Виктор Иванович Зуев "The Falling Bird"

At first, the recruits from the barracks were just complaining, “We didn’t join here to put up with cold and hunger – we’ve had this shit in the barracks in spades!” And then, a couple of months into the flight, those amongst the group who were stronger and cockier began switching up the living arrangements, kicking out the weaker and more timid members from their warmer cabins. This process got out of control, but the guards stayed out of it, having decided that everything would settle down somehow on its own, and being more preoccupied in fooling around with the chambermaids instead; even Valentin Valentinovich was indifferent to the infighting amongst the crew over the cabins, picking for himself the most curvaceous girl of the twelve helps, locking himself with her in his cabin and barely leaving it, entrusting GAS to entirely pilot the ship and manage the crew on its own. As for GAS, having economically considered with its silicon brain that having members of the high-stakes expedition engaged in promiscuous erotic escapades and physical altercations was an extravagant and excessive waste of air, water and food, ultimately decided to put all crew members into hibernation six months earlier than planned. So, on week ten of the voyage, it released the sleeping gas to all ship’s modules induce anabiosis, in the middle of the night time while everybody was already asleep. It also began injecting nutritional supplements into the atmosphere, to make sure that the travelers do not die from malnutrition before arriving to the destination.

Valentin Valentinovich and his mistress alone were spared from this event, as he made his suite completely autonomous from the ship’s general systems pre-flight. They learned that GAS had put all expedition members into stasis the next morning, when they saw a warning sign “Gas! No exiting!” appear above the hallway entrance and discovered that the door was automatically blocked.

Elina, the mistress of the ship’s director for duration of the expedition, was the first to wake up and wanted to sneak out to her friends to chitchat while her paramour was sleeping, but upon noticing the locked door and the alarming sign above shook Valentin awake.

“Valik, wake up! Someone locked us up, and some gas was released.”

Valentin scratched himself for a long while, unable to understand what this dumb broad wanted from him, and when the situation finally dawned on him, he hailed GAS.

“Listen, GAS, what is going on there?” he asked the on-board computer, yawning.

“Good morning, my master,” that was the ironic name that GAS had given to him, knowing that he liked it, “ To prevent the crew from screwing around all over the place, for economical purposes I have put them into stasis and supplied their air with the proper nutrients until we arrive to our destination. I hope after two to three years of some healthy sleep they all will wake up safe and sound.”

“Good God,” grumbled Valentin in response and thought to himself, “It was smart of me to disconnect my cabin from the general support system and make it autonomous. Otherwise, I would have been lying passed out somewhere with others, and who knows if I would have woken up in three years.”

“Well then, you better serve breakfast for two here in the bedroom. But next time before you do anything like that, let me know in advance. OK?”

“Yes, my master!” replied GAS joyfully and hung up.

The service board robots showed up a half-hour later, rolling food into the flight director’s sealed module chamber and passed his meal to him on a serving tray.

Valentin hungrily began eating and, mouth full of food, asked his girlfriend.

“And you, Elya, why aren’t you eating?”

“For some reason, I’m not hungry, sweetie. You eat,” she replied, stroking him on his slowly balding head.

Valentin Valentinovich was quite an ugly little man – short, fat, balding, with large, protruding, moist lips and bulging watery eyes. He always walked bowlegged, hunched over, and smacking his lips all the time, licking off saliva – in fact he resembled a toad. But despite his repulsive looks, Elya agreed to live with him right after she had got a job on the ship, because of his wealth and status, but also because she was two months pregnant by her last lover – a handsome, but very poor boyfriend. Elya tricked the medical board when applying for a job on this flight, not thinking that she would be away that long. She wanted to live with Valentin, provide him with sexual favors for as much money as possible, and come back to her beloved toy boy as a rich girlfriend. That the flight would take several years, not weeks, as she had originally thought, Elya learned only after blastoff from Valik. So she decided to announce that her unborn baby’s father was “the little toad” – the name she called him in private – just waiting for the right opportunity to do that. And any premature labor in the future could be blamed on the unbearable space conditions. This ploy would allow her to solidify her position on the ship as a chief hostess and let her do nothing for the whole duration of the flight, and then see what the future would hold. Elina’s morning sickness had started early: she was nauseous and craved something salty all the time, but she did her best to hide from “the little toad” for at least a couple of weeks. The fact that GAS had put the crew into sleep was to Elya’s advantage. The only problem was to being forced to tolerate the constant company of the slobbery “little toad”. Before, she was able to escape every day to the guards, but now they were gone too, and she felt nauseous, nauseous, and nauseous incessantly.

