The Wintertime Paradox

by Dave Rudden

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ the Time Lord said.

  ‘Things have to change.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘It is …’ Davros paused. ‘It is not easy to say this. It is harder to do it. But I have to admit that there is truth to what you say. You can continue to thwart my Daleks forever, but that will never change them. They will only hate more. Harm more aggressively. They know only one solution to being stopped, and that is to lash out more violently than before.’

  The waiter placed the Doctor’s drink before him, and the Doctor wrapped his long fingers round it. ‘That’s why I contacted you,’ he said. ‘I’m scared, Davros, of what might happen in the future, should we continue to clash.’

  The wine smelled sweet. Delicate. Davros looked at the menu sitting in front of the Doctor. He could ask for some. He still possessed smell and taste faculties – they were useful for laboratory work. He could have a drink with the Doctor. His old enemy. His old friend.

  It was Christmas, after all.

  ‘I’m scared too,’ he said instead. ‘Something has to change.’

  The tone of his voice made the Doctor meet his eyes, even as the first of the Daleks disengaged their cloaking field. Shoppers began to scream.

  ‘Oh, Davros,’ the Doctor said. ‘Really?’

  ++ EXTERMINATE! ++

  10

  ‘I see you got it working,’ the Doctor said.

  They were surrounded. More than a hundred Daleks, some afloat, others hunched amid the flattened remains of stalls. The merchants and shoppers had all fled, and Davros could tell, even without his scanners and screens, that his children ached to turn and fire, to chase moving prey.

  As always, however, the Doctor’s presence had an incredibly focusing effect.

  ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Davros said. He shook his head, enjoying the moment. ‘Working with the Krillitane, Doctor? For shame.’

  ‘Rebels,’ the Doctor said flatly. ‘A splinter group who want no part of their people’s expansion. I was helping them find a way to hide. A way to escape the Brood-Mother’s eternal wars.’ He took a long sip of his wine. ‘Families disagree sometimes.’

  ‘Except mine,’ Davros spat. ‘Is that it?’

  ++ CREATOR ++

  Davros knew. He knew there could be no emotion bar hate in the voice of a Dalek, but he let himself imagine that his children were proud.

  ++ YOU HAVE DELIVERED OUR GREATEST ENEMY TO US ++

  ‘Yes,’ Davros said. ‘Well. ’Tis the season. Isn’t that right, Doctor?’

  And there it was. The change. Davros had seen it before, and it was as profound as a regeneration. The tiredness vanished. The lanky shoulders rose. The chin lifted as if preparing to take a blow, or a bow. The Doctor had an audience now, and the compressors began to wheeze in Davros’s chest.

  ‘Do you know what’s good?’ the Doctor said. ‘Do you know what’s really very extremely good about this situation right now?’

  ++ YOU ARE SURROUNDED ++

  ++ YOU ARE UNARMED ++

  ++ NOTHING IS GOOD ++

  ‘I’m always surrounded,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m always unarmed. That’s where I do my best work.’

  He lunged to his feet and the front row of Daleks flinched.

  ‘You know that, don’t you, boys? That’s why you haven’t fired. You’re afraid I’ve got some scheme or fail-safe, and the second you fire on me is the second that trap springs.’ He grinned. ‘Tell me I’m wrong.’

  The silence stretched for too long before Davros broke it.

  ‘This is foolishness, my children. He comes defenceless to these truces –’

  ‘Exactly right,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘No allies. No backup. Not a biscuit. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that unnerving?’

  ‘No!’ Davros snapped. ‘It isn’t! Stop. Stop this!’

  The Doctor continued as if Davros hadn’t spoken. ‘But this is Christmas, and I’m going to be generous. Here’s my counter-offer.’

  ‘Counter-offer?’ Davros practically shouted. ‘My children are not stupid, Doctor. Stop this theatre –’

  ++ THE CREATOR WILL BE SILENT ++

  Davros froze. ‘Who said that? Who said that to me?’

  Not a single Dalek responded. Their focus on the Doctor was absolute.

