In the far future, a girl wakes up in a simulated reality that resembles Kubrick. She had led the crew of her spaceship, Field Circus, to a strange planet three light-years away from Earth before they had been trapped. They had all decided to upload their consciousnesses to a quantum entanglement interface that would connect them to the undiscovered sentient beings in the unexplored alien civilization nearby. The girl wakes up and is informed by the alien that she has been dead for magnitudes longer than she has been alive, and that her help is needed to tame a monster that is terrorizing the civilization. She agrees, but she asks for reality altercation privileges and the freedom of her crew. The alien tells her that is will be difficult to accomplish, because most of her crew has been lost. There is only one member of her crew still alive, but they are trapped in a dream. She feels like she is missing something else, but she insists that she be put into her crewmate's dream. The alien being acquiesces. The girl wakes up to a "classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature" where there are seductive, unclothed women everywhere. She encounters her crewmate, who mistakes her for one of the seductresses. She stomps on his foot and backhands him, convincing him that she is real, and not a zombie-like temptress. He tells her that this dream reality has been the opposite of Paradise, and he agrees to help her tame the monster. The alien being tells the both of them that the monster asked for them, and flees for safety. The girl and her crewmate sit and wait for the monster to arrive. When the monster comes, it comments that the aliens had hacked into their brains. The girl recognizes the monster as her beloved cybernetic cat, and her memories are restored. Now that she and her crewmate have broken free of their illusions, they plot to get back home. They are reunited with more of their crew, and they come up with a plan to repurpose the girl's crewmate's dream reality as a product to sell to the aliens. They convince the aliens to build a bridge to what they believe is a human civilization, but what is really just the crewmate's dreamscape. The crew happily flees the alien civilization using the bridge.