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(PART TWO)

We’re past the halfway point now. Most of the important pieces are still in play, but at this stage it’s hard to see where the game’s going. The board’s so cluttered up with rumours and counterplots that it’d take a grand master to spot the strategy behind it all, to work out how everything’s going to come together in the endgame. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The Doctor’s still trying to play chess, but the Remote are more interested in Trivial Pursuit. The two sides are playing by different rules, and it’s more a case of good-versus‐postmodern than good-versus‐evil. No wonder things are getting complicated.

So, to resume:

The Doctor’s trapped in a prison cell, a long way from anywhere he might want to call home. He’s running out of options, he’s doing his best to hold on to his sanity, and he’s being slowly tortured to death for no good reason at all. Meanwhile, Sam’s being led to the central transmitter of Anathema by the Remote, who are even now insisting that torture and imprisonment aren’t techniques they generally use. Still, you’d expect them to change their minds about that from minute to minute. And Fitz? Fitz is stuck on an Earth-built colony ship six hundred years in the future, along with the ancestors of the Remote and the representatives of Faction Paradox. How the Remote got back to the twentieth century in the first place, we can’t say for sure. Oh, and let’s not forget Guest, or Compassion, or Kode, the three agents of the Remote who seem determined to do something to the timeline of present-day Earth… but again, the details haven’t exactly been forthcoming.

Then there’s Sarah. Good old reliable Sarah Jane Smith, twenty years older and twenty years more cynical than the woman the Doctor once left on Earth with nothing but a stuffed owl for company. (Although we’re sure she can’t have changed that much; that’d spoil things.) Sarah’s investigating a man called Llewis, whom we’d have to describe as a mere pawn, if we were going to stretch the ‘game’ metaphor to breaking point. The Remote are trying to supply Mr Llewis’s company with the Cold, though, so maybe he’ll be promoted to a more important piece later on.

Ah. The unmistakable sound of a metaphor snapping.

This is what they call ‘the story so far’. In the old days, we’d just reprise the last scene of Part One, the cliffhanger ending where time froze and the characters went into stasis. In today’s world, however, things tend to be a little more complicated. For better or worse.

* * *

14

The Darker Side of Enlightenment

(Sam learns about the birds, the bees and the remembrance tanks)

It was like a set out of Frankenstein. The old black-and‐white one. But coloured in by the man who painted all the sets for Star Trek back in the sixties.

The transmitter building was the same kind of shape as the Eiffel Tower, the outer walls smooth curves, rising to the tip of the building hundreds of metres above the surface of Anathema. And the thing was hollow. From down here on the ground floor, Sam could see all the way up to the top, and she couldn’t make out any joins in the structure of the walls. The ground floor itself was surrounded by archways, one enormous arc on each side of the building’s base.

There was a single shaft of… steel? Plastic? Whatever. A single shaft in the middle of the floor, stretching from here to the peak, a cylinder of pale blue as wide as a decent-sized house. Science-fiction blue, thought Sam. Cybernetic blue. Looking up, she could see discs of transparent might-have‐been-perspex impaled on the shaft, ‘floors’ of varying sizes. Many of them were full of Remote people, reclining on see-through furnishings and (literally?) soaking up the vibes. There were no railings around the edges of the discs, though, so either the people around here were remarkably well balanced, or they simply didn’t care if they fell off. See-through veins ran up the sides of the shaft, conduits for the lift platforms that carried the locals from level to level.

The floor of the building was easily the size