Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [71]
Of course the essence of search-and-retrieval is speed and by the time everyone had done their part and the ships were assembled, equipped, crewed and holding for the go code, the enterprise had taken on a justification of its own which was no longer questioned. Overreaction? What price do you put on a life, anyway? Wouldn’t you want them to do the same for you, or your partner, or your son, or your daughter...?
News organisations that might otherwise have paid closer attention to what was happening in the Out-system Investigation Group were involved in the sudden excitement of an upcoming fight between two of the top contract duellists in either of the colonised worlds. With the toody Bardlenor due to face the firster Gex in an unlimited kill-zone combat to a finish, there was little interest in an attempt by a minor law-enforcement agency to hide its own incompetence behind flashy stunts.
All of this reaction and non-reaction was a reasonable response to Skinny-dick’s insistence on sending three ships in response to the distress call. It was reasonable, but it was wrong. Dangerously wrong.
The control area was a high chamber, huge and circular and domed as the Doctor had expected. What he had not particularly expected was a brightly glowing, smaller, transparent dome in the centre of the larger one and within that a virtual-reality representation of himself and Leela in the gallery of the larger dome, looking at themselves in the smaller dome, which contained a virtual representation of himself and Leela in the gallery of the larger dome, looking at themselves in the smaller dome... On and on the images went, down and down. It was seductive to watch them. It was like standing at the edge of a precipice and feeling it tug at you, wanting you to jump, urging you to tip over and fall into it for ever... The Doctor closed his eyes and stepped away, turning his back on the glowing dome. When he opened his eyes again he could see that Leela was still staring deep into the vision created by the feedback loop. Conscious of the knife she was holding and her increasingly aggressive reflexes, he carefully pulled her away from the viewing side of the gallery and turned her towards the entrance side, the side through which they had stepped.
The inside of the grey membrane they had crossed was a soap-bubble kaleidoscope of colour and light and images.
The patterns mixed and shifted in a band which stretched from the floor to just above the Doctor’s head and ran round the whole of the giant chamber. There were so many images that it seemed as though they must be from all over the planet, but the Doctor quickly realised it could be that they were only from the immediate region. What he was looking at probably related solely to that small area above and below ground, around which they had been chased since they arrived. The images themselves were more than mere representations: they interwove and drifted, connecting to each other as they distorted and remixed bringing a strangely emotional dimension to the overall effect. Present real-time moments mixed with fading glimpses of what had happened already. It occurred to the Doctor that perhaps somewhere in among it there were projections of what would and could be about to happen.
‘This must be a bit like how it feels to be inside a brain,’
the Doctor said.
Leela woke from her trance and stared at the swimming band. She could see a passing shadow of herself coming into the chamber following the Doctor and, weirdly,