Текст книги "The Makers (СИ)"

Автор книги: Minor Ursa

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Aia waited until the last tiny white furry wad, busily buzzing, disappeared into the hole, and slid after him.

12. 2328th year. Benji.

It was snowing through the morning in Paris.

As a white flies that looked like Aia's bumblebees, it softly and uselessly circled in the cold autumn air, covering and covering the dock and the half-empty cargo terminal.

Benji didn't know anything about the snowfall. He was busy. The night before, at the stroke of midnight, he found that he had turned fifty, and his former destiny had lost its former strength.

He was just sitting on the forum of linguists and figuring out the subtleties of language tools that serve to create "unclear" semantics, when all this had covered him.

If at that moment there was someone who was watching Benji from the sidelines, he would say outright that at 0:00 the android was frozen.

Not that the knowledge of the termination of the employment contract and the absence of obligations in relation to the now-former employer took him by surprise – no: he didn't forget the necessary things in principle, much less he didn't forget the things that could radically change his life.

It's just that, this knowledge, at this very moment has ceased to be irrelevant and has acquired such a great importance that the android with a slight perplexity noted that he was surprised at the change that had taken place within him.

These sudden changes didn't mean absence of work.

Benji was still free to deal with the work he had been assigned to until the very end of his machine age. But along with this, on the track along which the train of his life has been rushing, unexpectedly for him the first branch was formed. And Benji started thinking about it.

First, now he could stop doing anything at all and refuse any participation in this life that was the theater of absurdity. Secondly, he has acquired a choice.

The option "first" was almost immediately rejected by him as unsatisfactory due to the fact that somewhere in the distance of 1,500 kilometers from the surface of the Earth there was spinning in low orbit the fragile Citadel of Alpha with the little human girl named Aia.

There remained the option «secondly».

***

Benji vaguely imagined the processes that wandered around in the mind of little Aia, but well caught everything that concerned himself.

There are no any machines who is stupid, – it happens that the machines don't have the necessary information and the necessary ways of processing it. Benji could easily get hold first as well as second, and the time that was necessary for this operation was comparable to some simple human action such as breath or an act of quenching thirst.

Back then, two years ago, when Aia first announced to him about his exclusivity, upon returning to the home port, he blew through the Internet in search of all that would make it easier for him to understand such a very human things as interest and sympathy, and has realized that still really don't get it.

He could draw an analogy between the interest and the lack of necessary information about the world around him, but there wasn't anything which he could use as an analogy for sympathy. It was a sea in which he could not swim.

The most understandable in his network search were the ancient Greeks, who, as it turned out, found in the depths of this idea a lot of subtle differences.

Eros, as a result of certain biochemical processes aimed at the emergence of offspring, was theoretically more or less understandable to him, just as, for example, thermonuclear fusion was understandable, although he didn't use to practice it.

But further it was more difficult. What the Greeks called the philia (and what Aia most likely meant), as Benji suggested, was also a biochemical derivative, but it was closely linked to the personal choice. This derivative was what Benji has tripped over.

As a machine, he understood it would be logical if personal choice was linked to a personal gain. Moreover, he assumed that in the vast majority of cases this was exactly the case. But not in the case of Aia. As far as he understood, Aia did not expect from him any benefits and convenience.

At the same time, the love that she felt for him was not a downward love – whatever one may say, the robot was as strong and self-contained as she was. There remained cooperation – some joint work, about which neither Benji, nor (as it seemed to him), Aia still had not the faintest idea.

It's weird, he thought, when you choose a partner in a common cause before the common cause is chosen. It's more than weird.

For a moment everything that concerned people had seemed to him incomprehensible and unnatural, but only for a moment, – after which he has remembered how much the generalizations of such scales were erroneous.

Benji opened his eyes, took out his fingers from the connectors intended for them, and looked around, but all he could see turned out to be just a darkness.

For the first time in his life, the niche in which he spent almost all his free time seemed to him very tight space that was not calculated for life at all.

