by Doctor Who
‘Excuse me, gentlemen, lady. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.’
A man had appeared at the Doctor’s elbow. He was short and stocky, his jumpsuit white instead of the usual grey. He held his head at a tilt and looked down his nose at them. ‘Your appearance and behaviour are, ah, confusing my other patrons.’
‘Confusing them?’ The Doctor leaped on the words.
Rose didn’t know whether to be angry or amused. ‘We weren’t disturbing anyone.’
‘You mean to say you’re kicking us out for dressing a little differently?’ said Jack.
‘Listen, mate, this is hardly the Savoy!’
‘Go now,’ said the white-clad man sniffily, ‘and I might overlook the fact that you were all heard lying on these premises.’
‘It’s all right,’ said the Doctor quickly, leaping to his feet. ‘Time we were off anyway. And you were right about the chips, Rose. They’re rubbish.’
The manager cleared his throat meaningfully. ‘There is the matter of your bill, sir.’
The Doctor patted down the pockets of his battered leather jacket, then shared an abashed look with his two friends. Meanwhile, the voice of the television newsreader boomed at them from each side: Mrs Helene Flangan is the luckiest woman in Sector One-Beta this evening.
Usually, when the 31-year-old
schoolteacher drives home from work in her seven-year-old 1.5g injection Mark 14.B family vehicle, the journey takes her an average of forty-two and a half minutes. Tonight, though, she made it in half that time. The reason? Every one of the traffic lights on her route showed green. Earlier, we asked Mrs Flangan what she did with the time she had saved. She spent it watching TV.
9
∗ ∗ ∗
There were more flat screens in the foyers of every hotel they visited.
When they finally found a room –‘I’ve just got one on the top floor,’ the surly receptionist had grunted. ‘The lady’ll have to share with you’ –there was one in there too, already parading its images before nobody.
Rose flopped onto the single bed and flicked through channels with the remote control, finding news bulletins, news bulletins, news bulletins. . . something that looked like a drama. Half a dozen twenty-somethings were lounging around on sofas, talking about themselves.
‘Reality show,’ said the Doctor.
At the café, he’d produced his psychic paper and run it through the card reader on their table. It hadn’t worked, of course, but the manager had been easily persuaded that the ‘credit card’ was real, just a little dog-eared. He’d copied imaginary details onto a data pad, then seen his unwanted customers out.
The paper had done the trick again at the hotel reception. Rose had pointed out that technically this was stealing, but the Doctor had just shrugged. ‘Least they can do. I’m about to save their world, probably.’
The receptionist had scooped three small white tablets into a tube and slapped it in front of them with a dour expression. ‘To stop you dreaming,’ he had said when questioned. The Doctor had tried to refuse, but the receptionist had grunted, ‘Up to you whether you take
’em or not, but I gotta provide ’em.’
The room was cramped, its carpet worn and its wallpaper peeling.
The bathroom was down the hall somewhere, shared with six more rooms. Rose would rather have slept in the TARDIS, but none of them had fancied another slog through the jungle back to where they had left it. Especially not in the dark. Night had drawn in before they had known it, the ever-present lights of the TV screens fooling their body clocks.
‘What from?’ asked Jack now. ‘You said we’re gonna save this world.
What from?’
‘From its people,’ said the Doctor. ‘Can’t you smell it? Fossil fuels.
They’re burning fossil fuels. Not in any great quantities, not yet – but if this society’s in regression, as it appears to be. . . ’
10
‘Fossil fuels?’ echoed Jack. ‘You’re yanking my chain.’
‘Not about this. It’s not right. This wasn’t the deal. By the time your race had mastered space travel, you were supposed to have the technology and the maturity not to repeat your mistakes. You’ve no right to destroy another world!’
There was a long, awkward silence then. For something to do, Rose surfed the TV channels again, filling the air with snatches of information. A man’s car had stalled in his garage, making him ten minutes late for work. A teenager had found a one-microcred note in the street and taken it to the police station. A woman had accused her young neighbour of playing unapproved music, but the girl had retaliated with the more serious charge that the complainant was imagining things, and both were now under medical observation.
‘What is it with this place?’ said Jack. ‘It’s like they’re obsessed with knowing every detail of each other’s lives.’
‘Nothing wrong with showing an interest,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘I’m more interested in what we’re not seeing.’
‘It’s all news and documentaries,’ said Rose.‘They’ve got, like, thirty TV channels. You’d think I’d have found a soap or something by now.’
‘A sitcom,’ said the Doctor, ‘or a cop show, or one of those hospital dramas you all seem so morbidly fond of.’
‘No, hang on.’ A new image had appeared: a group of uniformed men and women on a spacious, futuristic set. And it was a set; Rose could tell as much without quite knowing how. Something about how it was laid out or lit, the camera angles, or perhaps the way the uniforms delivered their lines so clearly and confidently.
On the screen, a klaxon alarm sounded and the angle changed to show a star field through a curved portal. Two ships dropped into view, all earthy brown and hard angles, though Rose thought they looked a bit too flat to be real.
‘They’ve still got science fiction, then,’ she noted.
