Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [87]
The old women had once told Lost Boy that, on the aliens’ planets, everything could be bought or sold. Weapons, of the kind the aliens issued only to their most trusted followers. The word the women had used was ‘hardware’. Hardware was changing all the time, becoming more complicated, more suitable for killing and torturing. The alien races were perpetually at war, each making sure it had hardware at least as good as that of its enemies. And Ogron males, said the women, were one of the best kinds of hardware, hardware that did whatever the aliens told it to do. That was what ‘evolution’ meant. The Ogrons had to keep changing their bodies and taking the potions, so they’d be the best hardware on what was called ‘the market’.
The other Lost Boy – who lied a lot, of course – said that on some planets aliens changed their Ogron hardware themselves, fitting metal boxes into their servants’ heads to make them ‘more intelligent’. But it didn’t do anything of the sort, according to the darker Lost Boy. The metal boxes just made the Ogrons forget how to be Ogrons. Lost Boy wondered if that was what had happened to him. The Remote had put something into his head, to let him understand the speech of anybody he ever met, no matter what planet they came from. And there were other changes, changes to what went on inside his head. The Remote had taught him how to use computers, how to ‘hack into’ information, how to ‘process’ data. Lost Boy had understood what to do, but he still didn’t understand why he had to do it.
When they’d brought Lost Boy to Earth, he’d finally learned the truth of things. He’d been at a kind of market, the place they called COPEX, the settlement‐with‐a‐roof full of humans who talked and joked and traded. And he’d realised, finally, that these were the same kind of people who’d come to the home world all those generations ago, the ones who’d thought up the potions and weapons in the first place.
When he’d been younger, Lost Boy would have expected them to be like gods, or at the very least like the big orange holy things that lived up in the hills of the home world. But the traders were men, small, pale‐skinned, short‐armed men, with sick faces and ugly clothes. It had been a shock, certainly. The Remote were weak, but at least they had the Cold behind them, the god thing that gave them their armour and their weapons. The humans at COPEX had nothing.
It was then that Lost Boy had made his decision. He saw no reason why he should obey orders from humans any more. It didn’t really make sense, when you thought about it.
Hardware went wrong, sometimes. Weapons misfired. Security systems crumbled. Perhaps, thought Lost Boy, that’s what I am. A piece of hardware that’s gone wrong, that’s decided to speak with the enemies of its users.
So he sat on the big soft chair in the house of the human woman, and tried to explain these thoughts to her. It was difficult, but, with the metal dog there to translate, he seemed to be getting the message across.
When he’d finished, the woman was silent for a while, staring down at the fluffy brown floor.
‘You’re revolting,’ she said.
Lost Boy grunted a questioning grunt. The thing in his head didn’t seem sure how to translate that.
‘I mean, you’re in revolt,’ the woman said, hurriedly. ‘You’re throwing off your conditioning. They programmed you to be a weapon, but now you’re trying to sabotage their plans instead.’
‘Not a weapon,’ said Lost Boy. ‘A “security device”.’
‘“Security”. Well, that’s a big word, isn’t it?’ The woman sat on the floor, her legs curled up underneath her, her rump resting on what humans called a ‘cushion’. Lost Boy had already discovered that