Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48

by Borrowed Time # Naomi A Alderman

  Rory came and sat down next to her. He took her left hand in his and rolled up the sleeve.

  ‘I saw you had one of these,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think you’d… But you have, haven’t you?’

  Amy nodded.

  Rory put his arm around her. She didn’t resist. He rested his head on her shoulder.

  ‘Oh, Amy,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  She moved awkwardly. ‘I wanted to be in two places at once,’ she said. ‘I wanted to try to make everyone happy. To be a daughter and a wife and a friend and…

  and me.’

  ‘How much did you borrow?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Too much and not enough.’

  A little distance away, the Doctor was leaning against the fence watching dawn break over the Thames.

  Andrew stood next to him, the empty aerosol can of bug spray under one arm, the glass brick he’d taken

  from the store sticking out of his jacket pocket.

  ‘Did we find out anything useful, Doctor?’ said Andrew.

  ‘In the storage container?’ The Doctor shrugged.

  ‘No, not particularly. We know where they’re keeping the records, but we have no idea where the central time store is, or how to disable it. We don’t even know who let them into the Bank in the first place.’

  Andrew stared at the glass brick, the one with his name written on the front. ‘Might there be an answer in here?’

  The Doctor took it from his hand and looked at the hairline crack along the side. ‘If I could get inside it to take a look at the mechanism, maybe.’

  Andrew Brown looked at the glass box with his name “on. ‘I owe them 55,000 years?’ he said.

  The Doctor nodded.

  ‘And lots of other people do too? And probably even more than I owe?’

  The Doctor nodded again.

  ‘And if we find out who’s responsible and where they’re storing the time, maybe we can get everyone’s time back and none of this will have happened?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘And the information in here could help you find out?’ said Andrew.

  ‘Could be,’ said the Doctor. ‘No guarantees.’

  Andrew Brown hefted the glass brick in his hand, as if trying to decide how much it weighed. Feeling the value of every borrowed hour, everything he’d signed away without really realising how much he was giving up. The weight of a life.

  He raised his arm high. He was going to drop the block to the stone path, to shatter into tens of thousands of tiny gleaming shards.

  ‘No!’ shouted Rory, jumping up to grab his arm, wrestling the glass slab from him.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ said Andrew. ‘I made my own decisions, I have to take the consequences.’

  ‘No,’ said Rory, turning the brick over. ‘Not yet.

  Look.’

  On the base of the brick, embossed into the glass, in very tiny letters which looked darker green against the pale material, were the words ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  IF FOUND, RETURN TO THE OFFICE OF VANESSA LAING-RANDALL, LEXINGTON BANK.’

  Chapter

  14

  ‘So we do have to go back to the Bank,’ said Amy. She scratched at the watch on her left wrist. The skin around it was getting quite sore from all her worrying at it.

  ‘Not you,’ said Rory. ‘We want to keep you well away from those Symingtons and Blenkinsops.’

  ‘None of us can go there,’ said the Doctor. ‘They know us now. We won’t be able to sneak around. Unless…’

  ‘Unless?’ said Amy hopefully.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the Doctor. ‘We need to find Nadia Montgomery again. I need to take another look at her watch. But Andrew, we need you.’

  Andrew nodded. ‘I need to tell the others what’s going on.’

  ‘Well, that,’ said the Doctor. ‘But also to find out what’s going on in Vanessa Laing-Randall’s office…’

  Nadia drifted in time. Sometimes she was young again, so young that she felt well and strong. But those were only moments. There, and then gone. Sometimes she wondered if she simply imagined them. Perhaps the dream of being young was a delusion of being old. And her memory was so fragmented. She had no memory of growing old, but perhaps that was part of her madness too. She tried to figure it out herself, over and over, muttering her calculations, reminding herself that she was not, she was not, she was not crazy.

  She never wandered far from the Bank, was never able to. But sometimes kind people helped her. Like the kind young man who took her by the arm and said, ‘Nadia? Is that you? Nadia, Head of Marketing?’

