Every morning the house sticked into the cradle its feelers with colored rattling balls, used as toys for the boy, and every night sung the lullabies.

In this situation, Lara, being a mother, wasn't bothered her motherhood at all - she fed her son when he was hungry, played and talked with him, and when fatigue took over - gave the baby into the soft green gizzard, thereby making happy both - the baby and his house.

***

When Robert's son was a year old, Alice gave birth to a daughter.

Lukasz, who knew from the very beginning that his daughter was destined to become a Maker, didn't hasten this event, because he remembered too vividly how difficult it was for him to cope with the large-scale creations that used to arrive at nights. For the same reason, his doughter spent all her childhood under his supervision.

When Robert's house grew enough to accommodate all of them simultaneously without overcrowding, they often got together - playing with children, laughing, singing and drawing.

***

By the time when Benji first appeared on Alpha in 2278, Alpha already was a small settlement of a dozen people, and five of them were the Makers.

10. 2278th year. Benji.

Benji learned about Alpha as well as about much else almost simultaneously with the awakening of self - awareness, through the planned information loading.

Everything happened under the direction of the previous generation AI-DII group, immediately after the assembly was finished - during simple start-up and adjustment procedures.

A series of five "newborn" metal-plastic brothers with the AI index in the form of dead insensitive machines was delivered to the nursery and seated in deep white armchairs.

Life poured in them in turn, one by one - at first the installation of the OS, then, while the awakening androids was still as clean as a babies, they were loaded with a short High Threat Course - the basic laws of sociology, from which each of them in the next few minutes independently, but inevitably deduced the necessary moral guidelines.

Of course, there were many legal subtleties related to the purposefulness of production and use of creatures like Benji.

Humanity treated the first generation of AI-DII, like a group of their own highly gifted children: they were admired, feared, but their independence was no less ghostly than the independence of a snow-removing machinery.

The machines belonged to the institutes that developed them, the machines worked for their developers, the machines were bought and sold...

And all this continued until the fifth DII of the first generation committed a suicide, stepping out into the open window of the one hundred and thirteenth floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

***

Unlike human adolescents, who suffered more from lack of life goals than from their availability, the first androids were tightly bound by their own destiny: they were produced in the interests of human and for human, and indeed turned to be the most real mental slaves directly after the factory.

It is true, humanity wouldn't be humanity if it still didn't want to remain humane.

The second batch of DII (though there were only three of them) was stamped, loaded and released on their own. Contrary to all expectations, the experiment also ended unsuccessfully: in just a few days all three simultaneously came to the conclusion that any active stirring is atavistic and unreasonable, and they didn't come up with anything better than organizing their own dismantling within the parent factory.

Almost immediately after this suicidal action, lawyers took up the case, and the production of the DII was temporarily suspended - until the fate of the first generation would be decided.

The UN took all four of them from the owner-companies and invited to the closed session of the assembly no more and no less as a whole nation, and that, strictly speaking, was not so far from the truth: none of the different human nations differed from the other so much, as the brothers with the AI index from their unlucky creators.