Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [6]
It’d be a kind of immortality, Sam reasoned. But a dodgy kind. What happened if your friends didn’t have very accurate memories? Or if they remembered only the bad things about you?
‘Miss Jones?’ said Guest.
Sam didn’t jump this time. For one thing, the woman had taken all the yelp out of her. For another, Guest was too familiar to her now. He stepped into the dome, dressed in his shadow armour from his neck to his toes, just the way he’d looked in the last hallucination.
‘Evening wear?’ Sam suggested. All things considered, she did a pretty good job of not sounding scared stupid.
‘You don’t approve?’ Guest looked down at his armour, as if trying to work out what was wrong with it. Then he looked up, and seemed to notice the tanks for the first time. ‘What are you doing here, Miss Jones?’
‘Just taking a look at your nursery. These are dead people, aren’t they? Dead people being remembered.’
‘Of course.’
‘If I ask you why you bother with this setup, will I get an answer I can understand? I mean, why not just use clones? It’s a lot simpler, I should think.’
‘Clones wouldn’t change. Every generation would be identical to the last.’
‘Isn’t that what you want?’
‘No. The culture changes. The signals change. When we remember the next generation, our memories change to suit the culture. We develop. We evolve.’
Wait a minute. This was starting to add up. Sam remembered seeing a programme on Channel 4 just before she’d left Earth with the Doctor, all about history, and the way it changed over time. People would reinterpret the past according to the ideals of the present, or at least that was what the presenter with the stupid tie and the Oxbridge accent had said. In the 1970s, he’d argued, the leading theory held that Jack the Ripper was a high-ranking Freemason involved in some kind of national conspiracy – because, in the 1970s, the British were obsessed with bureaucracy and big government. In the 1990s, on the other hand, the leading theory was that Jack the Ripper was a gay American serial killer – because people in the 1990s had watched too many gay-American‐serial-killer movies.
Of course, all this was rendered somewhat meaningless by the fact that the Doctor had already told her the real truth about Jack the Ripper, but that wasn’t the point. She thought about the transmitters, laying down the limits of the culture for the Remote. She thought of them rebuilding their dead comrades, remembering the past the way the culture told them to remember it. Each generation would be born with the latest fashions built in, perfectly in tune with the signals around them.
Evolution by Chinese whispers, thought Sam. Like Sarah’s TV set, back in the hotel room: the receiver mutates to suit the picture. Just as it was on Earth, only much, much faster.
And then Sam knew, once and for all, that, whatever the Cold was, it really wasn’t controlling these people. The Remote were part of one all-consuming culture, eternally feeding off and renewing itself, always changing, never pursuing any real goals. They were the ultimate adaptation of the human race, capable of evolving to suit any environment in a single generation, altering themselves with nothing more than the power of the mass media.
And Guest was staring at her in a funny way.
‘You’re sick?’ he asked.
Sam shook her head. ‘You’re not people. You’re characters. Your whole history’s just one big costume drama.’
‘The ideas are all that matter,’ Guest said, and it sounded like he was agreeing with her. ‘It’s our strength.’
‘You rewrite yourselves. All the time. Just like the Faction rewrote your history.’
‘The dispersion of the past is our speciality,’ Guest announced. Sam seemed to remember him saying the same thing in that promo video the UN had shown the Doctor. ‘Shall we join Compassion? I understand she’s already on the top level.’
He motioned towards the doorway. Without thinking,