Lieserl

A.D. 3951

Lieserl was suspended inside the body of the Sun.

She spread her arms wide and lifted up her face. She was deep within the Sun’s convective zone, the broad mantle of turbulent material beneath the glowing photosphere; convective cells larger than the Earth, tangled with ropes of magnetic flux, filled the world around her. She could hear the roar of the great convective founts, smell the stale photons diffusing out towards space from the remote fusing core.

She felt as if she were inside some huge cavern. Looking up she could see how the photosphere formed a glowing roof over her world perhaps fifty thousand miles above her, and the boundary of the inner radiative zone was a shining, impenetrable floor another fifty thousand miles beneath.

Lieserl? Can you hear me? Are you all right?

Kevan Scholes. It sounded like her mother’s voice, she thought.

She thrust her arms down by her sides and swooped up, letting the floor and roof of the cavern-world wheel around her. She opened up her senses, so that she could feel the turbulence as a whisper against her skin, the glow of hard photons from the core as a gentle warmth against her face.

Lieserl? Lieserl?

She remembered how her mother had enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

Even at the moment she was born she knew something was wrong.

A face loomed over her: wide, smooth, smiling. The cheeks were damp, the glistening eyes huge. “Lieserl. Oh, Lieserl…”

Lieserl. My name, then.

She explored the face before her, studying the lines around the eyes, the humorous upturn of the mouth, the strong nose. It was an intelligent, lived-in face. This is a good human being, he thought. Good stock…

Good stock? What am I thinking of?

This was impossible. She felt terrified of her own explosive consciousness. She shouldn’t even be able to focus her eyes yet…

She tried to touch her mother’s face. Her own hand was still moist with amniotic fluidbut it was growing visibly, the bones extending and broadening, filling out the loose skin like a glove.

She opened her mouth. It was dry, her gums already sore with budding teeth.

She tried to speak.

Her mother’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, Lieserl. My impossible baby.”

Strong arms reached beneath her. She felt weak, helpless, consumed by growth. Her mother lifted her up, high in the air. Bony adult fingers dug into the aching flesh of her back; her head lolled backwards, the expanding muscles still too weak to support the burgeoning weight of her head. She could sense other adults surrounding her, the bed in which she’d been born, the outlines of a room.

She was held before a window, with her body tipped forward. Her head lolled; spittle laced across her chin.

An immense light flooded her eyes.

She cried out.

Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

The first few days were the worst. Her parentsimpossibly tall, looming figurestook her through brightly lit rooms, a garden always flooded with sunlight. She learned to sit up. The muscles in her back fanned out, pulsing as they grew. To distract her from the unending pain, clowns tumbled over the grass before her, chortling through their huge red lips, then popping out of existence in clouds of pixels.

She grew explosively, feeding all the time, a million impressions crowding into her soft sensorium.

There seemed to be no limit to the number of rooms in this place, this House. Slowly she began to understand that some of the rooms were Virtual chambersblank screens against which any number of images could be projected. But even so, the House must comprise hundreds of rooms. And shewith her parentswasn’t alone here, she slowly realized. There were other people, but at first they kept away, out of sight, apparent only by their actions: the meals they prepared, the toys they left her.

On the third day her parents took her on a trip by flitter. It was the first time she’d been away from the House, its grounds. She stared through the bulbous windows, pressing her nose to heated glass. The journey was an arc over a toy-like landscape; a breast of blue ocean curved away from the land, all around her. This was the island of Skiros, her mother told her, and the sea was called the Aegean. The House was the largest construct on the island; it was a jumble of white, cubeshaped buildings, linked by corridors and surrounded by gardengrass, trees. Further out there were bridges and roads looping through the air above the ground, houses like a child’s bricks sprinkled across glowing hillsides.

Everything was drenched in heavy, liquid sunlight.

The flitter snuggled at last against a grassy sward close to the shore of an ocean. Lieserl’s mother lifted her out and placed heron her stretching, unsteady legson the rough, sandy grass.

Hand in hand, the little family walked down a short slope to the beach.

