Al’s eyes flickered from her face to the photo and then back again. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What?”
“That’s the dark side,” Andie Mae said. “That’s the other side of the Moon, Al. The side you don’t see from down here. That’s where we were. That’s where we went. That’s where they took us. Cross my heart and hope to die, that’s what happened.”
“And then you had a fling with the boss?” Al said.
“Nothing happened,” Andie Mae said. “And if he was still here, he’d tell you the same thing. And you know androids don’t lie.”
Al put the phone down very slowly and very carefully.
“You’re seriously expecting me to believe that extraterrestrial androids came swooping down and ripped a hotel out of the ground and just flew you to the Moon?” Al said.
Andie Mae got to her feet again and rummaged in a teetering pile of paper that was stacked messily on the corner of the desk, finally coming up with hot — pink sheet of paper which she then held out to Al.
“That was Libby’s take,” she said. “That was Friday night’s newsletter. Welcome to Abducticon. We had a doctor who was running what Xander insisted on calling the Asylum Floor, for all the poor mundanes cracking up under it all, and there were at least three ambulances taking the poor confused souls out of here this morning after we landed again last night. And we had replicators. And we had real live androids who seemed to have come here to look for their ancestor gods, or something. And oh, God, Al, where the hell were you? You missed it all!”
“I made a detour,” Al said softly. “I stopped… at that place you liked… you said you wanted coffee. And then I was really late. And maybe I was careless. And then the other car hit me, and then everything went to hell.”
She came back to where he was sitting and subsided on the arm of the chair in which he was slumped.
“You got me coffee?” she asked gently.
“I forgot it in the car,” Al said.
Andie Mae unexpectedly leaned in and wrapped her arms around him, being very careful not to jostle the arm in the sling, and planted a kiss on the top of his head.
“I love you, so very much, right now,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
His good arm crept up and snaked around her waist. And then, against her shoulder, he murmured,
“Androids? A fling…? The Moon…?”
Downstairs, in the busy lobby area still teeming with people in the process of post — con departure from the hotel, Marius had taken himself out of the main throng by parking himself and a small suitcase at a booth in the breakfast restaurant. He had a cup of coffee on the table beside his open laptop, at which he was staring without any indication that it was performing any remotely useful task. But whatever it was doing was apparently very much occupying his mind because he jumped, startled, when he felt a tap on his shoulder that apparently came from the potted plant he was sitting next to. Upon a second look, the potted plant resolved itself into Vince Silverman, and Marius sat up sharply, straightening his shoulders.
“Hey, kid,” Vince said. “Just on the way to collect the wife, and then we’re on our way. Did I give you one of these?”
He was holding out a business card, and Marius reached out over the foliage to take it.
“Sam did say you wanted to write,” Vince said. “If I can help, email me.”
“Thanks!” Marius said, a little astonished but nonetheless enthusiastic at the opportunity that had just landed in his lap. “If you’re sure that’s okay, I’ll do that!”
“There you go, then. Good luck with the writing. And listen — about that fourth law of robotics… the one you came up with…”
“I was noodling around an idea,” Marius said with a grin. “Truth be said, you came up with the ‘law’ version of it.”
“Still. Your ideas,” Vince said. “Do you mind if I used that? I could call it the Tarkovski Corollary or something, credit where credit is due.”
“You’d put me in one of your books?” Marius said, grinning.
“And why not? As we’ve just proved, this weekend that was, life is just science fiction, when you think about it, really.”
Marius’s smile slipped a little. “Yeah. I know.”
“They left a message,” Vince said, dropping his voice just a little. “Let me know… if they call you back, would you?”
Marius held his gaze, searching Vince’s eyes with his own, and then looked back down onto his computer. “Sure,” he said softly. “Okay.”
“Got to go. Angel’s not good at waiting. Nice to have met you. Sorry about the elevator.”
Vince straightened from where he’d been half leaning over the potted plant, raised his hand in a gesture of farewell, and turned away.
Moments later Marius was startled again as someone slipped into the booth opposite him. He snapped his head around to look, and met Xander’s sharp gaze.
“And what did he want?” Xander asked. “He was actually smirking at one point.”
“I think that’s just the way he smiles,” Marius said. “He wanted to ask me if he could use that ‘Fourth Law of Robotics’ idea we were knocking around at dinner last night. Before we…”
“Yeah,” Xander said. “Thought any more about that?”
“I think… he left me a message,” Marius said, in what was almost a whisper. “Boss, I mean.”
Xander leaned forward over his crossed arms. “A message? How? What is it?”
“That’s just it. I have no idea. I almost tossed it as spam, but it wouldn’t let itself be deleted and then I thought it might be some sort of weird virus thing and then I took another look and — well — see for yourself. ”
He turned the laptop around so that it faced Xander, and Xander reached out to pull it closer to himself, studying what was on the screen.
“I don’t recognize…” he began, and Marius lifted both his hands from the table in exasperated agreement.
“Exactly. I don’t recognize. Neither does the computer. It’s something that I don’t have the software for, or it’s super encrypted in a way I have no way of unlocking, or any number of stuff like that. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it came from, all I know is that it’s there and it won’t leave.”
“But how do you know it isn’t just a weird bug?” Xander said.
Marius motioned for the computer, and Xander pushed it back across the table; Marius tapped a few keys, waited for a moment, and then turned the screen back to Xander.
“Because of that,” he said.
The open email on the screen bore just an alphanumeric string as its subject line — an alphanumeric string that, for a moment, was completely random to Xander. But then his rebus — solving back brain sprang into action, and he suddenly recognized the sequence. His eyes snapped back over the screen, sought Marius’s gaze.
“ZVL5559AD4,” he said. “That’s… I remember that was… that’s Boss, isn’t it?”
“Read it,” Marius said. “That bit of it — that’s just an email. A perfectly ordinary common email that could have come from anybody. But read it.”
Xander looked back on the screen again. “When you are ready, you will know what lies within.”
“The thing you were looking at was the attachment,” Marius said. “Encrypted, encoded, something. And I’m guessing the key hasn’t been invented yet.”