Xander roused — this was more questions, again — but before he could say anything the situation got away from him.
“It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it…” someone in the audience intoned darkly.
“Well, not quite,” Boss said, without pausing long enough to allow Xander to get back into the conversation. “I do not think the pathways are necessarily parallel. But in simplistic terms, then yes, you could call that an evolutionary path. Then there are others among us who maintain that our structure and composition implies that we were — at least at some point in our distant past — manufactured, made. By someone other than ourselves. And if we are made, then it is logical to suppose that there must have been a time when the first of us was made — and that this implies a maker, and in that case it may be logical to extrapolate that a maker might choose to make a thing in his own image. Those who believe this have researched our lineage, working back along a complicated timeline preserved in our memory banks, and this research has led us to an image of a human being, in the shape and form that you are familiar with in yourselves right now. The word I have chosen to describe ourselves to you was chosen from a vocabulary provided by this comparison. In other places, or times, or contexts, we may self — refer in different terms; here and now, with you as a reference point, the closest word that may describe us to the point of mutual comprehension is ‘android’.”
“And these are definitely not the droids you were looking for,” someone said from the audience.
Question 3 allowed the laughter to die down and stepped forward — a blonde slip of a girl, wearing cat ears on an Alice band and make — up to accentuate her large green eyes into something that did look a little bit feline.
“Do you sleep?” she purred at Boss.
“No,” Boss said. “Not as you understand that concept.”
“Talk about a wasted question,” someone grumbled from the audience.
“Should one ask if androids dream of electric sheep…?” That came from a man with graying temples sitting in the front row, who then looked so smug that Xander wanted to snack him.
“Next,” he almost growled.
But they weren’t finished, from the audience.
“What next, you ask him if he actually eats…?”
“Just don’t feed them after midnight, they turn into the Terminator…”
More laughter, and Xander made a cutting gesture across his throat with his forefinger.
“This panel has a time limit and the clock is ticking, folks. I said, next!”
Question 4 stumbled forward, as though she had been shoved from behind, and blurted, “Did you time travel? Really? Someone said that you came from the future — our future — ”
“That’s pretty much four questions,” Xander said.
“Yes, from what you perceive as your future,” Boss said calmly. “In terms of your years, on your home planet, approximately a thousand years separate this era from the time period which is our own ‘now’.”
“A thousand years? A millennium? Like, seriously?”
“A hundred centuries from now…?”
“How would you even know…”
“Why did you go so far…”
“But time travel is not possible,” a man in the audience finally stated stubbornly.
“Yeah, much like you go for a flight around the Moon every day in a hotel floating on a chunk of rock,” the woman next to him said sharply. “Impossible, like that.”
“And how long have you two been married?” Vince inquired conversationally.
The couple in the audience subsided, amidst another round of smothered laughter, and Xander seized his chance.
“Moving on,” he said crisply. “Five? You’re up.”
“Actually, building on that… I’m going to shelve my original question, because now I am interested in something else,” said Question 5. “After all this time… are human beings, are we, still, you know, around…?”
“We know of this world, in our time,” Boss said. “It is uninhabited by your kind.”
For once, the answer was greeted by utter silence.
Question 6 said, in a very small voice, “So are we extinct, then…? I mean, everywhere? Was this planet really all that we had?”
That was more than one question again, but this time Xander raised no objection. A part of himself had also shivered and gone cold at that epitaph that Boss had just uttered, and now he turned to the android, anticipating his answer with a mixture of dread and hope.
There was a long pause before Boss spoke again, or maybe it just seemed that way to the hushed audience, but then the android tilted his head a little to the side, as though considering something.
“I am not certain,” he said, “just how much of future history can be told without changing something in it, and if I change something that is to come I may affect my own timeline with that. But I will say this much. There were ships sent from Earth before all trace of your kind vanished from this world. And this happened before your year 2400.”
“Why 2400?” Xander asked, oddly breathless, jumping his own queue. The specified year was centuries in his own future, he would certainly never live to see it himself, but all of a sudden the answer seemed as important as if he were asking what would happen when the sun rose the next morning.
“Because by the year 2400 of your reckoning your world will… no longer be welcoming to your kind,” Boss said, almost unwillingly. “That, too, will be in the process of changing, after — and it may be that someday, in between that time and the end of this world when your sun destroys it completely, there may yet be perfect days in store. But from what we know… your people did not return to the world known as Earth once you left it.”
“So are there other kinds of people out there, then?” asked Question 7, and it felt like another question that had not been the one that the woman who had uttered it had originally meant to ask. “I don’t know… like Klingons? Or the Borg…?”
Uneasy laughter rippled through the audience, which had now grown to the point that there was standing room only at the back of the hall.
“You’ve already got Klingons,” grumbled someone in the audience, sitting next to a man kitted out as one.
Boss looked as though he was consulting internal data banks for a moment, but then gave his head a small shake to indicate a negative response. “No Klingons. No Borg. There are other kinds of life out there, though. But you know that already.”
“So — wait — you traced your origins to us? To the humans? So how come you say you aren’t sure, then?” That was Question 8, another question that felt like it was raised by the question that came before it rather than the one originally intended.
“I already answered this,” Boss said. “There are those of us who believe that we may have been made in the image of…”
“Made,” said #8, interrupting. “But MADE. So do you know where the first of you was made…?
“Bzzzt,” Xander said.
“Well, it’s a good question,” said Question 9, the next in the queue. “Short of the Big Bang and the origin of all life, if we’re still to believe that evolution from one level to a higher level takes place over time, every particular kind of life comes from something that came before it. If you aren’t claiming some robotic kind of Immaculate Conception, how do you reproduce, then? I mean, you don’t have sex…”
“Not between ourselves, no,” Boss said.
“With something else?” a voice from the audience demanded incredulously. “So who did you sleep with last night, then?”