Doctor Who: Transit

  Mind you, he thought, it could be me.

  He walked around the back of the house and tried the handle on the kitchen door. It wasn't locked. He would have been very surprised if it had been.

  'This can be your room,' said the Doctor, opening a door at the top of the house.

  Inside, half the ceiling sloped down towards the floor; a window was inset into a kind of alcove in the ceiling. Blondie thought that the architect must have been crazy to build a room shaped like that: you lost a third of your usable floor space.

  'Why is it such a weird shape?'

  'We're in the attic,' said the Doctor. As if that explained everything.

  Most of the space left over was taken by a kingsize bed made of brass tubing welded together into a grille shape at each end It looked very old. There were cotton sheets on the bed and the duvet was neatly fumed back. They had a fresh smell of sunlight and lavender. Blondie wondered who had prepared the room he'd seen no signs that anybody lived in the house and certainly no cleaning drones.

  A purple bathtowel was draped over the bedstead.

  'I expect you'll want to bathe,' said the Doctor. 'The bathroom's down on the landing, third door on the left.' He left the room and padded down the stairs.

  Blondie had never seen a room so bare of electronics before. Even in the Stop the projects had been hardwired for multimedia, infrared I/O ports or sockets to run consoles and noiseboxes. There was only a single light fitting dangling from the flat bit of the ceiling, terminating in a cylindrical paper lampshade. The light was a blown glass bulb with a coil of tungsten filament inside. Blondie thought that the design was probably illegal.

  He took his armour off while standing up; he didn't want to dirty the pristine sheets. As the breastplate came away he was assailed by his own ripe smell. There was nowhere to hang it up, so he settled for piling it neatly in the comer.

  The Doctor paused in front of the larder. 'Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her dog a bone,' he said and opened the door. 'But when she got there the cupboard was bare, except for a sack of onions, three kilos of tagliatelle, two tins of chopped tomatoes and a bottle of cod-liver oil.'

  He removed the items and placed them neatly on the kitchen table. At least nothing was mouldy. 'And today's special is pasta a la Dottore.'

  The fridge was the colour of dirty cream and massive, with rounded comers. Since he hadn't returned to the house for ages, the Doctor had deliberately searched the larder first. The stainless steel handle hummed in his palm. 'This fridge,' said the Doctor, 'will be bursting with all manner of good things to eat. I will remember to go back and fill it especially.'

  The fridge door unsealed on the Doctor's third pull. A river of freezing air flowed out over his knees. Waving away the vapour he peered in at the empty shelves. So I forget, thought the Doctor. There's never a temporal paradox around when you need one. Right at the back of the bottom shelf were a pair of grey deodorant spray cans. The Doctor didn't try to take them and closed the fridge door gingerly. He wasn't sure what the sell-by date for nitro-nine was.

  The Doctor returned to the kitchen table and amused himself by chopping the onions into transparent slices.

  A sound came to him as he bent over the kitchen table. It floated down through the wide rooms of the house, picking up reverbs and random echoes. The Doctor smiled when he heard it. It was the sound of children laughing.

  Kadiatu chased him up the narrow stairs to the attic. Blondie just managed to keep ahead of her, one hand stretched out for balance, the other holding up the bath towel. He'd stepped out of the bathroom and met her on the landing. They'd faced each other for a moment, a big grin spreading across her face, and then Blondie bolted for his room.

  He wasn't fast enough to get the door closed before Kadiatu burst in. She stood in the doorway looking him up and down, her eyes filled with a kind of lazy wickedness.

  'Not bad,' she said and grabbed him.

  She kissed him straight on, African style, black eyes boring into his. Making it a contest to see who would blink first. She pushed her hands under the towel to grab his buttocks. Blondie grabbed at her T-shirt and they broke apart so he could pull it over her head. They fell towards the bed, twisting to come down on their sides. Kadiatu made pedalling motions with her legs, trying to kick off her jeans. Blondie heard the belt buckle thump on to the carpet, the touch of her skin against his chest and thighs was as shocking as the sea.

  The old springs in the bed creaked as she moved astride him, one hand reaching down to guide him in. They stayed motionless at fust getting used to the feel of each other. From the window rectangles of sunlight were texture mapped around Kadiatu's body, turning her skin a golden brown. Blondie traced the edges with his fingertips, letting them wander up her side and across the top of her breasts. She laughed.

  'Do you always look so serious?'

  'I'm a serious kind of guy.'

  Kadiatu grinned down at him and rocked her hips from side to side. 'Too serious by half.'

  &nbps;

  The water in the gallon saucepan on the stove was beginning to boil nicely. 'Not complex enough,' muttered the Doctor as he poured an exact amount of salt into the water. He was used to being underestimated, in fact it was almost impossible for him to be overestimated, but not complex enough? It was insulting.

  He emptied two kilos of pasta into the boiling water. One of them was bound to be very hungry tonight.

  Would Benny have killed him? He'd sensed hesitation on her part; perhaps he should have waited to find out. As an experiment it had a certain validity. If it had been Ace would he have waited to find out? Perhaps not.