The android stretched out his hand into the darkness, pushed back the hatch cover and got out.

It was snowing over the morning in Paris.

Benji'd lifted his face to the sky, awakening through the a tiny iced flakes, and watched it had been floating toward him for a long time, until the snow that hasn't been melted on his terracotta face had obscured his optics.

And then he decided to act.

If I quit right now, he thought, then I would simultaneously say goodbye to the space, Aia and freedom. Therefore, before notifying the administration of Orly of his intentions, he should take care of translating these intentions into reality.

And first of all he should purchase from the employer a shuttle, which was, alas, not yet belonging to him.

The android blinked, erasing the snow from the optical lenses, and made a simple calculation in his mind: the cost of the used orbiter was about fifty million euros, his courier salary was some kind of ridiculous amount, so that, dividing the first by the second, he received result, which he has found too much big to him even with the fact that Aia was not an ordinary person.

But Benji was a machine, and machines are not stupid.

The first thing he understood was that no matter how advanced the employer was, he wouldn't ever pay such money within such a period of time, and don't turn out to be insane. The second was that now he should have studied the human market in order to outwit him.

He glanced once more at the snowy morning over Orly, at the white, snow-covered mother shuttle, turned and walked back to the dark and cold niche in the engine room. There he again stucked his thin fingers into their electronic sockets, closed his eyes and went to get acquainted with the laws of the world economy.

The snow, that he has brought inwards, hasn't been melting for a long time on his cold metal shoulders.

***

So Benji was a machine.

He could do without a London economic school or a Jewish background behind him: there were enough electronic resources like ESY and ESA at his disposal.

It took him a week to understand the theory of money and credit, a week more – the fundamentals of banking and investment management, two more – macroeconomics, taxation, civil, commercial and labor law, after which, at the very beginning of 2329, he began his great game.

The first thing which he counted on was that people let every member of the AI-DII family, when they reached the age of fifty, to take a machine retirement and feel like a human. And it meant no more and no less than the fact that, from the legal point of view, his peers DII in such a case didn't differ from people in any way and could, for example, organize their own financial project.

The second thing that he had hoped on was his, Benji's, personal ability: the law didn't limit the number of financial projects for the same individual.

At eight o'clock on January 18, 2329 Benji had to leave Orly for a short time – under the baffled looks of the Paris fonctionnaires he acquired an international passport under the name Benji Shabra.

A few hours later, at twenty-one seventeen, on one of the Icelandic servers appeared the first legal Internet Bar with procedural accompaniment, belonging to the machine with artificial intelligence. At ten thirteen on February 1 of the same year the federal institute of intellectual property in Bern became richer for one patent, and at eleven twenty-seven on May 28 in the Berne State Register for the first time in history was appeared Gmbh, belonging to the machine.

13. 2330th year. Aia.

Aia caught up with her brother very close to the ground, the sole was now only hundred meters below. She waved her hands – shoo! – and grabbed Matt by his jacket and pants, fluttering in the airflow. White flakes were blown out in all directions.

"Look down!" she shouted.

"The Valley..." gasped Matt.

While Aia was carrying him lower and lower, the water in the low part was rising, hunching, growing up in a fanciful blue fringe, and by the time when Matt's feet touched the ground, in place of the Valley there were gigantic water jungles: a colossal «trees» with flowing transparent trunks, transparent blossom and transparent thin leaves, interwoven with them and with each other liana streams, trembling underbrush.

All that what until recently were quietly and serenely floating somewhere in the Valley, was now fussy and loud shifting up and down inside of this unfathomably fantastic forest, flashing scales and fleetingly flicking its paws. And below all this in the muddy-green "grass", in color and texture very reminiscent of perennial bottom sediments, rustled those very small white animals with icy fur.

«Do you hear?» Aia quietly asked, carefully putting Matt on the ground, and Matt has really heard that somewhere near him the lemurs started singing.

