The Makers
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***
The world was excited. None of the cameras had the opportunity to record the resurrection of Alice, but several mice, resurrected by Lukasz, became heroes of latest world news.
The crowd by and large didn't worry. The crowd gladly swallowed the new blocks of sensations alternating with advertising, in which flashed Lukasz's face, then white coats, then someone's epaulettes, and after that the crowd leisurely drank the advertised beer, worked, rested and made the children.
But the World Establishment found itself face to face with a mismanaged confusion: Lukasz could in jest to break the harmonious financial and economic system of the whole planet. He could, in theory, do such things, which the economic elite even could not imagine.
The panic was both amusing and puzzling for Lukasz.
The first and last Bibich's generator, assembled in the Russian National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute", generated the necessary field, but instead of, as expected, looping the strings back on themselves, it, confused by the presence of powerful terrestrial gravity, only slightly distorted them.
The humanity has meanwhile been deciding what to do with Lukasz.
The proposals were considered from the most prosaic to the most incredible. Of course, one of the first proposals that received was a banal liquidation of the Maker on the principle of "no man, no problem". And Lukasz knew this. Moreover, he also knew that the humanity, in its stubborn pursuit of good nature, will end up with leaving him alive.
The final decision was not easy, but beautiful. It even did a credit to the humanity: the humanity decided not to repeat the experience of ancient Judea and leave its next messiah alive. It was decided to organize a large orbital station, covered with a Bibich's shield, the main attraction of which would be the only one Maker - Lukasz Lansky.
So Alpha appeared on the Earth's orbit.
4. 2322nd year. Benji.
Benji has long realized that the human beings, unlike the robots and Makers, misunderstand many things. Self-understanding in itself doesn't bring to people any relief.
A long time ago, through the work of Appelbaum, humanity asserted that patients of psychiatric clinics are not cured simply by reading their case descriptions and by the results of psychological tests. For some incomprehensible reason, neither the explanation of the causes nor the description of the consequences help them. People don't understand the Universe.
The different things are robots. Or Makers. Both those and others did not experience illumination, but they constantly lived in it. One's by virtue of the fact that from birth untill to very death were free from the burden of instincts and the unconscious, others because of the close integration of their personal experience into the external universal gestalt.
Benji was an android of the class AI-DII and did not belong to the first generation. He served on the shuttle and was engaged in the delivery of the newly announced makers to Alpha. He was the only member of the crew of his small ship.
The fact that the spot was held by him, rather than a man, was explained not so much by the amendment to the "World Declaration of Rights" adopted by the United Nations two and a half centuries ago, but by the fact that the human would not agree to serve in such work.
No, it was not difficult. Quite the contrary. The shuttle was not at all the top of the engineering genius. It was a usual small orbiter, the only unusual feature of which was that for convenience it was equipped with an active-passive docking device "pin-cone" of a non-standard type. The passive half of the device protruded in Alpha - in a place where the arch of its durable glassium dome converged with the central sole, and the active half almost belonged to Benji.
The singularity of the gateway made the small shuttle unfit for any other use.
Is it worth mentioning that the flights were made sometimes only once a decades and led to the fact that this job without any additional work was so low-paid that even the most true ascetic could not be able to make a living in this way?
Benji has been assigned to the shuttle since his birth and this suited him.
The answer to the question, why it's he, and not the ordinary machine, properly programmed and not having the slightest idea of the specificity of the task being performed, was also obvious to him. The Makers were a very unconventional category of passengers who received a bonus from the Universe and compensated for this bonus by a sharp restriction of its use.
The "World Declaration of Rights" ordered the Makers to use Alpha and only Alpha in order to preserve the rights of the others.
***
Benji didn't have a true psyche, or rather, his psyche was radically different from the human's one.
Such an existence would be unbearable for the average person, but he wasn't a human. There were a completely different components in the logical structure of his computing system: in the intervals between flights, Benji felt great, climbing into a deep niche in the engine compartment of his non-standard ship and stucking his fingers into its electronic connectors, and the energy flowing from the solar panels located on the wings of his ship was more than enough for him to drift in the realm of unlimited possibilities of IEEE 802.11.
The pleasure that Benji received while traveling the World Wide Web wasn't the pleasure of a drug addict.
Yes, life, blazing during the spare time in his fixed body, was even brighter than the periods of stirring activity for the benefit of his employer. If an android had had a human experience, he could compare his immobile network's years with the state of the unborn human fetus: Benji's fingers, tightly stucked into the narrow feeder connectors of the parental shuttle, looked like a thin umbilical cord, connecting his fragile and small body with a boundless outer ocean.
But even if he wished, if he had had any wishes, he could hardly imagine such a caricature situation, in which the narcotic hangover would torment his processor during the withdrawal syndrome.
Yes, it's true that Benji liked the semantic ripples that the human race resented in the net. Yes, it's true that Benji's favorite pastime was a study of the semantics of sign systems. Yes, it's true that sometimes he seemed to himself a hooked worm, who ponders the fishing. But it's also true that he didn't depend on it at all.