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.

“My master, the curvature of the galactic space has slightly altered our ship’s course and we shall arrive to the star Asteroin somewhat later than planned.”

“And when should we expect to arrive at this goddamn planet, my dear?” asked Valentin lazily.

“According to my calculations, it will take as long as we already have flown, if not longer.”

“That’s unbearable!” the expedition’s director exclaimed in indignation. “Can anything be done in this situation?”

“No, nothing, my master. I have already attempted every possible solution I could, and have brought the ship’s course back to the correct direction. The universe is cruel and unpredictable,” GAS philosophized.

“The space curvature can permanently alter the physical appearance of any crew members who are awake, so for that reason I suggest that you and Elya go into stasis for the remainder of the flight to Hop. This way your bodies will remain intact, and time will pass much faster for you.”

“Really? And what about the kid?”

“I will take care of Arcad. As he is a growing child, his body is not in danger of being affected by the curve. However, he also can’t be put into hibernation while he is maturing, so during your sleep my assistants and I will raise him in lieu.”

“But how will I be able to manage the flight?”

“When an emergency occurs, I’ll wake you up, my master.”

‘Oh all right, go ahead, ‘cause I’m sick and tired of lying on the couch and watching the TV serials over and over about ten times now. I can’t wait to arrive there, but you are wasting our time. Just give us a separate room to hibernate in.”

“Certainly. We’ll prepare the appropriate accommodations right away.”

Elina, though, wasn’t quite eager to be put into sleep along with her “master,” especially since a month earlier she had seen GAS’ assistants pushing a half-awake recruit into the ship’s airlock chamber and then with a special pusher launching him into the dreadful dark space. After accidentally having seen this cruel execution these robots carried out on an innocent person, she asked Valentin about it.

“Valia, how could they do something so merciless to a living human being?”

“He violated orders and dared to wake up ahead of schedule, for which he was punished,” Valentin sternly answered her question.

And as such she was afraid that if she was left on her own without Valia around, GAS would order its heartless mechanical beasts to jettison her overboard into space like unnecessary waste. Her paranoia was fueled more so by the fact that the synthetic GAS was jealous of Elya over the toddler, trying to limit the time she was spending with the child, and repeatedly telling Valentin, “This stupid bimbo can’t teach Arcad anything good.”

GAS arranged separate rooms for his master and the mistress and successfully put them into sleep until their arrival to their destination, while turning its attention towards raising the toddler as it saw fit. To GAS it was quite amusing to see a little human, having absolutely no knowledge of any kind and seeing no worlds other than the nursery where he had been living practically his entire life, talking only to GAS and its robots.

In the three following years it had took to escape from the unforeseen intergalactic gravitational field, GAS taught Arcad to speak, to read and type on the board computers, introduced him to the ship’s design and explained to him where they were flying to and their mission. The boy was quite gifted, learning everything on the fly, as if it was a captivating game. And because he knew nothing beyond his room, he assumed that this was all that the whole world had to offer and nothing and nobody else existed out there – it was just him, GAS and the two mechanical lookalikes of Arcad, carrying out their orders. And as for the documentaries GAS had shown him about Earth and the people living there, he believed those to be strange fairy tales about non-existent worlds among the far away stars, not worthy of any serious attention.

“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.