The Makers (СИ)

Annotation

The English version of the hoax.

Ursa Minor

Ursa Minor

The Makers

The Makers.

1. 2330th year. Benji.

The future has covered Benji in July 2330 on the way home to Orly from Swiss UBS AG. The android was driving there after a personal identification procedure, because the bank was insisted on it, no matter what. He was coming back with the authorized code of the safe deposit and caproplast imitation of his thumbprint.

He was driving the delicate plastic rented flyer at the height of thirty meters above the E23.57 track into a rich orange sunset over Besancon City, when he heard a gentle metal jingling. Just then the gyropilot for the first time started to alarm about the course malfunction. If Benji was a human, he would be scared already then. But he wasn't. Without hesitation he has tested the aircraft electronics, did not find any technical violations and has restored a course backup. However it reported a failure again in less than a minute. The android restored a course and tested the flyer's software again. And again didn't find any errors.

Nevertheless the angle of dismissal still was slow and steady crawling up to the critical one-tenth-of-a-degree point. Benji froze at a loss, started the testing for a third time not really hoping for anything and found out an alien code in a factory settings of the gyropilot's software. He had deleted it, and that removal blending into the not pilot's but total failure.

The flyer shuddered and plunged down keenly. Benji had no choice but to obey, while holding it on a minimum glide path.

The ground greeted him with cloud of dust and smash of the crushed chassis.

Benji didn't feel fear, but set loose the helm only after the flyer bounced off the concrete wayside twice and stopped. He pushed the door at full tilt and got out. The alike fliers, as purple and tiny little as flies, were going along the way above him.

He had no experience of similar passages. He definitely understood he should then report about incident, but notwithstanding that he was machine he did not have any transmitter parts.

He came back into the cab, squatted down and took up the dismantling of the plastic dashboard with an eye to a phantom-feeder device of the dead flyer. He scarcely managed to find the ferrite rims strung on the cable close by to the connection points, when an alien chassis rustled outside the flyer.

It turned out that he didn't have time to get up at all; he'd been attacked by two at once - one rushed to scotched his eyes and mouth, while the other one tightly pressed him to the floor. Whereas he, blind and tied, was drugged out of the cab, he realized that the event was anyway getting nasty.

And then they hauled him like a stolen ATM, don't concerning about his frame at all, ruthlessly crippling the photosensors and delicate gyroscopes on his face. Benji was dodging away as best as he could and, in hindsight, scolded himself for insouciance and unconcern... however, there was no sense in that anymore. So when he was crammed into the narrow and airtight luggage compartment, he even temporarily felt a relief.

As a result, he didn't know where he was brought. He only knew that along the way the kidnappers twice changed a flyer and twice shifted him from craft to craft, like a suitcase. Twice he tried kicking on a stopover, but for the second time he was kicked in return so hard, that in his chest something broke off and fell with a loud crash, and he quieted down.

Destination room eventually was small and cluttered with equipment, because there something clicked and chirred all the time, and he could hear the muffled footsteps and voices. Benji was squeezed and tightly packed into the armchair, similar to the "maternity ward" in which he woke for the first time, only this time there was a correct counter-fitting connector for the every, even tiniest, connector on his hull.

Benji wiggled his fingers a bit, and his scotched mouth stretched into a goofy smile, as he caught himself on the idiotic thought that his current, thoroughly connected docking condition is very much like coitus. Here it is, a love of universe, clothed in the fabric, he thought.

"It's still grins!" someone was surprised.

"It's maybe a little damaged in the mind." he was answered. "These idiots, while they dragged it here, didn't particularly stand on ceremony. There is something rattles in it. They maybe even beat off that stuff this piece of iron calculates with."

"It doesn't matter," the first voice said. "It would be great if it hadn't deleted what it's been carried for."

Well, Benji thought, it's all the fault of that damn money, and has prepared to delete the UMA-deferred codes.

But together with this thought such a tough high-frequency ripple burst into him that what a few seconds ago was his volition melted and evaporated like a small water drop from a red-hot metal. The android has skipped out an alarm and sorrow and reckoned that the time in this chair will be the end of his awkward and bumbling life.

"Look, Jake!" meanwhile, the passionate reality was wondering. "Looks like I found what we need! Damn asshole! It put them in his UMA! It's like I would hide the keys to my house in my stomach!"

And answered itself: "Calm down, kid! I can't catch up why are you touched as if it put them in a butt instead of a brain."

The reality burned him and muttered, muttered, muttered; Benji listened, and inside him grew such nameless tender pity for her, lonesome, loveless, forlorn, that through the burning ripple he'd made effort and in the nearly orgasmic paroxysm has spilled in her all the rest - the codes, memories and plans for an upcoming eternity.

2. 2322nd year. Aia.

Aia was ten years old, when it all began. The start was common and sad - her father died of brain cancer. The disease drained him right in front of her eyes.

At first his job at the lunar wharf was ruined. Instead, there were mother's sobs, oncologists, analyzes and endless queues among the same ones as he - unfortunate and silent victims, who don't understand whose evil intentions are going to break them down.

The meandering along all sorts of institutions, still pretending having a health care system in the country, had been lasted almost a half a year, and then her father eventually has declared a disability. He finally sat down at home in a chair and quietly nursed his tumor.

The tumor was untreatable, but not harmful. He almost didn't have a headache attacks and any other stuff, which was obligatory with such a serious state of affairs. He's just started walking with them not so far and not so often. After a while, one of his eyes began to shift, moving away from the living inside his skull ruthless monster. But he still smiled at her: "You're here alone, and I'm sort of looking straight at you, but it seems like there are two of you here."