“Data?” Xander suggested helpfully.
“For someone who might be acting a little strange. Tell him what happened. He should probably talk to the hotel security people, too, make sure everyone is on the same page and knows how to man the doors, if necessary.”
“On it,” Xander said. “Wow, it’s for real, isn’t it? You even nailed the place…”
“What are you talking about?” Andie Mae snapped.
“You know,” Xander said, backing up and falling into a verbal flounder. He seriously didn’t want his words to come across as critical, but somehow what tumbled out of his mouth didn’t quite come out the way he had intended it. “The California Resort. You know. Hotel California. And now we have people manning the exits, as it were. You can check out any time you like…”
“But you can’t leave, yes, I get it,” Andie Mae said. “God. God. Where the hell is Al? And did I just become an accessory to the kidnapping of the ex — governor of California? I’m pretty sure that’s a felony…”
“Schwarzenegger isn’t even supposed to be here until tomorrow, like you said — I don’t think you’ve got that to worry about,” Xander said, over his shoulder.
“Yes, okay. Fine. But what am I supposed to think is going to happen if he turns up as scheduled and this place…”
Xander looked up, wondering if a response was expected from him, but Andie Mae was already gone, talking to somebody on a phone, and Xander turned back to his computer. Before he had time to fully return his attention to his screen he happened to glance at the door to the control room, which had been left propped ajar when Dave had left. It was now open, and framed in it stood…
Xander let out a yelp, and everyone jumped, startled, and then turned to follow his frozen stare.
The silver man appeared to have found the con crew in their lair without Dave’s assistance. He stood in the doorway, in utter silence, waiting to be noticed — and when he appeared certain to have everyone’s attention, he moved forward into the room. His movements were fluid, not mechanical at all, but there was something about him — a certain sharp way of tilting his head, the unblinking stare — that screamed alienness. In the further reaches of the room, people who could back away did so.
“Don’t hurt us,” a girl whimpered quietly.
The silver head tilted in her direction, a small questioning motion, as though the silver man found the notion of hurting someone to be a rather novel idea. That, as far as Xander was willing to deconstruct things, seemed to be a good thing — if it had not occurred to the silver man to hurt anyone, then maybe they could count on, well, staying relatively safe. But what if he really had no clue what, in fact, would hurt the humans in the room and would — and the tone of the word really came to Xander without even trying — EX — TER — MI — NATE everyone in the room, not even necessarily through Dalek malice but through oversight and negligence and ignorance…?
“What did you do with Dave?” Andie Mae demanded, after peering over the silver man’s shoulder and seeing nobody standing behind him.
“Dave?” the silver man said. His voice was obviously crafted to be modulated, to convey intent or a complex algorhythm that might be considered an equivalent of an emotional response… but it was not a natural voice. Perhaps that reaction was an artifact caused by the simple psychological identification of “silver man” with “mechanical creature” that had instantly blossomed in all those present in the room, but it was nonetheless a very real and visceral reaction. Nobody who heard the being speak could doubt they were hearing a voice that had been made, not born.
“Dave,” Andie Mae said, bravely reclaiming the conversational high ground. “The one who went to find you…”
Somewhere to the right of the room, out in the silent carpeted corridors, an elevator door swooshed open, and the voice of the one whom Andie Mae had just invoked came wafting back into the room.
“Guys? I found him — he’s right…”
The voice died. The silver man in the doorway turned so that he was standing sideways, allowing a better view through the door into the corridor beyond… where now Dave Lorne stood open — mouthed, staring at the apparition in the doorway as another figure eerily similar to it stood just behind his own right shoulder.
“Holy crap,” Xander said conversationally. “There are two of them.”
“I am designated as B008199ZX5,” the one standing behind Dave said.
“I am designated as ZC77H771AI,” said the one in the doorway.
Eyes glazed over everywhere in the room.
Xander took command of the situation. He had always been blessed with a sort of mental screen on which he could project difficult to understand or phonetically pronounce words, a place where he could ‘see’ the offending word and play with it privately until he was ready not to embarrass himself by uttering it out loud. In this instance, he took the strings of letters and numbers and after a moment of cogitation he had managed to parse them into something more comprehensible.
“Nope,” he said. “You are Bob, and you are Zach. At least while you’re speaking to us, you are. Whatever you’re designated as… it’s like a safe computer password that a piece of software hands you to log in with initially until you can figure out something better. We humans don’t remember those all that well.”
“Fine one to talk,” muttered Dave, out in the corridor. “With a password like NTNDODNTINT…”
“That has meaning,” Xander snapped. “And I just knew that you’d seen me typing that in — you didn’t exactly warn me that you knew what my password is, dammit. That’s rude. By the way, I’ve already changed it — but it isn’t as though that’s the only thing I have to think about right now, you know…”
“Bob,” said the creature who had just been renamed that.
“Zach,” said the other one.
“Okay, that’s a beginning. Now — what would — ”
“Guys…?”
Libby, who had come up the stairwell, took a step off the stairs and into the corridor across from the control room, and then froze in place, her eyes flicking from one silver man to the other.
“Yes. We’ve just been introduced. Meet Bob and Zach. We were just getting acquainted…”
“No — I mean, what I mean is…”
Behind her, stepping smoothly out of the stairwell to stand beside her, another silver — skinned humanoid had emerged, and now stood waiting silently.
“Er, I knew I’d seen a girl one,” Libby said awkwardly. “This one… she came up to me just at the bottom of the stairs, and she said — her name is — ”
“I am designated as HLL5778N44X,” said the silver girl in a surprisingly pleasing alto voice.
Xander did his magic. “Fine. Helen. You’re Helen. Er, any more of you out there that we should know about…?”
If he was hoping for a denial, he was to be disappointed.
“ZVL5559AD4 is on his way,” Zach said. “We have summoned him. He is our leader.”
In Xander’s mind, the letters rearranged themselves into the less — than — reassuring ‘Vlad’ and he abandoned the acronym almost as soon as he found it. Luckily a better alternative was waiting, and he took it.
“When he turns up we’ll just call him Boss,” Xander said.
“Wait, you guys have mental telepathy?” one of the volunteers gasped.
Xander, who had his back to the offending speaker of those words, indulged himself in an epic eye roll.
“Libby, did you find the manager guy?” Andie Mae said, choosing to ignore the presence of the three aliens for the time being.