Виктор Зуев
The Falling Bird

Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum.

René Descartes

The administration responsible for finding promising new ways of discovering edible vegetation on distant planets that could prolong human life hastily assembled a covert division tasked with launching a spacecraft mission into the Canes Venatici constellation. Their reports suggested that that area contained a faintly visible planet on which the first cosmonauts to explore its surface discovered an undying moss-like plant which, when eat continuously, made one immortal.

The Center for Elementary Rationing and Productive Labor on New Exoplanets in the Solar System was located one level below, at the end of the hall behind the fire escape. Hardly anyone ever stopped by there, as all their methods for preparing and distributing material goods, produce and other items of value had long become obsolete due to new developments and rapidly changing priorities in era of explosive development in interplanetary travel, And also due to the fact that long-haul flights paid quite well. Yet none of the executives wanted to admit this, habitually employing a whole department of twenty five experienced senior female staffers consisting mainly of close and distant relatives of the top brass.

Their job was to calculate the requisite amount of food, extra clothing, everyday goods and money for colonists on the next newly discovered planet, referring to manuals approved many decades ago and doing their best to follow those to the letter. These manuals spelled out the number of bureaucrats, guards, supply agents, merchants, regular workers, agitators, and, above all, the leaders dedicated to their people. In order to provide for this core group of people required to sustain productive life on a new exoplanet, the Center would calculate the spaceship capacity needed to carry all the necessary supplies – food, air, water and other essential resources that would be required during the long interplanetary journey, right down to toilet paper.

The spacecraft, easily exceeding the speed of light, would biannually be shipped out to one of the explored planets orbiting the star Proxima Centauri, named Abba, which takes almost a whole year of travel time. Upon arrival, everyone on board would disembark and begin collecting the moss in the underground caves and deep hollows of that planet. Sparse reddish thin lichen-like build-ups grow on the rocks in the caves – one millimeter every ten years – and the workers dispatched to the planet would scrape them off, package and store on the spacecraft to be sent back to Earth. Harvesting of the lichen would continue until all of the ship’s storage modules specially designed to carry it under certain temperature and humidity conditions were completely full – usually this process would take up to a month and a half. After that, the surviving and homesick members of the crew (after undergoing a strict filtration) would return to Earth along with the valuable cargo.

The thing is that this lichen was needed on Earth as a reliable and tested medicine to prolong the lives of honored and notable people threefold. However, this method of extracting and delivering of the lichen to Earth was extremely expensive and took a long time, plus its existence on Abba was very scarce. And sometimes on the transit back home, the miners of that valuable cargo would eat some of it themselves to prolong their own lives, despite a strict law forbidding mere mortals from doing so under penalty of death. The first offenders had been dealt with precisely that way – upon returning to Earth they had been summarily executed by firing squad to set an example for others.

And these prohibition violators were caught quite easily: those who consumed several grams of that valuable lichen would develop a persistent and lingering garlicky breath, like all governing and elite citizens of Earth who partook in the ambrosia made from the lichen. The odor could be temporarily masked with strong aromatic substances or by eating plenty of fatty foods, but as soon as the unpleasant smell was no longer covered up by these methods, the garlicky breath would come back to the super-centenarians. And since this persistent smell was practically impossible to get rid of, people began to identify the elite super-centenarians by their distinctive stench. And not just that – by mandated laws for the people, the stink gradually began to be viewed as an aura of pomp and wealth. Naturally, regular Earth folk were not supposed to smell this way, so a whole series of regulations and decrees were passed prohibiting people from growing and eating garlic and its byproducts, so that their breath would not be confused of that of the governing elite.

As a result, workers and crews who had come back from the off-world lichen mining missions were easily probed during quarantine; anyone who was detected with the garlic breath was detained and executed. However, it was noticed later that within the prison cells where the ambrosia eaters had been kept, various insects (cockroaches, caterpillars, fleas) and other bloodsuckers would thrive for a long time even though the spaces were empty and had been disinfected multiple times after the criminals had been executed.

After pathologists had carefully investigated this strange phenomenon occurring in the prison cells where felons convicted for illegally consuming ambrosia were kept, the following was discovered: while condemned individuals were imprisoned and awaiting execution – which could go on for weeks – the insects living in the same space would actively inhale the air exhaled by the prisoners and thus prolonged their lives manifold, consequently developing an immunity to all toxins.

Earlier, scientists and political strategists had frequently noticed that after contact between the leaders and their electorate, the latter were imbued with extra energy having inhaled the garlicky exhaust from the mouths of the dignitaries, and could work for free for a while if fed simple peasant foods. And thus a question was raised: what was the point of executing the convicts right away if they could still be of use to the law-abiding populace of Earth?

The brass hats made the right call. They began placing convicts in specially built barracks with a powerful exhaust ventilation, and next to them compact health care centers were being built, equipped with the powerful system sucking in the garlicky air coming from those barracks; these became health resorts where the honored laborers working for the good of the motherland could enjoy rest and relaxation and so that worthy working classes could too taste – or rather, inhale – the elite garlic aroma in order to lessen the divide between the rich and the poor and, if possible, to prolong length of service of the able-bodied, rank-worshipping flock.

