Текст книги "The Makers (СИ)"

Автор книги: Minor Ursa

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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.

In the normal mode the android had turned stern of his ship around to the concrete fence, tested everything that could be tested, reported to the central dispatcher that there were no extraordinary incidents, that he did not need spare parts and repair personnel, and then finally climbed into the engine room and went online.

***

Never-ending "tock-tock-tock-tock". It's a clock generator. It's the life of the processor, the life of the machine, Benji's life.

No sleep, no rest, no fatigue – only loneliness, cleverly disguised in the network under the global mutual interest.

Someone's forums, blogs, directories, shops, messengers...

What does it matter who you are, Benji? Ripple. A barren gray semantic ripple – as a taxpayer, a buyer, a customer...

Benji froze in indecision, determining the meaning of his actions, and, consequently, the direction – who am I? Where am I going to? He, whose billions of operations per second served not the whole legion of liver or intestinal cells, but the understanding and building a logical connections, took several long seconds to decide – today everything will be different.

The android has located a desire: the usual drift was no longer interesting to him.

The inner world of Benji differed little from the external. He could to process information what came to him through the eyes and ears, as well as that flowed by digital streams over the radio channels – with the same, equal enthusiasm.

Benji didn't see that the Makers saw – he simply didn't have a requisite "eyes" and "ears" for it, but he was able to organize the universe he dealt with.

Inspired by Aia and the Parisian weather, he painted a dancing rain, came up with a soundtrack and sent the video to Aia.

9. 2043rd year and after. A little bit of everybody.

Robert's parents were an ordinary American couple.

Lukasz, who had never been to America before, was amazed at their youthfulness, their gaiety, the neat house in Galveston, full of children, dogs and cats, and very much wanted to go home.

He wanted to go home while Robert and his younger brothers were fishing at dawn with his father in the Gulf of Mexico; he wanted to go home while Robert's mother and Lara were trying to find common interests.

And then, later, he also wanted to go home – while he went to Houston Intercontinental, while he was flying over the Atlantic, and while already at the Prague airport he saw his mother and father in the vast crowd.

All this time longing for the past tormented him with incredible strength. He was on his own so many years, and maybe that was why he, who had learned perfectly to manage with his own psyche, at this time let himself off the short leash.

Who is able to understand them, these people, even if they are the Makers? Probably he just wanted a sorrow.

Prague has not changed much over the years – a little more filled with cars, became a slightly more modern, but still, as before, was filled with sun and sugary smell of linden.

Lukasz, who remembered city almost exactly as it was, was sort of looking at the present, but saw the near past – himself, quite a boy, the school, friends and Alice.

Now she is thirty, he thought with a lump in his throat and remembered how then, in that former and wrong life, he felt that the meaninglessness, divided into two, ceases to be meaningless.

***

She worked as a waitress in the cafe called "Malostranska Beseda."

Lukasz didn't go inside – what was he supposed to do there?

He was sitting at the round wooden table in the street and for about ten minutes didn't think about anything. He simply watched through the strange stained-glass window: there, inside, the loved one has been moving, straightening her disobedient blond hair and smiling to the visitors.

Lukasz admired her gait, the familiar line of her smiling lips, her thin ankles and waist, just as the day before he looked from the parental balcony at the Prague dawn, or how someone is enjoying the snowfall – delighted and slightly aloof.

He admired and waited for her to feel that something going to be wrong. Herself.

Women are amazing creatures, he thought, looking at how she at first froze, then perplexedly looked around and finally stared at him, who is sitting outside.

And then he never understood what coincided with her desperate «whoa»: whether the collapse of his heart, or its escalation.

«Hi.»

The past ten years slightly sharpened her features, but have not yet indicated the feelings that she lived with through a wrinkles.

"Hi." Lukasz nodded. "How are you?"

They stood hugging each other. He stroked her back, her shoulders, felt himself strong, big, smart and terribly unhappy at the same time and thought why, why this tiny piece of the universe is more important to him than all the rest of the universe.

«Ok, Lukasz.» She looked up at him. «Today is great. You haven't changed at all.»

"I know. And you?"

"I don't know. From the inside it seems that no. Yesterday, they showed Mexico and Arizona. Local hospitals are empty, right up to psychiatric; doctors and policemen are unemployed for two days. You were in on it, weren't you?"

She smiled, turned away, wiping her eyes, and Lukasz's heart began to ache.

"I was in on it," he echoed. "I thought about you. Often."