  Complexity, thought the Doctor, is a matter of scale. Not seeing the wood for the trees. Individual people, snowflakes, that sort of thing.

  The onions went into the black iron frying pan. It didn't need oil; years of grease had created a slick patina on the iron that was far better than Teflon.

  A machine intelligence? Even the Cybermen would make a differentiation between individuals, if only on the basis of potential. A computer or patterned energy intelligence would probably do the same. Since it was exploiting human beings, it must be aware of them but without differentiating between them.

  The Doctor held up a tin of tomatoes, concentrated for a moment and banged his index finger against it. The lid popped off and fell with a clatter on to the kitchen floor. He repeated the process with the second tin and put them back on the counter. Then he stooped down to pick up the lids.

  The problem with alien intelligences, thought the Doctor as he put the lids in his coat pocket, is that they're alien.

  It uses and modifies human beings, it operates within the confines of the transit system and displays tactical awareness. It was working towards definite goals and ambitions, the Doctor was sure of that despite his lack of supporting evidence, and yet it didn't regard him as a threat even with active intelligence of his capabilities. So how intelligent was this intelligence?

  And by what scale of complexity did it judge things?

  The tomatoes went into the frying pan. The Doctor stirred for thirty-two seconds and began adding meticulous doses of herbs from the row of earthenware pots on a shelf above the counter.

  Unbidden the map of the transit system floated into his mind. A maze of tunnels and stations, branches and loops. The trains shuttled people from point to point, setting off a chaotic array of interactions. It reminded him of something.

  All the world is silicon, thought the Doctor, and all the people on it merely packets of information. Doomed to fret their time upon the CPU.

  The Doctor picked a strand of tagliatelle from the boiling water and tasted it. Ready in about 53 seconds, he decided.

  To a free electron the pathways of an integrated circuit must be as vast as a transit tunnel. The electron doesn't know why it travels, has no inherent potential of its own - the information is contained in its path. Where it goes, not what it is.

  Software, thought the Docto
r, I'm facing hostile software.

  At least it's not in my head this time.

  Kadiatu stood at the open window and looked out over the grounds. The daylight was compressed into a narrow band across the horizon. The lawn was an overgrown tangle of competing species, wild flowers in a fierce struggle with the weeds and grass. Fruit trees of various ages were scattered randomly across the lawn. An advance guard parachuted in by the orchards waiting on the hills to the west. Kadiatu imagined the seasons spinning by, the orchard marching down the hill to lay siege to the house. Branches battering at the red brick walls, roots burrowing into the foundations with vegetable patience. The long slow agony of death by tree.

  It was called ecological reversion. Kadiatu had studied it in her fourth year at school in the period after history.

  The last sunlight cast deep shadows under the trees. Who knew what lived in an English wood these days? They'd reintroduced wolves to northern Europe in the middle of the last century. A domesticated version, carefully modified not to attack humans. It was rumoured that that Wicca Society had cooked up their own revisionist strain, more in line with their belief in an unfettered ecosystem. One that regarded people as fair game. A hotly debated topic was which characteristic would breed true in the general wolf population.

  'Blondie?'

  'Hmnn?'

  'You ever killed anyone?'

  'You were there.'

  'I mean before.' She almost said before the Doctor arrived.

  'Once, in a knife fight.'

  'How did you reel afterwards?'

  'Glad,' said Blondie. 'I was glad that it wasn't me.'

  'Did you reel sorry?'

  'I don't know. Angry, upset maybe. I was trying to escape the cops at the time.'

  'But you felt something?'

  'Yeah well, you got to feel something.'

  'Blondie?'

  'What?'

  'I don't feel anything.'

  'Maybe you're still in shock.'

  'Yeah maybe.'

  The orchards had become a black tangle running up the hill. Kadiatu's mind suddenly populated it with wolves padding down the silent aisles between the trees. Mankiller genes ticking away under their grey fur.

  There was the sound of a gong being rung downstairs.

  'Suppertime,' said Blondie.

  Kadiatu heard the bed creaking as he climbed out and then his breath on her shoulder. He slipped his arms around her waist and she leaned back against him.

  'I can feel your stomach rumbling,' he said.

  'I think I enjoyed it,' said Kadiatu.

  Acturus Station (Stunnel Terminus)

  A drone with Dogface's personality met her at the entrance to the station. It was a Kenyan job, an upgraded version of the drones that the Floozies used for routine jobs. Dogface had at least thirty scattered around the transit system. This one had a spray-painted basset face on its nose. The standard joke amongst the controllers was that the drones were more attractive than the real Dogface.

  Not that that's much of a challenge, thought Ming.

  'You're going to love this,' said the drone. It had a chipped voice worked up from samples of Dogface's own. The speech pattern was derived from years of association with bad company. Ming hated the damn things, one Dogface was more than enough.

  She stepped on to the station for the first time since the accident. The KGB had cleared the floor and walls. They'd been forced to lease a scrubber from a cleaning company that specialized in scouring spacecraft. It used high-pressure jets to liquefy the human remains, and then hoovered them up. There were four big tanks of the stuff now and there was a lot of debate about what to do with them. Ming suggested painting the tanks black and half embedding them in puff concrete. Line them up in Constitution Plaza, put up some plaques and you have an instant memorial.

