“And where do you think you’ll find the answers — on the Moon?” another voice chimed in.
“No. We just came here. The Moon was your idea.”
Bob’s flat words sounded utterly preposterous when they were trotted out baldly like that. Xander closed his eyes for a moment and wondered if he shouldn’t have left things well enough alone. He knew what the android meant — the side trip had been flung out almost as a joke when the possibility arose of the resort — on — a–rock, floating in the sky above a densely populated city, being used as target practice by a hair — trigger jumpy military command who might have conceived it their duty to remove the danger by any means necessary. But nobody else in this room had been present at that conversation. And now it sounded like a challenge or an accusation rather than a simple quip being taken seriously enough by an entity with the means to make it come true.
“Hey, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away,” a new voice said, a young voice, and Xander tried to focus on who had spoken. It was a kid, up near the front, half turning in his chair to face the back of the room. Xander did not know him. But he did know the older man sitting beside him — Sam Dutton, Andie Mae’s predecessor, the guy whose name was synonymous with this con.
Xander winced, uneasily aware that he really was on a rollercoaster ride and there was no way off until it stopped careening out of control. He didn’t even know the direction or the speed of the juggernaut he was on. For a moment — just a brief, disloyal moment — he actually entertained the traitorous thought that it might have been better for everyone if Sam Dutton had in fact still been at the helm of the con right now, because at the very least that’s where the buck would have stopped and whatever happened Andie Mae wouldn’t have ended up stuck with the full responsibility. And then another thought crowded that one out — had Sam known anything at all about this before it imploded on everyone and had simply said nothing and waited in the wings even now with some rabbit he could pull out of the hat at the last instant to be acclaimed as the savior of it all. And then he dismissed both thoughts. Nobody could have been expecting this.
The kid was still talking, and Xander re — focused on his voice.
“Anyone could have done it. Anyone with an ounce of curiosity would have done it. If you found out you were adopted, for instance, would you not be curious about who your real family might have been? That’s all this is, really.”
“They’re supposed to be robots,” complained one of the original hecklers. “Aren’t they? So there can’t be any curiosity, can there? They don’t exactly have feelings for anything or anybody, do they?”
“We don’t know that,” he flung back. “We don’t know really anything about them. And anyway, curiosity is supremely logical. What, you think the only reason you might want to know something is to scratch an emotional itch? Then what about empirical curiosity, the thing that drives science? What about journalistic or investigative curiosity, the urge to get to the bottom of a story or solve a mystery? What about faith?”
“Faith? How can a robot have faith? What does a robot have to believe in?”
“They might well have the same kind of questions about you,” the kid said. “What would flesh and blood and bone have to believe in — something so fragile as we are, so easily hurt, so easily damaged and destroyed? Why is it so hard to believe that something as … eternal… as they are — because they don’t have disease or decay — might believe in something that has always existed, just as they themselves have always existed and always will — they’re the irresistible force, after all, moving forward, and they have no reason to stop until they come up against an immovable object which can crush them or is too big or too logistically complex to go around. What, then, is left, except faith?”
“Good grief,” Xander muttered to himself, “how old is this guy, sixteen going on eleventy — one?… That’s all I need, a damned philosopher.”
“We needed to know where the origin was. It was the only way to see a destination,” Bob said in his flat, emotionless voice.
“It’s evolution,” said Sam Dutton equably. “Social evolution, if you will. Any sentience eventually evolves to a point of asking ‘Are you my mommy?’ — and maybe that’s all this is, really. It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Well, all I can say is that they picked a terrible moment in their social evolution to develop principles,” grumbled someone from the back row of chairs in the room.
“I take issue with both ‘social’ and ‘evolution’ — we have absolutely no reason to suppose that anything like them would need a society, or ever actually evolved in any way at all. They…”
“How many of them are there? There’s more of us, surely. There’s got to be. Maybe if we could just… I don’t know… do they have an off switch somewhere?”
“It isn’t your place to just switch them off! Even if they did and you knew how! They aren’t your family’s Dyson vacuum cleaner!”
“But are they ever taking us home? Really? How do we know that?”
“So what do you suggest, we just kill them? Won’t that make us exactly the kind of barbarians whom I would like to think they hoped they did not come here to find!”
This had gone far enough. Xander clapped his hands together.
“Are you crazy? Remember where we are, exactly? Do you know how we got here or have the remotest idea about how to get back? Do you think we’re floating up here in any manner that any physics theory we puny humans ever knew anything about could explain? Do you think that there is the slightest possibility that we can? And even if we could, do you really want to kill the only thing that knows how to drive this whole… hotel…”
That came out rather lamer than he wanted it to. But the kid beside Sam Dutton had watched just as much Babylon 5 as Xander ever had, and now came up with the perfect paraphrase, flinging back a modified piece of dialogue once uttered by the inimitable Lennier of the Minbari.
“If you’re going to kill him, then do so. Otherwise, he probably has considerable work to do.”
“Libby, you still there?” Xander said very softly, under cover of someone else raising their voice to comment. “Tell Boss to get him out. Call him out of here. Now.”
Someone must have heard him, because Bob suddenly came to his feet, a motion that silenced the voices in the room as every eye came to rest on him, some in curiosity, some in consternation.
“Excuse me,” Bob said, still cold and polite. “I have to go now.”
He turned and began to take measured steps towards the audience, and then through it, as they opened up a passage for him like the Red Sea parting before Moses and allowed him to exit the room unimpeded.
“There,” Xander said, into the absolute stillness and quiet that had accompanied this departure. “Y’all can have the rest of the panel, now, and talk about him behind his back. But I don’t think he’s really a villain, do you?”
Charlie, the moderator, blinked a couple of times and then said, “Well, what does our panel think? Can someone who follows orders, a foot — soldier as it were, a grunt, actually be a real villain? Does there have to be actual agency before a villain is a true villain — make his own evil decisions…?”
Xander backed away quietly, through the aisle still left open by Bob’s passing. He caught Sam Dutton’s eye as he moved, and Sam gave him a small nod and then got to his feet and followed him out. His young friend, the kid who had braved the barricades, gathered up a precariously balanced pile of a laptop and two battered and much graffitoed notebooks from underneath his seat and brought up the rear.