28. 2330th year. Benji.

Benji, just as he planned, waited for Aia in the waiting room at the exit from the migration terminal - where the crowd were meeting, and where was a sharp and lingering scent of surrogate coffee.

He sat up aside the crowd, under one of the transmitters, covering the hall with free Wi-Fi, and, taking the opportunity, used the local search engine with the request entitled "human needs".

As for his own needs, about them it was clear, simple and more or less understandable. By and large, in the absence of a driving purpose, even the only one that could be considered basic - the need for periodic recharging - wasn't one: Benji realized that if he somehow didn't get in time to the power source, he would be neither sad nor worried.

But for a human it all was important: the constant involvement in a universe passing by a human and through a human must necessarily have a nonzero degree. Smells, sounds, reflections - all this was the very essence of human life, all this was it.

It has to be said, Benji's curiosity was not entirely idle: gazing intently at the abstract human, he peered through him at Aia.

By the time she appeared at the entrance to the hall, he had managed to understand that the satisfaction of all human needs was not only impossible, but also undesirable, and was just finalizing the contract for the purchase of the apartment in the area of Rue des Lilas.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with you," he told Aia, "Because I don't know what you're going to do with me." But it seems we already have a common apartment for all this.

"Well," she said, so calmly, as if she was from the beginning sure of everything. "Then tonight it should smell of apples."

Rue des Lilas was a narrow green street, which faced the tenth gates of Orly. The proximity to the spaceport made it noisy and crowded.

Benji immediately recognized this house: it was exactly the same as on the advertising hologram in the network - yellow-white, with varying levels, wide green galleries and semicircular transparent balconies along the vertical edges.

"It seems that we now live with you at the very top of it, uh... right there," he pointed out.

The apartment was empty and definitely that's why Benji saw it as big and hollow. Even from the very entrance he could see the window - huge, as big as the whole wall of the living room, with the sky over the Orly torn apart by a numerous lunar ships.

The android hesitated, unloading apples at the entrance.

"Benji!" Aia called him from the depths. "Come here."

She was waiting for him at the window: a girl with a flame-like hair in a bright blue coat against a bright blue sky.

"I want to give you something, too."

"What?" he asked carelessly.

She stepped forward and hugged him, so that her narrowed eyes turned to be a few centimeters from his eyes:

"Memories, Benji. Just don't be afraid."

What are you talking about, Benji thought in amazement and complacency, you know, I can't to be afraid, but the question froze still on his lips, because suddenly the unknown rose inside him.

Maybe it started with Aia's fingers, and maybe with his back that was touched by these fingers - he didn't know, but only his skin under her fingers suddenly became soft, and in it started to stir something unnameable.

"It's nerves, Benji. It's growing nerves. Don't be afraid of anything," whispered Aia, smiling, looking attentively at his widened pupils. "I just want to show you what it's like to be a human."

"Human?!" Benji thought desperately, looking down. "Why?"

To love you, she silently smiled and embraced him, and stroked his skin, and under her thin white fingers into him grew the universe. Another universe, a new universe that has completely different properties and qualities...

"Do you feel how sweet the apples smell?" she whispered. "They are flowing into you - carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen..."

And Benji really felt that the air around him was getting a noticeable sweet taste. Apples, he thought, look at that, how sweet the apples smell.