Aia waited until the last tiny white furry wad, busily buzzing, disappeared into the hole, and slid after him.
12. 2328th year. Benji.
It was snowing through the morning in Paris.
As a white flies that looked like Aia's bumblebees, it softly and uselessly circled in the cold autumn air, covering and covering the dock and the half-empty cargo terminal.
Benji didn't know anything about the snowfall. He was busy. The night before, at the stroke of midnight, he found that he had turned fifty, and his former destiny had lost its former strength.
He was just sitting on the forum of linguists and figuring out the subtleties of language tools that serve to create "unclear" semantics, when all this had covered him.
If at that moment there was someone who was watching Benji from the sidelines, he would say outright that at 0:00 the android was frozen.
Not that the knowledge of the termination of the employment contract and the absence of obligations in relation to the now-former employer took him by surprise - no: he didn't forget the necessary things in principle, much less he didn't forget the things that could radically change his life.
It's just that, this knowledge, at this very moment has ceased to be irrelevant and has acquired such a great importance that the android with a slight perplexity noted that he was surprised at the change that had taken place within him.
These sudden changes didn't mean absence of work.
Benji was still free to deal with the work he had been assigned to until the very end of his machine age. But along with this, on the track along which the train of his life has been rushing, unexpectedly for him the first branch was formed. And Benji started thinking about it.
First, now he could stop doing anything at all and refuse any participation in this life that was the theater of absurdity. Secondly, he has acquired a choice.
The option "first" was almost immediately rejected by him as unsatisfactory due to the fact that somewhere in the distance of 1,500 kilometers from the surface of the Earth there was spinning in low orbit the fragile Citadel of Alpha with the little human girl named Aia.
There remained the option "secondly".
***
Benji vaguely imagined the processes that wandered around in the mind of little Aia, but well caught everything that concerned himself.
There are no any machines who is stupid, - it happens that the machines don't have the necessary information and the necessary ways of processing it. Benji could easily get hold first as well as second, and the time that was necessary for this operation was comparable to some simple human action such as breath or an act of quenching thirst.
Back then, two years ago, when Aia first announced to him about his exclusivity, upon returning to the home port, he blew through the Internet in search of all that would make it easier for him to understand such a very human things as interest and sympathy, and has realized that still really don't get it.
He could draw an analogy between the interest and the lack of necessary information about the world around him, but there wasn't anything which he could use as an analogy for sympathy. It was a sea in which he could not swim.
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.