Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

by Mark Speed

  "Are you, like, not afraid that Trinity's going to eat your cat?"

  "Trinity is the cat."

  Trinity opened her jaws and gave a large meowl. Kevin whipped his hand away.

  "I think she likes you," said the Doctor. "And not as a foodstuff, either. That's a relief. Particularly for you, I suspect."

  The Doctor had insisted Kevin wash his hands thoroughly in anti-bacterial soap in the downstairs bathroom, then given him a cup of hot chocolate for the shock he'd suffered.

  "I think I recognise some of the artists you have on your wall," said Kevin, as they descended the stairs to the cellar. He'd never met someone this well-to-do; nor had he been in a house like this one – not as an invited guest, at least – and was struggling for conversation. "Those kinds of prints can be very expensive, can't they?"

  "Prints? Those are originals."

  "But I swear I saw a something like an Old Master, and maybe a – what's-his-name? – a van Gogh. Something in that style, anyway."

  "Oh, Vincent spent a few years just down the road in Brixton. Surely you knew that? His uncle got him a job at Goupil and Cie, the art dealers, who then transferred him to their place on the Strand. Walked to work every day. He was happy here, for a time. Such a shame when Eugénie rejected him. He'd done the odd sketch, so I told him it would be good therapy – take his mind off things. We kept in touch. I sent him some woollen colour swatches after he moved to Arles, and he sent me that portrait back in return. I was mortified – poor chap was on his uppers by then. I sent him enough rent money for a quarter. Probably blew it on absinthe. You can't meddle too much in the lives of others."

  "He sent you a portrait of you?"

  "Of course. Very much the done thing in those days. Right, if you'll sit here for me, please." The Doctor pulled up a second chair in front of a large oak desk. The only item on it was a laptop.

  Kevin sat down and looked around the bare, white room with its flagstone floor. He was glad Trinity hadn't joined them. "What's the phone box for?" There was a traditional red British telephone box in the corner of the room opposite to where they'd come in. It was in pristine condition. The red paint seemed to pulse with the deepness of its red, and the glass panes reflected the white walls so brightly he couldn't see inside.

  "Can you just concentrate and stop asking questions?"

  Kevin swung his chair round to look at the screen of the laptop.

  The Doctor adopted a sober tone. "Look, we need to get to the bottom of this. You tried to hack me, but you also tried to hack someone else. They didn't like it one iota, and they were going to make you pay for it. Now, I need to know who it was. Clear?"

  "But why should you care?"

  "Because they also hacked me. I know who you are, but I don't know who they are. No offence, but I think they are a considerably greater threat to me than you are. Now, think back to what you were doing."

  "Well, you know, I was just, like, surfing some stuff on the dark web, you know."

  "Come on, hurry up. How did you come across me and my system?"

  "Oh, I could see there was all this activity. An IP address somewhere in Dagenham. Something looked a bit odd."

  "What?"

  "I've never seen code like it before. People have styles. It just seemed... I dunno. Alien."

  "Go on."

  "Well the characters wasn't even recognised by my system. You know, the characters wasn't supported by any font I could find."

  "Not even something that supported Ancient Greek, Cyrillic script, Arabic, Thai, something like that?"

  "Nah, nothing. I parsed it in all these fonts and it was all just nonsense."

  "And so you did what?"

  "Chopped it into binary and started crunching."

  "And?"

  "And it still didn't make much sense. Then I realised a big chunk of it could be turned the other way and used as graphics."

  "Turned the other way? What do you mean?"

  "I sorted it into blocks. There was a repeating bit of code. Did I mention that?"

  "No; a critical detail you missed out. Never mind. Go on."

  "It was a map."

  "Of?"

  "I don't know. I only got part of it."

  "But you saved it?" Kevin nodded. "We'll look at it later. Now, that was the passive thing you were doing. What was the active thing that made them hit back?"

  "They were snooping around an IP address in Streatham Hill, using the Dagenham thing as a proxy. I mean, what's something of that kind of industrial strength interested in something around my 'hood for?" He saw the Doctor wince at the thought of being considered in the same neighbourhood as himself. "Well, we's all south of the River, innit? No one loves us."

