“
Sci fi
,” muttered Xander scornfully.
“Everyone has to start somewhere, Rat,” Libby said, using the nickname that he was far better known by in that crowd – in its entirety, LabRat, often shortened to just Rat. “You were a con virgin once, too.”
“Yabbut I was fifteen,” Xander said, crossing his eyes. “And look at me now… Hey, is there any more coffee in that pot…?”
Coffee
.
Libby remembered that she’d overheard Andie Mae complaining about coffee, asking Al to bring some decent coffee when he came back with the posters which announced their star attraction. Andie Mae had scored the coup of getting two of the most famous androids of their genre – Data, from Star Trek, and the Terminator – to make a brief (but
very
expensive – this one item had eaten a lion’s share of their budget for that year) appearance at the con, with its theme of Robots and Androids. How Andie Mae had managed to even find a way to get in touch with someone like actor–turned–politician Arnold Schwarzenegger was beyond Libby’s comprehension – she herself wouldn’t have known where to start – but Andie Mae had been determined to make the first con she chaired something that would not be forgotten in a hurry. Somehow, through methods that might have involved a midnight summoning of demons, she had done it, and the two actors portraying the android characters, Brent Spiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were due to show up for a photo–op and a brief signing spot and fan meet–and–greet on Saturday afternoon, one of the crowning selling points of the con.
The demon hypothesis might not have been so farfetched, because once the coup was secured everything else seemed to go haywire. Libby, as the designated media and communications member of the ConCom, had been handed the publicity baton – and she had done fairly well in publicizing the presence of the two actors in outside media. Inside the con itself, however, things were a different matter.
That was why Al Coe was at the printers for the third time, for the final – and correct – version of the posters they had ordered for the con.
He should have been back with those posters by now.
The posters, and the coffee. To the best of Libby’s knowledge (and it would have been her business to know) the posters had not materialized. And neither had the good coffee; Andie Mae would have had a loud word to say on that if it had arrived, whether or not it had matched her own august criteria in the end.
No coffee. No posters. No Al.
And it was now getting on for Friday evening, and the queue of registrants had grown long, and a bunch of games had already started in the designated ballroom, with three tables surrounded by players throwing dice and blissfully divorced – for the duration – from anything resembling reality. The first scattered parties would be starting in a matter of hours. The con, to all intents and purposes, had begun – and Libby was woefully bereft in any material larger than an A4 sheet hastily printed on a local color printer, cobbled together by Libby herself to be inserted at the last moment into the glossy full color souvenir program books, letting those who had just been handed the booklets at the registration desk know that the famous androids would be coming.
But even those only announced their presence. It was the big posters to be plastered all over the hotel which were to announce a final date and time.
“Anyone seen Al?” Libby called out into the chaos of the Green Room.
“Not since this morning,” Xander said, chewing on a messy sandwich thrown together from the cold meats and cheese platter that had been provided for the Green Room volunteers’ sustenance.
“I think we should…” Libby began, but then several earpieces squawked simultaneously, with people wincing and reaching up a hand to adjust the volume in their ears, and Xander looked up in consternation.
“Holy crap,” he said, tossing the remnants of his sandwich aside and tearing off a piece of paper towel from a nearby roll to wipe traces of mayo off his hands. “Somebody better get down there. I heard that our writer GoH kind of dropped in unannounced while Dave was waiting for him at the airport – and now we seem to have a situation again – Rory Grissom just walked in the door and got
mobbed
… that wasn’t supposed to happen. Where’s Andie Mae? Crap. Never mind, I’ll go rescue him.”
“Send him up here, we can hide him until they get him into his room safely,” Libby said.
“Too late to stash him, they know he’s here. Aw,
dammit
. I’ve a got heap of work still to do, and now I have to go babysit a drama queen.”
He vanished into the corridor, and two more pros turned up to fill the space he had vacated, asking for their envelopes. One was found easily, the other appeared to be missing altogether, throwing Libby into a state of near panic until the pro in question thought to mention that, since his new book was coming up under a new pseudonym, that might be the name the registration envelope might be under. In a quite different part of the alphabet.
