Age of Aquarius (2/2)
If you've been following along over the weekend, you'll want to jump to the second cut.
Title: Age of Aquarius (2/2)
Characters/Pairings: Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers: None
Rating/Genre: Teen | action/adventure, sci-fi, plotty mcplotterson, genfic for most intents and purposes
Warnings (mouse over to read, as they do contain plot spoilers, but rest assured that I am really only warning for those with very specific violence-related triggers-this story is still rated Teen, contains no sex or sexual situations, and less violence than your average episode of Torchwood): Character death (OC), suicide
Summary: In the year 2089, the Doctor and Rose go to meet the man who can stop a nuclear war using only words. Or so they think.
[ Go back to Part 1]
A/N: This story was written as an "incentive fic" for those bidding on me in the Support Stacie Author Auction; I posted it in bits and pieces as people bid on me. I'd like to thank the following people for so generously bidding, and for having such wonderful spirits throughout the auction: wendymr, ladychi, wiggiemomsi, jaradel, EdgeOfWorld, 4ensicbones, np_complete and the winning bidder and the woman who now owns my ass: xebgoc
It was one of those moments that seemed to happen to Rose with increasing frequency as she travelled with the Doctor. People were talking-the Doctor and Dr. Mabuza were having a polite conversation and exchanging further pleasantries-but the meanings of the words suddenly slid completely out of focus, as if they were speaking a foreign language. Confronted with the massive wall of glass, behind which lay the largest aquarium she'd ever seen, it was like every other part of her brain just switched off. Fish of all descriptions swam past her view, and several stories below she could see a bottom covered by corals and seaweeds.
She could barely make out, on the far side of the enclosure, another glass partition, and on the other side of that, a shimmering blue light that she supposed was the actual open ocean. She approached the glass, drawn to it without even thinking about it, and realised that in actual fact what she was viewing was simply the lower portion of a much larger and more complicated system of enormous tanks. She craned her neck to try to see where it ended above them and wound up knocking her forehead quite loudly on the glass.
"Watch yourself, Miss Tyler," Dr. Mabuza said mildly.
"Perhaps you'd like to, you know, take some photos?" the Doctor added, taking Rose by the arm and leading her a few steps back from the glass again.
"Oh, right!" Rose replied. "Yes, well, you know how I like to work. Get the lay of the land first and all... or the sea as the case may be." She felt herself blushing and turned away as if to inspect another corner of the cavernous room.
"Please, sit down." Dr. Mabuza gestured to a grouping of sofas and chairs, arranged neatly on an antique Persian rug that stood in jarring contrast with the smooth, white, sterile feel of the rest of the building. "Who did you say you were with?"
The Doctor snapped to attention and followed the man over to sit on an overstuffed sofa. "I didn't. Freelance mostly, you know how it is in today's economy."
"I'm just curious, given that there seem to be a few more pressing matters in the world right now than just what I'm doing." There was an awkward pause while Dr. Mabuza reached over his head to switch on a Tiffany lamp. "And also given that I don't have a publicist."
"You don't... well... isn't that strange." The Doctor's hand flew to the back of his neck and he rubbed vigorously while closely inspecting his own shoes. "I wonder who it was I was talking to."
Rose thought it was a good time to take some photos before they were both summarily thrown out on their bums, and snapped still images of some of the larger, more showy fish that swam across her view. The Doctor seemed to be regrouping, taking a deep breath to talk his way out of trouble, but Dr. Mabuza simply raised a hand.
"I wouldn't mind if you told me why you were really here." His voice was calm, but somehow changed from the wearily polite tone of before to mesmerizingly sincere. He sat back in his chair and Rose found herself unable to look away from him now. His close-cropped hair had flecks of grey in it, but he seemed still a young man. Far too young for the accomplishments that the Doctor had rattled off to her on their walk here.
"Really, just to talk," the Doctor insisted, and it plainly wasn't a lie-when the Doctor did 'sincere' he was hard to doubt. "I just wanted to meet you."
"You're not a friend of Su-Jung?" It was a question, but his voice fell flat with disappointment and renewed suspicion.
The Doctor could clearly see the hoped-for answer was one he was unable to give. "I'm afraid not. Who's Su-Jung, then?"
Dr. Mabuza took a deep breath, and Rose sat on the sofa next to the Doctor. She could feel grief coming off of the man in waves, now that there was no reason for him to hide it.
"My wife," he said very simply. "Su-Jung Choi."
"I didn't know you were married," the Doctor replied, casting a furtive glance at Rose, letting her know that, as usual, the fact that he didn't already know something was worrisome to him. "Is she here now? I'd love to meet her as well."
Dr. Mabuza frowned and looked away. "She's not... here. She's dead."
"I'm so sorry," Rose said, feeling very strange about witnessing such an obviously great man so exposed. Seeing similar chinks in the Doctor's armour occasionally made her feel the same way, so that she wanted to provide comfort and run away, simultaneously.
"I'm sure she's dead. Certain of it," Dr. Mabuza continued.
"But..." the Doctor said suggestively, though Dr. Mabuza didn't take the bait. "But you don't know for a fact?"
Rose wanted to give the Doctor a good smack for being so emotionally tone-deaf as to press for more information from this man they barely knew.
"I know as much as I need to," Dr. Mabuza offered, much more sanguinely than Rose would have in a similar circumstance. "I know it's my fault. I know that nothing can stop what's coming now. Not without her. And I know what happens next."
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The final days of Su-Jung Choi were spent in a setting remarkably reminiscent of her old life as a normal schoolgirl in the suburbs of Seoul. When she first embarked on her task, she had, in her mind's eye, seen the seedy hovels and back rooms in which she'd surely be doing business, and perhaps giving over her life. But it hadn't been like that at all, in reality.
In reality, she seemed to find herself frequently in the homes of the global middle-class. People whose parents had escaped poverty, though just barely, and finally built their modest dream homes. If she hadn't known better, she would have thought all these houses had come out of the same kit, so similar in construction and amenities they were. Overwhelmingly beige, tiled, and just slightly out-of-scale with the size of furniture the inhabitants were able to appoint the rooms with, they seemed to grasp at some misunderstood notion of "respectability."
And likewise the people she was locked in a battle of both wills-and occasional weaponry-with were not greasy, moustache-twirling crooks with poor personal hygiene. Her captor now was a soft-spoken Azeri, whose home in a commuter suburb of Baku had wall-to-wall carpeting which was kept diligently hoovered. When he killed her, which he surely would, he'd certainly do so in the bathroom or kitchen, so as to avoid unsightly stains.
During her last day alive, she thought continuously about Themba, though not, she was surprised to find, regretfully. It was the end of the world and she knew him too well to think he'd hold himself apart from the human race during the coming holocaust. It freed her from having to think about what his life would be like without her.
She thought back on their meeting, when she was still a relatively young girl. There was only about fifteen years age difference between them, but it still seemed rather forbidden at the time. Her parents hadn't approved, of course, and she hadn't expected them to. Up until meeting Themba, she'd felt like she was just waiting for something, and it was instantly clear that the life he offered her was it. He recognised something in her that was also in him.
Something that a few years later compelled her to embark upon a quest, to stop a nuclear war before it began.
And she'd almost done it. She'd die here in Azerbaijan having come so close. And Themba, on a beach in the Seychelles, would die alone. At least she herself would have her murderer to bear witness to her death. Themba would have no one.
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The Doctor sat in stunned silence as he listened to this great man, this entry in the history books of many millennia hence, speak of his lost hope, his dashed dreams, and the inevitable end of the world.
He saw Rose looking back and forth between he and Dr. Mabuza anxiously. She was clever enough to know the implications of this turn of events. She'd stopped taking pictures of the flora and fauna of the aquarium and set her camera down on the mahogany coffee table, drawing her legs up to her chest as she sat in silence.
"My mother gave me the name Bhekithemba," Dr. Mabuza said solemnly. "Looking for hope. But there's only so long you can look, I suppose. It hasn't been found... just a bunch of false alarms. It seems so naive now, what I've done in my life. Aquarius was supposed to help humans leave this planet, but for what? To bring death and destruction and hate to other parts of the galaxy?" He sat back in his chair and stared off through the glass of the aquarium. "I've come to realise it's better this way. A controlled burn, as it were. We cauterise this planet and it starts again."
