Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [41]
'It would have to have been another defensive drone,' said kiKhali. 'And at very close range –
God would have seen it.'
'The drone,' asked the Doctor, 'or the attack?'
'Either,' said kiKhali.
'How many defensive drones are there in the sphere?' asked Bernice.
'Sixty-eight million,' said kiKhali, 'nine hundred and twenty thousand, four hundred and thirty-eight.'
'Including you?' asked Roz.
'Including me,' said kiKhali.
'And where were you on the night in question?' asked Roz.
KiKhali's face ikon vanished completely. AgRaven smiled.
'God knows where I was,' said kiKhali. 'Why don't you ask it?'
The Doctor smiled. 'The ultimate alibi.'
'What if God lies?' asked Roz.
'You have to assume God always tells the truth,' said agRaven. 'Let's face it, if God lies to you, you'll never know about it.'
The Doctor poked his finger inside the solidigram and wiggled it about. 'The brain cavity is very small,' he said.
'Most of a drone's brain exists outside of reality,' said kiKhali. 'The physical volume is really just an anchoring point for an intrusion into a subdomain of hyperspace.'
'Very clever,' said the Doctor.
'Stop me if I'm getting too technical,' said kiKhali.
Bernice refused to believe that the Doctor didn't know all about the way these machines worked. He'd asked the question, with just enough spin to make it insulting, making sure that kiKhali would answer in baby talk easy enough for even an archaeologist with an imaginary professorship to understand. It could be the Doctor's way of telling Bernice and Roz to pay attention, like a flagged item in a stream of data – listen up, children, this is important. Could this murder be the reason they had come here? Time was, she thought, the Doctor took an interest in such things because he happened to be on the spot. Nowadays she assumed it was the other way round.
KiKhali was getting technical, talking about double recurved spirals in imaginary time. The Doctor listened with an expression of polite interest. Roz was watching agRaven with narrowed eyes. AgRaven in turn looked bored and deeply uninterested as kiKhali droned on about the esoteric nature of hyperspace.
KiKhali had to know that the Doctor knew all about this stuff but did the machine know that the Doctor knew it knew? Trying to second-guess the Doctor was a fast track to a migraine and that was when you were on the Doctor's side.
Bernice wondered why having your brains in hyperspace might be important. Perhaps the monsters would be coming from that direction. She found it frighteningly easy to populate hyperspace with monsters; she'd run into a few of them herself. Let's face it, running into monsters was definitely not a problem when you travelled with the Doctor. It had been her fantasy when they'd been staying in the house on Allen Road that the Doctor had a secretarial service, one of those video-phone graphic constructs that took the place of ansaphones in the early twenty-first century. She imagined it would be programmed to deal with monsters – I'm sorry, the Doctor is not available right now. Please leave your name and the planet you wish to invade at the tone and the Doctor will get back to you. If you were a real unlucky monster.
Roz asked kiKhali how smart vi!Cari had been.
'Vi!Cari was rated an eight point three,' said the drone. 'That's twenty times smarter than you are.'
That was an insult. Bernice thought. No mistaking kiKhali's delivery. Not like the way these people called you a barbarian; that was just a statement of fact not an insult. I'm a machine, kiKhali was saying to Roz, and I can beat you at chess with one arm tied behind my back. Saying this to a woman who claimed she had once disassembled a securitybot for answering back. Said she'd done the deed with a plasma torch. Better be careful, kiKhali, me old cock, or you might just get to find out how much of a barbarian Roz really is.
'It's not what you've got,' said Roz pleasantly, 'it's what you