  The Doctor sighed. "You're right. North Londoners will never get it. Keep going."

  "So I hacked them trying to hack you. So it wasn't really that I was hacking you indiscriminately, or anything. I was kinda hacking them hacking you."

  "Hack not, lest ye be hacked."

  "Sorry?"

  "Go on, Kevin. Go on."

  "And your system was using the same sort of code, except that I couldn't convert it to graphics or nothing."

  "At that stage, neither my system nor theirs would have been using graphics."

  "And then I realised that the whole reason I could see any of this in the first place was that they'd been using the Dagenham address as a proxy but using me as a masking IP all along. I was on the inside, if you see what I mean."

  "Which is why I couldn't see their IP address."

  "And that's it. End of story. Next thing I know, I'm shut down. So what do you reckon?"

  There was silence for a few seconds, whilst the Doctor thought. "I have a cousin in Dagenham," he said. "I do hope he's alright. You see, this," he indicated to his laptop, "is an antique."

  "No it's not, it's a tasty bit of kit, that."

  "Kevin. It's an antique. Well, okay, it's not an antique. Technically an antique has to be at least a hundred years old. But what I mean is that it's really primitive. This is to my sort of computing what flint axes are to a machine gun."

  "Nah, you don't know –"

  "Take it from me, lad. It's Stone Age. I just use it as a convenient interface. Now, what could be better than to hide behind a curious young man who's interested in conspiracy theories, and happens to live within walking distance? Let's have a look at your map, shall we?"

  "It's on my computer back at home."

  "The entire contents of which I have here."

  "That's theft!"

  "Kevin, another little saying for you: He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. You were lucky to have intercepted the graphics because the rest of it would have been gobbledegook to you. Or anyone else, for that matter. Here we are." An image resolved itself on the screen.

  "Yeah, that's it. It's a map. Not like any map I've seen."

  "That's because it's a geological map, Kevin. Let me just fiddle with a few of these files." The Doctor ran a secondary program. "There you are. A 3D map of... of the geology of an area of Essex."

  "What's all them coloured layers?"

  "Those are rock strata. See, on the top there, is what's called the alluvial layer. That's the soil and clay laid down at the end of the last Ice Age. Underneath that you've got successive layers of older formations, from the blue clay through which the Tube system is built, down to sandstone, shale, and what have you."

  "So why's someone looking at that?"

  "You want to map it to see if there are valuable minerals down there. Coal, for example, or oil. In this instance, the data seem to have been stolen from a company which was interested in shale deposits."

  "Like shale gas."

  "Oh, you do watch the news. Good man."

  "I don't get it. Someone who's interested in shale gas is interested in hacking you."

  "A couple of obvious things here, Kevin. First, you might notice a small dotted area of some complexity if I zoom in... like so."

  "
Yeah, gotcha. Looks like plans for something underground."

  "Exactly. We don't know what, though. The second thing is that when you try to hack someone like me you're generally not merely interested in hacking."

  "I was."

  "Yes, well you're just insatiably curious. If you hack someone like me you're interested in neutralising me."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Because whoever did it had already hacked my cousin. They were using his machine."

  "You mean your cousin has a computer like a machine-gun too?"

  "If we're sticking with that analogy, yes."

  "You recognise the code?"

  "Yes, it's Gaelfrey."

  "Gallifrey? You're Dr Who, innit?"

  "No. I'm not Dr Who. I'm Dr How. And it's not Gallifrey." The Doctor's tone switched in an instant from patient to irritated. "I don't want to hear that word in this house. Or anywhere around me. Understood?"

  "Jesus, Doc. Sorry, man. Like, I didn't realise you was so sensitive."

  "Sorry. I overreacted. You weren't to know."

  Kevin twisted awkwardly on his seat. "Look, I need you to level with me. You're like... You're like the Doctor, innit? And that." He pointed at the phone box. "That thing over there is like the TARDIS."