“Take it easy,” Libby whispered to herself, looking up for a moment and seeing a Green Room thronged with visiting pro and ConCom members and convention volunteers, a swirling melee of smiling people full of energy and enthusiasm, waiting with a delighted anticipation for the real festivities to begin on the morrow but in the meantime running into friends they hadn’t seen for months, or maybe a whole year since the last con, chattering, exchanging news, asking after other friends who had not yet made an appearance.
It’s just the usual chaos, and it’ll only get more chaotic as the evening wears on…
“Libby, was it Alice who was in charge of the writers’ workshop this year?” somebody shouted into her ear, to be heard above the general noise level.
“No, she handed over to Lou Martin – I don’t think she could make the con this year,” Libby shouted in response.
“Seen Lou? Need to sort out something!”
“Don’t think she’s here yet!”
“Oh! Okay. I’d better email her. Hope she checks her email before she gets here tomorrow. One of her pros…”
But someone else was pawing at the envelopes, and Libby turned back to try and keep some control over the process. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed something that was sufficiently out of kilter with the rest of the scene for her to actually take notice. Amongst the heaving happy throng crowding the Green Room there was one person standing alone, with as much space between herself and everybody else as that was possible to achieve under the circumstances, a woman standing very still with both hands loosely by her side. She was dressed in something that may or may not have been a costume (not outlandish enough to be tagged as one immediately; just not commonplace enough to be immediately dismissed as
not
being one). There was something… strange… about her – the stillness, the ever–so–slightly off shade of her silvery skin, something about her eyes – but there was no time for further inspection. Someone else slipped in between Libby and the woman, and when Libby could look that way again she was gone. Libby could not even be certain any more what had attracted her attention, but the strange woman’s afterimage remained in the back of Libby’s head like a ghost, distracting her from something that she knew she had been about to do before she was distracted by something else before that.
She saw Xander slip back into the suite, and burrowed her way across to him to where he had gone back to the computers set up in the back room.
“Your movie star sorted?”
“I thought he’d be upset, but he was a pig in clover, surrounded by pink–haired chicks with fairy wings who were clamoring for his autograph and some really weird dude painted kind of silver or something who just stood there and watched – creepy, really, I don’t know if I ought to go give Sim and Security a shout about him.”
“What, you think we have a stalker or something on hand?” Libby yelped.
“He’s a mother–lovin’ movie star, doesn’t it come with the territory?” Xander said. “But maybe he was just a dude who was trying to pretend to be an android and fit in with the theme of the show, I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into it.”
Libby’s mind went fleetingly to the woman she had seen standing so very still in the melee of the Green Room, and come to think of it she too looked like she was playing an android character… but then, robots were this year’s theme, after all, and everyone was just tired and jumpy. That was all.
“There
are
a number of droids out there,” Libby said slowly. “And I distinctly remember seeing a baby blue Dalek near the Hospitality Suite area earlier.”
“Actually, to be honest, I’m more astonished that there was at least one dude dressed in a replica of the uniform Rory Grissom graced on the good ship
Invictus
,” Xander said, dismissing the matter. “I don’t know how the groupies even
found
him that fast, they must have been waiting at the front door for as long as it took for him to manifest. He seemed to be enjoying it all rather too much – I almost had to drag him bodily away from there before he spent all his con capital on one spectacular meet and greet – we have
plans
for him at Opening Ceremonies, after all, and that’s in just a few hours. Where’s the Steel Magnolia when we need her?”
Ξ
The Steel Magnolia, which was what Andie Mae was known as behind her back half in affection and half in abject terror, was chewing on her perfect lower lip while cradling her cellphone between her shoulder and her ear in a quiet spot she had found just inside a newly–cleared hotel bedroom due to be used as a programming room the next day. But Al Coe’s phone kept on going to voicemail, and she had left three messages already – she had started out by being snarky, but by the third message she had graduated to
Please call me, where ARE you, I am getting worried
. This fourth call was not giving her any more joy, and she finally thumbed off the phone with a frustrated grimace and without leaving another message. A passing thought about starting to call the local hospitals meandered across the surface of her mind, but then she mentally shook herself and firmly admonished her more paranoid self to stop being ridiculous – and to possibly start thinking of something adequate to say when Al did turn up with those posters, which were turning into quite the production.