The Sun burned through thinned air from an unbearably blue sky. Her vision seemed telescopic. She looked at distant groups of children and adults playingfar away, halfway to the horizonand it was as if she was among them herself. Her feet, still uncertain, pressed into gritty, moist sand. She could taste the brine salt on the air; it seemed to permeate her very skin.

She found mussels clinging to a ruined pier. She prised them away with a toy spade, and gazed, fascinated, at their slime-dripping feet.

She sat on the sand with her parents, feeling her light costume stretch over her still-growing limbs. They played a simple game, of counters moving over a floating Virtual board, pictures of ladders and hissing snakes. There was laughter, mock complaints by her father, elaborate pantomimes of cheating.

Her senses were electric. It was a wonderful day, full of light and joy, extraordinarily vivid sensations. Her parents loved hershe could see that in the way they moved with each other, came to her, played with her.

They must know she was different; but they didn’t seem to care.

She didn’t want to be differentto be wrong. She closed her mind against the thoughts, and concentrated on the snakes, the ladders, the sparkling counters.

Every morning she woke up in a bed that felt too small.

Lieserl liked the garden. She liked to watch the flowers straining their tiny, pretty faces towards the Sun, as the great light climbed patiently across the sky. The sunlight made the flowers grow, her father told her. Maybe she was like a flower, she thought, growing too quickly in all this sunlight.

On the fifth day she was taken to a wide, irregularly shaped, colorful classroom. This room was full of childrenother children!and toys, drawings, books. Sunlight flooded the room; perhaps there was some clear dome stretched over the open walls.

The children sat on the floor and played with paints and dolls, or talked earnestly to brilliantly-colored Virtual figuressmiling birds, tiny clowns. The children turned to watch as she came in with her mother, their faces round and bright, like dapples of sunlight through leaves. She’d never been so close to other children before. Were these children different, too?

One small girl scowled at her, and Lieserl quailed against her mother’s legs. But her mother’s familiar warm hands pressed into her back. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

As she stared at the unknown girl’s scowling face, Lieserl’s questions, her too-adult, too-sophisticated doubts, seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, all that mattered to herall that mattered in the worldwas that she should be accepted by these childrenthat they wouldn’t know she was different.

An adult approached her: a man, young, thin, his features bland with youth. He wore a jumpsuit colored a ludicrous orange; in the sunlight, the glow of it shone up over his chin. He smiled at her. “Lieserl, isn’t it? My name’s Michael. We’re glad you’re here.” In a louder, exaggerated voice, he said, “Aren’t we, people?”

He was answered by a rehearsed, chorused “Yes.”

“Now come and we’ll find something for you to do,” Michael said. He led her across the child-littered floor to a space beside a small boy. The boyred-haired, with startling blue eyeswas staring at a Virtual puppet which endlessly formed and reformed: the figure two, collapsing into two snowflakes, two swans, two dancing children; the figure three, followed by three bears, three fish swimming in the air, three cakes. The boy mouthed the numbers, following the tinny voice of the Virtual. “Two. One. Two and one is three.”

Michael introduced her to the boyTommyand she sat down with him. Tommy, she was relieved to find, was so fascinated by his Virtual that he scarcely seemed aware that Lieserl was presentlet alone different.

The number Virtual ran through its cycle and winked out of existence. “Bye-bye, Tommy! Goodbye, Lieserl!”

Tommy was resting on his stomach, his chin cupped in his palms. Lieserl, awkwardly, copied his posture. Now Tommy turned to herwithout appraisal, merely looking at her, with unconscious acceptance.

Lieserl said, “Can we see it again?”

He yawned and poked a finger into one nostril. “No. Let’s see another. There’s a great one about the pre-Cambrian explosion”

“The what?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “You know, the Burgess Shale and all that. Wait till you see Hallucigenia crawling over your neck…”

The children played, and learned, and napped. Later, the girl who’d scowled at LieserlGinniestarted some trouble. She poked fun at the way Lieserl’s bony wrists stuck out of her sleeves (Lieserl’s growth rate was slowing, but she was still growing out of her clothes during a day). Thenunexpectedly, astonishinglyGinnie started to bawl, claiming that Lieserl had walked through her Virtual. When Michael came over Lieserl started to explain, calmly and rationally, that Ginnie must be mistaken; but Michael told her not to cause such distress, and for punishment she was forced to sit away from the other children for ten minutes, without stimulation.

