Title: Plastic Dolls Floating Across the Atlantic, Toy Soldiers Crowding the Pacific - Four, "New and Used"
Author:
heddychaaCharacters: Jack, John, OCs, references to past Jack/John and Jack/Ianto
Rating: Hard R, leaning toward NC-17
Genre: Action, Suspense, Sci-Fi
Wordcount: 1,210/7,307
Warnings: Non-spoilery references to Series 5 of Doctor Who.
Disclaimer: Torchwood's characters, concepts, and events belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russell T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: After the disbanding of the Time Agency, only seven former Agents survive, scattered throughout time and space. Who are these seven? How do they live now that the Agency, once the defining factor in their respective lives, is gone? And what ominous presence is stalking them across the centuries?
A/N: A series of seven episodic interlinked vignettes. Complete, but due to their format I'll be posting one every day over the next seven days, excluding Sunday. This story is self-contained, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't putting this out there to see whether it would be worth it to invest my time in writing something longer!
Credits: Beta-d, as always, by the patient, smart, and oh-so-helpful
azn_jack_fiend and
_lullabelle_. Title from
this poem, the title of which isn't fit to print, by the late and great Allen Ginsberg. Fic's concept inspired by
this brilliant fanvid. Today's casting by
azn_jack_fiend. C'mon, you have to admit, it's absolutely brilliant.
Four: New and Used
5130, Zombus
Okay, so maybe it’s counterproductive to go into business enabling the very people you were once employed to stop. But a girl’s gotta make a living, and it was either this or go back into deep space transport mechanics, and does Isabel really want to spend the rest of her life wearing an oxygen tank for shit pay? Not when the black market’s been so kind to her.
She keys the code into her own vortex manipulator, stitched into the wrist of one of a pair of black leather fingerless motorcycle gloves. The case on the glass counter in front of her pops open with the hiss of hydraulics. She swings the lid open, surveying the six vortex manipulators laid out on the dimpled grey foam inside it. They range in size, shape, and colour; two are the standard wide brown leather bands, while others are narrower, and the final two, respectively, are encased in stretchy silicone material and set, like an expensive watch, in a band of metal links.
“I scavenge and refurbish them myself,” she tells the buyer, an anxious looking Blowfish, as she turns the case toward him. He stands on the other side of the counter, his back to the door of her shop. He’s wearing a pinstripe suit and it looks absolutely ridiculous. “Sure, you can get them elsewhere, but my prices are fair, I don’t kill living Agents to acquire them, and as a former Agent myself, I’m the most qualified person you’ll find to fix the tech. You buy it off of someone else, there’s a damn good chance they’re either outright selling you a dud or if they’ve attempted to fix it, they’ve cocked something up.”
“You wouldn’t have to refurbish them if you weren’t scavenging them out of junk shops and off of dead bodies, you know,” the Blowfish says, picking up one strap between his thumb and forefinger as though it’s something distasteful before dropping it again. He doesn’t outright suggest that she should kill living Time Agents for their vortex manipulators, but the suggestion is there in his tone.
“I’d also be causing more active damage to the timelines than I already am by selling the things to non-professionals,” Isabel retorts. Not to mention that if I ever did such a thing I’d never be able to live with myself. But she doesn’t say that part aloud, because that kind of sentiment won’t endear her to the customer at all.
“Now that one you just put down,” she says instead, “I know it’s a woman’s strap, but it has a great selection of coordinates saved in its memory banks if you’re at all interested in playing the stock market. I hear hindsight’s 20/20.”
The Blowfish snorts his disapproval.
She tries again. “Well, the third one over, there, the one on the brown leather strap, that one has a pretty interesting history. It was used by the Agent who went AWOL after he stole the Mona Lisa. It took four of us to hunt him down and execute him, in the end.” He’d been a smug bastard, sure, but weren’t they all smug bastards? She wasn’t sure, now, if his crimes really warranted killing him.
“Do I look like I’m out antiquing?” the Blowfish says. “I don’t care about the thing’s story.”
“If you’re looking for functionality, the last one there, the one on the metal links, is a later model. I checked its jump history and it has a 98.7% accuracy rate, as opposed to the typical 96% the older models produced. And you know, two-point-seven percent counts for a lot when you’re talking about a device that, when it fails, can send you as much as three hundred years off your target.” Maybe more. Anybody who’d been thrown out farther or, and she shudders to think of it, got caught in the time vortex, hadn’t lived to tell the tale.
“Are you telling me that even with the best model you’ve got here there’s still a 1.3% chance that I could end up in the wrong day or year?” The Blowfish’s hand tightens around the strap of the vortex manipulator, twisting the metal into half a DNA strand.
“There’s always a margin of error,” she replies. “It doesn’t really matter that much, usually. If you end up a few years off, which is the average error, you just jump again to the right place. It’s an infinitely small chance that you’ll get an error twice in a row. And anyway, those off-license ones you could get elsewhere? Have an even greater margin of error. I’ve seen ones that fail up to 60% of the time. So it’s really not worth the money saved.”
“Do you guarantee your merchandise?” he asks her, turning the strap over in his hands.
“Hell no!” she replies. “Do I look like a damn Best Buy?”
He doesn’t get the joke.
“Space and time are so big you’d never find me to claim it. If you want a warranty buy your shit legally. Oh wait, you can’t!”
She smiles as he counts out the bills into her waiting palm.
After he’s gone she gets up from behind the counter and flips the “Open” sign to “Closed” and draws the blinds, obscuring the backwards printing on the window that advertises “MECHANIC-FOR-HIRE: RARE TECHNOLOGY BOUGHT, REPAIRED, AND SOLD”. Once she’s alone and the door is locked, she opens the tracking program she’d written and installed on her own vortex manipulator. The Blowfish has travelled to Roaring Twenties Chicago. All the universe to explore and he wanted to relive The Great Gatsby? Typical Blowfish, though. None of her business.
She scrolls through the program’s records of vortex manipulator movement. There’s another strap out there that she’s been putting off scavenging. The program says it was last active for a jump to Britain in 1869 which was followed by what looks like more than a hundred years of silence. It matches the readouts she often sees for Agents who die in the past. Whose bodies aren’t recovered. But this one was somehow reactivated in a jump to 2008 from a year none of them have ever dared to visit. Another scavenger? A particularly smart archaeologist? How could it even be working, still, after all that time? Vortex Manipulators are durable, but there’s no way one could still be working through to the year one hundred trillion, if such a year even existed. Some kind of malfunction? She ought to just leave it, but it’s a mystery she desperately wants to solve.
She pulls up the program’s information on the strap, including a hologram of the face of the Agent assigned it. Not bad looking! Pity he’s dead. It’s no real danger to travel to 2008 and see what she finds there. Worst case scenario, she gets into a gun fight with another scavenger over it.
There’s a buzz as a person-sized rectangular portion of the shop door blinks out of existence. Isabel fumbles to draw her gun, but not before a pair of figures step through, the leader pointing a charged sonic blaster at Isabel’s chest. Putting up her hands, Isabel says, as casually as she can manage, “Oh hello, Pearl, come to kill me finally?”
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.