Unfinished Symphony-E8-The Other Side-Part One
Prelude
Unfinished Symphony Episode Eight
The Other Side-Part One
He ran into his Torchwood facility, paper still in hand.
He saw both Rose and Luke look up from where they were working to see what the rush was. Luke smiled immediately, Rose's came a bit slower. “Keep working on the higher functions.”, Rose said standing up, “I need to talk to the...I need to talk him real quick.”
Luke smiled and nodded. Since they had discovered the boy in the soda factory, The Doctor and Rose had done their best to raise him as their own. He was incredibly intelligent and telepathic on a level that was hard to explain, he was also incredibly sweet. Naive and open, it was obviously he looked to the The Doctor as a father.
But Rose had noticed something was wrong.
As he made his way into his office Rose followed, making sure the door was closed and locked behind her. “Where were you?”, she asked as he spread the paper out on his desk and started rummaging through the bin of random gadgets that had collected over the years by his desk.
“Huh?”, he said looking up for a moment and then back to digging.
“I asked where were you? Luke was here for over an hour waiting for you.”, she said trying not to raise her voice. This fight wasn't about Luke and it wasn't about where he was. But she sure in the hell wasn't going to have THAT fight now.
“Waiting for what?”, he asked tossing out something that looked dangerously close to a Dalek blaster out of the box. He still wasn't listening to her, she could tell. He was caught up in whatever new adventure or puzzle that had him distracted today, and again, he wasn't here.
He wasn't here, that was the problem.
She shook her head and pressed on, “For you!”, she paused and he looked up at her, “Advanced logarithms?”, blank stare, “Patterns out of chaos?”, more nothing, “You promised you'd help him design it if he did well on his test.”
'Universal translator!', he said loudly and then his face fell, “That was today?”
“That was today.”, she said not being able to hide her ire, “And that boy sat down there for over an hour, thinking you had to be doing something monumentally important or you would have been here.”, she put her hands on his desk and leaned forwards, “Tell me it was monumentally important.”
“It was!”, he said going back to his digging, “Most important thing in the world.”
“More important than breaking a little boy's heart?”
He looked up and for the briefest of moments, a flicker, she saw the answer in his eyes. She saw the complete apathy about the conversation and the growing desire to say whatever was needed for her to leave him alone so he finish what he was attempting. Out loud he said, “Of course not, tell him I'll be right down.”
But she saw the real answer, and that was enough. She turned, left his office and took Luke out for an ice cream. If the...if he noticed Luke was missing, he'd call her.
But Rose had stopping waiting for calls that weren't going to come a long time ago.
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At first she was in shock.
Having him kiss her like that, watching the TARDIS leave. She was almost numb in the speed in which it all occurred. He had taken her hand and smiled that smile of his, and all her doubts faded away. She was worried she had made a mistake, but what's done was done.
Having him here, it was like a dream. After a while, it was easy to forget he wasn't the Doctor, he was so much like him. The way he handled the Bane's invasion of London, the seconds it took him to figure out how to rig the cell towers across Britain to use against their queen, the compassion he showed when they had found Luke. He had adopted the boy into his family and folded him into their lives effortlessly. And Rose was beaming because this was everything she had wanted. But as usual, it was Jackie who wasn't buying it.
“He's not him!”, she would tell Rose when they were alone, “Hes not the same man, how can you just be with him!?” Rose ignored her mother's complaints based on one simple reason.
She was with the Doctor and that was enough.
She had helped him incorporate UNIT into Torchwood, making them a world wide network. She had never been so proud of him than standing on that platform with the world watching, as he told them about the future. He had brought a world together, and it was incredible to watch. Her father knew he had picked the right man to head the organization, and made it clear that if she was to marry him, he would gladly support it.
She had been so caught up in all of it, she failed to notice how easy it had been. How quickly the world delegates had signed on to making Torchwood the world authority on all things alien. The speed in which the directives flew through the world courts. The utter acceptance the people who govern accepted Torchwood control. She didn't notice any of it. After all.
She was with the Doctor, and that was enough.
It wasn't until President Harriet Jones of Great Britain took ill that she began to wake up. In the middle of her third consecutive term she was diagnosed with Pick's disease, a fatal neurological degeneration of all of her higher brain functions. Within a month she had gone from being one of the world's top leaders to a dementia racked patient. When Rose had gone to see her she was stricken by the change, this was the woman who united England after the Cybermen, who rallied against the American President Winter's arguments over moving the bulk of planetary defense from UNIT to Torchwood. If there was someone besides the Doctor who was responsible for this new world, it was Harriet.
