I am very drunk but wide awake. Shandy falls asleep in my bed. At some point around four a.m., Roman brings me a cup of camomile tea while I sit on the sofa watching the room sway, then takes a handmade afghan from the back of O’s favourite chair and drapes it over my shoulders, reaching around me to tuck it in while I sip the tea. I’m surprised by the amount of muscle in his arm.

‘Nice bicep,’ I hear myself say, then drink tea to hide my embarrassment.

‘It’s my wanking arm.’

The tea comes back out through my nose.

‘That’s better,’ Roman says. ‘We’re going to get through this, OK? I made coffee. I’ll stay awake so you can sleep. I have work to do, and if I run out of that I can mainline the latest season of Physics Goats—’

‘Spoiler: Episode Seven has dark matter monsters.’

‘Good to know. I’ll be here and I’ll watch you. Nothing’s going to happen to you. In a matter of hours, we should know where that other pigeon has got to. Unless it lands on a cruise ship heading for Barbados, it’ll end up somewhere in France. Donato will cross-reference the location with what we know about O and Elstree.’

He thinks I’m afraid of being attacked. He has no idea that I’m really planning to hack Elstree and make him disappear for ever.

No wonder I sometimes feel unreal. I can be thinking things and no one else knows what they are. That doesn’t seem right, somehow. It’s not like that in dreams. In dreams, my guts and heart are right out there in the environmental content. In dreams, I’m an open wound.

I’m not even making sense to myself.

‘It was a robot, what built that dream,’ I tell Roman. ‘Martin doesn’t have the balls to stand up to me so he sent a robot to do his dirty work.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘It felt like being in a VR game, not a real dream. And the only person in the dream besides myself was a mechanical bird. It was nothing like the dream with Daphne or even the Creeper dreams, except that he used the Creeper to attack me at the beginning. I think it’s the way he disables the R.E.M. atonia. But the rest was different.’

Roman smiles. ‘So you are coming around to my view that the Creeper is a phenomenon, not a person.’

‘Maybe. In the dream I heard his voice. He said something about being able to keep me sleeping. Like he had some mechanical way of doing it.’

‘The idea of an AI dream agent is right in line with what we know about BigSky’s ambitions.’

‘Yeah, but how would Martin Elstree get hold of that kind of tech?’