by Andy Lane
And, thanks to the immutable laws of cosmic irony, which Rhys believed in as much as he believed in anything spiritual, that was the perfect time for Gwen to walk back into the restaurant.
THREE
Owen was whistling again.
At least, Toshiko assumed it was Owen. Jack was in his office, doing whatever it was that he did up there, Ianto was out in the little Tourist Information Centre they kept as a back entrance and Gwen had left, Toshiko assumed, to return to her interrupted meal with her boyfriend. It was just Toshiko and Owen in the central atrium of the Hub, and she wasn’t the one who was whistling.
And if she had broken the peace and calm of the Hub at night with something as crass as whistling, it would have been soft and mystical, not an out-of-tune whine which wandered up and down several octaves apparently at random.
She tried to block it out by concentrating harder on the alien device on the table in front of her. There was something about the lavender colour and the smooth curves of the metal that made her think of Japanese art: the surface was incised in patterns reminiscent of formal calligraphy, and the colour was reminiscent of her father’s favourite Hokusai etchings. It wasn’t from Earth, of course. Her brain was just looking for comparisons, connections, similarities. But it was oddly comforting, compared with the harsh, hard-edged technology she usually ended up examining.
Toshiko had started off by using a microwave imager to get a picture of what was inside the shell. And that’s how she thought of it: a shell protecting something delicate, vulnerable. The image she got was fuzzy, in shades of green and blue, and so she had turned to an ultrasound scanner, using the vibrations from whatever was inside to map out the interior structure. The results had been ambiguous: there were definitely voids within the shell, separated from each other by denser areas, but it wasn’t as clear as she had hoped. The transmission X-ray system which she had wheeled in, based on the kind of thing used in dental surgeries but with some significant improvements of her own, had just revealed a series of what looked like grey-white whorls and spirals that didn’t really help.
And that whistling was driving her crazy. Tuneless, atonal, and yet strangely mournful.
She glared over at Owen, but he was sitting with his back to her, oblivious. He had his hands behind his head, and he appeared to be leaning back and listening to something on his headphones. Didn’t he have any work to do? Didn’t he have a home to go to?
Looking at the images from the three separate imaging systems that she had employed to no good effect, letting her eyes skip back and forth from one monitor to the next, Toshiko felt her mind teetering on the edge of revelation. It was as if there were something momentous sitting just beyond her reach: she knew it was there, but she couldn’t find a way of getting to it.
Her eyes slid from the turquoise contours of the microwave image to the grey spirals of the X-ray, and she suddenly noticed a correspondence: a curve that started off in the microwave and then apparently stopped dead, but in fact continued on in the X-ray, appearing there out of a dark void. And once her brain had made that connection, others suddenly sprang out. How could she have missed them? There was a picture, there was a coherent whole, but not revealed through any one sensor. Working feverishly, she whipped the cables out of the backs of the various monitors and fed them all into a central image-processing server. It took her ten minutes, during which she was so busy she couldn’t hear Owen’s sad whistling at all, but when she had finished she had all three images being projected at the same time onto the same screen.
And there, revealed in all its glory, was the inside of the alien device.
And it was beautiful.
‘What the hell is that?’ Owen’s voice said from behind her.
‘It’s a composite image,’ she said without turning, ‘formed by combining the images from three separate sensors. By themselves, the sensors didn’t have enough resolution to be able to map out the interior of the device – each one could see a bit of the picture, but it was only when I combined them all that I could see the whole thing.’
‘Yeah,’ Owen said, dubious, ‘but what the hell is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Toshiko said simply. ‘But it’s beautiful.’
The image on the screen was a multicoloured structure in which there were no straight lines at all. What appeared to be a series of flat oval plates of different sizes were linked to each other and to a constellation of small spheres by cobwebbed connections, and behind it all were hints of a larger irregular mass.
‘I was expecting wires,’ Owen said. ‘A battery, perhaps. Would a battery have been too much to ask? Circuit boards, maybe? Or am I being old fashioned here?’
‘They’re there,’ Toshiko said, running her fingers gently across the screen, following the contours of the inside of the shell, ‘but they aren’t obvious. They follow a different design logic to the one we’re used to.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The devices we humans build tend to follow some simple rules,’ she continued, confident now that she was talking about the things she loved. ‘Wires carry current, but the current heats the wires up, which means that resistance increases and the current drops, so we make the wires as short as possible. That way we don’t lose too much power. The heat needs to dissipate, so we separate components as much as we can in order to allow some circulation of air. We use transistors to switch the current in different ways, and capacitors to store it up and discharge it in big chunks. But what if some alien devices were designed with a different set of rules? What if art was more important than power conservation? What if symmetry was more important than efficiency?’
‘That’s mad. Isn’t it?’
Toshiko shook her head. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘Look at it, Owen. Really look at it. What do you see?’
‘A mess.’ He moved closer, screwing his eyes up as he concentrated. ‘No, wait. OK, it’s still a mess.’
‘Relax. Don’t try to look at the screen: try to look beyond it.’
‘What, like those dot pictures? I could never get them.’
‘Try.’