He looked pointedly at the Doctor, who felt his gaze cut through him like a knife.
"My money is on the cephalopods." Dr. Mabuza smiled sincerely, and as if on cue an octopus surged upwards across the aquarium's glass. "Maybe they won't make such a hash of it. It's our human complacency that has done us in. You know, cuttlefish only live for one year. A single year in which to grow up, find a mate, reproduce and die. And in that time they achieve remarkable innovations in their behaviour. We humans, we go on and on for decades, growing moss and clutching all our petty little thoughts to our hearts as if they matter in the grand scheme of things. We pretend as if the men and women with their fingers on the buttons are untouchable gods. Why don't the people get in their cars and drive to the bunkers and break down the doors? Ten billion people on this planet are about to be murdered by a few thousand. Best to just kick us out of the top slot and start again."
It was at these words that the Doctor's mind began ramping up with calculations and equations and probabilities. "A full-scale nuclear war on this planet won't leave anything alive for long," he said, finally, weighing his words carefully even as he spoke them.
"True," Dr. Mabuza said. "That is true. But I've had a great deal of free time to pass lately, and the artificial intelligence systems of this building aren't as difficult to reprogramme as I thought they would be. In the inevitable event of war, my work here will already be safe and sound. Tucked in and ready for a long wait." He smiled, placidly.
Rose sat even straighter in her seat and bit her lip. "Hang on... what does that mean? What's going to happen here?"
Dr. Mabuza closed his eyes and sighed deeply, shaking his head but saying nothing.
The Doctor stood now, drawing himself up to his full height. "What is happening here, Dr. Mabuza?" he demanded. It's hard to frighten a man reconciled to his own death, however-and no one knew this better than the Doctor himself. "Please," he cajoled, sitting back down again. "What have you done?"
"The AI has been... well, I suppose you could say it's been watching the news, in its own way. No use in waiting until after the fact of war-it'll be too late. The primary aquatic ecosystem of planet Earth is preserved in this building and I can't in good conscience leave its fate to chance. When all indicators are showing that a geopolitical point of no return has been reached, the doors will seal, permanently. In a few thousand years, the walls will start to fall, and the organisms here will perhaps have a chance to repopulate the planet." He chuckled darkly to himself. "I like to think of it as a slightly expedited form of evolution. Using the cheat-sheet, as it were."
"You'll be trapped here," Rose said.
"So will you, if you don't leave," Dr. Mabuza replied calmly. "Or, you can go die on the beach, sick and hungry and futilely hiding from the winds. Your choice, at least for a little while longer."
Rose came to stand next to the Doctor, though there still wasn't a clear course of action for either of them to take. Everything about this situation was wrong, and the Doctor ticked off the boxes in his head: if they left and went back to the TARDIS, would their next visit to the future of this planet find them standing on a charred, radioactive wasteland? If they stayed here, gambling that the history books were right and this man would somehow stop the war despite all evidence now presented, they'd risk being sealed in themselves. Time was running wild all around him, in a confusing tangle. The decisive moment seemed to be closing in faster than he could work out the correct solution.
"We have to do something," Rose said, looking around the room as if the answer might be written on one of the walls, just waiting to be read. "Dr. Mabuza, isn't there anything you can do?"
Dr. Mabuza joined the pair of them in standing, though his posture had much less urgency. "Do for what?"
"To stop this war, to stop all of it," Rose said, panic rising in her voice and causing it to have a tremulous quality that in turn made an anxious lump begin to form in the Doctor's throat.
Dr. Mabuza laughed and slowly walked over to a nearby bookshelf. He didn't seem to be enjoying his guests' panic as much as their naiveté. "Su-Jung was our only hope." He reached up to a heavily carved and inlaid wooden box, opening it carefully. "The people she had working for her and the information she was trying to find."
"Can you tell us what she was doing? Maybe we can help," the Doctor said, opening and closing his hands into fists at his side. "Do you have a computer or-"
The Doctor's pleading was cut short by the sight of the gun in Dr. Mabuza's hand.
Rose backed away a few paces and the Doctor put his hands out, attempting to look non-threatening and calm. It was still a fact, however, that the calmest person in the room was Dr. Mabuza himself, who deliberately and without any hesitation placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Rose screamed and ran to catch him as he crumpled to the ground. There's nothing subtle about a gunshot wound to the head, which is why, the Doctor supposed, it remained such a tried and true method for those who had lost hope. Dr. Mabuza's blood began to cover the front of Rose's shirt, and the Doctor could see from her rapid breathing that she was on the verge of the sort of panic that is not easy to come back from.
"Rose," the Doctor said, trying to pitch his voice to sound soothing even though every last one of his senses was telling him that now might be a good time to run.
"Do something!" she cried suddenly, her voice sounding strangled and reedy. She cradled the lifeless body of this man that she barely knew and looked at her hands as if she'd shot him herself and was trying to figure out how it had happened.
"Rose, he's dead."
She stared up at him, her eyes filling with tears and her makeup already running, and it was all getting to be more than he could bear.
"He can't be," she said, choking back a sob. "I mean, the war. He hasn't stopped the war."
"I know," the Doctor said from between gritted teeth. "I don't have an answer."
He reached a hand down to her. Dr. Mabuza was without a doubt dead, and as sorry as he was that Rose had had to see it, there was no time now to mourn or eulogise. She sniffled, and her hand was slick with blood as she placed it in his, easing herself carefully from under the body as she stood.
"We need to find a computer terminal," the Doctor said, trying to keep his, and her, mind on the cascading series of problems currently facing them. "I think, for now, we shouldn't assume anything. We're going in blind here, for the most part."
He turned, giving her hand a little tug to lead her from the room in search of the required technology, but he stopped suddenly short after a few steps. He heard the sound first, then after a second Rose clearly heard it too, with her human ears. A series of faint clicks, then silence again, followed by the low rumble of distant machinery switching on.
"What was that?" Rose whispered, perhaps already guessing exactly what it was.
"No!" the Doctor cried and took off at a run. "No, not yet!"
They ran together down the hallway they'd entered by, and the Doctor had his sonic screwdriver out before they even reached the cool white edifice where the front door had formerly been. There was no handle, no keyhole, just a smooth sheet of some sort of polymer material. There was nothing to even sonic, let alone attempt to force or ram. Rose absently put her hand against the barrier but then immediately pulled back as if she'd been burned when she saw the smear of red her touch left there. The Doctor turned to her, resting his back against the wall, to see before him a young girl with black circles under her eyes, blood covering her shirt and hands, and daubs of red around her cheeks where she had brushed a stray hair away.
"I'm sorry," he said, rather feebly. "I'm so sorry."
Strange, he thought, this impulse to take her with him in to danger, only to inevitably feel chest-tightening guilt in those moments when he realised what he was asking her to accept about his life.
"For what?" she asked innocently.
"For... I don't know, for all this. For everything."
"But we'll fix it, yeah?"
The edge of his mouth crept into a little half-smile, unbidden by his brain. "Yeah."
She smiled a little back at him, and it seemed to trip a circuit in his head.
"Right," he said, a little too loudly, making Rose jump a bit, with her already-frazzled nerves. "There's got to be a central mainframe that runs the systems for the living quarters, which we'll need to find to open the doors." He started walking down the hall, looking for more rooms, or perhaps a lift or stairway to another level. The structure was enormous and he guessed that the mainframe was either all the way at the bottom or all the way at the top. Rose fell into step behind him, holding her hands artificially in front of her and trying not to touch anything.
"But if the doors locked, that means that... what did Dr. Mabuza say? The geopolitical point of no return has been reached? That means war, doesn't it?"
"It means probable war. Computers can't tell the future, no matter how artificially intelligent." He passed an open door, stopped, and backed up a few paces. "In here. Let's get you cleaned up first."
They ducked in to a small prep kitchen where Rose immediately began washing, and then harshly scrubbing her hands as if she couldn't stop once she'd started. She squeezed more and more soap out of a wall-mounted dispenser into her hands until she was nearly elbow-deep in suds.