However, the surplus of the lichen brought from Abba kept depleting all the time. Whether because its reserves found in the planet’s hollows and caves were getting exhausted or theft of ambrosia had become more creative. At the same time, the number of the relatives of Earth’s elite kept growing exponentially due to increase in life expectancy and, accordingly, more numerous offspring. It became necessary to either cull the list of those worthy to receive ambrosia – something the public servants would resist with all their might, culminating in all-out brawls amongst one another – or to increase punitive measures against those caught embezzling the longevity elixir on the spacecrafts returning with the valuable cargo – that was extremely undesirable.

Over the last few years it was getting harder and harder, even for large material rewards, to recruit those willing to fly to space for two to three years to collect the lichen that leaders were dependent on to prolong their life. Rumors began to circulate among the people that after returning from space all surviving recruits were placed under quarantine in special barracks where they were half-starved and forced to strenuously expel the ambrosia-rich air (that they had accumulated from the planet’s atmosphere or from the moss they ate) until they were dying from exhaustion and starvation.

Yet, ambrosia stockpiles were quickly running out, and already less notable officials had to visit the health center to breathe in the therapeutic air exhaled by not only those condemned to death but also all quarantined miners – they were in short supply as well due to high mortality rates. The authorities had no choice but to add a regular fly spray into the air conditioning system in the visitors’ rooms to at least mask the fact that the garlic smell was no longer noticeable. Still, it seemed there was no solution to this insurmountable problem and the ambrosia shortage kept growing like a snowball rolling down a hillside, but a lucky strike saved the day.

The Earth’s brass hats were continuously dispatching spacecrafts with geologists and botanists on board for outer space reconnaissance missions in order to search for similar planets where the wonder lichen grew, but for a long time their efforts proved fruitless. Until finally, the explorers of the star Alpha Centauri were tipped off by the locals (those who had been marooned due to their status as a security risk) that the wonder-weed was plentiful on a remote planet, an easy-to-miss star called Asteroin in the binary star Cor Caroli (Heart of Charles) system within the Canes Venatici constellation. The star Asteroin had a lone planet slowly rotating around it, humbly named Hopus. The health-improving weed abundantly growing there not only could prolong life, but also would make a person eating it all the time flat out immortal. The test flight by the “pilgrims” (a name Earthlings had given to explorers travelling one-way off-world) to this planet helped discover this wonder-weed and test it on lab mice living on the pioneers’ starship. And the tests demonstrated that during the ten-year flight back to Earth, none of the mice had died and they thrived in good health on the ship to this day, while all the crew members died on the return journey from incurable diseases and poor quality nutrition. However, there was a downside: the travel time need to reach Asteroin and the lonely planet orbiting this star was three times longer than the average flight. Hence, both the fuel and resources (such as food, oxygen, and water) necessary to support the spacecraft and lives of the recruits onboard would be required threefold. But as a result the starship was overloaded above the maximum weight limit and could simply not get off the ground or was unable to decelerate when approaching the discovered planet, due to its monstrous mass and inertia. And who could guarantee that “the sprogs,” having learned about the miraculous power of the weed would even want to go back to Earth at all? It wasn’t unreasonable to have concerns that they all would stay there with the crew forever. The planet Hopus was even nicknamed “Hop” due to its inaccessible nature, taking cues from the old proverb – “Don’t say hop until you have hopped over.” The best scientific minds of Earth had been scratching their heads for a long time trying to come up with a solution to the problem until they came up with the following:

1. To accomplish this task, a supercomputer must be built. It should be able to autopilot the spacecraft and manage the people on board, be capable of anticipating all possible emergency scenarios that could arise during the flight, and making decisions to above all else ensure the wonder-weed is successfully harvested, packaged and shipped back to Earth.

2. The return home should be without the miners who must be left behind under any pretense, even resorting to euthanasia if necessary. This would increase the number of rooms for storing the product and cut the deadweight in half for the trip back to Earth.

3. The return flight must include the spacecraft pilot (who may not necessarily be the commander) and three cryogenic engineers who would ensure that the temperature conditions in the refrigerating modules and the vacated cabins are conducive to successfully preserving the precious wonder-weed.

For two years, the programmers and designers on Earth had been racking their brains over this problem and, finally, built a supercomputer superior to all previous versions by a thousand times. It was called GASSOS, an acronym for a long abstruse name for the super brain of the spaceship – the Global Automated Science-based Spaceship Operating System. But the developers themselves – and the spacemen later on – began calling it just GAS for short, and the computer answered to this nickname with pleasure, accepting it as its proper name.

