Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [11]
The idea had been to create a ‘reality’ that could keep the viral personality busy, while the Doctor ferreted out its memories and erased them, the same way he edited his own memories from time to time. Of course, the ‘reality’ would have to keep the Doctor’s conscious mind just as busy... a cyberspace wouldn’t do it, he’d have realized what it was too quickly.
The memories had swollen, taking up more of his mind, making it impossible to concentrate from minute to minute.
When he’d disappeared, Chris and Roz had gone to bring him back. They’d found him in the forest, talking nonsense.
The beach house had been a pocket of his own mind, monitored and stabilized by Cinnabar’s computer link. She and Byerley had also been monitoring the levels of virus in his blood, the changes to the memory RNA in his brain.
He’d given up so easily, so quickly, accepting that he’d gone mad. Perhaps, on a subconscious level, he’d been waiting for that to happen for a long time.
The question now was: whose memories had they been?
For that matter, why had they been packaged into the viruses? Why hadn’t they emerged in the minds of the infected humans? Why the psi powers in any case? Why... ?
He let go of the strap, sat on the trolley, folding his arms.
He was so close to the solution. So close. He hoped he hadn’t erased it along with the foreign personality. He needed the answer, before the colony’s tensions became worse. No-one had been hurt yet; they were scared, confused, but they hadn’t started to turn on one another.
If there was violence, it wouldn’t last long. There just weren’t that many of them. And now, some of them would be able to kill you by thinking about it.
Chris wandered in. ‘We’ve got you that dirt.’ He stopped, seeing that he’d caught the Time Lord in the middle of a train of thought.
‘If we don’t help these people soon,’ said the Time Lord in a low voice, ‘there’s the very real possibility that we’re going to find ourselves in the middle of a miniature civil war.
We’ve got to find a cure.’ He banged himself in the forehead.
‘If I could just work out where the infection had come from in the first place!’
‘Inoculations,’ said Chris.
The Doctor looked up at him.
Chris coloured. ‘They were all vaccinated before they came here, weren’t they?’
‘Great jumping gobstoppers!’ The Doctor hopped down off the gurney. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’
3 Looking for Things
‘Byerley!’ said the Doctor, almost running into the lab.
‘We’ve been coming at this from completely the wrong angle!’
The medic was filling a cup from his coffee machine. He spun around so fast that he sent a spoonful of sugar flying.
‘Listen,’ said the Doctor. ‘We’ve been assuming that the virus causes the psi powers.’
‘Well, everyone who’s been infected has developed powers...’
‘No. It’s the other way around.’ The Doctor waved his hands about, agitatedly. ‘We’ve tested everyone who developed powers. But we haven’t tested everyone else.
What if the virus only affects certain people?’
‘I do have two asymptomatic cases on record,’ said Byerley. He sat down, almost involuntarily, behind his desk.
‘Do you mean that...?’
The Doctor perched on a corner of the desk. ‘Everyone’s infected. We assumed that the virus was carrying the genes for the psi powers. But what if those genes are already present in some brains?’
Byerley leaned across the desk. ‘The viral code is switching on the latent genes in those individuals,’ he said.
‘The same way some cancer viruses switch on growth genes.’
‘And it would explain why different people have developed different powers, rather than everyone getting the same power.’
‘It’s too specific,’ breathed Byerley. ‘Something that specific couldn’t possibly be natural. But I thought, if it were manufactured, there’d be a serial number in the chromosomes...’
‘The standard procedure for this century is for a full biological survey to be done before anyone sets foot on the planet, correct?’
Byerley nodded. ‘Robots take samples of bacteria and viruses. Anything that might be