Starquake.pdf

Amalita and Abdul in two segments of the screen.
"Surprise! Surprise!" Abdul yelled.
"Itreally is us," Amalita said. "Or at least all of us that counts."
"I even have a moustache to twirl." Abdul lifted his hand to twirl the end of his long moustache. "And it
feels like the
real thing even though it's made of software instead of hardware."
Carole squeezed Pierre's arm in reassurance as she spoke. "The cheela scanned them thoroughly just
before their bodies were destroyed," she said. "Their intellect patterns now reside in cheela
supercomputers."
"But Amalita was irradiated and frozen," Pierre protested.
"I admit I have a lot of missing memories," said Amalita. "But the basic personality is still there."
"Yeah!" said Abdul. "She's just as bossy as ever."
"Hush!"
"See?" said Abdul, raising his eyebrows and shrugging his shoulders. "She'll be even more bossy when
we get into those walk-around bodies they're building for us."
"We have slowed ourselves down so we can say goodbye to all of you and our families," said Amalita.
"Then we had better get back up to normal cheela rates if we are going to stay up with what is going on
down here...."
"Doc! Seiko! Jean!" Abdul called. "Over here on the screen."
Pierre turned around to see astonished looks on the remainder of his crew as they came into the
communications room. His chronometer chimed the hour, and he looked down at it. He started to reset it
to make it agree with the clock on the wall, but decided against it. Not many people lived on a time-line
six months shorter than the rest of the universe.
06:00 CREW TIME WEDNESDAY 22 JUNE 2050
The long day was over.
Technical Appendix