Doctor Who - Downtime Part 18

Anthony nthony, his temper up, emerged from the lift and aimed a Asavage kick at the doors as they snapped hungrily closed, just missing him. 'Hah, better luck next time!'

He headed towards the Vice Chancellor's office. The trouble was that all these corridors looked the same. All Sixties-style breezeblocks, which the architect obviously a.s.sumed gave the university a historic traditional feel. ' Very Very Malcolm Bradbury, Very Sanderson, Malcolm Bradbury, Very Sanderson, ' he complained on frequent occasions, but no one under twenty-five got the reference. ' he complained on frequent occasions, but no one under twenty-five got the reference.

A couple of Chillys, plugged into their walkmans, approached. 'Hi kids,' he sneered. 'Been in any good deprograms lately?'

They ignored him, drifting past like zombies.

'Want any autographs?' he called after them. 'If you can read, that is,' he muttered. He had deserted his post, leaving a syntho-pop medley playing on the grams. It was pumping out into the corridors all over the campus. Yet the Chillys weren't even listening to it. Their headphones played a simplified version of the beat. He had tried it, but it literally gave him a bad head after only a few seconds.

He already hated the place. The students didn't behave like students. No illegal parties. No oversleeping, not even oversleeping in each other's rooms. No jailbait available. They were seriously dead, these Chillys. So chilled out that their minds and other faculties were frozen solid. Stepford Students.

I'll just die if I don't get that degree. I'll just die if I don't get that degree. that degree. Students should be radical and dishevelled and late for lectures he had been. Gigs for students should be like playing to a load of Krypto-Metal fans. Students should be radical and dishevelled and late for lectures he had been. Gigs for students should be like playing to a load of Krypto-Metal fans.

He reached the entrance to a computer room and stopped to listen to the deep growling hum that came from inside. It sounded like the chanting of Tibetan monks.

He scooped up a mangled piece of paper from the floor and smoothed it out. It was covered in codes and numbers with a line drawing of a pyramid. It was the note Danny had shown him in the canteen.

Anthony had been sitting at a table, bemoaning the lack of a Union bar on the campus, when Danny had come up and spoken to him. The kid was unlike any other Chilly he had come across. He displayed emotion. In fact, he was very upset, even disturbed, but Anthony was glad to talk to anybody else, however deranged. The only other people he spoke to were the right-wing fascists and loonies who called on the daily chat show lines.

Compared with them, Danny seemed completely rational.

Danny was convinced that something was going on at New World University. It was all too easy. Everyone was too taken in. Danny wanted to know how the computer that seemed to control everything really worked. He had elaborate plans to hack his way into the secure areas of the mainframe and find out what was behind it.

Anthony wasn't even sure he wanted to know. He just wanted to work out his short-term contract and go back to being unemployable. Even so, he liked the kid. There was no one else in the place to like. 'Let me know what you dig up,'

he said to Danny, 'and we'll see what we can get out of it.'

The kid obviously thought this would make the Big Time, and he sidled off looking happier. Anthony had thought that this might have been his good deed for the decade.

Here and now, looking at the crumpled paper, he wasn't so sure. He rubbed his fingers. There were strands of something resembling cobweb on them. He ducked back as the door opened and Christopher, resplendent in another new pullover, emerged.

'Something you want, Anthony?' he oozed.

Anthony rose to the challenge. 'A producer with a sense of humour?' He shrugged. 'I want a word with the High Priestess.'

Christopher closed the door behind him. 'The Vice Chancellor's busy.' He started steering Anthony back along the corridor, but the DJ pulled free.

'h.e.l.lo, first-time caller to Christopher Rice. Your jazzy-bright DJ has a problem.'

'You had a salary rise within a month of starting.'

Anthony was not deterred. 'I was top of my year at drama college, right?'

Christopher nodded. 'Nineteen seventy-two.'

'Listen up, buster. The conviction I give your propagandist c.r.a.p should win me a BAFTA. Instead, I get chucked out of my office so you can move in more b.l.o.o.d.y computer hardware.'

'It's part of the transmitter automation programme.'

'Then get the transmitter to read the scripts. There's no real people left in this G.o.dd.a.m.ned place. Just hundreds of empty offices, full of computers and squatting Chillys!'

Christopher locked eyes with him and smiled. 'I'll tell Miss Waterfield.'

