Ilse's designed span exceeded one hundred centuries. And though her brain was iron and germanium doped with arsenic, and her heart was a tiny cloud of hydrogen plasma, Ilse was one of Earth's creatures... Ilse's earliest memory was a fragment, amounting to no less than fifteen seconds. Someone, perhaps inadvertently, brought her to consciousness as she sat atop her S-5N booster.

From Long Shot, by Vernor Vinge. Published by Conde Nast Publications in 1972

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