The Doctor touched her shoulder lightly. "Let me help."
"I think I can wash my own hands," Rose snapped, and he backed up a half-step.
"No, I mean your shirt." He brandished a lab-coat he'd found handing on a hook nearby. "I promise I won't look."
"Oh." She turned the water off and shook her hands in the air a bit to dry them. "All right. Turn around."
Rose's shirt was flung into a nearby rubbish bin and the Doctor turned back around to see her all buttoned up into a lab coat that was about two sizes too big for her.
"Not really my best look."
"Nonsense," he said. "It's sophisticated. I like it. We'll have to get you some specs next!"
She smacked him playfully on the arm. "Unlike some people, I don't pretend to need specs just to look impressive."
"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that and just move on." He held the door open for her and they exited back into the hallway. "Now, I reckon there's loads of information about all sorts of things in the building mainframe. About Dr. Mabuza and also about his wife and why he seemed to think she could have averted the war on her own. So, what we need to do is find-" He cut off his own train of thought and stopped walking again. "What is that sound?"
Rose stopped as well and looked around. "You mean that sort of... rumbling? I just figured it was whatever makes the aquariums work."
"But it wasn't on when we first got here. It only started after the doors locked. Besides, nothing makes the aquariums work here. They make themselves work, that's the whole point."
They stood quietly again, both listening intently, trying to work out the nature and source of the sound. What he was currently perceiving was a sound cycling at about 10 hertz, not within audible range for your average human, but certainly able to be felt in such a way as to approximate hearing. He tried factoring in the decibel level and went over a few possible sources, tugging on his earlobe absently as he did so.
"Doctor," Rose said suddenly, and he realised he'd zoned out for a moment while thinking.
"Hang on, I'm just going to-"
"Doctor," she repeated, much more urgently, while pointing at a door at the end of the hallway.
"What?" He followed her finger to the end of the hall, and didn't see anything at all unusual. There was a door, perhaps even to a staircase, which would be brilliant right about now, and that was it.
"Look," she hissed, her eyes wide.
He looked.
"Look at the window!"
Sure enough, there was a little window in the centre of the door, and the Doctor began to walk towards it, only to stop again in his tracks when he finally saw what she was seeing.
Across the circle of glass swam a school of fish.
"Is that..." He started approaching it again, Rose coming up behind him and looking over his shoulder as he peered through the little porthole. He could, through the slightly murky water and beyond the colourful fish swimming by, see a perfectly normal, if rather institutional, metal staircase, descending down on one side of his field of view, and up on the other. He craned his neck to try and see how far upwards the chamber was flooded, but there was nothing but more water.
"Oh my god," Rose gasped breathlessly. "What's happening?"
"The rest of the building is being filled," he replied, with an unintended note of fatalism. "There won't be anyone living here any longer, so all available space is being converted to aquaria. That's that sound we've been hearing: pumps. Pumping water in from the sea, filling each part of the building in turn. That's why the process had to begin in advance of any potential radiological contamination. Mind you, that water is coming in at an amazing rate. It's been, what, five minutes since the lock-down? And already that stairwell is almost completely filled."
"And when it is filled, what then?" Rose asked, but her tone implied that she already knew the answer.
"My guess? The next portion of the building will begin to be flooded and that door will open to allow for stabilisation of the ecosystem. And then the next, and the next and then..." he clicked his fingers, "completely sealed in. Forever."
"You think it might be a good idea to-" She gestured with her head towards the hallway they'd just come down.
"Run? Yeah, I reckon so."
He didn't have to look back in order to correctly interpret the soft click then deafening roar of a wall of water pursuing them down the hallway. He reached back and grabbed Rose's hand, pulling her along with him back to the room where they'd begun. Dr. Mabuza's body was laying on the floor right where they'd left him in the centre of a dark pool staining the Persian rug.
There was a door on the far side of the room, and it was towards this that the Doctor made a bee-line, running straight past the bookshelves and the little grouping of furniture, and the body of one of humanity's greatest scholars. Rose pulled her hand from his, even as the rushing torrent of water caught up with them and spread throughout the large chamber, its force stolen slightly by being in a larger container. She stopped and knelt in rapidly rising water, next to the body.
"We have to move him out of here," she said, crossing the dead man's arms over his chest.
The Doctor was already trying the handle of the door, calling for her to come help.
"He'll be.... fish food!" Rose said adamantly, gesturing to the body.
"He wanted to be fish food. Just respect that and help me get this bloody door open!"
Water was rising up their legs at an alarming rate, and slamming into the door that the Doctor was struggling to open against the torrent. Rose took one more second to leave the side of Dr. Mabuza's body, grabbing something off of the coffee table before wading over and wedging her fingers underneath the Doctor's where he'd managed to pry the door open slightly.
"Okay, pull," he urged, and they did, both gasping and grunting and losing footing in the swirling eddies. He managed to wedge a foot in the opening, then his whole leg, then a shoulder. It took almost no time for his eyes to adjust to the lower light on the other side, but when they did, what he saw made him curse loudly.
"What?" he heard Rose yell from behind him, over the roar of the water. "Can we get through?"
He extracted himself from the doorway again. Water was now up to his thighs, nearly to Rose's waist. Her lab coat floated out around her and her chest was heaving with the struggle to stay upright.
"It's sealed off," he said, urgently wishing for one of his good ideas right about now. "There's another barrier. This is the next portion of the building to be flooded, and that seal won't be broken until it's full."
"Can't you sonic it?" she asked desperately, holding her hands above her hips as the water continued to rise.
"It's the same as the front door. Sealed, locked, designed to withstand anything."
Furniture began to float, and the Doctor noticed Rose standing on her tiptoes as the water crept up her chest and dampened the bottom of her hair.
"The bookshelves," the Doctor said. "I've got you." He held out an arm and she grabbed onto him with both hands as he pulled her towards the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the far wall of the room. The box out of which Dr. Mabuza's gun had come floated by, along with a great number of sodden leather-bound books. Rose was no longer able to touch bottom, but kicked her legs in order to propel herself forward as the Doctor walked, the water now nearly up to his own neck.
"Hold on to the shelves-we can use them like a ladder," he instructed, placing one of her hands on the nearest clear shelf above the water line.
"Are we going to die in here?" she asked innocently, as if it was a perfectly normal question. Which, he supposed, given their lifestyle, it was.
"No," he said firmly. "No, we are not going to die in here. Not by a long shot." As he spoke they each climbed up a couple more shelves.
"But the water-"
"I know."
"It'll fill the whole room, right up to the ceiling. There'll be nowhere to go!"
"I know!" They climbed up another few shelves and the Doctor spared a quick glance to count how many more to go until they were out of room.
"I can only hold my breath for, I dunno, like a minute. How about you, Doctor?"
She was attempting to make light of the situation with her daft questions, as if they were passing the time waiting for a train. She really did think she was going to die, the Doctor realised, and she was making small talk.
"Well... that's a complicated question. Long enough, I suppose." He found he didn't really want to divulge this particular difference between them. Not yet. Not now, when the need to breathe oxygen was what could separate them forever. They climbed up another two shelves-he could reach up and touch the ceiling now.
"Long enough for what?" Rose asked, flashing a fatalistic smile.
"Of course!" he barked, seemingly apropos of nothing. "That's brilliant! Long enough for this room to be filled, meaning this section of the building is filled, meaning that sealed door will have to open, and the water will temporarily drain out again, at least a few feet, leaving us high and dry. For a little while." He grinned and climbed up one more shelf, cocking his head to the side to keep from knocking it on the ceiling.
"How long do you reckon that'll take?"
Before he could answer, the point became moot. The both tipped their heads upwards, and instinctively moved closer together as the water overtook the last few remaining inches. He felt her chest expand against his as she took one last deep breath, and he wrapped his free arm around her. The less effort she'd have to exert to stay anchored to the spot, the less oxygen her body would need.
The world went muted and foggy, the sound of the turbines and pumps below much more audible through the water. He opened his eyes, his face inches from Rose's. Unable to speak to one another, all he could do was impotently watch the look in her eye move from determination, to uncertainty, to anxiety and panic. He gripped her more tightly as her hold on the shelving weakened, a small stream of bubbles emerging from the corners of her mouth.