It was all desperately, savagely unfair. It was the longest ten minutes of Lieserl’s life. She glowered at Ginnie, filled with resentment.

The next day she found herself looking forward to going to the room with the children again. She set off with her mother through sunlit corridors. They reached the room Lieserl rememberedthere was Michael, smiling a little wistfully to her, and Tommy, and the girl Ginniebut Ginnie seemed different: childlike, unformed…

At least a head shorter than Lieserl.

Lieserl tried to recapture that delicious enmity of the day before, but it vanished even as she conjured it. Ginnie was just a kid.

She felt as if something had been stolen from her.

Her mother squeezed her hand. “Come on. Let’s find a new room for you to play in.”

Every day was unique. Every day Lieserl spent in a new place, with new people.

The world glowed with sunlight. Shining points trailed endlessly across the sky: low-orbit habitats and comet nuclei, tethered for power and fuel. People walked through a sea of information, with access to the Virtual libraries available anywhere in the world, at a subvocalized command. Lieserl learned quickly. She read about her parents. They were scientists, studying the Sun. They weren’t alone; there were many people, huge resources, devoted to the Sun.

In the libraries there was a lot of material about the Sun, little of which she could follow. But she sensed some common threads.

Once, people had taken the Sun for granted. No longer. Nowfor some reasonthey feared it.

On the ninth day Lieserl studied herself in a Virtual holomirror. She had the image turn around, so she could see the shape of her skull, the lie of her hair. There was still some childish softness in her face, she thought, but the woman inside her was emerging already, as if her childhood was a receding tide. She would look like her motherPhillidain the strong-nosed set of her face, her large, vulnerable eyes; but she would have the sandy coloring of her father, George.

Lieserl looked about nine years old. But she was just nine days old.

She bade the Virtual break up; it shattered into a million tiny images of her face which drifted away like flies in the sunlit air.

Phillida and George were fine parents, she thought. They spent their time away from her working through technical paperswhich scrolled through the air like falling leavesand exploring elaborate, onion-ring Virtual models of stars. Although they were both clearly busy they gave themselves to her without hesitation. She moved in a happy world of smiles, sympathy and support.

Her parents loved her unreservedly. But that wasn’t always enough.

She started to come up with more complicated, detailed questions. Like, what was the mechanism by which she was growing so rapidly? She didn’t seem to eat more than the other children she encountered; what could be fueling her absurd growth rates?

How did she know so much? She’d been born self-aware, with even the rudiments of language in her head. The Virtuals she interacted with in the classrooms were fun, and she always seemed to learn something new; but she absorbed no more than scraps of knowledge through them compared to the feast of insight with which she awoke each morning.

What had taught her, in the womb? What was teaching her now?

She had no answers. But perhapssomehowit was all connected with this strange, global obsession with the Sun. She remembered her childish fantasythat she might be like a flower, straining up too quickly to the Sun. Maybe, she wondered now, there was some grain of truth in that insight.

The strange little family had worked up some simple, homely rituals together. Lieserl’s favorite was the game, each evening, of snakes and ladders. George brought home an old seta real board made of card, and wooden counters. Already Lieserl was too old for the game; but she loved the company of her parents, her father’s elaborate jokes, the simple challenge of the game, the feel of the worn, antique counters.

Phillida showed her how to use Virtuals to produce her own game boards. Her first efforts, on her eleventh day, were plain, neat forms, little more than copies of the commercial boards she’d seen. But soon she began to experiment. She drew a huge board of a million squares, which covered a whole roomshe could walk through the board, a planar sheet of light at about waist-height. She crammed the board with intricate, curling snakes, vast ladders, vibrantly glowing squaresdetail piled on detail.

The next morning she walked with eagerness to the room where she’d built her boardand was immediately disappointed. Her efforts seemed pale, static, derivativeobviously the work of a child, despite the assistance of the Virtual software.

She wiped the board clean, leaving a grid of pale squares floating in the air. Then she started to populate it againbut this time with animated half-human snakes, slithering “ladders” of a hundred forms. She’d learned to access the Virtual libraries, and she plundered the art and history of a hundred centuries to populate her board.