«Look! Look! Water forest will remain here forever!» one of them sang enthusiastically.

"You are the foolish, foolish lemur!" outraged another one. "Humans have nothing forever!"

Aia waved her hand and raised an eyebrow: so we go?

Go, he nodded willingly.

She stepped aside, giving way to him, and behind her he noticed a path, running deep in the water forest. The path was narrow, with tiny icy flowers, glistening thickly on both sides of it in the pointy gray-green grass. Matt listened and went toward the almost hushed, subtled lemure song that still could be heard.

When Matt and Aia went out into the clearing, the lemurs were sitting by the bush, overhead there dangled a large water balls, the setting sun reflected in this balls, and inside of them swam a numerous dragonfly larvae swam.

«Chillllly...» sadly complained one of the lemurs.

His head with a white triangular spot on his forehead was lifted towards the sun, he squeezed his eyes shut and tightly pressed a long striped tail to his chest.

"But beauuuutiful..." another one comforted him.

«Hey, katta!» Aia called to them. «What are you doing here in the middle of this puddle?»

"Aia! Aia!" both lemurs jumped as the one black-and-white lump from surprise. And then they hopped over to meet them and shouted, competing with one another:

"We saw the Valley makes a forest! We ran to look!"

"We didn't see you on the bank! But there was another Maker there!"

"Another?" Matt was surprised.

"Other! Other!" the lemurs nodded happily. "We'll show! We'll!"

Matt glanced at his sister, and she nodded: "Run, run," then she smiled, took a backpack from behind her back, took out from it a transparent jar full of small scintillant sparks that moved and poked into the glass and then poured them in front of her on the ground.

The sparks broke out even brighter, spun over the path like a flock of frightened moths, and flew forward, outrunning Matt with lemurs and lighting their way.

The other was Lukasz.

He was sitting on a top of hill, where the bank of the Valley was still half an hour ago, and looking at what Aia was doing. Not interfering and, in general, not even wondering.

For three hundred years he's lived among his own kind, and now he was philosophically looking at the fluidity of the world. A long time ago he outgrew such childishness: both his daughters and both grandsons became adults a long time ago too, and he more and more often wanted to be the cause of stability, and not changes.

However, he liked to observe the other one was involved in something.

During those three hundred years that have become his personal experience, Alpha has undergone thousands and thousands of metamorphoses activated by Makers. Ever the main generator of miracles was Robert, who in his childhood first tried to turn Alpha into an interstellar ship, then into the Peruvian Selva. Then, when Robert has already a little lost his boyish craving for savagery and mystery, there, on Alpha, were already women and children, and the changes began to occur mainly for their sake.

Lukasz, for the most part, now had been observing.

This evening he came to the hill, because he liked Aia.

At times he looked at her face and saw in it himself, at times – his already grown-up daughter, at times she seemed to him just a collective image of femininity and immediacy.

As a Maker, Lukasz was radically different from the average man: he saw this femininity not as a resource to be used, but as a magical song wishing to be written.

For already several years, he had been witnessing Benji, without knowing it, had been creating his magic song from Aia. Sometimes – actively, sometimes – by the lack and silence.

Lukasz simultaneously frightened and admired this explosive mixture of the strange alien machine, that Aia wanted to resemble, and the Maker that she was, boiling first in a little girl, and then in a beautiful ginger-haired girl.

Unlike the Aia's parents, who were admirable, but still ordinary parents, Lukasz knew from his own experience: from that very magical moment when a Human wakes up in a human, the rest of mankind becomes alien to him – about the same results as a river bottom becomes alien to the dragonfly, hatching from a chrysalis.

He saw Aia'd been pouring a longing for the lost umbilical cord with humanity on his brother, re-repeating the path, which each of the Makers somehow passed in their time, and sympathized with it.

Matt was Aia's bottom, with which she could not part.

As soon as the boy in the cloud of flickering sparks appeared at the foot of the hill, Lukasz raised his hand and threw the emptiness in his direction.

