AbductiCon (12 page)

The human panelists had introduced themselves and their works, and had then all turned with some curiosity to their newly–added colleague. The silver–skinned android registered the expectant silence, turned his head marginally in their direction, and then back to facing forward once more.

“I am designated as B008199ZX5, and I understand that my secondary designation for the duration of the period I am projected to spend in this environment is Bob,” he said, following to the letter the protocol he had observed the other panelists use. He did not have any published works to mention, so he contented himself with that. After waiting for another moment to see if the android would say anything more, the panel moderator cleared his throat and faced the packed room again.

“I guess we should maybe start by defining what exactly we mean by ‘villain’,” the moderator said. “In my experience it is often better to make sure right at the beginning that we’re all talking about the same thing – and on this topic there’s always been a swirling inexactitude around the concept of an actual villain and a mere antagonist. I would suggest that a character who is merely standing in a protagonist’s way, in some passive manner, or even someone who may be doing some active thing because of his or her own needs and requirements, even though that thing might get in our protagonist’s way is not a villain. A villain, to be worthy of the name, needs to have a concentrated and focused malicious intent squarely aimed at our protagonist’s wellbeing or even existence. Does the panel want to weigh in on this…?”

The panel did, and a lively discussion began. The four human panelists entered into a vigorous debate and an engaged audience tossed in tidbits when they felt moved to do so (sometimes without actually being called on to speak by the moderator) but everyone appeared to be waiting for Bob to say something. The android sat silent and apparently intently listening to the whole discussion but not contributing a word to it. Until a young voice from the audience called out,

“Bob, question for you – so do you see yourself as a villain or an antagonist, by the definition that Charlie put forward earlier?”

Bob inclined his head. “Could you clarify the question?”

“Well, as you know, Bob,” Charlie Tait, the moderator of the panel, said, turning to his co–panelist, “we’re all kind of captives here, right now, on a fantastical journey which a great many of us might well relish the idea of but to which none of us ever actually gave our informed consent. And we all have people we love or are responsible to or responsible for who may not have come with us to this weekend’s festivities because they don’t necessarily share our interests and passions – but to whom we are very closely connected, anyway, and at this moment have no way of even communicating with as to our situation, never mind offering them any reassurances as to our own continued safety and indeed survival – because, well, we don’t have such reassurances ourselves.”

“It’s our convention, thus our story,” said Marlise Wong, a young up–and–coming graphic novel writer and artist whose trademark was over–the–top comic book villains; she was known to take great pleasure in creating curled mustachios for her bad guys to twirl while cackling over her protagonists’ often extremely improbable plight. Bob didn’t fit the type, but she’d go there if the flow took the conversation in that direction. “So we’re the protagonists. But the story we signed up for was a fun–filled weekend in the company of like–minded people, after which we get to hug everyone goodbye and say ‘see you next time’ and go home without experiencing anything worse than possibly a particularly epic hangover. Instead… we came here… and we got…
you
. And a trip to the moon. And I think many of us are actually finding it difficult, despite the evidence of our own senses, to take any of this seriously because it’s a completely outlandish plot…”

“Yes, and the best interpretation I can put on the situation right now is that you and your friends are… an unknown quantity,” Charlie said. “Many of us here – most of us, I would venture to suggest – are not at all clear on what you are here to accomplish, and what role we are supposed to play in that, if any at all, and if we really were just collateral damage to something that you and your friends planned without really taking our presence here into account – well – that’s at the very least the act of an antagonist who’s following his own agenda without regard to the protagonist’s wishes and needs. And that’s the charitable interpretation.”

“To be sure,” said one of the members of the audience, “so far we’ve been treated pretty well and the whole thing’s been rather cool, as an experience…”

“Would you have knowingly come to the con if you had had warning that this would happen?” Charlie said. “You might well say yes, right now, because everything’s so utterly exciting and we’re literally living in a world torn from the pages of our beloved and preferred genre of fiction. But when we come back down to earth…”

“And who said we will, ever again?” someone in the audience shouted.

Heads started to turn in that direction, the expressions on some faces taking on an edge of unease.

“This
is
your earth,” Bob said unexpectedly. “We have made no direct changes to the environment – the composition of the air, the gravity, the environment in which you can exist in comfort and safety – all of that has been carefully controlled so that not one entity we are responsible for can be said to be harmed.”

“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!”