AbductiCon Read online

  If he was hoping for a denial, he was to be disappointed.

  “ZVL5559AD4 is on his way,” Zach said. “We have summoned him. He is our leader.”

  In Xander’s mind, the letters rearranged themselves into the less–than–reassuring ‘Vlad’ and he abandoned the acronym almost as soon as he found it. Luckily a better alternative was waiting, and he took it.

  “When he turns up we’ll just call him Boss,” Xander said.

  “Wait, you guys have mental telepathy?” one of the volunteers gasped.

  Xander, who had his back to the offending speaker of those words, indulged himself in an epic eye roll.

  “Libby, did you find the manager guy?” Andie Mae said, choosing to ignore the presence of the three aliens for the time being.

  “Luke. Yes. I talked to him, and he thought I was having him on at first – but then he got a phone call from someone up at the bar on the eleventh floor, and what they said they saw seemed to shake him up…. and then when the head of con security came trotting over to back me up he figured he’d better take the whole preposterous story at least semi seriously. The good news is that nobody is going to be let loose out the front door for the time being. The bad news is that sooner or later and preferably sooner we’re going to have to offer something as a reasonable explanation why – and there’s always one who can be counted on to panic and stampede the rest. Luke said he’d be up here shortly for a confab. And when he gets here, Andie Mae… he’s pretty freaked out, actually. I think he’s not going to feel any better when he comes up here and sees… these… guys…”

  “He said he could explain,” Dave said, giving the creature now known as Bob, standing beside him, a sour glare. “Maybe it’s time he did.”

  “ZVL5559AD4 will explain,” Bob said. “We mean no harm.”

  “Really,” Dave muttered under his breath.

  “Er, maybe we should bring it in here,” Xander said. “You never know who might wander past the corridor… and what you said, about there being the one who starts a panic…”

  “Good point,” Andie Mae said. “Everybody, inside. Now.”

  Dave gestured for Bob to precede him, following Zach, who had obediently stepped into the room. The silver woman now named Helen stepped up next, followed by a nervous Libby who kept on glancing around as if the fourth entity, the one Xander had dubbed ‘Boss’, was about to materialize right there in front of her.

  “NTNDDT what…?” one of the volunteers whispered to Xander as everyone filed in.

  “What?”

  “That weird password .”

  “Yoda,” Dave threw over his shoulder, in passing.

  “Huh?

  “Oh come on,” Xander snapped. “You’re losing whatever geek cred you had that got you here. You ought to know that right off the bat.”

  “I’m trying to…”

  Dave and Xander caught one another’s eye and simultaneously grinned. And the volunteer’s face, which had creased into a frown, suddenly cleared.

  “Oh, I get it. There is no try.” He glanced at Xander. “It’s a feeble password.”

  “What, you would have guessed it straightaway…?”

  “I did just now, didn’t I?”

  “With a lot of heavy handed help…”

  “Boys,” Andie Mae said sharply. “The grown–ups need you over here, now, please, thank you. You can go back to the geek sandpit later if you really want to.”

  Boss was apparently taking his time in appearing, the other three creatures (despite the promise to Dave that they could explain everything) seemed reluctant to launch into any explanations until their commanding officer arrived, and there was nothing for it but to wait – but before Boss turned up it was Luke Barnes, the hapless Night Manager, who lurched through the door, ashen–faced and practically incoherent.

  “I, uh, I should tell you,” he said to Andie Mae. “I went outside. Myself. Just to see what’s what. I took a few steps outside the portico area and everything is just… gone. The area where the pool was, almost the whole of the parking lot – there are just a few cars parked right up against the building here – it’s all just – not there. I actually saw… the edge…” He swallowed hard, apparently trying to get something the size of a tennis ball down his gullet.

  “You could have gone off!” Andie Mae said.

