Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [98]
Waiting for input, for instructions.
Mr Ghislain sat before them for a long time, consulting a device he held in his lap. His parrot perched inside its cage on top of the bookcase.
At last he said, ‘Events have repeated themselves. At the moment you sent the interrupt signal to the Savant structures inside Mr Perez, it acted in self-defence by creating another copy of itself’
‘I should have realised that would happen,’ said the Doctor. ‘Luis copied himself – copied the Savant – into Swan.’
Ghislain said, ‘However, the interrupt signal then shut down the new Savant as well. Evidently it was unable to copy itself to your mind.’
The Doctor admitted, ‘If I hadn’t been distracted at the crucial moment by Bob’s bit of scribble, I’d be sitting on that sofa beside them.’
‘Is there hope for them?’ I asked.
‘We may be able to reverse some of the changes to their neural pathways,’ said Ghislain. ‘But I regret neither one will be restored to their original state. I propose you permit me to take them to our ship.’
‘No,’ said the Doctor.
‘They can no longer function in this society. We offer to care for them.’
‘And do a little experimentation at the same time? No, Ghislain. Do what you can for them, but they’re not leaving Earth.’
‘The Eridani regret this outcome.’
‘Regret it? A successful test of your new weapon?’
snapped the Doctor. Ghislain looked at him placidly. ‘The
“supercomputer” these devices combined to create. It was a cuckoo’s egg all along – designed to infiltrate a society, no matter what technological level it might have achieved. It could adapt itself to any network, from a highly advanced computerised net to organic brain structures. Create a version of itself for any environment, and then spread itself like so much viral payload.’
‘It is truthful that the slow package was unintended for Earth,’ said Ghislain. His face was blank as ever, but his grammar was breaking down in the face of the Doctor’s onslaught. I thought of Operation Sea-Spray, a biological warfare experiment in the early fifties. The Army sent aloft a bunch of balloons carrying a supposedly harmless bacterium, Serratia, then burst them over the Bay Area. That harmless little bug lodged itself in lungs throughout the city, causing a steep rise in pneumonia.
‘Intended for a rebellious colony? Or any medium-tech civilisation that would gratefully accept your “gift”?’ The Doctor planted his hands on his hips and loomed over Ghislain. ‘I expect you not only to do your best to restore the minds of these people, but of all the people touched by your technology. Do you understand?’
I don’t know what power the Doctor had over the
‘Eridani’: presumably he had threatened to expose them. But they seemed happy enough to do as they were told. And why not? Each victim they examined would render more valuable data on their trial.
The Doctor arranged for Ghislain (and his parrot) to visit Ritchie, and went along with them to keep an eye on things.
Ghislain brought yet another device, one that could unpick the mental knots left behind in the unknowing victims, snipping out the time bomb of hundreds of Savant programs nestled in nervous tissue, waiting to hatch.
They walked the streets for a day and a half, letting the device pick out men and women and children who had been affected, getting close enough to them to let it do the rest of its work. Ritchie’s zombies knew no more about the cure than they did about falling ill. It wasn’t perfect; the Doctor suspected a lot of people would be left with small, odd gaps In their memories, perhaps even occasional, minor speech or concentration difficulties. ‘The small but noticeable scars of neurosurgery at a distance,’ he said, with a mixture of sadness and sourness. But the job was done; in the end, there were only two people Ghislain couldn’t restore to pretty much normal.
Once upon a time there was a