Doctor Who BBCN05 - Only Human

by Doctor Who

  ‘Oh, yes, you can,’ said Chantal, still singsong and smiles. ‘All you need is a combo in the 662 range.’

  ‘I can live without that!’ scoffed Quilley, starting to pace about. He turned and addressed the whole of the staff. ‘I can live without your smugness! I can live without your drivel, and I want to know why we’re still here!’

  50

  He sprang forward, grabbed the desk of the nearest worker and tipped it over. The office workers giggled. The man the desk belonged to just got up from his seat, set it upright again, picked up his typewriter and pencil holder, and sat back down.

  Quilley roared and tipped it over again.

  The man the desk belonged to just got up from his seat, set it upright again, picked up his typewriter and pencil holder, and sat back down again.

  Quilley squared his shoulders and prepared to tip the desk over a third time.

  The Doctor grabbed him by the shoulder and said, ‘Er, can I make a suggestion? Chill.’

  Quilley stared at the Doctor for a full five seconds. Then his attention turned to Rose. Normally she would have found the stare off-putting, but in this place the naturalness of the reaction was a relief.

  Quilley turned to Chantal, pointing to the Doctor and Rose. ‘Who are they?’

  Chantal shrugged. ‘Search me, duck. I guess they must have been sent back by the Committee. Late arrivals.’

  ‘Dressed like that?’

  Quilley looked Rose up and down.

  ‘Her

  clothes. . . where did she get them?’

  ‘Why not ask her? She’s got a name,’ said Rose.

  ‘We both have,’ said the Doctor, ‘sort of. That’s Rose Tyler and I’m the Doctor. You’re right, we’re late arrivals.’

  ‘Very late,’ said Quilley suspiciously.

  ‘Don’t let him give you wrong-feeling – it’s only what he wants,’

  said Chantal, as if talking about a naughty five-year-old. She stood up to her full six feet. ‘Hello, I’m Chantal. Welcome to Osterberg!

  Our mission plan is to deliver value by researching human history in a vibrant world-class environment.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Rose, trying to fit in.

  Chantal smiled. ‘Yes, it is.’

  Rose was beginning to find Quilley’s lingering gaze irritating.

  ‘Would you mind not staring at me?’ she asked politely.

  51

  ‘This is T. P. Quilley,’ said Chantal. ‘Senior zoo-tech. Better tell you straight, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m pretty sure you will have, he’s a Refuser.’

  ‘Is he now?’ said the Doctor, as if that made everything clear. ‘Well, Rose here, she’s my. . . ’

  ‘Boss,’ said Rose quickly.

  ‘My boss,’ said the Doctor. ‘And she was just saying on the way down your lovely steps how she needed to speak to your senior zoo-tech and go over your research.’ He spoke with heavy emphasis. ‘She really wants to know what kind of animal we met out there.’

  Rose picked up the hint. ‘Yeah, I was saying that. Mr Quilley, could you show me your work?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Quilley, who was still looking at her oddly. ‘Come on, then.’

  He stomped away and a second or two later Rose set off after him.

  Quilley led Rose through the winding streets of Osterberg and round a couple of corners to a shack with a porch nailed very ineptly to its front. He pushed open the front door and shooed her in. His staring was, if anything, getting worse. He hadn’t said a word to her on their little journey, but every so often he looked over at her, tutted and shook his head. It was starting to annoy her, but she knew the Doctor was relying on her to keep calm and do some digging. It wouldn’t be any good to have a go at this old lech.

  The big, shady main room of the shack contained a battered settee, a creaking shelf lined with books and a large table on which were scattered more books and a collection of jars. Rose picked one up and saw it contained the pickled heart of an animal. In the corner there was a washing machine, some CDs on a spindle and, strangely, a computer in a glass display case. The computer wasn’t futuristic. It looked just like a bog-standard PC of Rose’s time. A tattered rug and a small television set, with the detritus of a half-finished meal of bread, cheese and a chicken leg, completed a picture of disorganisation and clutter. The television set was on, showing black-and-white footage of a synchronised swimming team.

