“Excuse me,” Marius said abruptly, pushing back his chair and stumbling to his feet. “I just… I need to… I’ll be back…”
He reached blindly behind him to steady himself on the back of his chair, nearly overturned it, caught it in time and gave everyone a brief apologetic smile before he fled the restaurant like all the evil androids of the world were on his heels.
“What just happened?” Sam said, staring after him.
“Sam.” Xander laid an urgent hand on Sam’s arm. “Let me out. Let me after him.”
“Xander, I think I should probably…” Sam began, but Xander pushed on his shoulder, gently, but with real urgency.
“No. Let me. Trust me. You weren’t there, you weren’t right there, I saw what he saw. I know what he heard. I know what he’s thinking. Quickly, let me out. Let me go get him.”
Sam hesitated, but just for an instant – there was something in Xander’s eyes that made him accept these vague reassurances without further question. He slipped out of the booth, and Xander scrambled out after him and hurried in Marius’s wake.
“What does he mean, I wasn’t there and I didn’t see? You were – you were right there. What the hell happened on that stage?” Sam demanded of Vince, sitting heavily down on the chair Marius had just vacated.
“I would think that getting a visceral realization that the entity that was not supposed to be able to conceive of telling a falsehood or something that was not absolutely and provably true would be quite enough to spook that kind of quick and intelligent kid. But when Boss was talking about somebody in that room being the person who would take the first steps toward creating the androids… I think he was speaking directly to Marius.” Vince paused reflectively, then went on, “Of course, I am just a writer, and it is my stock in trade to extrapolate and make up stories on the basis of the tiniest things I notice out of the corner of my eye – and to be honest I thought, well, it was an intense moment, and the kid happened to be the one who had asked the question, and it might have been anyone in his place, really, and it would have felt the same. But now… Xander may be right… It may have been meant for him alone. Just for Marius. I think your friend Boss did find the answers he came here to seek, and they came… wrapped in that package. That kid was just handed quite a bill of sale, I believe. And now we have two choices.”
“Two choices?” Sam echoed blankly, trying to take it all in. “Marius? You’re telling me Marius is the one who creates… I mean, I know he was always a tinkerer, he could rebuild a computer from a pile of spare parts when he was thirteen years old, I probably shouldn’t tell you this but he hacked my cell phone so that it is a free agent when it comes to gathering signal from thin air – his phone and mine are possibly the only ones that still worked when this floating palace hit the void and everyone else lost the signal. I mean, we couldn’t phone home, he’s not that much of an E.T., but we could call each other. But you’re telling me Marius is the one who grows up through all this techno–pottering to become the literal father of the android race…?” And then, sitting up, he added sharply. “What do you mean, two choices?”
Vince gave him a wan smile. “If this is true, then yes, two choices,” he said. “If we know that this is what happens in our future… and if Boss’s ‘gaps’ imply what we think they might imply, and the consequences that follow… knowing that we have in our power right now to possibly change that future… we can choose to accept it, and go forward, and embrace what is coming, and that means telling absolutely nobody what we know and hope like hell that Marius himself might decide to do or not do something and take it out of our hands. Or we choose to reveal it, and let him take the consequences of that.”
“Reveal it to whom?”
“When we get back Earthside, assuming we get there in one piece. Take him in to Homeland Security, NSA, whoever will listen, and leave him to them.”
“They’d puree his brain,” Sam said. “Assuming of course they believed a word of your crackpot story in the first place.”
“I think we can prove it,” Vince said slowly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Back in the elevator, when we were stuck,” Vince said. “Marius was the last one in the elevator car. He was in there when the cable came down. The android that was helping us jumped into the car with him to avoid being flattened by that steel cable when it hit. But when it was all over and they both came out… it was not without its consequences. The android might have saved itself, but it was not quite fast enough. It was missing two fingers on its hand when it came out. I think Boss might have staged a little sleight of hand, afterwards, as it were – because the two androids were the ones who closed and sealed that door. And it was implied that it was the door that cost those lost fingers. But now – now – the more I think about it the more I think I know what really happened. It was in that elevator, in the dark, that the cable came down and mashed that hand. Marius has at least one of those lost fingers. If you are right, and he has a gift for the tech stuff…”
“It’s a Rosetta stone, of a sort,” Sam said. “It’s a blueprint. It’s enough of a hint, for him. If you are right, it will be enough – it will be more than enough.”
“What do you want to do with him?”
“He’s a kid,” Sam said. “Dear God, his mother gave him to me to keep an eye on, and I took a seventeen–year–old high schooler out of her house and, if we all land in one piece and I take him home, I’ll be returning with the Android All–Father…”
“Perhaps we can just stop him,” Vince said. “You have influence. Tell him to simply ditch the finger…”
“You can’t be sure of that. It makes for a great story, but you don’t know. But if it is true, do we have the right to make that decision, to change the future? Even if we think the future is our extinction?”
Xander had caught up to Marius just outside the restaurant. The kid was standing by the big plate glass window directly opposite, which looked out into the courtyard enclosed by the resort’s three towers, with his forehead pressed against the glass.