Of course it was no longer possible to play games on the board, but that didn’t matter. The board was the thing, a little world in itself. She withdrew a little from her parents, spending long hours in deep searches through the libraries. She gave up her classes. Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they came to speak to her regularly, and showed an interest in her projects, and respected her privacy.

The board kept her interest the next day. But now she evolved elaborate games, dividing the board into countries and empires with arbitrary bands of glowing light. Armies of ladder-folk joined with legions of snakes in crude reproductions of the great events of human history.

She watched the symbols flicker across the Virtual board, shimmering, coalescing; she dictated lengthy chronicles of the histories of her imaginary countries.

By the end of the day, though, she was starting to grow more interested in the history texts she was plundering than in her own elaborations on them. She went to bed, eager for the next morning to come.

She awoke in darkness, doubled in agony.

She called for light, which flooded the room, sourceless. She sat up in bed.

Blood spotted the sheets. She screamed.

Phillida sat with her, cradling her head. Lieserl pressed herself against her mother’s warmth, trying to still her trembling.

“I think it’s time you asked me your questions.”

Lieserl sniffed. “What questions?”

“The ones you’ve carried around with you since the moment you were born.” Phillida smiled. “I could see it in your eyes, even at that moment. You poor thing… to be burdened with so much awareness. I’m sorry, Lieserl.”

Lieserl pulled away. Suddenly she felt cold, vulnerable.

“Tell me why you’re sorry,” she said at last.

“You’re my daughter.” Phillida placed her hands on Lieserl’s shoulders and pushed her face close; Lieserl could feel the warmth of her breath, and the soft room light caught the gray in her mother’s blonde hair, making it seem to shine. “Never forget that. You’re as human as I am. But” She hesitated.

“But what?”

“But you’re beingengineered.”

Nanobots swarmed through Lieserl’s body, Phillida said. They plated calcium over her bones, stimulated the generation of new cells, force-growing her body like some absurd human sunflowerthey even implanted memories, artificial learning, directly into her cortex.

Lieserl felt like scraping at her skin, gouging out this artificial infection. “Why? Why did you let this be done to me?”

Phillida pulled her close, but Lieserl stayed stiff, resisting mutely. Phillida buried her face in Lieserl’s hair; Lieserl felt the soft weight of her mother’s cheek on the crown of her head. “Not yet,” Phillida said. “Not yet. A few more days, my love. That’s all…”

Phillida’s cheeks grew warmer, as if she was crying, silently, into her daughter’s hair.

Lieserl returned to her snakes-and-ladders board. She found herself looking on her creation with affection, but also nostalgic sadness; she felt distant from this elaborate, slightly obsessive concoction.

Already she’d outgrown it.

She walked into the middle of the sparkling board and bade a Sun, a foot wide, rise out from the center of her body. Light swamped the board, shattering it.

She wasn’t the only adolescent who had constructed fantasy worlds like this. She read about the Brontës, in their lonely parsonage in the north of England, and their elaborate shared world of kings and princes and empires. And she read about the history of the humble game of snakes and ladders. The game had come from India, where it was a morality teaching aid called Moksha-Patamu. There were twelve vices and four virtues, and the objective was to get to Nirvana. It was easier to fail than to succeed… The British in the nineteenth century had adopted it as an instructional guide for children called Kismet; Lieserl stared at images of claustrophobic boards, forbidding snakes. Thirteen snakes and eight ladders showed children that if they were good and obedient their life would be rewarded.

But by a few decades later the game had lost its moral subtexts. Lieserl found images from the early twentieth century of a sad-looking little clown; he slithered haplessly down snakes and heroically clambered up ladders. Lieserl stared at him, trying to understand the appeal of his baggy trousers, walking cane and little moustache.

The game, with its charm and simplicity, had survived through the twenty centuries which had worn away since the death of that forgotten clown.

She grew interested in the numbers embedded in the various versions of the game. The twelve-to-four ratio of Moksha-Patamu clearly made it a harder game to win than Kismet’s thirteen-to-eightbut how much harder?

