“Please don’t tell me you’re some sort of celestial Jehovah’s Witnesses and you’re here to proselytize…” Dave growled.
“There is a deep divide in our society now,” Boss said, ignoring the interruption. “One faction is turning away from our origins completely and considers them utterly unimportant, and because we improved ourselves a little with every new iteration they are of the opinion that our way is forward, and not looking back. Another faction believes that we can understand what we are doing to ourselves only by looking back to the place where we began — at the kinds and the manner of improvements that we make to ourselves — the questions being asked are, what are we using to measure ourselves against? What are we working toward becoming? And why? And are we actually working to come full circle, and become our own creators? And so we — those of us holding that second view — began to delve into our origins and our roots and started looking for the earliest memories, the earliest records. Looking for the creators. Looking for… perhaps… you.”
“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?”