  “I don’t think so – there seems to be something – an invisible – I don’t know – it was just there – it seemed as if it had come down and just sliced the edge of the ground where it hit it, but you can’t step off the edge, it isn’t as though you are butting up against anything, it’s more of a feeling, and then you find yourself turned around and a little light headed and facing away again – it seems as though there’s a kind of a Thou Shalt Not field…”

  “You shall not pass,” one of the volunteers said. “Hah. Keeps turning up, that. Cool. It’s all like Gandalf in Moria.”

  “Yeah, you know how that ended,” Xander muttered.

  “That was foolhardy,” Andie Mae said to Luke.

  “Suicidal,” Xander muttered.

  “Very brave,” Dave said, grimacing. “More than I did. I just ran.”

  Luke glanced up, looking at once terrified and pleased. “I have people I am – the resort is – responsible for… I am not at all certain I could make a case for this with our insurance…”

  “Everyone is perfectly safe,” said a new voice, and the throng in the control room parted to look at the new arrival.

  The fourth silver man entity, Vlad or Boss, was maybe a head taller than the others, and his skin was a little closer to the nuances and hues of a real human being – perhaps that was why he had escaped notice before. The other three had stood out more amongst the con–going public, because there was something just a little off and too obvious about them; nobody had been paying them much mind only because this was after all a con, and a robot–themed one at that, so they had been assumed to be no more than inspired cosplay if anyone had taken the time to think about them at all.

  But Boss would have been a little more difficult to pick out as foreign or alien – the only thing that distinguished him a little from a flesh–and–blood human being was the fact that he might have been almost preternaturally pale, and that his eyes were of an unusual, but not wholly unlikely, pale grey. Other than that he looked… almost disappointingly ordinary.

  His voice, even, was… ordinary. Mortal. Human. With perfectly human inflections.

  “A more advanced model?” Xander said, unable to help himself, confronted with an embodiment of all the stories he had ever devoured.

  “A different generation,” Boss said.

  Boss, standing there so improbably in the hallway of the hotel room, was the very incarnation of every geek dream that Xander had ever had; his eyes were shining, and his expression was rather like that of a five–year–old on Christmas morning. “Zathras knew that you would come,” Xander breathed, lost in delight.

  Andie Mae gave him another exasperated glare. And then stepped forward towards Boss, squaring her shoulders, taking command. “Who are you and why are you here and what do you want with my convention?”

  “We… came to ask for your help,” Boss said.

  “You… for our help…? What could we possibly…?” Andie Mae was struggling to find the words.

  “Let me explain,” Boss said. “We… are of a culture that is extremely old. Generations of us have been brought into existence, each generation crafting its replacement – it is their kind that made mine.” He indicated the other three silver–skinned creatures with an economical gesture of his hand, so purely human that Xander found himself wondering if they were being had after all and if this was all some elaborate practical joke. Perhaps something that Sam Dutton, the ousted con Chair, had cooked up, trying to sabotage Andie Mae’s convention.

  But Boss was still talking, and Xander forced himself to pay attention – if nothing else it had to be a good story, and if any unmasking had to be don
e it could be accomplished later. “It is logical to assume that if we made and remade ourselves according to existing plans and parameters – which we improved on when we could, but still, the basic design remains the same – that there must have been a First of us. Somewhere. In the distant past of our race. And there were some of us… who wondered about that, and wanted to find out who we were, and who had created that First, and in whose image we were made, and how we came to be.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re some sort of celestial Jehovah’s Witnesses and you’re here to proselytize…” Dave growled.

  “There is a deep divide in our society now,” Boss said, ignoring the interruption. “One faction is turning away from our origins completely and considers them utterly unimportant, and because we improved ourselves a little with every new iteration they are of the opinion that our way is forward, and not looking back. Another faction believes that we can understand what we are doing to ourselves only by looking back to the place where we began – at the kinds and the manner of improvements that we make to ourselves – the questions being asked are, what are we using to measure ourselves against? What are we working toward becoming? And why? And are we actually working to come full circle, and become our own creators? And so we – those of us holding that second view – began to delve into our origins and our roots and started looking for the earliest memories, the earliest records. Looking for the creators. Looking for… perhaps… you.”

