Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [7]
He made a careful record of their conversation and the misunderstandings by both sides. He filed that neatly in his own local memory, time, date and location stamped ready for retrieval. Flickering around the country, he found the key communications method: the telephone. Millions of packets of data broken down into analogue signal and sent down primitive cables, through junctions and exchanges, racing along until they are converted back to sound, back to information the humans could understand. Like all the Absolute, he approved of the telephone. It was primitive, prone to error and omission but its structure reminded them of the System. Of, for lack of a better term, home. It had been designed to convey information: it was as close to a natural environment as an Absolute in this era could find. He flicked a new connection into place, anchoring several of his positions within the network of hard copper wires and Bakelite handsets. He accessed his feed line from the System, pulled down a little extra power to hold the new link in place. The synapse was thick, pulsing with energy as the signals were pumped into him. White noise buzzed along it, forcing him to devote another little part of his conscious to damping it down. But the information. So much information. He would be filing such a huge report from this era, so many events.
A woman in Madrid was screaming down the phone for help. A Russian in Alcalá de Henares spoke secrets down a secure line, which could easily be decrypted back at the Hub, should anyone ever request both the message and the key that one of the other Absolute had doubtless recorded. There were no secrets to the Absolute, no lies that they did not hold the truths to. That was their role in the universe – that was his role – to see, to observe, to record the truth.
‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’
He could see everything – within his purview – with clarity and focus. Each person was a moving cluster of perspectives: he saw them from every conceivable angle, at every age, all overlapping yet fitting together to create a full representation of the person’s life. And from each person gossamer-thin shimmering lines spread, showing their relationships to their surroundings, to others, to the future. He had no such connections, he had no need for different perspectives. To the humans, or to whatever creatures they observed, the Absolute were less than ghosts, less than even the faintest tingle of a presence. They did not conform to the rules of the modern universe and so they were invisible to it.
In Barcelona, two unshaven men were dragged up from a cellar and bundled away by guards. He saw them arrive, later, at the barracks where they were tortured. And earlier, months earlier, they were sat in a hotel foyer laughing with friends. Years earlier still, before they knew each other, one was reading books earnestly in college whilst the other laboured in the grounds. Their whole passage through time was laid out to him: the events that influenced their movement through life, the bullets that would end it. All the events, all were streamed into his memory cache, ready to be collated into the definitive record and added to the information at the Hub.
This was his purpose. To observe without influence meant to observe without the subjects’ awareness. Beings, time, neither of these could see the Absolute. He felt as well as saw the information flowing, concatenating, compiling. The data was power, visible to him as it crackled along, the humans