  52

  In Rose’s experience of travels with the Doctor, you could usually sum a place up, however weird, pretty quickly. Things matched, giving you an idea of a new destination’s character, and what you might or might not expect to find there. Nothing about Quilley or his room matched the town or the other people of Osterberg. And stranger still, nothing about his own clothes or his possessions made sense in themselves either.

  Quilley shut the door and coughed importantly. ‘Now, young lady,’

  he began suspiciously.

  ‘I’d better warn you, try and cop a feel and I’ll have your eyes out,’

  said Rose in a friendly enough tone. She was used to dealing with older men.

  ‘I haven’t copped a feel of anything for a very long time, more’s the pity,’ said Quilley. He continued to observe her as if she was some kind of specimen or curiosity. He sat down and stretched his legs. ‘Now.

  We were supposed to be taken back home nine days ago. And I don’t relish the prospect of remaining here in this howling wilderness for very much longer.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Rose. ‘Me and the Doctor, we’re just here to join in with your research. Sent by the Committee.’

  Quilley raised an eyebrow. ‘So you’re a zoo-tech like me?’ He gestured to a poster on the wall by his bench. On the poster were drawings of a variety of animals – bears, wolves, mammoths.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rose. ‘I’m a zoo-tech.’ She took off her coat, which was still covered in blood and gore from the dead mammoth. ‘Do you mind if I put this in your wash?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Quilley after a pause.

  Rose put the coat in the washing machine. ‘So, what kind of animals d’you get here, then?’

  ‘You say you were sent here,’ said Quilley, cutting her off. ‘Didn’t the Committee tell you why the project’s been extended?’

  Rose was wary of saying anything that might blow her cover. She needed an excuse to get away for a moment and think – she was a terrible liar – and she decided to fall back on one that had served her very well at home when trying to get away from blokes she didn’t 53

  fancy. ‘Look, hope you don’t mind, but. . . I’m bursting.’

  ‘What?’ asked Quilley.

  ‘I need the loo.’ She pointed. ‘Is it through there?’

  Quilley frowned. ‘You need the what?’

  ‘The loo. The toilet.’

  Quilley got to his feet and advanced on her menacingly.

  ‘You

  weren’t sent by the Committee,’ he said slowly, shaking his head. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I only wanna use your loo,’ said Rose, backing away against the wall.

  Quilley came right up to her and barked in her face, ‘My dear girl, in the time I come from, nobody’s been to “the loo” for 1,000 years.’

  He pushed his face even closer to hers. ‘So what time do you come from?’

  Week 1

  Das’s Journal

  Jack has asked me to use our computer and put down my thoughts about our first week in the town of Bromley. He says it will be good practice for me at writing.

  Writing is something I didn’t understand for a couple of days. What it means is that instead of keeping your thoughts in yourself, or letting them out by saying or singing them, you let them out of your head and put them into small markings. But when I grasped it, I learned to understand these markings, which is called reading, very quickly. The words tumbled into my head. Jack says this is because of the Doctor’s machine, the TARDIS, which
gets inside a person’s head and adapts it to understand many different languages, spoken or written. He says this is not magic or the work of gods, and the Doctor is not a god but only very wise. (I think the Doctor is a god and Jack is mistaken here.

  Jack thinks he knows everything, but he just knows more about this time than me. It doesn’t mean he understands life in general at all.) Jack is very kind for a Them (I must remember to call Them hu-54

  mans). He has a very smooth face, which the other humans seem to like. There is a woman in the flat next to ours who keeps waving at Jack from her window and giving a mating call, and the man who came to install our television kept grinning at him in the same way, and so they went for a walk together.

  One of the first things Jack did was cut my hair. Then he went out of the flat and hunted for skins for me. At first I thought the shirts and trousers would be too thin, but I forgot the future is a much warmer time. I have many different shirts and trousers, and things called shoes to protect my feet, but I won’t wear socks because they are just stupid. There is no point to them.

