In here was quite the opposite. There must have been a side of the building, and the street, they had missed, for this room opened out into a huge space, all of it filled with greenery; bathed with light.
Palm trees and pot plants filled the space until it felt as if they were outside . . . and Donna saw, as she moved forwards, that there was an outside; that the room extended into an open courtyard with a vast garden beyond; there were raked gravel paths in the centre and plants all around. The pagoda-roofed buildings extended around a square. The greenery in the room they were in simply extended through the space out into the exterior. In one corner was a rock pool, in which fat orange fish darted lazily. A tiny, exquisitely fashioned wooden bridge arched over the babbling stream. Plucked music was playing, strange and low to Donna’s ears.
Looking more carefully, Donna could see there were large screen doors that could be pulled in to separate the inside from the outside if it rained. Otherwise, it was an entirely harmonious marriage of the indoors and the outdoors, a soothing sound of running water coming from a little stream that fed the pond.
Down by their feet was a low lacquered table, set with mats and several lacquered teapots of varying sizes, from tiny through to an enormous specimen that appeared to be made of jade.
The woman blinked at them. She didn’t speak, merely indicated the set table with her head.
‘Who are you? What’s going on? Who’s Ian?’ said Donna immediately, her heart still racing from their narrow escape.
But both the Doctor and the woman hushed her with a look.
Very calmly and in total silence, they sat down cross-legged and took their places at the low table. The Doctor genuflected his head a little as the woman unhurriedly began to heat up the water for tea. It boiled over sweetly scented cedar wood that burned on a little brazier.
Donna was almost bouncing with frustration. But time passed and still nobody spoke, and so, instead of sitting down like the Doctor, she went out into the garden to walk around.
In the garden everything was ordered.
The noise from the street was muffled here amongst the patches of wild grasses that were sown at careful intervals, and retreated into gentle white noise. The babble of the stream was calming; so were the paths that led through the garden in gentle twisting knots. Every corner of the path seemed to lead to another perfectly framed vista against the red pagodas or carefully raked stones; squares of gently weaving lavender scenting the air, or straight-planted rows of bonsai trees. The only thing she noticed that stood out was something shaped like a manhole cover, that seemed to be exuding a faint blue light. Or perhaps it was simply the way the sun dappled through the leaves.
Donna glanced back into the room behind her. Framed by the outline of the screen doors, the Doctor and the lady were now involved in a small intense ritual of moving cups; sieving green tea through ornate strainers, and, finally, pouring it from a great height, where it gently bubbled down into the exquisite china.
As she watched she felt an unfamiliar feeling steal over her; calm. Her heart rate slowed. Her shoulders untangled themselves from up somewhere around her ears.
The Doctor and the woman were performing an act that had not changed for thousands of years. It gave Donna hope, somewhere, somehow, that it would not change for thousands more.
Calmer now, Donna re-entered the light-filled room, and even though still not a word had yet been spoken, she felt welcomed back at a new, slower pace. She then tried to sit down on the cushions provided in front of the low table; something the Doctor had managed with no little grace, but to her felt like she was getting into trouble in primary school and being made to sit cross-legged at the front of assembly.
Finally a handmade cup of steaming, fragrant tea was set in front of her. There was a bud in it. As she watched, the flower unfolded itself in the hot water, and the soft scent of jasmine spread in the room. She watched what the others did and then carefully, respectfully, with both hands she lifted the earthenware cup and took a small sip. The taste was delicate, unusual and highly refreshing in the sunlit room. Suddenly Donna felt that she wanted to lie down and sleep for a hundred years. She had never felt so far away from the frenetic modern world.
‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor, bowing his head deeply, and Donna nodded in agreement.
‘Ji Woo,’ said the woman.
‘Donna Noble,’ said Donna.
The woman bowed her head. ‘And . . .’ she said. Her eyes were dark and penetrating and she turned her head to stare straight at the Doctor. ‘I have a theory,’ she said, ‘as to who you are. Are you aware of a Clive Finch from England?’