‘Historical reconstruction,’ said the Doctor.
Rose shot Jack a withering look, which wiped the smirk from his face.
On the screen, the uniforms had contacted the occupants of the 11
brown craft and were opening trade negotiations. The alarm had been stilled. Boring, thought Rose.
‘You can see the pattern, though, can’t you?’ The Doctor took the remote and zapped through the channels again, hunkering down in front of the screen as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. ‘News, documentary, news, news, makeover show, news. . . All factual programmes. There’s no escapism. No imagination. Nothing that tells a story.’
‘No lies,’ realised Jack.
‘No fiction.’
Rose couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t the unfamiliar surroundings; she was used to that by now.
And the blokes had let her have the bed, after she’d vetoed Jack’s first suggestion that they all share.
Jack was squashed uncomfortably between the arms of a battered sofa, snoring away, while the Doctor sat in a chair by the window, thinking.
He didn’t seem to have moved a muscle in hours. Every so often, Rose looked over and saw him, chin in his arms, his arms resting on the chair back. There was a TV screen outside, playing a light show across his grim-set face. More than once, she thought he must have nodded off until she saw the glint of an alert eye.
The traffic was still heavy down below, the humming of engines and the blare of an occasional frustrated horn acquiring an air of unreality with sixty storeys’ distance.
And the Doctor’s words were going round in her head. . .
‘OK,’ Rose had said with a shrug, ‘so they don’t like fiction. Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters. Of course it does. Fiction is about possibilities.
It’s about hopes and dreams and, yeah, fears. Take those things away and what’s left? A population of drudges, working, eating, sleeping, watching telly, unable to visualise anything outside the confines of their own dreary lives.’
He had seemed almost personally affronted.
> 12
‘No wonder this world has stagnated,’ he had growled. ‘If you can’t conceive of something bigger, something better, how can you build it?’
‘So what do we do?’ Jack had asked, tongue-in-cheek. ‘Overthrow the government and introduce story time to the masses?’
‘Don’t see why not. Do you think it’s fair that the people of this world – this human world – have never experienced the works of Charles Dickens?’
‘He’s a bit of a Dickens nerd,’ Rose had confided in an aside to Jack. . .
Somewhere there were sirens, undulating in tone. A blue light flickered in the window, draining the colours from the screen out there.
And if she concentrated hard, she could make out voices, shouting above the traffic.
Rose realised with a start that she had dozed off. She turned to where she had last seen the Doctor, but his chair was empty.
There were footsteps in the corridor outside their door.
Running.
13
The operation had been a shambles. The first police bike to arrive had been shadowed by a camera crew, all lights and sound. The fiction geeks had had a lookout posted – or perhaps they had just been monitoring the live feed on 8 News. They’d been holed up in the cellar of a condemned scraper. One way in, one way out. No one had suggested that they might have prepared an escape route.
A hole in the wall; a tunnel into the sewer pipes. They’d been popping out of personholes all over the sector, running like rats.
For a moment, Inspector Waller was taken by the simile. She pictured the fleeing geeks with whiskers and shrivelled eyes from skulking indoors, hiding from life. Then, feeling that old itch in the back of her brain, she dismissed the thought with an angry shudder.
She had seen the escape on the info-screen at the corner of 34th and 11438th, been halfway there before her vidcom had flared into life. Steel at HQ, with the expected instructions. She had put on her blue lights, but the traffic was packed too densely for the nightshift vehicles to pull out of her way. Fortunately, her police bike was slim enough to weave a path through most of them – and when there was no way around, a brief turbo-charge of the hoverjets would vault her 15
over.
It was as she came down from one such jump, whooping with the adrenaline rush and the butterflies in her stomach, that she found them in her searchlight. Four of them, startled for an instant but recovering quickly and separating, racing for the side streets. The lights of two more bikes blurred by, their riders choosing their targets and shooting after them.
Waller braked hard and came around, finding the tail of the nearest geek.
She lost him for a moment at a corner, rounding it in time to see his back disappearing into a residential building. She smiled to herself, brought the bike up alongside and kicked it into hover mode. She snatched the vidcom from the dashboard and snapped it into its wrist socket, reporting her situation and the last known whereabouts of the fourth runner as she raced for the door.
A nearby screen was tuned to 8 News. The feed had been pulled, presumably lest it prove too stimulating. A police spokesperson had been wheeled in to give the standard disclaimer, his words subtitled before he had even spoken them:
Obviously, this is an unpredictable situation, but I must urge the public to show caution and not to engage in unfounded speculation. The objective facts will be made available in a properly edited form as soon as they are known.
She was reaching for her override card when she saw that the building’s entry panel was broken. So the geek didn’t necessarily live here.
All the more reason for her not to lose him. Waller shouldered her way into the foyer, checked that the lifts were empty, standing open, and made for the stairs.
He was a flight and a half up. His freckled face appeared over the rail, turning pale at the sight of her. She drew her gun and yelled at him to surrender. He kept running. He was far gone, this one.
A rational mind would have accepted the cold fact that escape was impossible.
