Virginia only wanted the man to let go of her arm. She tried reason.

“The nations of equatorial Africa and America have had a hellish century, Otis. I don’t like the specious turn their ideology has taken in recent years either, but at least they’re environmentalists, nowadays. If they’ve become a bit fanatical in that direction, well, anyone will admit it’s an improvement over the way their grandfathers behaved. The pendulum will swing back again.”

Virginia did not like the expression on Sergeov’s face. He looked at her as if she were pitiably, even criminally naive.

“You think so? But no, my dear young Percell. Is only the beginning! They are already at war with us!”

His unshaven face drew closer. “And who can blame them? When Homo sapiens awakens to what is happening, more and more repression will come against us—the Successor Race. Nothing less than future generations are at stake here!”

“Oh, come on, Otis. Virginia laughed dryly, trying to lighten the tone. “It’s not like we few Percells are the next step in evol—”

“No, you listen, girl!” Sergeov’s eyes narrowed. “This is the main reason for ail such paranoia, such persecution! Is hard to blame Neanderthals for trying to protect their obsolete form, after all. Species protect selves.”

He grinned severely. “But that does not mean we must let bastards squash us, either. Is up to us to act first, or perish!”

Even though they were clearly alone, Virginia quickly looked about. She did not want to be around if this seditious talk was overheard. With no wasted motion she used a judo grip-break to yank her arm away hard, sending the man spinning back. Sergeov bumped his head on the unpadded wall.

“Ow!” he protested in hurt surprise. “Yayatamiy! Govenka! What you do that for?”

“You Uber extremists don’t have the answer,” she breathed. “You only give Percells a bad name by talking like that. We aren’t Nietzsche’s supermen. We’re misunderstood human beings. That’s all!”

Sergeov grimaced, rubbing his head. “Ask the regular human beings, the Orthos, if they think us brothers,” he grumped.

Pushing the walls with her hands, Virginia backed away like a fish from a shark, even though Sergeov showed no inclination to follow her. Once down the hall a few feet, she spun about and kicked off down the dimly lit corridor toward her sanctuary.

Everything in Virginia ’s private work capsule was neat, crisp efficient. The screens and opalescent holo displays that surrounded her webcouch all operated perfectly. Far from home and everything she had known—even hurtling out of the solar system at thirty kilometers per second—this was the center of her universe. She made certain everything was in good working order.

Officially, her role was to provide special support to Computations Section. But she had actually inveigled her way aboard this mission in hopes of getting some of her own research done. In the kind of scientific environment that was developing on Earth, the sorts of things she was interested in were frowned on.

Bio-organic computers… machines that might really think…These were areas that had been diagnosed as improbable, even dangerous, by increasingly conservative twenty-first-century science. Even in her native Hawaii, her superiors had grown more and more uncomfortable with the attention her work was drawing from the outside world.

But I know bio-organics can eventually outperform silicon and gallium! And machines can do better than moron mechanical water drawing and wood hewing. Stochastic processors can be made to think.

Over to the right, tucked under a desktop was the squat box containing her own, special simulation unit; the Kelmar organo computer had used up nearly all of her small personal-effects allowance, but it was worth it.

Panel lights rippled as the hatch hissed shut behind her and she slipped onto the web-couch. Virginia belted herself in and spoke softly.

“Hello, JonVon.”

The main holo screen glittered.

She smiled. No doubt in the eighty years ahead much progress would be made. It had to happen—even in a growing tide of scientific conservatism.

But right now her charge was the best there was—unconventional, using technology all but banned back home, but supreme in her own estimation.

She had named the unit after John Von Neumann, inventor of the theory of games. The program/mainframe could mimic a human’s response patterns well enough to pass a third-stage Turing test… fooling an unsuspecting person in a five-minute casual vidphone conversation into thinking the face and voice on the other end of the line were those of a real person, not a computer.

JonVon could even tell a dirty joke, leering just enough and chuckling at the right time.

Unprecedented, yes. But stunts like that weren’t true “machine intelligence”—not the way Virginia felt should be possible.

The molecular hardware in that five-liter box should be good enough to model the complex standing wave in a human brain. She was sure of it. They didn’t agree back home, of course, and so it had never really been given a chance.

For the next few weeks she would have little time to engage in her private experiments. She had to use all her equipment, including JonVon, to supplement the ship’s mainframe Nearly all her energy was devoted to preparing those mathematical models Captain Cruz’s spacers kept demanding.

Later, though, during her years on watch, there would be time. Time for work and undiluted thought.

Back in the twentieth century, they knew how to have daring dreams, she thought. They did not believe in limits. It was one reason she liked old-time flat-screen movies… and enjoyed simulating old-time film stars and long-ago poets.

Those people nearly wrecked the world with their greed, but they did believe in ambition. They wouldn’t have rested until they had machines that could think.

She glanced at the timepiece etched indelibly under her left thumbnail. “How about twenty minutes of diversion, Johnny?” Virginia lifted a cable from the console and bared a whitish bump at the back of her head. When the connection clicked home, the symbols on the screen were accompanied by a rich voice inside her head.

She answered quickly with an impulsive thread of verse:

The line to her acoustic nerve hummed:

She blushed. “Oh hush, silly. Come on now. Let’s take a look at your conversation subroutines.”

The dusty ice sheets were speckled and splashed, rainbow-mottled, packed and scoured.

Carl Osborn spun his workpod and vectored down toward Halley Core. He flew away from the razor-sharp dawnline, aiming for the north pole where their base was finally taking shape.

The grainy gray and brown surface was changing rapidly now. Like tiny, fat ants, mechs moved over it, preparing docking areas and mooring towers. Spiders hammered holes into the ice, their endless microwave zzzzzzttts leaking faintly into some of the data channels. Carl muttered a quick correcting command to his suit’s comm filter control and the interference stopped.