Time was passing. He felt every fraction of a second, counting up to one minute and beyond. There was no movement of the water, no sound of barriers lifting or doors opening. At one minute and twenty-three seconds, Rose began to thrash in his arms, clawing above her at the ceiling as he tried to calm her and keep her from wasting her last precious lung-full in a futile effort to escape.
Seconds continued to tick by. Her eyes closed, her movements slowed, and still no sign of the water being drained. She would begin to inhale water at any moment, the reflex to breathe trumping the knowledge that there was no air to be had. The Doctor wedged their bodies into a corner in order to get another free hand, held her nose shut and covered her lips with his. There wasn't much air remaining in his own lungs, and it would take time for his body to manufacture more out of the available gases in the water around them, but he needed to buy her time. He breathed in to her and felt the slight rise of her chest.
In the part of his mind that was not ticking off seconds or calculating how much oxygen the human brain needs lest it begin to die, he thought he could taste the vortex still on her lips, even now. As he pulled back he realised that while in this embrace something had changed.
There was silence. The water whoosed in his ears, but beyond that, nothing. The sound of the pumps pulling seawater in from below was gone. A flame of hope lit in his chest, and there was a series of clicking sounds, as the machinery started up again. The top of his head hit the air, followed alarmingly quickly by the sudden thought that they were wedged into a corner about 12 feet above the floor, and about to have the buoyant rug pulled out form under them.
The roar of the water was deafening as it rushed through the doorway that was now open and unblocked, and he soon found himself falling and then being carried by the current, his hold on a still-unconscious Rose tenuous and slipping fast. The world went upside-down, then right side-up again, water going up his nose and down his throat as he struggled to find purchase and hang on to Rose. They were close to being swept along and possibly into an even more dangerous situation when he managed to reach up and grab the handle of the forced-open door. He tightened the grip of his arm around Rose's waist and waited for the water-level to even out enough to lessen the current. It would soon begin to fill up again to make up for the water displaced by the new section being opened, and there wasn't much time.
His chest heaving from the exertion, he swallowed hard and looked down at Rose, fearing the precise assessment of her welfare that his brain would make instantly, even though he would prefer to hear comforting lies. What he saw, however, was her eyelashes fluttering, heavy as they were with caked make-up and droplets of water. She writhed weakly in his arms and he helped her turn to the side, where she coughed up a few tablespoons of water and gasped loudly.
The current ebbed enough that he could help her stand, with water swirling around their calves. She continued to cough and splutter, holding a finger up when he tried to ask how she was.
"Bit close for comfort," she finally said, her voice hoarse. "I wouldn't mind going somewhere dry now. I feel like a sponge that's been left in the sink after the washing-up."
The Doctor peered through the open aperture and grinned. "I think that can be arranged."
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The Doctor had let her go ahead of him as they climbed flight after flight of metal stairs. The rush of water below echoed loudly, making any sort of conversation impossible. She was sure he was right behind her, fretting over her well-being, and she hated it. The future of her entire species still hung in the balance, and the puzzle of what stops the war if not Dr. Bhekithemba Mabuza still remained unsolved, but she could feel the Doctor brooding over her fragility from three steps above him. And so, even though her lungs burned, and her clothes were sodden and heavy, she didn't let up in the pace of her climbing. She couldn't give him any reason to doubt her durability.
"Aha!" she cried cheerily when she saw the door at the top of the last flight. Inside, she was just praising all the saints and angels for there finally being an end to the climb. "Here we are."
This doorknob was amenable to a blast from the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor jauntily twirled the device in the air before pocketing it again.
"Now this is more like it!" he enthused as they entered the darkened room. "Let this be a lesson to you, Rose Tyler: If you ever build a home controlled by a central computer, put terminals in easily-accessible locations."
"Or just always live in a slightly psychic space ship," she added, followed by an awkward pause in which she found something extremely interesting on the toe of her shoe and he went about exploring the back of his neck with a twitchy hand.
"Right," he said. "Handy, that. But for now..." He approached a screen and pulled out the sonic again. "Time to do something about this minor flooding problem we seem to be experiencing."
Rose peered over his shoulder as he worked. "It's that easy?"
"'Course it is, if you're me. Which I will note that you are not, but I've never held that against you."
"Ha ha. But there's still this war- I don't think I understand what part Dr. Mabuza's wife was playing. I mean, have you ever heard of any of this? You made it sound so straightforward."
"Evidence seems to suggest that there's a slight chance that I was..." He trailed off and mumbled as he tapped a few keys on a nearby keyboard.
"That you were..." Rose prompted. "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you."
"Well, you know how time is, always in flux, things changing and all that. I didn't even know he was married, and you'd think that the wife of such a great man would be something you'd hear about. There!" He backed away from the computer with a flourish. "That should do it. Reversed the pumps, opened the drains, everything back out again."
"So now we just have to stop a global nuclear war," Rose said wryly.
He sat down on a table cross-legged and furrowed his brow. "So it would seem."
"Can't we just, I don't know... use the TARDIS, land right in the middle of some missile silo and tell them to all sod off, war's over?"
The Doctor's brow wrinkled further and he began to run his hands through his hair. "But what I don't get is how history has changed this much. I mean, little things change all the time-someone's middle name is Fernando instead of Alastair, the words someone speaks are slightly different, that sort of thing. But this is huge, and I didn't feel anything amiss when we landed."
"There's nothing for it, though. Dr. Mabuza never made a broadcast and he's not coming back from the dead to do it." Rose felt a chill go up her spine as she was forced to recall the very moment of his death, and what his warm blood felt like as it spilled onto her.
"I know, that's what I can't figure out. If not him, then who?"
Rose blinked, and wrinkled her nose at him. Was he really that dense? He just looked back at her, biting his bottom lip and nearly igniting his head on fire with how hard he was thinking.
"Well," she said finally, convinced he wasn't going to get it, "like I said when we landed... there's you."
He swallowed and gave a little sigh. "I told you, it's not me."
"How do you know it's not you? You said something huge has changed, and maybe what's changed is you being here."
He stood and approached her, getting much closer than friendly decorum would really call for. "Well, you're here too. What if it's you?"
She gave a little snorting laugh at the very thought. "Me? You must be joking. You think the leaders of the world are going to listen to a teenaged shop girl?"
"Well, I listen to you, and I'm more powerful than all of them put together." He laid a hand on the side of her arm and beamed a lopsided smile at her.
"And so modest, too," she laughed. "All right, but listen... you, or me, we're no one. We don't belong here. Either of us talking it would just be... it would be like spam email. No, there's something else here. Something with his wife-Su-Jung, was it? She was up to something and he thought she failed, but what if she didn't? What if it's her that needs our help, not him?"
"That," the Doctor said drawing her in for a suffocating hug, "is a brilliant thought. See? You are worth listening to."
She didn't care how many times it happened to her: being told she was brilliant by the Doctor was the most unsettling feeling she'd ever felt. She didn't know whether to feel proud, or patronised to, or what. All she knew was that the swirl of emotions involved were unique to his presence-no one else had ever caused such a crashing torrent of conflicting thoughts in her head.
"And here we are all cozily logged in to the mainframe. All right... email."
He continued to mutter to himself as he scrolled by screens at a dizzying rate, toggling the sonic on and off at various intervals and tapping his toe annoyingly. Rose looked around for some way to be useful, though she was afraid of dripping all over the electronics. Instead she started fishing through her pockets, taking an inventory of all of her personal items ruined by their soaking. Her lipstick had been partially eaten away by the salt-water that got inside its case, and she found a tenner that looked like it had been through the washing at least eight times. From her back pocket, she extracted her 23rd century camera, wincing as she pressed the "on" button, expecting it to be dead, or to blow up in her hand. To her great surprise, it did neither, but turned on just the same as always.
"Wahey!" she cried triumphantly, scrolling through all of her snaps and films. The Doctor ignored her, engrossed as he was in his work for the moment. Her jubilation was short-lived, however, as she opened a file and found that she'd accidentally filmed the entire conversation they'd had with Dr. Mabuza, including his tragic death. She clicked the device off again hastily.
