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By Root 725 0

He was changing already, becoming more like the other colonists, getting caught up in the culture. If he died in ten years’ time, or twenty, or thirty, then his ‘friends’ in the Remote would remember somebody else, not him. People’s memories of him were already going to be flawed, memories of someone he didn’t quite recognise. If he died of old age, then it wouldn’t be Fitz who’d be regrown in the tanks. It’d be… who? ‘Code-boy’? If he died now, every version that came after him would still have some Fitz-ness built into it, a little nugget of his true self buried somewhere in the biodata. Simple as that.

Besides, there was another factor involved now. When Mother Mathara had left Anathema, she’d made a speech that had surprised everyone. She’d told them she’d come back, just the once, in two years’ time. There’d be one final visit from Faction Paradox before the family left the Remote alone for good. To see how everybody was getting on, so to speak.

Fitz had known, as soon as she’d said it, what the Faction had been planning. They’d opened the door to him, and probably to a lot of the other refugees from Ordifica. They’d never actually said it out loud, but the cultists had given him a straight choice. Either he could stay with the Remote, and die a hundred times over in Anathema. Or he could join Faction Paradox full-time. Become a Little Brother in the family. Enter the house of the Grandfather.

Mother Mathara was coming back to see if any of the Faction’s potential children had changed their minds. To collect Fitz, and any other ‘chosen ones’ here who felt like leaving Anathema and sodding off to the Eleven-Day Empire. If she’d been telling the truth, then Mathara’s return trip was due within months. Maybe even weeks.

If Fitz didn’t die now, he’d end up running to the Mother when she came. He knew it’d happen that way. He had to get away from Anathema, to get away from the transmitter before he lost his identity for ever and became something more than human. If the Faction offered him a way out, then he wouldn’t be able to resist it. However grim that way out might be.

He couldn’t let the Faction give him that choice. He had to end this now. While part of him was still Fitz Kreiner.

He was still looking down, but the ground didn’t feel like a problem any more. The drop was just something that happened to be there. Fitz shuffled forward, and let the toes of his boots hang over the edge of the platform.

This was it. The one sure-fire way for him to stay alive was by dying now. And of course there was no hope of rescue. When the Doctor met that future version of Fitz in the twentieth century, he wouldn’t be able to come back here in the TARDIS to stop him jumping. Because that’d be a paradox, wouldn’t it? If Fitz didn’t jump, the Doctor could never have known he was going to jump, and so on and so on.

I will, In a very real sense, be history.

So. Out of options, and out of time. The Remote had short-range scout craft, and even long-range teleporters that linked the city to certain prearranged supply points around the universe, but there was nothing he could use to get away from Anathema for good. The city would always draw him back, unless the Doctor could help him find a way out of the loop. He was part of the colony now. Part of the media.

Fitz stood on the highest level of the tower, gawping down at the floor several hundred feet below. The media was still throbbing away above his head, and the ant-people were still mumbling to themselves as they wandered in and out of the dome buildings.

He couldn’t really do this.

Could he?

Could he?

* * *

23

Indestructible, Ms Jones? You Don’t Know the Meaning of the Word

(finally, the Cold)

The TARDIS’s cloister room had materialised around the fighter. Like all the rooms that contrived to be close to the TARDIS doors, the cloister room was a great big Gothic chasm of a place, the walls lined with crumbling stonework, the ceiling alive with mathematically modelled bats. Guest stood on the mosaic floor by the side of the fighter, gun in hand, covering Sam as