As the Irishwoman pushed the penthouse doors open, the Doctor marched in and glanced around. He began clapping slowly when he saw what was inside.
‘Madam Delphi, I presume?’ he said. ‘Of course.
You’re not a real person, are you? You’re a computer!
Well, I say a computer, more of an artificial intelligence, housing an ancient malevolence that should never really have been freed from its dimension. How are you, Mandragora? It’s been a few centuries.’
‘This… form is oh-so much more capable than a fleshy human body, Doctor,’ Madam Delphi said. ‘As a Time Lord, as someone who can stand so much more spatial and temporal trauma, your body is just what, if you’ll
excuse the excruciatingly bad pun, the Doctor ordered.’
The Doctor said nothing.
‘You’ve heard that one before, haven’t you?’ Madam Delphi asked.
The Doctor and Donna now stood at the front of their exhausted group, Wilf, Netty, Lukas and Joe hovering a few steps behind. Facing them, in a protective circle around the Madam Delphi computer, were Dara Morgan, Caitlin and the Mandragora converts who had walked them there.
‘Oh, hullo,’ said the Doctor, as if addressing a meeting of the WI. ‘This all looks very impressive. Nice room.
Nice hotel. Nice gesture.’ He pointed to where the old American lady had raised her arm in the now-recognisable Mandragoran position to fire a bolt of lethal Helix energy.
‘Although a bit unfriendly.’
‘I do apologise. You just can’t get the staff,’ the computer’s feminine voiced boomed out from speakers dotted around the room. ‘Welcome to my hotel. Can I recommend the gym? Great pool, I understand.’
‘What’s the bar like?’ Donna asked. ‘I mean, not exactly five-star without a good bar, is it?’
‘Ah, Donna Noble, welcome to you, as well. I think you’ll find we offer four bars, three restaurants and an à la carte room service 24/7.’ Madam Delphi then chuckled.
‘Gotta say, though, we aspire to a greater recognition than just five stars.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Well, I reckon you’re looking for about five million. What do you think, Donna?’
‘Gotta have good service to get five million stars,
Doctor. Do you remember that hotel on Cassius? That was a proper five-star hotel.’
‘Oh yes!’ the Doctor grinned at her. ‘And they understood customer relations, too. Remember when we had that little problem with the lizard?’
‘Do you get lizard problems in Brentford, Madam Delphi?’ Donna asked. ‘Cos if there’s lizard problems to be solved, I don’t think it’s that great a hotel.’
‘The Oracle is—’ started Dara Morgan, but Madam Delphi shushed him.
‘The Doctor and his sweet friend are just playing for time, Dara. Trying to figure out how to stop us, how to get out of the Oracle alive, how to “help” their precious planet Earth.’ Madam Delphi took a beat then continued, more silkily and thus slightly more menacingly. ‘But you really aren’t going to stop us, Doctor. I offer no guarantees about people getting out alive. And, from my perspective, helping Earth is precisely what we are doing.’
The Doctor walked towards the group, and they parted, almost reverently, so he was now looking straight at the screens of the computer.
‘Last time we had a chat, I sent you into the darkness, licking your wounds. Remember that?’
‘Of course.’ Madam Delphi’s sine waves pulsated ferociously. ‘I have waited so long for a chance to get to you personally. To make you pay.’
‘Oh, not the old revenge on the poor Time Lord schtick, Mandragora? I mean, you’re better than that. Go on, give us a better reason.’
Madam Delphi giggled. ‘It’s not the first time since
1492 that the Mandragora Helix has been to Earth, you know.’
‘Yup, that I do know. The Sacred Mountain of Xi’an, if I remember? Then there were the Orphans of the Future, all that white and crimson cowl stuff. Oh and the Mandrake nightclub stuff, now that was pretty good, I have to say. But each time, it’s just been a fragment of Helix energy, hasn’t it, a little sparkler sent out to test the waters. This time, we’ve got the whole bonfire. So why now? Why send me little psychic-paper messages to get me involved, to bring me here… ahhh… Yes, you wanted to get me here. This exact day, this exact time. Why?’
