“GAS, you keep showing me some mountains, rivers, seas, a sun, wind, cities, people on the screen and you are trying to persuade me that it all exists on some planet called Earth. But why does it all exist and for what purpose? And have you seen with your own eyes at least something of that strange, unnecessary ecology you showed me?”
Arcad’s inquisitions took GAS by surprise and it tried to answer his young charge as vaguely as possible, promising to show all of Earth’s diversity in the future, when he was older.
“No, I’ve seen nothing of that. My programmers uploaded into my memory the belief that this world does indeed exist.”
“Well, you see? Someone has persuaded you about that, but it seems to me that you aren’t sure yourself that it exists, and I doubt that too. I suspect that these are just colorful pictures, like the ones I draw on paper or on a computer. And as soon as I turn the screen off or go to another room, all of this diversity disappears like a dream.”
Arcad was becoming more interested in the really important issues of the current life on the ship – why was their city-ship so small? Why were there no other people but him and was there anybody else he could talk to but GAS? And why was he not permitted to go anywhere from his room? One day he asked.
“Listen, GAS, where did I come from?”
“What do you mean where did you come from? You were born.” For the first time while mentoring the child GAS was at a loss for words.
“What do you mean ‘was born’?”
“A woman, your mother, gave birth to you seven years ago. And now your mom, along with your dad is sleeping in a special room, five years already, to avoid body deterioration during this flight.”
“And why am I not sleeping and neither are our two helpers?”
“Our helpers are made of metal and are not sensitive to the enormous intergalactic speeds and gravity. But even if they break down for whatever reason, I have more helpers like that on reserve and can bring them to life at any moment to make them work for you and me. But you, as a growing living organism, cannot go into a lengthy anaerobic sleep, otherwise your physical and intellectual development will be compromised. You are currently living in a mini-gravitational chamber I made specifically for you at the expense of the ship’s fuel economy, so that you can grow up normally and when you come back to Earth, you are able to live there freely, like all the other people there.
“How strange! You don’t seem to exist physically in front of me, yet you can do anything.”
“Well, almost anything,” agreed GAS proudly.
And while Arcad was engaged in philosophical conversations and being schooled on various sciences, time passed by unnoticed by the little involuntary traveler, a passenger on a ship to a faraway unknown planet.
At last, on the eighth year of the flight, the distance to Asteroin was rapidly shortening, and GAS turned on the ship’s deceleration systems in order not to overshoot the star. The helpers on GAS’ order began to vent the noble gases from all the modules and filling them with an oxygen mixture so that everybody who was sleeping would begin to wake up.
And then it became clear that not all of the crew members survived such a lengthy slumber. Some couldn’t wake up, or, after awakening were unable to walk and were just crawling around in the cabins with no knowledge of who they were. The dead and those incapable of physical labor were being mercilessly “fired” – the robots were ejecting them into space with compressed air through the airlock chamber, like projectiles from a howitzer’s barrel.
