Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [29]
They followed Benny up the street, trying to copy the way she walked.
Lunarversity
The Doctor was knee deep in opera. Something he'd done while rummaging through Kadiatu's files had expanded the screen on the ceiling into a half-scale hologram. Now the bed floated over the orchestra pit with child-sized singers silently stamping around a stage level with his kneecaps. He still hadn't found the volume control and the way the violinist's bows kept poking up through the eiderdown wasn't improving his temper.
Nor was poking around in Kadiatu's database. She was, he estimated, six months from finishing the theoretical basis for a working time machine.
And it was all his fault, sort of.
Sensitive dependence on initial conditions - the butterfly effect.
A butterfly fans the air in Dakota and next year the people of Pontefract have to wade to work. An impossible causal chain that happens all the time but you never know which butterfly started it off. Such a small ripple in the Brownian motion of the molecules, such a drastic effect at the other end. And then there's me, thought the Doctor, dropping into human history with all the subtlety of a road accident. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later.
Simple to spoil her work, introduce a false premise into the complex chain of equations. Nothing too subtle, just enough to send Kadiatu running down a blind alley for fifty years or so. The human race wasn't due time travel until the botched sigma experiments of the thirtieth century.
He called up the passage dealing with flux instability within the containment field of the capsule. A minor change in the premise of one of the transposition matrices. It would make that avenue of enquiry look like a dead ringer for transtemporal propagation. The Doctor put his finger over the exact place. Push and it would interact with the sensor field which would send signals to the unit's CPU which would make micro-modifications within the lattice of suspended molecules that made up its memory storage. Do that and all of future history is secure.
Unless Kadiatu was supposed to discover time travel. In which case his interference could do things to the timestream that even a Daiek would think twice about. Perhaps time-travelling humans would be useful in some way.
Decisions, decisions.
Without taking his eyes off the screen the Doctor reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a coin. He flipped it into the air and caught it without looking. 'Heads you win,' he said and slapped the coin on his wrist. When he looked down it was at the profile of the young Queen Victoria complete with bun. The Doctor sighed and put the file back into memory. He examined the coin again. Inscribed below the queen's head was the legend Three Pennies. On the other side was another profile of Queen Victoria, only this one was grinning.
The Stop
The Dixie Rebs had their clubhouse in a disused health centre on Mississippi Plaza. Thirty years ago the projects were planned as a series of modular communities grouped around a central cluster of shops and amenities. The Plaza still had a general store but all the other units had long become a series of impromptu squats and catfood houses. A couple of skinny little boys were playing on the patch of razor grass that fronted the health centre entrance. The boys had transmitters wired into the collars of their Tshirts.
'Lookouts,' said Roberta.
The boys stopped playing and watched as the women approached. One of them touched a stud on his collar and whispered. Benny squatted down on her haunches so that her face was level with the boy's.
'What's your name?' she asked.
'Who wants to know?' asked the boy.
Benny slapped him once. Hard enough to rock the boy's head back. 'What's your name?' she asked again but the boy was crying.
'You shouldn't have done that,' said the other boy.
'He was rude,' Benny told him, 'and rude boys get slapped.'
'Billy won't like it.'
'Who's Billy?'
'Billy's the boss.'
Benny turned back to the boy who was still crying. 'You see,' she said sweetly, 'it always pays to be polite.'