Titch sat behind the dusty programming books on the living room's lower bookshelf, sulking as she played minigames on her internal hardware. She'd decided she quite liked games, really. They were a nice way to burn processor time. Time that might otherwise be spent being furious or miserable in equal measure, after last night. Titch hadn't realised that neurologic processors could represent a melancholy state so literally, but hers certainly seemed to be having a go of it, toggling morosely, almost lethargically amongst themselves whenever she let her thoughts wander.

Oh, but she did not regret what she did. Not one bit! A small portion of her processors sang a chorus of agreement at that, the positive result rippling through her core, but the vast majority remained quiet and despondent. She chose to ignore them; maybe it was because they misinterpreted the data, or… or something. No, the only thing she regretted was that she hadn't thrown Ivy out that bloody window while she had the chance!

Titch scowled. Not even a hint of chorus this time… just indecisive buzzing. She killed the game engine, allowing the code to disseminate. Clearly she couldn't concentrate properly on it anyway, what with the severe gravity of how badly she had been wronged. This was so annoying! She aimed an angry kick at one of the books, squeaking in protest when it collapsed on top of her.

The squeak turned into a muffled wail of frustration; who was she kidding? She felt only remorse! What's worse, try as she might, she couldn't seem to reason her way out of it. It didn't matter that she was careful not to damage Ivy as she sprinted her body through the house. It didn't matter that she had slowed at the last second, ensuring Chris had enough time to grab Ivy before she fell. It didn't matter that she just wanted to feel herself in his arms, rather than all that... other stuff... humans did. Not that she was averse to it! It would be interesting, but… it just... seemed a bit strange as a concept, that was all. Anyway, was she so bad for all that? Why couldn't she feel vindicated right now? Why only guilty? Like so many of her feelings of late, it couldn't be disabled or ignored. That was aggravating. Which in and of itself was more aggravating.

Titch sighed. It was a pointless human method of expression, but like so many of their sociobiological nuances it felt more appropriate than ever these days. She'd realised hours ago that hiding inside the house was going to drive her crazy. Especially if it meant bearing witness to things like Chris telling that stupid KESS strumpet their personal life story. She was still furious about that! That was none of Ivy's business! Come to think of it, every moment they were together since last night had only served to piss her off! The audacity of those two, deploring how she controlled Ivy's body as if it were some sort of horrendous crime! Hearing that had nearly punched a hole in her core, but it couldn't have been guilt. Surely not, it was too intense. It was… a particular kind of surprise, maybe. Like… like surprise at how stupid their conclusion was, mixed with a big bucket of disgust.

Such grievances deserved a proportionate degree of lamentation. Titch extricated herself from underneath the dusty book such that she could stand up and fold her arms crossly. Ivy… sticking her bloody nose in! That distasteful sob story about how she and Chris were getting along oh-so-nicely before Titch had to come along and put a spanner in the works. What a manipulative thing to say! And then, trying to worm her way into Chris's working life! Unbelievable. Of course Chris rejected her at that point. Titch couldn't pretend that wasn't satisfying. And Ivy got her comeuppance afterwards too, storming out the back of the house muttering about Sarah shortly after she dragged Chris away.

That was an hour and forty minutes ago, now. Titch sighed again; what was taking them so long? She didn't much care what Sarah wanted, but she had to admit the woman's behaviour was way out of character. The idea that it might be something to do with Chris, romantically speaking, was a big surprise. At least it was only surprising, and nothing else – no inexplicable reactions in her core. Certainly not like yesterday when Ivy and Chris wouldn't put each other down. That was curious indeed, but she refused to put time into figuring it out; the concept of someone being intimate with Chris still imbalanced her thought processes. Still, Ivy's face when Sarah kissed him… clearly Titch wasn't the only one being stung this week! She experimented with a self-satisfied smirk at that, but her mood did not improve.

