"It seems that we now live with you at the very top of it, uh... right there," he pointed out.
The apartment was empty and definitely that's why Benji saw it as big and hollow. Even from the very entrance he could see the window - huge, as big as the whole wall of the living room, with the sky over the Orly torn apart by a numerous lunar ships.
The android hesitated, unloading apples at the entrance.
"Benji!" Aia called him from the depths. "Come here."
She was waiting for him at the window: a girl with a flame-like hair in a bright blue coat against a bright blue sky.
"I want to give you something, too."
"What?" he asked carelessly.
She stepped forward and hugged him, so that her narrowed eyes turned to be a few centimeters from his eyes:
"Memories, Benji. Just don't be afraid."
What are you talking about, Benji thought in amazement and complacency, you know, I can't to be afraid, but the question froze still on his lips, because suddenly the unknown rose inside him.
Maybe it started with Aia's fingers, and maybe with his back that was touched by these fingers - he didn't know, but only his skin under her fingers suddenly became soft, and in it started to stir something unnameable.
"It's nerves, Benji. It's growing nerves. Don't be afraid of anything," whispered Aia, smiling, looking attentively at his widened pupils. "I just want to show you what it's like to be a human."
"Human?!" Benji thought desperately, looking down. "Why?"
To love you, she silently smiled and embraced him, and stroked his skin, and under her thin white fingers into him grew the universe. Another universe, a new universe that has completely different properties and qualities...
"Do you feel how sweet the apples smell?" she whispered. "They are flowing into you - carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen..."
And Benji really felt that the air around him was getting a noticeable sweet taste. Apples, he thought, look at that, how sweet the apples smell.
"Kiss me, Benji," Aia said, not taking her palms off his happy face. "Please".
29. 2330th year. Matt.
On the day when Hubble has found alien's ship in the area of the Ophiuchus, Matt just went to school for the first time in his life.
So it was just circumstances that he spent most of the day in ignorance: a large holographic screen in the school foyer told the first-graders only about the location of school buffets, toilets, about the rules of behavior and didn't spin news at all.
Later, in the evening, already lying in bed, Matt has been recrossing the incident in his memory: the cold September dawn, the people fussing around him, the fright in the eyes of the parents, the third time revising the evening news, and Lukasz, to whose reaction the boy was at a loss to find a definition.
Lukasz took the news calmly, even commonly. He grinned only as usual - whether to himself, or to the future, which again turned with the next intricate side - and that was all.
But Matt didn't sleep till very midnight, he looked out the window at the clouded sky and imagined an aliens like the Makers, then like ouzels with arms, then like lemurs in Alfa, and when he, after all, fell asleep, his dreams were bad and restless.
By the morning it was found out that while the mankind excited by the find was discussing the probable fruits of the union and the horrors of the intervention, a alien spaceship was approaching to the Earth, sending ahead of itself a strange lingering sounds.
"What do you think about this?" asked Lukasz at breakfast, digging in the tofu on his plate with his fork.
"Song," the boy shrugged. "It goes without saying."
He finished his meal in a hurry, grabbed a backpack, smiled at winking Lukasz and went to school, no more paying attention to the next news, deeply hidden grownup's alarm and Lukasz's eyes with the sparkles of craftiness.
He really believed that what was sounded in the morning in the news was a song. And taking into account his childhood spent in orbit in the company of the Makers, he didn't see anything extraordinary in all this matter.
Well, guests. Well, from afar. But they in fact warned about the arrival. They even sing songs - quite like whales - about wanderings and space. What else do you need?
The day passed noisily and briskly, and in the evening the UN Security Council reported through the official channel that wherever the alien spaceship entering the Solar system subsequently went, there should be present at least one representative of the community of the Makers and at least one android among the earthlings.
30. 2330th year. Aia.
In the corner in front of the projector, a small, three-dimensional copy of Selin Juti looked up at the invisible front camera:
"Good evening, dear audience. With you France 24 and evening news. That's the second day in a row that the whole Earth is discussing an alien interstellar spaceship discovered near the solar system. Today we have a guest, Director General, Institute of Nanobiology..."
The camera shifted, and next to Selin, a bald little man in an expensive business suit materialized out of nowhere.
Aia reached for the remote control and turned off the holo. The people blinked and melted, and she carefully climbed over Benji, that was lying next to her, get off the couch and went toward the bathroom.
"Do you think their fears about viruses are imagined?" Benji asked without opening his eyes.
"Definitely," came from the bathroom with the sound of running water. "I even think they are not scared. I think they just have nothing to talk about."
"And if there were no Makers on the Earth?"
"Benji, you know even if there were no Makers on the Earth, they still wouldn't have anything to talk about. Let them talk what they want to talk about."
A voice call pinged off, and Benji accepted it without opening his eyes:
"Salute, Lukasz. Do you need Aia?"
"Salute, Benji. I need you both. When this singing tin can stops, we all three should be there."
"Are we going to sing, too?" Benji grinned, opened his eyes and get off the couch. "I want to note I don't practice political cantatas."
"I'm crazy about you, I'm crazy without you..." Aia sang in the bathroom, adding shower gel into the water and closing her eyes. The water that was pouring from the ceiling with a fine rain went now in a large fluffy soap flakes: just like the morning November snowfall.
"Go ahead, laugh, laugh," Lukasz said. "I think there isn't much time left for this."
"I know, Lukasz, about a week," Aia shouted from the bathroom.
"Eeh," Lukasz shook his head and disconnected.