  She almost recognised him, just for a moment.

  ‘Andrew?’ she said, but then the memory faded.

  He took her to Temple Gardens, where a green baize lawn led down almost to the Thames, as if someone had laid out a carpet. There were three nice young people waiting for her there with a thermos flask filled with hot chocolate and cheese sandwiches.

  ‘That shoe needs resoling,’ said Nadia to Amy.

  She’d told them what she’d done - as best as she was able. They were grateful, if a bit confused. She couldn’t tell it quite right, everything was muddled. Shoes, though, still made sense.

  Amy looked at the underside of her boot where the sole was paper thin. ‘Yeah well,’ she said. We’re all a bit the worse for wear, eh?’

  The Doctor was fiddling with Nadia’s watch. The thing let out sparks from time to time, and sometimes it vibrated so quickly that it seemed to almost vanish for a moment.

  ‘What are you doing, Doctor?’ asked Amy. I thought you already got my watch to mimic Nadia’s?’

  in

  ‘Mimic it, yes, yes that’s right,’ muttered the Doctor, holding his sonic screwdriver in his mouth while he tried to insert the end of a paperclip into the crack in Nadia’s watch. ‘But what this watch does isn’t the only important thing about it.’

  Amy and Rory exchanged a look - the look that said ‘Yes, he may be a Time Lord, last of his kind, travelling the length of time and space and being pretty sexy with it, but I almost never understand what he’s going on about and nor do you.’

  ‘Aha!’ The watch spurted a thin stream of silver sparks, and then stopped.

  ‘Hmm, maybe not.’ The Doctor removed his screwdriver from his mouth. This made him at least ten per cent more comprehensible. ‘The thing is, all those Symingtons and Blenkinsops are the same creature, right? At different points in its time stream.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Rory. He’d definitely understood that part. Probably.

  ‘So the reason that they ignore Nadia’s watch isn’t just because it often makes her invisible to them. It’s also that they know it belongs to her.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Amy.

  ‘They ignore her because they know her watch is broken. If we can get the field of her watch to extend to cover us, they’ll ignore us, too.’

  Nadia’s watch spurted out a puff of black gas. The Doctor waved it away, coughing. Nadia became rapidly younger, de-ageing by about ten years in a heartbeat, her wrinkles smoothing out, her hair becoming thicker, her back unbending.

  ‘Hmm,’ said the Doctor. ‘I didn’t mean to do that.

  Not quite there yet.’

  Andrew walked towards Sameera’s office. She was behind her desk, tapping away at what he was sure was yet another perfect presentation that would make his efforts look like a schoolboy’s homework. And, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her again, at the far end of the corridor, carrying some paperwork. How had he not noticed long before that she was in several places at once?

  That lots of people in the Bank were? Perhaps because that’s how they were all supposed to be. Everyone in the building was supposed to give the illusion that they could be in nine different places at the same time, that they could do fifty hours’ work in five, that nothing was ever too much. Everyone was supposed to pretend that the Bank was the most important thing in their lives and they always gave a mathematically imp
ossible 110

  per cent. ‘He’d thought he was the only one who was struggling. But now he looked he saw that half the people working on this floor had tell-tale bumps under their sleeves on the left-hand side.

  ‘You missed the meeting,’ Sameera said as he walked into her office.

  ‘The… meeting?’ It felt like a hundred years since he’d last been in this building. Or even fifty-five thousand.

  ‘There was a meeting you were supposed to be at this afternoon. Don’t worry, I covered for you.’

  ‘How much time did you have to borrow to do that?’

  said Andrew.

  Sameera looked at him, considering. Then she shrugged. ‘Nothing I can’t pay back.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Andrew. ‘You think so? Let me tell

  you something about their accounting system.’

  Nadia was 50 now, and crying. The Doctor just looked embarrassed. Rory fished a handful of paper napkins from the sandwich bag and gave them to her.

