by Doctor Who
They stopped at a corner. A wooden water wheel was connected to a barrel. Lene leaned over and drank, inviting the Doctor to do the same. As he drank, she started speaking again.
‘She chose this time so we could study the Neanderthal people. Discover exactly why they died out. And there are lots of animals to 60
research, and we can take a look at our own human ancestors. But it’s really only a test. There’ll be many more studies. This is just a start.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said the Doctor, trying to keep the note of worry out of his voice. ‘And what else have you got lined up? As if I didn’t know, I mean.’
‘Travel back to times with more people about. There are lots of questions Chantal wants answered. What caused the collapse of the European Union? Who assassinated the Mage of Toronto, and why?
There’s so much we don’t know, so many gaps. We might even try going back to the Digital Age. Think what Chantal might learn from that!’
‘You keep coming back to Chantal,’ said the Doctor as they set off skipping again. ‘Aren’t you interested in the project?’
‘We all had interest patches implanted before we left,’ said Lene, ‘so of course I’m interested and enthusiastic. We all are.’
‘Good,’ said the Doctor.
‘For Chantal,’ added Lene.
The Doctor was about to remark on this when Lene suddenly stopped skipping and took her arm away. She swayed on her feet, put her hand to her head.
‘Are you OK?’ asked the Doctor.
She snapped out of it, smiled and took his arm again. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, as if nothing had happened. ‘Look in here.’
She led him through a low door into another barn, where a row of workers sat at typewriters watching a bank of black-and-white television screens.
‘We’ve got hidden cameras wired up to collect information. We have to hide away down here most of the time, as we don’t want to disturb the people up top. Chantal says if we all went up and mixed with them we’d ruin the experiment.’
She pointed to one of the screens, which showed a murky monochrome view of Neanderthal people gathered around a fire in the heart of the forest. ‘That’s the Neanderthal camp. Quite lively, them.’ She then pointed to another screen, which showed a cave opening in a sloping hillside. ‘That’s where the nearest humans live.
61
They must be asleep right now. Sometimes they don’t get up till about two in the afternoon. To tell the truth, Doctor, they don’t do very much.’
‘ Quelle surprise,’ muttered the Doctor to himself. ‘You’ve been outside, though?’
‘Once,’ said Lene. ‘I went on a trip to collect specimens of flora.’
‘And?’ the Doctor pressed her, trying to get a reaction. Any reaction.
‘It was all right,’ said Lene. ‘I found out quite a lot.’
‘For Chantal?’
‘Of course.’
The Doctor frowned. He was beginning to get an idea about these people. Now he needed to confirm it.
‘But you weren’t passionate, excited? You weren’t dying to get out there into another time, be one of the first to leave a footprint in the soil you were never born to tread?’
Lene shrugged. ‘Just work, isn’t it? And I had to get back. Chantal was having some drinks and I wanted to wear my new blouse.’ She teetered about for a second, grabbing the edge of a table to steady herself.
‘Lene, what’s wrong?’ asked the Doctor.
He watched her tap another code into her name badge. ‘It’s fine, I’m fine. I can work for a bit longer, but I’m not gonna be exactly brilliant.’
‘You should put your feet up,’ said the Doctor.
‘Why would I do that?’ asked Lene. ‘Sorry, Doctor, I’m going to terminate soon anyway.’ She pulled herself together and beckoned him out of the door. ‘Come on, there’s more to see.’
The Doctor stopped her. ‘You what? Terminate? Do you mean you’re gonna die?’
Lene giggled. ‘That’s a funny old word.’ She reached out and playfully chucked the Doctor under the chin. ‘You know what? You sound like a Refuser, you do.’
Rose had decided to tell the truth. At least Quilley behaved like a human being, even if he was the kind who invaded your personal 62
space.
‘The early twenty-first century. . . ’ mused Quilley.
‘Yeah,’ said Rose. ‘Is that good or bad? And could you get your breath out of my face?’
Quilley stepped back. ‘A time traveller from the early twenty-first century. . . ’ He stopped and pointed at her. ‘My child. . . you put your jacket in there.’ He gestured to the washing machine. ‘Why?’