“He did mean you,” Xander said quietly, coming up to stand just beside the younger man. “It’s supposed to be you. It’s you they came back here to find. To wake up. To push into… into actually creating them in the first place. God, my head hurts.”
“Your head…” Marius said, laughing hollowly, but lifting his head up from the glass pane to look at Xander. “I feel sick.”
“You don’t have to do anything that – ”
“Your head’s going to hurt worse in a second if you think this through to the end,” Marius said.
“What? After everything you’ve heard – after everything we think we know, everything that possibly happens – you’re going to make them anyway…?” Xander asked.
Marius stared at him. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he whispered. “I don’t get to choose anything anymore. This happened, this weekend. They came. They were here. They existed. They exist.” He paused. “Look, the only reason they could be here at all is… is… Xander, I’ve already done it.”
Ξ
The con was gearing up for another giant party by this time, with Earthlight starting to fill the corridors of the California Resort – but the mood was quite different the second time around. With the Moon fly–by it had been pure euphoria, everyone simply drunk on the wonder of it all, with absolutely no thought for anything else but that moment as and of itself, something unique and never to be repeated and as such to be celebrated in the grandest, loudest, most joyous and most abandoned way possible. Then had come the hard crash of the morning after, the Moon behind them, the home planet still a long way away and existing almost as no more than dream or memory.
But now, with the approach to Earth, with the familiar contours they had all seen on a thousand maps starting to emerge from behind clouds wisping over brown landmasses and brilliant blue oceans, the euphoria had changed to something much quieter, and deeper, and somehow more reve
rential. It was a homecoming, not a revel, and people weren’t thinking in terms of having the time of their lives. They were, rather, remembering the feel of wet sand between the toes of bare feet as the ocean’s foam withdrew from the shore back into the sea as another wave gathered to come in; they were remembering their first snowfall, and apple pie, and Christmas, and their grandmother’s smile, and blue skies, and the first scent of frost in the air on an autumn morning, and seedlings pushing their way through the earth in early spring, and the smell of lilac, and the feel of a sea breeze on hot cheeks, and the song of a whale, and the wild tailwagging joy of the first dog of their childhood. It was the feeling people knew well – the sense of gratitude and quiet joy of sleeping once more in the familiar warmth and comfort of your own bed after a long trip away from home. It had all somehow become quite precious, all those memories, like an answer to a prayer, and the party was more of a vigil this time around, a gathering where people shared not pure exhilaration but rather a quiet wonder. They watched, and they waited, and some cried, and others comforted them, and it was a forging of minds and spirits, a sense of being together, of being one.
The only thing that nobody quite knew, or at least they weren’t entirely sure of, was whether it was all going to end as well as they had been promised. All those things that they were remembering, that they had loved, that they suddenly yearned for with an intensity that felt like an almost physical pain – all of it might be lost forever if just one small thing went wrong.
But they had been asked to believe so many impossible things that weekend. This was just one more. And they could handle it. They could handle it together.
Up in Callahan’s Bar the clientele was much the same as for the Moon shot, but the mood had reached up there as well. No crazy cocktails were made on this night. It was much quieter, people standing in loose knots and speaking softly amongst themselves or standing by themselves nursing a glass of the good brandy – because the good brandy was what the occasion called for.
“When we hit that atmosphere,” Dave prophesied morosely, “there’ll be fire…”
“What, you think they’ll still shoot at us?” Xander asked.
“If we aren’t a flying cinder already, they might,” Dave said.
“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” Xander muttered.
“I was the one who saw us leave, remember?” Dave said. “It was freaky. In the extreme. And now I’ve got the shakes. I didn’t understand how we took off in the first place. It is utterly beyond me to contemplate how they are going to…”
“They’ll just reverse the polarity of the landing gear at the bottom of this rock,” said Libby, who had recovered enough from the previous night to give Callahan’s another game try.
“Well, let’s hope the dilithium holds out,” Dave muttered.
They were all braced for what they knew, intellectually, had to be coming. They had seen hundreds, thousands, of yards of footage showing atmospheric re–entry of solid objects into the mantle of air that surrounded the Earth. They had all heard of heat tiles on the NASA shuttles, and of the problems they caused when they failed – but at least the shuttles had had them, which they emphatically did not. They were waiting so hard that when what they were waiting for completely failed to materialize they were taken completely by surprise.
The Earth simply grew larger and larger and larger; it had grown, while they were watching, from a tennis ball to a basketball to a large pumpkin and then bigger and bigger, filling their vision, filling the black void, until it was all there was and they could see the surface of their planet approaching almost too fast to believe – but also slowly, very slowly, as though they were a leaf adrift on the wind, with almost no trace of their passage. Certainly there was no flaming trail, and it was when they were low enough that someone muttered about the lights below – which were suddenly a familiar sight, like something they might see out of an airplane on a perfectly mundane flight that all of them had taken at least once in their lives – being really awfully close that anybody realized that they had been in the atmosphere (with no effects, ill or otherwise) for some time and that they really were just floating their way down to the ground, in just the kind of way that none of them would expect a rock falling out of the sky to accomplish this feat.
