Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [73]
‘Where does all this come from to begin with?’ Leela gestured at the wall. ‘And where does it go to?’
The Doctor peered down the length of the gallery to where it curved away behind the central dome and merged into its glow. As far as he could see, when it emerged from the other side of the curve and ran back down an equally dizzying length of gallery to where they were standing, it was the same stream of sights and memories and feelings and combinations of all sorts of strangeness. ‘It goes all the way round. I suppose. What goes around comes around. And once it’s been started it keeps on going around, and coming around, losing things and gaining things as it does. I wonder if it learns as it goes.’
‘How do you stop it?’ Leela asked.
‘Stop it?’
‘If it is a machine you can stop it.’
‘A better question is, how do you control it?’
‘No, that is not a better question,’ Leela said. ‘You should stop it if you can. This is an evil thing.’
The Doctor was thinking aloud. ‘The runner’s been controlling it all very precisely.’
‘How do you know?’ Leela asked. ‘How do you know he has been controlling it? Madmen do not control things.’
The Doctor wandered further down the gallery trying to see some order in the moving pattern. ‘How does he pick out what he wants from this mess?’
‘Maybe it tells him,’ Leela said.
‘What did you say?’ The Doctor came back to where she was standing with one finger touching the wall.
‘I said you should stop it if you can.’ Below her finger a tiny swirl of blackness had formed in an otherwise plain white space.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘You said maybe it tells him.
And that’s it.’ His voice lowered to a stage whisper. ‘Of course, that’s it. You have to tell it what you want, and then it tells you how to achieve it. You have to commune with the system.’
‘That is not what I meant,’ Leela said, never taking her eyes off the swirl as up through its darkness a bipedal obscenity of flaky scales and fangs and patchy fur began to surface.
Leela rejected the biped by circling her finger the opposite way to the turn of the swirl. She said, ‘One of the tribal shamans communed with things. Mostly trees and large rocks. He said there were spirits in them.’ Another creature came up, eight legs this time and a smooth silvery carapace.
‘Its mouth parts are underneath,’ the Doctor said quietly,
‘and very nasty too, as far as I remember.’
Leela consigned it back to the depths. ‘How do I know how to do that, Doctor?’
The Doctor shrugged and shook his head. ‘There must be other layers below the immediate surface. Perhaps nothing is ever lost. It just sinks down as it’s overlaid by new data. This is infinitely more complex than I first imagined.’
Leela broke the contact with the surface and the swirl drifted away and faded and was gone. ‘I did not ask for those monsters and I was not communing,’ she said. ‘This machine chose them.’
‘Try thinking herbivores, something harmless and affectionate,’ the Doctor suggested.
‘You try,’ Leela said angrily. ‘I am not touching it again.’
The Doctor composed an image in his mind of a calmly grazing chumno, a charming animal he had once come across which was devoted to eating and grooming and loved to be handfed and stroked. He chose a blank spot on the wall and put a finger on the surface. Nothing appeared. The blank held its position as other images and textures and distorted visions flowed slowly past, but the blank remained stubbornly empty. He put his whole hand on it and concentrated fiercely. A herd of chumnos wandered over a lush plain in his thoughts but nothing happened to the blank on the wall. He gave up. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Cuddly is not an acceptable part of the repertoire it seems.’
‘ It tells you,’ Leela said. ‘It tells you what it wants you to want. Then it makes you want it.’
‘That’s what successful training does,’ the Doctor said.
‘My theory, for what it’s worth,’ the voice said behind them,
‘is that it finds what it’s looking for inside you and builds on that.’
The Doctor turned slowly. Leela did not turn but clapped both hands