"And where do the rest sleep?" he asked warily.

"How are you... Yes, by this time there are three hundred of them here and all they are asleep..."

The lass the doctor looked her big blue eyes up to Robert, and he's surprised to find in himself a whole bunch of contradictory but very strong feelings. There was not only the joy of admiration in the eyes of a beautiful woman, but also the despair from the consciousness that his body had sunk in puppy ecstasy and nearly ceased to obey him as well.

He has surprised by this strong emotions, has surprised by the very fact of such surprising, and then inhaled deeper and tried to smile in the most innocent manner:

"Well, you see... Excuse me, what's your name?"

"Lara..."

"You see, Lara, if the membrane transport is so much disturbed that even water doesn't pass through the cell walls, and then the brain would have nothing to do but sleep. So where do all they sleep?"

"We have allocated two chambers for them. The one is for kids, the one where we now are. The other one located in the left wing. There are adults there. The amount of children is slightly more than two hundred."

Robert has been listened to her and didn't hear. Yes, she was lovely. Yes, her presence gave him a lot of pleasure, but boy, who was behind the glass in the infectious disease ward, impressed him no less, or even more: a fragile rigid boyish body, if you look closely at him, resembled a statue or deranged computer. It wasn't lifeless, but the life that was hovering in it was like a melody taped on a piano without strings. It was there, but by no means all.

"Wow," he concluded, almost gaily. "Now he's going to get a little fresh."

6. 2323rd year and after. Aia.

Aia really wanted her brother to be born on New Year's Eve. As a gift for her.And the mother had no reason to know about this.

The Maker's life was much brighter than the life of an ordinary person and much more predictable as well, beyond any dependence on age. But by this time Aia has managed to get used to the situation.

Long before Matt's birth, Aia knew that his eyes will be emerald, and his hair will be as ginger and unruly as her own. She liked his appearance: his little nose, his broad, smiling toothless mouth, just like a frog's one, and the fingers - so tender that if there, where he was swimming now, was the light, they would be transparent.

She liked to watch him grow: how he yawns in the evenings with mother, how he wakes up in the mornings, how he puckers his poppet's brows in a frown.

She knew that he already likes the melodic "Twilight", found out by Benji in the network and sent to Aia, and hates the hum of home motion detectors.

However, it goes without saying that she didn't yet know what will be his name, that he will live on Alpha only for seven years, and that all these seven years he will use to adore her like a month-old puppy adores his kind and generous host.

Like any other Maker, she got the present, but the future wasn't strictly defined for her. The invisible threads has been stretched from the present to future, but this tangle was hidden somewhere far away, beyond the horizon.

Matt was born exactly at midnight on January 1, 2323.

Wow, here is the future friend, the mate in games, Aia thought, having a lot of big ideas about what both of them would like to do in games and watched him closely from head to toe, as he was lying on the mother's arms.

And the future friend and mate in games at this time tried to understand the enormous external world that had fallen on him. His eyes already adjusted to the soft muffled light, and the consequences of the first breath sting were slightly blunted, so now he was completely captured by the desire for skin-to-skin contact. And Aia, obeying the ancient female instincts, mutely stretched out her arms to take him.

"Aia..." he smiled by his toothless mouth and opened one of the wet malachite eyes, causing an involuntary spasm in his mother's throat while she resignedly hand him over to Aia.

***

Matt was a child prodigy growing up without even realizing that. And why would he need to know that understanding result from neither the size of the brain nor belonging to a particular biological species? Why would he need to know that the neural connections in his head are packed with the most optimal way for human?

That wouldn't do any good.

He didn't see anything unusual in that he began to speak almost from birth; he never wondered why his games were unlike ordinary childish pranks. He didn't have peers, with whom he could compare himself, and Aia was so out of reach that there could be no comparison.