When installed into the starship, GAS could perform each of the ship’s tasks on its own without any human assistance. It handled all of the starship’s vital systems, charted and set the optimal course mid-flight, toggled on and off the mechanisms necessary to maintain flight, arranged meals for the crew, calculated the minimal daily requirements for air and water, and the controlled the temperatures in the cabins. It could even entertain its passengers with various lectures, songs, stories, jokes, and just have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It knew everything: about the crew, the flight to Hopus, the ship’s functional capabilities, the Solar System and all the stars humanity had studied. GAS’ developers had accounted for everything and programmed it in such a way so that it only obeyed commands from the Center; when it is out of communication range, it should work according to its preprogrammed directives – its main goal was to deliver Hopus’ wonder-weed to Earth. Everything else for GAS was secondary and expendable to the task at hand. Of course, all possible contingencies over such a long journey cannot be foreseen, so the programmer implemented a machine learning function to GAS, functioning much like the human brain, so that it can decide on the optimal course of action in an emergency while following the principle “do no harm to yourself and the cargo.” To assist GAS on the ship the inventors built two androids capable to carry out simple jobs on command related to the servicing the machinery, serving the crew and system repairs if necessary.

While the problem of figuring out how to operate the ship during the long journey was solved, the developers still struggled to find a way to reduce the ship’s total weight to ensure the ship’s return to Earth while in accordance with the approved supplies requirements. The routine calculations for the necessary spaceship supplies were made by the experienced planners and logisticians who were located a floor below, and didn’t fit into the takeoff weight of the experimental long-haul journey. To make these calculations, a separate group of classified specialists was formed to assess the most extreme conditions the flight could undergo. Much like the staff from the old department, they worked in secret during the preparation activities of the classified department to prevent information from leaking to the people, as it often happens.

Thanks to the on-board artificial intelligence, it was decided to down the size of the crew to half, and as for the miners of the wonder-weed, all of them were to be left on the planet, possibly euthanizing them (if there is no other method) so they can’t prevent the last working shuttle from taking off into orbit, where the mother ship is to be waiting for them at all times. During the flight to Hopus, the computer is to put all passengers onboard into hibernation for four years, supplying their sleeping chambers with a special concentrated gas consisting of all necessary nutrients while they are asleep. Trial experiments on prisoners had shown satisfying results – eighty percent of the subjects had survived after an almost two-year sleep, and sixty five percent of the survivors were still capable of doing the necessary physical labor. All these measures allowed reduce the load by three quarters and additionally double the ship’s payload of the precious cargo.

It had been decided to assemble the interstellar ship piecemeal in lunar orbit and use shuttles to deliver the necessary resources to it – fuel, water, oxygen, and flight foods.

This measure would reduce the amount of fuel necessary for decelerating when returning to Earth and getting caught by its gravitational orbit.

Valentin Valentinovich, the head of the development team working on the flight conditions for the starship, became so overzealous that he offered additional radical measures to the executive management.

“I believe that we can halve the nutritional amount for those asleep, since a sleeping person needs less glucose and vitamins. And reduce food consumption twenty per cent taking into account the statistical mortality rate from induced sleep. Even the quantity of clothing can be cut in half, given that part of the expedition team will die, and the workers will be marooned after completing their job.”

“You, Valentin Valentinovich, are very prudent around here,” the chief-executive of the pre-flight commission responded, and addressing the commission members, continued, “that, in my opinion, you are the one who take the mantle of the ship’s director, and with your natural frugality directly supervise the hired workers on site so that they do not eat an extra slice of bread and do not have an extra sip of water or air. Am I right, colleagues?”

The members of the state commission remained silent for a short while, contemplating their chair’s suggestion, and began nodding their heads in agreement.

And Valentin Valentinovish, hearing such a fatal suggestion and becoming scared for his own life, turned pale, his forehead went clammy and his heart sank. He grasped for air for some time yet could not produce any sound, until finally, pulling himself together with a great effort, uttered, his lips trembling:

“My dear fellow executives! I am immeasurably glad about the honor granted to be your director in such a high-stakes journey, but I am completely untrained to direct interplanetary flights. I have no diploma and no experience in endeavors of this kind. Finally, I have a common-law wife on Earth and two little children, and I can’t abandon them to their fate.”

“Dear Sir, firstly, the chief executive and members of the state commission know better who is to be sent to this flight as a director. Secondly, during the flight everything will be managed by the on-board computer and you will have nothing to worry about; all that is needed it will do on its own. You will need to only control the computer’s course of actions and report everything to us. And when you exit the communication range, you will act according to the instructions given to you by the Mission Control Center. While you are away, we’ll look after your family and help them with anything they need.”

After the meeting, Valentin Valentinovich left the room, feeling his legs getting numb and a voice in his instantly turned dull head that said, “Run, immediately! But where?” Of all people he perfectly knew with a tracker implanted in his head he could only get so far. He would be caught regardless and sent to mine the weed, but this time as a laborer fated to be killed on the wild planet following his service. Nor was it possible to wriggle his way out of the decision declared by the high committee. “I must accept and fly there as director, and if I am lucky then I could eat my fill of this weed and come back immortal.”

And Valentin Valentinovich, taking time to grieve and shed a few tears, began to prepare for the interstellar trip. He negotiated for himself his own food, water and oxygen, his own personal quarters with his own air conditioner so that the terrible GAS could not accidentally put him to sleep, and altered the ship’s subroutines with the additional clause, “Whatever happens, GAS must bring him to Earth with the cargo.”

