Asho had just started undressing Rudolfo when the Pitcher exploded.

Rudolfo wore the white silk shirt she had designed for him the week before. They lay on the divan on the verandah overlooking the tranquil gardens and woods of Wintherest. The stream in the nearby grotto throbbed an insistent tune. She had just teased the first strand of lacing out of the opening at the neck that would lead to the sight of the broad chest she knew so well. Her fingers were only a hairsbreadth away from the silken threat of lace as it pulled languidly out of the clinging eyelet. One strong black hair reached out as if caressing the thread as it passed then fell back to the warm flesh to which it was attached. She opened her fingers to let the lace drop and reach for the next one. The lace stayed suspended in midair for a moment as she held her breath then slowly fell toward the waiting silk. Then it froze.

"What now?" she snapped

Rudolfo and the entire scene winked out like an expired arcade Sim. It was thirteen oh two. The lights in the ship flashed red and some klaxon shattered what had been the tranquility of Wintherest. It was like a scene out of some third class space movie.

"What the hell's going on?" Asho yelled. No response - that's assuming the system could hear her over that damn klaxon. She guessed that the stupid dobee system couldn't understand her question or didn't know she was talking to it.

"Hey pencil head. What is your problem? Shut off that noise."

The alarm stopped but the lights continued to flash red. The system's uninflected voice said, "The collision detection sub-system has registered a threat."

Great. Nothing like catastrophe out of nowhere.

"Stop with the red lights. How long do we have until this collision, and what is it, and where the hell did it come from?"

The lights went back to their normal boring colors: the blues and grays and whites so metallic and todee with the faint tang of metal and dobee machines that she had come to loath. The system spoke again. "The fourth request does not make sense."

Slow down Asho. This is a workstation not some word wise Sim processor. The fourth request was where the hell this thing came from. One step at a time. "Ignore fourth request."

"Estimated time to collision two years. Estimated collision objects are portions of ADS assembly."

ADS ? That's the official jargon for the Pitcher. Aqueous Delivery System. But two years? What's the big deal?. Why the red lights and that draking alarm? Of course, asking a computer 'Why' is something you do when you've got a lot of time. But portions of the Pitcher hitting the ship in a couple of years? She needed the console to figure this out. She was too far away from tech support to take chances on some stupid system malfunction.

Surrounded by the console with its complex panoramic of flashing displays made her feed better and worse. She had never tried to master the whole thing just enough to pass the qualification test, so it was still intimidating. But she had been building and playing Sims for eleven years and always liked getting close to the underlying structure.

After twenty minutes she understood a little bit. According to its help, the Collision system activated Alarms when it detected undefined (meaning unexpected) objects big enough or fast enough to affect the ship. It tracked some big objects in a long lazy orbit projected to loop away then gradually come back toward the volume where the ship was parked near the Ice and the Pitcher.

Asho decided to look at the Pitcher. Ten seconds later she was on the screen jammering. "Look, something went really wrong and the Pitcher seems to have exploded or flung itself into pieces. The central assembly is still there but the arms and the pitching hands have flown off God knows where. Some of the parts are tumbling slowly, and according to this blinking dobee system you have here, they're going to hit the ship in a couple of years. I don't know what caused it. I assume you're still getting the status logs so if one of you isn't napping you can tell me what the hell is going and what someone can do about it. I'll wait for your call in a mere eight hours seventeen minutes." She hit Pause and tried to think for a second. A minute to think didn't make much difference to eight and a quarter hours. Make a list. She started again.

"Look, one, confirm receipt of this transmission so I know I am not out of touch." Right like eight hours was such midas response time. "two, tell me what I should do? " And three get me out of here. She decided to keep that to herself. There was no other three. "Okay Asho Deska, your Faithful Teenage Girl Outrider." She hit Send.

Nothing more till almost twenty two. Nothing except waiting for something else to fall apart. She stared out at the black utter cold. The sun was up if you counted a bright dot the size of the nail on her pinky. Asho shivered.

Nothing ? Maybe there was a log somewhere of whatever had happened to the Pitcher.

There was, but it took her almost an hour to figure out how to read it. It turned out that there were millions of nano sensors and repair units and a whole system to coordinate them and their little gnats eye views of the Pitcher.

