The Makers
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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.