No matter how hard the developers tried to lessen the total number of the travelers, they were still coming up with fifty people at least – counting the crew, maintenance personnel, and the actual workers, while taking into account the demise of the part of the crew – up to forty percent – due to the prolonged sleep. Of all the crew, the ship’s director and the pilot were off limits for GAS, as well as three refrigerating engineers (to ensure extra control for the machinery and modules with the plant cargo, just in case). As for the others, GAS could dispose of them at any moment without compromising the weed storing prior to departure back to Earth. However, the director, mechanics and pilot was expendable only in the event that the cargo was endangered.

For two years the ship had been built in lunar orbit and equipped with everything that was needed – space shuttles were delivering these resources from Earth. And, finally, not long before the early winter, all of the supplies had been loaded and the final tests of the systems and the machinery had been finished. However, all of a sudden an unforeseen problem had occurred. The HR department for Space Expeditions found it impossible to accrue personnel for this fascinating flight, in spite of the double salary and quintupled reward upon returning to Earth.

It turns out that information about the flight had gotten leaked nonetheless; people began to talk about how it was a one-way trip and that those hired to work on the unknown planet would be abandoned there (or killed) after they gathered some invaluable weed for the Earth’s elites. So, knowing that the executive officials were lying to them, and the rumors were unlikely totally groundless, nobody volunteered to fly there, even with the promise of a big payout. As a result, the expedition’s executives decided to recruit former spacemen who were imprisoned in the special barracks for stealing the lichen and exhaling the state officials’ “property” they had illegally consumed.

Those who agreed to the mission had been promised, in addition to the big pay, that their sentence for their “horrible” crime would be revoked; many had to agree in order to avoid starving to death in the barracks. With a crew now assembled, the spaceship blasted off from its lunar orbit in the direction of the planet Hopus, without any unnecessary fanfare, one hour before the New Year, in order not to interfere with the planned reporting before the chiefs.

The huge starship, externally bearing the resemblance of a zeppelin, had been accelerating for four months, with great effort sped up to the velocity to break away from the Solar system’s gravity, and detached the first acceleration stage. Later on, it was picked up by a stream of the galactic aether which sucked it in like a speck of dust into its fast-flowing river of time, several times exceeding the speed of light. The giant ship merged into it just as a knife dropped into still water, and instantly disappeared into the endless space of the Universe, like a needle in the haystack.

The entire launch and interstellar flight was being vigilantly overseen by GAS; it was relentlessly and meticulously checking all of the parameters of the ship’s engines and systems’ operations, repeatedly calculating and re-calculating the variants of the burn rate of fuel necessary to slow down when approaching the intended destination, and was making adjustments to the possible maximum load for the return trip.

Trouble began on the ship right after blast-off, happening as early as the acceleration stage. The central air conditioning system on the ship started malfunctioning at once, and some cabins were cold and damp. Controlling the temperature and air humidity was impossible – this operation could only be done by GAS, which kept refusing to warm up the cold units on account of economy for the journey back. It was also supplying water to the lavatories for workers according to a strict schedule – for half hour in the morning and for two hours in the evening. And besides, the food for the personnel was meager in serving and tasted awful – no cook was hired for the flight to cut costs and resources, therefore GAS prepared the means using pre-stocked briquettes of frozen meat and fish as well as dried grain products. The uncomfortable accommodations and poor food quality created much hardship for the travelers. Given that the ship’s crew had been assembled at the last moment, it consisted of a ragtag group of individuals who were hard to manage. In addition to the recruits from the special barracks, there were twelve girls working as chambermaids, six guards for Valentin Valentinovich, and, finally, the crew of seven people.

At first, the recruits from the barracks were just complaining, “We didn’t join here to put up with cold and hunger – we’ve had this shit in the barracks in spades!” And then, a couple of months into the flight, those amongst the group who were stronger and cockier began switching up the living arrangements, kicking out the weaker and more timid members from their warmer cabins. This process got out of control, but the guards stayed out of it, having decided that everything would settle down somehow on its own, and being more preoccupied in fooling around with the chambermaids instead; even Valentin Valentinovich was indifferent to the infighting amongst the crew over the cabins, picking for himself the most curvaceous girl of the twelve helps, locking himself with her in his cabin and barely leaving it, entrusting GAS to entirely pilot the ship and manage the crew on its own. As for GAS, having economically considered with its silicon brain that having members of the high-stakes expedition engaged in promiscuous erotic escapades and physical altercations was an extravagant and excessive waste of air, water and food, ultimately decided to put all crew members into hibernation six months earlier than planned. So, on week ten of the voyage, it released the sleeping gas to all ship’s modules induce anabiosis, in the middle of the night time while everybody was already asleep. It also began injecting nutritional supplements into the atmosphere, to make sure that the travelers do not die from malnutrition before arriving to the destination.

