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By Root 363 0

no sense though, it ran contrary to the law of the System. The System recorded an accurate record of events, truthful, precise, concrete. Events were not mutable, they could not happen again, in a different configuration. Except they were. Everywhere he looked he saw events happening in the same time and space parameters which were different, which contradicted each other. If ten people were stood in a square when a truck hit a pedestrian, when a pedestrian walked in front of a truck without looking, when a pedestrian stumbled in front of a truck, when a truck tried to swerve, when a truck driver didn’t notice, when a truck was aimed at a pedestrian... Where ten people saw an event, they saw ten different events. This was insane.

These flickering people, these people with no histories, they were the key to the situation. If he could find them, try to communicate. He scanned for them again, making links as quickly as possible, events rushing past him again and again, every one slightly different. He caught fragmented glimpses of the man and woman from Bilbao, often with a third figure, another flickering male. The woman was running through dark woods, dragging someone with her, eyes wide. The younger man looked up, grimacing, one bloody hand shakily reaching up. The older man fell to his knees, screaming at the falling bombs, before the firestorm obscured him.

There. From five different viewpoints, he saw the older man and the woman in a large room. Sat around in a hotel foyer, talking with real people. The Absolute concentrated on watching them.

* * *

Chapter Four

Am La Polìcia A L’Esquena

Durruti was dead.

Of that there was no doubt, though Anji had heard at least four differing versions of his death. Yesterday the body had arrived back from Madrid, where it was at least uniformly agreed that he had been shot and had later died of his wounds. He had lain in... well, she supposed it was in state, although she wasn’t quite sure an anarchist would approve of the term. Walking back from the hotel to the TARDIS, she and the Doctor had passed a lengthy queue of people waiting to pay their respects, waiting patiently to reach the open coffin just as they would wait to reach the front of a food queue. She had found the idea grotesque.

This morning the square was so densely bannered in red and black material that she wondered briefly if the scanner’s colour control was on the blink. The Doctor had assured her it wasn’t and gone back to pressing in a lengthy string of characters on one of the keypads of the console. In an ‘ask me what I’m doing’ way. Anji ignored him whilst she poured herself a fresh coffee.

‘I really wish this was a mechanical keyboard,’ he remarked, glaring irritably at the small LCD above it and pressing the same button several times, ‘at least then the click tells you that you have hit the key.’

‘What are you doing, anyway? I thought new coordinates were put in there.’ Anji gestured to the opposite side of the pale wood console with her mug. She leaned her elbow on one of the less populated surfaces and then cupped her chin in her hand, in exactly the same pose as she adopted when she was catching up with gossip at the office. There was something about the pale wood interior, even down to the scuffs that had begun to appear on the surfaces, that reminded her of work places rather than homes. She wondered if they should get a water-cooler and a dusty half-dead pot plant to complete the effect.

‘They are. I’m just, well, I thought we’d do a little research whilst we’re here, give the old girl time to readjust before jumping on to rendezvous with Fitz.’

Anji raised a single eyebrow at him. The Doctor busied himself with the keypad even more. She continued to stare and caught him quickly glance at her through his hair.

‘Doctor? We’re five months early!’

‘Well, yes, but we’ll rejoin him no problem.’

Anji doubted that. ‘You said that yesterday but we’ve not moved anywhere yet. And if it was so easy, why does Earth 2001 elude you?’ The Doctor looked hurt, so she relented a little. ‘So what are you