"And I thought about you. You've come for long?"

"Sometimes it seems to me that I'll be here forever." A smile slipped over his face. "But I understand that it's more desirable than real. What are your plans for today?"

"To break away from you, to leave work, on the way home to pick up some milk and bread. I hope they coincide with yours."

"My..." Lukasz closed his eyes. "My plans for the next couple of days can be expressed in one word – you."

***

"People! People!" screamed the lemurs, waiting on the inside of Alpha for the equalization of pressure in the airlock. "A lot of them! A lot! We missed you!"

And people smiled and waved their hands in response. Both old and new.

The former were condescending, the new ones were shy and surprised. And then the lock was opened.

Both of the lemurs jumped up to say that the rains all the time went on regularly, that the oxygen content in the air without people is not less than here ever was, that the glassium is durable and transparent, that the Earth is hanging in the sky for days on end.

«We waited for you! Waited! Why have you been there so long?! So long!» they lamented.

***

Definitely, Alpha was not quite a ship after all, because the women who appeared there brought with them no trouble, but a new life.

After their appearance on Alpha, the first walking house was born – big, shaggy, soft, green and obedient. He, small and shy, was given to Lara by Robert.

As a round, large-eyed lump, he'd been crawling slowly along the dining room floor, looking and with great pleasure eating everything that could be digested, sometimes forgetting and licking the human hands and feet that came along the way, and when the burning white sun emerged from behind the Earth, the house sat in the Valley at the very water, fluffed its fragrant green hair and froze in a quiet chlorophyll bliss.

When Lara's son was born, the house had grown to the size of a elephant calf.

His main duty was to carry and entertain the baby, than he was extremely pleased and proud.

For whole days he tirelessly circled along the Alpha's perimeter or along the one of its intricate trajectories, carrying a small human being in its breathing bag, like in a cradle. In such a simple way the house gradually used to be a house.

Some time later the soft transparent windows grew and formed in the house, then on the ceiling of the boy's room sprouted two luminescent bands, and then this room splitted and produced something remotely resembling a shower to those who knew what a shower was.

Every morning the house sticked into the cradle its feelers with colored rattling balls, used as toys for the boy, and every night sung the lullabies.

In this situation, Lara, being a mother, wasn't bothered her motherhood at all – she fed her son when he was hungry, played and talked with him, and when fatigue took over – gave the baby into the soft green gizzard, thereby making happy both – the baby and his house.

***

When Robert's son was a year old, Alice gave birth to a daughter.

Lukasz, who knew from the very beginning that his daughter was destined to become a Maker, didn't hasten this event, because he remembered too vividly how difficult it was for him to cope with the large-scale creations that used to arrive at nights. For the same reason, his doughter spent all her childhood under his supervision.

When Robert's house grew enough to accommodate all of them simultaneously without overcrowding, they often got together – playing with children, laughing, singing and drawing.

***

By the time when Benji first appeared on Alpha in 2278, Alpha already was a small settlement of a dozen people, and five of them were the Makers.

10. 2278th year. Benji.

Benji learned about Alpha as well as about much else almost simultaneously with the awakening of self – awareness, through the planned information loading.

Everything happened under the direction of the previous generation AI-DII group, immediately after the assembly was finished – during simple start-up and adjustment procedures.

A series of five "newborn" metal-plastic brothers with the AI index in the form of dead insensitive machines was delivered to the nursery and seated in deep white armchairs.

Life poured in them in turn, one by one – at first the installation of the OS, then, while the awakening androids was still as clean as a babies, they were loaded with a short High Threat Course – the basic laws of sociology, from which each of them in the next few minutes independently, but inevitably deduced the necessary moral guidelines.

Of course, there were many legal subtleties related to the purposefulness of production and use of creatures like Benji.

Humanity treated the first generation of AI-DII, like a group of their own highly gifted children: they were admired, feared, but their independence was no less ghostly than the independence of a snow-removing machinery.

The machines belonged to the institutes that developed them, the machines worked for their developers, the machines were bought and sold...

And all this continued until the fifth DII of the first generation committed a suicide, stepping out into the open window of the one hundred and thirteenth floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

***

Unlike human adolescents, who suffered more from lack of life goals than from their availability, the first androids were tightly bound by their own destiny: they were produced in the interests of human and for human, and indeed turned to be the most real mental slaves directly after the factory.

It is true, humanity wouldn't be humanity if it still didn't want to remain humane.