But here she was, strapped to a medical bed with monitors recording her vital signs all around her. Pick's disease, which was not a disease per say as a condition, was thought to be a genetic disorder, yet all of President Jones previous medical scans showed her clean of any such condition. So the medical community had rallied around to find the cause the President's malady before her brain shut down completely. When Rose had gone the Doctor had begged off, still in the middle of shoring up the Asian components of his plan, he had little time to spare. Instead she took Luke, who Harriet had grown quite fond of over the years. Rose hoped that the boy could break through the fog that had descended over Harriet's mind and give her even an afternoon of rest.
Being the Doctor's consort had privileges, one of them was holding a Torchwood Code Black security badge that guaranteed access to nearly any facility on the face of the planet. The private hospital was no different. When they walked in to the room Harriet began to scream, an incoherent stream of syllables that sounded nothing like language at all.
“Hello Ms. President”, Rose said over the screaming, “I brought Luke to see you.” But if she could understand Rose, she gave no indication. She was wild eyed panicked as they approached the bed, she kept repeating the same two sounds over and over again like a chant. Rose could not believe how bad her condition had become.
“She's...”, Luke said getting right next to the bed, “...she's broken.”, he said hesitantly. “Her mind, there's a fracture.” The Doctor had worked with Luke the first few months in honing the boy's formidable telepathic skills to the point where the prepubescent boy was easily the most powerful human telepath ever recorded. So if he said something was broken in Harriet's mind, he knew what he was talking about.
“Can you...”, Rose started, she wasn't sure she wanted Luke exposed to whatever this was. But Harriet was a friend, and she needed them, “...can you help her? Fix it?”
Luke kept looking at Harriet as she repeated the same two sounds again and again and concentrated, “I think so. There's a hole in her head, and it's burnt away the parts that decipher language.”, he kept staring, “She knows who we are and where she is. But she is trying to tell us something, but her mind can't make the words.” He put his hand on hers and closed his eyes, “I'm gonna try to bridge the hole with my mind for a moment. It won't fix her, but she should be able to...”
Luke clenched as he touched her mind and he tried to pull back but Harriet grabbed his hand before he could move. Like a vise she held on to the boy's hand as Rose moved to separate them. Luke's eyes flew open as he focused on nothing, just looked straight forward. Then at the same time both Harriet and him started to saw the same thing, two voices joined in two words over and over again.
“Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf”
Rose froze as her heart skipped a beat. She watched in panic as they both said it over and over again. Rose had never told anyone what Bad Wolf meant. Not Luke, certainly not Harriet, but here they were, saying it over and over again. It was at that moment she knew, something was terribly wrong. She just had no idea what.
That was seven months ago and she had found a disturbing pattern. Every single person who was on the original negotiating team for the Torchwood project had fallen ill of a neurological condition. The symptoms and diseases were varied, but they all came down to the same basic concept. Their minds simply stopped working correctly. Her first thought had been to talk to the Doctor, to show him the evidence. But as strong as that impulse was another always stayed her hand.
If she had seen the pattern so quickly, why hadn't he?
So she had started to investigate on her own. Autopsy reports on the bodies at first, then using the very generous Torchwood travel account she had flown all around the world to meet and talk with these people before they lost the ability to do so. For the most part they complained of migraines and a scattering of thoughts that eventually led up to one form of mental impairment or another. The ones that were too far gone she took Luke with her, under the guide of showing him the different operations and how they connected together. Of course the Doctor didn't go, still too busy making sure all the bases were connected and talking to each other.
Each time Luke had reported the same thing, their brains were broken and it wasn't from disease or genetic alteration. The very fabric of their neural pathways seemed to have been altered, and in doing so wore, at times a literal, hole in their brain. Causing a variety of conditions. All of them ending in death. All of them thinking the same thing.
Bad Wolf.
With every new confirmation her heart sank a little deeper. She knew these people, had worked with these people. They were the original geo-political advisers that had been collected to sell the idea of a unified Torchwood. These had been their media soldiers, meeting with heads of states and convincing them the Torchwood plan was the best way to go. Before that though these were the people who had rejected the idea the loudest. The Doctor had collected them in hopes of convincing them so that they could convince the world. He said he didn't want a team of people who agreed with it, he wanted people who disagreed. If he could convince them, they could convince anyone. And he was right. One by one, over a series of months at her father's placial estate, these people came around to the merits of the Torchwood plan.