"Any luck?" she asked, trying to sound nonchalant to cover the renewed grief and confusion she felt.
"No, nothing.... wait!" He jumped back from the computer screen and pointed. He made a number of other exclamations like "Yes!" and "Is it?" and "No!" all in rapid succession, leaving Rose with her head spinning, until he turned around to face her with an expression that was simultaneously grave and vain. "I think I've worked it out."
Rose simply raised her eyebrows and waited for him to explain. She knew he would: his ego demanded that she be a witness to his brilliance.
"Su-Jung Choi has barely been here at Aquarius at all in the past six months, and has had almost no contact with her husband. At least, none that was recorded here. But every few weeks, there's an SMS message, all from different phone numbers. There's no name, and they always say the same thing, or almost the same thing."
"So you think that's her, like, checking in?"
He tapped the screen, where the most recent message had been called up. "Not just checking in. She's sending confirmation of... something. Some sort of mission that she's accomplished, but she never says with who, or where, or doing what."
"If she's some sort of spy, then she'll be keeping her contacts a secret from everyone, yeah? Even from her husband."
The Doctor nodded. "Even from each other. First rule of spycraft... or something. A rule at least. But the last one he received from her before she disappeared for good, it's different. It looks encrypted, just a bunch of gobbledygook, and at first that's what I thought was going on. But there's no use trying to decrypt, because that bunch of mumbojumbo is legitimately what she sent. And then I thought it's a code, and if it's a code, I can break it."
"Because you're a genius," Rose said, poking him with a finger playfully.
"I see that you jest, young lady, but here's the thing: I can't break it."
She gave him a sidelong, sceptical look. "How the mighty have fallen."
"Oh, ye of little faith. I can't break it because it's not a code and it's not encrypted. It's a password. It's not meant to be anything than what it is."
"A password for what? Something on this computer?"
The Doctor shook his head and started bouncing on the balls of his feet. "No, this level of security is way beyond what this system would ever need or be able to support. What you're looking at here isn't even a complete password, it's just part of one. That's military security, of the highest order."
Rose wrinkled her brow, trying to convey that she wasn't quite getting how it all fit together, hopefully without having to admit it.
"So here's what I think," the Doctor said, putting his hands into his pockets. "I think that Su-Jung Choi was neck-deep in serious military espionage."
"She was a spy?" Rose was legitimately surprised. Dr. Mabuza didn't seem like the type of man to be taken in by a spy, nor to admire spies just generally.
"I don't think she was. Not working for any actual governments at least. I think she was on her own, gathering intelligence on how to hack in to military computers and disarm nuclear weaponry. That is exactly the sort of woman a man like Bhekithemba Mabuza would fall in love with, don't you think? Brilliant, brave, willing to risk her life for the good of her species." He paused and stared wistfully at the computer screen displaying her last transmission. "And up until recently, she'd been keeping her secrets quite well, transferring the other bits of these passwords to a few select hackers. They'd all be kept ignorant of one another, so that if one got caught the entire network would remain stable. Su-Jung Choi was the only one who had the full picture."
"How does that help us now? She's disappeared and we don't know who, or where, the people she was working with are."
The Doctor bit his lip again and scrunched his face up in thought. "Well, if I'm right, this code here, her last transmission, she sent it to her husband as a last-ditch effort to give it to someone else before she was caught. She trusted him to find a way to get it to her network, even though he didn't know who they were."
"But he didn't. He just... he killed himself."
The Doctor sighed heavily. "He lost hope. I'm sure he tried but... sometimes trying isn't enough."
"If he tried and couldn't do it, how are we supposed to figure it out? I'm assuming our time is severely limited."
"That's what I'm trying to work out. Let me run through those old messages again and see if I can find anything. I'm sorry this trip has turned out so poorly, Rose. I just wanted you to meet someone truly admirable, not some rubbish alien in a stolen ship." He turned and looked at the screen again, flashing hundreds of lines of code before his eyes faster than Rose could hope to process.
"It's okay," she said. "I've got my pictures. I even filmed our whole conversation with Dr. Mabuza by accident. I'll never be able to figure this camera out, it just does what it wants without me even doing anything!"
The lines on the screen stopped scrolling and the Doctor pushed away from the table. "You... filmed it?" He sounded like he might be cross with her. Perhaps he found it disrespectful that she'd caught his last moments on camera.
"Yeah, but just on accident. I set the camera on the table and forgot about it."
"I think that might possibly be brilliant," he said, more to himself than to her. "I can't believe I didn't think of that before!"
He hugged her again and this time it was so vise-like that she squeaked.
"That's the solution, right there! Oh, I am an imbecile! Because we've been wondering this whole time, if he doesn't stop the war, if he doesn't transmit, than who does it? How does it happen? But that's just the thing! He does do it! From beyond the grave, mind you, but it's still him. And it's all because of us."
She narrowed her eyes, trying to cut through the waves of triumph rolling off of him. "Okay, you lost me."
"You filmed him talking, and he did say some very profound things down there. The last thoughts of a man who's lost hope and knows he's about to die. Powerful stuff. But not quite powerful enough to stop a war. That's where I made one wrong assumption and all my other mistakes followed from that. It's this code, the final transmission of Su-Jung Choi that stops the war, because that information is embedded into the recording of Dr. Mabuza's last words. What 10 billion people will see is a man appealing for the people of the world to rise up and take the destiny of their species in their own hands. What-I dunno-five or ten hackers around the world will see is a transmission that will allow them to extract the final sequence of the military passwords they've been waiting for Su-Jung to deliver."
Rose felt that lump in her throat that always formed when they were about to do something truly great together. "And how will they know to do that? That they should pay special attention to this transmission?"
"Oh, I dunno, we put some little private code in it?"
Rose found herself grinning back at him, in spite of the fact that they hadn't actually done any of these brilliant things yet. "Like... the last several phone numbers she messaged from. Or the sign-off she used. Or both? We can put it in the timestamp. No one ever knows how to set the timestamps on their cameras properly anyway. I can never figure the bloody things out. It always reads like the 12th of January of the year 3011 or something."
"I like it!" he beamed, running to a nearby computer screen and calling up a map of the building. "We'll need the TARDIS to help us put the transmission together and send it out. You know, I always did wonder how it was that he was able to transmit something to the entire planet all at once."
He pressed a button that turned all the screens in the room off, grabbed her hand and ran out the door, pulling her precariously down the stairs after him.
"Rose Tyler, we're about to stop a nuclear war! How does it feel?"
She ungracefully slammed into a wall at a turning in the stairs. "Bumpy!" she cried, jumping down the next flight, three steps at a time.
***
"You ready?" the Doctor pulled the TARDIS viewscreen over and took a quick look, before turning his warm smile back on Rose, who was putting her jacket on by the front door.
"As ever," she chirped. "Where are we?"
"You'll see," he replied in a teasing sing-song, pushing the doors open with an unnecessarily grandiose gesture which made his coat flutter behind him a bit.
Rose stepped out to find herself in a very familiar park, on a very familiar river, with a very familiar skyline. "London?" she said, but it wasn't really a question.
"If that's all right with you," he said, taking her hand and leading her towards the Houses of Parliament.
"What's that sound?" There was a sort of white noise on the wind, and behind it she could hear a cacophony of instruments.
"Why don't you take a look?"
They exited the park and instantly were nearly run over by a pack of teenagers running at full pelt towards Westminster Bridge.
"Oi!" she yelled at them, and actually found herself literally shaking her fist. She was getting too old, she thought. "Watch where you're going!"
"'S'all right, love!" one of them turned around and called. "Just don't want to miss it, yeah? You'd better hurry up!"
"Miss what?" She turned to the Doctor. "Miss what?"
At that moment Big Ben began to chime its familiar tune, and the sound of thousands of people cheering was unmistakable. She could see a huge crowd up ahead, all of them with their faces raised towards the clock tower. As the chimes marking the time began the crowd began to count along. One... two... three... four... and on to twelve, at which point there was sheer pandemonium. She had to lean in and shout her questions straight into the Doctor's ear.
"What is this, what's going on?"
