AbductiCon Page 18

  “I am not certain,” he said, “just how much of future history can be told without changing something in it, and if I change something that is to come I may affect my own timeline with that. But I will say this much. There were ships sent from Earth before all trace of your kind vanished from this world. And this happened before your year 2400.”

  “Why 2400?” Xander asked, oddly breathless, jumping his own queue. The specified year was centuries in his own future, he would certainly never live to see it himself, but all of a sudden the answer seemed as important as if he were asking what would happen when the sun rose the next morning.

  “Because by the year 2400 of your reckoning your world will… no longer be welcoming to your kind,” Boss said, almost unwillingly. “That, too, will be in the process of changing, after – and it may be that someday, in between that time and the end of this world when your sun destroys it completely, there may yet be perfect days in store. But from what we know… your people did not return to the world known as Earth once you left it.”

  “So are there other kinds of people out there, then?” asked Question 7, and it felt like another question that had not been the one that the woman who had uttered it had originally meant to ask. “I don’t know… like Klingons? Or the Borg…?”

  Uneasy laughter rippled through the audience, which had now grown to the point that there was standing room only at the back of the hall.

  “You’ve already got Klingons,” grumbled someone in the audience, sitting next to a man kitted out as one.

  Boss looked as though he was consulting internal data banks for a moment, but then gave his head a small shake to indicate a negative response. “No Klingons. No Borg. There are other kinds of life out there, though. But you know that already.”

  “So – wait – you traced your origins to us? To the humans? So how come you say you aren’t sure, then?” That was Question 8, another question that felt like it was raised by the question that came before it rather than the one originally intended.

  “I already answered this,” Boss said. “There are those of us who believe that we may have been made in the image of…”

  “Made,” said #8, interrupting. “But MADE. So do you know where the first of you was made…?

  “Bzzzt,” Xander said.

  “Well, it’s a good question,” said Question 9, the next in the queue. “Short of the Big Bang and the origin of all life, if we’re still to believe that evolution from one level to a higher level takes place over time, every particular kind of life comes from something that came before it. If you aren’t claiming some robotic kind of Immaculate Conception, how do you reproduce, then? I mean, you don’t have sex…”

  “Not between ourselves, no,” Boss said.

  “With something else?” a voice from the audience demanded incredulously. “So who did you sleep with last night, then?”

  A smothered yelp from somewhere in the back of the room had heads turning even as another ripple of laughter, this time a little nervous in nature, swept the hall. But whoever had uttered that small inarticulate sound had gathered their wits about them and nobody could see anything untoward.

  “We have locations where new units of our kinds are researched, and produced,” Boss said, ignoring the commentary from the hall. “We are always improving on our potential and abilities. It is part of our covenant. We consider flaws in our form and purpose, and we work to rectify them and improve future generations that are accepted as prototypes for future generations.”

  “So you’re born, after all, kind of,” said Question 10, his voice curious. “But do you die? Or is your kind immortal?”

  “We can exist for a very long time,” Boss said, “in your terms. But although ageing components may be repaired or replaced, eventually the essential core of each one of us becomes obsolete. And when that happens, we enter a recycling program where that which we once were is repurposed when new units are modeled and created. Our memories, of course, go into the memory banks – and you may wish to consider that immortality, if you wish. It is, of a kind.”

  “So you live until you die,” Question 11 said. “But can you be hurt…?”

  “If you are asking if we can feel being hurt, the answer to that is no,” Boss said. “We did not see the purpose in creating in ourselves the thing that I understand in your kind as pain receptors. In organic species pain is… necessary. It alerts to mortal danger. But with us this seemed unnecessary. Yes, early models could indeed be ‘hurt’, if you wish to consider this in the context of that concept, because it was possible for them to lose components of themselves – and these would have to be physically replaced by our technicians. The loss of a limb, for example, would have to be dealt with by a grafting of a new limb to replace the one that was damaged or destroyed. But this was not threatening to their existence, it was an inconvenience. More advanced models were self–repairing, but again, only up to a point. We can be damaged, yes, but not hurt, not in the sense that I think you are using that word.”

  There was a short, awkward silence while everyone pondered the idea of mangled robots, and then Question 12 stepped forward, looking vaguely belligerent.

  “Well, I am going to ask the thing I came up here to ask,” he said, “even though it has nothing to do with anything. What I want to know is, how in the name of Jesus’s horny billy goat are you actually flying this damned rock, and how come we all have power and air and food and stuff, but we don’t have the Internet?” He raised his voice a little to be heard over the laughter in the hall. “I mean, do you freaking realize just how much spam I am going to have in my inbox when I get hold of it again…?”

  “You cannae change the laws of physics!” someone called out from the back of the room. “So how come you did?”

  “What you call the laws of physics… may not be complete, at the current level of your scientific development,” Boss said. “It would not be entirely possible to explain. And we apologize for the lack of your Internet. We tried to keep all the life support functions at their optimal level, but we neglected, perhaps, to provide for all the things that you required for sustenance and comfort.”

