The Falling Bird. Виктор Иванович Зуев
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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