The emptiness hissed, sprouted in the heavy prickly bright red drops and fell down with tinkling sounds, turning into a sparkling red lane.

The lemurs screamed in fright, jumped from the tinkling "rain" in different directions, and Matt almost immediately felt that the path, on which he was, gently warmed his frozen wet feet. And went on it further.

The lemurs hesitated. They meowed for a long time in the dark, sniffing red and gently tugging it with thin cold paws, and then had stopped being afraid and trotted after Matt.

The red lane ended at the very top.

"Hi," the darkness said in Lukasz's voice.

"Hi," the boy said.

Looking more closely, he saw in the darkness the smiling face of the Maker.

«How are you doing this?» he asked, sitting down next to Lukasz directly on the warm ground.

White Aia's sparks circled around for a while and also fell.

«Give me your hand.»

Matt stretched out his hand, and Lukasz took it, small, into his, large, and slightly shook, scattering in the air exactly the same thick red sparks.

«Wow!» Matt was delighted. "Can I do it myself?

"Shoot," Lukasz agreed.

The boy stirred his own hand, and from his fingers also fell a red drops.

By the time Aia appeared at the top of the hill, Matt, laughing, had dripped in front of the overwhelmed lemurs a whole pile of sparkling red magic.

«Just think!» remarked Lukasz to Aia, who crouched beside him. «Sometimes it takes so little to make him happy.»

Yes, Aia nodded wearily, sometimes so little, took off her sandals and prosaically buried her bare, frozen feet in the miracle created by Matt:

"And as for me in order for my soul to shut up, there is not enough height and temperature."

"It's a bad barometer," Lukasz grinned. "How can that be happiness when the soul is silent?"

"Maybe so," agreed Aia. "I mean maybe it's not. But it just asking all the time for something wrong."

"Asking for what wrong?" said Matt, who had been silent before.

"Some food for the mind, some replication, some mismatch."

"So you mean that a happy soul is dumb, blind and lonely?" Lukasz raised one eyebrow.

"I'm not so sure about that." Aia pocked the warm red "beads" with her foot, and they turned white, illuminating their faces with a ghostly blue light. "Not dumb, but satisfied, not blind and lonely, but self-sufficient."

"It's strange," Matt said. "I always believed that all Makers think alike."

"Really? Why is that?" turning to him, in chorus resented both Makers. "Only those who don't think at all think the same."

"That's like that," the boy laughed, and the darkness echoed his laughter.

All three raised their heads, peering into the darkness.

«Well, it looks like a real coven,» the darkness continued, shifting heavily round about somewhere ahead, or behind the back.

"Robert!" Matt gasped.

Lukasz and Aia exchanged glances.

«Yes, it's me,» said the big black-and-gray-haired wolf, stepping out of the shadows to the glittering white pile. His fur was wet and smelled like snowstorm and frost. «I heard you have here a joint session about self-sufficiency and loneliness.»

The wolf grinned broadly, his white-toothed smile stretched across his muzzle, and from this purely human smile from the top down has fluctuated the wave of transformation. Not at all embarrassed by his former wolfish, and now human nudity, Robert put his hand forward, showing «wait, give me a break», and, like a real wolf, he shrugged his shoulders, shaking water from them, and then winked at the others with the rustle of the appearing clothing:

"Well, let's continue about loneliness? Who will find at least one argument for the fact that we here in isolation from humanity are terribly alone, for half an hour will deserve my respect. Well, to make it more interesting to play, I"ll allow my Mora not to be interested in this person."

Apparently, in order to show that his words weren't an empty chatter, darkness around brightened, revealing an impossible surreal picture: around the patch on which they sat, lay, curling like a tremendous lazy black cat, and looked at them Robert's creature – Mora. Her eyes was black like condensed cosmic darkness, her mouth, in which all of their company could easily fit, was stretched in a grin, exactly the same as grin of its master.

