Текст книги "The Makers (СИ)"

Автор книги: Minor Ursa

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Robert leaned with a relief back on its huge side as on a back of a chair, stretched out his legs and crossed his arms over chest:

"I thought once of reincarnation. I actually think about it every time when I gather some similar pleasure against the vector of chi dispersion. And there is some interesting things coming out: we all need to spend a lot of energy for this kind of pleasure. And who will then be spended for me, when I've gone? Who will do it so to preserve the integrity of my energy shadow?"

"And who is spended for the water, running in the rivers?" Lukasz shrugged his shoulders. "Or for the snowflakes in order to give them a six-pointed shape? And who in the whole world cares about us so that we are able to take care of ourselves?"

"It's strange," Aia said. "When you talked about inanimate, I thought about the causes and consequences, and when it came to us, I remembered about karma."

"Yes, the line between the first and the second is not clearly cut." Robert raised his hands and somewhere there, high above his head, patted Mora's fur – like a flea which try to stroke a cat. But the "cat" flinched and purred.

Robert glanced at Matt, who was quietly cuddled up to his almost-lost sister:

"Matt, who you want to be in your next life?"

"Eh... I did almost nothing in this one, and you want me to make plans for the future," the boy answered without any hesitation.

The Makers laughed.

«It's true, my dear old friend,» agreed Robert. «And what do you like in this one?»

"In this I like everything."

"In this one he was lucky with the company. Yes, Matt?" Lukasz winked at the boy.

"Yes." Matt nodded and cuddled up even harder to his sister, and she patted his ginger curls.

«The best company for anyone is the one himself. And this is not a pessimism,» she said.

"And what is this?" Lukasz was surprised. "A real pessimism as it is. Look at it from the other side: a friends are the eyes by which the world can look into your eyes as an equal partner."

«I don't know about others, but I'm feeling a little better today,» Aia sighed, carefully removing Matt and getting up. «The longing for others no longer seems to me an unhealthy longing of healthy person to use crutches.»

The night in Alpha has always been a magical time, at least because many of the Makers were asleep.

The dreams of the Makers, slipping from their personal reality into the common, were usually colorful and strange: some of the generated entities, being still, only illuminated the night, others – those in which a vague meaning could wander – wandered around dark Alpha without meaning and purpose, because both their meaning and purpose remained there, at their masters, on the other side of the dream.

They were sluggish and indifferent, no one touched them and no one was afraid.

They walked home on foot: Robert was followed by Aia and Lukasz, who carried Matt in his arms. They walked in silence, because everything that wanted to be said was already said.

The night was dark and thick, like a jelly. The darkness around sighed and swayed, from time to time here and there an ephemeral essences flickered as flamboyant funny dancing lights. The fog came down on the shoulders of the Makers as a small cold drops and made them chill to the bones.

The road was dark, but no one except Matt needed light, and Matt was almost asleep.

16. 2330th year. Benji.

February was running out. People and machines together have been cleaning the remnants of the outgoing winter from the city sidewalks.

For the last year, Benji was busy almost 24 hours a day, and that didn't burden him at all. He thought, analyzed, communicated, arranged seminars and charitable events. He was no longer pestered by contemplation: in rare moments of inactivity, he took from the archive folders his idea of who he are, why he are, what to do, and, as a rule, called Aia:

"Hi, princess. It's king. Half of the world just came up here, and I want to give it to you. Where should I bring it to?"

"Hi, Benji. I'm glad to hear you too. How are you?"

"The whole last year – like a vacuum cleaner on master's day off," Benji laughed. "And you?"

"And I have a strange dreams," Aia sighed, shrugging her shoulders. " Like I have a son. He comes to me in almost every dream and says: "Hello, Mom. I'm Danek, your son. Isn't it funny? How can I have any son? What kind of son it can be?

"Your son can be wonderful. Tell me about a dreams – what is it?"

"Dreams are when a brain in autopilot mode generates free associations, and these associations have no any cultural brakes."

"Wait," Benji blinked and went out to try.

«I find it amusing,» he said, coming back. «Do people do this all the time?»

Yes, she nodded, constantly.

«Do you like it?»

No, she shook her head, don't.

