"Alarm! Alarm!"

Only slowly did the voice get through to Ethan. The awakening from cryosleep took long minutes. "Which emergency?" he croaked.

"I'm bored," Amelie replied. The engineers had tried to make the on-board computer as human as possible. Perhaps too human.

"How far are we from our target planet?" asked Ethan.

"Another ninety years or so – which we'll spend together." Amelie's voice sounded just as friendly as ever.

"Let me go back to sleep," Ethan asked, although he suspected Amelie's answer. Ethan was almost forty. Her "no" meant that he would die in space – alone with a bored computer.

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