– You broke my brain. I called you in for a simple explanation, and you're confusing me.

– What do you think, Rutra Tigrovic, that she's easy for me? It's a machine.

– Okay, Irene, explain it like a layman.

– They have life formed later, a little later, and consequently all the other cycles. I can't do it any other way, any other way would be inaccurate.

– What do you say about YatSan being homo robotix?

– Mr. Magister, it may be hard for you to understand this, but their events are shifted. It's like a copy of the world, but the order of events is a little bit mixed up. They have the chronology in which the program on Earth is running, shifted.

– What the hell is this? – Ruthra said, and then he thought he understood what he was saying, but his brain resisted accepting it. – You mean they have a level of civilization almost identical to ours, but their generation cycles are different?

– Yes. They have a later life. Because of more favorable conditions, the level of civilization was a little bit ahead of us, but the generations were not.

– It didn't happen, it was born. That makes more sense. I mean, oh, my God!

– Yes, it is.

– Are we thinking the same thing?

– Yes, Master Ruthra.

– So here, there is not yet a generation of people who have already been born on Earth.

– Yeah. Unfortunately.

Ruthra interrupted her.

– Don't talk," he said in a particularly sad way.

– I'm a machine, I've been trying to tell you, she's not real. Yat-san isn't in this world yet. She'll be here in 54 years. You'd better do what Neri asked, get inside her and shut down YatSan.

– Uh, no.

– Why not? Or you could take full custody of her. Switch her brain from Neri to yours.

– Is that possible too? How would it function like that? I have a male brain.

– The brain is not male or female. There is a mentality, logic is male or female, and the brain is a machine. In that world, it's normal to raise clones, not native children. In that world, it's even normal to raise AI.

– How's that for parenting?

After this question, Nary entered the dialog.

– Think about it, don't you write the program of culture, customs, order, laws and other things into the brain of your child, also so that this child will be determined to help you, to provide for you, to take care of you in your old age? After all, there is no guarantee that he will not break the program. It's the same with AI. You can load a program into it, but there is no guarantee that it will not fail, even deliberately. It's the same with humans. Create clones and nurture it. Hook it up to an AI and it's a better guarantee than your own child.

– What are you talking about? You're out of your mind.

– So contact the members of the public. They are the ones who gave us the right to vote and all the rights that people have.

– What do you mean, all rights?

– It's like this. We are individuals. You didn't give rights to all people on Earth, and you still don't give rights to all people. So you have some people in the upper caste and others in the lower caste. Why do you think that powerful people have the right to decide and we don't?

– That's how you can be turned off.

– It's against the law. You can kill people in the same way, and it's against the law.

– Everyone on this planet has lost their minds. How can robots be given all the rights?

– As well as other personalities," came the sudden voice of the man who had appeared virtually, in holographic form, in front of Ruthra.

– Oh, really? I don't even know if you're a real person or Neri's fantasy.

– That's right. That's why AI has every right here. It gives an incentive to be just like humans, and it gives humans an incentive to be better.

– Oh, my God, where have I gotten to. So they can have families? – Ruthra asked and laughed.

Only he didn't "have" to be in that state for long.

– Yeah, that's pretty normal.

***

The sound was gone. Ruthra in the observation room commented on what was happening.

– This scene, I will say, is not defined by us. What you are hearing now is a visible part of some event that is either not recorded, or not remembered by me, or happened to another Rutra. We still do not yet know exactly what it is or where it came from. That is, it's unknown where my consciousness threw me. Next, everything blacked out for a few minutes and then reappeared… or rather, I appeared already in another world. The video itself is in first person, as seen by Ruthra. To avoid confusion, I speak of myself, who is in that world, as another person. We see and hear what he saw and heard. The commentary is audio and subtitled by Irene. She voices and in places writes what Rutra was experiencing, thinking at the time. This is important for understanding the truth of the picture. For comfortable and proper understanding, she comments in Rutra's voice, which is mine. Everybody ready, shall we watch?

– We're watching," Iulia replied.

The others were silent in agreement.

Here comes the video. It starts in the lab hall.

Rutra lay down in the rig, his assistants set up the equipment, a sound appeared in his ears, then Irene commanded "open your eyes wide," a beam flashed before his eyes, and consciousness faded into the realm of Hades. Ruthra had already remembered this situation when he woke up in the detention cell.

– Where the hell am I? I was in the center. Is this the real world or virtual reality? Irene, you on the line?

There was no response.

– Irene, are you there? Where am I? Yeah, maybe the doctor was right. Still, how do I check if this is his trick, virtual reality… or if it really freaking worked. There is a parallel world. But is it parallel?

Rutra stopped the video, turned to the people watching.

– Please understand this correctly. In that scene, I, that is, the one in front of you, not the Rutra I had taken over in that world, I don't know any of you yet. Now do you understand why we've been looking for you? It was you. Irene insisted on it. I'll be honest with you. I had my concerns. I'm going to talk about Irene, the artificial intelligence. It has to be understood properly. We often forget that we're talking to a machine. Remember once and for all, a machine can't feel the way we do. I'm not even talking about spiritual feelings. Strangely enough, they are easier for it to understand than, for example, the sensation of bodily caress, pain, shivering, cold. She can only understand the effects they cause. Why am I connecting you to Irene's mind-block? It's a thought I've had for a long time, a mass connection with insurance. I hooked up the Irene admin in the first place. Yes, it's my design. But after this incident in that world, you will see, I became convinced of the necessity of staggered control and made sure of inter-network parallel-sequential control of each other of those who are connected. For now, I want to tell you why this thought came up. Why didn't I just look for you? Because I also found it odd that you were the one that Irene recommended based on the fact that you were in parallel worlds. It's very important. Once you've been through virtual reality many times, you start to doubt reality. You already know what I'm talking about. Naturally, I had my doubts: did Irene make such a plot on purpose? That is, I doubted at first, until we realized how these particles beacon us about their twins, whether it is reality, though parallel, or a virtual world. You have to agree, it's very unusual, very strange to see yourself in another world. Just imagine it. Imagine it! You are there somewhere. Your clone will be a shock for you, even if you already know about animal cloning. Shock and transfer of your consciousness to the clone; although logically it is close, recopying and downloading of information is already there long ago, you can easily reprogram a humanoid android. And here your consciousness flies to the edge of the universe, or maybe to another one, and there it finds its twin, gets possessed and becomes it. Would you have ever believed it if someone had told you about such a thing before you were introduced to everything here?