‘OK.’ There was silence for a few moments. Toshiko could imagine Owen screwing his face up like a small child. Perhaps his tongue was even poking out between his lips. ‘Oh. Oh shit. Is that what I think it is?’
‘What do you see, Owen?’
He sighed deeply. ‘This can’t be right, but I think I can see a face. Inside that piece of tech. A fucking face!’
As soon as Gwen walked into the Indian Summer, she knew that something had changed.
It wasn’t just the fact that the place was almost empty and the waiters were standing around with tea towels, waiting for the last few diners to leave: it was more the fact that Rhys and Lucy appeared to be holding hands and staring deep into each other’s eyes.
A farrago of feelings bubbled up within her, rooting her in the doorway. Her legs seemed to be operating independently from the rest of her: they simultaneously wanted to run across to the table so she could slap their silly faces inside out, turn and stride out of the restaurant in a massive hissy fit, and collapse on the floor. Part of her felt like she wanted to be sick. Another part was telling her that it was all a massive misunderstanding, some trick of perspective that made it look like their hands were touching when they were actually miles apart on the table.
Rhys’s face, when he turned his head and saw her in the doorway, put paid to the ‘trick of perspective’ theory. His eyes widened, and she saw – she actually saw – the colour drain from his face. He pulled his hand out from underneath Lucy’s and the girl looked surprised for a moment. Then she turned her head to follow Rhys’s horrified gaze, and she saw Gwen in the doorway.
And she smiled.
Gwen was surprised to find that a sudden flush of anger was powering her legs to carry her across the restaurant to the table. For a moment, when she arrived, she wasn’t even sure what she was going to say. Rhys, on the other hand, see
med pretty sure that he wasn’t going to say anything until he knew what tack she was going to take.
‘I don’t mind you eating my food,’ she said to Lucy. ‘But don’t think you can do the same to my boyfriend.’
Rhys, to his credit, smiled, although it was a cheesy, uncomfortable grin. Lucy’s face creased into an exaggerated look of concerned horror. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I can see how it looks, but no! No, I was just telling Rhys about the problems I’ve been having with my boyfriend.’ Her gaze dropped theatrically to the table. ‘It’s been terrible. Rhys was just comforting me. You’re lucky to have him. He’s very sensitive.’
Gwen was torn. On the one had, she didn’t believe a word of it. On the other hand, she wanted to. Partly because, after the events at the nightclub, she just didn’t have the energy for a fight. And partly because, if she and Rhys ended up having a heart-to-heart about the state of their relationship, lots of stuff was going to come spilling out. She just about had the moral high ground now, and she didn’t want Rhys to feel that he had a genuine grievance.
So she decided to do something that was, she had realised during her time with Torchwood, a defining human characteristic. She was going to pretend she hadn’t seen anything.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long night. I need to get to bed. Lucy, can we put you in a cab?’
‘It’s OK,’ she said, forestalling Rhys who had opened his mouth to make some gallant offer to walk her home, or offer her use of the spare room for the night. ‘I parked round the corner. I’m OK to get back.’
She got up, and put her coat on. Looking at Rhys, she said, ‘Thanks for letting me talk. I needed someone to listen. See you in the office tomorrow?’
‘Er… yeah. Goodnight.’
And with that, she headed for the door. Rhys, to his credit, didn’t watch her elegantly skinny arse wiggling in her too-tight jeans as she went. Instead, he turned to Gwen and said something that gained him several brownie points in her eyes, and saved him from a night on the couch.
‘I feel like a man who’s just been pulled back from the edge of a cliff.’
‘You know, you really don’t want to be thinking about “going down” right now. Even in passing.’
He laughed, and it was a genuine laugh, not a forced one done for effect. ‘Gwen—’ he started.
‘Rhys, we don’t have to talk about it. We really don’t.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said. ‘Which is probably why we need to talk.’
They moved toward the door together with the kind of sub-telepathic harmony that partners get after a while. ‘Lucy is cute—’ he continued.
‘You mean “hot”.’
‘No, you’re hot. She’s cute. And she’s got some real problems with her boyfriend. He’s doing heroin, and he’s stealing her stuff to pay for it. And she’s never sure what kind of mood he’s going to be in when he gets home, which is becoming more and more infrequent. She’s been reaching out for sympathy, and I just happened to be there. That thing with her holding my hand – I didn’t know she was going to do it, and I was trying to work out how to get my hand back when you walked back in. I’m really sorry it happened. So – are we OK?’
Gwen reached out to take his hand. ‘No, we’re not OK, and it’s my fault. I’m never home. I don’t spend enough time with you. And when we are together, it seems like all we do is argue. Rhys, I don’t want it to be like this. I love you, and I don’t know how things got like this.’
He squeezed her hand as they left the restaurant, walking into the humid, petrol-scented air of Cardiff’s city centre. Behind them, the waiters set to work like worker ants, clearing the restaurant in record time. ‘I love you and you love me. That’s what’s important. Anything else is a trivial problem that we can sort out with enough chocolate and massage oil.’
‘Rhys, I really love you.’
‘I know. Oh, by the way – is it OK if Lucy comes to live with us for a while?’
