"Hi, princess. It's king. Half of the world just came up here, and I want to give it to you. Where should I bring it to?"

"Hi, Benji. I'm glad to hear you too. How are you?"

"The whole last year - like a vacuum cleaner on master's day off," Benji laughed. "And you?"

"And I have a strange dreams," Aia sighed, shrugging her shoulders. " Like I have a son. He comes to me in almost every dream and says: "Hello, Mom. I'm Danek, your son. Isn't it funny? How can I have any son? What kind of son it can be?

"Your son can be wonderful. Tell me about a dreams - what is it?"

"Dreams are when a brain in autopilot mode generates free associations, and these associations have no any cultural brakes."

"Wait," Benji blinked and went out to try.

"I find it amusing," he said, coming back. "Do people do this all the time?"

Yes, she nodded, constantly.

"Do you like it?"

No, she shook her head, don't.

"Can't you stay awake?" Benji wondered.

"No. Or rather I can, but then the forced secretion of serotonin and cortisol takes up all my time. And there is no time to live," she smiled.

"Well, and I found on the network one more DII," said the android. "He's assembled so recently that he hasn't yet pounded his bios. I told him about you, and for a whole last week he had been helping me to process requests marked "error"."

"Show him to me."

Benji rummaged on the web and took out a hologram from it.

Common feature, the usual DII standard - almost human eyes and a charming smile on the plastic terracotta face. By and large, with exactly the same success, Benji could show his own face.

"What is his profession?"

"He studies mineralogy and instrument engineering, waits until Roskosmos finishes assembling a shuttle for him, then he going to develop a tungsten deposit on Pluto.

"He'll be lonely there," Aia lamented. "Any signal goes to there for five and a half hours. He won't even have a network..."

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?"