16
Waller took the steps at a measured pace, letting the micro-motors in the mesh of her uniform augment her efforts. She could have pushed them harder, but she had no wish to cut the chase short. This was the best part. And she could afford to be patient.
The geek was scrambling, panting and making plaintive sounds in the back of his throat. She was gaining on him with each flight.
Realising this, he changed tack. He barrelled through a set of swing doors and was momentarily lost to Waller’s sight again.
She followed him into a maze of passageways and doors, amplifying the audio receptors in her helmet with a flex of her fingers. She could hear his footsteps, so close that they could almost have been inside her head. Then the sharp crack of a door jamb. And voices, raised in fear and protest, guiding her to her prey.
He had forced his way into a flat. An elderly couple were sitting up in bed, scandalised, holding on to each other.
‘Police,’ rapped Waller in their direction. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. This is all really happening.’
She crossed the room in four strides. The geek had one foot out of the window, feeling for the fire-escape cage. Waller seized him by the overalls, micro-motors whining as she yanked him whimpering away from the sill and flipped him onto a table, which buckled under his weight. She hauled him back up and drove him into the wall, with a bit more force than was really necessary. As Steel always said, it was the only way to knock some sense into his kind.
She pulled the geek’s hands behind him and bound his wrists with quick-set spray cuffs. ‘Name,’ she demanded, beaming with triumph.
‘Alador Dragonheart, paladin of the northern kingdom of Etroria –but I will never betray the princess to orckind, you foul –’
She bounced his face off the wall. ‘Reality check, pal!’
‘P-please, p-please don’t hurt us.’
Waller turned to see that the old couple were staring at her wide-eyed. More accurately, staring at their own reflections in her helmet visor. Trembling in their beds, as afraid of her as they had been of the geek. The man was trying to hush his wife, but she was babbling tearfully, ‘We don’t have many credits, b-but you can have them. Take 17
everything. Just d-don’t . . . don’t. . . We have a grandson, you know.
He’s only t-two years old.’
Waller’s good mood vanished in a second. A hot spring welled in her chest, and she pushed the geek aside and advanced on the couple angrily. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she snapped. ‘Did you? I told you there was nothing to worry about. Are you calling me a liar? Are you accusing an officer of the law of spreading fiction?’
The man was shaking his head desperately, dumbly, but the woman didn’t know when to stop. ‘N-no, of course not. It’s just. . . we understand, we know how it w-works. Just name your price and it’s yours.
Anything. It just. . . We might need some time to p-pay, that’s all, but we will. We will.’
Waller’s eyes narrowed. ‘You understand what? What have you seen?’
‘N-nothing, I swear.’
‘Then how can you know? What makes you think?’ Her fingers twitched on the butt of her gun, and the old man found his voice at last.
‘Please. My wife is a good woman. She doesn’t imagine. She was confused, that’s all. Tell her, Ailsa. Tell her.’
‘I. . . please, I wouldn’t have. . . ’ The woman sobbed. ‘You can’t accuse me of. . . I. . . we saw it. I know it was wrong, I know we shouldn’t have watched, but it was real. I never. . . He told us.’
‘ Who told you, ma’am?’ growled Waller. She knew the answer. She just needed to hear it, needed it to be real.
‘Th-that man on the TV. Mr Gryden. Hal Gryden.’
She left her three prisoners stuck to the heating pipes and rode back down in the lift. She had called for a wagon, but it might take an hour to arrive – maybe longer, on a night like this – and she was too busy to wai
t. Anyway, they weren’t going anywhere. Not without a solvent spray laced with the correct code sequence.
Waller stepped out onto the pavement and her jaw dropped open.
A man was leaning over her bike, apparently tinkering with the controls.
18
She blinked. She had to be confused. She closed her eyes and used the techniques she had been taught, breathing deeply, concentrating on what she could hear, taste, smell, feel, what was real. When she looked again, he was still there, in his non-regulation clothing – and while there was no law against that, it did mark him out as a potentially unsafe individual.
He had seen her and he met her gaze expectantly, one hand still lodged between the steering bar and the front shield. Waller went for her gun.
‘All right, pal, step away from the vehicle. I said step away from the vehicle!’
He did as he was told, raising his hands, but he was grinning broadly. Far gone, she thought.
‘Do you know the penalty for stealing police property?’
‘I wasn’t stealing it,’ he protested. ‘Anyway, it’s OK. I’m with the government. An inspector.’ He produced a card wallet from his pocket.
She advanced until she was facing him across the bike, her gun muzzle almost touching his chest. ‘All right, that’s enough, you keep those hands where I can see them. I’m taking you to see a doctor.’
‘I’m the Doctor,’ he said.
She edged her way around the bike towards him. He had given her no reason to shoot him yet, but he could snap at any moment. ‘You are experiencing a delusional episode,’ she explained to him slowly and clearly, ‘but you can believe in me. Focus on my words and nothing else. I am Inspector Waller and I’m detaining you for your own protection.’
He was circling too, keeping the bike between them. ‘Ah. What gave me away?’
‘There is no government. Colony World 4378976.Delta-Four has had no government for three generations.’
‘Is that what you think I said?’
‘You said you were an inspector.’
