Maybe. I don’t know if we need the poetry, Lieserl. What about other tubes? Can you still see them?

“Yes.” She turned her head, and induced currents in her Virtual body made her face sparkle with radiation. “I can see hundreds, thousands of the tubes, all curving through the air — ”

The “air”?

“The convective zone gases. The other tubes are parallel with mine, more or less.” She sought for a way to convey the sensation. “I feel as if I’m sliding around the scalp of some immense giant, Kevan, following the lines of hairs.”

Scholes laughed. Well, that’s not a bad image. The flux tubes can tangle, or break, but they can’t intersect. Just like hair.

“You know, this is almost relaxing…”

Good. Again she detected that hint of sympathy — or was it pity? — in Kevan’s voice. I’m glad you’re feeling — ah — happy in yourself, Lieserl.

She let the crisp magnetic flux play over her cheeks, sharp, bright, vivid. “My new self. Well, it’s an improvement on the old; you have to admit.”

Now the flux tube curved away, consistently, to the right; she was forced to deflect to avoid crashing through the tube’s insubstantial walls.

In following the tube 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, Kevan. I’ve got myself into a rope, that’s all…”

Lieserl, you should get out of there.

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

Maybe. But the rope is heading for the photosphere. 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, Kevan, you’re just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go.”

Lieserl —

She slid out of the flux tube, relishing the sharp scent of the magnetic field as she cut across it. “All right, Kevan. I’m at your service. What next?”

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

“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? I thought you said you could tell the systems were functioning to specification, and — ”

They are. That’s not the point… We’re still testing how well integrated they are —

“Integrated into my sensorium. Why don’t you just say what you’re after, Kevan? You want to test how conscious this machine called Lieserl is. Right?”

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, she let her Virtual image of herself — the illusion of a human body around her — crumble.

It was like — what? 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.

But even that was an illusion, she thought, a metaphor for herself behind which she was hiding.

She considered herself.

The wormhole Interface was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing hot gas of the convective zone poured into its triangular faces, so that the Interface was embedded in a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun’s flesh. That material was being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; there, convection zone gases emerged, blazing, making the drifting tetrahedron into a second, miniature Sun around which orbited the fragile human habitat called Thoth.

Thus the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive with its precious, fragile cargo of data stores… The stores which sustained the awareness of herself. And the flux of matter through the Interface’s planes was controlled, to enable her to move the Interface through the body of the Sun.

She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.

At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing, the patterns of bits which, together, comprised her memories. Then, overlaid on that — visually, if she willed it, like a ghostly superstructure — was her logical level, the data storage and access paths which represented the components of her consciousness.

Good… Good, Lieserl. You’re sending us good data.

She traced paths and linkages through the interleaved and interdependent structures of her own personality. “It’s functioning well. To specification. Even beyond. I — ”

We know that. But, Lieserl, how are you feeling? That’s what we can’t tell.

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

Enhanced.

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

She was supremely conscious.

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

Even in her old, battered, rapidly aging body, she had been conscious, of course. She could remember a little of what had happened to her, or in her mind, a few moments earlier.

But now, with her trace-function memory, she could relive her experiences, bit by data bit if she wanted to. Her senses went far beyond the human. And as for inner perception — why, she could see herself laid open now in a kind of dynamic blueprint.

By any test, she was more conscious than any other human had ever been — because she had more of the mechanism of consciousness. She was the most conscious human who had ever lived.

…If, she thought uneasily, I am still human.

Lieserl?

“Yes, Kevan. I can hear you.”

And?

“I’m a lot more conscious.” She laughed. “But possibly not much smarter.”

She heard him laugh in reply. It was a ghostly Virtual sound, she thought, transmitted through a defect in space-time, and — perhaps — across a boundary between species.

Come on, 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… in a way. And yet, she thought, restrictive.

No wonder Superet had been so concerned to imprint her with sympathy for mankind… before it had robbed her completely of her humanity.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this thin vestige of humanity.

And then what?

Bathed in Jovian light, Louise, Uvarov, Milpitas and Mark sat in the soft, reclined couches. The Virtual of Michael Poole held a snifter of old brandy; the glass was filled with convincing blue-gold Interface light sparkles, and Virtual-Poole sipped it with every sign of enjoyment — as if it were the first, and last, such glass he would ever enjoy.

As, probably, it was, for this particular autonomous sentient copy, Louise thought.

“To the survival of the species.” Louise raised her own glass and sipped at whiskey, a fine peaty Scotch. “But what’s it got to do with me? I don’t even have any kids.”

“Superet has a long history,” Virtual-Poole said stiffly. “You may not be aware of it, but Superet is already a thousand years old. It took its name from an ancient, obscure religious sect in North America that worshiped the first nuclear weapons…”