“Luke. Yes. I talked to him, and he thought I was having him on at first — but then he got a phone call from someone up at the bar on the eleventh floor, and what they said they saw seemed to shake him up…. and then when the head of con security came trotting over to back me up he figured he’d better take the whole preposterous story at least semi seriously. The good news is that nobody is going to be let loose out the front door for the time being. The bad news is that sooner or later and preferably sooner we’re going to have to offer something as a reasonable explanation why — and there’s always one who can be counted on to panic and stampede the rest. Luke said he’d be up here shortly for a confab. And when he gets here, Andie Mae… he’s pretty freaked out, actually. I think he’s not going to feel any better when he comes up here and sees… these… guys…”
“He said he could explain,” Dave said, giving the creature now known as Bob, standing beside him, a sour glare. “Maybe it’s time he did.”
“ZVL5559AD4 will explain,” Bob said. “We mean no harm.”
“Really,” Dave muttered under his breath.
“Er, maybe we should bring it in here,” Xander said. “You never know who might wander past the corridor… and what you said, about there being the one who starts a panic…”
“Good point,” Andie Mae said. “Everybody, inside. Now.”
Dave gestured for Bob to precede him, following Zach, who had obediently stepped into the room. The silver woman now named Helen stepped up next, followed by a nervous Libby who kept on glancing around as if the fourth entity, the one Xander had dubbed ‘Boss’, was about to materialize right there in front of her.
“NTNDDT what…?” one of the volunteers whispered to Xander as everyone filed in.
“What?”
“That weird password.”
“Yoda,” Dave threw over his shoulder, in passing.
“Huh?
“Oh come on,” Xander snapped. “You’re losing whatever geek cred you had that got you here. You ought to know that right off the bat.”
“I’m trying to…”
Dave and Xander caught one another’s eye and simultaneously grinned. And the volunteer’s face, which had creased into a frown, suddenly cleared.
“Oh, I get it. There is no try.” He glanced at Xander. “It’s a feeble password.”
“What, you would have guessed it straightaway…?”
“I did just now, didn’t I?”
“With a lot of heavy handed help…”
“Boys,” Andie Mae said sharply. “The grown — ups need you over here, now, please, thank you. You can go back to the geek sandpit later if you really want to.”
Boss was apparently taking his time in appearing, the other three creatures (despite the promise to Dave that they could explain everything) seemed reluctant to launch into any explanations until their commanding officer arrived, and there was nothing for it but to wait — but before Boss turned up it was Luke Barnes, the hapless Night Manager, who lurched through the door, ashen — faced and practically incoherent.
“I, uh, I should tell you,” he said to Andie Mae. “I went outside. Myself. Just to see what’s what. I took a few steps outside the portico area and everything is just… gone. The area where the pool was, almost the whole of the parking lot — there are just a few cars parked right up against the building here — it’s all just — not there. I actually saw… the edge…” He swallowed hard, apparently trying to get something the size of a tennis ball down his gullet.
“You could have gone off!” Andie Mae said.
“I don’t think so — there seems to be something — an invisible — I don’t know — it was just there — it seemed as if it had come down and just sliced the edge of the ground where it hit it, but you can’t step off the edge, it isn’t as though you are butting up against anything, it’s more of a feeling, and then you find yourself turned around and a little light headed and facing away again — it seems as though there’s a kind of a Thou Shalt Not field…”
“You shall not pass,” one of the volunteers said. “Hah. Keeps turning up, that. Cool. It’s all like Gandalf in Moria.”
“Yeah, you know how that ended,” Xander muttered.
“That was foolhardy,” Andie Mae said to Luke.
“Suicidal,” Xander muttered.
“Very brave,” Dave said, grimacing. “More than I did. I just ran.”
Luke glanced up, looking at once terrified and pleased. “I have people I am — the resort is — responsible for… I am not at all certain I could make a case for this with our insurance…”
“Everyone is perfectly safe,” said a new voice, and the throng in the control room parted to look at the new arrival.
The fourth silver man entity, Vlad or Boss, was maybe a head taller than the others, and his skin was a little closer to the nuances and hues of a real human being — perhaps that was why he had escaped notice before. The other three had stood out more amongst the con — going public, because there was something just a little off and too obvious about them; nobody had been paying them much mind only because this was after all a con, and a robot — themed one at that, so they had been assumed to be no more than inspired cosplay if anyone had taken the time to think about them at all.
But Boss would have been a little more difficult to pick out as foreign or alien — the only thing that distinguished him a little from a flesh — and — blood human being was the fact that he might have been almost preternaturally pale, and that his eyes were of an unusual, but not wholly unlikely, pale grey. Other than that he looked… almost disappointingly ordinary.
His voice, even, was… ordinary. Mortal. Human. With perfectly human inflections.
“A more advanced model?” Xander said, unable to help himself, confronted with an embodiment of all the stories he had ever devoured.
“A different generation,” Boss said.
Boss, standing there so improbably in the hallway of the hotel room, was the very incarnation of every geek dream that Xander had ever had; his eyes were shining, and his expression was rather like that of a five — year — old on Christmas morning. “Zathras knew that you would come,” Xander breathed, lost in delight.
Andie Mae gave him another exasperated glare. And then stepped forward towards Boss, squaring her shoulders, taking command. “Who are you and why are you here and what do you want with my convention?”
“We… came to ask for your help,” Boss said.
“You… for our help…? What could we possibly…?” Andie Mae was struggling to find the words.
“Let me explain,” Boss said. “We… are of a culture that is extremely old. Generations of us have been brought into existence, each generation crafting its replacement — it is their kind that made mine.” He indicated the other three silver — skinned creatures with an economical gesture of his hand, so purely human that Xander found himself wondering if they were being had after all and if this was all some elaborate practical joke. Perhaps something that Sam Dutton, the ousted con Chair, had cooked up, trying to sabotage Andie Mae’s convention.
But Boss was still talking, and Xander forced himself to pay attention — if nothing else it had to be a good story, and if any unmasking had to be done it could be accomplished later. “It is logical to assume that if we made and remade ourselves according to existing plans and parameters — which we improved on when we could, but still, the basic design remains the same — that there must have been a First of us. Somewhere. In the distant past of our race. And there were some of us… who wondered about that, and wanted to find out who we were, and who had created that First, and in whose image we were made, and how we came to be.”