Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [61]
As John emerged from below deck, Alexander pointed out to sea. He put the boat into gear and it began to chug forward, oily smoke billowing grumpily around the engine housing. Away in the distance, floating on the sea, was a glinting shape, reflecting back the sky like a crumpled chocolate wrapper. It took him a few seconds to realise that it was moving and that it was a person in a shiny suit.
‘Bloody hell! There’s someone out there!’ said John, sheltering his eyes from the sun.
‘Well done Sherlock. Find the lifebelt and get ready to throw it when we get close enough.’
Weird suit, thought John as they drew close enough. It looked like a space-age Michelin man. For an uncomfortable second, he wondered what they’d do if the suit contained a corpse. He remembered, as a child, finding a dead cat, tied up in a bin bag and thrown onto some waste ground near where they’d lived. He’d ripped open the bag, and the stench had made him throw up on the spot. If there was any suspicion that this suit contained anything other than a live, breathing human being, then he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to open it up.
He needn’t have worried: as they pulled up alongside, the new arrival made a sudden rocking motion, trying to flip itself over. John threw the life preserver overboard and watched the blimp unfasten the seal around the spacesuit-like helmet. With a hiss and a froth of bubbles, it came loose, and suit began to deflate.
‘Grab the ring!’ shouted Alexander over his shoulder.
After a few seconds of floundering, the newcomer looped its arms through it and John began hauling on the rope, dragging the – by now – quite diminutive figure towards the boat.
‘Careful of the handrail,’ Alexander warned. ‘It’s been giving off electric shocks all week.’
John threw him a wary glance as their guest climbed the ladder on the side of the boat, removing the helmet.
Whatever John had expected, it certainly wasn’t the young woman that stood before them.
The Doctor didn’t move – couldn’t move. He lay, listening to the sound of Megan’s footsteps departing, her whistling slowly fading away. What was she doing? What had she done?
Inside his brain, the living silver wires had found their goal, and with another intense flash, the darkness into which he’d been abruptly plunged flared into aching white light. He felt his mental faculties splitting, as his visual field darkened down again, now only illuminated by the streams and rivers of numbers which Joyce had described. One half of his mind could only observe – a mute, impotent presence; the other half, out of his control, joined with the minds of the others present in the room, and started absorbing the flows of data. The Doctor found it hard not to be fascinated by the whole process, the ingenuity that had gone into this parallel processor: harnessing the computational power of a dozen human minds and using it to...
well, he expected that he’d come to that soon enough. But it was certainly an achievement.
Another spike of pain lanced along his spine and his sense of touch vanished as if a switch had been thrown. Perhaps his body shuddered, or spasmed. Perhaps he’d rolled off the couch and was now lying in a pool of rancid water on the floor. His sense of balance seemed unaffected, but how could he be certain? He was totally cut off from his body, the ultimate in sensory deprivation. Pragmatically, he realised there was nothing he could do about that now, and turned his attention to working out what this colossal processing power was being used for.
Joyce had been right about the frequency analyses being performed: someone had huge amounts of data to wade through and, from what he could judge, the processing was far from complete. He realised, to his delight, that although he couldn’t alter the raw data, he could influence what he saw, which equations presented themselves to him,