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The
Angelia
.’
    ‘I know. I
am
Angelia. I know what you’re thinking. That I am a PR stunt. A model, hired by your father to personify—’
    ‘I don’t actually care,’ Stef said abruptly.
    That surprised Lex. ‘You’ve got an impatient streak, haven’t you, Kalinski?’
    ‘If somebody’s being deliberately obscure, yes.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Angelia said. ‘I don’t intend to be. If your father had explained to you the mission concept—’
    ‘You know about me. How come?’
    ‘Well, I have got to know your father as we’ve worked together. And he speaks of you, Stef, a great deal. He’s very proud of you.’
    ‘I know,’ Stef snapped, feeling obscurely jealous.
    Lex said, ‘Be nice, Kalinski. Now it’s your cue to ask, “What mission concept?” ’
    ‘Oh, Lex, I don’t care. It’s obvious this woman is some kind of projection.’ On impulse she bent, picked up a pebble, an impact-loosened bit of Mercury rock, and threw it
at Angelia.
    Angelia caught the pebble easily. ‘Not a projection. Not quite an android either.’ She looked at the rock, then popped it into her mouth and swallowed it. ‘I’m not in a
suit like yours.’
    ‘You’re programmable matter.’
    ‘That’s right.’ Angelia held up her left hand, and watched as it morphed into a clutch of miniature sunflowers, which swivelled their heads to the low sun.
    ‘Ugh,’ Lex said. ‘Creepy.’
    ‘Sorry.’ She turned her hand back into a hand, and pointed up at the empty sky. ‘I’m to be fired off into interstellar space, by the microwave beam from your
father’s defunct solar-power satellite, up there.
I’m
the payload. But there is a me in here. In fact, a million mes, in a sense. A whole sisterhood, all sentient to a degree.
Stef, I’m sure your father will walk you through the mission design—’
    ‘But it makes no difference.’ Lex walked around Angelia, studying her. ‘Whether you’re sentient or not, I mean. You’re not
human
. And it’s an
authentic, physical human presence that counts when it comes to touching a new world. Sending some AI like you doesn’t count. That’s why the kernel ships are the important breakthrough
here, because they can carry humans. Maybe even all the way to the stars – and back, unlike poor old Dexter Cole.’
    ‘That’s very post-Heroic Generation thinking,’ Angelia said, and she smiled indulgently. ‘A backlash against the philosophical horrors of that age. And typical of what
they teach you at the ISF academies, from what I understand. Human experience is primal, yes? In fact this modern incarnate-humanism is the reason why Stef’s father programmed me into this
form, so I could attend the pre-launch ceremonies in person, so to speak. It’s expected, these days.’
    Lex shook his head. ‘No offence, Angelia, but nothing you will ever do could match the achievement of Dexter Cole, no matter how his mission pans out.’
    Stef knew Cole’s story; every kid grew up hearing about it. When a habitable planet of Proxima Centauri was discovered, nations in what had since become the western UN federation had
banded together, and within a couple of decades had scraped together a crewed mission. Cole had launched from Mercury for access to its energy-rich solar flux, just like Angelia would. A tremendous
laser beam, powered by that flux, had blasted into a lightsail, sending Cole’s thousand-tonne ship to Proxima. Dexter Cole was flying alone to the stars on a forty-year, one-way mission
– and, in some sense Stef had not been allowed to discover, he would somehow become the ‘godfather’ of a human colony when he got there. All this had been launched from an Earth
still reeling from the aftermath of the climate Jolts and the Kashmir War of the previous decades, an Earth where the huge recovery projects of the Heroic Generation were still working through
their lifecycles – all this as mankind was only just making its first footfalls on the worlds of its own