‘The stars are aligned,’ Dara Morgan said.
‘I’m talking to Madam Delphi, thank you, not the hired help.’
‘How dare you—’ Dara Morgan began.
‘Oh, do belt up,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘I mean, who are you anyway?’
‘I am Dara Morgan. I set up MorganTech. I created the M-TEK, I devised—’
‘Oh please, you did nothing that the Mandragora Helix didn’t tell you to. No, who are you really? Who did the Helix take, distort, manipulate and totally screw up before reimagining you as Dara Morgan?’
‘What?’
‘Lukas?’ the Doctor barked. ‘My research assistant,’ he explained quietly to Madam Delphi. ‘Donna was busy.
Family matters.’
Donna frowned. Not that he was getting Lukas Carnes to do his research, but why he’d said ‘family matters’. She
threw a look at Wilf but he shrugged. Then she glanced at Netty, staring intently at the stand-off before them. When Donna looked back at the Doctor, she recognised a look in his eyes. A look that, if given voice, would have been some variation on ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘No,’ she mouthed. ‘Don’t you dare!’ but the Doctor’s attention was back on Dara Morgan.
‘All over the world, Dara Morgan, billions of people will fall victim to this alien consciousness you’ve given access to the world. And that’s going to happen today.’
‘I know,’ smiled Dara Morgan. ‘How brilliant is that?’
‘Well, it’s brilliant from the point of view of your M-TEK being a pretty damn brilliant piece of technology, augmented by alien know-how and distributed quite magnificently to people who, I imagine, had no idea what it would do to them today.’
‘Not a clue.’
‘There’s a lot of blood on your hands, Dara Morgan. If I were a policeman, I’d have you arrested but, as Lukas will now explain, that’s not possible.’
‘Dara Morgan came to prominence eight years ago, making his first claims about MorganTech on a news special, broadcast live on 31 December 1999.’
‘End of the millennium, neat.’
‘Before that, there’s no trace of any such person.
MorganTech was registered as a private limited company at 5.29pm that same day.’
‘So who were you before Mandragora got hold of you?
Before reimagining itself as a human, becoming the anagrammatical Dara Morgan?’
‘Oh, I get it now,’ Wilf called out. ‘That’s very clever.’
‘Yes, thank you, Granddad,’ Donna hissed. ‘But let the Doctor focus.’
Before anyone could stop him, the Doctor put his hands to either side of Dara Morgan’s head, fingers pressed against his temples and whispered, ‘Open the locked doors, and let yourself out.’
The assembled acolytes took a step towards the Doctor, and Madam Delphi pulsed menacingly. ‘Stop him,’ she said.
In his mind’s eye, the Doctor could see an image. A dark night, cold, damp. He was walking down a lane, hedges high on either side, rain trickling down his neck.
He shivered. He was angry… No, not angry. Hurt.
Bewildered. She’d said no. No to what? Who was she? In his hand was a box, soft, velvety. And inside it, yes, he could imagine it. Silver band, plain diamond. All he had been able to afford. And she’d said no. Said that she needed to get away from Derry, wanted to go to Sydney.
Or San Diego. Or anywhere other than close to him. How had he got her so wrong? How hadn’t he seen this coming? How was it possible to love someone that much, so that every time she walked into a room, every time she spoke, smiled, laughed, h
is heart would leap. That just knowing she was in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the hallway was enough to send those fantastic, amazing, wonderful thoughts rushing through him? Yet when it came to it, when he’d said ‘I love you’, she’d said she wanted to get away. No ‘I love you too, but…’ No ‘Thank you, but I’m sorry.’ Just an ‘Oh my God, are you for real?
No, I’m getting away from Ireland as soon as possible. I don’t want to be tied to anything here!’
It was as if someone had ripped everything out of him that mattered and walked all over it.
You’re not the first person to fall in love and be rejected, he told himself rationally.
But he didn’t want to be rational. What was rational about being in love anyway? What was rational about offering yourself up to someone only to be squashed?