Turning sharp right as she exited the sanctuary of the not–yet–panel–room, she nearly collided with a figure standing close to the wall, very still, his skin a silvery–white, with two pale eyes set dully into an almost expressionless face.
“Sorry,” she said automatically, ducking around the guy.
He did not respond, by word or gesture, and Andie Mae briefly felt as though she should be offended and flounce off in a huff – but she had other things on her mind, and she methodically subtracted the silver man from her thoughts as she hurried forward and plunged into the busier corridors where the con was beginning to swing into a higher gear.
She failed to notice a pair of con–goers who had paused as she flung herself unseeingly past them, but the older of the two, a middle–aged man with a receding hairline of salt–and–pepper hair that swept around the back of his head like a half–tonsure and a lush gray beard, halted as he turned to follow Andie Mae’s progress with glittering gray–blue eyes.
“Thar she blows,” he muttered.
His companion, a lanky youngster in perhaps his late teens, turned his head marginally.
“She didn’t even look,” the young man said, in a voice dithering between obligatorily aggrieved (on his mentor’s behalf) and vaguely puzzled.
“Oh, she wouldn’t pay attention to the likes of me, Marius, not in public,” Sam Dutton, Andie Mae’s predecessor as the con Chair, said. “I only owned this con for the last three decades, that’s all. But it’s her baby now and she doesn’t want to be reminded of history, not today. And I’m history. I’m not surprised that she wouldn’t stop and chat. But still – she looks rather more singularly focused than one should be at this stage of the game. I wonder if everything is okay.”
“Do you miss it?” Marius Tarkovski asked, turning back to Sam with a small smile.
Sam waved his hands in a gesture that implied a complete inability to answer the question. “Some part of me does,” he admitted. “I just
know
I should be in the thick of things, and it feels odd – like a mental itch – being here and not being on the inside. But on the other hand… anything that
does
go wrong won’t be my fault this time, dammit. Her show. Her game. Her responsibility. It’s what she wanted, and I hope that she gets exactly what she wanted.” He stopped, and looked almost astonished. “That came out rather more claws–out than I intended,” he said. “Who knew. Maybe it does rankle just a bit more than I thought it would.”
“You sure it was a good idea coming this year?” Marius asked.
“Well, your Mom is happier knowing that you’ve got me on standby – your first solo con and all that,” Sam said, grinning. “So there’s the babysitting aspect of it…”
Marius aimed a polite but still affronted fist bump at the older man’s shoulder. “I’m
seventeen
,” he said.
“Exactly,” Sam agreed laconically, and followed the passage of a trio of scantily–clad female fairies wearing the barest minimum of chiffon and oversize pink wings. One of them became aware of the scrutiny and half–turned, offering a flirtatious glance from underneath drooping eyelids that looked too weak to support the weight of glitter piled upon them. Marius flushed a bright scarlet, right to the tips of his ears, a reaction to both Sam’s implications and that particular response, and looked down to the toes of his sneakers.
Sam laughed, but not unkindly; he gave Marius’s shoulder an understanding squeeze and at the same time used the gesture to propel him forward once again in their original direction.
“Come on, kid,” he said. “We’ll mingle a bit more – I’m sure there are friends out here somewhere – and then we can turn in. Tomorrow the fun begins. AndieCon starts in earnest…”
“Sam…?”
Sam’s head turned very slowly at the sound of his name, to face a young man a good thirty years his junior but with signs of exactly the same receding hairline beginning to make an appearance. They looked remarkably similar, in fact – that hair, and eyes of almost exactly the same color, of almost identical height and build allowing for some middle–aged spread on Sam. Marius, who immediately recognized the new arrival as Andie Mae’s ex–liutenant Liam Connors, wondered not for the first time if there was actual truth in tales of time travel and whether it was possible that somehow, without even knowing it, Liam was a young Sam and there was a dangerous time–line crossing occurring here which meant that the entire con would implode into a temporal black hole any minute.