“Very exciting, I’m sure. What exactly are you trying to do, Shar?”

Sharrow used her right hand to click across the worn-looking surface of the keyboard. Her left hand still hurt but she used it for the occasional shift stroke.

“Hacking into Skave’s homeboard. I’m going to give the incompetent old wreck a nightmare.”

“Really?” Breyguhn said, rolling over on the bed, her nightgown wrapping itself around her. The screen was still boring.

“Yes,” Sharrow said. “Skave is so ancient they programmed something like sleep into it so it can assimilate what happened during the day and amend its own programs. It’s so old and hidebound it doesn’t really need to do it any more, but it’s become a habit. I’m going to shift its snoozing arse into a Nightmare game.” Her fingers performed a ballet across the board.

“What?” Breyguhn said, looking interested as she sidled closer across the bedclothes. “One of those things people dream into, to see how long they can last?”

“That’s the idea,” Sharrow said, watching a complexly folded holo of a deepframe data base’s architecture spring up like a polychromatic mountain range from the stick-on’s screen. She touched it, sliding her fingers into the image, shifting parts of that landscape and tutting to herself as her still sore left hand manipulated the wrong bits and had to correct. Finally she was satisfied and Entered the holo-glyph code.

The folded shape disappeared to be replaced immediately by an infinite corridor that disappeared into the screen. She smiled and reached in with one hand while her other thumb kept Exponential Shift depressed.

“We’re going to give old Skave a night to remember,” she said, selecting a section in the forward-scrolling corridor and stopping there. “Only for him it’ll last for a thousand nights, and he can’t wake up out of it.”

“A thousand nights?” Breyguhn said, trying to see further into the image.

Sharrow rolled her eyes. “That’s how much faster than us they think, you doughball,” she said. She keyed Auto Load; she already had the estate’s smart but non-sentient system well mapped and primed. Glyphs surged and sank, figure-screens race-scrolled and flickered.

“There,” she said after the screen went still.

“Is that it?” Breyguhn said, looking disappointed.

Sharrow looked at her. “Girlie, what I just did was interrupt the system of a ‘droid that’s been around for seven thousand years.” She snapped the stick-on shut. “Watch for it at breakfast tomorrow morning, and don’t order anything hot unless you enjoy eating off your lap.”

She put her hand into Breyguhn’s hair and ruffled it vigorously, shaking the other girl’s head.

Breyguhn put her hand up and forced Sharrow’s away.

Their father was distraught. “Skave!” he said. “Skave!” he still had his napkin tucked in his shirt as he paced round the breakfast room, kneading his hands. “After all these years! I can’t forgive myself. I should have kept him in better repair. It’s all my fault!”

He went to the window again. Outside, two bulkily powerful androids and a man in tech overalls were just closing the doors of the secure van that would take the inert body of Skave away.

The android had been discovered still locked into its download collar in the house’s Mechanicals cellar, its eyes wide and staring, its head vibrating from side to side. A diagnostic scan revealed that its personality had effectively been wiped out, along with much of its intrinsicised programming and even some of its supposedly hard-wired functions-suite.

The android/Al management and leasing company that had been called in to help had advised that only some bizarre and-especially after all these millennia-unlikely nano-physical fault could have caused the fugue, or (rather more likely in their experience) somebody had hacked into the android’s home data base and deliberately fried its geriatric brains.

Sharrow sat looking upset but feeling determinedly smug while her father wrung his hands and paced up and down the room, refusing to be comforted by his relations. She felt the buddings of guilt when she thought about what had happened to Skave, but squashed them with the sheer totality of her success in having proved her hacking skills to Breyguhn-that ought to put the fear of Fate into her-and with the harshly comforting idea that Skave had been old and becoming useless, and hence long overdue for retirement, or whatever happened to outmoded robots.

She put her hands beneath the table and squeezed her left hand in her right, to take her mind off what she had done, and to remind herself of part of the reason why she had thought of it in the first place. She watched her father knead his hands as he paced, and felt the stabs of pain go up her own arms. She squeezed harder, keeping her face straight, until her eyes threatened to water, then she stopped.

Breyguhn seemed genuinely shocked. Sharrow watched glances of delicious complicity alternate with something like horror as they sat at the breakfast table with the rest of the family, listening to their father fret and mourn.

“Lost to us! Lost to us, after all these years! In the family for a millennia and lost to us in my stewardship! Our last asset! The shame!”

Sharrow collected herself, shook her head sadly and helped herself to icebread from the table cooler. Breyguhn sat looking at her, eyes wide.

Sharrow accessed the house system and saw the report the people who’d taken Skave away had sent to her father. They were sending the report by personal letter too. She had no way of intercepting that.

To her relief, it didn’t implicate her or anybody else in the household; the android management/leasing company reckoned somebody had hacked in from outside (they strongly advised a thorough up-grade of the estate’s systems, which they would be honoured to quote for at most reasonable rates). She was briefly proud of their judgement that whoever had done the job was quite possibly a professional, they had covered their tracks so well.

The report concluded that the android required a new brain, and as such had to be regarded as a total loss unless there was a major and extremely unlikely change in the law. As all owned androids were extremely valuable regardless of condition, they assumed a substantial claim on the android’s insurance would be the next step, and would retain the machine in their vaults if required, and cooperate with any insurance assessor.

Sharrow put her head in her hands when she read that part. She knew her father no longer had any insurance on Skave-why pay a premium on something that hadn’t gone wrong in seven thousand years, when the same money could win a million in the right bones game? Why, it would be a waste.

She switched off the stick-on and let it roll itself up.

“That stupid machine was part of our inheritance!” Breyguhn hissed. They were in the skidder rink, waiting between rides while the other adults and children gave up their small cars and walked over the rink’s floor of compacted snow to the side barriers, to be replaced by new drivers. Beyond the shallow bowl of the refrigerated rink the weather was hot and sunny, and every now and again a soft, warm gust of wind would bring a smell of flowers and greenery rolling across the chill of the rink’s own sharply wintery scent.

Breyguhn had taken great delight in charging Sharrow’s skidder several times during the last ride. Sharrow’s preferred method of skidder driving was to avoid all collisions, so as a technique for annoying her these constant crashes were more successful than most of the stratagems Breyguhn employed.

“Oh, so what?” Sharrow said, glancing round to make sure there was nobody to overhear her. “The old fool would only have sold Skave; we were never going to see any of the money it was worth.”

“We might have!” Breyguhn insisted, as the last few people found cars and the klaxon sounded, warning that the signal was about to be transmitted which would switch each skidder’s engine on again.