The following four months Valentin and Elina had done nothing except for eating, sleeping, and getting fat. GAS occasionally tried to talk to them and educate them about their current location and the stars they were flying by, but it found them to be quite poor students and stopped its lectures. On the sixth month of the journey GAS noticed Elina’s quickly growing belly and mentioned it to her.
“Well, Elya, it appears that your belly is growing much faster than that of my master’s.”
“It’s ’cause I’m pregnant, Gassy, and soon will give birth, I think.”
“And what does that mean?” GAS became concerned as it was not prepared for medical emergencies of that kind on its ship.
“Valik and I will be having a baby due to our shacking up together.”
“Wait a minute, I am not prepared to such transformations, what am I supposed to do in this strange case?”
“You’ll need to prepare a special delivery room, for starters,” Valentin joined the conversation; Elya had already broken the news to him regarding his impending fatherhood.
“Acknowledged, I will make the necessary preparations for this unexpected development,” said GAS, as he began searching in every block of his memory bank for any information related to childbirth.
A couple of weeks later with the help of its android assistants, GAS was able to put together a decent makeshift birthing chamber and readied itself, in theory. And in a month’s time, Elina – attended to by GAS and its robotic assistants – successfully gave birth to a healthy boy, weighing at almost five kilograms. Surprisingly, the happiest out of everyone was GAS itself, as the new arrival brought much entertainment to the supercomputer as well as the pleasant responsibilities of babysitting which it had assigned to itself. Day in and out, GAS was primarily monitoring the baby and instructing his mother about the proper methods of parenting, according to the archival data it regurgitated from the depths of its massive brain. The baby was growing up like in a fairy tale – growing not by days, but by the hour – and was gaining weight quickly. Elya, after discussions with Valentin, decided to name the boy Angel, after all being a child born in the cosmos, but the board computer rejected it and bestowed him with the name Arcad, after one of the names of the mythological hunting dogs – the ones the ancients used for Canes Venatici constellation, where their ship was en route to. As for Valentin, he excused himself from parenting the baby and kept living his days leisurely – spending the whole trip watching sitcoms, eating, sleeping, and growing fat. The child was being raised solely by GAS, who found the task to be an interesting experiment.
Two years of the voyage across the endless galaxy had passed. Arcad began walking and talking quite early, much to GAS’ joy, who was now constantly telling the toddler funny stories about Earth and space complete with pictures which it projected on the wall in the nursery. GAS, having gotten carried away with raising the child, entirely neglected to monitor the ship’s flight path – when it did happen to check the ship’s coordinates, it was surprised to discover that the ship had deviated far from its planned route. It was flying in a huge, inconceivable arc in space, caught in the intergalactic curvature of space-time that GAS had failed to take into account. After having corrected the course and factored in the drift, GAS re-calculated the ETA to the planet Hop and became slightly sad at his conclusions – it would take almost twice as long to get there. GAS reported this unfortunate news to Valentin.