  I soon realised the strangest thing about my new home. All the hunting is done for you by a tribe of hunters who bring food to the shops. In my tribe, everybody was a hunter, or made the fire, or looked after the children. We only did those jobs. The humans have many different jobs and don’t have to think about hunting and food all the time. This means they feel something called boredom. They don’t like boredom, but I think it’s very relaxing and so they should shut up and count themselves lucky.

  Jack brought food from the shops to the flat on our first night in Bromley. He made an invisible fire in the kitchen and we ate cooked meat. Then he gave me afters. I shall never forget it. He passed me a crumbling made-thing called a Bakewell tart. I admit I didn’t like the look of it, but he encouraged me to taste it.

  I bit into it and then I fainted. The humans make the Bakewell tart by mixing many different kinds of food together. It tastes of the fat of beasts, the goodness of grain and the sweetness of rare, wild fruit, but it is far better than any of those. I don’t think I shall ever get used to it. It made me feel happier than I have ever been. I was wrong to fear the future.

  When I woke up, I ate all the Bakewell tarts and other things called mini-rolls, and flung my arms round Jack to thank him for bringing them. Jack told me there was no need to eat them all, as there were many, many millions of Bakewell tarts and mini-rolls in the shops. I thought he must be mistaken, as such bounty could only belong to the 55

  gods in their shadow-world, but he went out and got more to prove it to me. I ate them, but Jack warned me that as there were so many fatty made-things in Bromley, I would become ill if I carried on.

  The plenty in this time is unbelievable. Boredom means you start thinking about other things, not just hunting, because food is always there for you. My thoughts started to race faster and faster, and I had a lot of questions. Jack did his best to answer them but it was hard and tiring for him.

  He has decided that before I go out into Bromley I must watch television, which will answer many of my questions. Television is a machine that shows pictures of what all the different human tribes are doing. Each tribe has its own channel and there are many hundreds of channels. I learned numbers by flicking a button to check on the different tribes.

  There are tribes that sing and chant, tribes that play games with many different kinds of ball and tribes that fight – as humans still do, the idiots – with things called guns. My favourite television tribe are the Grace Brothers of UK TV Gold. Their purpose is to sell skins to other tribes, but they are not very good at it and there is a crowd in their shop (that we never see) who laugh at them all the time, very cruelly. I hope the Grace Brothers will soon get better at their jobs, or they will run out of money and die.

  Jack says I do not understand humour. I don’t know what he means.

  Captain Jack Harkness’s Data-Record

  Some anthropologist is gonna love this stuff, probably pay good money for it, so I’m making a record of my progress with the boy that time forgot.

  No matter what Rose reckons, bringing this guy up to speed is difficult – but still kind of fun. One of the jokes back at the Time Agency was that people are people; you can go back to any point in human history, anywhere in the universe, and they’ll be doing the same old things, making the same mistakes. I know this to be true. There was 56

  that girl at a party in Elizabethan London and that proto-humanoid Gloobi hybrid in the wastes of thirty-ninth-century Tarsius who were both happy to make the same mistake with me.

  But of course Das isn’t quite a human. Thanks to the TARDIS, he took to reading, writing and ’rithmetic like a duck to ducks, but be-yond that his brain is wired up in a totally different way. That can be kind of cute at times, but if he’s gotta live out the rest of his life here, there are some behaviours he’s gotta at least learn to copy, even if he doesn’t actually understand them.

  OK, so let’s make a little list of them. Jokes, especially feel-bad jokes, irony, sarcasm and – bad luck for me – innuendo. Fiction is a biggie problem. To Das, everything’s happening now and everything is true. And people never lie, they’re just mistaken. Take a look at that last one and wonder again why his lot died out. So it turns out telling lies is the greatest weapon in the human arsenal.

