Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [46]
Tourette was immensely proud of that metaphor.
The machine clacked and juddered, spewing out strips of paper marked with inky black letters. The reply. Another coded sequence, then words.
SSM13GTOU AGENT TOURETTE REPORT
RECEIVED AND INTERPRETED DO NOT MOVE DO
NOT ACT CHIRURGEON IN PHILADELPHIA ALREADY
ALERTED CHIRURGEON ON HIS WAY REPORT LATER
SSM13EN
Tourette gaped. But gaped heroically, of course. They were sending a chirurgeon? His fingers tapped at the machine again, informing his superiors that there was no need, that he was quite capable of looking after the situation on his own.
The reply took mere seconds to arrive.
SSM13GTR REPEAT CHIRURGEON ALREADY
ALERTED CHIRURGEON ON HIS WAY REPORT LATER
SSM13EN
He shook his head. Not a chirurgeon. Surely not. That would be terribly messy, wouldn’t it? And unnecessary –
The device chattered again.
SSM13 LA VERITE EST LA DEHORS SSM13EN
Tourette sighed. Dramatically.
‘ La vérité est là dehors,’ he repeated, formally.
‘You’re a psychic?’ the user called Chris Cwej was saying. ‘Is that what you mean?’
The woman who had identified herself as Marielle Duquesne looked puzzled. ‘I do not recognize the term. Earlier this evening, I... heard someone else use the word.’
‘Psychic. It means sort of, um, gifted. That’s what we call them in my time. "The Gifted". Like you can read minds and make things move just by thinking about it.’
‘I cannot do any of these things, Christopher. Surely, you would think them impossible?’
The TARDIS interface watched the exchange carefully, with an eye that it had surreptitiously planted in the ceiling of one of the cloisters. While the interface was active – and the Cwej individual had never unplugged it, of course – it had a duty to warn its user of any threat within the TARDIS
environment. Cwej was its user now, it had concluded. The disruptions to the ship’s structure were a threat. That much was simple.
But this Duquesne woman. What was it supposed to make of her?
Interface decided that there was some kind of complex social interplay between Cwej and Duquesne that it hadn’t been programmed to understand. It had a good working knowledge of human culture, plus a decent facsimile of a human voice, complete with a full range of sighs and nervous
‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, but beyond that... it didn’t have human perspectives, human thought-processes, human priorities. It didn’t have a human personality.
So it decided to make itself one. That wasn’t difficult, really. It seized a few spare strands of the TARDIS’s intelligence and began knotting together the loose ends, using its observations of previous TARDIS occupants as neural knitting-patterns.
‘How far have you travelled?’ Duquesne asked.
‘Hard to say,’ Cwej answered. ‘I mean, it’s not just distance, it’s time. How do you measure how far you’ve gone in time? You kind of lose your grip on the universe, when you’re a drifter in the vortex.’ Oh, very deep, Interface thought. Very profound. What do you do for an encore, ponder on the senselessness of existence in a basically uncaring universe?
Yes. This personality was working out quite nicely.
‘You said you were from a thousand years in the future,’
prompted Duquesne.
Prompted? Interface narrowed its eyes, roundels squinting all over the ship. The woman was pumping Cwej for information, often in subtle and roundabout ways. Parts of the new personality had been modelled on the former TARDIS
user called McShane, so Interface knew a thing or two about manipulation.
It closed its eyes. It needed information. Much more information. Interface let its consciousness waltz through the suburbs of the ship’s psychosphere, occasionally peeking into the various data storage facilities that littered the systems. The
‘data banks’? No, no good. Just glorified encyclopaedias, really, compiled by Time Lords and largely inaccurate. The
‘data core’, then? Emergency procedures and technical specifications