Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [41]
Still, it could be worse. They could be robots.
Talking of which . . .
The Doctor turned back to the warbot.
‘Can you whisk eggs with that thing?’ he said, pointing to one of its multi-function limbs. The bot swivelled its sensors to follow him as he walked closer to it.
‘The prisoner is warned that approaches closer than five feet will result in a weapons discharge,’ it warned – somewhat obscurely, the Doctor thought as he came to a halt.
‘But I haven’t got five feet,’ he replied, wondering how far he could twist the conversation before the bot lost track.
It failed to go for the bait. Try something else.
‘Who is the prisoner?’ he asked, glad that Ben and Polly weren’t there. They would have ribbed him about that one.
‘You are the prisoner,’ the bot replied.
‘How do you know?’ the Doctor asked. This could be a line worth pursuing.
The bot thought for a moment. ‘Imperial Landsknecht records confirm that you are the prisoner.’
‘And are Imperial Landsknecht records always correct?’
‘Yes.’
It was the Doctor’s turn to think for a moment. He had to get this right first time. If he mucked it up, the robot wouldn’t give him a second chance. He could only pray that it had no formal training in philosophy.
‘That archive building,’ he said casually. ‘Contains a lot of information, does it?’
‘Approximately seven quadrillion gigabytes,’ the robot responded.
‘Hmm. Very impressive. And how many separate documents is that? Approximately?’
‘Ten billion.’
‘Broken down into various categories, I’ll be bound?’
‘There are fifteen thousand separate categories of document.’
Almost there. Just lead it those last few steps.
‘And are there any catalogues that record the titles of all the documents in each category?’
‘Each category has a category catalogue that fulfils that function.’
The Doctor’s mind was racing: checking each logical step to ensure that it led to one and only one conclusion. A paradoxical one. ‘And I presume that 71
the category catalogues do not actually contain entries for themselves. That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?’
The robot thought for a moment, almost as if it sensed the yawning logical trapdoor. ‘No,’ it said finally, ‘the subject category catalogues do not list themselves as entries.’
The Doctor wiped a bead of sweat from his temple. Time to spring the trap.
‘If there were to be a catalogue that listed all of the catalogues that do not list themselves,’ he said carefully, ‘then which catalogue would list this catalogue?’
The robot stood, and thought. And thought. And thought a bit more.
The Doctor rubbed his hands together with glee. Good old Bertrand Russell.
Time to really get to work.
From orbit, the Earth seemed a lush, verdant world, ripe with promise and bereft of civilization.
Micheal van Looft, shift supervisor on the Vigilant IX orbital laser satellite, knew it wasn’t true. He knew that the green of the continents were just the cultivated tops of floating buildings, and the blue of the seas was a few metres of water protecting vast algae farms, and that thirty billion or so people lived down there, loved down there and died down there.
And he knew that his boyfriend was having an affair down there.
He’d known for months. Nick had simcorded up to the satellite shortly after Micheal’s three-month tour commenced and told Micheal about it, laughing as he did so. He’d enjoyed taunting Micheal with stories of how good his lover was in bed. Micheal had felt like a knife had been thrust into his guts.
After three months he thought he’d got used to the idea. Life was quiet on the Vigilant belt. Nobody really thought that any aliens were going to attack –
they’d all been pacified during the Wars of Acquisition – and if they did, there would be plenty of warning. He read books, watched simcords, and thought.
After three months, he’d persuaded himself that he was better off without Nick. Honestly, he was.
And then he’d woken from a tormented dream in which Nick