‘It’s a washing machine,’ said Rose.
‘A washing machine,’ Quilley repeated. ‘So not a votive offering to the goddess Maria Vidal, then?’
Rose shook her head. ‘What gave you that idea?’
Quilley waved a hand airily. ‘This is a small selection from my collection of historical artefacts. I’ve studied their designs and possible functions for many years. I dress in the manner of the past. I brought some of these objects here to make myself feel at home. Many of them, I think, come from your time. Which must’ve been very much more advanced than I thought if you had time travel.’
‘We didn’t,’ corrected Rose. ‘It’s only me that does that.’
‘How marvellous!’ boomed Quilley. ‘Well, I got that right, then.’ He hobbled over to his collection and indicated the discs on their spindle.
‘Now, what are those?’
‘CDs, DVDs,’ explained Rose.
Quilley frowned.
‘You play them.’
Quilley shook his head. ‘Please explain.’
‘They’ve got music or films on them.’
‘On them?’ Quilley looked baffled. He took one from the spindle.
‘So they aren’t counters in a game? I thought you. . . ’ He mimed a throwing action.
Rose shook her head. ‘Look, I really have to go. I mean – go. To the loo.’
Quilley took a packet of pills from his pocket and pushed one out of the foil into her hand. ‘Have one of these. It absorbs and recycles the waste products. One of the few drugs I’ll take. Saves a lot of bodily unpleasantness but doesn’t cloud the mind.’
63
Rose really didn’t like the sound of that. She looked down at the pill, weighing up her dilemma. Then a familiar northern voice said,
‘Go on, Rose. There are no toilets, so it’s either that or you find a lamppost.’
She turned to see the Doctor standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame with an expression that was half wry, half troubled.
Rose swallowed the pill. It tasted of nothing and slipped down almost disturbingly easily. A second later her desire to go to the loo vanished. ‘I dread to think what just went on down there,’ she told the Doctor, then gestured to Quilley. ‘By the way, I messed up our cover.’
‘That’s all right. No one’d care anyway,’ the Doctor said, moving into the room. ‘And you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve worked it out. When these people are from.’
‘If I could, I’d wet myself with excitement,’ said Rose, grinning. ‘Go on, then, do your stuff.’
The Doctor smiled back and gave a mock self-important cough. ‘The Great Retrenchment – about AD 436,000. There was a massive space battle over in Monoceros, between Kallix Grover and the Sine Wave Shrine of Shillitar. Try saying all that with a mouth full of cornflakes.
Anyway, Earth got caught in the crossfire. A massive reef of magnetic energy missed its target, drifted billions of miles off course at about a million times the speed of light and smacked into Earth. Wiped every computer, every last scrap of recorded data. And by that time there was a computer in everything. Toasters, tables, grass, air molecules, even people’s heads. A vast grid of nanotechnology that curled up and died in under a second.’
‘Did they try turning it all off and turning it all back on again?’<
br />
asked Rose.
The Doctor nodded. ‘The IT people did their best. But that just made things worse. There was fire, plague, famine, war. So much was lost. The planet got cut off from its colonies. It was 10,000 years before they got themselves together. A new Dark Age, and this lot of charlies come from it. The after-effects of the reef mean no computer, not even the most basic digital device, worked for millennia. So they turned to different forms of technology. Analogue.’
64
Rose realised Quilley had leaped for a pencil and paper and was trying to write this all down. ‘You’re going too fast for me. You’re solving the great mysteries of human history and I’ve got to write this all down!’
‘See?’ said the Doctor. ‘ Write it all down. Paper, books.’ He crossed to the spindle of CDs and DVDs and picked one up. ‘Everything digital was lost for thousands of years.’ He checked the label. ‘Even Coldplay.’
‘Every cloud. . . ’ said Rose, then a thought occurred to her. ‘But they can travel through time, so they can’t be that dumb.’
‘Using dead-end analogue rip engines. Which is even worse than normal rip engines. And they don’t strive to create anything better, anything cleverer. Their whole attitude is “that’ll do”.’ He reached into his pocket and took out one of the name badges. There was no name on it, just the small keyboard. ‘Because of these. I nicked a spare on the way over.’
