Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [98]
‘Yes. Interesting equations. Many irrational and impossible numbers.’
‘I should think so. Does that bother you? Possibly you find it a bit threatening.’ The being didn’t reply, nor did its expression change. ‘Well, now that the introductions are over, I’d like to know what you think you’re doing.’
‘Becoming immortal, Doctor.’
‘By draining the cosmos?’
‘Is there another way?’
‘Haven’t you worked out the little flaw in your plan? Sooner or later, you’ll run out of matter and energy to devour. You’ll die in the end, anyway. So why not let everything else live?’
‘We will continue for aeons. In that time, we will find a solution.’
‘No you won’t,’ said the Doctor impatiently. ‘You can’t achieve a perfect non-entropic state without perfect stasis. And perfect stasis would be indistinguishable from death. Bodies at rest, as in eternal rest, as in rest in peace. You can only live forever by dying.’
‘All paradoxes will be resolved on the quantum level.’
‘It’s exactly the quantum level you’re going to have problems with.’
‘That would be true, if we were matter.’
This stopped the Doctor. ‘You must be either matter or energy.’
Chapter Twenty-four
201
‘We are concepts. The sapient races dream of our transcendent order and timeless perfection.’
‘Don’t pull Plato on me,’ said the Doctor. ‘If you were only conceptual, then you would already have eternal life. All this energy-robbery would be unnecessary. Where are you finding the energy for this conversation, by the way?
You’re fairly expressive.’
‘I am expending only the tiniest amount of energy. We are so near to absolute zero that we encounter almost no resistivity.’
‘That still doesn’t answer my question. You’ve evolved into a purely mathematical, near-static form of being. You burn out planets and stars to maintain your anti-entropic state. But you must be drawing power from somewhere in your world, or you wouldn’t be able to have this conversation, much less contact Brett and Unwin or make your attempts to pierce the barrier.’
‘Some of us, pieces of us, sacrifice ourselves.’
‘Then you’re a hive mind.’
‘Both hive mind and individual. At this level, we form what you know as a Bose-Einstein condensation. Many and one simultaneously.’
‘And that one is weak as an infant.’
‘Infants cannot gather their own food.’ It broke into pixels and reappeared partly within the translucent wall, apparently its equivalent of sitting down.
‘You have a great amount of energy, much more than a human.’
‘Artron energy.’
‘So much I suspect it is not all your own.’
‘I’m connected to my TARDIS through transcendent biomechanics.’
Its mouth opened slightly, and a white tongue peeked in and out. ‘That is power indeed.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up. I’m not such a fool as to come in here with any power you could access. The connection is based on irrational and imaginary equations; any contact would reduce you to zero or spiral you into infinity.’
It smiled. ‘As to that, we do not need to go through you, Doctor. Already, we are in your TARDIS’s computers, taking them over program by program.’
‘A lie. You were stopped by the firewall. You haven’t the code to go farther.’
‘Haven’t we? That brilliant boy is still on your ship. Perhaps you should have killed him.’
The Doctor’s eyes darkened. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Who lies now? We were inside of him for an instant and found the memory.
There’s something wrong with him, you know.’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘I know.’
202
The Algebra of Ice
‘But all of this is beside the point. We no longer need the code. Our worm slipped in as you came out.’
‘Impossible. I calculated for that. You didn’t have the power.’
‘Ordinarily, no. But we happened to have use of the body of Mr Brett. Our one that died managed to access and transport the condensed energy of his decomposition. Interestingly, some of his personality came with it, I suppose because they had merged.’
‘Brett,’ said the Doctor scornfully. ‘You really don’t expect me to believe that, do you?’ But he remembered the state of the corpse.