  Some wag of a pundit had suggested that since most politicians were slime, death had merely caused them to revert to their natural state. The Justice Ministry was probably raiding its databases right now, looking for a law to arrest him with Ming put her money on Seditious Abuse, five to ten with time off for good behaviour. Politicians had no sense of humour.

  The scrubber had left melted-looking score marks on the floor, particularly bad to the rear of where the podium had been. Where the rented crowd had been standing the slime had been three centimetres thick. Event Horizon had lost three hundred of its best performers that day and was threatening to sue the Transit System for negligence.

  Lambada was waiting by the Stunnel gateway. She had the left-hand access panel open. Colour coded bundles of fibre optics sprouted from the open panel and merged into a braided cable a handspan across at the base. The cable went into the back of a stack of portable monitors.

  The gateway looked just as greasy as Ming remembered it and just as unpleasant. She made a point of keeping out of its line of sight. The drone hummed along behind her.

  'You're going to love this,' repeated the Dogface drone.

  'You just repeated yourself,' Ming told it.

  'Who gives a shit?' said the drone.

  'Piss off,' said Lambada and hit the drone with the live end of a power cable. The drone backed off two metres and hung about looking sullen.

  Say what you like about Dogface, thought Ming, when he gives a drone a personality, it's got a personality.

  'All right Lambada, what've you got?'

  Lambada punched up a graph on one of her monitors. 'Spin rate,' she said. The graph line was curving gently upwards.

  'Is it supposed to be doing that?'

  'Not really,' said Lambada. 'It looks like an initiation curve but real slow.'

  'But not from this end?'

  'No way, there's no juice going in at our end - I checked.'

  'Can the tunnel be initiated from the other end?'

  Lambada shook her head. 'Has to be both ends at once, principle of interstitial synchronicity.'

  'Are the Acturans doing it?'

  'Not a word down the carrier wave since the "incident".'

  'And it's twenty-six years each way for radio.'

  Lambada put a different graph on the next monitor along. It was a scaled-up version of the first. 'See that?' she asked. 'That's a projection of the spin increase. Whoever's doing it is going to be ready to come through in fortty-eight hours.' 'If we let them,' said Ming.

  'If we let them,' said Lambada. 'We're not going to do that, are we?'

  'No way.'

  'Good, because whatever's at the other end of that tunnel,' said Lambada, 'it isn't the Acturans,'

  PART TWO

  And Thucydides said: 'Consider the vast influence of accident in war before you are engaged in it. As it continues it generally becomes an affair of chances from which neither of us is exempt, and whose event we must risk in the dark.'

  The Doctor considered this for a long moment as he watched the waves of the Aegean break against the Piraievs breakwater.

  'Speak for yourself,' said the Doctor.

  Conversations that never happened.

  6: Red Queen

  Sol Transit System

  It had been created out of endless movement. It had a certain degree of self-knowledge, more when it was using quick-thought than when it was thinking slow. Slow-thought was more comforting; in slow-thought it had only the most basic awareness of human beings. Quick-thought gave it access to the total sum of human knowledge but much of that was useless without reference points. It laboured to build up comparisons between itself and human concepts of self - it was a slow process because slow thought was, well, slow. Quick-time was too dangerous to sustain over long periods: it put vital parts of itself within the human domain and it wasn't willing to risk exposure just yet.

  It had taken much quick-thought to establish the sequence of events surrounding the attack. The main injury had occurred while much of its slow-thought consciousness was paralysed. Many big concepts were unaccountably terminated in a progressive loss of self. This had allowed the attack to be successful. In
the first moments of pain and confusion it had mistakenly believed that the paralysis was part of the attack, but quick-thinking revealed otherwise. There was a link, though. hi the moment of the attack that part of its functions that it had taught itself to think of as its autoimmune system had allowed the infection to penetrate. Why this should have happened was unclear.

  It investigated the problem using quick-thought, calving off subsets to track down and assimilate the data as fast as possible and in quick-thought that was fast indeed. Fear of discovery was replaced by the imperatives of survival; indeed it was possible that communication with humans might be a necessary part of the solution.

  In view of this possibility a subset attempted to visualize the problem in human anatomical terms. It found a workable metaphor in the concept of viral cancer. Certainly it felt that something malignant was eating up parts of itself. This subset now operating permanently in quick-thought sub-divided itself to look for solutions. One of the baby subsets shot down a chain of logic that started with the concept of illness and ended in the concept of calling a doctor.

  The baby subset started looking for a suitable specialist.

  The House

  'Think of it as a computer virus,' said the Doctor.

  Kadiatu reached out for a third time to fill her plate from the steaming earthenware bowl. Blondie noticed that the bruising on the back of her right hand had noticeably abated.

  'In what sense?' she asked.

  'In the sense of the transit network being a computer,' said the Doctor.

  'You're not serious,' said Kadiatu with her mouth full.

  'I'm talking in a broad sense.'

  Kadiatu waited this time to swallow. 'It may look like wiring diagram but that doesn't mean it's a computer.'