As it continued, another thing alarmed the ship. The creature was now exploring without bothering to open its eyes at all, but it was not stumbling or tripping as it did so, as though it already knew the space.

The ship hesitated, then shifted a passage in the creature’s path. It was gratified to see Lassite collide with a wall, not gently. He stopped, tilting his head to one side, eyelids still shut, then continued on.

The ship shifted another wall, then another. But this time Lassite seemed to anticipate it, moved as though expecting each wall. The ship shifted the level of the passageway, and Lassite stumbled and caught himself. This time the misstep made him grunt, a brief hard sound. But after that, the ship could not catch him out. It tried abrupt turns and half walls, tall stair steps followed by shallow ones. No matter how irregular the pattern, it could not make him falter.

This was dangerous, the ship decided. And it experienced something very close to human irritation when its walls closed around Lassite in a small cubicle and he stopped, dead-still, with what might have been a smirk on his lipless mouth and sat down in silence.

The ship continued to watch the creature called Lassite as it sat in its cell. At some point, the ship would have to either release it or tell the others that it would not release it, and although it kept searching through its programming to find some rhetorical way to justify keeping it, several million scenarios had been tested toward this end and failed each time.

The only saving grace in all of this was that the ship could experience the emotion known as frustration, although it was reasonably sure this was a feeling that was not appealing. Still, the ship liked to experience gradations of emotion, and it was trying to figure out exactly how frustrating it was to have this little creature seem to outguess it at every turn.

“It is because I am on the Spiral of Destiny,” Lassite said to his cell wall, knowing that the ship would hear what he was saying. “I can take comfort in knowing the others died to bring me to this point, because you are part of that path as well. I have seen you in my dreams.”

The Thing was unsure what to make of this. Mysticism and magic were things far outside its purlieu and in the vast factory, out in the Dannefer system, where it had been birthed, such matters were definitely not the sort of curriculum given the nascent ships as they grew. It understood dreams, though.

“Dreams are neurons randomly firing in the brain during sleep,” it said to Lassite, speaking through a small fleshy grille located near his elbow. “You have not been asleep on board and you have never traveled on this ship before. Perhaps you have read of me? I am somewhat famous.”