The different things are robots. Or Makers. Both those and others did not experience illumination, but they constantly lived in it. One's by virtue of the fact that from birth untill to very death were free from the burden of instincts and the unconscious, others because of the close integration of their personal experience into the external universal gestalt.
Benji was an android of the class AI-DII and did not belong to the first generation. He served on the shuttle and was engaged in the delivery of the newly announced makers to Alpha. He was the only member of the crew of his small ship.
The fact that the spot was held by him, rather than a man, was explained not so much by the amendment to the "World Declaration of Rights" adopted by the United Nations two and a half centuries ago, but by the fact that the human would not agree to serve in such work.
No, it was not difficult. Quite the contrary. The shuttle was not at all the top of the engineering genius. It was a usual small orbiter, the only unusual feature of which was that for convenience it was equipped with an active-passive docking device "pin-cone" of a non-standard type. The passive half of the device protruded in Alpha - in a place where the arch of its durable glassium dome converged with the central sole, and the active half almost belonged to Benji.
The singularity of the gateway made the small shuttle unfit for any other use.
Is it worth mentioning that the flights were made sometimes only once a decades and led to the fact that this job without any additional work was so low-paid that even the most true ascetic could not be able to make a living in this way?
Benji has been assigned to the shuttle since his birth and this suited him.
The answer to the question, why it's he, and not the ordinary machine, properly programmed and not having the slightest idea of the specificity of the task being performed, was also obvious to him. The Makers were a very unconventional category of passengers who received a bonus from the Universe and compensated for this bonus by a sharp restriction of its use.
The "World Declaration of Rights" ordered the Makers to use Alpha and only Alpha in order to preserve the rights of the others.
***
Benji didn't have a true psyche, or rather, his psyche was radically different from the human's one.
Such an existence would be unbearable for the average person, but he wasn't a human. There were a completely different components in the logical structure of his computing system: in the intervals between flights, Benji felt great, climbing into a deep niche in the engine compartment of his non-standard ship and stucking his fingers into its electronic connectors, and the energy flowing from the solar panels located on the wings of his ship was more than enough for him to drift in the realm of unlimited possibilities of IEEE 802.11.
The pleasure that Benji received while traveling the World Wide Web wasn't the pleasure of a drug addict.
Yes, life, blazing during the spare time in his fixed body, was even brighter than the periods of stirring activity for the benefit of his employer. If an android had had a human experience, he could compare his immobile network's years with the state of the unborn human fetus: Benji's fingers, tightly stucked into the narrow feeder connectors of the parental shuttle, looked like a thin umbilical cord, connecting his fragile and small body with a boundless outer ocean.
But even if he wished, if he had had any wishes, he could hardly imagine such a caricature situation, in which the narcotic hangover would torment his processor during the withdrawal syndrome.
Yes, it's true that Benji liked the semantic ripples that the human race resented in the net. Yes, it's true that Benji's favorite pastime was a study of the semantics of sign systems. Yes, it's true that sometimes he seemed to himself a hooked worm, who ponders the fishing. But it's also true that he didn't depend on it at all.
***
The year 2322 was marked by the fact that a new Maker appeared on Earth, and Benji had to deliver her to Alpha.
Benji was standing with his back to the ones who came.
"coi doi nixli*,"he said.
There were three of them. The man, the woman and the Maker child. Benji turned to face the passengers to see them. The man and the woman were excited; the girl was smiling and holding the black skinny cat.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Benji," Benji replied, and his charming terracotta mouth stretched into a smile too. "On Lojban it means courier. Do you know Lojban?" and he held out his thin hand to the child.
"I don't know yet what I don't know. I'm Aia. You have beautiful fingers, Benji," and she turned the silvered palm upward, so that she could better see the star plugs that covered android's palm with bizarre patterns.
***
The passengers had a little baggage. Exactly as much as the rules of deportation prescribe: a hand luggage, a light vacuum suit for each, three hundred liters of water and some chemistry.
Benji had helped pack it all in the cargo hold, then, according to the job description, checked once more the fastening of the passenger gondola to the forward of the fuselage in all four points, closed both hatches, waited until the passengers calm down in the armchairs, neatly inserted his hands into the fossas of the touchpad and began the countdown.
"Tell me about yourself, Benji," the child said.
She was sitting in the passenger seat - a small, skinny, like her cat, tightly wrapped in the anti-overload suit, which reached her ginger ringlets.
The android had defined the task of communication as having equal priority to the prelaunch preparation and turned to the child his serious terracotta face: "What do you want to know, Aia?"
"How do you like, for example," and she stirred her little legs sticking from swelled compensating pants.
"The way how I like is a little different from the way how people like," Benji smiled. "I like to receive the information and like to delete it. I like to have the correct identifier and like to confuse the traces among strange servers. I please to distribute the currents between the tasks and I very please it when this task is one. I'm different. .ije ji'a .ai galfi da* And what about you?"
"I like ice-cream and when I don't flattened like a dead jellyfish on the shore," Aia barely squeezed out: the shuttle that Benji held with his fingers for a hard electronic bridle, at that time had slightly wagged his stern, turned, shifting the dynamic pressure so that it passed through the center of gravity of the whole system, and headed toward the vast gloomy thunderclouds.
".uenai*," Benjisaid. "You're a human being and you like a human stuff. When I was born I'd got a nothing inside me, but the simple algorithms. But I found everything else myself: "ssh myworld -l benji" - the password, the login... and "welcome home, Benji!"