‘Will you please slow down!’
shouted Quilley.
His pencil had
snapped as he tried to keep up with the Doctor.
‘I never slow down,’ said the Doctor. ‘Biology and chemistry became their big sciences. They can do anything with the body – they know it inside out. They can do anything to it. They could probably take you apart and put you together again. And the body includes the brain.’
He waggled the badge under Rose’s nose. ‘Pharmacology. They’ve mapped out the brain with incredible precision. Must have taken them centuries of study without computers. So they know how the chemical transmitters in the human brain, that incredible machine, work – down to the tiniest detail.’
Rose took the badge and looked at it. On the back were two small pads and a small triangle.
‘That little triangle contains tiny amounts of a vast pharmacopoeia of chemicals. You hook it up to yourself –’ he demonstrated by placing it against his own chest – ‘and if you’re feeling sad, or scared, or frightened, or anything you don’t like, no problem! You can send a specific chemical signal to block it. You’re fine. Everything’s just fine, fine and dandy, hunky-dory.’
Rose couldn’t work out if he was angry or impressed.
65
‘There’s a woman out there,’ the Doctor went on, ‘she’s gonna die in three weeks. Rose, she just doesn’t care.’
‘This is amazing stuff,’ said Quilley, getting a replacement pencil.
‘Could you go back to “every last scrap of data”. How do you spell data? And, er, what does digital mean? We know about the Digital Age, but all the printed material about it was lost.’
Rose ignored him. ‘And they’ve found a way to stop people going to the loo.’
‘Swift would’ve loved that,’ said the Doctor. ‘The human race, with all its wit and intelligence, finally unchained from the lavatory. Yeah, they can control all the functions of the body. They know every gene, they’ve bred themselves into beauties. Knocked out the genes that cause ageing, introduced genes that cure almost everything, with regular updates sprayed out to keep everyone healthy. They still die in the end, but with the drugs why should they care? Grief and sorrow boiled away, till they’re just old mad words.’
Rose struggled to get her head round these revelations. ‘They’re not human any longer. It’s horrible.’
‘It’s different,’ said the Doctor.
‘Too different,’ said Rose. ‘Look at them, they’re like androids.
What’s the point of them being alive?’
‘So.’ The Doctor folded his arms and tilted his head slightly. ‘You’re in pain, in agony. . . back home, what do you do?’
‘Take a drug,’ said Rose. ‘But it’s not the same.’
‘Or you’re grieving, and the hurt’s gonna last for years, and you’ll never be the same again without the person you’ve lost. And someone offers you a quick way out.’ He looked her in the eye. He wasn’t angry with her, just interested. Rose had the feeling he was trying to get a handle on the situation himself and was using her as a sounding board. ‘You telling me you wouldn’t take it?’
‘Would you?’ asked Rose pointedly, and she couldn’t read the Doctor’s reaction to that at all.
Quilley broke the silence in his booming actor’s voice. ‘I refuse to!’
‘Guessed that,’ said Rose.
66
‘I, T. P. Quilley, am one of the last Refusers,’ he continued, rolling the words proudly around his tongue. ‘And all my human qualities remain intact. I laugh – ha ha ha! I cry! I feel! I appreciate bitter irony! I get bored and angry!’ He gave Rose a playful punch on the shoulder. ‘I’ve even been to the “toilet”, as you call it. Twice!’
‘And you’ve got a very loud, irritating voice,’ pointed out Rose. ‘Not to mention, you keep invading my space.’
‘Insults!’ cried Quilley. ‘I haven’t heard an insult since my Elaina died. . . ’
‘You refuse to pop the pills?’ asked Rose.
Quilley struck a dramatic attitude. Everything he said and did was overdone, thought Rose. Unsurprisingly, if everybody else was a zombie. He had nothing to interact with, nobody to compare his feelings to. A small piece of her heart went out to him.
