"My..." Lukasz closed his eyes. "My plans for the next couple of days can be expressed in one word - you."
***
"People! People!" screamed the lemurs, waiting on the inside of Alpha for the equalization of pressure in the airlock. "A lot of them! A lot! We missed you!"
And people smiled and waved their hands in response. Both old and new.
The former were condescending, the new ones were shy and surprised. And then the lock was opened.
Both of the lemurs jumped up to say that the rains all the time went on regularly, that the oxygen content in the air without people is not less than here ever was, that the glassium is durable and transparent, that the Earth is hanging in the sky for days on end.
"We waited for you! Waited! Why have you been there so long?! So long!" they lamented.
***
Definitely, Alpha was not quite a ship after all, because the women who appeared there brought with them no trouble, but a new life.
After their appearance on Alpha, the first walking house was born - big, shaggy, soft, green and obedient. He, small and shy, was given to Lara by Robert.
As a round, large-eyed lump, he'd been crawling slowly along the dining room floor, looking and with great pleasure eating everything that could be digested, sometimes forgetting and licking the human hands and feet that came along the way, and when the burning white sun emerged from behind the Earth, the house sat in the Valley at the very water, fluffed its fragrant green hair and froze in a quiet chlorophyll bliss.
When Lara's son was born, the house had grown to the size of a elephant calf.
His main duty was to carry and entertain the baby, than he was extremely pleased and proud.
For whole days he tirelessly circled along the Alpha's perimeter or along the one of its intricate trajectories, carrying a small human being in its breathing bag, like in a cradle. In such a simple way the house gradually used to be a house.
Some time later the soft transparent windows grew and formed in the house, then on the ceiling of the boy's room sprouted two luminescent bands, and then this room splitted and produced something remotely resembling a shower to those who knew what a shower was.
Every morning the house sticked into the cradle its feelers with colored rattling balls, used as toys for the boy, and every night sung the lullabies.
In this situation, Lara, being a mother, wasn't bothered her motherhood at all - she fed her son when he was hungry, played and talked with him, and when fatigue took over - gave the baby into the soft green gizzard, thereby making happy both - the baby and his house.
***
When Robert's son was a year old, Alice gave birth to a daughter.
Lukasz, who knew from the very beginning that his daughter was destined to become a Maker, didn't hasten this event, because he remembered too vividly how difficult it was for him to cope with the large-scale creations that used to arrive at nights. For the same reason, his doughter spent all her childhood under his supervision.
When Robert's house grew enough to accommodate all of them simultaneously without overcrowding, they often got together - playing with children, laughing, singing and drawing.
***
By the time when Benji first appeared on Alpha in 2278, Alpha already was a small settlement of a dozen people, and five of them were the Makers.
10. 2278th year. Benji.
Benji learned about Alpha as well as about much else almost simultaneously with the awakening of self - awareness, through the planned information loading.
Everything happened under the direction of the previous generation AI-DII group, immediately after the assembly was finished - during simple start-up and adjustment procedures.
A series of five "newborn" metal-plastic brothers with the AI index in the form of dead insensitive machines was delivered to the nursery and seated in deep white armchairs.
Life poured in them in turn, one by one - at first the installation of the OS, then, while the awakening androids was still as clean as a babies, they were loaded with a short High Threat Course - the basic laws of sociology, from which each of them in the next few minutes independently, but inevitably deduced the necessary moral guidelines.
Of course, there were many legal subtleties related to the purposefulness of production and use of creatures like Benji.
Humanity treated the first generation of AI-DII, like a group of their own highly gifted children: they were admired, feared, but their independence was no less ghostly than the independence of a snow-removing machinery.
The machines belonged to the institutes that developed them, the machines worked for their developers, the machines were bought and sold...
And all this continued until the fifth DII of the first generation committed a suicide, stepping out into the open window of the one hundred and thirteenth floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
***
Unlike human adolescents, who suffered more from lack of life goals than from their availability, the first androids were tightly bound by their own destiny: they were produced in the interests of human and for human, and indeed turned to be the most real mental slaves directly after the factory.
It is true, humanity wouldn't be humanity if it still didn't want to remain humane.
The second batch of DII (though there were only three of them) was stamped, loaded and released on their own. Contrary to all expectations, the experiment also ended unsuccessfully: in just a few days all three simultaneously came to the conclusion that any active stirring is atavistic and unreasonable, and they didn't come up with anything better than organizing their own dismantling within the parent factory.
Almost immediately after this suicidal action, lawyers took up the case, and the production of the DII was temporarily suspended - until the fate of the first generation would be decided.
The UN took all four of them from the owner-companies and invited to the closed session of the assembly no more and no less as a whole nation, and that, strictly speaking, was not so far from the truth: none of the different human nations differed from the other so much, as the brothers with the AI index from their unlucky creators.
In turn, DII asked about the presence of at least one of the Makers, after which they expressed their own views on what was happening.
As a result, the most famous amendment to the "World Declaration" was born.
According to the newly confirmed amendment, the world population was now divided into three unequal categories - people, androids and Makers. Henceforth each category, apart from different rights, also had the quite certain duties.
The duty of people now was a severe restriction of the production of the androids and the ban on production for the sake of entertainment: now the "birth" of each DII should be compulsorily agreed with their older brothers and be strictly targeted - in order to avoid a crisis of meaninglessness that killed the second generation.