Lukasz brightened up and smiled. Aia threw a worried glance at Matt, but he sighed quite as a grown-up and said:

"To whom much is given, much is required. When you see the whole world, it turns out that you are alone with this world, no matter how it looks, even if your environment is very much like you. So hello, Maker's loneliness. And loneliness in general."

"Not bad," Robert nodded, and Mora agreed, lowering her huge black head.

«But I miss Benji,» Aia said, muffling in the shawl that appeared on her shoulders. «And I'm even ready to call it loneliness.»

"It can hardly be called loneliness," Robert objected. "Quite the contrary."

"What does it mean – the contrary? I don't get it." Aia said.

"It means when you love someone, it makes you open, at least in relation to him. And where there is openness, there is no loneliness."

At these words, the huge black head of the monster grinned a little wider, showing a fence of sharp white teeth, and its eyes narrowed.

Aia shrugged her shoulders and tightly muffled herself: if it doesn't, it doesn't. Almost simultaneously in the huge Mora's eyes there appeared a slight flicker of anxiety. The monster yanked: first its mouth, which now couldn't be opened, and then – its paws, that now couldn't be stirred. Robert laughed:

"Hey, Aia!"

"You have nothing to blame her," Lukasz objected thoughtfully, looking at his feet. "And as for loneliness, then no one relieved us from any social or psychological burden that is boiling somewhere inside our cell ribosomes as fairly as in human ones." In the matter of loneliness, it does not matter who, no matter how and no matter how densely paid his attention to you, all that matters is how this attention settles in your soul."

He lifted his head and looked around at those seated, and then he looked at Aia:

"If there is one who is really cool in this regard, it's Benji. He chose to have a relationship with you, although he has quite a different chemistry..."

14. 2329th year. Benji.

From the simultaneous planning, accounting and decision-making the android was distracted by the call from the outside.

He activated the external video camera and saw three visitors beyond the hatchway: a girl in a coat of bright green fleece, a skinny guy with four cameras on his shoulder and a man in a expensive leather coat.

If Benji didn't disdain to watch the news on a daily basis, he would be able to recognize these two: the girl was Selin Juti, the chief of the evening news "France 24", and the man in the leather coat was the director of operations of Orly named Aler Leroy.

«Hello, Benji,» the girl smiled charmingly, staring straight into the camera under the friendly green eye. «France 24. We would like to interview you.»

***

"Hello, dear audience! With you the evening news and Selin Juti. Today we are at the Paris airport Orly on a visit to the most famous representative of the glorious family AI-DII, Benji Shabra. How are you, monsieur Shabra?"

"I'm a machine, I never get depressed," Benji replied, looking at his companion.

They sat in the passenger gondola. The android sat in the pilot's seat, turning with his back to the dashboard and facing the passenger room, Selin, blatantly putting one long leg on the other – in the front passenger seat, against the backdrop of a hanging compensatory suit on the far wall.

"Great," she nodded. "Tell me, Benji, how do you think: where does human bad mood come from?"

"People don't always correctly interpret what is happening to them and don't always correctly react to it," the android evasively replied. "And often it happens not because the situation so requires, but because it is so customary and understandable."

"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."

Lukasz gingerly picked up the lonely violet moth from the ground and put it on Aia's shoulder.

"Definitely! She's not a pretty good in judging of characters. Of all the twenty-five billion people, living there on Earth, and of two dozen local dummies, she's chose this machine."

«Don't be silly,» Aia waved it off like it was nothing. «Sure, if I can get to the bottom of something, it's only about my own femininity. And, of course, I'm not very good at this, because I even like being a woman. I like it so much that I'm ready to repeat this experience in one of the following lives.»

The darkness began to crackle and rustle, once again thickening and gathering into a black mass: Mora, implemented back by Robert, sighed, heavily spreaded a long dragon body on the top of the hill and again curled as a huge cold black cat around the Makers who were sitting in a tight circle.