All of them turned around by the Doctor.
Something was wrong, and the universe was trying to warn her about it.
So Luke and her sat outside his favorite ice cream shop, him tackling a three scoop monstrosity while she looked over more CAT scans. She couldn't figure out the cause of all this, but she knew the answer was in front of her. With Luke's help she had become a minor expert in dealing with the mind, and so far nothing added up. The defects in the brain each occurred at different places in different degrees, the only linking factor was that they were all on the Torchwood payroll.
She put the papers down trying to clear her mind, the images and numbers in her head were all becoming jumbled. She looked over and saw Luke taking large licks of the cone from different places with different sides of his mouth. She smiled despite herself, no matter how smart the boy was, it was the simple things that reminded her how young he really was.
“Do you and the ice cream need some time alone?”, she said smiling.
Luke looked up and blushed as he saw her watching him, “No”, he said smiling in embarrassment, “It's just I am using the different taste receptors in my tongue to stimulate the different pleasure areas of my brain.” She had to admit that was a sentence about ice cream she had never heard before.
“How's that?”, she asked taking a bite of her own melted sundae, “It goes in your mouth and you swallow.”
Luke shook his head, “No. The brain collects different tastes in different places. So if I want to stimulate my cerebral pleasure, I like the coffee ice cream with the sour part of my neurotransmitters.”
“Taste buds”, she corrected.
“Same thing”, he said cocking his head, “It stimulates a different part of my brain. If I lick the lemon sherbet with the tip I can generate pleasure in the emotional center.”
“And the chocolate fudge?”, she asked.
“Oh I just like the taste of that.”, he said smiling.
“So the taste activates different parts of your brain?”, she said between bites.
“It's the way the mind stores emotional residence. It makes sure that conflicting emotional information isn't stored in the same location as diametrically opposed information. So if you hated one thing, the brain stores what you love somewhere completely different. It all depends on what your feeling on it is.”
And something clicked in Rose's mind.
“Does it do that with everything?”, she asked leaning forward, “I mean with facts, not just tastes.”
Luke looked over his cone, “Well, yes. What do you mean specifically.”
“What if you had something people were objecting to, but they objected to it based on different things. Like say...abortion. If one person objected because of their faith and another because of personal experience, the feelings would be in different places right?”
Luke nodded not understanding what Rose was asking.
She pulled out the CAT scans again, “Like a group of people who objected to unifying Torchwood, all because of different reasons? If their minds were altered, each based on whatever objection they had...”
Luke's eyes widened, “Then whoever altered their mind would have had to probe them in different places.”
Rose nodded quickly, “Someone hacked their minds, overriding whatever objections they had at the time...”, she started.
Luke put down his ice cream, “...but whoever did it had to be powerful. I mean really powerful Rose. Altering someone's mind wouldn't leave this kind of damage unless they were trying to kill them or had no idea how strong they were pushing.”
“Like someone who was telepathic, but didn't know the strength of their own mind?”, she asked looking away.
“Possibly. But that is still a massive amount of physic energy. And who had access to all of these people? They were all kept safe at your dad's...”, and his voice trailed off. He looked up at her and she looked back, the fear in both their eyes were the same.
Yet neither found they could say it aloud.
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He examined the paper with everything he had.
For some reason he didn't think it was paper at all. It had too coarse a surface to be just paper. As he placed it under a microscope and he found what looked like paper, was some kind of fibers bound together. The writing were some form of metal, but nothing he had ever seen before. He placed it under a spectrometer and that was when things got weird. The paper pinged as if it was over 4 and half million years old. Which was impossible of course, but three readings all said the same thing.
This was not of this Earth.
If he was reading this right it wasn't of this universe. Which should have been impossible after the walls of the multiverse healed themselves. There should be no movement between this world and the other, yet here was his proof. For it to arrive just as he was there and thinking what he was thinking...well not was not coincidence. But what it was, he didn't know.
And then in front of his eyes the words began to bleed down the paper like liquid. Then slowly they moved and began to form new letters. Within seconds the paper now read, “If it was a good enough hiding place for one, then it is good enough for you.”
And instantly, he knew exactly where he had to go.
He only hoped the funeral parlor was still there.
To be continued...