“I was wondering what it all had to have looked like, at Ground Zero,” she said. “Weird.”
“Weird?” Al exploded. “That’s all you’ve got? There’s a great big honking charred hole in the ground where the hotel was supposed to be… and none of us noticed it or could see it… and we all acted like we’d been fed happy pills for a week… and then everyone shook hands and went home and it’s only after I looked at the pictures that I saw the reality behind the illusion screen – and what did you mean, SEP?”
“That’s apparently what they set up,” Andie Mae said faintly. “The androids.”
“The androids? You’re telling me that you think that it was Spiner and…”
“No. Real androids.” Andie Mae lifted her eyes from the computer screen and back to Al’s face. “They flew us to the Moon.”
Al stared at her in silence.
Andie Mae’s eyes filled with unexpected tears. “I was so worried,” she said. “I didn’t know what had happened to you – and then – well – look, this is going to sound totally unhinged. I know. But while you were out with those stupid posters… they turned up. The androids. Four of them. They had alphanumeric names like one of your high–security passwords, but Xander renamed them so that we could actually remember a name by which we could tell them apart – and they turned into Zach, Bob, Helen… and Boss.”
“Boss,” Al said. He seemed to have developed a nasty habit of repeating everything that Andie Mae said, but couldn’t seem to stop it. “This was the boss Xander just blabbed about?...The one that you… How do you have a fling with a robot?”
Andie Mae flushed a bright scarlet, and took a sip of her coffee to hide it.
Al said, “The Moon. They flew you to the Moon. What the hell does that mean?”
“It means they quite literally… wait a minute. I have pictures too.”
She put down her coffee cup and hauled out her phone, tapping on the screen and then sliding around photos with her finger until she found one she wanted and handed the phone to Al.
“Here,” she said. “look.” She tapped on the screen with her finger as he took the phone from her and stared at a picture of Andie Mae standing in front of the windows in Callahan’s Bar, with the Moon filling what should have been just open sky behind her. “The Moon. They literally took us to the Moon. The whole hotel, I mean. Picked it up and flew it out…”
“Andie Mae,” Al said, “that’s ridiculous.”
“Look harder,” she said. “I suppose I might have faked that at some point, in all the copious spare time I had while this convention was up and running and I had everything to prove from the Chair – but look harder. It may not be obvious, but what don’t you recognize in that photo?”
Al’s eyes flickered from her face to the photo and then back again. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What?”
“That’s the dark side,” Andie Mae said. “That’s the other side of the Moon, Al. The side you don’t see from down here. That’s where we were. That’s where we went. That’s where they took us. Cross my heart and hope to die, that’s what happened.”
“And then you had a fling with the boss?” Al said.
“Nothing happened,” Andie Mae said. “And if he was still here, he’d tell you the same thing. And you know androids don’t lie.”
Al put the phone down very slowly and very carefully.
“You’re seriously expecting me to believe that extraterrestrial androids came swooping down and ripped a hotel out of the ground and just flew you to the Moon?” Al said.
Andie Mae got to her feet again and rummaged in a teetering pile of paper that was stacked messily on the corner of the desk, finally coming up with hot–pink sheet of paper which she then held out to Al.
“That was Libby’s take,” she said. “That was Friday night’s newsletter. Welcome to Abducticon. We had a doctor who was running what Xander insisted on calling the Asylum Floor, for all the poor mundanes cracking up under it all, and there were at least three ambulances taking the poor confused souls out of here this morning after we landed again last night. And we had replicators. And we had real live androids who seemed to have come here to look for their ancestor gods, or something. And oh, God, Al, where the hell were you? You missed it all!”
“I made a detour,” Al said softly. “I stopped… at that place you liked… you said you wanted coffee. And then I was really late. And maybe I was careless. And then the other car hit me, and then everything went to hell.”
She came back to where he was sitting and subsided on the arm of the chair in which he was slumped.
“You got me coffee?” she asked gently.
