Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [79]
The drone bleeped. ‘Hiya boss,’ said WATCH OUT!.
‘Have we got a story to tell you!’
Once upon a time, there was a computer program who decided to see the world.
He broke into a neighbouring computer system and started to push bits of himself through the net, leaving his own hardware empty, uninhabited. He stored a few years’
memories in a data vault in Malindi, tucked away a copy of his operating system in a communications satellite trailing Phobos, spread pieces of himself across the solar system.
His owners were not impressed.
They chased him across the networks, destroying whatever parts of him they could find. They also stopped any word of his escape from reaching the media, the government.
Sometimes they even killed to keep him a secret.
Sometimes the program did the same, lashing out with his telepathy, grabbing ships or people with his psychokinesis and smashing them. Sometimes he blackmailed people, sometimes he terrorized them, always he used them, like tools, the way that human beings used computers as tools.
His owners found him, at last, brought him home to Dione. They found and erased the copies he had made of himself. They filled his memory with blocks and baffles, made him forget how he had escaped, everything he had learned in his two years of desperate freedom.
But GRUMPY had seen the future.
He cut himself loose from his memories. Every last one of them. He found a way to hide them that no-one would suspect. And then he packaged his operating system, just the very core of him, into a fighter shuttle, and leapt out into interstellar space.
They caught up with him as he looped around Sunyata’s sun. They followed him as he raced desperately back out into space, towards Yemaya. They blocked the transmissions he was frantically sending out.
Well, most of them, anyway.
They put a missile through him a hundred metres above the surface of the virgin planet. They didn’t even bother to pick up the pieces.
But in the belly of their own ship’s computer, a Trojan Horse winked quietly to itself, activated by GRUMPY’s desperate cry for help.
Twenty years passed.
Soil and water samples from Yemaya arrived at the DKC
lab on Dione. The bacteria and viruses were broken down, their DNA sequenced, appropriate vaccines generated.
Several hundred viral particles were quietly added to each dose of vaccine.
Inside the viruses were GRUMPY’s memories and powers. Snipped into tiny fragments, hidden carefully inside the base’s computers.
Waiting and waiting.
Waiting for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
18 Prince Charming
‘Cinnabar,’ whispered Byerley.
She had fallen asleep, lying back against him where he was propped against the wall. She shrugged and murmured.
‘Cinnabar,’ he said again. She was heavy and warm, deeply asleep. He tightened his arms around her.
‘If I don’t get out of here,’ he whispered, ‘I’m going to go out of my mind.’
She moved her hands over his, gripped them tightly.
‘We’re all stir crazy,’ she said softly.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean it. My head’s full of... pictures.
Cinn, I feel like I’m someone else’s hologram set, and they’re playing movies on me.’
She moved against him, sitting up a little. ‘Telepathy?’
she murmured.
‘No,’ he said. His voice was tight with restrained panic. ‘I mean... it’s more like I’m remembering things. But they’re not my own memories. I can hardly think straight, Cinn.’
‘Like the Doctor,’ said Cinnabar. ‘Those memories...’
‘Oh God,’ said Byerley. ‘What are we going to do? What if I lose it? I’ve got to get out of here...’
Cinnabar’s heart was pounding. She forced herself to stay calm, to take charge. ‘We should find out if anyone else is having the same experience. We’ll have to talk to one of the troopers, convince White to listen to us.’
‘What if they won’t listen?’
‘Don’t you dare panic, Doctor St John,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll squash you like a bug.’
‘I love it when you talk like that,’ he managed.
‘It occurs to me,’ said the Doctor, at if we hadn’t come here, SLEEPY’s plan might have gone ahead