Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [68]
‘I’ve encountered more telepaths than you can shake three wavy lines at. There are species where only a few individuals have the ability; there are species only telepathic with one another. There are species who can turn your mind inside out Without thinking about it.
‘And there are different kinds of telepathy. Like language
— now I’m using similes — there are so many ways it can be used. Single bursts of information, casual conversation, touch telepathy, links over interstellar distances, rapport — sharing information from the senses, or only words, or deeper, more abstract communication, a bit like the direct transmission of Zen.
‘My favourite of them all is conversation. You can pack in so many more nuances, and there’s far less chance of being misunderstood. And of course you can usually get around the language barrier, so long as the brain you’re talking to isn’t too different to your own in the way it handles the stuff.
‘Foamasi, for instance. Their language consists of clicks intended to stimulate the visual cortex; they see the words as they leave the speaker’s mouth. The way language is actually processed in the Foamasi brain is unique.
‘But the drawback of telepathy, of course, is the very fact that so much more information can be packed in. Even for a highly trained telepath, it’s difficult to narrow the channel of communication to keep out extraneous information. You can be discussing the local political situation, and at the same time find out what the other person had for breakfast, and that one of their feet is itching, and exactly what they think of your tie.
‘Which is why professional telepaths tend to rotate their jobs so much. The more anonymity, the less invasion — it’s easier to have a stranger picking up the personal details of your life. The same way it’s sometimes easier to tell a stranger your troubles.
‘But when telepaths must work together over a long period of time — as part of a permanent team, for example —
the tensions can be extraordinary. No matter how many precautions they take, how anonymous they try to remain.
‘Sometimes they kill one another. Privacy is a vitamin for human beings. Take it away, and they become ill.
‘Another metaphor.
‘You’ll have to forgive me. It’s difficult to conduct the entire dinner conversation and sparkle.’
15 A Door Made of Doors
The Doctor walked slowly and calmly down the corridor.
He looked over his mental map of the habitat dome. It was a map of people rather than of rooms or hallways. White, and at least one lieutenant, in Exploration and Recovery.
Cwej, SmithSmith and the pyrokinetic woman in the infirmary. Everyone else crammed into the common area: wall-to-wall, terrified, ordinary people.
A drone hovered silently at his shoulder, an interface to the colony’s mainframe and the AIs he had set free inside it.
Assuming the programs managed to stay undetected, he’d be able to keep track of what was going on inside the dome.
There were no guards in this section of the dome, only a lonely security camera. Either CONNECTICUT was trapping and altering the camera’s signal, or White knew exactly where the Doctor was. Since he was still alive, the Doctor was assuming that White didn’t know. There were an increasing number of things White didn’t know.
WATCH OUT! had dug up the colonists’ medical records
— their new medical records, the results of the last week’s testing. He’d crashed the drive they were stored on, and let the automatics bring it back up again. The DKC technicians sat back and let him do it. When the records came back online, two dozen of them were flagged as damaged.
When the soldiers ordered twenty-four colonists to the infirmary, along with Doctor St John, all