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In Benji's eyes flashed small mischievous devils, he pretended to sigh and condescendingly smiled:

"Don't ascribe to us what you've got, we haven't despondency: machines don't know how to be bored. He will have something to do in the next fifty years. And then we'll see."

Yes, nodded Aia to the android, life flows continuously, the horizons change all the time, and we'll see everything someday.

Definitely, the design of android's psyche didn't presume either boredom, or despondency, or despair, but nevertheless, thinking about people's needs, Benji was deeply mistaken.

He was mistaken, because he lost sight of his own.

Yes, the machine with external purpose didn't feel any torment of devastation. Yes, any of the DII brothers could find employment in the mode of deep isolation: the collection and processing of all kinds of data was such a blue sky and open field that it was almost impossible to be bored with all this for any reasonable period. But the DII were not just the machines, they were intelligent creatures, with all the consequences that followed: the machine wasn't be able of suffering without company, but when the machine had internal purpose, it could be disappointed in the outside one.

Benji himself for a long time has already been following purpose that was internal.

17. 2330th year. Aia.

She realized almost immediately: it was a dream. It was a dream for the simple reason that there was never such a blue sky in Alpha.

The sky was really blue, almost navy, and the grass was lush and surprisingly green. The real earthly grass, with precious inclusions of buttercups, forget-me-nots and polished ladybirds.

Aia was sitting on the edge of the forest, in the filigree birch shadow, and she was crying.

He came up from behind and hugged her over her shoulders: a small blond boy named Danek. Her tears immediately ceased to be easy and turned out to be filled with bitterness.

"Mom, what's going?" the boy was surprised. He leaned forward upon Aia's shoulder and looked into her face. His eyes were as blue and bottomless as the hot earthly sky hanging high above. "Why are you crying?"

"I don't know, Danek. It's crying by itself."

"Okay. You know, I came to say you're so funny in the mornings..."

"Why is it funny?" she looked up at him.

"I don't know. Maybe because you become a maker only when you finally waking up. And before that, while you asleep, you're no different from all them. Or maybe because your hair is tangled in the mornings. And your nose is freckled."

Aia wiped her wet eyes with the back of her hand and smiled through the tears:

"My nose is always freckled."

The light wind was gently going through the long green birch braids, somewhere nearby, in a thick rosehip bushes, the bluethroat-bird was singing its loud song, and the air smelled of blossoming sage and mint.

It's strange, thought Aia. The last summer, which she remembered, was dusty and multi-storey. No grass, no flowers, no singing birds in the mornings. Only the bare city: dry gray dust, forest of portal cranes, hot tarmac, stuffy glass flasks of skyscrapers and machines, - countless, endless machines...

However, by and large, there in the memory, which so obligingly prompted the nonexistent and weaved such magical dreams, was nothing strange at all, because Aia was a Maker.

All of them, who were living on Alpha, had the inner being that smoothly flowed into the outer, and memory flowed too: the blue summer sky could also be the sky of a young Lukasz, Robert or Josh. And the boy who comes to her...

And the boy was so real and independent that she didn't want to consider him as her dream or all the more someone's memories.

"Hey," he said, touching her shoulder. "Well, enough already ... I hate it when you cry. I just want to do something, but don't know what."

"I know." Aia rose, straightened the light citrine frock, and held out her hand. "Let's go somewhere."

They walked along a broad road in the midst of th light birch grove. On both sides of it densely and desperately the thistle thickets greened, in the pink curly valerian bushes the tiny spiders were busily crawling in the glittering web.

"You know," Danek said, "sometimes I come here alone. There is a big cherry orchard here. Do you like cherries? "

"I don't know," Aia smiled.

"And I definitely like."

His cherry orchard lined up in rows along the slope of the hill to a quiet shallow stream. Between the trees were flying, crawling and buzzing small live fliers, the bluegrass rippled, and the cherry trees themselves were carefully and neatly trimmed and were as tall as Aia, so that she could reach tree top up with her hands.

"Hold on," Danek shouted and ran between the trees, down to where the lush reeds grew very near the river.

He was already far below, when his desperate "ah!" blow up into her, and she suddenly saw everything as clearly as if she were there, next to him: how absurdly he waved his disobedient hands, how slowly he settled in the lush grass, and the long, black slippery muck that slipped away. Snake.

The peaceful blue sky suddenly collapsed and hit the peaceful cherry orchard, and Aia get panicked - just like in her childhood, when the reality lived its own separate incomprehensible life. Here, now, in a dream, she again became a lost little girl.