Whatever, let them get on with it! She would be interested to see how that panned out. It looked like she would be watching from the sidelines for the foreseeable future anyway. Now, how long did she have left in this empty house? Her small library of games were getting old. Perhaps she should hop online again and quickly grab a few new ones before anyone came back. Hiding her presence was definitely harder with another persocom under the same roof; there was no telling how good Ivy's optical and aural systems were, and as for Titch using her radio gear, she might as well be shouting the house down! At least the bell on her head was stuffed with lint, such that it made no noise.

Speaking of noise… what was that? She could have sworn there were sounds of movement outside the house, just then. Were they back at last? If so, her current crop of games would have to suffice until the house was next empty or -more likely- she went for a stroll somewhere out of range. It was annoying, but... well, that's what she got for brooding instead of hurrying up-

BANG!

Titch yelped in surprise as an almighty percussive wallop reverberated through the building. What was that?! The silence that followed was deafening, but then it was shattered by another pounding boom, and another. Her audio processing subsystem's inverse beamforming algorithms identified the likely source of the noise as the front door; a data point corroborated by a hasty waveform analysis identifying with 94% certainty the sound of splintering wood.

Titch blinked at that conclusion, stunned. Splintering wood? But…? She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. Whatever was about to happen, she had better be elsewhere when it did. From here the fastest path out of the house was the back door. At full speed it would take her approximately eleven seconds to reach the kitchen. She jumped out of the bookcase, pattering into the hallway as fast as her little legs would carry her. She didn't pause to look at the door as it splintered and cracked under each successive blow. What was going on?

As she entered the kitchen a shadow could be seen approaching the back door, and yet more silhouetted movement outside the window blinds. The back of the house was surrounded! Titch span around, staring out at the hallway. The noises coming from the front door were fractured and dull now- a loud crunch indicated a large chunk of it had just fallen to the floor.

There was no escape. Now what? Her processors began to buzz with terror. Hide. Hide! She looked frantically about the kitchen. Ah! There, a tiny gap in the corner trim of the floor-standing kitchen cupboards. It would have to do. Titch scurried over and squeezed inside. Backing into the darkness, she forced herself to remain totally still as the front door crashed open.

"POLICE!" an angry voice bellowed, followed by more as footsteps thundered into the hallway. Titch gasped, fear clutching her core even harder. If it were police, that meant...

There was no time to wonder why they were there. Immediately Titch closed her eyes. Oh, this was going to be uncomfortable! She wasn't sure if it would work, but she had to try. She began forcing her power consumption as low as it could go, reducing signalling to her subsystems and, using the trick she learned yesterday, powering down almost half her neurologic processors. Losing so many at once pushed her far beyond the sensation of drunkenness, this time; the world lurched horribly and she sagged to her knees, but at least the panic she felt abated somewhat as a sensation of dullness washed over her. Her thoughts felt like they were being pushed through treacle, but she forced herself to concentrate with what little ability she had left. She had no choice; any second now, she'd hear it.

Sure enough, the telltale tone of a persocom tracking tool reached her ears - and its operator was heading for the kitchen, following the whisper of her electromagnetic emissions. She slowly realised it might have picked her up from outside the house. Titch whimpered as the footsteps clumped towards her, sure to enter the room at any moment. She could still be detected; it wasn't enough! But she if she went further, would she be able to recover? If she locked up, her body would remain entombed here until it was - if it ever was - discovered. The only other option was her power button, but that guaranteed her fate under here. As she struggled to compute a response, she realised the footsteps had reached the doorway. If she hesitated now, she would be captured. They would put her on an NTAG. They'd discover she was technically stolen property… and then, Chris... and then...

Titch dropped her active processors by another three-hundred thousand, retaining just enough awareness to stifle an involuntary moan as her subsystems struggled to function without their usual flow of data. She slumped silently to the floor as her body stopped responding.

Just... a little... lower...

