AbductiCon Read online

  “I heard they’ve set aside a floor in one of the towers for the mundanes who might have gone slightly doolally about all of this. A sort of a makeshift loony bin,” someone else from the audience said. “You know, for the people who are not–us, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and who can’t get their heads around any of it. They’ve all been moved to that single floor and the curtains are being kept drawn and some of them are supposed to have been given a heavy duty sleeping pill of sorts that will keep them knocked out until… well… whatever happens, in the end. That’s harm…?”

  “They are safe,” Bob said. “They will not be harmed.”

  “Physically,” the heckler from the audience said. “But they’ll probably need serious therapy for years to come.” A ripple of self–conscious laughter swept the room at that remark. “Assuming you haven’t made any other miscalculations and failed to factor in circumstances that more of us might be adversely affected by.”

  “Are you at least able to tell us,” Marlise said, leaning forward to lean her chin on her interlocked hands and giving Bob the android a genuinely curious stare, “why we are all here…?”

  “Uh–oh,” muttered Xander, from the back of the room. He wasn’t sure this panel was going in a direction that would remain under control. Bob would probably tell the bald unvarnished truth and it would not be enough for some and far too much for others – and the ‘loony bin floor’ wasn’t immune from being expanded to an entire hotel wing if things spun sideways…

  But apparently Bob was under orders. “I cannot discuss the full purpose of our presence with you here at this time,” he said, in an infuriatingly calm voice that began to raise hackles – Xander could hear the murmurs begin to stir in the audience. What Bob seemed to be implying was that the people in that room really were too insignificant in the greater scheme of things for the truth to be offered to them, let alone discussed. Bob might have started the panel as a curiosity, he might have been painted as a mere antagonist to begin with, but he was swinging fast in the direction of true villainy – doing things because he wanted to do things, with reckless disregard of whose toes he was treading on.

  Xander looked around at the people whom he had followed here from the Con Ops room, but none of them could be of immediate use under the circumstances. He quietly pulled out of the back of the crowd at the rear of the room and stepped out into the corridor, tapping his earpiece.

  “Hey, if anyone can hear me – get Boss to get telepathic fast – maybe putting Bob on a panel was not such a totally glorious idea – I think he’s in trouble – he needs to say something and I’m not sure what he thinks he’s allowed to say so he’s not saying anything or he’s saying just enough to come across as having something to hide and it’s going down like a lead balloon. We need PR help, fast. Mayday, mayday, can anyone hear me…?”

  The earpiece crackled briefly in his ear, and he winced. Then Libby’s voice came on.

  “Boss is here. I’m on it.”

  “Step on it.”

  Xander slipped back into the panel room, where the discussion seemed to have heated up a couple of degrees during his short absence.

  “…so basically we’re not nearly important enough to know – I don’t know how things work out in your universe, but out here…”

  Bob’s head came up the tiniest bit and tilted, as though he were listening to something, and then he simply interrupted the voice from the audience.

  “We are here to look for our origins,” Bob announced. “That is why we came.”

  “You think we know?” someone demanded incredulously.

  “And where do you think you’ll find the answers – on the Moon?” another voice chimed in.

  “No. We just came here. The Moon was your idea.”

  Bob’s flat words sounded utterly preposterous when they were trotted out baldly like that. Xander closed his eyes for a moment and wondered if he shouldn’t have left things well enough alone. He knew what the android meant – the side trip had been flung out almost as a joke when the possibility arose of the resort–on–a–rock, floating in the sky above a densely populated city, being used as target practice by a hair–trigger jumpy military command who might have conceived it their duty to remove the danger by any means necessary. But nobody else in this room had been present at that conversation. And now it sounded like a challenge or an accusation rather than a simple quip being taken seriously enough by an entity with the means to make it come true.

  “Hey, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away,” a new voice said, a young voice, and Xander tried to focus on who had spoken. It was a kid, up near the front, half turning in his chair to face the back of the room. Xander did not know him. But he did know the older man sitting beside him – Sam Dutton, Andie Mae’s predecessor, the guy whose name was synonymous with this con.

  Xander winced, uneasily aware that he really was on a rollercoaster ride and there was no way off until it stopped careening out of control. He didn’t even know the direction or the speed of the juggernaut he was on. For a moment – just a brief, disloyal moment – he actually entertained the traitorous thought that it might have been better for everyone if Sam Dutton had in fact still been at the helm of the con right now, because at the very least that’s where the buck would have stopped and whatever happened Andie Mae wouldn’t have ended up stuck with the full responsibility. And then another thought crowded that one out – had Sam known anything at all about this before it imploded on everyone and had simply said nothing and waited in the wings even now with some rabbit he could pull out of the hat at the last instant to be acclaimed as the savior of it all. And then he dismissed both thoughts. Nobody could have been expecting this.

  The kid was still talking, and Xander re–focused on his voice.

  “Anyone could have done it. Anyone with an ounce of curiosity would have done it. If you found out you were adopted, for instance, would you not be curious about who your real family might have been? That’s all this is, really.”