  Doctor How sighed deeply. "Yes, and no. I am a Doctor. There is no the Doctor, except in fiction. And except in one person's head in particular." He spat out the last sentence with some bitterness, but regained his composure. "Despite my assertion to the contrary, you think I'm Dr Who, don't you? A real-life Time Lord?"

  "Yeah, man. It's like way cool."

  "No, Kevin, it is not way cool. It is not even – as you mistakenly say in your street patois – like way cool. It is an enormous responsibility. A huge burden. Yes, a pleasure at some times, and it does occasionally have its privileges. It serves well my taste for art, for example. But most of the time it is bloody hard work. Do you understand me?"

  "Like don't have a cow. I was just asking."

  "Forget everything you know – or think you know – about Dr Who and Time Lords. It's a fiction. Do you understand?" Kevin nodded. "It's a fiction taken up unwittingly by the BBC, touted by a megalomaniac back in the Sixties. He's made my job a dozen times more difficult, and nearly trashed the entire universe into the bargain."

  "So is that your –"

  "No, it's not my TARDIS, Kevin! That's a misnomer."

  "A...?"

  "A misnomer." Kevin looked at him blankly. "It means wrong name. It's a misnomer put out by the BBC. TARDIS is actually a very rude word in my native language and nearly one in yours if you changed the 'a' for a 'u'. A certain someone, who will remain nameless, thought it would be terribly amusing. According to the BBC, TARDIS is supposed to mean Time And Relative Dimension In Space." The Doctor was now ranting wildly. "Can you believe the sheer gall of these people? Like they actually know, like they understand how the physics works?" The Doctor glared at Kevin, who shook his head.

  "Let me tell you what it's like. It's like a troop of monkeys – and I mean monkeys, like baboons; not chimpanzees, not even apes – coming up to your very sophisticated saloon car with individual climate-control for each passenger, and a hi-fi system that would fool a bat. As you drive your state-of-the-art car through a safari park this troop of purple-bottomed baboons comes up to your car and calls it "Oog". And then – and then –– then, they have the cheek to first of all capitalise the entire thing, so it's not Tardis, it's T-A-R-D-I-S, just to spell out the first letters of exactly what these monkeys think the physics is that they can't even begin to comprehend. And after that they march down to another baboon who calls himself a lawyer and they register it as a trademark. So if I wanted to write my own biography, my autobiography, and I wanted the boneheaded human reader to understand the concept by way of using the word TARDIS, some baboon with a Technicolor™ bottom specialising in intellectual property law could demand money with menaces through the good courts of baboon society. And all this," spluttered the Doctor. "And all this after I saved your – forgive my crude colloquialism here – after I have saved your sorry collective Technicolor™ asses on more occasions than I care to remember."

  Silence hung in the air. The Doctor was breathing deeply.

  "And was that thing you used...?"

  "No. It's not a Sonic Screwdriver. Such a thing does not exist. How in God's name could it? How could you possibly have something working on sound waves in the vacuum of space?" The Doctor slammed his fist on the desk.

  "You has like got issues, hasn't you?"

  The Doctor slowly closed his eyes, then reopened them. "Yes," he said quietly, "I have issues. I have issues about this and many other things. First of all, it's Gaelfrey. A script-editor misheard it and renamed it Gallifrey, probably because it didn't sound quite right for use on early evening Saturday television. Second, it's not a TARDIS, it's a Spectrel. That stands for Space Expanding-Contracting Time Relationship. I only use a capital for the first letter, because I consider it a proper noun, and no longer an acronym. I only call it that because it sounds nice in your language and gives you a set of words you can easily remember. It doesn't actually explain the physics any better than the word TARDIS, but I find that if I don't at least attempt a fancy name that sounds like a vaguely convincing – albeit absurd and nonsensical – explanation, then you humans don't trust it. Third, it is a Tsk Army Ultraknife. I will explain some other time just how idiotic it would be to call something so sophisticated a Sonic Screwdriver. Clear?"

  "Yes, clear, boss."

  "Boss?"