“I feel as though I ought to have a towel with me, and that right about now someone should be telling me not to panic,” said somebody behind Libby, in a rather chagrined voice.
“Cleared to land in Docking Bay One,” a girl sang out from right beside the window, her face glued to the glass.
“I feel a bit cheated, actually,” Xander complained. “One would want a bit of drama, really. Like, we’re having problems with re–entry, Captain – and then someone does something improbable, and everything turns out all right in the end. That’s what happens in the movies.”
“You just wanted to see someone be a hero,” Dave said, braced against the wall as though he desperately needed something solid to hang onto when – as it must – the rock they were on hit Mother Earth, hard. Falling rocks did that, after all. It was a known fact.
“Scaredy cat,” Xander said, laughing.
Dave lifted a finger and began to intone, “I must not fear – fear is the mind killer – ”
A shudder rocked the building and a cry went up in the bar, but then things righted themselves again and descent resumed.
“We apologize for the turbulence,” someone said, “please keep your seat belts fastened until the hotel has come to a complete stop…”
“Help me, Obi–wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope,” Libby said, turning to hang onto Dave’s arm. And then, as his hand came round to cover hers in what was meant to be a gesture of comfort but suddenly turned into a vice–like grip on her wrist, “Ow! Take it easy! I don’t want to have to…”
“Look,” Dave said, pointing.
The four androids who had taken them on this entire merry ride had somehow appeared in the far corner of Callahan’s. They had a glow about them, and appeared two–dimensional. Xander narrowed his eyes at the apparitions.
“Holograms?” he said. “That’s not the real…”
“We have brought you home, as we have promised” said the voice of Boss, and even as he spoke they all felt it – something almost too small to notice, something almost entirely unremarkable, a tiny bump, a sense of things knitting and connecting, and then a stillness, and what they could see out of the window was night sky. Just ordinary night sky. Like they might have seen on a thousand nights before. “We have to leave now. But before we go we wanted to thank you, one more time. Now, with your help, we understand.”
“Hey, wait,” Libby said, stepping forward and raising one hand, but there was no response from the four androids except for all of them raising their right arms, hands lifted in a gesture of farewell, palms toward the crowd in Callahan’s. And then, from their edges inwards, the four glowing figures developed a coruscating sparkle which dissolved their shapes until each was just a point of light that lingered for a moment and then winked out.
“I’ll be damned,” Xander said explosively. “They beamed up.”
Libby, dropping Dave’s arm, glanced down at her wrist, and sighed.
“Well, it’s ten minutes past midnight,” she said. “I guess if we all walked out of the front door right now we’d be right back where we started out. I guess it’s over. Dammit, Monday always comes.”
EPILOGUE: MONDAY ALWAYS COMES
“The final newsletter is a work of art, Libby,” Dave said, grinning, as he stuck his head around the door into the Con Ops room and caught Libby’s eye as she blearily looked up from the computer screen.
“Thanks,” she said with a yawn. “Worked on it all night. I actually literally haven’t been to bed yet. Too much to do, too little time., But I have to confess, it’s easier when someone actually does half your work for you. And you can always rely on fen.”
“You mean the elevator signage?” Dave said. “Yeah, that
was inspired.”
Libby patted a pile of paper on her left. “I’m keeping the originals,” she said. “Too good.”
Dave stepped fully into the room and picked up the sheaf. “You stole them off the elevators?”
“I left replacements,” Libby said. “Don’t worry, safety first. But those… those are mine.”
The signs in question had been the ones that Luke had raced to place on the crippled elevator bank. Initially they had simply stated OUT OF ORDER in large black type with a line below, in smaller letters, saying PLEASE USE STAIRS. But passing con–goers had annotated each individual sign, in different pens and different handwriting. Libby, wearing a wide grin of her own, glanced up at Dave as he stood there with the pilfered signage in his hands, and said,
“Start from the bottom and read up from there.”
Dave was already doing that, laughing out loud as he did so. The sign from the Lobby level had, in an act of inspiration, been left absolutely untouched – a virgin control panel, showing what the origin of the game had been. But on Floor 1 the competition began, with handwritten commentary underneath each original warning statement.
OUT OF ORDER
PLEASE USE STAIRS
We mean it!
Uh–oh…
Floor 2 upped the ante.
OUT OF ORDER
PLEASE USE STAIRS
We_ really_ mean it
Yeah, they actually locked it
You tried to open it?
He touches wet paint cuz they might be lying
With wet paint you don't fall 20 stories
….or 200,000 miles
238,857
that depends, how fast are we approaching?
Dave looked up.
“I’d pay money to know who wrote that wet paint comment,” he said.
Libby traded grins again. “Gets better.”
Floor 3 signage was a little more meta.
OUT OF ORDER
PLEASE USE STAIRS
This is not the elevator you were looking for.
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