Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [83]
‘It won’t last. And I’ve interfered too much already.’
‘I still say we should give them a good reprogramming.’
The Doctor sighed. ‘In future, remind me to ignore everything you say.’
‘D’you want a logical analysis of that sentence?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘There’s a name for people like you, y’know.’
‘Oh? Is it complimentary?’
‘Not really. But it’s three letters long, and it only makes sense in Haitian.’
The Doctor gave the girl a funny look. She just grinned back at him. Lost Boy shook his head.
‘You make no sense at all,’ he pointed out.
‘Good,’ the Doctor and Sam said, as one.
* * *
K9:
Sarah-mistress was in the bath when K9 picked up the Artron disturbances. He waggled his ears, as was his custom when he had to calculate bioform-based probabilities. His memory banks informed him that the last time he’d called the mistress while she was submerged she’d thrown a sponge at him. So he decided to wait and see what happened.
Soon, a pattern began to develop in the disturbances. Something was materialising in the front room, right in the middle of the Persian rug. K9 calculated an 89 per cent chance that Sarah-mistress would get a bit irate about that.
By the time the pattern completed its materialisation, K9 had already worked out what the object was, and what its crew complement was likely to be. Sure enough, the first figure to emerge from the big blue box had an unmistakable biological signature, in spite of the DNA discrepancies (and K9 calculated a 91 per cent chance that the subject really didn’t want to talk about those at all). Despite the discrepancies, the Time Lord still had the telltale 69 chromosomes, divided into 23 homogeneous triads, instead of the more usual pairs.
‘Hello, K9,’ the Doctor said. ‘Is Sarah in?’
‘Affirmative,’ K9 chirped. ‘Sarah-mistress currently in “damp” mode.’
It was supposed to be a joke, but the Doctor didn’t laugh. That was hardly surprising. After all, he’d never even worked out that K9 had a sense of humour.
* * *
Alan Llewis:
He’d insisted on meeting the Bland woman, or whatever her name was, in a car park. That was where you were supposed to have secret meetings, Llewis had seen it a million times on TV. Besides, there was something nice and normal and grubby about a multistorey in Croydon.
It had been two days since the space machine had dropped him off in London.
‘Nothing,’ he said, as he stared out through the windscreen. He’d rented the car that morning; he wouldn’t have driven around in the Fiat, even if it had survived. He wasn’t entirely sure who might be following him, but he hadn’t been back to the office since he’d got back to London, just in case. ‘Bloody nothing. You don’t understand, do you? Peter bloody Morgan’s got it all. All his toys. He’s selling them to the police, d’you know that?’
In the passenger seat, the Bland woman nodded. ‘It was a stupid business to begin with,’ she said.
‘It was my bloody business,’ snapped Llewis. ‘You saw the kind of… the kind of things they had in that… that other place…’
‘You’re upset,’ the woman said.
‘All the way there.’ Llewis wasn’t sure he was making sense, but he wasn’t sure he cared, either. ‘All the way there. And nothing. Nothing. I can’t… I can’t tell you. What it’s like. What it feels like. It was dark, and… the faces…’
‘Maybe you’ve got more than you think,’ the woman suggested.
‘Like what? Bloody self-awareness?’
‘No. Information.’ Bland sighed, deeply and pitifully. Or pityingly, maybe. ‘You’re never going to be able to go back to the office, are you? In fact, you’re never going to be able to show your face anywhere like COPEX again. Am I right?’
Llewis looked away. The woman took a deep breath.
‘I’m making this documentary…’ she began.
* * *
Kode:
The Remote are not by any means the only media-dependent culture in our galaxy. However, they are unique among humanoid races in that each society is held together by a single media system, which the Remote have very nearly elevated to the status of godhood. The closest