"It's third November, 2089, just a few weeks after the planet was just minutes from self-destruction. And now, the last nuclear weapon on Earth has just been destroyed," the Doctor shouted back into her own ear. "Congratulations, Rose Tyler: you brought about world peace!"
"So did you!"
The Doctor just grinned and rocked on his heels a bit. Rose found the energy of the crowd to be utterly infectious, and wound up forming a human pyramid with a bunch of the same blokes who'd run by them a few minutes earlier. Kneeling at the top, she looked up into the cloudless sky, and could think of no better way to remember Bhekithemba Mabuza and Su-Jung Choi than to laugh until she cried.
Title: Age of Aquarius (2/2)
Characters/Pairings: Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers: None
Rating/Genre: Teen | action/adventure, sci-fi, plotty mcplotterson, genfic for most intents and purposes
Warnings (mouse over to read, as they do contain plot spoilers, but rest assured that I am really only warning for those with very specific violence-related triggers-this story is still rated Teen, contains no sex or sexual situations, and less violence than your average episode of Torchwood): Character death (OC), suicide
Summary: In the year 2089, the Doctor and Rose go to meet the man who can stop a nuclear war using only words. Or so they think.
[ Go back to Part 1]
A/N: This story was written as an "incentive fic" for those bidding on me in the Support Stacie Author Auction; I posted it in bits and pieces as people bid on me. I'd like to thank the following people for so generously bidding, and for having such wonderful spirits throughout the auction: wendymr, ladychi, wiggiemomsi, jaradel, EdgeOfWorld, 4ensicbones, np_complete and the winning bidder and the woman who now owns my ass: xebgoc
It was one of those moments that seemed to happen to Rose with increasing frequency as she travelled with the Doctor. People were talking-the Doctor and Dr. Mabuza were having a polite conversation and exchanging further pleasantries-but the meanings of the words suddenly slid completely out of focus, as if they were speaking a foreign language. Confronted with the massive wall of glass, behind which lay the largest aquarium she'd ever seen, it was like every other part of her brain just switched off. Fish of all descriptions swam past her view, and several stories below she could see a bottom covered by corals and seaweeds.
She could barely make out, on the far side of the enclosure, another glass partition, and on the other side of that, a shimmering blue light that she supposed was the actual open ocean. She approached the glass, drawn to it without even thinking about it, and realised that in actual fact what she was viewing was simply the lower portion of a much larger and more complicated system of enormous tanks. She craned her neck to try to see where it ended above them and wound up knocking her forehead quite loudly on the glass.
"Watch yourself, Miss Tyler," Dr. Mabuza said mildly.
"Perhaps you'd like to, you know, take some photos?" the Doctor added, taking Rose by the arm and leading her a few steps back from the glass again.
"Oh, right!" Rose replied. "Yes, well, you know how I like to work. Get the lay of the land first and all... or the sea as the case may be." She felt herself blushing and turned away as if to inspect another corner of the cavernous room.
"Please, sit down." Dr. Mabuza gestured to a grouping of sofas and chairs, arranged neatly on an antique Persian rug that stood in jarring contrast with the smooth, white, sterile feel of the rest of the building. "Who did you say you were with?"
The Doctor snapped to attention and followed the man over to sit on an overstuffed sofa. "I didn't. Freelance mostly, you know how it is in today's economy."
"I'm just curious, given that there seem to be a few more pressing matters in the world right now than just what I'm doing." There was an awkward pause while Dr. Mabuza reached over his head to switch on a Tiffany lamp. "And also given that I don't have a publicist."
"You don't... well... isn't that strange." The Doctor's hand flew to the back of his neck and he rubbed vigorously while closely inspecting his own shoes. "I wonder who it was I was talking to."
Rose thought it was a good time to take some photos before they were both summarily thrown out on their bums, and snapped still images of some of the larger, more showy fish that swam across her view. The Doctor seemed to be regrouping, taking a deep breath to talk his way out of trouble, but Dr. Mabuza simply raised a hand.
"I wouldn't mind if you told me why you were really here." His voice was calm, but somehow changed from the wearily polite tone of before to mesmerizingly sincere. He sat back in his chair and Rose found herself unable to look away from him now. His close-cropped hair had flecks of grey in it, but he seemed still a young man. Far too young for the accomplishments that the Doctor had rattled off to her on their walk here.
"Really, just to talk," the Doctor insisted, and it plainly wasn't a lie-when the Doctor did 'sincere' he was hard to doubt. "I just wanted to meet you."
"You're not a friend of Su-Jung?" It was a question, but his voice fell flat with disappointment and renewed suspicion.
The Doctor could clearly see the hoped-for answer was one he was unable to give. "I'm afraid not. Who's Su-Jung, then?"
Dr. Mabuza took a deep breath, and Rose sat on the sofa next to the Doctor. She could feel grief coming off of the man in waves, now that there was no reason for him to hide it.
"My wife," he said very simply. "Su-Jung Choi."
"I didn't know you were married," the Doctor replied, casting a furtive glance at Rose, letting her know that, as usual, the fact that he didn't already know something was worrisome to him. "Is she here now? I'd love to meet her as well."
Dr. Mabuza frowned and looked away. "She's not... here. She's dead."
"I'm so sorry," Rose said, feeling very strange about witnessing such an obviously great man so exposed. Seeing similar chinks in the Doctor's armour occasionally made her feel the same way, so that she wanted to provide comfort and run away, simultaneously.
"I'm sure she's dead. Certain of it," Dr. Mabuza continued.
"But..." the Doctor said suggestively, though Dr. Mabuza didn't take the bait. "But you don't know for a fact?"
Rose wanted to give the Doctor a good smack for being so emotionally tone-deaf as to press for more information from this man they barely knew.
"I know as much as I need to," Dr. Mabuza offered, much more sanguinely than Rose would have in a similar circumstance. "I know it's my fault. I know that nothing can stop what's coming now. Not without her. And I know what happens next."
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The final days of Su-Jung Choi were spent in a setting remarkably reminiscent of her old life as a normal schoolgirl in the suburbs of Seoul. When she first embarked on her task, she had, in her mind's eye, seen the seedy hovels and back rooms in which she'd surely be doing business, and perhaps giving over her life. But it hadn't been like that at all, in reality.
In reality, she seemed to find herself frequently in the homes of the global middle-class. People whose parents had escaped poverty, though just barely, and finally built their modest dream homes. If she hadn't known better, she would have thought all these houses had come out of the same kit, so similar in construction and amenities they were. Overwhelmingly beige, tiled, and just slightly out-of-scale with the size of furniture the inhabitants were able to appoint the rooms with, they seemed to grasp at some misunderstood notion of "respectability."
And likewise the people she was locked in a battle of both wills-and occasional weaponry-with were not greasy, moustache-twirling crooks with poor personal hygiene. Her captor now was a soft-spoken Azeri, whose home in a commuter suburb of Baku had wall-to-wall carpeting which was kept diligently hoovered. When he killed her, which he surely would, he'd certainly do so in the bathroom or kitchen, so as to avoid unsightly stains.
During her last day alive, she thought continuously about Themba, though not, she was surprised to find, regretfully. It was the end of the world and she knew him too well to think he'd hold himself apart from the human race during the coming holocaust. It freed her from having to think about what his life would be like without her.
She thought back on their meeting, when she was still a relatively young girl. There was only about fifteen years age difference between them, but it still seemed rather forbidden at the time. Her parents hadn't approved, of course, and she hadn't expected them to. Up until meeting Themba, she'd felt like she was just waiting for something, and it was instantly clear that the life he offered her was it. He recognised something in her that was also in him.
Something that a few years later compelled her to embark upon a quest, to stop a nuclear war before it began.
And she'd almost done it. She'd die here in Azerbaijan having come so close. And Themba, on a beach in the Seychelles, would die alone. At least she herself would have her murderer to bear witness to her death. Themba would have no one.
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The Doctor sat in stunned silence as he listened to this great man, this entry in the history books of many millennia hence, speak of his lost hope, his dashed dreams, and the inevitable end of the world.
