This feeling wasn't hopeless at all, at least because Aia wasn't an ordinary person.
Of course, she inherited from people so much: she also had to eat and breathe, she also needed love and understanding, and the love and understanding she lacked were exactly the same utopian, and get them was also unrealistic, but there was a huge difference. The seeds of Benji's love were planted on fertile soil of her own love and her own understanding.
She saw the future - and her, and Benji's. She saw it as clearly as she saw, for example, droplets of moisture on the glassium pane or her hand getting around her knees, and this future was inevitable.
It turned out that her "I can't bear it anymore" meant that the future struggled to be realized in the very this way .
Aia sighed and, under the rustle of the wind tickling between her wingless shoulders, slid down into the hole, like a little tin-soldier.
26. 233the year. Benji.
As a machine, Benji could well afford not to waste a time.
"Ding-ding-ding", tinkling inside him, caught him in the process of transforming idle cash into a loan capital. He still didn't have a little more than fifteen million euros to buy the shuttle.
"Hello, Benji," have said the message that was tinkling inside him with Aia's voice .
"Hey," the android responded, shifted the priority of financial operations aside and made a room for the opportunity to talk.
And the opportunity hasn't been lost:
"Can you get me out of here?" it shooted.
Benji coolly calculated the latest political trends, his own financial capabilities and technical condition - his and the shuttle's:
"Yes."
And then, just in that half a second, while her sigh of relief had been lasted, he realized that it's got nothing to do with something bad that might happen somewhere and might require urgent intervention: judging by what the Irish Munster had recently experienced, wherever required Aia's intervention, she could reach it on her own.
Consequently, it turned out that it was about him, Benji. But why such an urgency?
"But why such an urgency?" he smiled.
"But when does urgency begin? And in what kind of units is it measured?" Aia answered a question with a question, and in her voice was so much dejection that the smile slowly slid off Benji's face.
"I got it. Okay," he agreed, and switched to activating the local call, over the spaceport.
***
There was a man at the table, and Benji unmistakably identified him as the director of operations of Orly named Aler Leroy.
"Good day, Mr. Leroy. I would like to pay a private flight to a near-earth orbit."
"But why did you come to me?" asked the man. "The rental of the ships is carried out by the Charter Department. It's not here."
"The thing is, Mr. Leroy, that this will be a bareboat charter for Alpha, and in the end I would like to take the Maker to the Earth. The Charter Department says they need your visa."
The man pulled away from the holographic screen deployed in front of him and pensively looked at the android - from head to toes:
"As a matter of principle, there is nothing extraordinary in a private-funded flight into space. And taking into account the specifics of your main job, the bareboat charter is no different from the usual chartering of the ship together with the pilot. If your passenger will not get into trouble with the migration control, you can take anyone through the Orly terminal, even the Lord God himself. Give your contract."
"Thank you, Mr. Leroy," Benji grinned, handing him the completed form.
The preparations were in a hurry, because the take-off time issued to him by the on-duty dispatcher only barely allowed him to sort things out with a freight, a technical inspection, a guest visa for Aia, a fuel and a duty.
However, by and large, what bothered the on-duty dispatcher only was the challenge to Benji: he was smoothly complying with his own calculations. Before the very flight he called Aia to say only one word:
"Wait."
When he took off away from his seventeenth path to the runway and went along it, quickening pace, it was right two o'clock in the afternoon. One hundred and forty, one hundred and eighty, two hundred and twenty, I have blast-off... take-off!
The shuttle lifted its nose and lay flat on the stream, and Benji fixed the pitch and let himself to glance at the horizon opening in the distance. The air was extremely clean - without dust, clouds and fog; the sun shone so that it clogged the sensitive electronics with solid white.
While the Earth below has been removing and turning out to be round, he didn't think about Aia, about Alpha, or about what would happen next: he could predict the future only on the basis of sufficient data, and he had almost no data at all.
"ju'i la alfa .i ba'apei mi*," he said when Alpha became the size of a large apple.
Alpha was silent for a long time, and only then, when Benji was almost finished docking, responded with Josh's voice:
"re'i .i la aias cu caca'o denpa do fe'eco'a la alfa*"
Aia was waiting for him almost at the same place, sitting on the grass near the airlock.
"I miss you terribly when you're not here," she whispered, looking up at him.
"Sometimes I see that you human beings are surprisingly similar to us," Benji replied, descending downward to beside her. "When you are planning, when you are synthezing an algorithms in the process of solving problems. And sometimes I see that you are completely different. And your goals are different, and the ways to achieve them are paradoxical. Sadness, boredom, grief, fear is so much costly and so unproductive... No matter how much you fear, no matter how much you grieve, no matter how sorry you are - neither fear, nor anguish, nor grief will ever save you from anything."
Aia, without saying a word, moved closer to him, and he in return hugged her by the shoulders with his thin silvery hand.
For a couple of minutes they sat like that - silently, looking at how nearby, a few dozen meters from the airlock, was stomping Aia's puzzled and abandoned house.
"It's very difficult for the frightened and longing to hold the situation," Benji said. "Although, as a result, unambiguous motivation, probably, is worth both longing and grief. And everything else."
Yes, Aia nodded, things are not going well with the motivation of you, machines.
"By the way, your repatriation scheduled for 4 pm UTC," the android said again. "And my plan is you have your own plan. You see, I was never puzzled by many important things. For example, housing."
"I'm not so good at plans," Aia tore a leaf of grass and lifted it on her open palm closer to her face, watching closely as it concentrates and busily grows its eyes and legs. "And you will laugh, but some important things elude me too. But I'm afraid, in your "cradle" I really will be a little cramped."