AbductiCon Read online

  Andie Mae sighed. “Him again?”

  “Not the damned writer,” Dave snarled. “A silver man. Literally. He looked almost human, almost, but then he took this thing that he was typing stuff into – looked like an iPad or some other mini tablet or something of the sort – and he put it back into his chest…”

  “What, now?” Xander said.

  “I am telling you, there is a robot – a silver man – ”

  “What, the Terminator?” Andie Mae gasped, suddenly flushing a bright red. “Schwarzenegger’s here? Early? In costume? He isn’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow! Why didn’t someone call me…?”

  Dave closed his eyes for a moment. “Not the…”

  “A Cylon?” someone asked, gamely offering an alternative to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unexpected manifestation.

  “A Cyberman?” Libby said. “I think I saw one clomping around, earlier… Dave… the con’s theme is robots – there are bound to be – ”

  “No, no and no,” Dave said. “It was more like… Data.”

  “Spiner is here too?” Andie Mae squawked. “Is Al back? With both the guys? How did he get hold of them? Where is he?”

  “Haven’t seen him,” Xander said, trying to keep his voice neutral. “Dave, what did you see? Really? There have to be as many smartphones and tablets here as there are people – this is a tech–savvy crowd – so you saw somebody typing into a tablet, and you…”

  Dave skewered him with a withering glare. “All right. Just shut up. All of you. Just shut up and listen. I came up out of the parking lot, and I stopped right there under the portico over the front drive, just outside the front door, and there was a silver man – shut up about the writer dude! – standing there by the door, typing something into what looked like a tablet right until he stopped typing and kind of put it up against his chest and it just… just… sank in there, blended in, whatever, I know, it sounds insane. I am not drunk. Anyway. Then I felt light – lighter than I should have been, anyway, for just a moment – and then I looked out and I realized what I was seeing – I was seeing us lifting off.”

  “Lifting off,” Andie Mae repeated, frowning. “What, exactly…?”

  “I know what I saw!” Dave snapped. “And I wasn’t wrong, either. I looked at the silver guy and I said something like ‘Put us back!’ and you know, he didn’t say, you’re a moron, or go home you’re drunk, or anything of the sort. He said… he said…”

  There was a pause, a longer than expected one, and Xander finally stirred. “What did he say, then?”

  “He said, ‘I can’t do that, Dave’.” There was a ripple of laughter, somewhere in the back of the room, and Dave’s head swung around in that direction.

  “I think you’ve been watching too many…”

  “I know, okay? I know. I am well aware that this whole thing sounds nutso. But look outside again. And then he said – he said – ‘ I can explain.’ He actually…”

  “He actually talks? This robot?”

  “Of course he talks,” Dave snapped.

  “Well, did he?” Andie Mae said, trying for the practical.

  “Did he what?”

  “Explain,” she said, patiently enough.

  “I didn’t stick around to listen!” Dave said. “I just ran off into the hotel – I thought I’d better find you – somebody – make sure that everyone knew that something strange was… What are you doing?”

  One of the volunteers by the sliding door had unlatched the door handle and was poised to push the slider open, and Dave had instinctively flung out an arm to stop him. The volunteer froze, his hand on the latch.

  “I just thought… if we stepped out – I mean, the balcony is still here – and we could see what exactly – ”

  Another of the volunteers reached over and slapped the optimist’s hand down.

  “And what if there literally is nothing out there? Thought about that, genius?”

  “It worked fine on Doctor Who!” said the first volunteer defensively. “Didn’t someone snatch up a hospital and slap it down on the moon – and they could still open up the windows and go out on balconies and stuff? There was a force field or something…”

  “That’s science fiction, you moron!”

  “And this is….?”

  “Okay, enough!” Andie Mae yelped, silencing everyone. “So where is he, now, your guy, Dave? I mean, if he said he could explain, why isn’t he here right now?”

  “I have no frakking idea. You think I looked to see if he was following me?”

  “Come to think of it I think I saw him,” Andie Mae said, tapping her chin with her forefinger thoughtfully. “Sounds like someone who vaguely matched the ‘silver man’ description, assuming we aren’t talking about Vince. He was out there in the foyer, before…”

  “Wait,” Libby said. “Wait. Just… wait. There was someone up here, earlier – in the Green Room – but it was chaos, I was trying to find itineraries for the pros, and it was a zoo, but I think I saw someone who looked rather a lot like… but… unh… maybe I’m just making things up, now, because I thought it was a girl…”

  “You sure about that one?”

  “No, actually, like I just said – I think I remember seeing someone but it might have been a girl and dammit we have a robot–themed convention swirling all around us and for all I know there may be an army of them crawling around the place, it might be a new fad, or they might have heard about Brent Spiner coming and they wanted to be Data, or they…”

  “Wait, are you saying there’s more than one of them?” Xander said. “Er… just how many…

  “Well, do I open the door or not?” the volunteer at the sliding door said practically. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “We all die,” Xander said, crossing his eyes and then sticking his tongue out in an overblown grimace while wrapping both hands around his own neck. “Seriously, people. Seriously. Occam’s Razor. Are we looking for zebras in a horse herd? Face it, this is a room of science fiction geeks. We might all be just reading our favorite comic book scenario into all this. And Dave… dammit… you can’t know…”

  The volunteer at the sliding door scowled at Xander. “I’m a science PhD in real life!” he barked. “I live my life by empirical evidence!”

