The speakers made their way to the stage and claimed their seats, and Xander turned to the audience.
Now that he was up here and they were down there, looking expectantly up at him, they seemed even more numerous than he had realized, or maybe that was just his angst whispering cautions into his ear. Either way… he was up.
“Welcome to the GoH panel,” he said, and if his voice wavered just a little on that first sentence, he had himself in hand now and his next words were firmer, filled with the confidence he was very far from feeling at that point. “Unfortunately one of your panelists was somewhat… indisposed… this morning…”
“Moonlighting, was he?” someone from the audience heckled, and there was a ripple of laughter.
Xander grinned.
“I suspect all of us feel rather… struck… by last night’s Lunar Extravaganza,” he said. “I know I was. Am. This isn’t me talking quite yet. Automatic pilot at least half engaged. More coffee required for a full reboot of the system. But that probably applies to everyone in this room — except one of our guests. Either way — we’ve got our writer GoH, Vincent J. Silverman, who says he’s got plenty to tell you about life, the Universe, and everything. Or at least about life, as it pertains to the way a writer lives it. Perhaps we can leave at least some of the questions about the Universe and everything to our extracurricular jack — of — all — trades GoH here on my left, who goes by the name of Boss — you couldn’t pronounce his real name — and whom you can praise or blame for this little excursion that we’ve been taking this weekend.” He didn’t say it out loud but he added, in his own head, the rider, And we still need him — at least until he comes through and puts us back where he found us — if he can — so please don’t disassemble him…
There was a smattering of applause, and Xander backed up and made his way back down the steps from the stage, leaving Vince and Boss in command of it. He had his fingers crossed so hard they hurt.
“Picture this,” Vince said easily, leaning back in his chair and crossing his long legs at the ankle before him. “Just before we all got here — you heard there was an emergency, didn’t you? Well, I was kind of the emergency. At least a third of the emergency, anyway. One of three people stuck in a malfunctioning elevator, and no jolly little firemen on call to come get us out. So there we were, hanging in the shaft, not knowing when…”
Xander had to hand it to the man, he knew how to spin a yarn. Vince gathered them all in, talked to that crowd as if he were talking to each one of them individually, holding everyone’s attention. He told the story of the elevator rescue in a way that brought the audience to the edge of their seats with tension one moment and had them outright giggling the next, and when he had exhausted that tale he segued smoothly into talking about writing, painting a picture of a writing life as something lived to its full potential and milked of its experiences and contacts and ideas for the purpose of re — creating it as something else, something new, something that existed just between the pages of a book but was every bit as ‘real’ as the world in which the writer lived in his or her everyday existence.
“It’s a burden,” he said, “and it’s a gift, and sometimes it’s damned hard to tell the difference. Like, right now, right here. It actually feels as though we’re all staring back at ourselves from a comic book panel, or the pages of a particularly weird novel… and yet here we are, all of us, and if we look out of the window it’s real even though it’s impossible to believe, and let me tell you, this convention is the best con I’ve been to. Ever. Because this is living the writer’s life. Take the impossible and make it believable. Take doubt and make it into faith. Take lunacy and make it into a trip around the Moon. But maybe at this point I’d better defer to Mr. Boss… because sometimes truth just is that little bit stranger than fiction, it would appear. And if there are any questions as to the nature of our current reality, he’s better placed to answer those.”
“We get to ask questions?” someone from the audience called out.
“We get true answers?” someone else asked, sharpening the question.
“I will answer,” Boss said unexpectedly.
Several people began to talk at once, and Xander leapt up from a seat he had taken at the side of the room and raced to the front of the stage, raising his arms. “One at a time, please.”
Almost every hand in the room was up and waving urgently, and Xander glanced at Boss, and then back to the crowd, and then at his watch.
“We have a limited amount of time, and he said he’ll answer, not that he’ll spend the next six hours doing so. How about we play the game of twenty questions. Twenty people. And just to keep this random, I’ll call out people by seat number — your row, and the number of your seat in your row, counting from the right — from my right. In the unlikely event that I call out an empty seat, or I call out your seat and you don’t want to ask a question, the next person on the right of the seat I called who actually does want to ask something gets picked. And if I call you, come out here, and ask a question from the front so that everyone can hear it. Okay? Okay. Here goes. R for row, S for seat. R3S7, R5S9, R2D2….”
There was a ripple of laughter, and Xander grinned.
“Make that R2S2, R10S1, R2S7, R6S6, R7S12, R1S8, R9S1….”
He did the roll call of twenty seats, and twenty people scrambled out of their chairs and made their way to the front of the room, lining up expectantly a little to the side of the dais.
“Can we please not have the existential questions first?” Xander asked. “If you go first and shoot your wad right at the outset, the rest of you guys might as well go back and sit down. And I do suspect that some answers may fall into two categories that may not be popular — the ‘can’t explain so you’ll understand it’ and ‘you really don’t want to know’. You may want to think carefully about what you want to ask so you’ll get full value out of being picked to pose your question. Okay? Okay. Within those parameters. Shoot.”
Question #1 stepped forward, a girl in black leggings and close — cropped pink hair.
“So are you really robots?” she asked.
Xander rolled his eyes and hoped that nobody noticed. But Boss took it in stride.
“That depends on your exact meaning, and on what you would call a ‘robot’,” he said. “We are made, not born; that makes us a non — organic life form. If you call that a robot, by definition, then the answer would have to be yes, we are. But we are much closer to what your culture and context has called an android…”
“But an android is a human — like robot — and that means you — ”
“Hey,” Xander said, “you had your question! No discussions!”
“Okay, I’ll ask that one,” said the next guy in line, a lanky youth with wire — rimmed spectacles, clad in a tank top that left his arms bare and showed off a complicated tattoo on his upper right arm. “If you self — identify as androids, that implies knowledge and imitation of the human form — so how did you come to that self — identification?”
“We are made in a certain form, with certain functions,” Boss said. “Those things had to originate somewhere. There are some among our kind who dismiss ideas of an origin that did not involve a self — creation process — they begin with the premise that this form was arrived at as our existence has evolved, to suit our purpose and our needs, and that originally we may have existed as something quite different. “
“What, like an android amoeba — and you then evolved into walking android fishies and then maybe silicon — based dinosaurs…?”