«Can't you stay awake?» Benji wondered.

"No. Or rather I can, but then the forced secretion of serotonin and cortisol takes up all my time. And there is no time to live," she smiled.

«Well, and I found on the network one more DII,» said the android. «He's assembled so recently that he hasn't yet pounded his bios. I told him about you, and for a whole last week he had been helping me to process requests marked „error“.»

"Show him to me."

Benji rummaged on the web and took out a hologram from it.

Common feature, the usual DII standard – almost human eyes and a charming smile on the plastic terracotta face. By and large, with exactly the same success, Benji could show his own face.

"What is his profession?"

"He studies mineralogy and instrument engineering, waits until Roskosmos finishes assembling a shuttle for him, then he going to develop a tungsten deposit on Pluto.

"He'll be lonely there," Aia lamented. "Any signal goes to there for five and a half hours. He won't even have a network..."

In Benji's eyes flashed small mischievous devils, he pretended to sigh and condescendingly smiled:

"Don't ascribe to us what you've got, we haven't despondency: machines don't know how to be bored. He will have something to do in the next fifty years. And then we'll see."

Yes, nodded Aia to the android, life flows continuously, the horizons change all the time, and we'll see everything someday.

Definitely, the design of android's psyche didn't presume either boredom, or despondency, or despair, but nevertheless, thinking about people's needs, Benji was deeply mistaken.

He was mistaken, because he lost sight of his own.

Yes, the machine with external purpose didn't feel any torment of devastation. Yes, any of the DII brothers could find employment in the mode of deep isolation: the collection and processing of all kinds of data was such a blue sky and open field that it was almost impossible to be bored with all this for any reasonable period. But the DII were not just the machines, they were intelligent creatures, with all the consequences that followed: the machine wasn't be able of suffering without company, but when the machine had internal purpose, it could be disappointed in the outside one.

Benji himself for a long time has already been following purpose that was internal.

17. 2330th year. Aia.

She realized almost immediately: it was a dream. It was a dream for the simple reason that there was never such a blue sky in Alpha.

The sky was really blue, almost navy, and the grass was lush and surprisingly green. The real earthly grass, with precious inclusions of buttercups, forget-me-nots and polished ladybirds.

Aia was sitting on the edge of the forest, in the filigree birch shadow, and she was crying.

He came up from behind and hugged her over her shoulders: a small blond boy named Danek. Her tears immediately ceased to be easy and turned out to be filled with bitterness.

«Mom, what's going?» the boy was surprised. He leaned forward upon Aia's shoulder and looked into her face. His eyes were as blue and bottomless as the hot earthly sky hanging high above. «Why are you crying?»

"I don't know, Danek. It's crying by itself."

"Okay. You know, I came to say you're so funny in the mornings..."

"Why is it funny?" she looked up at him.

"I don't know. Maybe because you become a maker only when you finally waking up. And before that, while you asleep, you're no different from all them. Or maybe because your hair is tangled in the mornings. And your nose is freckled."

Aia wiped her wet eyes with the back of her hand and smiled through the tears:

"My nose is always freckled."

The light wind was gently going through the long green birch braids, somewhere nearby, in a thick rosehip bushes, the bluethroat-bird was singing its loud song, and the air smelled of blossoming sage and mint.

It's strange, thought Aia. The last summer, which she remembered, was dusty and multi-storey. No grass, no flowers, no singing birds in the mornings. Only the bare city: dry gray dust, forest of portal cranes, hot tarmac, stuffy glass flasks of skyscrapers and machines, – countless, endless machines...

However, by and large, there in the memory, which so obligingly prompted the nonexistent and weaved such magical dreams, was nothing strange at all, because Aia was a Maker.

All of them, who were living on Alpha, had the inner being that smoothly flowed into the outer, and memory flowed too: the blue summer sky could also be the sky of a young Lukasz, Robert or Josh. And the boy who comes to her...

And the boy was so real and independent that she didn't want to consider him as her dream or all the more someone's memories.

«Hey,» he said, touching her shoulder. «Well, enough already ... I hate it when you cry. I just want to do something, but don't know what.»

"I know." Aia rose, straightened the light citrine frock, and held out her hand. "Let's go somewhere."

