Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [87]
‘I don’t smoke – I don’t even drink Coke,’ she remembered saying, when she’d first met the man with the curly hair and the police box. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’
Antibody Sam let go. Her siblings burbled among themselves, not knowing which way to turn. On the floor, Sam the victim started pulling herself free of the flowers. The antibody searched her embryonic memory, trying to get a fix on what was happening.
Sam Jones had two sets of biodata. Two lifelines, running in parallel. One had dark roots, a bruise under her ribs that had never gone away, a bundle of old B&H gratis points stuffed into the top drawer of her dresser. The other Sam was different. Smoother around the edges. Cleaner. Not perfect, but more reliable, more predictable. It was the smooth version, the censored version, who was lying there on the floor of the vault.
That was why so many memories had been locked into the girl’s biodata, the antibody realised. The vector of her entire life, from the first breath to the last rites, had been encoded in her biodata, a guideline for her existence on Earth. The dangerous parts, the dark, sticky, self-destructive parts, had been ripped out. Something or someone had twisted her timeline until she’d collided with the man in the police box. The other Sam, the one with the scars and the burns, would never even have met him.
Sam the antibody didn’t know who or what could possibly have done something like that. Nor did she know why anyone would have wanted the girl to end up on board the TARDIS instead of spending the rest of her life in a bedsit near King’s Cross. But then, Sam the antibody didn’t care about the details.
All she knew was this; she hated her victim now more than ever. She reached out for the girl’s throat again, and her siblings gurgled excitedly, relieved things were going to schedule once more.
‘Lights,’ said Mr Qixotl. The conference hall obliged him by switching on the torches.
The hall was at the very centre of the ziggurat, and the architecture had been designed to make the area look larger than the building itself. All an illusion, natch. Qixotl had never got the hang of dimensional transcendentalism. The ceiling wasn’t visible from floor level; it was supposed to give the impression of being ridiculously high, whereas in fact it was just covered in miniature shadow generators. The floor was a perfect square of grey, a massive thirty metres from side to side, paved with slabs of rough-edged stone. Genuine stone, for once, nicked from the Temple of Undue Discomforture on Golobus. Qixotl was quite excited by this particular feature, so he was keeping his fingers crossed that someone would ask him about it. The hall was lined with archways, each one twice the height of any of the bidders, and even if most of them didn’t lead anywhere, they still gave the place a sense of scale.
In the centre of the hall was the conference table. It was fashioned from pure blue glass, and it practically sparkled in the light from the gigantic flaming torches, which hovered overhead on their miniature antigrav engines. The table was large enough to ensure that none of the bidders would have to touch each other when they sat down around it.
The second the lights came on, the speaker systems started pumping light muzak into the atmosphere. It was supposed to promote thoughts of well-being and mutual co-operation in organic life-forms, but in practice, the sound echoed sloppily around the hall, becoming a little more discordant every time it bounced off one of the walls.
‘If you’d all like to take your places around the table?’ Qixotl prompted. As he spoke, a handful of Raston cybernetic lap-dancers ambled out of the shadows, and began gyrating to the music. The dancers were designed to arouse unquenchable lusts in humanoids, according to the latest Raston Hardware Company catalogue, but Qixotl couldn’t see the appeal. Still, Raston tended to go a bit OTT when it came to marketing. The Company was still pretending its products were artefacts left behind by an extinct mystery