Unfinished Symphony-E5-I Don't Like Mondays-Part Five
Prelude
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Unfinished Symphony Episode Five
I Don't Like Mondays-Part Five
The afternoon show was preempted by a news break. The Doctor changed the channel quickly but every station seemed to be covering some incident at a mall with a live remote. He flicked the screwdriver angrily a few more times and then turned off the television.
He sat there fuming for a few moments and then made a decision. He got up and opened the sliding back door to Sarah's backyard. He stood there for a moment, watching the afternoon sun radiating down on his TARDIS. And against all odds he smiled.
He walked inside and closed the door behind him.
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The mall was surrounded already by police and emergency cars. Sarah parked as close as she could, but it was already becoming a nightmare. The two women pushed their way through the crowd towards the police barricade, a wall of uniforms blocked the swelling mass of people from getting any closer to the mall than necessary.
“So now what?”, Donna asked as they struggled to be pushed forward by the mob.
Sarah didn't answer, she simply pulled out an ID and showed it to the nearest officer, “I need to see the field commander”, she said to the now wide eyed policeman.
He spoke a few words into his radio and after a moment he moved aside the wooden barricades and allowed them inside, “He's in the large blue van over there”, the officer said pointing.
Sarah thanked him and made her way across the parking lot.
“Who did you say you were this time?”, Donna asked.
Sarah flipped the card over and showed her a UNIT ID badge at listed Sarah Jane Smith:Special Agent, Security level Black, “I told him who I really was.”
Donna tried to cover her shock as they made their way into the cramped police van. Inside there were over a dozen people, most of them watching the three dozen security feeds that were being routed in from the mall. As soon as the door opened the same SWAT commander from the day before. And he didn't seem any happier to see them.
“What's this? UNIT back again for more? Wasn't she shot?”, he said looking at Donna.
Donna flexed her arm and made a show of looking at it, “Me? No, can't say I've been shot. Were you shot?”, she asked looking at Sarah Jane.
“What have we got Commander?”, using his official name hoping it would show him some respect.
“I have a teenager male who has taken over a dozen people in the food court hostage. I don't know what you have but it isn't this.”, he said standing in the doorway, arms on his hips.
“Commander”, she started, “There are forces at work here...”
“Ms. Smith is it?”, he said, “I am trying to keep fifteen innocent people from being killed. Though I would love to chat with you and your friend here, I have to get back to work.” He took a step back and closed the door, leaving the two women standing on the metal steps.
“Now what?”, Donna asked seeing the look on Sarah Jane's face.
“I gave him a chance. Now we do it my way.”, and she began to walk around to the rear of the mall. Donna followed, wondering if this was a good or a bad thing.
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He wrapped the humans hands up in tape. There were sniffles and low sobs coming from the humans, which was like a symphony to his ears. Their suffering and fear, it wouldn't go away. The ones that lived would carry this event, around with them. Like an open sore this trauma would fester and seep into their every day lives. Jumping at loud noises, fearful of dark, enclosed places, hesitant to leave their own houses. They would pass it along to others, making them fearful by the dead and haunted look in their eyes. This one, this one would be remembered, his score should be off the charts.
He checked the wrap, both hands bound from wrist to finger in duct tape, their hands in a praying position. “Wouldn't want you to drop it would we?”, he said with the boy's mouth. The woman tried not to scream out in terror, but she was screaming in her mind. And that was enough for him.
He moved to the next hostage at took a sideways glance at the television monitors he had connected in the food court. They were showing the different newscasts about his event, each one repeating the same fear over and over again. He saw a picture of the his mount and his father on one screen. The mount's sire was in the military, and lucky for him had access to a motherload of weapons and explosives.
Lucky for him, unlucky for them.
And then he saw it. Out of the corner of one eye, the same car again; two of his sluts stepping out. His rival had succeeded in only wounding one of them, no points for him. But here they were again, which meant it was his turn.