  “When you aren’t partying with Space Babes and Chewbacca at a con bar,” Xander muttered.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing! I’m a science geek myself, remember? But I still don’t know…”

  The PhD volunteer responded by slipping the catch on the sliding door and theatrically yanking on the door handle.

  “Well, then. Only one way to find out!”

  It seemed like time slid into slow motion as the door began to move, and everyone in the room, in a shared delusion of it maybe being a helpful thing to try, literally held their breath. Nobody was quite clear on what precisely they were expecting to happen next – there may have been images that flashed through various minds of explosive decompression resembling the Hollywood CGI idea of what one looked like when an airlock opened to the vacuum of outer space, but if there were, nobody shared them or even owned up to them. And then the PhD candidate, finding himself still alive after the first breathless instant, released his own pent–up breath and took a cautious sniff through the open door.

  “Smells fine to me,” he said at length, after a small hesitation. “Okay, then. In the interests of science, here goes. Call me the sacrificial monkey, if you like. If I go splat, tell Monica I love her.”

  Before anybody could stop him he stepped sideways, and out onto the balcony.

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing happened for so long that Andie Mae finally called out, sounding very much like a little girl she hadn’t been for many years, “Are you okay…?”

  “I… uh…” The response from outside was soft, and slow in coming, but it was definitely there, and Andie Mae clutched at her temples with both hands in a gesture that was eloquent
of the release of the fear she’d been holding in. “I think you’d better come out here,” the voice from the balcony said faintly.

  There was a concerted movement towards the balcony by every warm body in the room, but Andie Mae raised an arm in an imperial gesture.

  “The terrace won’t hold everybody,” she said peremptorily.

  Dave stepped forward anyway. “Is it what I thought I felt… what I saw…?”

  “Dave, come on,” Andie Mae said, reaching out for his arm and pulling him forward. “Xander. You, too. The rest of you, wait.”

  Dave and Andie Mae stepped outside onto the terrace at the same moment, crowding one another through the door; Xander followed a step behind. And then they stood there, the four of them, clutching the railing of the balcony or one another, whichever closer, with a white–knuckled grip, and staring open–mouthed at the view that lay before them.

  The hotel appeared to be marooned on a piece of ground that looked like it had been torn from the earth as a great chunk of rock – it stretched out a little way beyond the edge of the building, but not by much. Most of the parking lot had completely disappeared – instead, a long way below them, there were twinkling lights of what might have been the city whose zip code they had recently been a part of, and then, beyond that, a spill of shadow that was the ocean with a shimmer of moonlight glittering upon it. And they – the four people watching this, the balcony they were standing on, the building the balcony was part of, the narrowest piece of skirting land around the foundations of that building – they were all floating above it all. Somewhere up in the sky. Hanging there, defying common sense, science, and gravity.

  “Houston,” Xander said quietly, “I think we have a problem.”

  Ξ

  “Right,” said Andie Mae after a beat. “Right, then.”

  She turned smartly and marched back into the room, starting to fire orders as she went.

  “Libby, don’t I remember you saying that a nice young manager type came trotting up here to give us the hotel’s regards? Remember his name? Never mind. Just find whoever is in charge. I would think at this point it would be a very good thing if they shut the doors – at least for tonight – and didn’t let people wander out there and fall off the edge.”

  “On my way,” Libby said.

  “I’d think that would be unlikely, given that we have air,” Xander said, following her in. “Obviously something is keeping the air in. That same something might serve to stop people doing a Wile E Coyote and walking off the cliff. Holy freaking cow, that may be an honest–to–God real force field out there. Like, for real. I might walk out there myself, just to see if I can…”

  “Xander. Please.”

  Xander lost his goofy grin and blinked back into serious mode. “Right. Sure. Sorry. Anything I can do?”

  “Dave, where the hell did you leave this silver freak that you think did this?”

  “No clue, just left him behind when I ran into the hotel to look for you. He may have…”

  “Well, if you’re telling the truth and he said he is going to explain, I suggest it’s time he did that. Go back to where you lost him and see if you can run him to ground. Xander, call in Sim and Security – tell them to keep an eye out for… for…”

  “Data?” Xander suggested helpfully.

  “For someone who might be acting a little strange. Tell him what happened. He should probably talk to the hotel security people, too, make sure everyone is on the same page and knows how to man the doors, if necessary.”

  “On it,” Xander said. “Wow, it’s for real, isn’t it? You even nailed the place…”

  “What are you talking about?” Andie Mae snapped.