‘Twenty years ago I joined the Refusers,’ he said. ‘Their numbers were dwindling even then. We used to meet at each other’s houses and try, step by step, not to use our popper packs. Many fell by the wayside in the attempt. But Elaina and I were dedicated. We were both students. I was a zoo-tech, while she studied the few remaining books of the time before the Digital Age. I noted the ways of animals.
The bouncing joy of the kangaroo. The unforced friendliness of the dog. The padding arrogance of the cat.’ He sighed. ‘Elaina explained some of the books to me, the old stories that people didn’t bother with any longer, told me how the wrong-feelings of people in the old days helped them to savour life.’
‘A pair of romantics,’ said the Doctor approvingly. ‘Fantastic.’
‘Exactly!’ cried Quilley. ‘And we embarked on our romantic journey together. It took many months, as we adjusted and identified the glittering panoply of wrong-feelings. Shame, lust, cruelty, envy!’ He glowered at Rose. ‘Passion. . . ’
‘Whoa, Nellie,’ said the Doctor.
‘Fear, anger, resentment. And there were so many different shades of resentment – simmering resentment, open resentment, guilty resentment. . . ’
‘Please calm down,’ said Rose in a small voice.
67
‘I’m sorry,’ said Quilley. ‘You don’t know what this means to me.’
His voice cracked and he swept away a tear theatrically. ‘Oh, my dear Rose. Come here!’ He grabbed Rose roughly and hugged her. ‘And you, Doctor!’ He pulled the startled Doctor to him, and held both their heads tightly.
The Doctor and Rose caught each other’s eyes and laughed at the sheer weirdness of it all.
‘You don’t know what it’s been like all these years!’ Quilley thundered. ‘Except, of course – you do! At last I have somebody else to feel!’
Rose’s eyebrows went up.
‘I think he means “feel with”,’ said the Doctor.
‘I hope he means “feel with”,’ said Rose.
There was a whoosh of air. Chantal, who was picking listlessly at her lunch, brushed the crumbs from her hand and reached for the envelope that had fallen from the tube onto her desk. She slit it open with her paperknife, then took out and read the message inside.
In bold and immaculate copperplate s
cript it said, CHANTAL – I’m back in now. Still hungry. Can you fix me something? Yours, X01.
Chantal tidied the envelope away in the breast pocket of her suit and crossed over to her workers’ desks. Her eyes flickered inscrutably over the pretty, doll-like faces of her charges. Then she came to a decision.
‘Tina,’ she called.
A pert young woman looked up. ‘Yes, Chantal?’
Chantal beckoned her over. ‘Tina, can you be an absolute love and pop down to the Grey Door for me? Just knock on the door and, when it opens, go inside. Simple.’
Tina smiled. ‘Of course, Chantal.’ And she set off.
Chantal headed back to her desk and picked up the remaining half of her baguette. She was just crunching into the crust when she became aware that Tina was lingering at the door, looking at her with a puzzled expression.
‘Yes, Tina?’
68
Tina came over. ‘Chantal, the last three people who went down to check on the Grey Door for you. . . ’
‘Suzy, Maria and Pedro, yes?’ said Chantal brightly. ‘What about them?’
‘I haven’t seen them around for a few days,’ said Tina falteringly.
‘They weren’t at last night’s party, for example.’
‘I think you’ll find they were,’ said Chantal. ‘Don’t you remember?
Suzy was totally sloshed, and Pedro and Maria were dancing like a pair of idiots. We had a fine time.’
Tina tried to remember. She was sure Pedro, Maria and Suzy hadn’t been there, but Chantal was really clever, with an intelligence enhancement of 810. She must be right.
So she said, ‘OK,’ and set off for the Grey Door.
The Grey Door was set into one wall of the cave and, as its name suggested, was a huge grey metal door. All the outlying huts and barns of Osterberg faced away from it and the overhead lights shone the other way. There was nobody else around.
Tina walked briskly up to it and knocked. She had no idea what was inside. She didn’t care. Her interest patch had been set to typing, so that was the only thing about the project that interested her. She started to wonder why Chantal had chosen her to carry out an errand that she knew nothing about, but the thought didn’t go anywhere. It started and then it just kind of drifted away into the back of her mind like a speedy summer cloud.