He stopped and walked over to the cell phone he had left on the table. Flipping it open the human police leader answered, “Is everyone alright?”
“Let the women in.”, he said ignoring the answer.
The commander paused for a moment, then he said, “I am not giving you any more hostages!”
He turned and aimed a rifle at one of the hostages, “Send those women in or...”, and he shot one right in the head, “...I kill another.” He hung up the phone and drank in the screams and cries of those that were left.
“Magic”, he said grabbing the roll of duct tape, “Pure magic.”
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“God damnit!”, the commander said slamming the phone down. He looked over to the officer watching the security cameras and saw all he needed to know. From the ashen look and shock in the man's face, he had just killed another one.
“Get me those two women!”, he shouted, “Now!!”
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Luke got home and did his daily dance at the front door.
It was a combination of shucking his backpack off, sliding his shoes free and closing the door all at the same time. To Luke it was a series of ergonomic responses to achieve all his goals simultaneously. Maria had once said it looked like he was under attack by several snakes under his clothes or possibly one of those old style 80's dance they sometimes watched on Youtube.
All Luke knew, it an average of 4.3 seconds, he was racing upstairs to help Mr. Smith.
“Mr. Smith, do you need me?”, he called out, sliding across the wooden floor in his socks to the computer terminal.
“Need you for what Luke?”, the computer asked in its normal monotone voice.
“Compiling the data from the hard drives. Mom said to help you out.”, he looked over the data streams the computer was looking at now.
“I am looking over the computer records from every website contained within the victims hard drives and then running multiple IP traces to see when the last time they had been accessed by the computer.”
Luke nodded, “Ok, pull my MySpace.com for me.” Mr. Smith opened a new screen and then displayed the opening page of the website. “Now I need to have full access to the sites controls.” Taking less than a second Mr. Smith opened up the sysop control that allowed one of the websites maintainers to access the site remotely.
Luke quickly went through the site, looking for the victims individual profiles. Then, using the MySpace server data, calculated the last time they had checked their accounts. Within a minute he had found at least three of the victims had been on MySpace minutes, if not seconds before the attack.
“I think I found something Mr. Smith.”, Luke said, “Now we need a listing of exit portals.”
“Define exit portal”, Mr. Smith asked.
“Normally servers keep track of where their users are coming from and sometimes where they are leaving to from their site. I need to know where the victims went from MySpace, if at all.”
“You believe they went to another site?”. The computer asked.
“Its a logical guess.”, the young boy said grabbing a stool to sit down.
The screen changed and Mr. Smith adjusted his calculations, “Searching MySpace servers for all incoming and outgoing traffic at the times of the attacks.”
Luke nodded, “And then rule out the sites that we know are just normal websites. We are looking for something out of the ordinary, its possible that if they had MySpace open and then opened another site, the server would list that as an exit portal.”
“I was not aware you were so proficient in internet protocol.”
Luke smiled, “I wasn't. I read a few books at school.”
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Donna and Sarah had gotten towards the back and saw two officers guarding the service door. They both moved to attention when they saw them, their hands lingered by their weapons, “You ladies need to get out of here!”, one of them called out as they approached.
“You wanna take the one on the right?”, Donna whispered as they walked up.
“Can you handle the one on the left?”, Sarah asked in surprise. Donna did a doubletake for a second.
“You're serious?”, she asked.
“Well I could try for both, but if you can handle one...”
Donna stopped, “We aren't jumping them.”
Sarah stopped, “Well we aren't now.”, she sounded upset, “Donna there are innocent people up there about to be killed and we need to get in. How to expect to do that? Walk up and ask nicely?”
Donna turned to the men, who were listening to something being said over their radio, “Oy, copper. You think you'll let us go in so we can go do some good?”
Sarah winced and closed her eyes, knowing they had just lost any chance of surprise. Her eyes flew open when she heard the officer say, “Go ahead, you've been cleared to go up. He's asking for you.”