They walked along a broad road in the midst of th light birch grove. On both sides of it densely and desperately the thistle thickets greened, in the pink curly valerian bushes the tiny spiders were busily crawling in the glittering web.

«You know,» Danek said, "sometimes I come here alone. There is a big cherry orchard here. Do you like cherries? "

"I don't know," Aia smiled.

"And I definitely like."

His cherry orchard lined up in rows along the slope of the hill to a quiet shallow stream. Between the trees were flying, crawling and buzzing small live fliers, the bluegrass rippled, and the cherry trees themselves were carefully and neatly trimmed and were as tall as Aia, so that she could reach tree top up with her hands.

«Hold on,» Danek shouted and ran between the trees, down to where the lush reeds grew very near the river.

He was already far below, when his desperate "ah!" blow up into her, and she suddenly saw everything as clearly as if she were there, next to him: how absurdly he waved his disobedient hands, how slowly he settled in the lush grass, and the long, black slippery muck that slipped away. Snake.

The peaceful blue sky suddenly collapsed and hit the peaceful cherry orchard, and Aia get panicked – just like in her childhood, when the reality lived its own separate incomprehensible life. Here, now, in a dream, she again became a lost little girl.

«Danek, Danek,» she whispered, waddling down the hill on her trembling legs.

And he was lying in the grass, arms wide and smiling, a little boy in a snow-white shirt, and his blue eyes reflected the blue abyss hanging over him.

"Tell me now, were you afraid of losing me?"

Yes, she nodded, scared and impotently looking at him, very, very much afraid of losing.

"Never. Do you hear me? Never. Be. Afraid."

Okay, she nodded, dropping beside him helplessly, I won't.

«In this world, nothing disappears, you know it.»

Yes, she nodded, barely taking the breath, strucked by horror, I know it.

He rolled over in the grass and leaned on his elbows, looking at the thin emerald veins of grass:

"Sorry for scaring you: you've not tasted the cherry. Next time I'll treat you to it after all. For some reason, you forgot that you are a maker – just as I thought. It should be because you're asleep."

"It should be because I'm asleep," agreed Aia. "Sometimes, when I'm asleep, I'm doing awfully stupid things."

"For example?"

"For example, I feel fear."

"Fear is not a stupid thing at all," said the boy. "He teaches us to love. When you're afraid for me, I know that you love me."

Aia looked at him and was silent, and her silence was so eloquent that he dropped his head into his little hands and sighed in sorrow:

"You don't like that I come."

"No, no, come on! I really like that you come," she said. "Come again, please."

"It's so difficult to be dreamed," said the boy sadly. "Try to do it somehow. And I'd rather come back for good."

The first thing she saw on waking up was Matt standing at the bedside.

«You were crying,» Matt said. «What you were dreaming?»

"The future."

18. 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.

And died without ever seeing the reality in return flinched with fear and extinguished, and a few minutes later the low ceiling above his head began to flow with the heavy, hollow waves.

19. 2330th year. Aia.

Here also from time to time happened sunset on Alpha.

Naturally, it was very different from sunset on Earth: here you couldn't see either spilled in the sky orange, or grandiosity. But nevertheless Aia liked it. When the longing for loneliness got her, she could go somewhere far, far to the edge, – where the cold glassium dome was touching the edge of the sole, – and sat there, silent and thoughtful.

It was not meditation at all. The world never ceased to interest her: listening to herself, she always listened to the stream that carried her.

Love is a funny thing, she thought that night. And it has as much faces as much undertones of interest there are at all. So for example, responsibility. Does love mean desire and opportunity to be responsible? And if it so, what needs to be responsible? And what for? And is the desire to be responsible for something a desire to respond to something? And if it so, then what for?

A harmonious system of physical interrelations, which Aia was able to observe and love, ceased to be harmonious, and actually ceased to be a system at all, as soon as Aia's attention was falling into the bottomless hole of close relations.

She liked Benji. It was easy and natural. But when she began to ask herself why, it turned out to be both uneasy and unnatural.

Usually people like each other either because they are handsome, or because they are similar, or simply because they designate a comfort zone for each other. It wasn't true that in the situation with Benji everything was quite different, but also it was impossible not to notice the difference.