  It doesn’t help that he had to turn up in this dumb-ass century. The times between the full mapping of the Earth and the first great break-out into space aren’t exactly stirring for the spirit. Everyone either just sits at home or they go camel-trekking in Tunisia or something and call it a big deal. “Woo, let’s have a trip round the Greek islands this summer, what an adventure!” – not. No wonder Rose loves ex-ploring so much. The curiosity factor here is zero. They think Mars is exotic, mysterious and far away. Ha. Just two centuries to go until you can get a mortgage right on top of that Face for a bag of Maris Pipers.

  I’ve got him a TV. As those notorious experiments in the forty-second century by Mad King Gary of Kiev proved, you can lock kids in a room with only TV and food aged two and they’ll come out sort of fully socialised, if insane, aged fourteen. I reckoned Das could pick up a lot from the boob tube.

  But that’s where the fiction problem reared its head. I tried to explain the difference between the news (which is supposed to be fac-tual, but in early twenty-first-century Britain that’s actually a moot point) and the fictional soaps. But all I got was blank looks. To Das, Rita Sullivan of Weatherfield and Jacques Chirac are equally bona 57

  fide. He still hasn’t got the idea that life here is semi-civilised and that if you lose your job you’re not gonna get cast out to starve in the wilderness. MTV showed some bimbo in a boy band getting thrown out by his manager and Das pleaded with me to find and save him.

  And science fiction or anything historical is a real no-no. I had to turn off Farscape and Deadwood before he saw them and picked up some very mad ideas.

  So it’ll be a long job, but I’m gonna do it. I’ll wow the Doctor and Rose. Three weeks to go – Das is gonna be a fully functioning twenty-first-century boy.

  58

  ‘Ah, here’s Lene,’ Chantal told the Doctor, shortly after Rose had gone off with Quilley. ‘She can show you round properly, fix you up with a room, cos I’ve got some reports to compile.’ She picked up a huge pile of papers bundled up with green string. ‘You know, quite heavy stats. Bor-ing.’

  So the Doctor went off with the new arrival, Lene. She was as tall and beautiful as all the other women in the town, but as they walked out into the artificial yellow glow of the huge floodlights, the Doctor noticed rings of tiredness under her eyes.

  He was rather enjoying not knowing exactly what was going on, but still there was something unsettling about these people that put him a little on the back foot. The strangest thing about them, he had come to realise, was their indifference. Only Quilley had behaved towards himself and Rose in a normal way. Everybody else seemed to simply accept
their arrival and their flimsy story, as if they weren’t even slightly curious. The Doctor decided to test this indifference.

  He’d make it screamingly obvious that he wasn’t who he said he was and see how the woman reacted.

  59

  ‘Right, Lene,’ he said. ‘Let’s pretend I know nothing about Osterberg or what goes on in it.’

  It was a dead giveaway, but Lene merely asked, smiling and clearly not very intrigued, ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, you know, it’s a fantastic way of making sure I get up to speed with everything. So, take me through it right from the start. . . ’

  ‘Didn’t the Committee brief you?’ asked Lene.

  ‘Yeah, of course, but what if the forgetful so-and-sos left something out?’ replied the Doctor.

  A very faint look of boredom, or irritation, crossed her face. ‘Explain everything?’ she said grudgingly.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said the Doctor.

  Lene tapped a code into her name-badge number panel. A broad, genuine smile lit up her face a moment later. ‘Well, I don’t now!’ she said, suddenly bubbling with enthusiasm. ‘Come on, then, Doctor!’

  To his astonishment, she took him by the arm and started trotting, almost skipping like a little girl, along the main street, pointing things out on the way. ‘This is Osterberg, our little research community. It was built in our time and sent back here with us in it. There are 100

  of us – well, 102 now, with you and your boss, Rose. It’s named after Chantal Osterberg. You just met her.’

  ‘So she’s in charge?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘Yup, she’s the boss lady. She’s got an intelligence enhancement of plus 810!’

  ‘Bully for her,’ said the Doctor, trying to sound enthusiastic.

  ‘So we do everything she says, yes. She joined the team who de-veloped the time engine. And this is the first proper try-out of it. She came up with the notion of using it to travel back to study the past, and put together a team of zoo-techs and anthrop-techs. Us.’