  “You know,” Xander said, backing up and falling into a verbal flounder. He seriously didn’t want his words to come across as critical, but somehow what tumbled out of his mouth didn’t quite come out the way he had intended it. “The California Resort. You know. Hotel California. And now we have people manning the exits, as it were. You can check out any time you like…”

  “But you can’t leave, yes, I get it,” Andie Mae said. “God. God. Where the hell is Al? And did I just become an accessory to the kidnapping of the ex–governor of California? I’m pretty sure that’s a felony…”

  “Schwarzenegger isn’t even supposed to be here until tomorrow, like you said – I don’t think you’ve got that to worry about,” Xander said, over his shoulder.

  “Yes, okay. Fine. But what am I supposed to think is going to happen if he turns up as scheduled and this place…”

  Xander looked up, wondering if a response was expected from him, but Andie Mae was already gone, talking to somebody on a phone, and Xander turned back to his computer. Before he had time to fully return his attention to his screen he happened to glance at the door to the control room, which had been left propped ajar when Dave had left. It was now open, and framed in it stood…

  Xander let out a yelp, and everyone jumped, startled, and then turned to follow his frozen stare.

  The silver man appeared to have found the con crew in their lair without Dave’s assistance. He stood in the doorway, in utter silence, waiting to be noticed – and when he appeared certain to have everyone’s attention, he moved forward into the room. His movements were fluid, not mechanical at all, but there was something about him – a certain sharp way of tilting his head, the unblinking stare – that screamed alienness. In the further reaches of the room, people who could back away did so.

  “Don’t hurt us,” a girl whimpered quietly.

  The silver head tilted in her direction, a small questioning motion, as though the silver man found the notion of hurting someone to be a rather novel idea. That, as far as Xander was willing to deconstruct things, seemed to be a good thing – if it had not occurred to the silver man to hurt anyone, then maybe they could count on, well, staying relatively safe. But what if he really had no clue what, in fact, would hurt the humans in the room and would – and the tone of the word really came to Xander without even trying – EX–TER–MI–NATE everyone in the room, not even necessarily through Dalek malice but through oversight and negligence and ignorance…?

  “What did you do with Dave?” Andie Mae demanded, after peering over the silver man’s shoulder and seeing nobody standing behind him.

  “Dave?” the silver man said. His voice was obviously crafted to be modulated, to convey intent or a complex algorhythm that might be considered an equivalent of an emotional response… but it was not a natural voice. Perhaps that reaction was an artifact caused by the simple psychological identification of “silver man” with “mechanical creature” that had instantly blossomed in all those present in the room, but it was nonetheless a very real and visceral reaction. Nobody who heard the being speak could doubt they were hearing a voice that had been made, not born.

  “Dave,” Andie Mae said, bravely reclaiming the conversational high ground. “The one who went to find you…”

  Somewhere to the right of the room, out in the silent carpeted corridors, an elevator door swooshed open, and the voice of the one whom Andie Mae had just invoked came wafting back into the room.

  “Guys? I found him – he’s right…”

  The voice died. The silver man in the doorway turned so that he was standing sideways, allowing a better view through the door into the corridor beyond… where now Dave Lorne stood open–mouthed, staring at the apparition in the doorway as another figure eerily similar to it stood just behind his own right shoulder.

  “Holy crap,” Xander said conversationally. “There are two of them.”

  “I am designated as B008199ZX5,” the one standing behind Dave said.

  “I am designated as ZC77H771AI,” said the one in the doorway.

  Eyes glazed over everywhere in the room.

  Xander took command of the situation. He had always been blessed with a sort of mental screen on which he could project difficult to understand or phonetically pronounce words, a place where he could ‘see’
the offending word and play with it privately until he was ready not to embarrass himself by uttering it out loud. In this instance, he took the strings of letters and numbers and after a moment of cogitation he had managed to parse them into something more comprehensible .

  “Nope,” he said. “You are Bob, and you are Zach. At least while you’re speaking to us, you are. Whatever you’re designated as... it’s like a safe computer password that a piece of software hands you to log in with initially until you can figure out something better. We humans don’t remember those all that well.”

  “Fine one to talk,” muttered Dave, out in the corridor. “With a password like NTNDODNTINT…”

  “That has meaning,” Xander snapped. “And I just knew that you’d seen me typing that in – you didn’t exactly warn me that you knew what my password is, dammit. That’s rude. By the way, I’ve already changed it – but it isn’t as though that’s the only thing I have to think about right now, you know…”

  “Bob,” said the creature who had just been renamed that.

  “Zach,” said the other one.

  “Okay, that’s a beginning. Now – what would – ”

  “Guys…?”

  Libby, who had come up the stairwell, took a step off the stairs and into the corridor across from the control room, and then froze in place, her eyes flicking from one silver man to the other.

  “Yes. We’ve just been introduced. Meet Bob and Zach. We were just getting acquainted…”

  “No – I mean, what I mean is…”

  Behind her, stepping smoothly out of the stairwell to stand beside her, another silver–skinned humanoid had emerged, and now stood waiting silently.

  “Er, I knew I’d seen a girl one,” Libby said awkwardly. “This one… she came up to me just at the bottom of the stairs, and she said – her name is – ”

  “I am designated as HLL5778N44X,” said the silver girl in a surprisingly pleasing alto voice.

  Xander did his magic. “Fine. Helen. You’re Helen. Er, any more of you out there that we should know about…?”