They had reached a stairwell. Anthony glared for a moment before he started down. At the first landing, he stopped. Out of reach. 'Tell her I want action now. Not when orders arrive from our Glorious Sponsor, wherever he hangs out.'

Having delivered himself of his tirade, he set off back to his gla.s.s dungeon. If they didn't react he would do a DLT live on air and see how they liked that. He still had Danny's crumpled note in his fist. He rubbed at his fingers where they were irritating.

13.

Shapes rush of stale air and the approaching roar of another Aengine.

The presence inhabiting Travers pushes his shape into the low angle between the wall and the floor. A niche for itself, confined to the extent of the body's substance, anch.o.r.ed by gravity to the Earth.

The sound of bodies moving. A threnody of a thousand footsteps clattering, dispersing, echoing away.

The thing in the blind old man's body listens to their shapes. Light and heavy shapes, clumsy, old and young shapes.

A human voice shouts, 'Mind the doors.'

A shrill alarm of bleeps. A slide. A thud. The engine's roar fading into the distance and a rush of air pressing against Travers's surface skin.

Footsteps approach and pause. A c.h.i.n.k of metal pieces on the ground in front of it. The footsteps move on again.

The presence feels itself in every region of Travers's body, held in the stasis it has imposed. It knows every ancient blood cell moving sluggishly in every ancient vein. Every hair and follicle, every nerve-ending. Its own pounding thought-beat overwhelming the dull double thud of Travers's heart. It can make him jerk with spasms as it flexes inside his body. But laughter, cruel and mocking, is exhausting. And it is still so weak. A scooped-out pulp without its own sh.e.l.l.

It has no shape. That was lost long ago. Does it recall what it was once? Was it huge with ma.s.sive claws to crush and maim? A bloated spider-mind filling every cavernous gap with billowing web? Was it a mountain? A bank of mountains looming and rumbling like clouds in another sky or on another continuum? A comet scattering thoughts when it surges through the junctions and circuits of the New World computer?

It is there now, resting while it projects out of that body into Travers's body, where it has had a hold for years.

In truth, it cannot remember what it once was. That was so far off, in another dimension, another form of now.

It struggles to hold its thoughts together. A ma.s.s of thoughts is all it is. But such substantial thoughts. More than just an idea. A ma.s.s of thoughts with one single thought. The Doctor reversed the energy flow. Reversed everything. The power that enabled it, It It, the Great Great Intelligence, now binds it. Intelligence, now binds it.

Now it it is the p.a.w.n. It is blinded. It cannot escape. is the p.a.w.n. It is blinded. It cannot escape.

It is still weak, but it has a new web now: a web of wires and fibres where it has soothed and healed its wounded mind.

The new web reaches and connects with other webs. The Intelligence has spread slowly, bridging interfaces, breaching firewalls, hiding in other commands and texts. The new web already circuits the Earth. All systems are converting to one command system. Search and retrieve that focus that binds it.

That Locus must be recovered and destroyed!

And that is not enough. The rigid web binds it too. It must have solid form and substance. Not to exist solely as blind impulses of data. But does it have the strength?

Something squeaks nearby.

The Intelligence feels a shape brush against its foot against Travers's foot encased in soft animal skin. It reaches out its will, temporarily abandoning its aged host.

It feels itself inside the new shape. A hairy little body with a long febrile tail and a tiny racing heart. The little creature stops, terrified by the sudden enforced blindness of the invader. The blind Intelligence revels in the creature's heightened sense of smell vividly and colourfully pungent.

The creature squeals and rolls over and over, all but bursting apart from the monstrous existence inhabiting its tiny form.

The intruder loosens its inner grip, allowing the puny creature's instincts to scurry it forward. From its newfound whiskers, it senses the narrow crack that the animal enters. At home in the acrid darkness. The presence feels rough wood and mortar below the creature's paws and then something smooth, unnatural, fed with a charge of electricity.

The Intelligence abandons its tiny host and enters the cable, surging along it, a long finger of thought stretching thinner and thinner. It remembers this place and seeks the tinny voice at the end of the cable.

'Victoria! Victoria!'

It hears startled reactions below: 'What are they on about?'

'This is Piccadilly Circus, isn't it?' 'Nah, change at Green Park for the Victoria Line.'

The address system gives a burst of hysterical demonic laughter that echoes away into the tunnel. 'My strength is returning.'

The Intelligence gives a leap of imagination back into the well-tried and hateful prison body of Travers. It needs him now. There will be no more waiting.

