Heirs of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Page B

the cutters from within. If any serious harm was to be achieved, then it was going to require antimatter bombs and mass-superposition weapons, or the like.
    At least that was the conclusion she came to from studying the up-front attacks. More subtle intrusions generated more ambiguous data. Probes that remained quiescent in their niches were for the most part ignored during the time of the test; others that had been programmed to explore their surroundings had been immediately set upon by security systems. Feeds from the dying probes reported crushing pressure, electromagnetic interference, along with anomalous readings of a dozen kinds.
    Nowhere in any of the data did Thor glimpse anything that looked like it might be an alien, suggesting that perhaps the defense systems themselves might have been automatic. Although she hadn’t dared hope for a glimpse of one of the mysterious Starfish, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. To be the first to sight one of the aliens would have been a great moment for her and a real slap in the face for Sol.
    Ever since that moment of revelation in the ruins of Sothis, when she had understood that Sol wasn’t capable of the decisions required to save humanity from the Starfish, she had felt curiously—almost alarmingly—free of any loyalty to her original. If she was going to survive, she realized now, she would have to take the steps herself. That seemed logical enough to her, although it obviously wasn’t to the others.
    Why me? she wondered. What sets me apart from the other copies of me? Why am I the only one who stands up to her?
    Perhaps it was selective pressure in action. Only the strongest would survive the coming of the Starfish. While a biological species might evolve by accruing mutations in its genes, engrams could only experience copying errors through the program that ran them. Hers, she was beginning to assume, had just such an error—only her error made her stronger, more independent, than the others.
    And if there was anything wrong with that, she couldn’t see it.
    She returned her attention to the sluggish rush of information. Of the many probes that had been sent, only twelve had remained in operation at the end of the experiment. The behavior of those probes would be examined in the finest possible detail to ascertain what, exactly, had enabled them to survive for so long in the hostile environment of a cutter while the others had failed. Was it the location they found themselves in, perhaps? Or the way they behaved? Whatever the reason, she was determined to find it. No possibility would go unexplored; every piece of information would be thoroughly investigated.
    The only thing they couldn’t know was how long those probes had survived for. When the cutters had left zeta Dorado, all ftl transmissions from the probes had ceased, meaning either they’d been taken out of range or simultaneously destroyed. Thor was keeping her fingers firmly crossed for the former. She wasn’t intent on throwing herself into the lion’s mouth without having at least some hope of getting out again afterward.
    “Is there something you’d like to get off your chest?”
    The voice—hers from another’s mouth—snapped her out of the data flow. With quicksilver smoothness, her pov was back in her android body and staring at her original.
    So much more beautiful and capable , came the involuntary thought. So much more... me.
    Thor forced it down.
    “I thought you were going to let others make the decisions,” she said as she sat up. “That was the deal after Beid, right?”
    “And it’s still the deal,” Sol replied. “Unless you’d prefer me to be in charge?”
    Thor tore her eyes from Sol’s forearms and their shockingly natural skin tones. Human flesh was available in abundance by conSense, the communal illusion inhabited by most of the engrams, but in the real world its scarcity was a source of constant despair.
    “You are in charge, Sol,” Thor said. “And