  “So – you think you’re superior to us? I mean, beyond the technology. I’m not going to argue that – it’s painfully obvious that we can’t do what you’re doing. Not yet, anyway. But otherwise? If you believed yourselves created in our image, does that mean you think you were an improvement?” That was Question 13, seizing his chance.

  “In some ways,” Boss said. “We…break…less easily than you do, and have fewer lasting or permanent consequences when we do. We have better protocols of information storage and retrieval. But we also lack things that you may consider to be – if you insist on using that word – superior in their own way. In cognitive methodology, for example. We do not – cannot – make intuitive leaps which may lead us to solutions that could be applicable to a problem we may be attempting to solve. We use logic. And if logic fails us, we have no recourse.” He paused, and then added, “But logic rarely fails us.”

  “So you think you’re better than us,” said Question 14 unexpectedly, shuffling forward past #13, who had opened his mouth to argue but didn’t have a chance to speak. “But I’ve seen you guys around the place. Somebody said that you were the latest model, yourself – the most advanced – and the others, I’ve seen them, they do your bidding. You say jump and they ask how high. You treat them like slaves. Like a slave race, they are there to obey. But we have long since decided – we, the human race – that slavery was not such a good thing. We’ve gone beyond slavery, we no longer believe that one human being can own or absolutely control another…”

  “Well, most of us,” someone muttered from the audience. “There are always maroons who think…”

  “Shut up, I’m talking, and I haven’t asked my question yet!” #14 said sharply.

  “Well, is there a question hidden in the soapbox speech somewhere? If so then spit it out!” the heckler growled.

 
; “Actually, she kind of did,” another audience member said unexpectedly. “How come a ‘superior’ race is still clinging to an arguably ‘inferior’ social model and treating a lesser member of its kind as a slave?”

  “But we do not,” Boss said. “Not as I understand your notion of slavery. There is certainly no question of any one of us claiming any kind of ownership of another. We are all independent and self–sufficient beings who choose to function in a social mode. Our earlier incarnations are only ‘inferior’, if you want to think of it in those terms, because the later models may have improved on problematic aspects of their structure or function. And because they have been in production longer, there are more of them numerically and it is logical that there would be an inverse relation in terms of the numbers of earlier models versus more advanced ones. When my team was sent here our composition reflected the numbers that prevail in our society at this time. And I was placed at the head of the team because I am one of the new line of my kind, with improved computational speeds and cognitive understanding. They are not our slaves, they are our children, in one sense. I am responsible for my team. If I give them orders it is because I reach conclusions faster than they and can better assess a situation, not because they are inferior or expendable or in any sense ‘owned’ by another like myself.”

  “That seems fair,” Xander said. “Okay, we’d better move things along. Next?” Things were moving into rougher waters again, and he was very much hoping that question number fifteen would be another utterly inane one that would derail the whole conversation into laughter and repartee. But what came next dashed cold water on those expectations, and made him tense up all over again.

  “I keep thinking,” Question 15 said slowly, “about the way things played out. In our future. In how things happened. How we disappeared. How come you guys exist. How come you guys exist in the future and apparently we don’t any more, or not that you know of, or will say. I don’t know how many stories I’ve read in my time about the wars between men and their machines – if you’re right, if we made the first of you – what if you guys turned against us, in the future?... How come your kind survived whatever cataclysm emptied Earth, and ours did not? Or were you begot on some other world than this one…? And if you were, how come you think it was us who began it…?”

  “Our memory banks… are not complete,” Boss said. “There are gaps. I cannot answer that question.”

  But he had hesitated. Just the slightest bit. Perhaps Xander would never have noticed it at all had he not been watching the remaining queue of people waiting to ask their question and happened to have his eyes on the face of Marius Tarkovski, who had been one of his co–victims in the Elevator Incident and happened to be holding the seventeenth position in the queue. Marius had been watching Boss as the android had spoken, and Xander suddenly saw it clearly on the younger man’s face, something that changed ever so slightly, an expression that was at once astonished and unhappy. An expression that made him replay Boss’s response in his own head, and arrive, belatedly but inevitably, at the same conclusion that Marius had.

  The answer had been a lie.

  The android had told a falsehood. Knowingly and with every appearance of sincerity.

  If they could lie… if they could lie this well… what else weren’t they telling the truth about?

  Xander’s hands felt like ice as he lifted one to signal the next person in the queue forward, but if he was hoping for a respite, he wasn’t going to get it. The woman who stepped forward to take her place was frowning a little.

  “But if there are gaps… how do you know there are gaps? How do you know what you don’t know? And if there are gaps, then what made you come back here – what made you look for humans…?”

  “Not all trace of humans was erased,” Boss began, but Marius put a gentle hand on the shoulder of the woman who had preceded him and moved her out of the way, stepping up to take her place.