The Pitcher had been about to fling the hourly load, the same as it'd been doing for the last ten months when the wrist, the point of heaviest stress, failed. The load and the whole hand sheared and then broke off, flying into space and the twisting set up waves in the arm that pulled it apart. The arm was designed for tension along the line of pull and sideways was just like balsa wood. Twelve hundred meters of balsa wood. A few seconds later the other arm popped out, apparently in reaction to the change in weight, to keep the central core positioned. This arm also disintegrated as it moved off. She watched the replay in slow motion over and over again. The only thing she couldn't understand was that the stress display at the point of break was only at eighty percent. She decided to send another message highlighting what she had seen although the data was in the telemetry.

She stared at the time to response counter: six hours fifteen minutes. Here she was, out here somewhere beyond Pluto, a mere two and a half billion miles away from anything interesting, watching a two mile machine throw snowballs at some future designated catcher. That is, until the machine decided to fling itself to pieces.

The Pitcher was running here faithfully when her tour started six months ago, a faithful copy of Aqueous Delivery Systems operational in the Belt for a decade, the first in the Oort Cloud, that wispy collection of large and small iceballs, rocks and dust that stretched almost a two light years beyond Pluto. The Pitcher, a vast two armed spinning assembly of carbon steel composite, took ice melt from the twenty mile snowball they called the Ice and flung the melts toward the distant City belts. The ice was unusually rich in carbon, nitrogen and other organics enough so that mining was justified even if the Oort Cloud was a heck of a commute. The megasnowball thrown today would spiral in sunward and in ten or twenty years would be retrieved by an orbital City not yet built. The cities would drink it, grow plants and swim in it. They would make plastics and poly-kitchen-floor-ites from it. Or whatever.

It wasn't like this was a high priority project but it gave her good points toward dobee-hood. If that was what she wanted. Meanwhile, she was trapped here, three months away from anything touchable and four hours away from the world's net, trapped watching what everyone else reacted in, trapped in history instead of life. And now something was broken. Something. The draking reason she was here had pulled itself apart. And she was trapped out in the black cold.

Asho had grown up in the Louisiana swamps. She had always thought of herself as a loner since the nearest kid her age was usually about a swamp boat hour away. Her father, Dan, was a biologist who devoted his life to watching the wetland ecosystems and building computer models describing them. Her mother, Drina, was a writer working on the fourth book of a planned twelve volume saga of the DuBois, a mostly mythical Louisiana Civil War family. So Asho had one parent who was a dobee and one an artee. Her parents lived in two different cultures and Asho was useless in either.

She liked working with her father's computer models. In fact the first Sim she built when she was only seven, was Swamp Thing X - The Untold Story. But she didn't want to be a biologist. Even after a swamp childhood, she had a limited tolerance for squishy things and that was all there was in biology. As for writing like her mom, Asho liked to read almost anything but building Sims more real than some crazy war where people wore hoop skirts, corsets, and pantaloons, whatever they might be.

Asho grew up playing with other kids in Nursery Sims.

Sims or simulations started when Dungeons and Dragons met Virtual Reality, and collided with Soap Opera Digest and video games. Like the early World Wide web let anyone build their home page on the Net, Virtual Reality protocols let them build their own world. Gun nuts built Sims of the OK Corral. Tolkien fans built the shire. You could rerun and live in your favorite drama. There was a Global Hospital Sim that has over a thousand instances active at anytime. Kids could play together with other kids under supervision no matter where on Earth they were. In 2048, everywhere on Earth was right there in the Sims. But Sims were low culture, games, like TV used to be, not Literature or Art. Not Real Programming.

After growing up alone in the wetlands, with the world next door, Asho was a teenage Outrider, a tad over four light hours away from that warm global net. She was like some lighthouse keeper with her ear plastered to the tube radio. Now she knew what lonely really meant.

Asho stared at the rotating remnants of the Pitcher until she started to trance out. Six hours ten minutes. Rudolfo ? No, she was way too tense. Sleep ? No, she was afraid of what her dreams might be. She decided to look into what the Net had on mechanical failure. The topic was bound to come up.

Anyhow, it would pass the time until the response to her message. When the response came in, the ground dobees would know what to do.

The ground dobees didn't know what to do. They didn't know what had caused the Pitcher to fail; they didn't know if she was in danger; and they didn't know if she could move the ship to leave. As the one of them, said

"If something is causing things to break under stress, well firing the ships motors produces a lot of stress."

Great. Maybe she would blow up. One thing was clear. They didn't know drake-all. They sent irrelevant content free lectures on safety and procedures on three different channels so that she could find out how little they knew three times as fast. They even let her watch the Failure Board meetings. It was worse than watching her father's fogy academic conferences. When someone said something outright stupid, she couldn't say a word because the stupidity would be eight hours dead by the time they heard her.