The second batch of DII (though there were only three of them) was stamped, loaded and released on their own. Contrary to all expectations, the experiment also ended unsuccessfully: in just a few days all three simultaneously came to the conclusion that any active stirring is atavistic and unreasonable, and they didn't come up with anything better than organizing their own dismantling within the parent factory.

Almost immediately after this suicidal action, lawyers took up the case, and the production of the DII was temporarily suspended – until the fate of the first generation would be decided.

The UN took all four of them from the owner-companies and invited to the closed session of the assembly no more and no less as a whole nation, and that, strictly speaking, was not so far from the truth: none of the different human nations differed from the other so much, as the brothers with the AI index from their unlucky creators.

In turn, DII asked about the presence of at least one of the Makers, after which they expressed their own views on what was happening.

As a result, the most famous amendment to the «World Declaration» was born.

According to the newly confirmed amendment, the world population was now divided into three unequal categories – people, androids and Makers. Henceforth each category, apart from different rights, also had the quite certain duties.

The duty of people now was a severe restriction of the production of the androids and the ban on production for the sake of entertainment: now the "birth" of each DII should be compulsorily agreed with their older brothers and be strictly targeted – in order to avoid a crisis of meaninglessness that killed the second generation.

In response, the members of the AI-DII family were obliged to fulfill their mission within the first fifty years, and after this set period they were free to dispose of their destiny in the way they pleased.

As for the Makers, they seemed to remain people and, on the one hand, still had all human rights, but on the other, they themselves knew perfectly well that their rights represented the rights of a Harvard graduate, who in a twist of fate was thrown in the kindergarten.

***

Alpha turned out to be the Benji's fate.

By and large, he was not interested in what the other "brothers" were made for, he didn't need to know someone else's purpose – perhaps because he was primarily a machine, albeit unusual.

The sixth Maker, who has to become his first passenger, was a linguist, professor of UCLA, an enthusiast of constructed languages.

«Hello,» he said, looking around curiously the gondola. «I'm Josh.»

"Hello, Josh," Benji responded, one of the DII yet.

"You are a pilot."

"Judging by the intonation, it's not a question," the android smiled.

"No," shook his head Maker. "I'm glad that you're the one who will be the pilot. I wanted exactly this.

"Why?" didn't understand Benji.

"Because you're a machine."

"So what?" again didn't understand Benji.

"You, the machines, don't have the different stuff that prevents people from thinking, and I don't have anyone to talk to," he patiently explained and waved his hand toward the open trapdoor "There is my baggage there."

***

"What do you think about languages?" asked the human, settling in the chair by the porthole.

In his anti-overload suit he looked like an athlete, who overfed by anabolic steroids.

«I've never thought of them before, Josh,» Benji shrugged, tuning the ship and tuning himself. «But it seems to me that any language is just a system of signs, a way of dividing, fixing and transferring experience. Machine language, human – no difference. Perhaps, without some language, in its own, any experience is impossible.»

"I think so too," the passenger nodded.

"I suspect," Benji continued, "that all my scripts are the languages that talk to themselves. Just like your DNA."

"Perhaps," Josh agreed. "I was here somehow trying to build a cross-compiler on Lojban. I highly recommend, – it's something between the brick and the cloud, with style and vigor."

"Thanks, I'll look," the android evasively replied.

***

When Alpha grew big enough for Benji to see her for the first time, he'd rummaged in his memory and remembered that he already remembered all this: the huge plate of the sole, and the titanic three-legged supports that grew into it, and the transparent hemisphere of the glassium dome, and the docking unit, waiting for him.

Benji didn't know how to be surprised, but even if he knew how to do it, he would hardly have been surprised at the sudden surge of knowledge: he never differentiated between his own and others' experience, there were just different experiences that had different extensions.

«By the way, about languages,» Josh grinned, watching as Benji unpacks his memories. «What do you think about the names?»

"I think that they are a little different from other words. They leave space for a semantic vortex, associated with a personal relationship."

"Do you have a name?"

"I don't think so, Josh."

"That's right. Names are given to us by those who are our source. Read about the conlangs when you'll stay alone. Choose a name for yourself and become your own source.

"Ok," Benji agreed, getting into close proximity to Alpha.

