Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [90]
‘We don’t live in the world we think we live in,’ Sam said, out loud. ‘We live in the signals of the world we think we live in. I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘Why did you do it?’ James Stewart asked.
Sam gawped at him for a moment or two. ‘The tablet? Because… I wanted to see what’d happen. That’s all.’
‘No. That’s not what you told me.’
That confused her. She didn’t remember ever sharing her private thoughts with James Stewart before.
‘You did it because of your parents,’ the man prompted. ‘Because you wanted to find out just how liberal-minded they were, when it came to the crunch. Isn’t that true?’
Sam nodded, slowly and carefully. ‘That’s not all,’ she said. ‘They want me to be like they are. You know? I mean, they’re not forcing me to go on demos with them or anything, but you can tell, the way Dad talks to me…’
‘Isn’t that what you want?’
‘No. Well, yeah. But not like that.’ James Stewart was nodding politely, so Sam kept talking. ‘They’re so out of it, you know? They support all these protest groups, all these causes, but they’ve never been inside a thousand miles of a real torture camp. Or a real ghetto. Dad got arrested for going on a march back in the sixties, and that’s about it.’
‘I think I understand,’ said James Stewart. ‘You wanted to get your hands dirty.’
‘Yeah. Mark Lessing… he’s the one I bought the stuff off… he’s one of the people my parents want me to stay away from. But he’s part of the world they’re trying to save, isn’t he? He’s closer to it than they are. Closer to ground level. I can’t explain it better than that. It’s just…’
‘Sam.’ James Stewart reached out and put his hands on her shoulders, his touch throwing off tiny imaginary sparks of red light. It felt quite nice, actually. ‘Listen to me. I’m going to ask you something. Now, you’re very open to suggestion at the moment, and I shouldn’t really be doing this. I’m changing things just by being here. But it’s important to me. I made a promise to someone, and I have to keep it. Do you understand?’
Sam stared back at him. His ears were leaking, too, she noticed. But there were numbers popping out of his head, not signals. The numbers danced in circles around his shoulders, accidentally-on‐purpose locking together to form equations, and Sam thought she could see patterns in those equations, like the patterns in tea leaves or tarot cards. There were whole futures in the maths, and the more the actor spoke, the more solid they seemed to get.
‘What do you want to do?’ James Stewart asked.
‘I want to save the world,’ said Sam. It just slipped out, really, and it’d probably sound downright embarrassing once all of this was over.
‘The world?’
Sam nodded. ‘I want to stop everything hurting so much. I want to help all the people. And all the animals. I want to stop everyone killing each other, and I want to stop them killing the dolphins, and I want to let all the beagles out of all the research labs. I want to change everything.’ She stopped for breath. ‘Is that enough?’
James Stewart seemed tense for some reason. ‘You can save some of the people some of the time,’ he said cautiously. ‘But you can’t change everything. Let me tell you a secret. Let me tell you about the future.’
He took a deep, deep breath. Sam saw the numbers freeze in midair, as if they were listening to him.
‘Early in the next century, human civilisation will be on the brink of collapse,’ he explained. ‘There’ll be disasters. Major wars. The first nuclear terrorist incidents. Whole cities will turn into no-go areas. By the mid-2050s, the government – the world