He saw Rose looking back and forth between he and Dr. Mabuza anxiously. She was clever enough to know the implications of this turn of events. She'd stopped taking pictures of the flora and fauna of the aquarium and set her camera down on the mahogany coffee table, drawing her legs up to her chest as she sat in silence.
"My mother gave me the name Bhekithemba," Dr. Mabuza said solemnly. "Looking for hope. But there's only so long you can look, I suppose. It hasn't been found... just a bunch of false alarms. It seems so naive now, what I've done in my life. Aquarius was supposed to help humans leave this planet, but for what? To bring death and destruction and hate to other parts of the galaxy?" He sat back in his chair and stared off through the glass of the aquarium. "I've come to realise it's better this way. A controlled burn, as it were. We cauterise this planet and it starts again."
He looked pointedly at the Doctor, who felt his gaze cut through him like a knife.
"My money is on the cephalopods." Dr. Mabuza smiled sincerely, and as if on cue an octopus surged upwards across the aquarium's glass. "Maybe they won't make such a hash of it. It's our human complacency that has done us in. You know, cuttlefish only live for one year. A single year in which to grow up, find a mate, reproduce and die. And in that time they achieve remarkable innovations in their behaviour. We humans, we go on and on for decades, growing moss and clutching all our petty little thoughts to our hearts as if they matter in the grand scheme of things. We pretend as if the men and women with their fingers on the buttons are untouchable gods. Why don't the people get in their cars and drive to the bunkers and break down the doors? Ten billion people on this planet are about to be murdered by a few thousand. Best to just kick us out of the top slot and start again."
It was at these words that the Doctor's mind began ramping up with calculations and equations and probabilities. "A full-scale nuclear war on this planet won't leave anything alive for long," he said, finally, weighing his words carefully even as he spoke them.
"True," Dr. Mabuza said. "That is true. But I've had a great deal of free time to pass lately, and the artificial intelligence systems of this building aren't as difficult to reprogramme as I thought they would be. In the inevitable event of war, my work here will already be safe and sound. Tucked in and ready for a long wait." He smiled, placidly.
Rose sat even straighter in her seat and bit her lip. "Hang on... what does that mean? What's going to happen here?"
Dr. Mabuza closed his eyes and sighed deeply, shaking his head but saying nothing.
The Doctor stood now, drawing himself up to his full height. "What is happening here, Dr. Mabuza?" he demanded. It's hard to frighten a man reconciled to his own death, however-and no one knew this better than the Doctor himself. "Please," he cajoled, sitting back down again. "What have you done?"
"The AI has been... well, I suppose you could say it's been watching the news, in its own way. No use in waiting until after the fact of war-it'll be too late. The primary aquatic ecosystem of planet Earth is preserved in this building and I can't in good conscience leave its fate to chance. When all indicators are showing that a geopolitical point of no return has been reached, the doors will seal, permanently. In a few thousand years, the walls will start to fall, and the organisms here will perhaps have a chance to repopulate the planet." He chuckled darkly to himself. "I like to think of it as a slightly expedited form of evolution. Using the cheat-sheet, as it were."
"You'll be trapped here," Rose said.
"So will you, if you don't leave," Dr. Mabuza replied calmly. "Or, you can go die on the beach, sick and hungry and futilely hiding from the winds. Your choice, at least for a little while longer."
Rose came to stand next to the Doctor, though there still wasn't a clear course of action for either of them to take. Everything about this situation was wrong, and the Doctor ticked off the boxes in his head: if they left and went back to the TARDIS, would their next visit to the future of this planet find them standing on a charred, radioactive wasteland? If they stayed here, gambling that the history books were right and this man would somehow stop the war despite all evidence now presented, they'd risk being sealed in themselves. Time was running wild all around him, in a confusing tangle. The decisive moment seemed to be closing in faster than he could work out the correct solution.
"We have to do something," Rose said, looking around the room as if the answer might be written on one of the walls, just waiting to be read. "Dr. Mabuza, isn't there anything you can do?"
Dr. Mabuza joined the pair of them in standing, though his posture had much less urgency. "Do for what?"
"To stop this war, to stop all of it," Rose said, panic rising in her voice and causing it to have a tremulous quality that in turn made an anxious lump begin to form in the Doctor's throat.
Dr. Mabuza laughed and slowly walked over to a nearby bookshelf. He didn't seem to be enjoying his guests' panic as much as their naiveté. "Su-Jung was our only hope." He reached up to a heavily carved and inlaid wooden box, opening it carefully. "The people she had working for her and the information she was trying to find."
"Can you tell us what she was doing? Maybe we can help," the Doctor said, opening and closing his hands into fists at his side. "Do you have a computer or-"
The Doctor's pleading was cut short by the sight of the gun in Dr. Mabuza's hand.
Rose backed away a few paces and the Doctor put his hands out, attempting to look non-threatening and calm. It was still a fact, however, that the calmest person in the room was Dr. Mabuza himself, who deliberately and without any hesitation placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Rose screamed and ran to catch him as he crumpled to the ground. There's nothing subtle about a gunshot wound to the head, which is why, the Doctor supposed, it remained such a tried and true method for those who had lost hope. Dr. Mabuza's blood began to cover the front of Rose's shirt, and the Doctor could see from her rapid breathing that she was on the verge of the sort of panic that is not easy to come back from.
"Rose," the Doctor said, trying to pitch his voice to sound soothing even though every last one of his senses was telling him that now might be a good time to run.
"Do something!" she cried suddenly, her voice sounding strangled and reedy. She cradled the lifeless body of this man that she barely knew and looked at her hands as if she'd shot him herself and was trying to figure out how it had happened.
"Rose, he's dead."
She stared up at him, her eyes filling with tears and her makeup already running, and it was all getting to be more than he could bear.
"He can't be," she said, choking back a sob. "I mean, the war. He hasn't stopped the war."
"I know," the Doctor said from between gritted teeth. "I don't have an answer."
He reached a hand down to her. Dr. Mabuza was without a doubt dead, and as sorry as he was that Rose had had to see it, there was no time now to mourn or eulogise. She sniffled, and her hand was slick with blood as she placed it in his, easing herself carefully from under the body as she stood.
"We need to find a computer terminal," the Doctor said, trying to keep his, and her, mind on the cascading series of problems currently facing them. "I think, for now, we shouldn't assume anything. We're going in blind here, for the most part."
He turned, giving her hand a little tug to lead her from the room in search of the required technology, but he stopped suddenly short after a few steps. He heard the sound first, then after a second Rose clearly heard it too, with her human ears. A series of faint clicks, then silence again, followed by the low rumble of distant machinery switching on.
"What was that?" Rose whispered, perhaps already guessing exactly what it was.
"No!" the Doctor cried and took off at a run. "No, not yet!"
They ran together down the hallway they'd entered by, and the Doctor had his sonic screwdriver out before they even reached the cool white edifice where the front door had formerly been. There was no handle, no keyhole, just a smooth sheet of some sort of polymer material. There was nothing to even sonic, let alone attempt to force or ram. Rose absently put her hand against the barrier but then immediately pulled back as if she'd been burned when she saw the smear of red her touch left there. The Doctor turned to her, resting his back against the wall, to see before him a young girl with black circles under her eyes, blood covering her shirt and hands, and daubs of red around her cheeks where she had brushed a stray hair away.
"I'm sorry," he said, rather feebly. "I'm so sorry."
Strange, he thought, this impulse to take her with him in to danger, only to inevitably feel chest-tightening guilt in those moments when he realised what he was asking her to accept about his life.
"For what?" she asked innocently.
"For... I don't know, for all this. For everything."
"But we'll fix it, yeah?"
The edge of his mouth crept into a little half-smile, unbidden by his brain. "Yeah."
She smiled a little back at him, and it seemed to trip a circuit in his head.
"Right," he said, a little too loudly, making Rose jump a bit, with her already-frazzled nerves. "There's got to be a central mainframe that runs the systems for the living quarters, which we'll need to find to open the doors." He started walking down the hall, looking for more rooms, or perhaps a lift or stairway to another level. The structure was enormous and he guessed that the mainframe was either all the way at the bottom or all the way at the top. Rose fell into step behind him, holding her hands artificially in front of her and trying not to touch anything.