The Doctor shook his head.
‘He had a website.’
The Doctor looked at her.
‘Do you control all the websites in the world?’ asked Donna.
The woman shook her head, smiling. ‘Oh no. Some pique my interest more than others.’
‘But you deal in websites . . .?’ Donna realised she had only the haziest idea how the internet actually worked.
‘I deal in exchanges,’ said the woman, sipping her tea. ‘Between the old world and the new. I cannot help the new world coming, Doctor. Nobody can. I am here and I facilitate.’
The Doctor blinked. ‘You form it, every single person on Earth. You forge your own future.’
The woman shook her head. ‘Oh, I am merely caught up in the slipstream.’
The Doctor gave her a shrewd look. ‘I think we both know that’s not true.’
Donna glanced at the locked steel door. ‘Why are all those people lined up back there, like they’re doing school detention? Who are they?’
‘This is the safest, the most private, the fastest internet space on Earth,’ said Ji Woo. ‘Here we have a completely clean space. It is utterly unhackable by anybody outside it. We have our own cable, our own network, our own completely sealed-off private online universe. Nobody can get in and nobody can get out. Only very specially selected clients may apply. The cost is . . . astronomical. But there is no remote access. To anything. Everyone must be in the same space at the same time, so nobody who is involved could ever possibly infiltrate anybody else without us instantly being aware. No hacking. No undercutting. Physical presence only.’
‘Who are they?’ said the Doctor.
Ji Woo shook her head and carefully poured more tea. ‘Why on earth would we ask?’
‘And you don’t care what they talk about, what they’re doing in there?’
‘I’m just providing a service, albeit highly specialised,’ said Ji Woo. ‘Like every other internet provider in the world. I’m not responsible for what they do.’
Donna frowned. ‘I don’t buy that.’
‘Do you use an internet provider?’
‘Yeah, but . . .’
‘Well then I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do indeed “buy that”.’ Ji Woo slightly tittered, and hid her mouth with a napkin. ‘You probably give your date of birth away for free Wi-Fi.’
‘She does,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m always telling her.’
Donna pouted.
The Doctor turned back to Ji Woo. ‘You know something has come. Something is here; something is inside your “clean” pathways. You have a hitchhiker. You know what the Rempaths are?’
Ji Woo shrugged carefully and did not reply.
The Doctor set down his cup. ‘They are travelling along your roads, Ji Woo. Your cold, brutal pathways. Your silk roads, your shadow paths: each of them paved with the crushed skulls of the innocents who got lost along the way.’
‘So you would kill the road builders, Doctor? Perhaps the architects too, just to be safe?’
‘If I can’t stop this, Manim, I won’t have to. The Rempaths will do that for me.’
‘Stop it?’ laughed Ji Woo. ‘You can’t stop it, any more than you can stop the wind. So many people out there, Doctor. Wanting so many things. Wanting, wanting, wanting. Terrible things they want. Terrible things. And they get so
cross. So angry, so frustrated when they don’t get what they want. So I give them what they want; that is all.’
‘Have you tried raising a child that way?’ said the Doctor, bitterly. ‘You won’t like what you get.’
‘Have you?’ returned Ji Woo, without looking up from her cup.
There was a long silence.
‘You run this business,’ said the Doctor, finally. ‘But you don’t own it. I reckon you couldn’t pull the plug here even if you wanted to.’
‘Why would I want to?’ said Ji Woo. ‘History comes and history goes, but some of us remain. I am Korean, Doctor. Very little scares me.’
‘Tell me who runs this place.’
Ji Woo smiled. ‘Ah, Doctor. I don’t employ Ian for nothing.’
‘You don’t employ him at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘Someone else pulls the strings of all of this, don’t they? Otherwise you’d probably have employed someone with more of a brain in his head.’
‘Yeah, you should tell him to watch out for sword kicking,’ said Donna. ‘Seriously, that’s like, day two of sword school.’
