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 human -- because she had more of the machinery of consciousness.

She was supremely conscious -- the 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, goals -- lives of their own to follow. But they're here for you.

"Lieserl, your experiences have been designed -- George and I were selected, even -- to 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 it -- without the other stars -- we couldn't survive.

"We're a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars -- for tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that. But we've had -- glimpses -- of the future, the far distant future... disturbing glimpses. People are starting to plan for that future -- to 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; something -- or someone -- is killing it."