She began to draw new boards in the air. But these boards were abstractionsclean, colorless, little more than sketches. She ran through high-speed simulated games, studying their outcomes. She experimented with ratios of snakes to ladders, with their placement. Phillida sat with her and introduced her to combinatorial mathematics, the theory of gamesto different forms of wonder.

On her fifteenth day she tired of her own company and started to attend classes again. She found the perceptions of others a refreshing counterpoint to her own, high-speed learning.

The world seemed to open up around her like a flower; it was a world full of sunlight, of endless avenues of information, of stimulating people.

She read up on nanobots.

Body cells were programed to commit suicide. A cell itself manufactured enzymes which cut its DNA into neat pieces, and quietly closed down. The suicide of cells was a guard against uncontrolled growthtumorsand a tool to sculpt the developing body: in the womb, the withering of unwanted cells carved fingers and toes from blunt tissue buds. Death was the default state of a cell. Chemical signals were sent by the body, to instruct cells to remain alive.

The nanotechnological manipulation of this process made immortality simple.

It also made the manufacture of a Lieserl simple.

Lieserl studied this, scratching absently at her inhabited, engineered arms. She still didn’t know why.

With a boy called Matthew, from her class, she took a trip away from the Housewithout her parents for the first time. They rode a flitter to the shore where she’d played as a child, twelve days earlier. She found the broken pier where she’d discovered mussels. The place seemed less vividless magicaland she felt a sad nostalgia for the loss of the freshness of her childish senses.

But there were other compensations. Her body was strong, lithe, and the sunlight was like warm oil on her skin. She ran and swam, relishing the sparkle of the ozone-laden air in her lungs. She and Matthew mock-wrestled and chased in the surf, clambering over each other like young apeslike children, she thought, but not quite with complete innocence…

As sunset approached they allowed the flitter to return them to the House. They agreed to meet the next day, perhaps take another trip somewhere. Matthew kissed her lightly, on the lips, as they parted.

That night she could barely sleep. She lay in the dark of her room, the scent of salt still strong in her nostrils, the image of Matthew alive in her mind. Her body seemed to pulse with hot blood, with its endless, continuing growth.

The next dayher sixteenthLieserl rose quickly. She’d never felt so alive; her skin still glowed from the salt and sunlight of the shore, and there was a hot tension inside her, an ache deep in her belly, a tightness.

When she reached the flitter bay at the front of the House, Matthew was waiting for her. His back was turned, the low sunlight causing the fine hairs at the base of his neck to glow.

He turned to face her.

He reached out to her, uncertainly, then allowed his hands to drop to his sides. He didn’t seem to know what to say; his posture changed, subtly, his shoulders slumping slightly; before her eyes he was becoming shy of her.

She was taller than him. Visibly older. She became abruptly aware of the still-childlike roundness of his face, the awkwardness of his manner. The thought of touching himthe memory of her feverish dreams during the nightseemed absurd, impossibly adolescent.

She felt the muscles in her neck tighten; she felt as if she must scream. Matthew seemed to recede from her, as if she was viewing him through a tunnel.

Once again the laboring nanobotsthe damned, unceasing nanotechnological infection of her bodyhad taken away part of her life.

This time, though, it was too much to bear.

“Why? Why?” She wanted to scream abuse at her motherto hurt her.

Phillida had never looked so old. Her skin seemed drawn tight across the bones of her face, the lines etched deep. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Believe me. When weGeorge and Ivolunteered for this program, we knew it would be painful. But we never dreamed how much. Neither of us had had children before. Perhaps if we had, we’d have been able to anticipate how this would feel.”

“I’m a freakan absurd experiment,” Lieserl shouted. “A construct. Why did you make me human? Why not some insentient animal? Why not a Virtual?”

“Oh, you had to be human. As human as possible…” Phillida seemed to come to a decision. “I’d hoped to give you a few more days oflife, normalitybefore it had to end. You seemed to be finding some happiness”

“In fragments,” Lieserl said bitterly. “This is no life, Phillida. It’s grotesque.”

“I know. I’m sorry, my love. Come with me.”

“Where?”

“Outside. To the garden. I want to show you something.”

Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida’s warm grasp.

It was mid-morning now. The Sun’s light flooded the garden; flowerswhite and yellowstrained up towards the sky.

Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.

Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the light. The sky was a searing-blue dome, marked only by a high vapor trail and the lights of habitats.

“No.” Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl’s hand down from her face, and, cupping her chin, tipped her face flowerlike towards the Sun.

The star’s light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes, stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images.

The Sun. Of course…

Kevan Scholes said, Damn it, Lieserl, you’re going to have to respond properly. Things are difficult enough without”

I know. I’m sorry. How are you feeling, anyway?”

Me? I’m fine. But that’s hardly the point, is it? Now come on, Lieserl, the team here are getting on my back; let’s run through the tests.

“You mean I’m not down here to enjoy myself?”

Scholes, speaking from his safe habitat far beyond the photosphere, didn’t respond.

“Yeah. The tests. Okay, electromagnetic first.” She adjusted her sensorium. “I’m plunged into darkness,” she said drily. “There’s very little free radiation at any frequencyperhaps an X-ray glow from the photosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And”

We know the systems are functioning. I need to know what you see, what you feel.

“What I feel?”

She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the “air” of the cavern. The huge convective cells buffeted and merged like living things, whales in this insubstantial sea of gas.

“I see convection fountains,” she said. “A cave full of them.”

She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face down, surveying the plasma sea below her. She opened her eyes, changing her mode of perception. The convective honeycomb faded into the background of her senses, and the magnetic flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.

Lieserl dipped into a tube; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. Its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m inside a flux tube. It’s an immense tunnel; it’s like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun.”

Maybe. I don’t know if we need the poetry, Lieserl. Kevan Scholes hesitated, and when he spoke again he sounded severely encouraging, as if he’d been instructed to be nice to her. We’re glad you’re feelingahhappy in yourself, Lieserl.

“My new self. Maybe. Well, it was an improvement on the old; you have to admit that.”

Yes. I want you to think back to the downloading. Can you do that?

“The downloading? Why?”

Come on, Lieserl. It’s another test, obviously.

“A test of what?”

Your trace functions. We want to know if

“My trace functions. You mean my memory.”

…Yes. He had the grace to sound embarrassed. Think back, Lieserl. Can you remember?

Downloading…

It was her ninetieth day, her ninetieth physical-year. She was impossibly frailunable even to walk, or feed herself, or clean herself.

They’d taken her to a habitat close to the Sun. They’d almost left the download too late; they’d had one scare when an infection had somehow got through to her and settled into her lungs, nearly killing her.

She wanted to die.

Physically she was the oldest human in the System. She felt as if she were underwater: she could barely feel, or taste, or see anything, as if she was encased in some deadening, viscous fluid. And she knew her mind was failing.

It was so fast she could feel it. It was like a ghastly reverse run of her accelerated childhood. She woke every day to a new diminution of her self. She had come to dread sleep, yet could not avoid it.

She couldn’t bear the indignity of it. Everybody else was immortal, and young; and the AS technology which had made them so was being used to kill Lieserl. She hated those who had put her in this position.

Her mother visited her for the last time, a few days before the download. Lieserl, through her ruined, rheumy old eyes, was barely able to recognize Phillidathis young, weeping woman, only a few months older than when she had held up her baby girl to the Sun.

Lieserl cursed her, sent her away.

At last she was taken, in her bed, to a downloading chamber at the heart of the habitat.

Do you remember, Lieserl? Was itcontinuous?

“…No.”

It was a sensory explosion.

In an instant she was young again, with every sense alive and vivid. Her vision was sharp, her hearing impossibly precise. And slowly, slowly, she had become aware of new sensessenses beyond the human. She could see the dull infra-red glow of the bellies and heads of the people working around the shell of her own abandoned body, the sparkle of X-ray photons from the Solar photosphere as they leaked through the habitat’s shielding.

She’d retained her human memories, but they were qualitatively different from the experiences she was accumulating now. Limited, partial, subjective, imperfectly recorded: like fading paintings, she thought.

…Except, perhaps, for that single, golden, day at the beach.