Valentin Valentinovich and his mistress alone were spared from this event, as he made his suite completely autonomous from the ship’s general systems pre-flight. They learned that GAS had put all expedition members into stasis the next morning, when they saw a warning sign “Gas! No exiting!” appear above the hallway entrance and discovered that the door was automatically blocked.

Elina, the mistress of the ship’s director for duration of the expedition, was the first to wake up and wanted to sneak out to her friends to chitchat while her paramour was sleeping, but upon noticing the locked door and the alarming sign above shook Valentin awake.

“Valik, wake up! Someone locked us up, and some gas was released.”

Valentin scratched himself for a long while, unable to understand what this dumb broad wanted from him, and when the situation finally dawned on him, he hailed GAS.

“Listen, GAS, what is going on there?” he asked the on-board computer, yawning.

“Good morning, my master,” that was the ironic name that GAS had given to him, knowing that he liked it, “ To prevent the crew from screwing around all over the place, for economical purposes I have put them into stasis and supplied their air with the proper nutrients until we arrive to our destination. I hope after two to three years of some healthy sleep they all will wake up safe and sound.”

“Good God,” grumbled Valentin in response and thought to himself, “It was smart of me to disconnect my cabin from the general support system and make it autonomous. Otherwise, I would have been lying passed out somewhere with others, and who knows if I would have woken up in three years.”

“Well then, you better serve breakfast for two here in the bedroom. But next time before you do anything like that, let me know in advance. OK?”

“Yes, my master!” replied GAS joyfully and hung up.

The service board robots showed up a half-hour later, rolling food into the flight director’s sealed module chamber and passed his meal to him on a serving tray.

Valentin hungrily began eating and, mouth full of food, asked his girlfriend.

“And you, Elya, why aren’t you eating?”

“For some reason, I’m not hungry, sweetie. You eat,” she replied, stroking him on his slowly balding head.

Valentin Valentinovich was quite an ugly little man – short, fat, balding, with large, protruding, moist lips and bulging watery eyes. He always walked bowlegged, hunched over, and smacking his lips all the time, licking off saliva – in fact he resembled a toad. But despite his repulsive looks, Elya agreed to live with him right after she had got a job on the ship, because of his wealth and status, but also because she was two months pregnant by her last lover – a handsome, but very poor boyfriend. Elya tricked the medical board when applying for a job on this flight, not thinking that she would be away that long. She wanted to live with Valentin, provide him with sexual favors for as much money as possible, and come back to her beloved toy boy as a rich girlfriend. That the flight would take several years, not weeks, as she had originally thought, Elya learned only after blastoff from Valik. So she decided to announce that her unborn baby’s father was “the little toad” – the name she called him in private – just waiting for the right opportunity to do that. And any premature labor in the future could be blamed on the unbearable space conditions. This ploy would allow her to solidify her position on the ship as a chief hostess and let her do nothing for the whole duration of the flight, and then see what the future would hold. Elina’s morning sickness had started early: she was nauseous and craved something salty all the time, but she did her best to hide from “the little toad” for at least a couple of weeks. The fact that GAS had put the crew into sleep was to Elya’s advantage. The only problem was to being forced to tolerate the constant company of the slobbery “little toad”. Before, she was able to escape every day to the guards, but now they were gone too, and she felt nauseous, nauseous, and nauseous incessantly.

The following four months Valentin and Elina had done nothing except for eating, sleeping, and getting fat. GAS occasionally tried to talk to them and educate them about their current location and the stars they were flying by, but it found them to be quite poor students and stopped its lectures. On the sixth month of the journey GAS noticed Elina’s quickly growing belly and mentioned it to her.

“Well, Elya, it appears that your belly is growing much faster than that of my master’s.”

“It’s ’cause I’m pregnant, Gassy, and soon will give birth, I think.”

“And what does that mean?” GAS became concerned as it was not prepared for medical emergencies of that kind on its ship.

“Valik and I will be having a baby due to our shacking up together.”

“Wait a minute, I am not prepared to such transformations, what am I supposed to do in this strange case?”

“You’ll need to prepare a special delivery room, for starters,” Valentin joined the conversation; Elya had already broken the news to him regarding his impending fatherhood.

“Acknowledged, I will make the necessary preparations for this unexpected development,” said GAS, as he began searching in every block of his memory bank for any information related to childbirth.

A couple of weeks later with the help of its android assistants, GAS was able to put together a decent makeshift birthing chamber and readied itself, in theory. And in a month’s time, Elina – attended to by GAS and its robotic assistants – successfully gave birth to a healthy boy, weighing at almost five kilograms. Surprisingly, the happiest out of everyone was GAS itself, as the new arrival brought much entertainment to the supercomputer as well as the pleasant responsibilities of babysitting which it had assigned to itself. Day in and out, GAS was primarily monitoring the baby and instructing his mother about the proper methods of parenting, according to the archival data it regurgitated from the depths of its massive brain. The baby was growing up like in a fairy tale – growing not by days, but by the hour – and was gaining weight quickly. Elya, after discussions with Valentin, decided to name the boy Angel, after all being a child born in the cosmos, but the board computer rejected it and bestowed him with the name Arcad, after one of the names of the mythological hunting dogs – the ones the ancients used for Canes Venatici constellation, where their ship was en route to. As for Valentin, he excused himself from parenting the baby and kept living his days leisurely – spending the whole trip watching sitcoms, eating, sleeping, and growing fat. The child was being raised solely by GAS, who found the task to be an interesting experiment.

