Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [35]
It was a labourer. Most people wore worker’s clothes but Eleana could see that the heavy body inside the coveralls was thickset with muscle, not the flab of a now thinning capitalist. The body was uncovered, though the arms were folded and it had been put into the shade to await removal.
‘Who was he?’ she asked one of the men standing near her, jerking her head at the corpse. The man shrugged.
‘He was Juan Hernandez,’ one of the others supplied, ‘he used to work here.’
Eleana looked up at the now never-to‐be-completed church. Even in daylight, the spires were black against the grey sky, encrusted with soot and cracked from the heat. As a small girl, she had seen the burial of the architect. The one that had been called ‘Master’ had been run down by a tram, the old fool too slow to get out of the way of the new transport. No Gods, no Masters. Not now.
She looked back at the body, lying in the shady weeds. He had a pockmarked face, with pale grit buried deep in some of the holes. What she could see of his hands were callused, hard whitened skin. In one hand he was clutching the remains of a rosary, the string broken and the beads now lying next to him in the dirt. Religious then, and found at the Sagrada Família. He had put his faith in the wrong belief system, she thought, with a little sadness. He must have clung on to the old ways.
‘He was found here praying?’ she asked.
The person who had supplied the name shrugged this time. ‘He was not shot,’ was all he remarked. Eleana moved in a little closer, unwilling for the comrade standing guard to think she was a friend of the corpse. There were no signs of any wounds. Juan’s eyes were still open, still staring widely upwards. Such an expression of fear, such terror. It could have been an execution, though most people closed their eyes when they knew they were to die, as if wishfully hoping that their deaths would be averted if they couldn’t see it coming. Like children hiding under a blanket in a thunderstorm, closing their eyes against the fear.
Eleana shrugged. It would be barely a paragraph. She could hardly write that someone breaking the religious ban had been struck down by a mysterious fate, could she? She pushed her way back out of the thinning press of people and started back to her rooms. You know where you are with bullets, she thought. Then she tried to block out the unbidden image of her brother’s misshapen body, discarded like a doll in a gutter. Yes, you knew where you were with bullets.
* * *
He could not send information back to the System. Every attempt to transfer data was rejected, returned to him. The Absolute’s records were starting to pile up around him, waiting, using up his mass and energy. He didn’t understand why the data was being refused: this had never happened before. He was receiving a constant stream of contradictory information from his observers, so much that he could not handle it all. He had some firm connections now, could see how the humans handled the different, conflicting versions. Their minds appeared to work on so many levels simultaneously: perhaps they even had several minds in each skull? Had the Absolute never really perceived these creatures before? The way in which one body could hold so many different voices, clear, distinct, arguing with each other. No wonder their motives had been opaque before. He could sit at the back of their brains and watch them take information, impose their own version on to it and then ‘forget’ any inconvenient elements that didn’t fit with that version. He needed somewhere to shunt the problematic data, some way of ‘forgetting’ it.
He had made a start – building up a library of data in an actual physical space. He was still able to draw his energy from the System, even if it was refusing him access to the Hub, and he was already finding ways to manipulate it. He was dumping the wrong data into a shell, an extrusion, but it was building in mass. But the