The hardest part of Christmas, as far as Carol was concerned, wasn't the dinner. Nor was it getting the decorations up, or the cards written. This was mostly because, like any sane technopath, she cheated and used machines to do all of that for her - on the off chance that they worked correctly, of course. Daniel still wouldn't let her forget the time that the AutoTree had decided it wanted to be a rocket ship and left a huge hole in the ceiling, way back in 2015.
No, the hardest part was trying to get Sine a present.
Cauren was easy. Cauren hadn't seen half of what modern human civilization had to offer, and thus would be happy with quite a lot of things. It was basically like shopping for a kid all over again. But Sine... Sine was the sort of person who'd already been mostly everywhere, had already had everything at least twice and was most certainly not wanting for anything. And Carol was pretty sure that a Netflix subscription wasn't going to cut it.
No, this present had to be special. Because when one went gift-hunting for Sine, one had to go to some very great lengths.
And so it was that, one night, Carol borrowed the Sifter and began her search.