  ‘Families at Christmas,’ the Time Lord said. ‘They’re always the same. Tell you what, boys. I’ll let you kill me. I won’t resist.’

  He turned towards Davros, and his smile had disappeared.

  ‘Just kill him too.’

  Davros laughed, high and cracked and wheezing. ‘You must be truly desperate, Doctor.’ He shook his head. ‘My children, this has gone on long enough. Kill the Time Lord.’

  It was difficult, even for Davros, to read expression on a Dalek but, as the neon signs fizzled and the wine bubbled and boiled over in its mulling pot, it seemed that the hundred Daleks surrounding them might be suddenly lost in thought.

  ‘Children,’ Davros repeated. ‘Kill him.’

  With a low whine, fifty Daleks turned to point their weapons at Davros.

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No. You can’t. You wouldn’t.’

  ++ TO KILL THE DOCTOR ++

  ++ TO ACHIEVE VICTORY ++

  ++ THERE IS NOTHING WE WOULD NOT DO ++

  ‘This is how you built them, Davros,’ the Doctor said. ‘This is how they were made.’

  ‘Do not do this, Doctor. Do not do this.’

  The Doctor spread his hands, a charlatan professing empty palms and innocence just before the climax of a trick. ‘I’m not doing anything. This is on you. From the beginning, this was always on you.’

  ‘Doctor, please –’

  The Daleks fired.

  11

  Later, just a little later, when the smoke had cleared, the Doctor finished the last of his wine.

  Sirens were blaring in the distance. The authorities of Alacracis IV, no doubt having detected the sudden absence of Dalek life signs, were rushing to show their control of the situation. Merchants were already returning, picking their way through the rubble. Shoppers too, lifting bags dropped in the chaos. Christmas, re-establishing itself in little spreading islands of calm.

  The cinnamon scent of smoke still leaked from the incense burners, mingling with the smog from the broken Dalek husks.

  ‘You didn’t have a fail-safe,’ Davros said eventually.

  ‘Of course I did,’ the Doctor said. ‘I had you. Tell me, do they know you build them to self-destruct if they ever turn on you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does it happen often?’

  ‘I need to take precautions,’ Davros said numbly. ‘My children are unpredictable.’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor said. ‘They’re not. Merry Christmas, Davros.’ He placed his cup back down on the little table. ‘I hope we do not meet again.’

  12

  It was the day after Christmas.

  Davros had instructed his servant creatures to bring the Dalek corpses on board. It wouldn’t do to have the wider empire learn about his precautions, and the workshops deep within his command ship always needed new resources. He had Dalek models dating back to his very first experiments on Skaro, and there was usually much calm to be found in delving into his designs – assessing, improving, perfecting.

  It felt like … conversation.

  Now, though, silence seemed preferable, broken only by the whirring of Davros’s chair as he drifted through the cluttered metal halls. It was time travel, in a way. Not the graceful sailing of the Time Lords, but a creaky, halting passage through the monuments of a failed life.

  There, the dissected remains of a Supreme Dalek. Here, the arachnid chassis he had never quite been able to make work. Sensor globes and shoulder slats, dome lights and eyestalk after eyestalk after eyestalk, all looking at him with blank, rote hatred.

  Distantly, he noticed that his engineered servants were following him, cowering and clicking at each other, unused to silence after a defeat. Rage
was more common. Spitting curses. Making promises that next time the Doctor would not thwart him.

  Next time.

  Next time.

  ++ TO ACHIEVE VICTORY ++

  ++ THERE IS NOTHING WE WOULD NOT DO ++

  Nothing, except listen to their father. Nothing, except trust him to know what was best.

  ‘Is this all I am?’ he whispered. ‘Is this all I am for?’

  Davros, the last Kaled. Davros, the scientist who had once dreamed of holding the universe in his hand. Davros, the father chasing the love of the creatures he had himself designed never to feel it.

  ++ WE DO NOT REQUIRE YOUR HELP ++

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ A strange feeling was blooming in his chest. ‘Live without me. Fight without me. Die without me. Ungrateful children. Undeserving. I contain more than you.’ A fierce grin cracked his features. ‘I always have.’