“I forgot it in the car,” Al said.
Andie Mae unexpectedly leaned in and wrapped her arms around him, being very careful not to jostle the arm in the sling, and planted a kiss on the top of his head.
“I love you, so very much, right now,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
His good arm crept up and snaked around her waist. And then, against her shoulder, he murmured,
“Androids? A fling…? The Moon…?”
Ξ
Downstairs, in the busy lobby area still teeming with people in the process of post–con departure from the hotel, Marius had taken himself out of the main throng by parking himself and a small suitcase at a booth in the breakfast restaurant. He had a cup of coffee on the table beside his open laptop, at which he was staring without any indication that it was performing any remotely useful task. But whatever it was doing was apparently very much occupying his mind because he jumped, startled, when he felt a tap on his shoulder that apparently came from the potted plant he was sitting next to. Upon a second look, the potted plant resolved itself into Vince Silverman, and Marius sat up sharply, straightening his shoulders.
“Hey, kid,” Vince said. “Just on the way to collect the wife, and then we’re on our way. Did I give you one of these?”
He was holding out a business card, and Marius reached out over the foliage to take it.
“Sam did say you wanted to write,” Vince said. “If I can help, email me.”
“Thanks!” Marius said, a little astonished but nonetheless enthusiastic at the opportunity that had just landed in his lap. “If you’re sure that’s okay, I’ll do that!”
“There you go, then. Good luck with the writing. And listen – about that fourth law of robotics… the one you came up with…”
“I was noodling around an idea,” Marius said with a grin. “Truth be said, you came up with the ‘law’ version of it.”
“Still. Your ideas,” Vince said. “Do you mind if I used that? I could call it the Tarkovski Corollary or something, credit where credit is due.”
“You’d put me in one of your books?” Marius said, grinning.
“And why not? As we’ve just proved, this weekend that was, life is just science fiction, when you think about it, really.”
Marius’s smile slipped a little. “Yeah. I know.”
“They left a message,” Vince said, dropping his voice just a little. “Let me know… if they call you back, would you?”
Marius held his gaze, searching Vince’s eyes with his own, and then looked back down onto his computer. “Sure,” he said softly. “Okay.”
“Got to go. Angel’s not good at waiting. Nice to have met you. Sorry about the elevator.”
Vince straightened from where he’d been half leaning over the potted plant, raised his hand in a gesture of farewell, and turned away.
Moments later Marius was startled again as someone slipped into the booth opposite him. He snapped his head around to look, and met Xander’s sharp gaze.
“And what did he want?” Xander asked. “He was actually smirking at one point.”
“I think that’s just the way he smiles,” Marius said. “He wanted to ask me if he could use that ‘Fourth Law of Robotics’ idea we were knocking around at dinner last night. Before we…”
“Yeah,” Xander said. “Thought an
y more about that?”
“I think… he left me a message,” Marius said, in what was almost a whisper. “Boss, I mean.”
Xander leaned forward over his crossed arms. “A message? How? What is it?”
“That’s just it. I have no idea. I almost tossed it as spam, but it wouldn’t let itself be deleted and then I thought it might be some sort of weird virus thing and then I took another look and – well – see for yourself. ”
He turned the laptop around so that it faced Xander, and Xander reached out to pull it closer to himself, studying what was on the screen.
“I don’t recognize…” he began, and Marius lifted both his hands from the table in exasperated agreement.
“Exactly. I don’t recognize. Neither does the computer. It’s something that I don’t have the software for, or it’s super encrypted in a way I have no way of unlocking, or any number of stuff like that. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it came from, all I know is that it’s there and it won’t leave.”
“But how do you know it isn’t just a weird bug?” Xander said.
Marius motioned for the computer, and Xander pushed it back across the table; Marius tapped a few keys, waited for a moment, and then turned the screen back to Xander.
“Because of that,” he said.
