“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.
Arcad was moving around the ship together with the robots observing with interest what was going on. He was taking in a completely alien world within the same ship he was on himself. His edifice of how the world was organized had been built on the premise that it was revolved around the nursery where he had already been living for the past eight years. And now his belief was seriously shaken and fractured after he had seen something outside of his worldview; the illusion was broken and he began revising his perception of life as he was discovering new areas of the ship – previously off limits – and the members of the crew that were coming to. The stale odor coming from the cabins where the crew members were housed, their sluggish movements, and lethargic indiscernible speech brought about in Arcad only a feeling of disgust and some kind of repulsion. Looking at the nearly insane workers, he wished that the robots had ditched all of the remaining people into space through the airlock. That was exactly what he said to GAS now that he had seen everything.
“I would do that with pleasure, my boy,” GAS answered him. “But who then will be harvesting the weed on Hop? You, maybe?” bursting into laughter like a human.