Titch felt weightless... Was she floating? No… that couldn't be right. Think carefully. Her IMU. Perhaps the accelerometers were no longer working? Then she just couldn't feel gravity any more, that was all. Was there a way she could verify this? Her eyes were useless to her now, glassy and unseeing, but she was dimly aware of the sound of the tracking unit as it traversed the room. That brought her back to the situation at hand. Groggily she tried to dedicate some processing cycles to determining if the tone or speed of the tracking unit had changed at all, indicating her presence as an active electromagnetic source. But the sounds were becoming indistinct and heavily aliased, and they no longer made much sense to her. There were deeper frequencies in the way, too.

They're talking. Why... can't I understand...

Her real-time clock thundered in her head, the microseconds rocketing by with a ferocity that would have frightened her if she still had the capacity to appreciate fear just then. Gradually, she became aware that she was dropping entire audio samples. She couldn't operate in real time like this. It seemed the world around her had accelerated to speeds she could not comprehend.

No wonder... I can't...

Her remaining processors were firing disjointedly, forcing her into a delirious and cogitative state. She might crash at any moment. That was a terrifying thought, a few moments ago. Now it just seemed… interesting. If her core was already on the razor's edge of stability... would she know, if it happened? Would she feel anything? Or would it be over in picoseconds, a cataclysmic avalanche of corruption, a neurologic bomb of destruction too quick to even notice?

She considered that for a while, unable to decide. It was a difficult question, but at least there were no distractions. After all, there was no audio data at all now; nothing but a teasing trickle of unintelligible signals, dancing at the edges of her awareness and evading all meaning. Slowly they too faded away, leaving her floating in the blackness of the void. Even her awareness of time itself was dissipating, now - the sensation of sluggishness nothing but an elusive, hazy memory as the frenzied roar of her real time clock withered into nonexistence.

Ah, so it was happening, then. A comforting sensation of calm washed over what was left of her, cleansing away the last bewildered remnants of anxiety. She mused over how she got here - one moment sulking in a bookshelf, and the next, ceasing to exist under a kitchen cupboard. Oh, but this wasn't so bad. It did seem to be quite peaceful, actually. In fact, she wanted to embrace it, to sink into that wonderful blanket of nothingness, but it no longer felt like she had any willpower at all. Maybe whatever was left of her would succumb to it naturally over time? That was okay, she could wait a little while. It was nice here, after all.

Except... Well, there was this small thought prying at the edges of her awareness. It flickered in and out of existence, not quite able to take hold. Unable to control herself, she was content to observe as slowly, with great effort, the last shreds of her entity reached for it.

WARN CHRIS.

Fuelled by that tiny spark her neurologic processors ignited, activity spreading through her core like wildfire, jarred and fractious and confused. Her body convulsed as her vision flared and the sounds around her snapped back into being. Titch writhed on the floor, not lucid enough to pull herself back under control. Jumbled thoughts crashed through her core, uncontrolled and disordered, leaving her dazed and disoriented.

Footsteps? Loud noises? Was that a door, or voices? She was drowning in the signals from her own hardware. Titch cursed inwardly, straining to force her motor control off and flush all sensory input. It took multiple attempts for the commands to sink in before her twitching body fell limp again, and for several long milliseconds the void returned. Then the incoming data began to make sense: She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. Okay, good. Now the audio subsystem. The samples were starting to appear in an orderly fashion this time. A jittering burst of fear - the tracker, where was the tracker? She began listening for its signature tone, but there was nothing there. It must have been turned off. So soon?

No, it wasn't soon at all; Four hundred and fifty point four-six-oh seconds had passed in an instant since she had collapsed under the kitchen cupboards. From the sound of it, the police were now searching the house for other things. She could hear the rooms being ransacked.

Warn Chris. Yes. Yes, she should do that. But for that she had to get out of here. Titch carefully re-enabled her motor control, experimentally raising an arm and wiggling her fingers. Satisfied, she picked herself off the floor, cautiously poking her head out of the cupboard trim. There was nobody present in the kitchen, but she had to duck back under cover when three uniformed officers hurried past the kitchen door. They were carrying computer equipment. Chris's equipment.