Two years of the voyage across the endless galaxy had passed. Arcad began walking and talking quite early, much to GAS’ joy, who was now constantly telling the toddler funny stories about Earth and space complete with pictures which it projected on the wall in the nursery. GAS, having gotten carried away with raising the child, entirely neglected to monitor the ship’s flight path – when it did happen to check the ship’s coordinates, it was surprised to discover that the ship had deviated far from its planned route. It was flying in a huge, inconceivable arc in space, caught in the intergalactic curvature of space-time that GAS had failed to take into account. After having corrected the course and factored in the drift, GAS re-calculated the ETA to the planet Hop and became slightly sad at his conclusions – it would take almost twice as long to get there. GAS reported this unfortunate news to Valentin.

“My master, the curvature of the galactic space has slightly altered our ship’s course and we shall arrive to the star Asteroin somewhat later than planned.”

“And when should we expect to arrive at this goddamn planet, my dear?” asked Valentin lazily.

“According to my calculations, it will take as long as we already have flown, if not longer.”

“That’s unbearable!” the expedition’s director exclaimed in indignation. “Can anything be done in this situation?”

“No, nothing, my master. I have already attempted every possible solution I could, and have brought the ship’s course back to the correct direction. The universe is cruel and unpredictable,” GAS philosophized.

“The space curvature can permanently alter the physical appearance of any crew members who are awake, so for that reason I suggest that you and Elya go into stasis for the remainder of the flight to Hop. This way your bodies will remain intact, and time will pass much faster for you.”

“Really? And what about the kid?”

“I will take care of Arcad. As he is a growing child, his body is not in danger of being affected by the curve. However, he also can’t be put into hibernation while he is maturing, so during your sleep my assistants and I will raise him in lieu.”

“But how will I be able to manage the flight?”

“When an emergency occurs, I’ll wake you up, my master.”

‘Oh all right, go ahead, ‘cause I’m sick and tired of lying on the couch and watching the TV serials over and over about ten times now. I can’t wait to arrive there, but you are wasting our time. Just give us a separate room to hibernate in.”

“Certainly. We’ll prepare the appropriate accommodations right away.”

Elina, though, wasn’t quite eager to be put into sleep along with her “master,” especially since a month earlier she had seen GAS’ assistants pushing a half-awake recruit into the ship’s airlock chamber and then with a special pusher launching him into the dreadful dark space. After accidentally having seen this cruel execution these robots carried out on an innocent person, she asked Valentin about it.

“Valia, how could they do something so merciless to a living human being?”

“He violated orders and dared to wake up ahead of schedule, for which he was punished,” Valentin sternly answered her question.

And as such she was afraid that if she was left on her own without Valia around, GAS would order its heartless mechanical beasts to jettison her overboard into space like unnecessary waste. Her paranoia was fueled more so by the fact that the synthetic GAS was jealous of Elya over the toddler, trying to limit the time she was spending with the child, and repeatedly telling Valentin, “This stupid bimbo can’t teach Arcad anything good.”

GAS arranged separate rooms for his master and the mistress and successfully put them into sleep until their arrival to their destination, while turning its attention towards raising the toddler as it saw fit. To GAS it was quite amusing to see a little human, having absolutely no knowledge of any kind and seeing no worlds other than the nursery where he had been living practically his entire life, talking only to GAS and its robots.

In the three following years it had took to escape from the unforeseen intergalactic gravitational field, GAS taught Arcad to speak, to read and type on the board computers, introduced him to the ship’s design and explained to him where they were flying to and their mission. The boy was quite gifted, learning everything on the fly, as if it was a captivating game. And because he knew nothing beyond his room, he assumed that this was all that the whole world had to offer and nothing and nobody else existed out there – it was just him, GAS and the two mechanical lookalikes of Arcad, carrying out their orders. And as for the documentaries GAS had shown him about Earth and the people living there, he believed those to be strange fairy tales about non-existent worlds among the far away stars, not worthy of any serious attention.

“GAS, you keep showing me some mountains, rivers, seas, a sun, wind, cities, people on the screen and you are trying to persuade me that it all exists on some planet called Earth. But why does it all exist and for what purpose? And have you seen with your own eyes at least something of that strange, unnecessary ecology you showed me?”

Arcad’s inquisitions took GAS by surprise and it tried to answer his young charge as vaguely as possible, promising to show all of Earth’s diversity in the future, when he was older.

“No, I’ve seen nothing of that. My programmers uploaded into my memory the belief that this world does indeed exist.”

“Well, you see? Someone has persuaded you about that, but it seems to me that you aren’t sure yourself that it exists, and I doubt that too. I suspect that these are just colorful pictures, like the ones I draw on paper or on a computer. And as soon as I turn the screen off or go to another room, all of this diversity disappears like a dream.”