  “Then maybe the better question is this,” Marius said, his eyes locked on the android’s. “What brought you back… here? To this specific place, to this specific time? What made you choose this specific group of humans? You said you came back looking for answers. Have you found the answers you were hoping for?”

  If anyone was expecting Boss to hedge, they were disappointed. The answer came swiftly, and firmly, with the android holding the young man’s intense gaze and looking straight back into Marius’s own soul.

  “I believe we found the answers we needed,” he said, “if not the ones we came back to seek. I believe it mattered that we came here, came now, chose this particular group of humans. I cannot tell you more, but I can tell you that I have come to believe that we came here… to create our own creator. That someone who is in this room right now is going to take the first step on the journey that leads from your kind to my own. Someone who might never have taken that step… had it not been for that person’s encounter with us here at this gathering. In very simple terms, if we had not returned to this here and now, we might very simply never have existed.”

  They might have been alone in that room. They were speaking to one another, directly, in a conversation that was on quite a different level from that which the mere words – full of import as they were – implied.

  But that meant that Boss seemed to think – to infer – that it was Marius who was fated to be that creator of whom he spoke. And Xander suddenly felt as though he could very well end up spending the days of his old age telling people he had once been stuck in an elevator at a con with the Android Messiah.

  He could see that Marius was a little shaken, too. And then Boss rose to his feet in a single fluid motion.

  “I think,” he said, and the voice was almost gentle, “that I have given what answers I could. But now… my team and I have a lot of preparations to make in order to bring you all home safely as we have promised to do. So I will withdraw in order to assist with those. We thank you, all of you, for helping us understand. We are very grateful for the opportunity to have shared these days with you, and we sincerely regret any injury or inconvenience we may have caused.”

  He gave the hall a slight bow, and then turned, descended the steps from the dais, and walked serenely and without looking at anyone at all down the central aisle of the hall – through a spreading pool of silence and under the concentrated weight of hundreds of eyes upon his straight and retreating back. The crowd at the back of the hall parted to let him through, and he walked regally through the double doors and out into the corridor and then out of sight.

  In his wake, the murmurs of voices of those left in the hall began softly but quickly grew in volume. The three remaining people in the question queue, the ones behind Marius, had melted away; the panel was very much over, even without Xander’s own official closing words. Vince retrieved his empty coffee cup from underneath his chair and came ambling down the steps from the stage in Boss’s wake, coming to a stop next to Xander.

  “Well,” he said to Xander, “I don’t think I upstage easily, and that was me comprehensively upstaged. I feel as though I was just the warm–up act for that.”

  Xander’s head snapped around. “Jesus, I’m sorry. Dave said it was going to be a disaster, but I didn’t think…”

  Vince lifted a hand and rested it briefly on Xander’s shoulder. “Take it easy, that wasn’t a complaint,” he said. “On the contrary. I think I have about three more novels that I need to write, just from that Q&A session alone. Thanks, Xander. This whole weekend… has been a gift.”

  He nodded in a gesture of farewell and plunged into the now milling audience where he was immediately waylaid by a couple of eager fans – but Xander had already switched his attention to Marius, who had not moved from where he had been standing during that last intense exchange.

  Marius looked up to meet Xander’s eyes.

  “What just happened?” Marius asked quietly.

  “Funny,” Xander said, “I was about to ask you that. Anything you want to tell me?”


  “In the elevator…” Marius began, and Xander’s ears pricked up as he waited for the rest of that sentence, but it never came. Instead, Marius sighed, lifting one nerveless hand to rub at his temple. “Excuse me,” he said, “I think … I need to go find Sam…”

  And then he, too, was gone.

  And Xander was left standing by himself in front of an empty stage on a Sunday morning of a con, usually a moment that might have left him feeling a little tired and wrung out and despondent that another con was so nearly over, but instead he felt something scalding and strange bubbling up inside him, and the rest of his life suddenly seemed as though it was going to have a tough job living up to this particular incandescent instant of time. It felt as though he had been walking on what had seemed to be perfectly solid ground called the Here and Now, and suddenly his foot had gone through what had proved to be just a thin crust and he was left standing knee deep in the hot lava of History, that which had passed and that which was in the making and yet to come.

  “Welcome,” he said to himself, very softly, “to Abducticon…”

  Ξ

  It might have been entirely understandable if none of the parties who had agreed to a dinner meet–up on Sunday night had actually remembered the assignation, given the events of the weekend – but at about five minutes before six that evening Sam and Marius turned up outside the hotel restaurant to find Vince waiting for them – with a bleary–eyed Angel in tow.

  “Have you met my wife, Angel?” Vince said, his arm around Angel’s waist in what looked like a loose embrace but what Sam immediately realized was in fact a tight grip which was mostly what was keeping Angel in an upright position. “Sorry,” Vince added, his voice a little lower, “but I can’t leave her alone and awake up in the hotel room. She almost had a seizure when we rocked around the Moon; if she looks out of the window, on her own, and sees the Earth approaching, things might get rather… dramatic.”