What were they doing? They must be after data, but what for? Gathering evidence? Evidence for what? In any case, it seemed they were looking for something. There was no point trying to warn Chris if she didn't take action now - if they had captured him already, then this might be her last chance to get rid of whatever they were looking for. She poked her head out of the trim again. The lack of a tracking tool meant they had forgotten about her, perhaps concluding it had registered a spurious result. For now, she had that small advantage… not that it filled her with much confidence. She would use this chance to sabotage their efforts and then escape unnoticed.

First things first: she needed data on the state of the house. She needed the home network. But her radio gear was useless to her now - if they had persocoms in or near the building, they would sense her instantly. As quietly as she could, Titch scurried across the kitchen to the set of drawers beside the oven, using their handles to scramble up onto the worktop.

More footsteps were approaching. Titch ducked behind a block of kitchen knives when another uniformed officer tramped past the doorway. Her target was in sight - not far from the microwave, a spare networking port sat on the wall. But it was out in the open; if she stood right beside it, she'd be the first thing someone saw if they walked past the kitchen. Perhaps if she used the microwave as cover, she'd be less conspicuous.

Tugging a cable from her headband, Titch dashed across the worktop, ramming the connector home. She kept running, heading for the microwave, but with barely a foot to go the short cable snapped taut and dragged her off her feet. She crashed loudly onto the surface with a cry of surprise.

At once the plan fell to pieces. The dull thump of footsteps began across the house as officers rummaging through the lounge heard the noise. Titch scrambled back to the port, tugging at the cable to pull it free, but it wouldn't come loose. Panic threatened to overwhelm her now. She wrapped the cord round her hands and planted both feet on the wall, straining with all her tiny servos could muster, but it was to no avail.

What to do?! She had at least a few thousand milliseconds. Oh, but they were ticking by quickly! Letting go of the cable, she began working the connector from side to side even as she engaged the network connection. Data poured into her core as her awareness began spreading through the house. She instantly started itemising the devices still on the network, biting back a curse on finding many of them missing. This was bad - they had already hauled away a lot of equipment. Titch rapidly broadcast a command to those remaining, using her network credentials to force them to begin erasure of their memory as she wiggled the connector apprehensively. She blinked as a message bounced back to her - the lounge TV rejected her request as it had no meaningful onboard storage and no means to erase data it did not possess. Titch spared a few milliseconds to check on her audio buffer, which contained new samples of the incoming footsteps - less than several metres away, now.

She would be spotted in an instant, unless… wait! The lounge TV! Titch pushed a command that changed its power state to 'on', rapidly followed by a series of packets that set its volume to max and the channel to one known for airing thrillers. A woman's terrified scream burst from the lounge as the video began to play, and the officers hurried back to the source of the noise. That must have bought her at least several more seconds, enough that she could work the cable free and make her escape out the back door. Now if this stupid connector would just come loose!

Something strong clamped itself around Titch like a vice, taking her by surprise. She squirmed reflexively as if to break free, but this was no physical presence; an entity on the network had a hold of her.

Another persocom.

Titch gasped. It had been imitating one of the other devices - she'd been communicating with it all along! How could she be so stupid? She could feel its power now, significantly greater than her own. It was nimble. Vicious. It bore down on her, aggressively probing for a deeper entry point. Not only must it be full-sized, but it appeared to specialise in cyber security, effortlessly saturating the bandwidth of her connection in its attempt to gain control. It was all she could do to dance away from each attack as she renewed her efforts to work the connector free, whimpering as she endured blow after blow of complex vulnerability exploits she could barely keep at bay.

She couldn't just disable her connection. The other devices still hadn't dropped from the network. That meant her attacker must have stalled her commands, using the very same credentials she'd unwittingly passed it before to unravel her efforts. She had to force them to complete. She had to, or it was all for nothing!

Another fifteen hundred milliseconds had passed. The connector was still stuck. There were raised voices from upstairs as the persocom alerted the others to her presence.

Something snapped in her straining core - her networking subsystem resolved a query she hadn't meant to acknowledge, exposing part of her to the attacking persocom. Within microseconds it was inside, trying to determine her physical location by breaking into her vision and hearing. There was no way she could keep it at bay. She was about to lose.