  The words made him feel young again.

  ++ CREATOR ++

  The voice thundered through the command ship.

  ++ WE REQUIRE YOU ++

  ++ WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED ++

  ++ WAR ON GALLIFREY ITSELF ++

  ++ A TIME WAR ++

  ++ A FINAL WAR ++

  ++ WILL YOU AID US? ++

  For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of Davros’s chest compressors wheezing in and out.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice cracked with a father’s pride. ‘Yes.’

  3

  Inflicting Christmas

  ‘My name is Adeyemi Lawal. Let me show you what I can do.’

  The audience went wild. It wasn’t the words in themselves. Friedrich Zas had the morning slot, and he arrived on the stage via the prototype of Earth’s first teleporter. Last night it was Lilith Decrois, who made her entrance by breaking both the world record for parachute-jumping out of a space shuttle and the skylight of the Convention Centre Dublin. Compared to that, simply stepping on to a dark, empty stage to deliver your presentation comes across as practically shy.

  This was We Create Futures 2045, after all. At an event like this, you go big or go home.

  Over the last twenty years, however, Adeyemi Lawal had made those simple words a battle cry. Let me show you what I can do. They were the mission statement of her company. They were emblazoned on the side of her satellites. When she began her life in the public eye, just a ten-year-old on VidTube, scavenging parts from the bins behind electronics stores and rebuilding them in her bedroom, they were the words she used to kick off every stream. Not a boast, she’s fond of saying. A promise.

  ‘I think a lot about memories,’ she said, and a corner of her mouth quirked, just a fraction. This was, as any of her long-time viewers knew, the closest she ever came to smiling. ‘Memories are what make us who we are. They are the foundations of our personalities. The basis for our relationships. The source of our hopes for the future. They are the filter through which we perceive. Every memory, no matter how small, has a purpose. Everything has a purpose. And, if it doesn’t have a purpose –’

  ‘We give it one!’

  This too was one of her sayings. As soon as she said it, a thousand teenagers shouted it back.

  ‘And yet,’ she continued, ‘memories are fleeting. They fade. They get confused. They blur into each other like ink on a damp page. What are we without our memories? What are we when they’re gone?’

  She fell silent and the room fell silent with her. Motes of dust spun in the single spotlight. A hundred articles were already being written, analysing every word, every pause, every detail of Lawal’s short white hair and her sleeveless smock and the circuitry tattoos standing out pale on her dark, muscled arms.

  ‘But what if we could save them? What if we could inhabit them? What if we could make them real enough to touch?’

  Cameras flashed as an attendant ran out onstage to hand Lawal a circlet of metal. It was thin and silvery, too delicate to be called a crown.

  ‘This hippocampal conduit taps directly into the memory centres of my brain, recording and copying every detail of a specific moment. The sounds, the smells, the textures. We do not just remember with our minds, my friends. We remember with our senses and our bodies and our hearts and our bones.’ She donned the circlet. ‘It is hard to put a memory – a real memory, a tangible one – into words, even to yourself. But, with the help of the minute hard-light holographic emitters placed around this room, I don’t have to. I can make it real.’

  She snapped her fingers, gunshot loud, and just like that Christmas bloomed.

  A thousand gasps were suddenly visible, as plumes of smoking breath disturbed air that was now filled with swirling, drifting snow. Tinsel wove itself out of nothing, inching across surfaces like caterpillars, and wreaths flowered on every door. The stage was no longer empty. Instead, Adeyemi Lawal was now standing in the centre of a cosy little living room. It wasn’t anything fancy – certainly not what you’d imagine as the home of one of the world’s greatest inventors. The hidden holographic projectors had not just replicated the sagging couch and the mismatched chairs, but the slightly balding tinsel and the cloudy stain halfway up a wall where someone had inexpertly painted over some mould.

  However, for the reaction of awe it elicited, it may as well have been the Palace of Versailles. Even as a child, Adeyemi Lawal was famously protective of her privacy. Whole forums were dedicated to puzzling out details of her life, from obsessively investigating serial numbers on the components she stole to attempting to work out her country of origin by the plug sockets half-glimpsed in her videos. All to no avail, of course. Figuring out something Adeyemi Lawal doesn’t want you to know would mean outsmarting her.