  ‘It’s always worst when I’m younger,’ she sobbed into the tissues. ‘When I’m old, I forget everything. I don’t know there’s anything to be upset about. But then, when I’m a bit younger, I remember.’

  Amy patted her on the back and looked glumly at her own watch.

  ‘I’m only 40,’ Nadia wailed. ‘I thought there was time for everything. Time to meet someone and settle down, maybe even have a family. And now look at me.’

  ‘There could still be…’ Amy couldn’t even finish the sentence. Nadia was getting older again in front of her eyes.

  The Doctor was still tinkering with Nadia’s watch. At last, there was a fizz of orange sparks which surrounded them all - Amy and Rory and the Doctor too - and then slowly faded away to nothing. Nothing except that, when Rory looked at his arm side-on he could see a faint glow still surrounding him.

  ‘There, got it!’ said the Doctor. ‘Of course, that does mean that… hmmm… and well need a…’

  Nadia stared at him, tears wet on her cheeks.

  ‘The Doctor will fix everything,’ Amy said to Nadia.

  ‘He always, always finds a way to fix it.’

  Nadia shrugged. ‘What’s he going to do, change the past?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Amy.

  ‘I just can’t stop thinking of everything I’ve lost,’ said

  Nadia. ‘AH the places I wanted to visit that I’ll never see, all the things I wanted to do with my life… the children I’ll never have…’

  The Doctor turned his head sharply and looked at her.

  ‘The children you’ll never… Yes, that’s very interesting.

  Very interesting indeed.’

  Sameera sat back in her chair with a heavy thud.

  ‘I did know,’ she said, ‘about the compound interest.

  I’ve tried to be careful.’

  ‘You have been careful,’ said Andrew. ‘More than me, anyway.’

  The Doctor had shown him the trick to making the watches show how much time you owed in total. The display of Sameera’s account hung in the air, glowing orange.

  ‘BORROWED TIME TOTAL SINCE LAST

  REPAYMENT: 5 DAYS, 5 HOURS. INTEREST TERMS: 5 MINUTES PER HOUR, PER HOUR. TOTAL TIME

  OWED: 35 YEARS.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Andrew softly. He’d never thought he’d feel sorry for Sameera, or even imagined they’d have much in common. In this building, where getting ahead was all that mattered, she’d always seemed like the enemy.

  ‘I tried always to pay it back after a few hours, I knew the interest would pile up otherwise,’ Sameera said. ‘It’s just, with this big new deal on and…’

  Andrew nodded. ‘We did this to each other,’ he said.

  ‘All those meetings where I felt like you’d be one step ahead.’

  ‘But I wasn’t!’ Sameera said. ‘Sometimes I had to

  leave to go to the loo to borrow the time so I could come back looking prepared!’

  ‘I did the same thing,’ said Andrew.

  Sameera nodded. ‘All those presentations where I kept trying to be just a bit better than you. All those client meetings where I just had to pull one more thing out of the bag…’ She sighed and stared out of her office window at the glass atrium sculpture. ‘We did this to each other. And now we’ve got to fix it.’

  Amy patted Nadia’s hand helplessly. She was about 60

  now, still getting older.

  ‘I don’t know how to stabilise her,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘The only way is to get that watch off her.’

  ‘This could happen to me too, couldn’t it, Doctor?’

  ‘Oh I think that’s very unlikely,’ the Doctor said, without much conviction. He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I rather think we have something else to worry about.

  Show me your camera again, Rory.’

  Rory pulled the useless Super Lucky Romance Camera out of his pocket. All it would do now was present increasingly pleading messages on its digital screen: ‘NEW CHARGING IS REQUIRED. NO MORE

  LUCKY ROMANCE MOMENTS UNTIL CHARGING.

  PLEASE TO RECHARGE!’

  ‘It used to have infinite battery life, didn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what they told me when I bought it,’ said Rory.