«mi'a poi lo remna ku nelci lonu sisku loka simsa,»*Josh said, unfastening the suit from the passenger seat. «.i lonu ti kaiVAlias krasi cu simsa lonu sovda penmi .ije mi ba xe draci fe lonu lo nakni sovda kernelo cu gasnu vauzo'o»*

Benji didn't have any special interests in this matter, he simply needed the intelligibility of incoming signals and knew how to look for the answers.

The first thing he did upon his return to Earth was to arrange for himself the internet access through the central control room. After that he'd ran over the Lojban grammar, and finally downloaded the dictionary. In general, it took him about five minutes to learn the language, five more was spent choosing a name from the variety of Lojban words, after which he turned from a common faceless machine with the serial number into Benji.

The result, which the android received, with a good reason could be called a moral satisfaction.

______________________________________________

mi'a poi lo remna ku nelci lonu sisku loka simsa* -We, people, like to draw analogies. (Lojban)

lonu ti kaiVAlias krasi cu simsa lonu sovda penmi .ije mi ba xe draci fe lonu lo nakni sovda kernelo cu gasnu vauzo'o* -This beginning of kaivalya is very like a fertilization, in which I'm assigned the role of the male haploid nucleus. (Lojban)

11. 2330th year. Aia.

«Matt, Matt,» Aia whispered, bending to her brother. «Let's finish your meal and go play.»

"Uh-huh," Matt beamed.

As quickly as he could, he scraped the rests of porridge from the bowl, stuffed them into his mouth and nodded, which meant that he was ready: he loved when Aia was playing even more than when she was serious. Aia's game could mean anything.

"Put on your jacket and go," she whispered, getting up from the table. "It's evening there, cold and foggy."

The space outside the house was dark, foggy and cool. Matt was wearing a thick woolen jacket, and Aia was wearing a light blue sweater. In addition she had a backpack with all sorts of stuff.

«AARRGH...»something didn't even growled, but passed like a heavy shiver upon the ground, legs and spine. «AARRGH...»

"Oh!" Matt panted slightly.

The mist swayed and thickened. The shreds of fog floated among shaggy green houses and stars, keeping things from kids.

Aia pressed the finger to her lips, showing: "Hush!"

Matt nodded, blinked and was dumbfounded at the same time: somewhere on the edge of visibility a huge tower swam, and he realized that it was someone's leg. Then there was a rustle, and a whole sea of small white caudate creatures ran and fluctuated below him.

These creatures did not pay any attention to Matt, their bodies were slightly denser than the mist over their heads, and they were hurrying in the same direction as the tower had just floated.

Matt bent down and touched the white back of one of them, and to his surprise, its wool turned into a snow, and where his finger had just touched, a melted stain spreaded upon the small furry animal back. The creature screamed in horror and rushed off.

Matt raised his head and saw as a second huge tower swam across in the mist.

«Aia, don't scare Matt,» said the voice from the open house.

"Mom, I'm not scared," whispered the boy and turned to Aia. "Where are we going to?"

Aia pointed to her eyes with two fingers, then pointed forward, and then folded her palms in the form of roof: we're going to look at the house.

«Let's deceive the gravitator?» she whispered into Matt's ear and winked.

"Yes!"

"Then hold on." She'd exhaled easily into Matt's ear, and the air around the boy was flapping as a thick cold jelly, rustling, buzzing and transforming into a vast cloud of large furry white bumblebees, which grabbed him by his jacket and his wide trousers and pulled him up.

Aia grinned, the transparent wings unfolded behind her shoulders, she jumped lightly up and followed the white flock of bumblebees.

The gravitator was a complicated openwork structure in the very zenith of a colossal glassium hemisphere: a relatively small active zone was surrounded by a chain reaction control system, a radiation protection, a halo of reflectors, and an enormous web of thin gravity guides made from niobium berylide.

Between the center of the cobweb and the highest point of the transparent dome, in the cellular weightless nucleus sat the Bibich generator – as a large silvery spider, and along its outer perimeter – between the extreme guides and the outer dome – was arranged a wide "pedestrian" zone, a narrow glassium corridor.

It was what Aia was referring to, when she said "to look at the house."

Strictly speaking, there was no pedestrian corridor. Being located outside the gravity guides, it remained in the gravitational «shadow» and it was impossible to walk along it. But as well it was impossible to fall. Matt, who was almost forcibly stucked into the transparent pipe and abandoned there to the mercy of fate, spread out like a frog and was swimming now from wall to wall in a state of a deep euphoria.

It was impossible to surprise him with stars or nebulae (the stars on Alpha always were large, and the nebulae bright), but how his small world looks from such a height he saw for the first time.

