cash rewards save for the salary he drew from the academic institutions that employed him. Any patentable technologies would be owned and exploited by those
institutions, on behalf of the UN-governed taxpayers that supported them. And, yes, Angelia was an advanced, sentient AI, the mission could not have been achieved without smart onboard technology.
She was capable of suffering – that was the price of sentience. But the mission was designed to sustain her, Dr Kalinski said, to deliver her to Proxima Centauri alive and sane. She was being
honoured, not mistreated.
But the team were evasive when they discussed details, and Dr Kalinski would not look Angelia in the eye – or eleven-year-old Stef, Angelia noticed. Evidently there were things she, and
Stef, hadn’t been told about certain aspects of the mission.
Despite such tensions it was a wonderful, warm, immersive final evening for Angelia. And at the end, as the dinner party was breaking up, Stef Kalinski came to her and took her hand.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve been nasty to you,’ Stef said.
‘You haven’t been.’
‘It’s just a bit difficult for me. My mother died, she was French—’
‘I know.’
‘And then I had Dad all to myself in Seattle. Then you showed up. It’s like . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Like I suddenly had a big sister.’ She screwed up her small face, thinking hard. ‘Like I had to get all my sibling rivalry out in one go.’
Angelia laughed. ‘You’re very perceptive. And very self-aware. I haven’t been offended. I’m glad I had the chance to get to know you.’
‘Yes. Me too.’
‘Are you jealous of where I’m going, the adventure I’m going to have?’ It was a reaction she’d encountered from several of the ground crew – Bob Develin, for
instance, a thirty-year-old from Florida who’d spent much of his youth working on the underwater archaeology of a drowned Cape Canaveral, and dreaming of space.
But Stef shook her head. ‘Oh, no. The kernels – that’s what I want to study, even if Dad thinks it’s cheating to use them, or something.’
‘You don’t want to go to the stars?’
‘What for? Stars are
easy
to understand . . .’
Maybe so. But as Stef got up on tiptoe to kiss her synthetic sister on her programmable-matter cheek, Angelia wondered if even a kernel could be as complex as an eleven-year-old girl.
That was the end of the night. Dr Kalinski showed Angelia to her room, an authentic human space with a regular bed and a wall mirror and everything. He stroked her artificial hair and said
goodnight. She laid down on the bed, fully clothed, and entered sleep mode.
When she woke, she was in space, pinned by sunlight.
CHAPTER 11
S he no longer had a human form, not remotely. Now she was a disc spun out of carbon sheets, a hundred metres across and just a hundredth of a
millimetre thick. Yet she was fully aware, her consciousness sustained by currents and charge stores in the multilayered mesh of electrically conductive carbon of which she was composed. She had
slept through this transformation, this atomic-level reassembly conducted by Dr Kalinski and his technicians.
And she could see, hear, taste the universe, through clusters of microscopic sensors.
She faced Mercury, a cracked, pitted hemisphere. The lights of humanity glimmered in the shadows of ancient crater walls, and crawled along cliffs and ridges. Orbiting the planet she saw the
hard, ugly lump of the defunct solar-power station, assembled decades ago in near-Earth space and now hauled here for reuse, and the tremendous lens, a structure of films and threads that dwarfed
even her own lacy span, that would throw the station’s microwave beam across the solar system to power her flight. The scale of all this was extraordinary, and the energies to be unleashed
were huge. If anything went wrong she would die in a moment, a moth in a blowtorch. She felt a stab of unreasonable
institutions, on behalf of the UN-governed taxpayers that supported them. And, yes, Angelia was an advanced, sentient AI, the mission could not have been achieved without smart onboard technology.
She was capable of suffering – that was the price of sentience. But the mission was designed to sustain her, Dr Kalinski said, to deliver her to Proxima Centauri alive and sane. She was being
honoured, not mistreated.
But the team were evasive when they discussed details, and Dr Kalinski would not look Angelia in the eye – or eleven-year-old Stef, Angelia noticed. Evidently there were things she, and
Stef, hadn’t been told about certain aspects of the mission.
Despite such tensions it was a wonderful, warm, immersive final evening for Angelia. And at the end, as the dinner party was breaking up, Stef Kalinski came to her and took her hand.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve been nasty to you,’ Stef said.
‘You haven’t been.’
‘It’s just a bit difficult for me. My mother died, she was French—’
‘I know.’
‘And then I had Dad all to myself in Seattle. Then you showed up. It’s like . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Like I suddenly had a big sister.’ She screwed up her small face, thinking hard. ‘Like I had to get all my sibling rivalry out in one go.’
Angelia laughed. ‘You’re very perceptive. And very self-aware. I haven’t been offended. I’m glad I had the chance to get to know you.’
‘Yes. Me too.’
‘Are you jealous of where I’m going, the adventure I’m going to have?’ It was a reaction she’d encountered from several of the ground crew – Bob Develin, for
instance, a thirty-year-old from Florida who’d spent much of his youth working on the underwater archaeology of a drowned Cape Canaveral, and dreaming of space.
But Stef shook her head. ‘Oh, no. The kernels – that’s what I want to study, even if Dad thinks it’s cheating to use them, or something.’
‘You don’t want to go to the stars?’
‘What for? Stars are
easy
to understand . . .’
Maybe so. But as Stef got up on tiptoe to kiss her synthetic sister on her programmable-matter cheek, Angelia wondered if even a kernel could be as complex as an eleven-year-old girl.
That was the end of the night. Dr Kalinski showed Angelia to her room, an authentic human space with a regular bed and a wall mirror and everything. He stroked her artificial hair and said
goodnight. She laid down on the bed, fully clothed, and entered sleep mode.
When she woke, she was in space, pinned by sunlight.
CHAPTER 11
S he no longer had a human form, not remotely. Now she was a disc spun out of carbon sheets, a hundred metres across and just a hundredth of a
millimetre thick. Yet she was fully aware, her consciousness sustained by currents and charge stores in the multilayered mesh of electrically conductive carbon of which she was composed. She had
slept through this transformation, this atomic-level reassembly conducted by Dr Kalinski and his technicians.
And she could see, hear, taste the universe, through clusters of microscopic sensors.
She faced Mercury, a cracked, pitted hemisphere. The lights of humanity glimmered in the shadows of ancient crater walls, and crawled along cliffs and ridges. Orbiting the planet she saw the
hard, ugly lump of the defunct solar-power station, assembled decades ago in near-Earth space and now hauled here for reuse, and the tremendous lens, a structure of films and threads that dwarfed
even her own lacy span, that would throw the station’s microwave beam across the solar system to power her flight. The scale of all this was extraordinary, and the energies to be unleashed
were huge. If anything went wrong she would die in a moment, a moth in a blowtorch. She felt a stab of unreasonable
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