  “They’re supposed to be robots,” complained one of the original hecklers. “Aren’t they? So there can’t be any curiosity, can there? They don’t exactly have feelings for anything or anybody, do they?”

  “We don’t know that,” he flung back. “We don’t know really anything about them. And anyway, curiosity is supremely logical. What, you think the only reason you might want to know something is to scratch an emotional itch? Then what about empirical curiosity, the thing that drives science? What about journalistic or investigative curiosity, the urge to get to the bottom of a story or solve a mystery? What about faith?”

  “Faith? How can a robot have faith? What does a robot have to believe in?”

  “They might well have the same kind of questions about you,” the kid said. “What would flesh and blood and bone have to believe in – something so fragile as we are, so easily hurt, so easily damaged and destroyed? Why is it so hard to believe that something as … eternal… as they are – because they don’t have disease or decay – might believe in something that has always existed, just as they themselves have always existed and always will – they’re the irresistible force, after all, moving forward, and they have no reason to stop until they come up against an immovable object which can crush them or is too big or too logistically complex to go around. What, then, is left, except faith?”

  “Good grief,” Xander muttered to himself, “how old is this guy, sixteen going on eleventy–one?... That’s all I need, a damned philosopher.”

  “We needed to know where the origin was. It was the only way to see a destination,” Bob said in his flat, emotionless voice.

  “It’s evolution,” said Sam Dutton equably. “Social evolution, if you will. Any sentience eventually evolves to a point of asking ‘Are you my mommy?’ – and maybe that’s all this is, really. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Well, all I can say is that they picked a terrible moment in their social evolution to develop
principles,” grumbled someone from the back row of chairs in the room.

  “I take issue with both ‘social’ and ‘evolution’ – we have absolutely no reason to suppose that anything like them would need a society, or ever actually evolved in any way at all. They…”

  “How many of them are there? There’s more of us, surely. There’s got to be. Maybe if we could just… I don’t know… do they have an off switch somewhere?”

  “It isn’t your place to just switch them off! Even if they did and you knew how! They aren’t your family’s Dyson vacuum cleaner!”

  “But are they ever taking us home? Really? How do we know that?”

  “So what do you suggest, we just kill them? Won’t that make us exactly the kind of barbarians whom I would like to think they hoped they did not come here to find!”

  This had gone far enough. Xander clapped his hands together.

  “Are you crazy? Remember where we are, exactly? Do you know how we got here or have the remotest idea about how to get back? Do you think we’re floating up here in any manner that any physics theory we puny humans ever knew anything about could explain? Do you think that there is the slightest possibility that we can? And even if we could, do you really want to kill the only thing that knows how to drive this whole… hotel…”

  That came out rather lamer than he wanted it to. But the kid beside Sam Dutton had watched just as much Babylon 5 as Xander ever had, and now came up with the perfect paraphrase, flinging back a modified piece of dialogue once uttered by the inimitable Lennier of the Minbari.

  “If you’re going to kill him, then do so. Otherwise, he probably has considerable work to do.”

  “Libby, you still there?” Xander said very softly, under cover of someone else raising their voice to comment. “Tell Boss to get him out. Call him out of here. Now.”

  Someone must have heard him, because Bob suddenly came to his feet, a motion that silenced the voices in the room as every eye came to rest on him, some in curiosity, some in consternation.

  “Excuse me,” Bob said, still cold and polite. “I have to go now.”

  He turned and began to take measured steps towards the audience, and then through it, as they opened up a passage for him like the Red Sea parting before Moses and allowed him to exit the room unimpeded.

  “There,” Xander said, into the absolute stillness and quiet that had accompanied this departure. “Y’all can have the rest of the panel, now, and talk about him behind his back. But I don’t think he’s really a villain, do you?”

  Charlie, the moderator, blinked a couple of times and then said, “Well, what does our panel think? Can someone who follows orders, a foot–soldier as it were, a grunt, actually be a real villain? Does there have to be actual agency before a villain is a true villain – make his own evil decisions…?”

  Xander backed away quietly, through the aisle still left open by Bob’s passing. He caught Sam Dutton’s eye as he moved, and Sam gave him a small nod and then got to his feet and followed him out. His young friend, the kid who had braved the barricades, gathered up a precariously balanced pile of a laptop and two battered and much graffitoed notebooks from underneath his seat and brought up the rear.

  “Xander.”

  “Sam,” Xander said, a shade uneasily. He was Andie Mae’s man, but he had been involved with this convention for a number of years before Andie Mae had reached out to raise him to his present position. For all of those years bar this last one, it had been Sam Dutton who had been the reigning God King of the con, whose very name had been synonymous with it for almost as long as Xander had been alive. Xander’s loyalty was to Andie Mae, but he could not help the tiny twinge of guilt, and he could not seem to make himself look Sam in the eye. Quite.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said, with a mixture of serenity and resignation. He understood this reaction perfectly. “Listen, I just wanted to say… if there’s anything I can do. You know.”

  “It did occur to a few that you might have invited these things,” Xander said, with a commendable attempt at a sincere chuckle.

  Sam snorted. “I think you might have rather enormous delusions about my grandeur. If I could pull off this kind of thing, I probably would have done when I was actually in a position to rake in the glory, as it were.”

