The Makers (СИ)

"So here's the deal..." she seemed embarrassed. "What does it mean to correctly interpret what is happening?"

"Without comparing it with the expected. With keeping the expected and obvious in different folders," - Benji smiled broadly: first to her, and then to the skinny boy behind the frontal holocamera.

His smile was so open and charming that Selin had no choice but to smile back:

"And this distinguishes the machine from human?"

"I think the fundamental constructive difference is that your upbringing is much more imperfect than our installation. Imperfect because it takes much more time, and in it can be broken an unscheduled gaps, something undesirable, but giving a short-term positive effect."

"Well, that sounds about right." Selin agreed. "And what do you think about emotions? Do they help people or interfere?"

"Emotions are tools. And, like any tool, they need to be properly used. People are strange creatures. None of you going to fly by a hammer or to hammer nails by airplane, but a very few of humans are embarrassed by the use an inappropriate emotions."

"But we, humans, don't so much use emotions as we experience them."

"Which is not always rational," Benji said. "Being exposed, any emotion may be appropriate under some circumstances and completely vain in others."

In general, yes, his companion nodded and went on, leaning slightly toward Benji and squinting up her huge blue eyes:

"Monsieur Shabra, you are familiar with the natural selection idea of monsieur Charles Darwin?"

"Yes," Benji said.

"And how do you see the joint existence in the future of your family and humanity from the point of view of his theory?"

Benji slightly loosed his voice membranes - so that his voice sounded lower and more velvety - and said with a lovely baritone:

"Humans like metaphors, and I'll tell you a metaphor: the DII family and humanity are just different kinds of trees in the same forest. And as for my family, my family is those who need me, and not those who wear the same mark on their neck."

"Do you renounce the family of machines?"

"Not really," the android shook his head. "I'm just getting a new family. By my own choice."

"Wow!" Selin said in surprise. "And whom did you choose?"

"I'm not very different from a human in that regard." Benji shrugged. "I like those who understand me."

"Many people believe that only a person can know about another person. And how do you thought: maybe only another machine could understand the machine?"

Benji turned his silvery palms up on his lap, looked at the star shaped connectors covering them and temporarily drowned through the highmem in Aia's quiet voice - "You have beautiful fingers, Benji..."

"I think understanding is the result not so much of similarity as of interest," he said. "You, people, more interested in each other than machines, such your interest is the basis for the survival of the species. But if anyone of machines had had such a program that requires an indispensable repetition of themselves in another, it definitely would be identified as a malicious code."

"So you equate love with virulence?" Selin asked, leaning back in her passenger seat and watching Benji while he was staring at his metal hands.

Her voice came out unexpectedly sharp and unpleasant.

"Well, no, no!" hastily contended android. "I just wanted to say that the way the machine communicates with the universe does not provide for the universe to be populated with myriad copies of machines. Interest for us is different thing. And understanding is different."

"What exactly?"

"Packaging of the incoming external in the available internal by the most harmonious way."

The girl nodded and again leaned forward slightly:

"Do you know, Monsieur Shabra, what is half of humanity talking about at the mention of you?"

Benji looked up at her: about what?

"About how the commercial component is included in your theory of packaging of the incoming external. What do you need your business for, monsieur Shabra?"

"And how about that part of the mankind which is engaged in it too? What do they need their business for?" smiled Benji.

15. 2330th year. Aia.

"It looks like Benji is really cool in many regards."

Robert gently touched Matt's shoulder, drawing his attention, and nodded toward his Mora: look, Matt. In the meantime Mora was as completely self-absorbed as a molting cobra: slowly and majestically it blossomed into the numerous violet St. Elmo's fires.

Aia glanced at her brother, grinned and let loose the floundering reality: in one second Mora lost its tight grandeur and blew its jaws in an incredible shot - so that Aia, who was sitting apart of the company, in one elusive movement ended up inside it.

Matt gasped, but he didn't have time to get scared.

Light, that a few seconds ago was running with purple sparks along Mora's fur, suddenly dived down as the glowing plankton in the darkness with the warm ocean current, and the jaws that had devoured his sister started glowing purple from the inside.

In this violet glow the boy saw Aia, who had suddenly fallen to her knees, then rose and arched, looking through the Mora's head at the high sky, and then took a deep breath and exhaled vertically upwards with something dazzling-white.

Opening his mouth with amazement, Matt watched as the white cloud in the air above Aia's head stirred, rustled and crawled along the Mora's entrails, literally gnawing it from inside. And then - blow! -and the violet light which remained from the giant Mora's lump, sparkled and turned into a myriad of tiny purple moths.

Aia waved her hands, and moths, frightened by her, fell off, for a while had been stirring among the people, and then flew high up.

Robert sighed with the fake regret.

"Oh, again your delicate stuff... By the way, it was the beautiful beast...

"Was? Come on, puss, puss, puss..." called Aia, again slumping down between Matt and Lukasz, and the purple moth cloud, before melting in the dark, smiled somewhere in the sky with a huge toothy Cheshire smile.

"Does Benji talk to you sometimes?" Lukasz asked.

Yes, Aia nodded, he does talk.

"He's going to buy the shuttle, because he wants to come here?"

"He wants to be free. And one cannot jump out from Earth with your own power. At least, he is the one who does not jump so high."

"The one doesn't jump out, and another one doesn't jump in," Robert winked. "I even don't remember last time when I was there."

"Yes, there is a charm in a large space," Lukasz agreed. "Clouds, winds and rains are real, not requiring of effort."

"You surprise me, Lukasz," Aia said. "For as long as I could remember, I always thought that a laziness and a Maker don't go hand-in-hand."

"Oh ... You're just not yet well-versed in the peculiarities of the male psyche," Robert grinned. "Come to us more often, especially in the evenings after dinner, and I'll show you what it means to be really lazy."