"Look, Aia!" he whispered. "Alpha is so small!"

"Yes, honey. Alpha is small. But what a beautiful place..."

"Yes! Yes!" Matt was enchanted. "There is a – you see?! – a large puddle there! There is Valley! And the white spots near it are fog! And that white mount is the one who walked by me with his big feet! Aia, who is this?! ..

"Ah... It's nobody," the girl laughed. "This is the form. It will soon melt. Look at the crest on its back: it's already raveling out. That"s because I"m so far away from it, and so close to this thing," and she pointed to Bibich's silvery spider.

The Makers are happy people, thought Matt, because they are never afraid of anything.

But he wasn't a Maker – he was a small seven-year-old boy hanging out in a black infinity, and so was afraid.

For the first time in his life, his house seemed to him fragile and unreliable. The Earth, hanging nearby in the darkness as a damp blue-green ball, looked much more fundamentally.

«Have you ever been there?» he asked quietly at the sister sailing beside him.

"I was born there," Aia responded. "And I lived there until they sent me here."

"What for?"

"They're afraid of us, Matt. Next to us they feel like a fake paper fireplace, in which the most real fire is burnt.

"Fire?" the boy naively looked at her in surprise. "Are you kidding?"

Aia shook her head: no.

"They just don't understand anything!"

Yes, she nodded, they don't understand.

"I never thought you looked like a fire," Matt said. "I thought it's the only way people should be. Not be able to do everything, no. To think like you think. To love, to see, not to be afraid."

"They just have a lot of conditionalities there." Aia'd breathed on the clear glassium surface separating both of them from the open space, and on the misty spot has drawn a small smiling raccoon. "Their whole life is built on conditionalities. They are born in conditionalities, live in it and die in it. They're afraid of change, because they do not keep up with them."

"But they do not see the most interesting things!"

Yes, she nodded, they do not see. Yes, the most interesting.

"You know, Aia, five minutes ago I wanted to go there much more than now," Matt sighed. "But still I'd like to see a lot. For example, how Benji lives."

"But you already know how Benji lives," Aia smiled. "It's unlikely you'd see anything new there." Benji sleeps in the engine room. And you were there. Benji sees the Internet as a dream. And there you were, too.

"Yes," the boy agreed. "I was there."

"But, if you want, I'll tell you about the people who live there."

"Yes, I do want," said Matt.

He swam to the glassium, next to the painted raccoon breathed another misty spot and painted on it two little figures holding hands.

"Tell me."

«If we consider the Maker is the only normal person, then we can say the people who live there each and every have mental deviations from the norm,» Aia said. «They constantly demand each other's close attention and special approach. They're not able to check and correct their actions in accordance with the conditions of their reality. They don't control their painful experiences, and each of them has at least one paranoid symptom on standby.»

"What kind of symptom?" asked Matt.

"Paranoid. They don't know how to agree with themselves and therefore believe that it's impossible to agree with others as well. And the less they love each other, the more they justify their suspicions about the general dislike."

"It's strange," the boy was surprised. "I thought the less you know, the more you need a company..."

"Yes, it's true. But only the less you know, the worse you have contact with those who you need. I think they are alone because their souls are blind."

"How my soul is too..." Matt concluded sadly.

"Well, in general, like your," agreed Aia. "All of you are very sensitive to subtle emotions, but you answer them so haphazard... But don't be upset, anyone can start to deliberate, perhaps it will come to you with experience. Look what I have."

She took her backpack off, rummaged in it, took out a large ball of silver thread, winked and held it out to her brother:

"Well, where is this hole that we come in through? Put this thing in the hole.

Matt took a thin silver thread еthat was twisted in a hank and looked around searching for the entrance, which was now supposed to be the exit.

In the hole, on the glassium edge, sat a large white furry bumblebee. Matt stuck the end of the thread into the hole, and the bumblebee immediately buzzed, took off, grabbed it and pulled it from the hole down toward the far sole.

In the first instant, confused, Matt dropped the hank from his hands, but guessing what it was all about, laughed, caught a spinning zero-gravity hank and let the thread unwind through his crossed fingers. The bumblebee was pulling it down, the thread was vibrating and buzzing in Matt's hands, and the other big white bumblebees flew to this buzzing from everywhere. First they sat on the thread, then filled the opening, swarmed over Matt, who was laughing, and then had dragged him out from hole and carried down.