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"Yes," the boy agreed. "I was there."

"But, if you want, I'll tell you about the people who live there."

"Yes, I do want," said Matt.

He swam to the glassium, next to the painted raccoon breathed another misty spot and painted on it two little figures holding hands.

"Tell me."

"If we consider the Maker is the only normal person, then we can say the people who live there each and every have mental deviations from the norm," Aia said. "They constantly demand each other's close attention and special approach. They're not able to check and correct their actions in accordance with the conditions of their reality. They don't control their painful experiences, and each of them has at least one paranoid symptom on standby."

"What kind of symptom?" asked Matt.

"Paranoid. They don't know how to agree with themselves and therefore believe that it's impossible to agree with others as well. And the less they love each other, the more they justify their suspicions about the general dislike."

"It's strange," the boy was surprised. "I thought the less you know, the more you need a company..."

"Yes, it's true. But only the less you know, the worse you have contact with those who you need. I think they are alone because their souls are blind."

"How my soul is too..." Matt concluded sadly.

"Well, in general, like your," agreed Aia. "All of you are very sensitive to subtle emotions, but you answer them so haphazard... But don't be upset, anyone can start to deliberate, perhaps it will come to you with experience. Look what I have."

She took her backpack off, rummaged in it, took out a large ball of silver thread, winked and held it out to her brother:

"Well, where is this hole that we come in through? Put this thing in the hole.

Matt took a thin silver thread

еthat was twisted in a hank and looked around searching for the entrance, which was now supposed to be the exit.

In the hole, on the glassium edge, sat a large white furry bumblebee. Matt stuck the end of the thread into the hole, and the bumblebee immediately buzzed, took off, grabbed it and pulled it from the hole down toward the far sole.

In the first instant, confused, Matt dropped the hank from his hands, but guessing what it was all about, laughed, caught a spinning zero-gravity hank and let the thread unwind through his crossed fingers. The bumblebee was pulling it down, the thread was vibrating and buzzing in Matt's hands, and the other big white bumblebees flew to this buzzing from everywhere. First they sat on the thread, then filled the opening, swarmed over Matt, who was laughing, and then had dragged him out from hole and carried down.

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.