She studied the husk of her body. It was almost visibly imploding now, empty…

“I remember,” she told Kevan Scholes. “Yes, I remember.”

Now the flux tube curved away to the right; and, in following it, she became aware that she was tracing out a spiral path. She let herself relax into the motion, and watched the cave-world beyond the tube wheel around her. The flux tubes neighboring her own had become twisted into spirals too, she realized; she was following one strand in a rope of twisted-together flux tubes.

Lieserl, what’s happening? We can see your trajectory’s altering, fast.

“I’m fine. I’ve got myself into a flux rope, that’s all…”

Lieserl, you should get out of there…

She let the tube sweep her around. “Why? This is fun.”

Maybe. But it isn’t a good idea for you to break the surface; we’re concerned about the stability of the wormhole

Lieserl sighed and let herself slow. “Oh, damn it, you’re just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go.”

We’re not done with the tests yet, Lieserl.

“What do you want me to do?”

One more…

“Just tell me.”

Run a full self-check, Lieserl. Just for a few minutes… drop the Virtual constructs.

She hesitated. “Why? The systems are obviously functioning to specification.”

Lieserl, you don’t need to make this difficult for me. Scholes sounded defensive. This is a standard suite of tests for any AI which

“All right, damn it.”

She closed her eyes, and with a sudden, impulsive stab of will, let her Virtual image of herselfthe illusion of a human body around hercrumble.

It was like waking from a dream: a soft, comfortable dream of childhood, waking to find herself entombed in a machine, a crude construct of bolts and cords and gears.

She considered herself.

The tetrahedral Interface of the wormhole was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing-hot gas of the convective zone poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun’s flesh, almost obscuring the Interface itself. The Solar material was, she knew, being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; convection zone gases emerged, blazing, from the drifting tetrahedron, making it into a second, miniature Sun around which human habitats could cluster.

By pumping away the gas, and the heat it carried, the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survivewith its precious, fragile cargo of datastores…

The stores which sustained the awareness of herself, Lieserl.

She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.

At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing. And overlaid on that was the logical structure of data storage and access paths which represented the components of her mind.

Good… good, Lieserl. You’re sending us good data. How are you feeling?

“You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel”

Enhanced…

No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone behind eyes made of jelly.

What made her conscious? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and what had happened in the past.

By any test, she was more conscious than any other humanbecause she had more of the machinery of consciousness.

She was supremely consciousthe most conscious human who had ever lived.

If, she thought uneasily, she was still human.

Good. Good. All right, Lieserl. We have work to do.

She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form. Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting… and yet, she thought, restrictive.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this last vestige of humanity. And then what?

Lieserl?

“I hear you.”

She turned her face towards the core.

“There is a purpose, Lieserl,” her mother said. “A justification. You aren’t simply an experiment. You have a mission.” She waved her hand at the sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. “Most of the people here, particularly the children, don’t know anything about you. They have jobs, goalslives of their own to follow. But they’re here for you.

“Lieserl, your experiences have been designedGeorge and I were selected, evento ensure that the first few days of your existence would imprint you with humanity.”

“The first few days?” Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall, looming towards her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she was a counter on some immense, invisible chutes-and-ladders board.

“I don’t want this. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida.”

“No, Lieserl. You’re not free, I’m afraid; you never can be. You have a goal.”

“What goal?”

“Listen to me. The Sun gave us life. Without itwithout the other starswe couldn’t survive.

“We’re a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the starsfor tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that. But we’ve hadglimpsesof the future, the far distant future… disturbing glimpses. People are starting to plan for that futureto work on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition…

“Lieserl, you’re one of those projects.”

“I don’t understand.”

Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of megayears and the future of the species.

“Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is dying; somethingor someoneis killing it.”

Phillida’s eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. “Don’t be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. You are a new form of human. And you will see wonders of which Iand everyone else who has ever livedcan only dream.”

Lieserl listened to her tone, coldly, analyzing it. “But you don’t envy me. Do you, Phillida?”

Phillida’s smile crumbled. “No,” she said quietly.

Lieserl tipped back her head. An immense light flooded her eyes.

She cried out.

Her mother enfolded her in her arms. “The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun…”

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