Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  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, seemed 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, walk
ing 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 size 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?’

  ‘Yeah, what is it?’

  ‘Could you please stop whistling?’

  That took him by surprise. ‘I’m not whistling. I thought you were whistling.’

  ‘I am not the one who is whistling. I assumed it was you. It is the kind of thing you would do. That, and singing. And breaking wind.’

  ‘Tosh, I promise, I am not whistling.’

  ‘You might be doing it without realising.’

  ‘So might you.’ He took hold of her shoulder. She tensed under his grip. ‘Turn around. Come on — turn around.’

  She turned on her stool, but for some reason would not look him in the eye.

  ‘Tosh — look at me. Am I whistling?’

  Her gaze rose to his mouth. ‘No, Owen,’ she said. ‘You are not whistling.’ Her face tensed as realisation caught up. ‘But I can still hear whistling.’

  She was right. Owen could hear that low keening noise as well, a mournful threnody that threatened every now and then to break into a tune but never quite made it. The kind of noise someone might make if they were working, concentrating on something, half-remembering a tune.

  ‘Gwen’s gone…’ he said.

  ‘And Jack is in his office, and we wouldn’t be able to hear him from there. And besides,’ she added, ‘he does not whistle. Not ever.’

  ‘Well if it’s not you, and it’s not me, and it’s not Gwen, and it’s not Jack…’ He left the rest unsaid, but he gazed into the darkness at the edges of the Hub. ‘What about Ianto? Is he still out the back in his little cubbyhole?’ he asked, thinking about the interface between them and the rest of the world. Th
e man who acted as gatekeeper and general office manager for Torchwood. ‘Does he ever whistle?’

  ‘I have never heard Ianto whistle.’

  ‘Then the wind? Tell me it’s the wind.’

  ‘It’s the wind,’ Toshiko said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘It’s not the wind,’ Owen said. ‘It’s one of my big complaints about this place — no breeze. I keep telling Jack we need air conditioning.’

  He nodded towards the dark depths of the Hub. ‘Do you think we should…’

  Toshiko nodded. ‘I think we should. Definitely.’

  Together, they moved away from the brightly lit central area of the Hub, and into the shadowy outer areas. As far as Owen was concerned it was like moving backwards in time. In the centre, the high-tech equipment and bright lights, not to mention the metal-backed waterfall that continued on down from the Basin above, gave the Hub a twenty-first-century feel despite the brickwork and the remnants of old pumping equipment. But as they moved further away, along one of the many curved tunnels that led away from the centre, the crumbling masonry and the massive, curved arches always made Owen feel like he was passing back through the twentieth century and into the bowels of the nineteenth. The architecture made him wish he was wearing a top hat and tails. Jack the Ripper should be prowling around there somewhere. Prostitutes in frilly knickers should be showing their wares on the corners.

  ‘I think we’re going the right way,’ Toshiko said, and she was right. The whistling was getting louder, like an AM radio searching for a signal.

  They turned a corner, and as they saw what lay ahead the whistling suddenly stopped.

  It was the area where they kept Torchwood’s occasional unwilling guests. A series of archways had been closed off with thick armoured glass, forming isolated cells. Riveted steel doors at the backs of the cells gave access to a connecting corridor. It was where the Torchwood team kept any visitors who really shouldn’t be allowed to wander around. Wander around the Earth, that was, not just the Hub.