Ji Woo blinked. ‘There are many, many Ians,’ she said. ‘Consider him our entry-level expendable. Although Clive Finch suggested that isn’t how you operate.’ She held his gaze. ‘And yet you are still considered highly dangerous. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Isn’t it?’ said the Doctor.
Donna looked suddenly into the corner of the room. Behind a vast and green bank of ferns, several CCTV cameras were monitoring the main room and the street beyond – where, she now noticed, people she had thought were restaurateurs scanning the street for custom were clearly lookouts. They had been expected all along.
She looked back into the room. The rows of people were still typing, intently, each buried in the private universe their screens afforded them, each its own world to them where they carried out their business, whether drug running or slave trading or terrorism . . . who could say? Who knew? Someone started and glanced behind them; as if they had felt a draft.
Her eye was caught by a younger girl, beautiful, who looked South American. She was dressed immaculately, very high-end white designer gear, in which she fitted perfectly; with a bag with a huge branded logo; shoes that cost more than Donna had spent on her wedding dress, which was just as well, she thought, in retrospect.
She looked more closely. The woman was frowning at her computer screen. Her elegantly shod leg in its tight white jeans was kicking out, a repeated nervous tic.
The Doctor and Ji Woo were still pouring tea, sitting in a perfect facsimile of politeness. Donna moved closer to the screen. The woman was typing now furiously, her face a mask of anger.
‘Doctor,’ said Donna, in a warning voice.
He glanced up. Ji Woo’s head turned.
Now the woman was gesticulating, shouting at the screen. Her leg accidentally kicked someone else on the opposite side of the desk. Now that man had stood up, and was shouting back at her. She stood up too.
The warm sunlit room chilled suddenly; as if a cloud had appeared. Even the cooing birds seemed to go quiet.
It happened so fast.
There was no noise on the CCTV. But you didn’t need noise to know that the delicate diplomatic balance that held sway amongst that room of the misbegotten had gone.
Now you could see people’s faces, filled with rage and fury. Spittle flew in the air. Two men in the far corner squared up to one another. It was becoming obvious that blows were about to be struck. Ian turned his head towards the camera in consternation. He obviously had orders not to discipline his paying customers. Ji Woo looked at it intently.
A very small, young-looking chap who Donna had hardly noticed on the end of the row darted up, frightened suddenly. He charged towards the door. Before he got there, someone had tripped him up.
‘Oh my . . .’ said Donna.
‘Open the door,’ ordered the Doctor, now standing, trying to pull open the steel. ‘Open it now. We can still save some of them.’
On the CCTV in the corner one man grabbed at his chest. His mouth opened in a soundless howl and he clutched himself, froze, and then began to fall. The rest of the people in the room completely ignored him, continuing to fight one another. Someone bit someone else. Ian was pounding on the door now.
The Doctor grabbed his sonic and worked on the locked door, but Ji Woo simply leaned over – her face now had lost all its grandmotherly friendliness and was a pale white-painted mask – and pressed her fingertip on a control panel. Instantly, great big sheets of steel began to descend at high speed from the ceiling, covering the walls.
‘No!’ shouted Donna. The pounding on the other side of the door grew louder.
‘Let me in! Let me in!’ came Ian’s voice, desperate now. There was an increasing hubbub.
The Doctor frowned, desperately working on the door. But the metal sheets were falling faster and faster every second. The beautiful sunlight and the garden were vanishing like a dream. The room darkened.
‘Doctor!’ yelled Donna, and at last he gave up his fruitless efforts on opening the door, his face in agony.
Instead he turned in consternation towards the back part of the room, the side that led out to the garden. The steel had nearly hit the ground. He glanced around the room quickly, weighing and measuring at lightning speed in his mind. Finally he grabbed the largest, beautifully glazed jade teapot; the precious antique, patinated by generations of traditions over the years; a sacred household object, handed down through families.