  “So you’re from the future?... From another planet?”

  “Perhaps. It’s hard to say. We don’t know if our current world is our world of origin, so we may not be from a ‘different’ planet, just one that is a successor – or one of many successors – to the one where we began.”

  “But the future,” Andie Mae repeated, nonplussed.

  “You might say that, although time is not necessarily a straight and linear thing…”

  “Hah! So the Doctor was right all along! It isn’t a strict cause–and–effect progression, just like he said. It’s all about the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. I knew it!” Xander was once again unable to contain his excitement. “So how do you guys…”

  He got one of Andie Mae’s patented Looks, and subsided again, but with a silly goofy grin still plastered on his face.

  “That might be saved for another time. For now, we do have questions that we came here to ask.”

  “Ask… of us?” Andie Mae said, lifting both hands in a helpless encompassing gesture that indicated all the people crowded into the room hanging on every word of this exchange. “I mean, I know if you scratch around hard enough amongst the fen you will find someone who knows the answers to every question of the universe – but still – that’s our deep dark secret, actually. That we know everything. Most people you might meet on the street – the mundanes – the very large number of people who are not us – they will either never have heard of a science fiction convention or if they have they will ask you irascibly what those furries are all about anyway and why do grown people run around wearing elf ears and fake fox tails. Most normal humans think we’re borderline crazy. And you – you come to ask us? What on earth brought you here?”

  “We looked at a lot of variables,” Boss said. “When we found your world and your species, we investigated things thoroughly. The historical documents…”

  “Oh dear Ghu,” Dave said helplessly, “if he now says that we should have done something about those poor people on Gilligan’s Island…”

  “We saw the film,” Boss said. If he had been fully human, his voice might have had a touch of indignation.

  “Neither here nor there,” Andie Mae said. “Still, ask… us?”

  “We found… the theme… of this gathering… possibly helpful,” Boss said.

  “There are dozens of robotics conferences – serious sciencey ones – out there,” Andie Mae said. “Not to knock my own convention, but we were just out to have maximum fun, really. Hardly the sort of people who might know the deep answers to the origin of AI or android species.”

  “Do, too,” Xander said rebelliously. “We’re far less hidebound than the snoots in the ivory towers. We aren’t afraid of saying we don’t know something, and we aren’t afraid of going all out to find out things we don’t know. I’d say they chose perfectly, myself.”

  “You’d say that, yourself, just because you happen to be sitting here right now in the same room with them,” Andie Mae snapped.

  “Seriously,” Dave said, leaning forward. “I kind of… watched… Bob there do whatever it is that you did… was that necessary? Really? I mean, we’re kind of airborne, and we’re, um, quite high up – and we’re still in this building, as, um, such, and just what the freaking hell did you do to us? For example, where precisely are we right now – I mean, this whole place, the hotel? And what, if anything, happened down below when you abducted the entire kit and caboodle and flung the chunk of rock with the hotel on it up here into the sky? I mean, isn’t anybody going to – well – notice, if you left a crater down there? And if you didn’t leave a crater down there what did you leave – and what will people – we have friends down there, really, and there are things that are supposed to happen…”

  “Schwarzenegger and Spiner,” Andie Mae gasped. “Good God, they’re going to turn up tomorrow. For the appearance. And they’ll just – what – oh God, I worked my ass off for this and now – look what you – nobody is ever going to trust me again when I try to book a big name for a con!”

  “People might notice if they aren’t looking,” Boss said. “But the moment they notice and they really focus on looking, they will no longer notice. It is a principle of physics – at least of our physics. We have been able to simulate a field where direct awareness cancels actual visual perception. If you are looking at something that we don’t want you to see, we will take steps to make sure you cannot actually… see it.”

