Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [4]
Back on Earth, they had laws. But the laws were arbitrary. The signals told the politicians what rules to make, and told the people what rules to believe in. The signals told her how to respond to any stimulus, because whatever happened to her, the TV and the radio had already prepared her for it. The soap operas covered every eventuality, from birth to death and everything in between. Even her political streak was based on what she’d seen on the Nine o’Clock News, or, at the very least, on what her parents had seen on the Nine o’Clock News. And even the Doctor. The way Sam had adapted to life on board the TARDIS so easily. The way she’d been trained for it by years of watching old sci-fi serials on BBC 2.
What had Compassion said? That her world was the same as Sam’s, only without the camouflage? Something like that, anyway. All of a sudden, it seemed to make sense.
Or was this place just making her think like a native?
Sam looked up, towards the top of the shaft. The top level, Compassion had said. Soon, Guest would be waiting for her up there. And the Remote knew she’d join them, because that was the only possible response to the situation.
Right.
Sam made her way across the floor of the building, brushing past the people in their pseudo-military non-uniforms, people whose culture was the aftershock of Rassilon’s war, but who no longer had anyone to fight. Yes, she’d do as Guest expected. She’d go to the top of the tower. But she was going to write her own script. She was going to use whatever time she had here to find out more about the Remote, to look for some kind of cultural weakness. If they listened to the signals so closely, it had to be possible to send out a few signals of her own. That’d throw a spanner in the works. The question was, how?
She stopped at the doorway of the nearest dome, and peered inside. In shape and size, the dome seemed identical to the one on the floating platform, but its function was evidently quite different.
There were three large boxes on the other side of the doorway, great clunking metal cuboids, lined up next to one another like coffins in a vault. Sam could see tubes attached to the sides of the boxes, thick rubber feed-lines connecting them to the floor, as if there were some larger piece of equipment somewhere underground. There were glass panels set into the tops of the boxes, like big round portholes. Sam’s first thought was that they might be suspended-animation units, although she couldn’t see any controls. Still, the Remote didn’t seem to go for fiddly bits.
She looked around. Nobody in the tower was paying her any attention, despite the fact that, by local standards, her clothes were positively elaborate. This was the first time in her life she’d been the only one in town wearing high heels.
Might as well take a closer look at the hardware, she thought. After all, they didn’t have any laws against it, did they? The worst thing that could happen was for someone to pick up a nasty signal and come at her like a slavering maniac. Which, to be frank, would almost have been reassuring.
Nobody seemed to notice as she stepped into the dome. She leaned over the first of the boxes, feeling the warmth of the metal-plastic under her hands as she peered through the window. There was, as she’d expected, a body in the box. A human male, eyes tight shut, dark hair just beginning to sprout out of his shaved scalp. Sam couldn’t make out his face in much detail, because…
Well, because there wasn’t much detail there. No subtlety, and no interesting little wrinkles. It was like a sketch of a face, maybe a computer-generated image of a face.
Sam moved over to the next box. There was another corpse inside, but this one had no features