Arcad was becoming more interested in the really important issues of the current life on the ship – why was their city-ship so small? Why were there no other people but him and was there anybody else he could talk to but GAS? And why was he not permitted to go anywhere from his room? One day he asked.

“Listen, GAS, where did I come from?”

“What do you mean where did you come from? You were born.” For the first time while mentoring the child GAS was at a loss for words.

“What do you mean ‘was born’?”

“A woman, your mother, gave birth to you seven years ago. And now your mom, along with your dad is sleeping in a special room, five years already, to avoid body deterioration during this flight.”

“And why am I not sleeping and neither are our two helpers?”

“Our helpers are made of metal and are not sensitive to the enormous intergalactic speeds and gravity. But even if they break down for whatever reason, I have more helpers like that on reserve and can bring them to life at any moment to make them work for you and me. But you, as a growing living organism, cannot go into a lengthy anaerobic sleep, otherwise your physical and intellectual development will be compromised. You are currently living in a mini-gravitational chamber I made specifically for you at the expense of the ship’s fuel economy, so that you can grow up normally and when you come back to Earth, you are able to live there freely, like all the other people there.

“How strange! You don’t seem to exist physically in front of me, yet you can do anything.”

“Well, almost anything,” agreed GAS proudly.

And while Arcad was engaged in philosophical conversations and being schooled on various sciences, time passed by unnoticed by the little involuntary traveler, a passenger on a ship to a faraway unknown planet.

At last, on the eighth year of the flight, the distance to Asteroin was rapidly shortening, and GAS turned on the ship’s deceleration systems in order not to overshoot the star. The helpers on GAS’ order began to vent the noble gases from all the modules and filling them with an oxygen mixture so that everybody who was sleeping would begin to wake up.

And then it became clear that not all of the crew members survived such a lengthy slumber. Some couldn’t wake up, or, after awakening were unable to walk and were just crawling around in the cabins with no knowledge of who they were. The dead and those incapable of physical labor were being mercilessly “fired” – the robots were ejecting them into space with compressed air through the airlock chamber, like projectiles from a howitzer’s barrel.

Arcad was moving around the ship together with the robots observing with interest what was going on. He was taking in a completely alien world within the same ship he was on himself. His edifice of how the world was organized had been built on the premise that it was revolved around the nursery where he had already been living for the past eight years. And now his belief was seriously shaken and fractured after he had seen something outside of his worldview; the illusion was broken and he began revising his perception of life as he was discovering new areas of the ship – previously off limits – and the members of the crew that were coming to. The stale odor coming from the cabins where the crew members were housed, their sluggish movements, and lethargic indiscernible speech brought about in Arcad only a feeling of disgust and some kind of repulsion. Looking at the nearly insane workers, he wished that the robots had ditched all of the remaining people into space through the airlock. That was exactly what he said to GAS now that he had seen everything.

“I would do that with pleasure, my boy,” GAS answered him. “But who then will be harvesting the weed on Hop? You, maybe?” bursting into laughter like a human.

Valentin Valentinovich woke up after everybody else had done and learned from GAS that all six of his guards perished after the lengthy space sleep and had been disposed of by the robots. So he did his best to leave his module as little as possible in order not to run into the disgruntled surviving crew members and provoke a mutiny, against which he would have no one to defend him.

Arcad met his parents when they woke up but that stirred no interest in him and left him indifferent as if they were completely unrelated to him, and began doubting that it was even them who had brought him into this world. And when a week later he had stopped by their place again and taken a much better look at them, he came to the final conclusion that such primitive beings, like these ones, simply couldn’t be his parents, and decided that it was GAS which was his father and mother.

And for his biological parents, they didn’t protest that he was wrong, as they were wholly preoccupied with rehabilitation of their bodies and trying to bring them back to normal. Arcad’s parents, as soon as they had woken up, right away pigged out on foods, devouring everything in sight, like hungry animals. They pawed the meal up, shoved it into their mouth, pushing it deeper with their fingers almost without chewing it. They were taking short breaks only after getting full, and after they woke up they ate, ate, and ate again, oblivious to anything else around, except for food.

All survivors from the prolonged sleep – and of those were only just half of the crew – were staring with curiosity at a boy, who appeared out of nowhere and was running around in the ship, like a master, with all doors (including those that were off limits to everyone else) opening for him on command from a remote Arcad had in his pocket. He began being regarded as the big boss of the ship, along with GAS, and the executor of its will. And Arcad behaved accordingly, talking to everybody with a commanding voice and tolerating no objection.

On the tenth morning after the crew had been roused from their slumber, Arcad, as he usually would after breakfast, was running along the hallway to continue observing life of the strange – in his opinion – people. From the opposite direction in the middle of the hallway a large man was unhurriedly walking, with no intention of yielding to anyone in his path. Arcad had become so used to the fact that everybody on the ship would give him way that he ran into the stranger without slowing down.

