Sal settled on the arm of the threadbare sofa beside Maddy. ‘Think her chip’s OK?’

Maddy nodded towards the bank of screens across the archway. Several of them were spooling streams of encoded data. ‘Computer-Bob’s running a diagnostic on her chipset right now. I don’t know. I hope so. It’s gonna take a while. The silicon wafer casing’s dented. A bullet must have hit it on the way through. I don’t know what that’s done to the drive inside. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

The three of them silently watched the spooling screens, a flickering stream of letters and numbers, data: countless terabytes of stored memories of dinosaurs and jungles, knights and castles.

All that made Becks… Becks.

‘We’ll re-grow her, though,’ said Liam. ‘Aye?’

Sal nodded. ‘Yeah, two support units are better than one.’ She looked down at Maddy. ‘Right?’

‘Sure we will. But…’

‘But what?’

‘There’s no certainty that we can use her AI. If there’s too much damage, if it’s an unreliable AI, she could be a hazard to us. We may need to work from default AI code.’

‘That won’t be our Becks, then,’ said Liam.

Both support units, Becks and Bob, had developed distinctly different artificial intelligences despite running the very same operating system. Maddy’s best guess was that it was something in the way the small organic brain interacted with the silicon, that it was the ‘meat’ component of their minds that ultimately defined them, gave them their individual personalities.

‘You’re right,’ she replied, ‘it wouldn’t be the same Becks.’

‘I really hope her computer’s all right,’ said Liam wistfully.

Sal looked at him. ‘She was a bit… I don’t know, a bit cold, though, sometimes, don’t you think?’

He shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I think she was beginning to learn how to feel things.’