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Coppélia looked out of the large porthole, hoping that her special message to Karen had arrived on the correct day. She would have loved to see her friend again – and to meet the children – but she knew that that wouldn’t happen for a long time. And when she did see Karen again, the ex-policewoman would be at least seventy-three years old. Her children wouldn’t be children but in their late thirties or early forties. And Coppélia would still look as she did when she left Earth.
But the android couldn’t spend all her time looking out of the window, imagining that she was somewhere else; she had work to do. She was the conduit through which humanity would experience setting foot upon an interstellar planet for the very first time. She had a responsibility to those back home. She transmi