The open email on the screen bore just an alphanumeric string as its subject line – an alphanumeric string that, for a moment, was completely random to Xander. But then his rebus–solving back brain sprang into action, and he suddenly recognized the sequence. His eyes snapped back over the screen, sought Marius’s gaze.
“ZVL5559AD4,” he said. “That’s… I remember that was… that’s Boss, isn’t it?”
“Read it,” Marius said. “That bit of it – that’s just an email. A perfectly ordinary common email that could have come from anybody. But read it.”
Xander looked back on the screen again. “When you are ready, you will know what lies within.”
“The thing you were looking at was the attachment,” Marius said. “Encrypted, encoded, something. And I’m guessing the key hasn’t been invented yet.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Xander asked carefully.
“I’m considering reformatting the hard drive,” Marius admitted, with a rueful shrug. “Except I’m not sure that if I did that then the only thing left on this hard drive afterwards would be this thing. If I scrap this computer and get a brand new one out of the box… the only thing that would be on that drive, before I even put an OS on it, would be this thing. In the worst possible way it is a virus, but it’s attached to me, in a sense, and it’ll infect any computer through me if I tried to get rid of a computer it’s already on. This is something… that is written, and that history already has a record of, and it’s fixed, it’s all fixed. I told you, I’ve already done… whatever it is that I am going to do. It’s entirely possible that the future is the only thing that will unlock this thing, in time, whatever it is. And the worst of it is…”
“What?”
“I’ve… dreamed about the first ideas…” Marius shook his head. “No, that sounds insane.”
Xander offered a small smile. “Name one thing that happened this weekend that meets our general definition of something sane,” he said. “I might easily be convinced that I too have in fact ‘dreamed’ – that I dreamt it all, that none of it really happened. Except for the inexplicable pictures on my phone. And the memory of that panel. And him, the Boss. And you. That was… real. As real as it gets.”
“I won’t be able to not do it,” Marius said helplessly. “Not now. Not now that I’ve met them.”
“Well,” Xander said, crossing his arms and leaning back, “it’s unlikely that we’ll live to see the 25th century and whatever happens then according to the Gospel according to Boss – the human migration, whatever. And by that stage it will be well out of your own hands, anyway.”
“But I’ll begin it,” Marius whispered. “I don’t know if these first glimmerings of ideas are going to have to come to something reasonably concrete before I figure out how to open this attachment, or whether at some point everything will just reach a critical mass and what’s in there will help me take the final step…”
“If that’s the case, then they’re really inventing themselves and you’re just the middleman,” Xander said. “But I didn’t get that feeling from Boss. He seemed to think that you’re going to be…”
“That he’s going to be what?” inquired Sam, who walked up to the table just in time to hear the last snatch of that conversation.
“We were just discussing what we wanted to be when we grew up,” Xander said. “And as far as I am concerned, I am going to take a vow of silence concerning this entire conversation.” He slipped out of the booth, and hovered for a moment beside Sam before finally sticking out a hand to be shaken. “I’m glad you were here, for what it’s worth. It just wouldn’t have seemed fair, your being the Chair of this con for so many years and then missing this the year that you stepped down.”
“Was pushed,” Sam said, lightly but pointedly. “But, yeah. Thanks. I know what you mean. This year was a kind of a gift, really. I figure if Andie Mae could navigate through this, she can probably handle any problems that our poor old Earth can throw in her direction.”
“Well, I’d better go,” Xander said. “Loose ends. End of con. You know how it goes.”
“I know how it goes,” Sam said. “Good luck.”
Xander raised his hand in a half wave that bade farewell to both of them and sauntered off. Sam took his place in the booth, perching on the end of the bench and leaning his elbow on the table.
“Well,” he inquired of Marius, turning to face him and resting his chin in his hand, “are you ready…?”
Marius stared at his laptop for another long moment before sucking in his breath and then letting it out in a long deep sigh as he tabbed his email software closed and brought the screen down over his keyboard.
“No,” he said. “But faith manages.”
