Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [44]
Keep them out of Mutter's spiral, away from the time/space nexus and, by everything that is sacred, away from Earth. So far they've adhered to the treaty's secret protocols even if the Time Lords have not. Have I made a mistake coming here? Was a mistake for sure to involve aM!xitsa.
Still the murder is good, keep God off-balance, keep Bernice off-balance and give Roz something to do. Keep everyone's attention away from that thing at the cove. Hard sometimes to do the right thing; the lesser of two evils is still an evil. Should have destroyed it when I first realized, should have let Ace deal with it in Paris. But then Ship might have killed me for certain and a king/queen swap is a losing gambit in any variation you care to mention. Old hologram chess set in the TARDIS attic, one whose pieces fought short doomed battles when they were taken. Played a game against Melanie, tinny little voices screaming in triumph and pain. Got so distracted that I lost the match. Scared to make the winning moves in case I lost a pawn. Lost them all in the end, mate in thirty-seven. Lesson in that but not a pleasant one.
God is watching, the air has ears, the water has a nose. Doctor sings the blues, I was born under a bad sign, if it wasn't for bad luck I would have no luck at all. That dark 3 a.m. place with Nietzsche talking about the abyss, superman and monsters. I've looked into all of them and found I was already there. Davros's eyes staring back at me from the mirror. I condemned the Brigadier for sealing up the Silurians. Me, steeped in the blood of Skaro up to my elbows, who would have guessed that Daleks had so much blood in them? Out, damned spot. Promised Bernice a nice simple adventure this time; turn up somewhere and do what's right. Knew I was lying even as I set the co-ordinates. Never were any simple adventures. I was just too naive to realize it.
God is watching, all the Gods are watching.
Rambling while Rome bums. I have doubts, but doubts are good. Davros had no doubts, neither did the Master. Cybermen and Sontarans have never a care. They wouldn't stand on a balcony in the unreal light of an artificial planet and ask themselves what it all means, really, when you get right down to it.
Doubts are good, they're what makes me –
Human?
Hyper-lude
Imagine a globe, a bubble if you like, you can make any size you like because it exists in a subdomain of hyperspace where dimensions like depth and width are a matter of taste. Now imagine the surface of your globe is like that of an oily soap bubble, rainbow colours shifting across the surface. Now imagine that each discrete element of that colour represents an analog logic state capable of recording a fixed range of values.
Now, remember a summer's afternoon, one from when you were young and a single afternoon could last half a lifetime. Try to remember everything: the precise colour of the sky, every mouthful of food, your emotions, what you did and what you thought. You can't, of course. Some of it is inaccessible, buried in the basement of your subconscious, and some of it has just plain gone, crowded out by more recent experiences. But just pretend for a moment that you can remember everything from that afternoon. That's a tremendous amount of data, sorted, catalogued and analysed and, as stated above, discarded. Now string all those afternoons together and add in all the mornings and nights between the ages of, say, three and nine. Never mind the complete works of Shakespeare, or all twenty-six volumes of Encyclopaedia Universalis, they represent information that has been pinned down and sanitized. What we are talking about here is the accumulated