  The Doctor rooted around in his pockets. At last he found the bag that he’d left for himself in the storage unit. He held it up. It was plastic bag with the magazine article and a couple of batteries inside. Across the top of the bag, underneath the zip-lock strip, were the words ‘Time proof to a depth of 40,000 years.’

  ‘It’s a time-bag,’ said the Doctor. ‘Like a freezer bag, only more useful. Prevents the contents from being affected by the passage of time or - and this is crucial, pay attention - or by ripples in the space-time continuum.’

  ‘Ripples in the…’

  ‘If I put you in this bag, Rory, sealed it and then went into the past and killed your grandfather, as long as you were still in the bag you’d be OK. Of course, then you’d have to live the rest of your life in a plastic bag, but there are worse things. There’s a planet near Ursa Minor where they all have to live inside the stomach of a giant spinefish. The smell alone… So, could be worse, Rory, think of the upside! Where was I?’

  ‘A time-bag,’ said Rory.

  ‘Ah, yes, quite right. So this is a time-bag. While the article is in here, it’s protected from other changes in time. When we take it out, it won’t be any more.’

  ‘And then what’ll happen?’

  ‘I don’t… know. Interesting, isn’t it? Go on, have a read.’

  Rory looked at the article in the bag. It was a short news piece, ripped from a paper magazine dated to the year 5013. ‘Do they still have paper magazines in the fifty-first century?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘Some people still like them,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s probably edible paper, rich in vitamins and flavoured with the saliva of whoever wrote it. There’s a bit of a fashion for that for a while.’

  Rory wrinkled his face in disgust.

  ‘As if Big Brother is any more normal. Just read the article.’

  Rory read.

  It was an article about a prize being awarded to the inventor of ‘cosmic radiation power’. Professor Henrietta Nwokolo had been honoured, the article said, for the amazing innovations made by her and her team at Aberdeen University. The writer was full of praise for the amazing new power source. The article went on to say that teams in Japan and Australia had also been working on similar devices, but their versions were slower, and experienced sudden battery depletion.

  Underneath the article was an advert for Rory’s Super Lucky Romance Camera mentioning the Super Infinite Cosmic Battery.

  ‘OK…’ said Rory. ‘What does this tell us?’

  ‘No idea,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘And what’s going to happen if we take it out of the bag?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s try!’

  The Doctor unfastened the zip-lock. There wa
s a hiss, and a strange kind of movement on the page of the article, like the letters rearranging themselves as Rory watched. He pulled the article out and looked at it. It wasn’t much different. A bit shorter. It still started the same way: ‘Team working on Cosmic Radiation Power awarded Buffett Prize’ - but now the inventor was different, a professor at Tokyo University. And the praise for the invention was more measured - the technology wasn’t perfect, there were sudden battery depletions to contend with, but nonetheless it was a real step forward.

  The Doctor tipped the batteries out of the bag into his hand.

  ‘I think you’ll find those will re-power your camera, Rory,’ he said, ‘but maybe not for long, so be careful when you use them.’

  Rory nodded, and slipped the batteries into his pocket. He stared at the magazine. ‘But why did the article change, Doctor? I don’t get it.’

  The Doctor stared at the page. ‘I do,’ he said.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that the people who made the breakthrough in that camera’s technology never existed.

  They were never born. Your planet is losing its future.

  Piece by piece, the people are going.’

  Sameera and Andrew were knocking on doors. It wasn’t hard to work out who was using the watches, when they asked themselves. Who had suddenly had a burst of productivity over the past few months? Who had got in earlier than everyone else, left after everyone had gone home, but still wasn’t divorced? Who had they been absolutely sure they’d seen on the fifth floor and then, moments later, spotted walking out of the building?

  Andrew went to talk to a woman, Dorotea Kemal, who worked on the Scandinavian desk. He knew he’d seen her in the office working late on the very same night that he’d passed her laughing and joking with friends in a restaurant when he’d gone for a walk round the block. Sameera decided to approach Dan Logovik -

  an Australian in-house editor in his mid thirties who’d recently started to produce a huge volume of extra work.