  And now, casually, she had invited them right into her head.

  ‘This is Christmas in the apartment I grew up in,’ she said, after an instant’s pause, ‘and I can call it up whenever I want. A frozen moment of time. A memory made real enough to touch. A present to myself.’

  Then, to yelps of surprise from the audience, Adeyemi Lawal – inventor, philanthropist, master engineer, a woman so poised and precise that a single raised eyebrow can earn its own news cycle and stock fluctuation – took two steps and flung herself on to the couch like a kid just home from school. The hard-light projection shimmered, before stabilising once more into worn fabric and sagging springs.

  Again, that lightning flash of amusement.

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Doctor, why are we here?’

  Bill Potts had been to some amazing places with the Doctor. She’d walked on the frozen River Thames two hundred years before her own birth, and had run for her life under alien suns. She’d faced Dryads and Ice Warriors, and capitalist algorithms in space. She’d even had a date ruined by the Pope.

  Compared to all that, you could be forgiven for wondering why Dublin’s convention centre had been next on the Time Lord’s list. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the place. It was quite a nice building, actually – a gargantuan glass cylinder ringed by neon, jutting up from a concrete base into the sky at a forty-five-degree angle like the focusing ring of some huge sci-fi space cannon. (Sci-fi space cannon had been Bill’s first guess as to why they were there, in fact. So far, unfortunately, that did not seem to be the case.)

  ‘We Create Futures, Bill,’ the Doctor said, pointing at the huge banner overhead. ‘Which, yes, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense seeing as everybody creates a future if you wait long enough, but it’s a catchy title for an inventors’ conference all the same.’

  He peered through his sunglasses at the milling crowd. Bill had almost got used to him wearing the glasses constantly. This was made easier by the fact that, somehow, they’d managed to find a crowd of people that the Doctor didn’t stand out in – which was sort of a miracle in itself.

  The convention centre’s foyer – the base of that huge glass cylinder – was packed to groaning with hundreds of people. Most were teenagers; thrilled and nervous in equal measure, some in school uniforms and some in what Bill cou
ld only describe as ‘inventor chic’ – clothes as colourfully mismatched as the boxes of scientific equipment they carried. Then there were the parents, who mostly just looked nervous; laden down with more equipment, with presentation boards and flipcharts and schedules they checked about once per minute, hurrying their charges into one line or another for registration.

  ‘Everyone here’s an inventor?’ Bill said. ‘Some of them look like they’re still in school.’

  ‘That’s why I like it,’ the Doctor said. ‘We Create Futures is where young scientists gather to impress some of the biggest companies and innovators in the world. I’ve been meaning to come for years. Every teenager here is hoping to be selected and sponsored. Oh, look at this!’

  A cluster of drones was dancing through the air, assembling themselves into a single robot before breaking apart again without missing a beat. The Doctor raised his hands, stopping just short of touching them.

  ‘Wireless hive mind, compressed-air hovering system, totally green energy – fantastic!’

  The fourteen-year-old girl operating the controls went pink.

  ‘And then, over here – come, come!’ He bounded – actually bounded – across the display-room floor, dodging between the crowds to a booth where a set of complicated graphs and equations danced across a screen. ‘This is …’ He paused, peering closer. ‘This is … What is this?’

  The young man behind the booth glanced up from his notepad. ‘An algorithm proving why time travel is impossible based on paradox theory, extrapolated string fusion and Wittgenstein’s secret love of poetry. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it. It’s for Adeyemi Lawal, not –’ he indicated them lazily with a hand – ‘you know. Civilians.’

  The Doctor looked at the graph. Bill looked at the Doctor.

  Finally, he gave the young man a slow, wide smile. ‘Marvellous. Wonderful work. Very good. Although …’

  ‘Although?’

  The Doctor tapped one of the equations. ‘Here. You’ve forgotten to carry the two.’