Sam tilted his head and looked at him, and for a disconcerting instant it was like looking down the tunnel of the future and he could clearly see the man this boy would become… and all the things that he would do. But then Marius happened to look up, and caught the unexpected and flirtatious glance of a pretty brunette still clad in a body–hugging, glitter–spangled con costume across the top of the potted plant, and flushed a bright scarlet, looking away again. And he was still, again, unquestionably, the boy.
Whatever would come, would come. The legacy of an android named Boss… would keep. And it was Monday. Abducticon – the magical, the unexpected, the luminous, the overwhelming – was over.
“Come on, kid. Time to go home,” he said.
The day’s newspapers had been delivered, albeit belatedly, and Sam glanced at the headlines as they walked past the pile of them on top of the reception counter – just the usual mess of politics and inane celebrity gossip, no mention of an entire hotel inexplicably vanishing off the face of the Earth, quite literally as it happened, unless it was a squib of a story buried on page 3. Outside, as Sam and Marius stepped out from under the mother–of–pearl inlaid portico over the main entrance, the sun hung in a washed–out autumn sky. For a moment, a heart–stopping moment, Marius thought he saw that sunlight glinting off something amongst the cars in the parking lot – something that might have been a metallic flash, a glimpse of silver skin, as though the androids were back, and watching him – but there was nothing there, of course, when he looked closer.
It was… it might have been… just another ordinary day, just another Monday.
But it wasn’t. Not really. It would never be ‘just another Monday’ again.
Marius tucked his laptop more securely under his arm, and then, as his hand fell back down to his side, it brushed past his pocket and a small object tucked safely inside. His Rosetta stone, the first word on the blank page on which he would end up writing the future history of h
is world… a severed Finger of the Gods which had pointed straight at him, singled him out, made him a whole different human being than he had been when he had walked into the hotel on the morning of Friday last. A small and cryptic smile hovering on the corners of his mouth, he stepped out into that future, and into the light.
APPENDIX: WHAT THE MESSAGE SAID
MESSAGE IN THREE PARTS
PART ONE – DATELINE 3 NOVEMBER 2076
UNPUBLISHED FOREWORD TO “THE BIRTH OF MECHANICAL MAN” BY DR. MARIUS TARKOVSKI (BOOK PUBLISHED 15 MAY 2078)
Looking back on a long and hopefully well–lived life, anybody would eventually ask a question about regrets. Was there anything you might have regretted doing, or not doing, or doing sooner rather than later, or choosing to embrace or to walk away from? The seeds of my answers to that lie in one single extraordinary weekend in 2014 when I was seventeen years old, and the hand of God reached out and pushed me into the future. Quite literally.
Let me explain.
That weekend, I was taken along to a science fiction convention by a man who was an elder in the writing group to which I belonged to at the time, Sam Dutton. I was there, almost on my own, the air redolent with an adult freedom, but still too young to realize that I did not know everything.
That was the year they came, the four androids who said they were from our future. They said that they had come searching for their origins, for their creator. Nobody was completely clear about why they would be doing this at a science fiction convention when there were so many places where they could have gone, so many people whom they could have tapped, so many great and intelligent and incisively insightful researchers into the field of robotics which was only just in its infancy at that time. But they chose us, this convention, this particular crowd of crazy fen (as the multiplicity of science fiction fans referred to themselves) and somehow we ended up – all of us, complete with the hotel we were staying in – being taken for a joyride around the Moon.
I still remember that night, the night we rounded the Moon, as though it was yesterday instead of seven decades ago. I remember something deep and full of awe stirring in my heart. It was a moment that has been the yardstick against which I have always measured wonder, and nothing at all has ever really managed to hold a candle to it. That night was their gift to us, although I don’t even remember now, not any more, why it happened that way, why the Moon was a part of it all. Looking back, it seems almost impossible for me to believe the smug complacency, almost, with which we all responded to it then – we barely believed it, to be sure, but we nonetheless took it as our due, and accepted it, and threw a revel for it, and partied the night away.
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