Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [5]
The figure in the third box was a woman, her features half finished. Sam got the impression she was at a halfway stage, between being a biomass blob and being a complete person.
‘Did you know her?’ a voice asked.
Sam yelped, and turned. There was another woman standing in the doorway, her thin limbs wrapped in a blue all-over bodysuit, her skin the colour of coffee. Her hair was dark, pinned behind her head. In her early thirties, by the look of her.
‘Er, not very well,’ Sam said.
The woman nodded, and stepped forward. ‘Me neither. She lived right underneath me. Used to complain about the noise. She used to come up to my apartment and dip her eyebrows at me. You know? Great big eyebrows.’ She shrugged. ‘Thought I’d come and remember that. I don’t know why. Seemed like a good idea. Have you finished?’
The woman stepped right up to the box. Sam took a step back. ‘Um, yes,’ she said. ‘I was, erm, just going.’
The woman didn’t say anything else. She reached out for the surface of the box, and pressed her fingers against a section of the metal-plastic casing at the feet of the body, sliding open a small compartment there. Sam watched, trying not to ask any stupid questions, as the woman pulled one of the Remote’s receivers out of the space. The receiver was attached to the coffin-box by the same kind of rubber cable that linked the box to the floor.
The woman pressed the receiver to her neck, and closed her eyes. There was the faint sound of feedback. Sam wondered if the receiver in the woman’s ear was causing interference.
Then there was movement across the window of the box. For a moment, Sam thought the body inside was starting to move; but the movement was purely on the surface, a rapid succession of flashes and crackles, split-second images flickering across the glass. After a few moments, the woman lowered the receiver, opened her eyes and shook her head.
‘Uhh,’ she said. ‘Don’t know why, but it always hurts when I do this. D’you get that?’
‘Er, sometimes?’ Sam tried.
‘Well… Anyway.’ The woman turned back to the doorway. ‘l hope she’s less fussy this time. I don’t suppose I’ve helped, though, have I?’
‘Well… maybe not.’
‘Hmm. I’ll see you around.’
And then the woman was gone.
Sam looked down at the porthole. The flickering had stopped now. Through the glass, she could just see the face of the woman inside, and it looked…
It looked better defined than it had done. As if someone had tried to tune the features in, and made the image a little sharper. The eyebrows were particularly noticeable.
The eyebrows?
The woman who’d been here had left the cable dangling from the end of the box. Sam lifted it up, and inspected the receiver at the end. It looked like any other receiver the Remote might use. But whatever signals the woman had sent down it, they’d gone straight into the box.
Thought I’d come and remember that, the woman had said.
Memories. The woman had downloaded her memories into the box. No, wait, that didn’t make sense. She said the person she was remembering had died. But the person in the box hadn’t even been born, by the look of her.
The last Compassion looked more human than I did. That was what Compassion had said, back on Earth.
‘Bloody hell,’ Sam mumbled.
That was it. The only thing that made sense. The signals were everything, Compassion had said; maybe that was true even when it came to the way the Remote were born. Suppose, for whatever reason, they couldn’t reproduce normally. When one of them died, what happened? They had some kind of telepathic technology, that was obvious. So, all the friends of the deceased would gather round and put together their memories of the late lamented, dumping them into these tanks, as if they were any other kind of transmission. The tanks would