Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [39]
but. . . well, I wondered if it might mean “light bulb five twists”. The sun gives light, you see, and that plant does seem to be growing out of a bulb, and –’
‘Oh yes,’ said Anji, feeling a bit silly. ‘Um, could someone give the light bulb five twists, please. And be careful not to burn yourself.’
In the end, Beezee had to give Zequathon a leg-up, in order for them to reach the light bulb.
One.
Two.
Three.
Nothing seemed to be happening; Anji made a surreptitious visual check of the room just in case there really were some sunflowers that they’d failed to spot earlier.
Four.
Was that a faint creaking sound from somewhere below them?
Fi—
And the floor suddenly tipped sixty degrees, and with shrieks of shock – the loudest from Zequathon, who was suddenly suspended in midair – the four were careering down the cold stone surface towards the black depths below, as if it were the biggest, scariest slide in the world.
I am not Fitz.
If I am not Fitz, what is Fitz?
Fitz is dead.
The Fitz thing told himself – itself – that it had to pull himself – itself –
together.
The real Fitz hadn’t been much of a one for philosophy – apart from ‘if it looks female, try to shag it’ – but he had been aware of the dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’. And he – well, not he, but the Fitz-shaped object – was definitely thinking, mainly about how he wasn’t a real person. So the very act of thinking about not being real made him real. . . ? Did that make sense?
Analyse it (oh, Christ, no. . . ). If he (until knowing otherwise) had thought he were Fitz, and had Fitz’s memories, and Fitz’s attitude to life, and basically had been made to be as exactly like Fitz as made no odds, in what way wasn’t he Fitz? He lived and breathed and needed food and oxygen and – hang on, did he (it)? (the Fitz-thing managed to hold its breath for thirty seconds before deciding that it did) – and was an actual living being.
No, he – it – was a made thing, a construct.
72
EarthWorld
But everyone is a made thing. Some are made by a mummy and daddy loving each other very much, and others are made by someone plonking down a whopping great lump of biomass and telling it, ‘be like Fitz’. If you’d never known otherwise – or if someone had stuck rotten old ‘real Fitz’ Father Kreiner to a lie detector and proved he was fibbing for reasons unknown – then you’d be Fitz now. The real Fitzgerald Michael Kreiner. No worries.
Yeah, ignorance had been bliss. But the Fitz thing wasn’t ignorant any more.
He knew exactly what he was.
Hang on, he’d just thought of himself as ‘he’ again. Oh, and again!
Old habits dying hard.
Or an acknowledgement that he didn’t have to have been physically born of Fitz’s mother to be a person, not a thing.
His earliest memory was of a trip to the zoo. He’d laughed at the monkeys, and his dad had bought him a paper bag of peanuts to feed to them. There was a man with a monkey on the beach, and the monkey’d sit on your shoulder and you could have your picture taken – no, that was a different memory. But he remembered the photo, black and white with a white border, a bit creased, showing the small Fitz in his school blazer, scruffy curls and cheeky grin, the monkey in its little hat gripping his collar – the monkey’s hat had been red, although you couldn’t tell that from the photo, obviously. His mum had kept that photo by her bed, right up till when she’d gone off to be a test case for Dr Roley.
He remembered Roley’s place, too, and how he’d met the Doctor there, and the girl called Sam (who he’d fancied), and how the police thought he’d killed a man, so he’d hitched a ride in a time machine to get out of North London, 1963.
He remembered all these things.
And he knew exactly how Fitz’d act in any given situation. That is to say, sometimes he didn’t, but that was because he was frequently useless and faffed around a lot, which