Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [21]
So he had to assume that the human had been altered by being brought into the System: that the two physical spheres were not identical and whilst he could exist in both, humans could only exist in the one. That would limit his options in resolving his problem, since he was going to have to rely on the partisan views from the humans.
He looked again at the material he had physically drawn in. It was of no use to him now, nor could he get any information from it which the Hub did not already possess. It would have to go back.
The Absolute re-concentrated on the links he had created to humans whilst letting one part of him focus on replaying the information that had been gathered whilst he had been considering the boy. He had increased his links exponentially, trying to recreate the complex web of relationships he had previously been able to view. Each time one of his tapped humans encountered another untapped person – either in person or by the telephone – he established a tap to the new one, so that he had begun to replicate his usual method of surveillance. The procedure the Hub had sent, the one that worked on Danomh, had had limitations though: only a finite number of links could be supported using the standard power supplied by the central coaxial into the System. He would need to draw increasing amounts of power down the now wavering connection if he were to tap into every person in the area.
Pause! He replayed an already recorded feed from one of his observers in the north of the country. The date and time stamp clearly indicated it to be 21 April 1937ECE. A crosscheck indicated the coordinates to be a city called Bilbao on the coast. What had caught his attention was the two figures on screen. Both human; one male, one female; one tall, one short. Both were flickering in and out of sight, just like the figure who had triggered this whole problem.
They had both been recorded moments, events caught in his cache. He traced the observer back to the point where s/he had first noticed the figures and watched the moment play again in real time. The observer had just glanced briefly at the two figures as s/he had walked past them in the street, wondering why they were so strangely dressed. He replayed it. The observer walked down the street, not passing anyone until the bottom of the hill where s/he exchanged a brief hola with a neighbour walking up. The Absolute immediately established a tap into the neighbour, wanting to see what he noticed as he walked past the flickering couple. There were two people standing on the opposite pavement, arguing in English. The Asian girl had her arms folded and was nagging at the Inglese. The street was empty.
The Absolute reviewed as many versions as he could find, but each time the couple flickered in and out of view. He froze their images and sent them back to the Hub, to check the full record. Then he began systematically to search for the same patterns in all his records of 1930s Spain.
* * *
Hearing her back crack, stretching as she sat in the stiff wooden chair at her desk, Pia caught her superior looking at her. She wasn’t sure if he was staring because she had dared to show signs of tiredness, despite working most of the night for the cause, or because she had undone the top button of her blouse and was, by the Communist Party’s standards, decadently displaying her clavicle to the other workers. All four of them in this tiny airless office. She returned her eyes to the flimsy in her typewriter and continued to translate from Italian to Russian. It hadn’t helped that her superior, who had been with her throughout her interview with the prisoners,