A nearby voice is saying, 'Come on, old man. You can't sit begging here.'

Travers's shoulder is gripped by a human hand. He is being pulled upwards. Flat circles of metal are being pushed into his palm.

'Here you are. Take your money and push off.' Travers, old and worn out, is grunting in confusion.

'Come on,' says the voice. 'Don't you have a home to go to?'

With a rush, the Intelligence takes full possession again.

Travers gives a bearlike snarl. His stick lashes out and strikes something hard.

There is a scream from nearby.

The stick swings wide, searching its way, dragging blind Travers behind it.

Victoria's conference with the Chancellor was part of her daily ritual. First the office was darkened and she would sit in contemplation before the screen of her monitor.

Concentrate relax concentrate...

Increasingly it became important to gather her inner strength before they spoke, if only to withstand his rages. As it was, he often left her weeping. The Chancellor was old, a reclusive hermit, driven by a great will that would one day provide the greatest revelation to them all. Victoria never saw him. He spoke to her through disciplines inlaid in the New World computer, his creation, which the students nicknamed the Omputer. He spoke from somewhere distant and unknown, but with such intense conviction that when she heard him, she knew nothing else. He held the key to the future and she was chosen to help him.

Relax concentrate relax...

He had shown her how to pilot her mind from perception into imagination and rise out of her body; to project herself into other etheric states; to see the world in overview, from a witch's-cradle of thoughts.

Contemplation, however, had its drawbacks.

'Thinking again?' her father would say. 'Too much of that and you'll forget how to talk.'

She had achieved so much, but was she content?

No. Contentment was as much a fallacy as perfection. Yet they all strove for it.

She was driving her thoughts, concentrating. Then thinking of blue, deep infinite blue. Drifting back again. Back, back into dream memories.

Eastbourne holidays. Watching the sailing-boats with her mother and collecting sh.e.l.ls and starfish on the beach when the tide was out. The wind blowing her bonnet into the sea from the promenade and the fisherman who fetched it back and got thrupence from her father for his trouble.

Sunday dinner with boiled leg of mutton and caper sauce.

Stewed greengages with egg custard. Cook in a fl.u.s.ter when Disraeli the spaniel stole the vanilla blancmange. Mother taking camomile medicine for her poorly stomach.

It always ended in sadness.

Suppose they had fled the house near Canterbury? She and her father. Away from the horror and cruelty of the Daleks who imprisoned her there. Brutal monstrosities, forever screaming orders at her and pus.h.i.+ng her to and fro while they engaged in their horrible experiments.

Where would they have gone? Back to London? Or even Oxford? Would she have married? Would she be running her own household, bearing a baker's dozen of children and having two dozen more grandchildren playing around her skirts? Would that be fulfilling enough?

The modern world had become almost unrecognizable.

Moral codes that had been strictly dictated by Victorian society were now more and more in the domain of the individual. Even so, her students were devoted to their studies.

Perhaps too much. There was little of the wildness that seemed to dominate society at large. She was almost glad when one of them did rebel a little. That was why Daniel Hinton must be cared for.

The world still frightened her by the speed with which it changed. She was forced to rely on Christopher for guidance.

She didn't like him, but he was single-mindedly brilliant at organizing and promoting the university. Even if the results were strange, she trusted him because the Chancellor said he was the best man for the job. In modern terms, Christopher had the twentieth century sussed and she was left on a shelf in the antiques market. If only he didn't lunch lunch quite so often. quite so often.

Her privilege was to liaise with the Chancellor. Her task was to find the thing he craved, the vital Locus that had been missing for over twenty-five years. His voice had lately grown more fierce, his endless demands more wearying. The staring white eye of the monitor, his blind eye, burned out at her as his harsh whisper echoed into the shadowy office. The voice dislodged other sounds that scattered around it as he tore angrily at the injustice of the sacrifice he had made. The suffering was great for those who sought Enlightenment. Only she could offer consolation.

'The Locus must be recovered now!'

He was bad today. Ranting accusations at her. It was as much as she could do to stay calm. She was on a knife-edge. 'I gave you my word. Soon.'

On an impulse, she reached for the box on her desk. It was a surprise and a relief to see that the silvered globe was back in its place, although she could not remember how it had returned.

The voice gave an almost inhuman groan of pain. 'You know nothing of this blind, empty outer darkness where I am bound... It is unendurable!'