Sarah looked to Donna who was smiling, “See? Now so hard Jamie Bond!” The officers opened the doors and let them in, their expressions were ones that seemed they didn't expect them to return.
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“What is that?”, Luke said edging up to the computer screen.
Mr. Smith scanned the numbers again, “It is a web address it seems.” but even the computer seemed unsure.
Luke shook his head, “Internet protocol works on a unique 32 bit number system. They are octets because they can have a value between 0 and 255.”, he pointed to the screen, “That has a completely different type of address.”
“Searching”, Mr. Smith intoned. He sent his digital probes shooting across the world. His feelers went searching for a correlation in MI-6, Torchwood, CIA, FBI, The Initiative, NORAD and NASA databases. It took almost three seconds, an eternity to Mr. Smith before he said, “It is a relay used by the NASA space agency.”
“What for?”, Luke asked.
“Originally it was for the Ranger Space Probes. It was a radio frequency that was picked up by various satellites and then transferred to Earth.”
“Ranger Probes?”, Luke asked, “What are those?”
“They were a series of intrastellar probes designed to map and chart the interior of the Sol system. Unlike the Voyager series that were meant to leave our solar system, the Rangers were designed to stay within our system and map out each planetary mass.”, Mr. Smith showed a series of file footage from the lift offs to the technical schematics of the probes.
“What happened?”, Luke asked looking at all the information.
“The first probe was lost somewhere between Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto. No reason could be found for the probes failure and the project was shut down.”
“So something is broadcasting on that signal...to MySpace?”, Luke asked completely confused.
“The original satellites that were designed by NASA were primitive and have since fallen out of orbit. But the new digital models have the capacity to receive the old style radio frequencies and transform them into a binary signal for digital broadcast.”
“And someone is using them to do that?”
Mr. Smith thought a moment, “It appears so.”
“Is the broadcast still there?”, Luke shifted on his stool, “I mean it would take almost four hours for a signal to reach Earth. So is it possible it is always broadcasting, it just doesn't have the satellite release the digital equivalent?”
“Scanning”, Mr. Smith said.
“Cool!”, Luke said, “This is so wicked!”
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They both made their way to the food court, walking over the corpses that lined the mall's interior. They had counted over thirty so far, with some unconscious but still breathing.
“Any ideas?”, Donna asked.
“You said the sonic screwdriver should work.”, she whispered back.
“In theory.”, she said thinking, “But it would take time to find the correct frequency that would counter the telepathic intrusion.”
Sarah slowed, “You didn't say that before!”
Donna kind of shrugged an apology, “I thought it was implied.”
Sarah shook her head, “I am not an expert in telepathic frequencies, and since when are you”?', she asked as they climbed the steps leading upwards.
“You pick some things up traveling with him.”, Donna said, not sounding at all confident. It was obvious she didn't know where the knowledge had come from either. Sarah narrowed her eyes, “Are you sure you aren't still carrying around his...”, and she pointed to her head, “...you know?”
“I still feel dense.”, Donna whispered as they got to the second level.
“You aren't dense!”, Sarah said to her.
Before she could answer they both heard a male voice, “I wouldn't say that. After all, you two walked up here free of will.”
They turned to find a tall, teenage male with a blue mohawk and facial piercings. He had a green military fest on with a
bandoleer around it, in his hand he gripped a MP5 machine gun. The look on his face was one of pure madness. He pointed the rifle at them, “Come on, join us.”, he said motioning them into the food court, “It's a party!”
The two of them made their way in, both of them hoping the other one had a good plan up their sleeve.
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“I have found it.”, Mr. Smith said.
“Show me!”, Luke said jumping off his stool.
Mr. Smith grabbed the radio signal and then translated it into a digital equivalent that would be displayed on the screen.
The screen burst into light as Luke looked on with his mouth open. “What is that?”, he said as a small trail of smoke detached itself from the screen, and made its way towards his throat.
To be continued...