thing!” As the baby let out a wail, Leslie scooped him up and carried him quickly to a nearby flight chair that was changing its shape to that of a playpen. Justinian watched the receding face of his son and felt his own panic burned away by hot, searing anger.

“Look what you’ve done to me!” he screamed. “Look what you fuckers have done to me and my son!”

“It can’t be helped,” Leslie said. Justinian surged upwards at him, his hands catching nothing but the cloud fluff of Leslie’s suddenly expanded fractal skin. He scrabbled ineffectively at the robot’s body.

“Be careful! Fall forward and you could seriously wrench your knees.”

“FUCK OFF!” Justinian scrabbled for a moment longer, then slumped back in his chair. He held his head in his hands and uttered a despairing sob.

“What is going on? Even in my dreams an AI commits suicide rather than enter this waking world.”

“You don’t know that,” Leslie said. “Your subconscious could just have been reflecting your recent experience.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Justinian said darkly. “Are there such things as dream AIs?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Leslie said.

“Yes, you do; you saw what happened to my wife. Can an AI take root in a human brain? How would a dream AI be different than one living in a processing space?”

“There’s no such thing. It couldn’t happen.”

“Why not? It’s what MTPH does. Every mind transcends the physical mechanism that supports it. Hah! The human mind is just an AI that has evolved within a set of grey cells.”

“You’re extending a metaphor…”

Justinian wasn’t listening. He gazed at nothing as he spoke out loud. “Lots of new ideas taking root in the universe. Released by the EA and the new AIs. Ideas that humans could never think. Ideas coming awake in my dreams. And then when they see this world, they commit suicide, just like all the other AIs on this planet.”

“I’m going to change this chair’s shape,” Leslie said, moving back behind Justinian. “Get ready to pull your legs clear.”

There was a rolling feeling at Justinian’s back, and he began to twist, to tilt slightly to his right. The chair was splitting into myriad spiders upholstered in orange fabric; they crawled over each other and Justinian began to tumble backwards. The pressure behind his legs gave way and he pulled them back and up-then he was rolling over and over across the orange patterned carpet.

“Done it!” Leslie announced with satisfaction.

Justinian looked across to see the matte-black shape of the BVB still wrapped around four plastic struts sticking up into the air. The rest of the material that once formed the chair was busy folding itself into smaller and smaller shapes as it flowed to rejoin the main body of the flier.

“That BVB almost got me!” he said hoarsely. “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

“You needed the sleep,” Leslie said. “Anyway, you were perfectly safe.”

Justinian glared at the robot, his head pounding with fury, but the hysterical cries of the baby dragged him back to reality. He unclenched his fists, strode across to his son, picked him up, and gave him a hug. The child hugged him back, still sobbing.

“Hey, baby. Hey, baby boy,” crooned Justinian, still breathing hard. “Not long now. We’ll soon be at the secondary infection. Then maybe we can go home.”

“Justinian…” Leslie began.

“I’m comforting my son,” Justinian replied edgily. Leslie hovered nearby, his body fuzzing and unfuzzing in waves as he tried to catch Justinian’s attention.

“Justinian…” he said again.

“What?” Justinian snapped.

“Justinian, I know you’re upset, but I must make an urgent request. Please don’t make the flier go all the way to the next location. The last AI was quite insistent about that.”

“Leslie, this flier has been ordered to follow my instructions, right? It’s bad enough that my son and I have been placed in this danger at all. I will not compound that danger by leaving him alone on the ship with you while I go trekking across the surface of this planet. I say again, we go all the way to the next position.”

Leslie adopted his most reasonable tones. “Oh, Justinian, the last AI pod knew you would react like this. It knows how pig-headed you are. Don’t you realize what you are doing? You are putting us all at risk. You’re putting your son at risk.”

“You’re the one who put us in this situation, Leslie, by bringing us to this planet. Don’t try to make me think otherwise.” He looked towards the flight deck. “Ship, how long until we arrive there?”

“Four hours, Justinian.”

“Fine. I’ll have something to eat: pasta and roasted vegetables. Have a cut-up portion made for the baby.”

He looked up at Leslie. “Are you going to sit at the table with us?” he demanded.

“Me? I wouldn’t have thought you wanted me there.”

“The baby needs social stimulation. Even the hologram children don’t work since the AIs pulled out.”

A table formed itself from memory plastic. Three flight chairs slid up, circling dancers in the dinner-time waltz. One chair shrank in girth to accommodate the baby.

“I can’t make pasta anymore,” apologized the ship’s TM. “As of five minutes ago, my intelligence has dropped below the level necessary for complex food production. You’ll have to eat the freeze-dried meals we brought on board for emergencies.”

Leslie shook his fuzzy head, and Justinian gazed at him.

“Was that your doing?”

“Yes. I got the signal from the hypership. We’re turning down all machine intelligence on this planet even further.”

“Why?”

“Because of you, Justinian. Against all advice, you’re flying us to the secondary infection. We’re not taking any chances.”

Justinian gazed at the robot. “So you’re telling me that the knowledge of how to cook pasta cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.”