The Makers (СИ)

The three others - the one waiting in the hotel in Las Vegas and the two remaining in Warsaw - have had only a few minutes to be horrified at the perniciousness of their intentions and surrender to the local police.

When Robert, who caught the ascending air stream, again appeared on the edge of the cliff, Gilels already was brushing away the rusty dust from his crumpled pants, and Lukasz's eyes were no longer bottomless and have regained their depth.

Lara's face was still white, she still covered it with her hands, but the mask of horror on it almost faded.

"Wow! What a ride!" Robert exhaled. "Lukasz, I hope that's all?"

No, Lukasz thought, nodding in agreement.

"Then I'm taking the lass with me, we'll find you at the hotel."

Robert touched the ground with his feet, picked up Lara in his arms and again stepped off into the abyss, which a couple of minutes ago almost cost him his life.

***

Lara, who never jumped out of a cliffs - neither with parachute nor without, but deeply impressed by the miracle of visible creation that has been just unfolded before her, clutched his neck with a death grip, afraid to close her eyes and leave them open at the same time.

"Don't worry," Robert whispered into her ear. "I'm here. Now everything will be fine."

She nodded, looking up at him and desperately trying to believe it, and her dress fluttered in the oncoming airflow.

"You are in the center of the universe, and the center is always unharmed," he went on in a whisper, realizing with awe that just about a little more and he won't want to think about anything else. "Look how beautiful."

Below, in the canyon, the orange light was gradually ceasing, giving way to the night that was going to cover the earth.

"I want you," she said, as he touched the black bottom with his feet.

I know, he agreed in silence. Any questions of any love were non-existent yet.

***

Then, when the world regained its contours, they were walking for a long time, and a blue night moths were landing on her crumpled white dress. Did Robert know that he'll have a son?

He just didn't think about it.

8. 2327th year. Benji.

I'm Benji, I'm a mediator. But I don't know what an area of mediation I should apply to.

I have been bringing amazing creatures from one amazing place to another. But the further, the more ridiculous seems to me my function, because from such a rearrangement of the summands, the amount of the surprising matter in my locality doesn't change at all.

It's strange: something turned upside down in my world; I began to perceive in another way that trifle, that almost zero, which all this time so masterfully pretended to be me. And also strange that all this is strange to me. Because...

Benji, do remember: you're a machine, you know how not to lie. Because she loves you. Congratulations, Benji: meaningful zero is no longer zero.

Benji's silvery palms lay on the dashboard. He didn't need any screens, scales and indicators to know exactly how the present moment flows here, inside his shuttle.

He didn't need any eyes to know that there, inside Alpha, the present moment also flows quite definitely: Aia stands there, pressing her forehead against the hatch, and will stand there until the hum from running orbiter's engines ceases through the glassium, - until he undocks.

Benji held his hands on the dashboard and his fingers trembled.

He was a machine and didn't know how to be nervous. His hands were never a source of trembling. In flight, the trembling always came to him from the outside - from the stern in which the main engines were humming, or from additional engines of the orientation system, or from the fuselage, and he never placed much value in this trembling. No, it is not: he placed it, but it always was purely practical - the number of revolutions, speed, condition of the equipment.

Benji didn't know how to be nervous, but he knew how to draw conclusions.

Today, the trembling that came to his thin fingers from the engines meant not only the engine speed; today it meant that the universe had chipped him from itself.

He realized himself as a person.

Technically, according to the realization that has covered him, a person exists as a person in no way through the attainment of the objectives. He listened to the hum of the engines, which was expending fuel from the drop tanks, and pondered about sociality.

It's paradoxically, Benji thought, but as for a person, a person exists as a person only through the sociality.

As an intelligent machine, android definitely knew what systematics is.

Of course, if to adhere to logic, there was a group to which he could relate himself. But he didn't exist as a person through the brand "AI-DII" engraved on his neck, just as a human doesn't exist as a person through the presence of hands, feet or head. A person exists as a person through the ability to feel the need and be in this need.

The need, thought Benji, is exactly what gives special value to the things and the processes and distinguishes them from one another.

He didn't feel the need in the sense in which a people feel it: he never wanted to eat, drink, sleep or warm. His need was of a somewhat different nature: he needed free access to the necessary information, the veracity of the addresses and the observance of the sequence of commands. The need he experienced was not as deep as, let's say, the human need to breathe, but, nevertheless, was also a need. Benji had no idea of the depth and intensity of the senses, but he had an idea of a depth and intensity.

Theoretically, he thought, a human named Aia seemed to violate the law of kinship with her species group, feeling in need of a being radically different from her. But on the other hand (also theoretically) a human named Aia remained a human - experiencing an eternal craving for the unknown.

In Aia there was nothing strange, the strange was now waking up in him: he, who never distinguished himself from his own kind, now, unexpectedly for himself, thought about the fact that the difference, despite everything, exists.

While Benji, who never wanted anything for himself, through that reasoning vaguely and from afar was looking at his own desires, his shuttle quickly and inexorably had pumped all the air, which no longer was needed to the android himself, from the shuttle into the glassium dome of Alpha and undocked from the hatch chamber.

***

The cargo terminal Orly met him with a thin drizzling rain.

The wet airstrip was empty and densely glowed red. Outside it there were a lot of interplanetary lorries, which were as much looked like pterodactyls, as the true pterodactyls, and between them bustled around people. All of them shifted and shifted something from place to place, endlessly loading and unloading it.

Under the loud rustling sound of raindrops, evaporating from the sheathing, and the moody brooding of the electronic dispatcher, Benji has led the mother ship over the red stripe and further, at the very end of the dock, to the seventeenth path.