The Makers
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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.