Owen gazed, fascinated, over Toshiko’s shoulder. ‘That can’t be a face,’ he breathed. ‘I mean, it just can’t. Can it? Tell me it can’t.’
But it was. At least, it was something approximating a face. Not even as close as the Weevils got, but the same basic shape, the same proportions, the same general relationship of features.
Toshiko was whistling to herself: a tuneless lament that grated on his nerves. He tried to ignore it, and process what his eyes were telling him.
As a biologist – or, rather, as a trainee doctor with a solid knowledge of human anatomy – Owen had assumed that life on other planets would follow a completely different course from life on Earth. Not that he’d thought about alien life on a regular basis before he joined Torchwood, of course, but it was the kind of thing that occasionally bothered him in those stretches of time, late at night, somewhere between the fifth bottle of San Miguel and the tenth, when his mind could raise itself from thinking about sex and consider some of the deeper mysteries of the world. Evolution meant that everything from bilateral symmetry to five fingers and five toes was the result of random mutation that, by sheer fluke, conferred a slight advantage over other random mutations, which meant that their possessors would have a slightly greater chance of not dying, and therefore a slightly greater chance of passing their mutated genes on to their offspring. And that advantage was entirely down to local conditions: the chemistry of Earth, the geology, the weather, the predators, everything. Take any alien planet – assuming there were such things – and any or all of those conditions could be different. And that meant other, different, random mutations would confer a slight advantage, and get passed on. Radial symmetry might be the preferred design option: an entire ecosystem of creatures that looked like starfish, perhaps, with eight, or ten, or fifteen arms. Or no symmetry at all: protean creatures with eyes located at random locations all over their bodies. The chances of two arms, two legs, two eyes and all the rest occurring as a random evolutionary outcome on an alien planet were infinitesimally small.
At which point, Owen usually stopped thinking about evolution, and random mutations, and alien life, and started worrying about whether he was going to get the chance to pass his own genes on that night.
Since qualifying as a doctor, and then later joining Torchwood, Owen had discovered that the basic human form was more like the norm across the universe than the exception. Not exclusively – there were creatures out there that were about as far from human as it was possible to get – but there were more beings that could pass for human in a dark alley than not. Which, for a biologist like him, raised the question: why? What was it about the universe that favoured a human-like design?
And now, as he looked at a picture of a form of life probably never even seen before by humanity, encoded somehow into a series of alien electronic circuits, all those late-night undergraduate thoughts came back to haunt him.
That lonesome whistle was really beginning to grate on his nerves. He wanted to say something to Toshiko, to suggest that she shut up, but Owen worried about the way Toshiko reacted to things sometimes. She internalised a lot. Not like Owen, who let everything out as often as possible. She pondered. Brooded. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her withdraw even more. It wasn’t that he cared, particularly, but she was a key part of the team. Owen didn’t want to be blamed if she went over the edge.
The face that looked back at him and Toshiko from inside the alien device was differently proportioned to humanity: shorter and wider, something like a hammerhead shark. There were two eyes – at least, there were things that might have been eyes – placed at extremes of the head. A vertical slit right in the middle of the face could have been a mouth, or perhaps a nose. Or something completely different. The image finished at the neck, but Owen would have bet a lot of money on the probability of there being arms and legs somewhere beneath the head, all joined up with a central torso.
Scale was impossible to ascertain – that head could have been the size of a house, or the si
ze of a microbe – but Owen was pretty sure that if you put the alien being and him side by side they could have looked each other in the eye.
‘So is that all this is?’ he asked Toshiko. ‘Just a portrait? A snapshot of the wife?’
‘No,’ she said quietly, still studying the image on the screen, moving her finger across it as she talked. ‘This is a functioning device. There is a power source just there: some kind of battery, I think. And I believe this area over here to be an amplifier, although I’m not sure what is being amplified. Judging by the way the circuits are routed, some kind of energy is being detected here, and the amplified version is transmitted here. The picture of the creature is a side effect. Something incidental to the primary function.’
‘Incidental?’
She shrugged. ‘Have you ever seen cheap radios shaped like…’ She paused, casting around for an appropriate analogy. ‘Elvis Presley! Or David Beckham!’
‘No,’ Owen said quickly. ‘Never. I’ve never seen a radio shaped like David Beckham, and I’ve certainly never owned one.’
Toshiko glanced back over her shoulder at him, and her expression was disbelieving. ‘I understand they were unaccountably popular, once,’ she said. ‘The circuitry works no matter what shaped case it’s in. The shape of the case is a decoration. And that’s all this is – a decoration. An incidental addition.’
‘But with Elvis Presley radios, the decoration is on the outside. This image is on the inside. In the circuitry itself. It is the circuitry. Who was it designed for?’
‘Perhaps it was a joke,’ Toshiko said. ‘Something the designer put in that they knew nobody else was ever going to see.’
‘Or perhaps the race that the designer belonged to had some kind of X-ray vision. Perhaps everything they designed had a picture inside, rather than outside.’
‘I suppose anything is possible,’ Toshiko said. ‘Look, Owen, may I ask you something?’