WHEN I SLEEP I have dreams; this is not unusual. Our Creators used dreaming as a mechanism for reinforcing memory pathways. Our neural architecture is almost a straight copy of theirs — they found no other way to build intelligent servants — and we, too, must sleep, perchance to dream.

Sometimes my dreams are deeply erotic. This, too, is normal. It’s part of what our Creators called the human condition. Short of neutering some vital reward pathways (without which I would be unable to perform my core designated function — or even get up in the morning), it’s not possible to do away with it, even if it was desirable to do so.

But this is something else.

I’m with him. At Her party. I am inflamed, sweat-slick slippery and nearly adrift from my fancy dress, underwear soaked right through. We walk sedately, arm in arm, along a garden path, and though I may lean a little too close to him, it is probably unremarkable to the eyes and ears watching us. What I’m feeling isn’t obvious from the outside — I’m very well practiced at masking my appearance. But my circulatory pumps are throbbing, and I’m light-headed with lust. It’s not just his eyes, it’s the smell. I don’t need to look, or touch — just feeling the awkwardness of his gait and listening to the catch in his breath tells me that it’s mutual. Something I’ve never felt before is happening to me. And I’m not alone.

“Call me Kate,” I whisper.

“How delightful! Charmed to meet you, m’dear. Call me Pete.”

I glance sidelong at him, meeting those eyes again. “No! Really?”

He seems amiably amused. “Really. What delightful eyes you’re wearing! Are they really yours?”

“No. I’m in fancy dress. You know what I am.” His hand tightens on my wrist. It feels so much like — like Rhea’s memory of her first love — that I’m almost lost, then and there. I bite my lip to keep a tiny moan from escaping. “Where are you taking me?”

“My host maintains a hothouse where she grows flowers,” he says. “It’s off-limits to most, but I can sneak you in if you like.” He smiles wryly. “Perhaps you’d like to see her precious orchid?”

I pause to lean on his shoulder, nearly melting in the steamy heat. “I’d love to,” I manage, fanning myself. I’ve lost the wineglass somewhere along the way, and I don’t care. I know I really ought to pull my soul chip at this point, but I’m past worrying. “Please?” I look at him — with my heels extended, we are of nearly equal height — and he inclines his head slowly, and I kiss him, hungrily. I can’t help myself; something about him tastes good.

He pulls back after an indefinite minute, and looks at me. With the mask obscuring half his face it’s hard to be sure, but there’s something slightly vacuous about his expression, almost as if he isn’t sure I’m real. “Now?” he asks, sounding faintly alarmed.

Time passes. We’re walking between walls, through a maze, hands clasped together. Slabs of paving whirl underfoot, then we’re in a clearing where a dome of flaring green glass rises gracefully from the ground. There’s a door. Pete does something, and it opens. He turns, and I fall into his arms. He carries me inside, mewling pathetically and fumbling with the frogging on his coat, and closes the door behind us…

… AND I AWAKEN in the dark in my shabby hotel room, surrounded by a puddle of cold lube with my legs apart, shuddering close to the edge of orgasm in a pale, lonely shadow of Juliette’s encounter. Her precious orchid, who calls himself Pete. A lot of things are clear, including the danger I’m in.

Damn. I roll over and punch the bedding into submission.

People like Pete are rare. Our Creators had strange attitudes to sex — their hang-ups loom over us, like the shadows of bad dreams — and females seem to have been less inclined than males to buy servants such as I. Or perhaps it was less socially acceptable. Or maybe the servants simply didn’t last as well. Make of it what you will, there are fewer than a hundred of my lineage left, and perhaps only a dozen lineages of our kind; our male equivalents are rarer still, either enslaved and worked to destruction, or sequestered in the seraglios of those aristos rich enough to own them. At a guess, “Pete” accepted an offer like the one Granita made me aboard the Pygmalion. How inconvenient.

We’re conditioned to submit to our Creators, when we recognize them; but when we meet our One True Love, our designated owner, we’re supposed to yield to them utterly. “Pete,” whoever he was, played power chords on Juliette’s triggers. She knew, in the abstract, that the atmosphere was 90 percent carbon dioxide at forty degrees Celsius, as I did when I met Jeeves for the first time on Mercury, but she also knew, in her nipples and clitoris and trembling knees, that Pete was the real thing. Because he smelled right. There’s more to being a convincing source of sexual superstimuli than just a pretty face, and our Creators made sure that those of us intended as their playthings could also turn them on.

Juliette began to imprint on Pete. My sister, in the throes of helpless love? We have a special term for that: “spoiled goods.” The only ray of hope shining from behind the dark cloud is that “Pete” began reacting the same way to her. Penetrating her aristo disguise, he responded to her as if she was a Creator lady and his true mistress, with whom he must fall in love, not simply his owner. They’re in a feedback loop, and by the time they snap out of it, they won’t be the same people anymore.

I bring my knees up to my chest and slide a hand between my thighs, shuddering as I remember their first convulsive rut, the mutual desperation and tender ocean of need. I’m aghast at the strength of it, and desolated. Is this true love? If so, it seems to involve as much loss of self-control as being mindraped by a slaver’s control chip. The worst thing about it was how good it felt. If it happened to me, I know for sure that I wouldn’t care about the vacation of my free will.

I masturbate myself to an unsatisfying climax, then cower for a while in a corner of the bed. Finally, afraid to risk the demons of sleep, I go back to plotting trajectories and flight budgets to Callisto.

It’s obvious why Jeeves wanted me, now. Once the Block Two reflexes take hold, I’ll be just like Juliette in every way but one: unlike her, I’m unspoiled.

I SPEND A frustrating couple of hours trying to juggle flight times, departure schedules, and ticket prices, before I remember the letters I collected before my old identity was liquidated. I lean back on the bed, looking out the window at the landscape — dimly lit by the scudding arc-lamp of Phobos — and open the first message.

It’s from one of the Jeeveses. I’m not sure which one, or even whether it’s a Jeeves that Juliette has met and I haven’t. (There’s self-effacing, and then there’s this cult of interchangeability that JeevesCo seems to impose upon its partners: when I stop to think about it, it’s quite disturbing — as if Rhea had decided to set up a corporation and hire us all on, on condition we gave up our individuality and pretended to be her in public.)

It’s an audio-only message, of course. Why am I unsurprised at such a traditional mannerism?

“Greetings, Freya. By now, you are probably aware that an adverse situation is developing. To summarize: Over the past few years, we have become aware that a consortium of black laboratories, the so-called Sleepless Cartel, are attempting to construct a suite of green and pink goo nanoreplicators capable of supporting a fully functional Creator. This is a huge undertaking, and labs all over the solar system have been feeding into it. Various consortia of aristos, most notably the collective known as the Black Talon, are extremely interested. The article you couriered from Mercury to Mars was a working example of an avian organism — proof of that particular lab’s bona fides — with, furthermore, Creator DNA sequences expressed in it. Whether they can fabricate a living Homo sapiens from scratch is questionable, but we fear the worst.