  "Just a turn of phrase. Respect, innit?"

  "Now, as it happens, fate has thrown us together. I recognised your thumbprint on the back of one of my Turners upstairs."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean your thumbprint is on the back of one of the pieces given to me by the painter J. M. W. Turner."

  "How –"

  "My system scanned your prints and matched them. Oh, don't worry about the damage. It's history. And I was reconciled to it long ago."

  "But I never touched your Turner! How could I have?"

  "That's quite literally another story, Kevin. You and I have to get through this one first."

  "You mean...?"

  "Yes, you're my new assistant and it looks like we're destined to have a series of adventures together. Welcome aboard. Please, call me Doctor. We have work to do."

  "Wow, this is so cool, man!"

  "I keep telling you that it is not cool, Kevin. It is highly dangerous. Oh, and if you think you're going to wander around telling all and sundry about your new position, you're very much mistaken."

  "But can I not tell my Mum?"

  "I suppose she has a right to know something, yes. But be careful what you tell her."

  "Hang on just a second. Have you, like, had assistants before, yeah?"

  "A few, yes."

  "So, like, where are they now?"

  "Dead, mostly."

  "Dead?"

  "You know, old age. For the most part."

  Kevin goggled at him. "For the most part?"

  "Yes, for the most part." The Doctor patted him on the shoulder. "Stick with me and do as I say and you should be okay. Before I forget, we'll start by giving you a couple of hundred quid for some new clothes. Here." He handed Kevin a wad of notes from his wallet. "For God's sake don't spend a penny of it on what you call bling. Clothes only, and I shall want to see itemised receipts. Understand me?"

  "Yes, boss. Doctor."

  The filling station had run out of diesel at around seven-thirty at night. A customer had been filling the tank of his SUV when it had run dry after just a few litres. Just seconds earlier, the indicators had flashed a low-level warning. Mr Patel, the station's owner, had thought it was an error, given that the bunkers had just been filled that morning. If a member of his staff had been on duty at the time he'd have thought he'd been duped – conned out of a delivery. But the gauges had indicated that his tanks h
ad been filled with the same amount of diesel and petrol he'd signed for.

  This had left only one possibility, and it filled him with dread. Unfortunately, the seriousness of the incident had meant the involvement of the fire brigade because the only rational explanation was that the diesel bunker had suffered a catastrophic failure. If that were the case, his insurer was going to face a hefty bill. It wasn't just the repair of the structural damage – there was the clean-up bill to consider. The surrounding ground would be contaminated, and would probably need digging out. He'd be out of business for months, at least. If it had leaked into the sewers then there was the potential for a massive explosion.

  It was now ten o'clock, and he was standing on the other side of the police cordon watching the fire crew flush the drains with industrial detergent to reduce the fire risk. He was thankful that he wasn't in a residential area, and that he didn't have a couple of hundred displaced households pouring their ire on him. All he could do was watch the figures on the forecourt and wait for any news.

  A police patrol car pulled up onto the forecourt and a sergeant got out. "Alright, Hughesie?" said Steve. "Makes a change, eh? No one hurt. No motors."

  "I was going to ask how long you're going to be," said Sergeant Hughes. "We've got a hell of a big diversion."

  "Just about to take a look inside. Got a specialist coming in from Tilbury for a butcher's. Refinery fire officer. Private, so we'll have to charge him out of budget."

  "I suppose you don't get many of these."

  "Serious business, ruptured fuel bunker. Think back to the Buncefield explosion in 2005. The petrol one seems to be intact, but there's always the danger it'll go. Diesel ain't quite so bad, but petrol – whoof!"

  "What caused it?"

  "Search me. Happened very fast from what I hear. You'd expect a slow leak – a crack, something like that. This is pretty new, too. Mr Patel over there said it's no more than four years old. So if one bunker's failed suddenly then you have to think in terms of something big like subsidence. But the thing is that the concrete's reinforced, and a good six inches thick. Enough to stand on its own. You could take one of these out and crash a car into it, I should think. We don't get earthquakes here, but they're designed to withstand them."