“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 The historical documents…”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 accumulated 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.
“We’re
flying
!” she cried out, her face glued to the glass, one hand cupped over her forehead to cut the glare. “Wow! Freaky!”
“Now look, I really have to protest,” Luke Barnes said weakly. “I don’t think our insurance… I don’t think
they
have insurance… the personal liability…”
“Nobody will come to any harm,” Boss said. “You have my word.”
Dave’s mouth worked. “Hey, nobody gave you
permission
– you really are abducting us against our will. And what if we can’t provide the information that you’re looking for, anyway? What if we are completely clueless? What if you came back fifty years too far and if it really
was
this world that spawned you, nobody who had a hand in it is even alive yet?”
“Or remotely
here
,” Libby added. “I mean, there’s millions of us. How can you possibly expect a gang of science fiction nerds – and a posse of furries who are here for their own reasons and wouldn’t know what to say to you if you went up to one of them and asked ‘Are you my mommy?’ – and that bunch of loaded dice down in the game room who probably haven’t even realized yet that they aren’t on their home planet any more – to come up with anything resembling an actual answer for you. And plus, we haven’t even heard the question yet…”
“Then how do you know that you do not have the answer?” Boss said.
“No, but really – these guys aren’t the only ones in the hotel right now, you do realize that,” Luke remonstrated. “A number of our current guests aren’t actually
with
the convention – they’ve got nothing to do with any of this, and I think it is highly irregular that they have simply been kidnapped, right along with…”
“We’d better do something,” Libby said, interrupting, apparently oblivious that he had even been speaking – although her point did jibe exactly with what Luke had been saying. “We need to tell them – we need to let people know, before someone basically goes nuts and creates a stampede out there, if it isn’t already too late.”
“What, you think nobody’s looked out of the window yet?” Dave said sarcastically. “You’d think that anybody with two brain cells to rub together would have panicked already, just to save time later.”
“How do we do
that
?” Xander said. “I mean, there’s the Opening Ceremonies – and we get a good turnout for that, so it might be an option – but not everyone at the con even attends them – we can’t possibly get everyone to turn up at the same place at the same time for a general announcement…”
“There is no venue in the hotel that would support such a large number of people all in the same place, anyway,” Luke said. “The Fire Codes…”
Dave gave him an incredulous look. “You’re flying to the freaking
Moon
and you’re still worrying about the freaking
Fire Codes
?” he demanded.
“We’re doing the daily newsletters anyway,” Libby said abruptly. “How about using those?”
“Not everyone reads the gossip rag,” Xander said.
“We could make sure everyone got a copy,” Libby said. “Even if it means standing in the corridor handing them out by hand, flyer by flyer. Make absolutely certain everyone had a copy of it in their hands. And now.
Now.
Tonight.”
“But what are we going to say?” Dave asked. “Sorry, folks, we’ve been hijacked by Robot Aliens from Outer Space, wave the Earth goodbye?”
“We can probably help with that,” Boss said. “B008199ZX5, HLL5778N44X, you will assist in the preparation of this newsletter. Please make sure the information is accurate and reassuring.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” Andie Mae said, with a touch of acid. “It would be a lot better if we actually knew the reasons behind any of this. Maybe not everyone – maybe not the lesser crew or the passengers, maybe not yet, maybe not quite ever for some of them – but us, here, who are responsible for the ship, as it were.”
“For now, it would help just to have it in writing,” Dave said. “A do–not–go–outside thing. Along the lines of a safety notice. We can deal with the details later, or make the necessary decisions about a need–to–know ladder. There’s always the next newsletter.”
“And who’s going to write this thing?” Andie Mae demanded.
“Technically, that would be me,” said Libby. “In theory, I’m on the ConCom as the newsletter producer and program booklet editor – I’m the communications node. I guess I’d better get cracking, then.”
“Make it so,” Andie Mae commanded.
“Right, then,” Libby said. “Bob? Helen? Or whatever alphanumeric characters pass for those names? This way, please?”
She rose and made for one of the computers in the other room of the control suite, and the two she had named got smoothly to their feet and followed her like an honor guard.
“Zach,” Dave said, “you’d better go out on corridor duty and report back through that positronic telepathy or whatever you all have to say howdy to one another, just in case you seen anyone going crazy early. I’ll go too. I’ll check in with Simon and see what Security’s got so far. We’ll try and keep a lid on it – I’ll make some weird shit up if I have to. But you’d better come up with something better than what I can concoct with that newsletter thing. Opening Ceremonies is in less than two hours – and I think realistically you have maybe an hour to get something organized in terms of a general announcement. Before we have a real
situation
on our hands. We’re lucky it’s night and not that many people will be
expecting
to see anything outside right now, but if anyone looks – really
looks
– we’re kind of screwed.”