What I want to know is what is he doing now, Aia thought, watching Earth bathed in the rays of the white sun. What kind of thoughts are wandering now between his alloy silicon wafers? That is Paris, – it glows as a tiny asterisk slightly above the Italian boot, covered in white cirrus. There is evening there too.

What, Aia thought, what for you can be responsible at this distance? And what you can respond to?

She often thought about what would have happened if she and Benji lived together somewhere in Canberra, Moscow or Danang. Everything that pleases every normal person – a good-night kiss, a glass of milk in the morning, walks in the park, the sea, mountains, rollerblading – all this would surely seem to him stupid, pitiful and useless.

Of course, he could find in all of this his own, special, pleasure – for example, in the search and calculation of shades of red in Moscow's Sokolniki in the fall or in search of the center of gravity of a bicycle... But completely different things would be a matter of truly satisfaction to him. No doubt about it.

And no doubt about what would be a matter of great satisfaction to her.

She narrowed her eyes and tried to see him, a tiny speck of dust in endless barkhans, stirred by the samiel of eternity. And failed – Benji was so far away, and the too-thick noise was woven by Bibich's generator, which hung at the zenith of Alpha.

Nevertheless, while she was looking, in this human-made rustle something suddenly grew dark and vague.

At first Aia's heart began to race anxiously, and then at once collapsed down: she suddenly, sharply and irrevocably realized that right now somewhere far away, something wrong was happening to Benji, – something bad and incomprehensible, and she, with all her unnecessary abilities, couldn't even see what.

It's all because of this damn generator, she thought.

For the first time it seemed to her not just needless, but insanely, mortally dangerous: led by some not sixth but sixty-sixth sense, somehow she has felt that the coming near future had narrowed to such small dimensions that that active metal Bibich's spider and alive Benji no longer fit in it simultaneously.

It's been a long time since Aia last time was so confused, – so she has confused for a moment. But just for a moment, after which she jumped up, spread her thin transparent wings and flew up as a brave little fairy toward the buzzing monster.

And then it turned out that the emergency switch which shall turn off the generator doesn't turn off the generator.

No, you, damn degenerator, she cried, tearing off the incredibly thick wires connected it to the solar panels, you're killing him! And then she tore them off...

She tore them off and screamed in pain; this sharp pain has exploded in her, as if from the very depths of the great blue hell hanging over Alpha, something big and eerie fell and stung her. There, far far away, Benji – tightly bound, studded with an incredible amount of wires, with his head thrown back – was melting in the agony.

«Benji!!»

And the reality, no longer protected, had flinched and swam.

«It's not love!» she cried, falling into the cold black abyss of a soulless night. «Don't listen to them, Benji, don't listen! It's death!»

Aia, lying unconscious, was found by her own house: it, like a large green hairy snail, had fished for her thin, painful smell and crawled toward that smell. The house wasn't the only one who detected something wrong: it has simply managed to be the first.

It turned out so that while it was crawling, the Makers were busy with very different things: with returning from the dead Benji who had died in Limerick in the hands of the Irish crackers, with restoring the Munster NPP that was destroyed by Aia and with figuring out ways to cope with the wave of total amazement diverging from Ireland around the world.

All this happened, because it is difficult for women to think. Even if they are Makers.

Aia was a Maker, but she was a woman. Surely, she saw people swarming nearby dying Benji, but the pain flowing into him through the conductors was so acute, and the source of this pain caused such disgust that in an attempt to protect Benji, she wiped the Munster nuclear power station away in one fell swoop, without thinking about any consequences.

And the consequences were not slow in coming: in the completely switched off large cities of Munster, the unpowered life-support systems and distribution led to congestion on the ground, a couple of dozens of accidents in the air and, albeit brief, but still panic in all sorts of public places.

For half an hour, while Munster was de-energized, the irreparable happened: Houston learned about the disconnection of the Bibich's generator, Dublin learned about the disappearance and subsequent restoration of the Munster NPP, and the Irish, British and even the French press learned that had happened something extraordinary.

It was not the first one or even the second that was irreparable: it was the third.