  “But this way you don’t get the responsibility,” Xander said. “And you still get to enjoy watching everyone squirm.”

  “Son, trust me. Nothing to do with me. I haven’t even been formally introduced to the Creatures from Outer Space yet. Yes, I was at the Opening Ceremonies, yes, I read the newsletter, yes, I realize that we aren’t exactly in Kansas anymore, Toto – but I don’t know anything beyond what I could piece together myself from all of these sources.”

  “You should come see the replicator,” Xander said.

  “Oook?” Sam said politely, tilting his head a little. “What would those be…?”

  “They…well, you watched Star Trek,” Xander said. “Those things. You ask, and it produces. Anything from tea to, I’m sure, fresh and lustily squirming racht for the Klingons amongst us.”

  Xander didn’t really think he was breaching the agreed–upon need–to–know arrangement when it came to the replicators – this was Sam, and with only a tiny tweak in the space–time continuum he would have been the one in charge of this whole mess anyway. But he had forgotten, in the heat of the moment of the reveal, that the two of them were not alone.

  The kid from the panel blinked, clutching his paraphernalia close to his chest. “You’re telling us. We have. Working. Replicators.”

  “Marius,” Sam said absently, making the belated introduction. “Marius Tarkovski. His mother entrusted him to my care this weekend, God help her. Marius, meet Xander Washington. And Xander… what Marius said. Are you serious?”

  “I asked one for Earl Gray,” Xander said, quite unable to hide the grin that crept onto his face. “And it produced exactly that. Then someone asked for a pizza and it produced one the like of which you’ve never…”

  “Xander!” Libby came surging out of the stairwell that led into the corridor which the panel rooms were on. Xander flushed, guiltily, caught in the act of spilling the replicator beans – but Libby had other things on her mind. “Is everything… all right?”

  “I think so,” Xander said. “The kid helped.”

  Marius turned an alarming shade of beetroot. “I did? Really?”

  “You took on the crisis, and you headed it off at the pass,” Xander said. “Kudos.”

  “I trained him,” Sam said, with a quicksilver grin. “I meant what I said, all joking aside. If there’s anything I can do… and yes, I would love to see a replicator.”

  “You told him about those?” Libby said, eyes flicking to Xander’s face.

  “This time last year, he would have been the one dealing with them,” Xander said, a shade defensively. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Don’t worry, Libby, the secret is safe with me,” Sam said. And then added, directly to Xander, “Do you still have my cell number?”

  “What, is your cell working? Mine has been pretty much a brick since we left Earth orbit.”

  Sam gave a small helpless grin, and shrugged. “Instinct,” he murmured.

  “Well, I suppose we’ll have to figure out other means of communication. Just think, we may go back to the basics. When was the last time you actually remember sending messages on paper? Just like they used to do in pre–history? In the meantime…have fun. Try not to fall off the edge of the world. And if you see anything you think we ought to know about…”

  “I don’t think Andie Mae wants me anywhere near ops,” Sam said. “I’ll send a ringer.” He tapped Marius on the shoulder.

  Xander nodded. “Secret handshake, kid. Remember it. Just ask for Xander.”

  “Right,” Marius said.

  “We’ll keep in touch,” Sam said. He and Marius nodded at the two committee members and walked off towards the elevators.

  Libby
rounded on Xander.

  “What was all that about?”

  “Tell you later,” he said. “Is everything okay upstairs – with Boss and the underdroids?”

  “I told you this would be a bad idea,” Libby grumbled as the two of them fell into step along the corridor.

  “No, you didn’t. Or more to the point – everybody might have. I thought it was worth a try – we needed to get a conversation – is that Rory over there? In full fig?”

  Their media Guest of Honor, Rory Grissom a.k.a. Captain James Fleming of the starship Invictus, was lounging against the wall as they came out of the stairwell and rounded the corner into the main corridor. He was dressed in his tight–fitting Invictus uniform, which showed off a still remarkably fit physique given that at least a decade had passed since his star turn and the TV series in which he had made the uniform famous. Surrounding him was the usual bevy of fans simpering up at him, and Xander shook his head in astonishment

  “I’m damned if I know how he does it,” Xander muttered. “Some of those girls were in kindergarten when he strutted around as Captain Fleming. How do they even know who he is?”

  “Somebody in the Green Room called him Captain Charisma,” Libby said.

  “No kidding,” Xander said. “Let get out of here before he… aw, damn, too late…”

  Rory had noticed them, and raised a silver–clad arm in a gesture that was half greeting and half salute. And then he bent his head to his audience and said something to them before giving them a small bow and striding towards Libby and Xander.

  “I see you’re enjoying the con,” Xander said to Rory, nodding toward the giggling girls who were still hanging together in a tight knot of whispering and eyelash–batting adoration.

  “You might do me a solid,” Rory said, in a low conspiratorial voice.

  “Sure, anything I can do…” Xander began, in full ConCom mode to the convention’s Guest of Honor.

  Rory turned his head marginally and indicated his groupies with a subtle jerk of his chin in their direction.