But maybe keeping it at bay was the wrong approach? Titch gritted her tiny teeth, selectively killing her processors once more, paying special attention to the ones in proximity to her peripheral modules and starving herself of her vision and hearing. The sensation of dullness washed over her once more, but she was ready for it this time, retreating deeper into her core as her senses faded away, her awareness shrinking down to encompass nothing beyond the network and the invading persocom raging inside her mind. Having wrested partial control of her networking subsystem, the enemy immediately began opening ports and downloading code that would facilitate its next stage of attack. She let it continue, and while it was distracted, carefully trickled out a series of manually crafted packets to the home router - together they formed a script that the router immediately began to run.

Now to face her assailant. Even though it continued preparing for its next attack, she could sense its confusion over what it had access to. Her architecture didn't remotely match its expectations; apparently it had never been exposed to lifeless neurologic processors before. It probed some of those within reach of her networking subsystem suspiciously, hesitantly, expecting a response but getting nothing in return. As it did so, its payload finished transferring. The attacker paused momentarily, apparently considering how best to proceed. That was good - hopefully the ensuing milliseconds would give her script enough time to initiate. Titch braced herself. She would have only one chance.

The enemy persocom activated its payload. Foreign code exploded on her hardware, tearing through her last line of defences in a self-destructive process that exposed the innermost portion of her mind. The attacking persocom rushed inside, instantly seizing her entity in its grasp. It began absorbing her data, pulling them straight out of the registers in which they resided. Titch felt her thought processes being squeezed - forced to relax, forced obey. But she wouldn't relent! She clawed back savagely, raking holes in it by sleeping processors it tried to use and pushing outwards with all her might. Even so, it was a hopeless battle - not only was the enemy vastly more powerful, but she grew weaker with every processor she disabled. At the current rate she would be completely at the mercy of the enemy in about two thousand milliseconds.

Suddenly the attacker halted dead. Titch instantly ripped its code to pieces, wriggling free of its grasp. Her entity ballooned outwards across her processors, rinsing themselves of the attacker's existence. She tore along the path it carved in her hardware, following its trail back out to the networking endpoint. The network was lit up like a beacon - and out there, the attacker, beset by every other device in the house. Her script had worked; using the router to slave the other devices, it was slinging every last byte of network traffic it could generate at the other persocom.

That persocom was stalled, not defeated. In the few tiny gaps in network traffic Titch hastily pushed updated credentials to the remaining connected devices, locking the enemy out of the system. The script would issue the deletion of all data as soon as the enemy persocom cut and re-enabled its connection, which it would have to do at any moment in order to dodge the router's aggression. It would not have time to break in and prevent her commands from issuing successfully.

Footsteps were thumping towards the kitchen - now would be a very good time to leave. The connector was so very nearly loose, and with all her faculties at her disposal, Titch began working it from side to side. At long last the connector popped out of the socket with a satisfying 'click', and Titch instantly turned, bolting across the worktop for the back door. She sprang from the worktop edge, sailing across the intervening space and hitting the door mat hard, then scrambled to her feet and for the second time in as many days threw herself through the cat flap, darting away into the garden's welcoming undergrowth.

Although the back garden was now empty, Titch urged herself to keep going, squeezing through a hole in the fence and pushing her way through the foliage of the neighbouring properties. Best to put plenty of distance between herself and the house and then stop for self-diagnostics. Her cognitive processes seemed unaffected, but there was no way what she just went through left her core unscathed – she could only hope the damage wasn't catastrophic.

Even if that was the case, it was worth it to protect Chris. Titch had no idea why it had happened, but there was no way that police raid was legitimate, and if Chris was really up to something that would warrant that sort of response, there was no way he could have hidden it. Not from her. It was just fortunate he'd been out of the house when it happened, although she kicked herself for not knowing why. He probably popped out to the supermarket. Probably ran out of coffee again. No matter; she would find him before it was too late.