He grabbed it and hurled it beneath the crushing metal where the doors opened on to the garden. There was a juddering, tearing noise, and the wall continued to descend, the teapot giving, and softening. Until, as the room watched, it buckled a little . . . and then there was a judder and a sound of crunching gears and, not half a metre from the bottom, the door froze. The rest of what was clearly a panic room was now sheeted in metal.
Ji Woo strode towards them both. ‘I’m afraid you may not leave now,’ she said.
Donna could no longer watch the horrifying CCTV footage. She couldn’t bear it any longer and leaned over and covered the screens with her jacket.
Ji Woo carefully bent down to pull out the teapot from the still grinding metal wall.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ shouted Donna, and grabbed another pot. She lifted it up high.
‘This is boiling!’ she said, dashing to her and holding it up. ‘You move and it’s going right over your face and . . . melting it. Ugh.’
Ji Woo made a small smile. ‘Getting angry, are we? I hear that is not terribly useful.’
‘No,’ Donna said. ‘I’m completely calm about what I have to do to immobilise you.’
The Doctor had already dashed over and pressed the fingerprint screen to raise the doors. Nothing happened.
Ji Woo looked at him. ‘You’re not me,’ she said, the hint of a smile playing on her lips.
‘Thank goodness,’ said the Doctor, roughly. ‘Come here and press it, please.’
‘And condemn myself to death?’
The Doctor blinked. All three of them in the room suddenly were silent, looking at one another.
‘Oh, Ji Woo,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m so sorry. But you know. Whatever happens. You are already condemned to death.’
There was a pause.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘You knew all along. You facilitated this.’ He looked her straight in the face. ‘You have more than one paymaster, don’t you? Those . . . wretches . . .’ He indicated the door beyond. ‘Well. They’ve gone. But there’s someone else, isn’t there?’
He indicated the screens, then crouched and looked at the manhole shaped disc in the garden, which was now pulsing its blue light.
‘Perhaps they’re a little . . . unusual, maybe? Or maybe you haven’t met them? Just through an intermediary?’
Ji Woo’s face sagged suddenly, and she seemed older, but tried to look resolute, even with Donna holding up the kettle. ‘He will know my discr
etion was absolute.’
‘Oh, he won’t care,’ said the Doctor.
‘I shan’t let him down.’
‘Too late,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s simply too late.’
There was a buzzing from the other room of computers starting up. As they did so, the manhole began to pulse even more strongly with the blue light.
‘You didn’t need me to tell you what Rempaths are,’ he said, coldly. ‘You knew that all right. You just didn’t know whose side I was on.’
Ji Woo’s expression didn’t change.
‘Oh, Ji Woo,’ said the Doctor. ‘Never yours.’
The Doctor looked at the jade teapot creaking under the metal wall and back at the round figure of Ji Woo. ‘You can’t fit under that gap.’
‘I’m sure you’d say I don’t deserve to.’
Already, the CCTV cameras were showing a mass of men in uniforms – not police, and not national soldiers either, but something more akin to a private army – amassing on the road outside the shop. Their faces were grave.
‘Go,’ said the Doctor to Donna. She squeezed herself under with some difficulty, but was relieved when he didn’t offer to give her a shove. In fact, when she glanced back underneath, she saw him looking back at Ji Woo.
‘I walk a lonely road,’ she was muttering to herself.
The Doctor nodded as if he understood, and perhaps he did.
Ji Woo moved herself back to the low table. The beautiful tea pot they had used was still there. Ji Woo sat back down again, blinking rapidly, and, with a trembling hand, poured herself a last cup of tea.
said the Doctor, but Ji Woo looked around only once, and merely shook her head.
The Doctor glanced for the last time at the darkened room, the seated woman, the horrifying tableau – still, now – of what was left of the inhabitants of the computer room, seemingly frozen on the CCTV screen. Then he heard the rapping and barked ‘Open up’ commands of the militia men.
Doctor Who: In the Blood Page 6