At least they were ruling out causes pretty quick. It wasn't an explosion, a meteorite strike, or acid because the nanos would have detected it. It wasn't anything organic: a fungus, lichen, bacterium, or moss because it was so cold out here that you went to Pluto to warm up. The problem was they just weren't sure what it was. Whatever it was made good old standard carbon filament steel composite 107, the main constituent of the Pitcher's wrist, act like stale pasta.

Asho was in a reading frenzy on mechanical failure and metallurgy, while auditing Failure Board meetings. Her waking hours filled with analyses of bridges falling, drilling rigs collapsing, space stations disintegrating and the fine structure of crystals, composites, fluxes and strands; the Failure Board voices a basso continuo underneath. Her dreams were of familiar objects freezing and cracking into a million pieces: the moss draped Live Oak tree over her home, the verandah at Wintherest, the ship around her, and one dark night, her parents as if dipped in liquid nitrogen.

Tens of thousands of pages and scores of reports later she saw the answer, that had been in front of her all along. Testing her theory meant examining what was left of the Pitcher. She knew what to use.

Old McNano Had A Farm or Ant Farm was a popular Remote. In a Remote, you controlled a probe in a real life location sensed and touched things. Ant Farm used two simple claws. Picking something up with them, felt like picking up the real thing, like remote controlled chop sticks

After a fiddling with it for a few days, she was able to get the Ant Farm program to talk to the sensor and repair nanos on the Pitcher. A few hours later she was tugging on parts of the Pitcher with the Ant Farm claws.

Watching the meeting, Asho felt like opening night at her first feature Sim. She was next on the Agenda and even though the meeting was four hours earlier, this was her first sight of it.

The Chair glanced up at the camera and then introduced her explaining that her message was being shown at her request as a formal submission to the Failure Analysis Group. Her image popped up on the large screen in front.

She had audited enough of her dad's meetings to be familiar with the form and she had modeled her appearance and dress after the slightly archo fashions of dobee women scientists: gray shirket, bunned hair and an earnest focused look. She had used an early Foster film as a model, where Foster was the astronomer that found the good aliens. Asho's image spoke with the delivery that a decade of Sim acting gives.

"I thank the Failure Analysis Group for allowing this submission. I have been auditing the Group's work with understandable interest. If you don't find a cause, I'm frozen out here.

"One of the groups frequently voiced concerns was absence of real time analysis to determine the current state of the Pitcher."

Several of the watchers looked at each other quizically. The image smiled and continued.

"Excuse me, the Aqueous Delivery System, or ADS and the materials which compose it," Four hour delay or not, she had timed that reaction.

The screen shifted to the rerun of the Pitcher coming apart and froze at the most dramatic movement.

"or rather the portions still remaining."

A series of images of parts of the Pitcher with tensile strength measurements flashed by as the voice-over said.

"We have managed to obtain critical measurements of the ADS and with some slight assistance can obtain more. In addition, we propose a cause of failure. Extreme cold has accelerated metal fatigue reducing the useful life of the Pitcher from the projected decades to slightly under the ten months it has been operational. There are reference descriptions of this rapid aging in early Trans-Siberian petroleum operations. Samples from the remaining portions show lower than normal tensile strength, lowered ductility or brittleness and fine structure cracks characteristic of much older structures. All tests were performed with the existing nano instrumentation using a modified software control protocol." She figured that phrase sounded more dobee than 'Old McNano Had a Farm.' And her dad always wrote his papers in first person plural even when it was just him and his models.

"We invite review of these test results, assistance in performing additional tests and consideration of our theory as to cause. Thank you for your attention."

There was silence in the chamber. Asho held her breath. No reaction. Finally, the senior metallurgical engineer stood up and faced the camera.

"Ms. Deska, I must say I'm amazed at your results.. We'll verify them but assuming they are accurate, your theory as to cause makes sense. I use the words amazed because the hardware and software you used were not designed for the job. We also didn't expect you to do metallurgical research." He shook his head. "I'm not saying this right. We didn't expect you to be able to do what you did. If you are right and the cold is the culprit, then we can restructure and rebuild the Pitcher." He looked off to the side thinking for a second and gave a big grin. "In fact, I think we could probably show you how to do it. How would you like to be the first Oort qualified construction engineer?"

Asho grinned. Maybe dobee-hood wasn't all bad. What about a Sim called 'Ant Farmers in the Oort.'?