...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 herself -- the illusion of a human body around her -- crumble.

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 survive -- with 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.