And here he was, lost and alone. Everyone had said she wasn’t interested. Everyone had tried to say he was wasting his time. But when you’re in love, you grasp at anything, you believe that one day you’ll wake up and they’ll say, ‘You know what, I’m wrong, you’re right, you are the person for me.’
But that hadn’t happened.
It never happened.
Instead he’d seen the lightning ripping across the night sky as he stumbled along the road, tears mixing with the rain, thinking that all he wanted to do was be home now.
Home.
Ten minutes’ walk, max.
More lightning. Blue, white and purple… Purple?
It struck the ground in front of him, knocking him backwards.
He remembered seeing the little box with the ring vanishing in a sudden conflagration, literally and metaphorically drawing a line under that part of his life.
He felt as if he were on fire, too. All he could see was purple light, surrounding him now, blotting out the
hedges, blotting out the road, the darkness, the rain.
And then the voice. All around. In his head. Coming from the sky and his heart at the same time.
‘It is your time. Callum Fitzhaugh is no longer relevant. Now you have a greater cause.’
The voice stayed with him long after the purple fire had gone, over days and weeks as he willingly gave himself a new purpose.
The next morning he touched the keypad on a cashpoint machine and it spurted out two hundred pounds.
Eight more cashpoints that morning. Then more in different towns. Then he set up an account. He manipulated the online banking, untraceable movements because he fed figures into the computers that erased all traces of his actions.
Within three weeks, he was a multimillionaire. He had buildings all over the world. He owned companies which he then closed or merged and, within a month, MorganTech had come into existence due to the manipulating influence of the voice in his mind that told him how to do it.
Next he had put together the computer system that would change his destiny. Somehow the voice guided him as he built Madam Delphi, felt that voice in his head transfer into the hardware, somehow, creating artificial life on a scale unheard of before now.
‘I need you,’ the voice had soothed. ‘Now and for ever.
I need a human interface, a connection to the world of flesh and blood. An avatar in reality.’
So Dara Morgan had been created.
He remembered coming from a rich family of bankers and investment traders. His parents died in a private plane crash, and MorganTech had passed to him when he was just 21.
He remembered more false memories, events, people, qualifications and parties. None of them real, but each time he imagined a part of the fictional history, it came true. The voice showed him how a society that relied on computers for information, that no longer used paper and ink to keep records, could so easily be manipulated in accepting the history, the lies, the fabrications you told it via the keyboard were true.
He remembered the voice telling him how to develop the M-TEK over a few years, so that the market would trust in it. Trust in MorganTech. This was a long game.
And he remembered seeing her in a street in Dubai one afternoon.
She was with a couple of men, going through a sheaf of documents in a roadside café.
He had listened as the men had explained that they needed to think about whatever deal they were doing and moved away. Then he went to sit beside her.
She looked up, initially intrigued, then surprised and then shocked. Eventually she found her voice. ‘Cal?’
‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Dara Morgan.’
She laughed, a soft, gorgeous, beautiful laugh that brought back all that love he’d felt years earlier.
But the voice in his head hissed, ‘No. Remember the ring. Remember the tears and the pain. Do not give in now, Dara Morgan.’
‘You do look like him, Cal,’ she said. ‘What brings you to Dubai?’
‘Mandragora will swallow the skies,’ he said. ‘Let me show you, Cait.’
He took her hand, and her eyes flashed with violet Mandragora energy. Then she had opened the folders she had been going over with the businessmen earlier. ‘Sign here please, Mr Morgan.’ And he did, because the voice told him to.
Within an hour, MorganTech owned a chain of five-star hotels across the world, and Caitlin had become his first convert.
With a gasp, the Doctor pulled away from Dara Morgan, who immediately collapsed to the floor.
The whole thing had taken less than a second in real time but, to the Doctor, it had seemed like for ever.
He staggered away from Dara Morgan as the rest of the Mandrogara-influenced group turned on him, arms raised, ready to deliver the death blast.
