Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [90]
They had another task: sometimes an animal, through starvation or opportunity or perhaps just plain old genetic imperatives, would start to attack and kill humans on a regular basis.
It became the task of the game warden, these people who professed to love animals more than anything, to track this animal down and kill it. The euphemism they used to describe these killings was 'problem control'.
I read the folder while drinking a bottle of something industrial. Most of it was technical specifications, page after page of what I barely recognized as a human genome chart. The Doctor had written helpful little notes in the margin, explaining which cluster of base pairs represented which particular antisocial tendency or superhuman capability. The last third of the folder contained details of how she was supposed to have been trained; an entire base was being built on Titan under conditions of strict secrecy. The security measures were impressive, most of them aimed at preventing anything escaping. I got the distinct impression that her makers didn't really know what it was they were creating. Just mixed up a cocktail of the worst aspects of humanity and hoped for the best.
I guess the joke's on me, isn't it, Doctor? I keep looking for some sign of the young woman I thought was Kadiatu and finding the animal staring back. I won't let you do this to me – she has to live. Otherwise everything I've said to you and to others was so much self-righteous poppycock.
I tried to imagine that I was telling Alistair about Kadiatu; she is his great, great, great, granddaughter (sort of) after all. She comes from a family of soldiers starting with him. All I got was a vague sense that I should buck up my ideas and pull myself together.
I can't sleep, even after another bottle of industrial. What are my options? I could leave her on the sphere, make an arrangement to have her watched. I'm sure that aM!xitsa would agree to that; there's definitely something more than scientific curiosity that draws the drone to her. No good: she'd escape, I know she would.
She knocked holes in the fabric of space-time, almost destroyed the entire universe. If I let her go, what will she do as an encore? According to the notes she automatically goes into kill mode at the first sign of danger. The first time someone takes a swing at her, bang, they're dead. And that first death will be my fault because I was the one that let her go. All the deaths will be my fault.
It's all those people I don't know that worry me. The ones that she's certain to kill once she starts travelling again. She's like a blaster with no stun setting. The inevitable consequence of my decision will be that some people will die, an awful lot of people in fact. That's a very high price for salving my own conscience.
No, I can't think like this. Kadiatu is a human being, she must make her own moral choices, must be allowed to make her own moral choices. I am not my sister's keeper.
Yeah, I'm sure the dead will be forgiving. 'That's all right,' they'd say, 'we were glad to give up our lives so that you could prove a point to the Doctor. Our only regret is that we have but one life to lay down for your conscience. Being brutally killed by a programmed psychopathic killing machine actually gave meaning to our existence.' I don't think so.
I'm going to turn out the light in a minute and drink something that House assures me will slap my alpha waves flatter than the Norfolk fens.
I have come to the horrid realization that maybe I'll have to problem control Kadiatu after all.
No wonder the Doctor sleeps as little as possible.
Extract Ends.
9
Cult Status
Give me a woman,
with a flat