"Okay, but I'm on level four, you want to start at the beginning - there's one of these on your computer if you want to start your own game -" Keziah reaches over and minimizes the textbook and pulls up the algebra game.

"It's fun, isn't it?"

"Yes it is!"

"There's got to be hundreds of games, I haven't tried them all."

"This one is fun," says Junia. "What other ones are fun? I will try them next."

"All the ones I've tried are fun except there's a puzzle game I don't like."

"What do you not like about it?"

"If you make a mistake it explodes. I mean on the screen, the computer doesn't explode."

"Yes," says Junia. "It would be very inconvenient if the computer exploded."

"Yes, I don't think anyone would design a game that way."

"Only very unpleasant people or people with strange senses of humour," says Junia, smiling a little.

"Who had more than a few computers."

Junia giggles.

"Because you have to test these sort of things, apparently, they don't work by magic - well, I guess Mom could make one by magic or Jane could make a perfect one on the first try because of how she works, but most people have to test them."

"That is interesting," says Junia, examining the game on her screen. "How are they made?"

"People 'write' them," says Keziah. "That's about all I know. I'm pretty sure they don't write them in Samarian though."

"Perhaps I would like to learn how," Junia muses. "Along with learning about spaceships."

"You are assigning yourself approximately a lifetime of work. Fortunately I'm much better at producing programming curriculum than spaceship curriculum," says Jane.

"Keziah's mother can make people immortal," Junia observes. "A lifetime is not a meaningful unit of measure anymore."

"It still means 'about seventy or eighty years'," says Jane. "Although what do I know, maybe you're a prodigy and you can get up to speed in complete ignorance of background concepts really fast." The screen of Junia's computer shifts. "Here's intro to programming. Cute little beginner's language from Peace. I'm dual-running operating systems on this terminal now so you'll be able to try it."

Junia pokes fascinatedly at it.

It's very, very beginnery - it tells her how to open a blank program file, shows her where to find all the special characters she will need to type, and then walks through writing and running a program that will print "Hello, world." before launching into how to make it do arithmetic.

Keziah goes back to playing computer games, giggling softly.