Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [78]
‘Ready for access,’ said the voice from the speakers. The voice of the computer.
‘Can’t you improve on that?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ said the Doctor.
Benny shrugged disdainfully and took the keyboard from him. She rifled among a pile of computer accessories in an old shoebox and selected a mouse. She plugged it into the keyboard and moved the cursor around the screen until she found the sound icon. She clicked on it and the voice on the speaker said, ‘Interactive speech sample, testing.’
Benny clicked through a menu of options. ‘Testing,’ said the voice, sounding young and virile, then old and frail, then altering to voice samples of various well‐known personalities. Finally Benny got it to sound like Cary Grant, but as if Cary had been drinking mescal for a fortnight in a Tijuana dive, and she passed the mouse back to the Doctor.
‘Satisfied?’ he said.
‘These small things are important. Now what are you up to?’
‘It looks as if you got about as far as you could pursuing warlock in New York. I’m starting our own investigation here.’
‘Waiting for instructions,’ said the computer in its drunken Cary Grant voice.
‘Access all data on the warlock file.’
‘Warlock accessed,’ said the computer.
‘How come it knows about warlock?’ said Benny. Despite the comic voice she felt a sudden chill crawling down her spine.
‘I’ve typed in everything we know,’ said the Doctor, ‘which isn’t very much. But it’s about to become a lot more. Cross‐reference, please.’
‘Please?’ said Benny. ‘You’re talking to a computer.’
‘It doesn’t do any harm to be polite, even to machines. Some of my best friends are machines.’
The Doctor leaned forward, the coloured light of the computer screen on his face, two tiny identical screens glowing in his eyes. ‘Why is it taking so long?’ said Benny.
‘It’s making connections. Relating the facts we have on warlock to everything else in its memory.’ The Doctor made a spreading gesture with his hands. ‘Like the roots of a tree growing and reaching out through a rich loam of data. It’s checking every file, interrogating every other machine on our network. Look, it just hit one of the mainframes.’ He pointed to a huge metal box on the other side of the garage, trailing wires and spattered with mouse droppings. Benny saw a row of valves on the box suddenly come to life in a warm orange glow, revealing dead leaves stuck between them.
‘I didn’t know that thing worked.’
‘Ah, computers were built to last in those days.’
‘Cross‐reference continuing,’ said Cary Grant. ‘Subject: warlock.’ An old reel‐to‐reel tape recorder sitting under a pile of greasy rags began to buzz and its spools turned, gradually working up to speed. Now the dark garage was full of glowing technology. A Bakelite television flashed alive with a milky green light on its bulging screen. Benny almost expected to see Eisenhower making a speech on it. She took a closer look and saw a row of figures flickering rapidly across it, an endless stream of zeros and ones rippling past.
‘Nice one,’ she said.
‘Cross‐reference complete,’ announced the drunken Cary Grant. ‘Ready for questions.’
‘We need to know more about this drug warlock,’ said the Doctor. ‘And by the way, you can adopt a more conversational tone.’ He himself spoke in an easy casual voice, as if he was addressing a real person who was somehow lurking in the garage unseen. Benny felt he was overdoing it a bit.
‘Okay,’ said Cary, suddenly relaxed and friendly