‘No!’ Madam Delphi’s sine waves were bouncing up and down on her screens. ‘No, I need that body. It’s why I have waited these long centuries for the Doctor to present himself. The last of the Time Lords, possessed by Mandragora Helix energy, animated by me!’
The disciples lowered their arms.
And little Joe Carnes wrestled away from his brother and ran to the Doctor. ‘No,’ he yelled. ‘Leave him alone.’
Lukas was at his side in a second, and then Donna and Wilf were there, too.
They stood between him and the Mandragora-possessed computer.
‘Yes, thank you all,’ the Doctor said. ‘But not really necessary.’ He smiled at Madam Delphi. ‘So what a lot of choices. Kids no one would take seriously, an old man with a heart condition who could drop dead at a moment’s notice, his friend Henrietta, an expert on the stars…’
He threw a look behind them all, a look only observed by Donna.
Henrietta Goodhart was still by the door, as if trying to make sense of what was going on.
The Doctor was looking at her with a mixture of sadness and… what was that, Donna wondered. Panic?
Desperation? As if he were willing her to say or do something?
But it was no good. Netty wasn’t with them at the moment.
‘The lights are on, but no one’s driving.’ The sort of thing Donna could imagine her mother saying. A horrible phrase, but one Donna couldn’t disagree with right now.
And it was as if the Doctor thought Netty had let him down, somehow.
‘Donna,’ the Doctor hissed. ‘Your mobile. Now.’
She pushed it into his hand and, keeping an eye on Madam Delphi, he expertly scrolled through her address book.
‘Donna?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why isn’t your granddad’s number in here?’
‘Cos he never turns the bloody thing on. What’s the point?’
‘Oh great. Thanks.’
‘Why are you ringing him? He’s standing here.’
‘His phone is in Essex. I need to call it.’
Donna closed her eyes, imagining her fingers on the keypad and hissed the numbers at him. As she said each number, he pressed the key. When he heard the call go through, he hung up.
‘I hope you’re right, cos if you’re not…’
‘Someone just got a strange call?’
‘And the
world will end. But hey-ho, it’s been fun.’ He passed the phone back to her.
‘You won’t get him,’ her grandfather was saying to the computer. ‘This man is brilliant, he’s saved this planet, the whole universe, probably, more times than we’ve had hot dinners. You’ll have to go through us to get him!’
God bless Granddad, but Donna seriously doubted that was going to stop Madam Delphi. The Doctor needed something from Netty, Donna was sure of that. So he needed to be bought time.
‘You want a body to inhabit that’s been round the galaxy, lady,’ she said, ‘take mine. Oh, I might not have two hearts or hair that defies fashion, but this body’s seen a bit of outer space action.’ She pushed the Doctor right behind them now, so he was closer to Netty.
Madam Delphi’s screens pulsed again. ‘Noble by name, noble by nature, is it?’
‘Oh, like I haven’t heard that before. One night when Neal Bailey decided to get frisky at the Odeon, he muttered in my ear, “Now cracks a noble tart, how about a good night sweet Donna.” I clumped him one where it
hurts and walked out. Mind you, I reckoned he knew his Shakespeare and should’ve got Brownie points for originality. My dad didn’t agree and bopped him on the nose down the pub the next week.’ Donna smiled sweetly at the computer. ‘Ever had a bloke come on to you? No, course you haven’t, cos you’re all electrics and wires and stuff. All alone, aintcha? That why you’re doing all this, is it? Looking for love? Should’ve gone for the Lonely Hearts angle, instead of the astrology bit.’
Wilf tugged his granddaughter’s arm. ‘You’ll make it cross.’
‘Really, Granddad? That had never occurred to me.’
She winked at him. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
Madam Delphi pulsed angrily. ‘Wish I could get my head around why the Doctor always surrounds himself with silly humans. I mean, what purpose do you serve?
Other than sacrificial lambs. How many travelled in his TARDIS before you, Donna Noble? And what happened to them? I mean, you reckon you’re going to travel with him for ever. You think you’re the first to believe that?
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