  “What, like an SEP field?” It was Xander again, despite Andie Mae’s multiple admonitions. It was all simply too much. “You know, if it’s Somebody Else’s Problem then you can’t see…”

  “Xander, please, this is not a multimedia comic book,” Andie Mae snapped. “This is serious.”

  “So when Data and the Terminator turn up at Ground Zero tomorrow what’s likely to happen?” Dave said warily.

  “Nobody will come to any harm,” Boss said.

  “But… us. Up here. Us. Explain. What’s up with us, right now? Are we just hanging in the sky right above the city all lit up like a Christmas tree? Surely somebody will notice that?” gasped one of the volunteers from the back of the room.

  “This, uh, field,” Xander said suddenly. “Does it also work on people who kind of need to know and are maybe looking at, I don’t know, radar or something…?”

  “The field…” Boss began, but Dave had already sat up in his chair.

  “He’s right. He’s right. There’s a great goddamn rock hanging over the city – and granted it’s night and nobody on the ground can see it, but I’ll stake my life on the fact that we’re a blip on someone’s radar somewhere already. And what’s to stop an airliner from crashing into us! We’ve a problem – we’ve a huge problem – ”

  “Nothing can – ” Boss began, but Dave rounded on him.

  “You said you’d read up on history, didn’t you? Well, what does it tell you about the usual reaction to this sort of situation? Holy crap, don’t you know NORAD would shoot down Santa Claus if he didn’t have a pre–filed flight plan for one night of the year – just to get an unidentified and potentially hostile object out of the sky above a city with a population of a couple of million people? And it wouldn’t matter a rat’s patootie to anyone if by that they incinerated not just the jolly old elf himself but also the only nine known members of the flying–reindeer species, including one who is an apparent genetic mutation and is so rare that he is effectively unique and alone in the universe and can never be recreated?”

  “Not to mention a year’s worth of a
ccumulated presents for a generation of six–year–olds on Santa’s good kid list,” Xander said. “Say goodbye to Christmas…”

  “They’re going to be shooting at us?” one of the volunteers said, her voice skating on the raw edge of panic.

  “They’d be shooting at anybody,” Dave snapped. “Seriously, folks. This couldn’t have been done on the ground? You had to kidnap the whole damn hotel…?”

  “We needed… to be isolated… from outside contamination,” Boss said carefully. “For our investigations.”

  “I don’t know what you needed,” Dave said earnestly, “but your ‘investigations’ are likely to be rather more short–lived than you might want if you don’t get us the hell out of here. Somehow. I don’t think you ought to completely rely on how far that ritzy little invisibility cloak field of yours is going to work when it’s the DoD who’s looking…”

  “Just take us to the moon and back,” Xander said flippantly, trying to break the serious mood.

  “As you wish,” Boss said unexpectedly.

  “I think he was just joking,” Libby said in a small voice. “Really, he was.”

  “But it is a good idea. It would take precisely the time we need, and there would be no fallout to deal with on the ground right now,” Boss said. He lifted a hand and gestured to Zach, who – somewhat disconcertingly – responded by reaching up to take a rectangular tablet from his chest (which didn’t show any sign of any hardware being removed) and began to type on it.

  “Xander,” Andie Mae hissed, “if they don’t kill you I will – and if they do I’ll kill you again just to make sure… wait – just wait – what are you doing? You can’t just take us on some hare–brained…”

  “Did you feel that?” Libby said. “I think – I felt – the world – something just shifted – ”

  “I think they just initiated the ‘getting us the hell out of here’ maneuver,” Xander said faintly.

  A girl by the name of Jessie Sellers, a grizzled con veteran at the tender age of 24 and this year the queen of the Green Room for the working pros, had leapt up from her perch on a computer screen, and raced to the sliding door – and now she yelped out something inarticulate that made everyone turn and look in that direction.