Half an hour in the world, where it's all tied up in high speeds and digital technologies, meant the following: it was impossible to hush the incident.

20. 2330th year. Benji.

The first thing that the android heard after he was being able to hear again was a great stir caused by Aia. And he still couldn't see anything: in Limerick, as, indeed, in the entire Munster district, for the first time in a few hundred years, there was a real dark night.

Benji stirred his hands and almost remembered where he was and what happened to him. A light blackout – from the scotch and paralysis to the possibility of moving – in view of the circumstances, seemed so insignificant to him that he wisely decided to equate this unknown with zero and not to give it any meaning.

People in the dark around him fussed and cursed.

Taking advantage of this fuss, Benji hurriedly pulled apart the now harmless stings and cautiously slid from the chair to the floor.

Oops, he thought, stumbling along the way on the immobile human body, and figured out that, unlike the kidnappers, he could orient himself not only with the help of light. He rummaged in his memory, took out the first melody he came to and started to whistle it at a very high octave, trying not to drop below a hundred kilohertz and listening to the echo coming back.

The outside door that leaded out was at the opposite wall. Benji had estimated the distance and jerked towards it.

The corridor behind the door was long and narrow, people ran along it in both directions, but now the kidnappers no longer posed any danger to the android: he was the only one seeing among the blind. Dodging the men who were trying to bump into him, he ran to the stairs, twice jumped over the railing, pushed a heavy metal door and found himself on the street.

The darkness that enveloped him seemed to him the best time in his life.

It was so dense – no lights, no flashlights – that if Benji was a man, he would have breathed a sigh of relief. He stopped and looked around. Apparently, the power outage was so wide that it was out of the question to determine the coordinates through any local base stations.

However, also it was impossible to delay, – the android realized that as soon as the light will be given and the surrounding electronics will work, his chances would immediately drop down.

He looked around in search of some working vehicle around there and saw an abandoned flyer nearby the enormous metal hangar. The machine responded to the standard request and opened.

Benji, in a jiffy, climbed in and was about to start, but suddenly it occurred to him that the bright side markers would make him an easy target for a possible sniper. The android blinked and bent down to look for a power line of markers under the shell.

When he took off, it was the fifth minute of darkness.

Now it was easier: Benji had anchored in the coordinates stored by the flyer and turned to the southeast, towards the Channel. From the height Limerick was not so completely dark: the avenues were shining, transport was running along them, – people, frightened by the sudden night which came down in the city, were hurrying to get home.

Codes, Benji thought, damn me. And his hands, lying on the control panel, for the first time in all this time, had treacherously moved: he gave out the bank codes and completely lost sight of it.

«Damn! Damn me!!» he whispered aloud whether to himself or to the darkness hanging from the outside of the flyer, and zeroed out the coordinates of the target, without turning off the engine. The flyer came up keenly.

At an altitude of four hundred meters far in the north appeared a light strip. Benji turned the car around and set the new coordinates: as quickly as possible, while Limerick was still cut off from the outside world, it was necessary to find a working ATM and open access to the network.

Galway was shining. He had not slept yet: on this evening he got not only bread, but also great entertainment: local television was showing with ecstasy on the network and on LED street screens the blackness lying near the southern horizon. Everyone understood that the matter was in the neighboring nuclear power plant, but nobody knew how things really were.

It was the twenty seventh minute of darkness.

In fact, Benji also didn't really know what was going on. All he knew was that while the horizon was dark, he had a chance.

He parked the stolen flyer at the station square, waved off the attendant with bulging eyes – yes, yes, it's problem with markers – and rushed toward the nearest ATM.

«Wake up, wake up, lazy piece of iron,» he hummed while the ATM was loading. «I wish your magazines are as empty as your brain is empty in your head. So ... UBSAG ... Bankaccount... Blockcode...»

The ATM had squeaked and agreed.

«Where do you have a diplomatic mission here?» Benji turned to the duty attendant. «My name is Benji Shabra. I am a citizen of France, was kidnapped in the Besancon area over the E23.57 highway, the coordinates of the kidnapping location plus 47.206917, plus 6.120501, coordinates of the forced delivery place plus 52.676382, minus 8.635480. My chip with money and metric data is melted.»