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Blinking through her tears, she looked at the machine, conscious of Breyguhn
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watching her. She tried not to sob.
`You idiot
!' she told it.
The android vibrated again, hands shaking.
`Oh, my love, my little love; why, silly old Skave didn't mean it. Here;
another kiss . . .'
`Right,' Sharrow said, swinging into Breyguhn's room while she was combing her
long, brown hair before the mirror. Breyguhn watched as Sharrow plumped
herself down on the bed and unrolled a simple stick-on computer.
She flicked her hair back and woke the machine up with a couple of keystrokes.
`You wanted to see some hacking;
I'll show you some hacking.'
Breyguhn finished doing her hair and tied it up, then joined the older girl on
the bed. She looked at the screen. It was all figures and letters.
`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
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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 hardwired 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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]