“You little shit, ain’t you looking where you runnin’? You blind?” the big guy yelled at Arcad and brushed him aside with such a great force that Arcad hit his shoulder against the wall with a hard impact.

“I am Arcad, you idiot!” he shouted back, rubbing his hurt shoulder.

“This is how you talk to your elders, tyke? How ‘bout I tear your ears off!” said the stranger to Arcad and harshly pulled on his ear.

“Ouch! Let it go, it hurts!” screamed Arcad and added, “GAS, help!”

“Let the child go, Peter,” right away sounded GAS’ metallic voice through the ship’s PA system, and the man let Arcad’s ear go.

All over the ship, every cabin and corner were bugged with the “eyes” and “ears” of the mighty GAS, enabling it to incessantly observe everything that was happening on the ship and make decisions without delay and, if needed, to rectify any problems with assistance from its beast-like helpers. The robots had little patience for humans, and on GAS’ command they could tear a person apart. All crew members knew this and as such carried out the board computer’s demands without questions and complaints.

Freed from Peter, Arcad ran back to his room sobbing from the insult. It was the first time in his life that he was hurt and humiliated by another person – he had never experienced that before – and it felt terrible. Arcad wished to destroy this assailant immediately and accustomed to all his whims being fulfilled on requested, he barked orders to GAS.

“GAS, this savage sadist must be thrown off the ship, like you have disposed of other people you no longer needed.”

The board computer was not programmed to recognize human emotions and it was just at the very beginning of getting to know them on its own, via its automatic learning mode. And at that moment its thinking was based on a pragmatic perspective, centered on its main objective – to deliver the cargo to Earth – so it decided not to carry out the request of the slighted boy.

The thing was that Peter was a space pilot by profession, and GAS knew this from the personal files of the crew members. But he joined this flight as a regular laborer out of despair, because he had been placed into the special “health resort” barracks for a “well-deserved exhale” after his return to Earth, delivering lichen harvested on Proxima. The Admission Investigation Unit became suspicious that he had the garlicky aroma and put him into quarantine until he had “breathed out” everything criminally eaten. But Peter was sure that he had been thrown to the barracks for his comments about the ruling elite. And for that reason there was no chance he would be released from quarantine in the foreseeable future, except if he signed for this insane mission as a volunteer.

The ship’s PIC (pilot in command) had been unable to come to his senses after the lengthy sleep, and GAS had to dispose of him. As a result GAS had been left without a professional pilot for the return journey, as well as to maneuver around the planet Hopus, and here the pilot Peter would come in really handy.

“Hold on for a little while, my boy. For now we need this man,” GAS placated Arcad. “As soon as we can do without him, I’ll push him into the airlock chamber, all right?”

“Well, all right,” agreed Arcad and the conflict was resolved.

Peter was an experienced pilot, and after he had heard that the PIC perished, he realized that he was indispensable for GAS to approach and maneuver the ship around the planet Hopus. That was why he began acting brazenly and aggressively, unlike the other survivors. Soon after coming to, Peter started paying visits to the cabin where the survived girls lived, just four out of twelve remaining. He would pick up the most attractive girl or the first one available (depending on his mood) and take her back to his cabin to have sex. None of the girls would decline his invitations for several reasons. Firstly, Peter was a tall and handsome young man, and, second, there was more than enough food in his cabin – meal packs were being rationed for cabins of four, and he was all alone in his quarters after his three roommates had died. The girls were happy to get their hands on the extra food, as GAS was starving them, thinking of them as useless eaters. Peter perfectly understood that after returning to Earth he would be thrown back to the special barracks under any pretext, and was secretly hoping to stay on the planet Hopus if such an opportunity would arise, with one of the girls who would accept his offer. And he was trying to choose the best one of the four.

Following GAS’ orders, Peter spent every day in the ship’s cockpit, checking the operations of all systems. He was quite savvy in electronics, having a background in engineering and machine programming. And because the ship had been assembled in a hurry and had been flown in automated mode twice as long as had been planned, many manual control units just didn’t respond to his commands – red lights kept turning on to report a problem. Peter was taking them apart, pinging back and forth, pinpointing the damaged parts and faulty electronic boards, and replacing them with the new ones – luckily, spare microchips, diodes, and capacitors were all in plentiful supply on the ship.

The designers and contractors foresaw that the huge rush the spaceship was being built in, breakdowns during the flight would be unavoidable, and prudently loaded the ship with several boxes of all kinds of parts.

Peter had to work quickly as the ship was finishing its slowdown – very soon, when Hopus’ orbit was reached, he was supposed to switch to manual control. Sometimes he even was sleeping in the cockpit, leaving it only to have a bite in his cabin. It was during those routine trips through the hallway between the two spaces when he ran into the little boss. His fellow crew members had told him about some child, who appeared out of nowhere and was running back and forth, poking his nose into everything and trying to give orders on GAS’ behalf. But Peter was ignoring what others were saying, assuming that it was some new advanced robotic assistant of GAS, and after colliding with the buster in the hallway immediately forgot about him.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «Литрес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на Литрес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.