"But if the doors locked, that means that... what did Dr. Mabuza say? The geopolitical point of no return has been reached? That means war, doesn't it?"
"It means probable war. Computers can't tell the future, no matter how artificially intelligent." He passed an open door, stopped, and backed up a few paces. "In here. Let's get you cleaned up first."
They ducked in to a small prep kitchen where Rose immediately began washing, and then harshly scrubbing her hands as if she couldn't stop once she'd started. She squeezed more and more soap out of a wall-mounted dispenser into her hands until she was nearly elbow-deep in suds.
The Doctor touched her shoulder lightly. "Let me help."
"I think I can wash my own hands," Rose snapped, and he backed up a half-step.
"No, I mean your shirt." He brandished a lab-coat he'd found handing on a hook nearby. "I promise I won't look."
"Oh." She turned the water off and shook her hands in the air a bit to dry them. "All right. Turn around."
Rose's shirt was flung into a nearby rubbish bin and the Doctor turned back around to see her all buttoned up into a lab coat that was about two sizes too big for her.
"Not really my best look."
"Nonsense," he said. "It's sophisticated. I like it. We'll have to get you some specs next!"
She smacked him playfully on the arm. "Unlike some people, I don't pretend to need specs just to look impressive."
"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that and just move on." He held the door open for her and they exited back into the hallway. "Now, I reckon there's loads of information about all sorts of things in the building mainframe. About Dr. Mabuza and also about his wife and why he seemed to think she could have averted the war on her own. So, what we need to do is find-" He cut off his own train of thought and stopped walking again. "What is that sound?"
Rose stopped as well and looked around. "You mean that sort of... rumbling? I just figured it was whatever makes the aquariums work."
"But it wasn't on when we first got here. It only started after the doors locked. Besides, nothing makes the aquariums work here. They make themselves work, that's the whole point."
They stood quietly again, both listening intently, trying to work out the nature and source of the sound. What he was currently perceiving was a sound cycling at about 10 hertz, not within audible range for your average human, but certainly able to be felt in such a way as to approximate hearing. He tried factoring in the decibel level and went over a few possible sources, tugging on his earlobe absently as he did so.
"Doctor," Rose said suddenly, and he realised he'd zoned out for a moment while thinking.
"Hang on, I'm just going to-"
"Doctor," she repeated, much more urgently, while pointing at a door at the end of the hallway.
"What?" He followed her finger to the end of the hall, and didn't see anything at all unusual. There was a door, perhaps even to a staircase, which would be brilliant right about now, and that was it.
"Look," she hissed, her eyes wide.
He looked.
"Look at the window!"
Sure enough, there was a little window in the centre of the door, and the Doctor began to walk towards it, only to stop again in his tracks when he finally saw what she was seeing.
Across the circle of glass swam a school of fish.
"Is that..." He started approaching it again, Rose coming up behind him and looking over his shoulder as he peered through the little porthole. He could, through the slightly murky water and beyond the colourful fish swimming by, see a perfectly normal, if rather institutional, metal staircase, descending down on one side of his field of view, and up on the other. He craned his neck to try and see how far upwards the chamber was flooded, but there was nothing but more water.
"Oh my god," Rose gasped breathlessly. "What's happening?"
"The rest of the building is being filled," he replied, with an unintended note of fatalism. "There won't be anyone living here any longer, so all available space is being converted to aquaria. That's that sound we've been hearing: pumps. Pumping water in from the sea, filling each part of the building in turn. That's why the process had to begin in advance of any potential radiological contamination. Mind you, that water is coming in at an amazing rate. It's been, what, five minutes since the lock-down? And already that stairwell is almost completely filled."
"And when it is filled, what then?" Rose asked, but her tone implied that she already knew the answer.
"My guess? The next portion of the building will begin to be flooded and that door will open to allow for stabilisation of the ecosystem. And then the next, and the next and then..." he clicked his fingers, "completely sealed in. Forever."
"You think it might be a good idea to-" She gestured with her head towards the hallway they'd just come down.
"Run? Yeah, I reckon so."
He didn't have to look back in order to correctly interpret the soft click then deafening roar of a wall of water pursuing them down the hallway. He reached back and grabbed Rose's hand, pulling her along with him back to the room where they'd begun. Dr. Mabuza's body was laying on the floor right where they'd left him in the centre of a dark pool staining the Persian rug.
There was a door on the far side of the room, and it was towards this that the Doctor made a bee-line, running straight past the bookshelves and the little grouping of furniture, and the body of one of humanity's greatest scholars. Rose pulled her hand from his, even as the rushing torrent of water caught up with them and spread throughout the large chamber, its force stolen slightly by being in a larger container. She stopped and knelt in rapidly rising water, next to the body.
"We have to move him out of here," she said, crossing the dead man's arms over his chest.
The Doctor was already trying the handle of the door, calling for her to come help.
"He'll be.... fish food!" Rose said adamantly, gesturing to the body.
"He wanted to be fish food. Just respect that and help me get this bloody door open!"
Water was rising up their legs at an alarming rate, and slamming into the door that the Doctor was struggling to open against the torrent. Rose took one more second to leave the side of Dr. Mabuza's body, grabbing something off of the coffee table before wading over and wedging her fingers underneath the Doctor's where he'd managed to pry the door open slightly.
"Okay, pull," he urged, and they did, both gasping and grunting and losing footing in the swirling eddies. He managed to wedge a foot in the opening, then his whole leg, then a shoulder. It took almost no time for his eyes to adjust to the lower light on the other side, but when they did, what he saw made him curse loudly.
"What?" he heard Rose yell from behind him, over the roar of the water. "Can we get through?"
He extracted himself from the doorway again. Water was now up to his thighs, nearly to Rose's waist. Her lab coat floated out around her and her chest was heaving with the struggle to stay upright.
"It's sealed off," he said, urgently wishing for one of his good ideas right about now. "There's another barrier. This is the next portion of the building to be flooded, and that seal won't be broken until it's full."
"Can't you sonic it?" she asked desperately, holding her hands above her hips as the water continued to rise.
"It's the same as the front door. Sealed, locked, designed to withstand anything."
Furniture began to float, and the Doctor noticed Rose standing on her tiptoes as the water crept up her chest and dampened the bottom of her hair.
"The bookshelves," the Doctor said. "I've got you." He held out an arm and she grabbed onto him with both hands as he pulled her towards the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the far wall of the room. The box out of which Dr. Mabuza's gun had come floated by, along with a great number of sodden leather-bound books. Rose was no longer able to touch bottom, but kicked her legs in order to propel herself forward as the Doctor walked, the water now nearly up to his own neck.
"Hold on to the shelves-we can use them like a ladder," he instructed, placing one of her hands on the nearest clear shelf above the water line.
"Are we going to die in here?" she asked innocently, as if it was a perfectly normal question. Which, he supposed, given their lifestyle, it was.
"No," he said firmly. "No, we are not going to die in here. Not by a long shot." As he spoke they each climbed up a couple more shelves.
"But the water-"
"I know."
"It'll fill the whole room, right up to the ceiling. There'll be nowhere to go!"
"I know!" They climbed up another few shelves and the Doctor spared a quick glance to count how many more to go until they were out of room.
"I can only hold my breath for, I dunno, like a minute. How about you, Doctor?"
She was attempting to make light of the situation with her daft questions, as if they were passing the time waiting for a train. She really did think she was going to die, the Doctor realised, and she was making small talk.
"Well... that's a complicated question. Long enough, I suppose." He found he didn't really want to divulge this particular difference between them. Not yet. Not now, when the need to breathe oxygen was what could separate them forever. They climbed up another two shelves-he could reach up and touch the ceiling now.
"Long enough for what?" Rose asked, flashing a fatalistic smile.
"Of course!" he barked, seemingly apropos of nothing. "That's brilliant! Long enough for this room to be filled, meaning this section of the building is filled, meaning that sealed door will have to open, and the water will temporarily drain out again, at least a few feet, leaving us high and dry. For a little while." He grinned and climbed up one more shelf, cocking his head to the side to keep from knocking it on the ceiling.
"How long do you reckon that'll take?"
Before he could answer, the point became moot. The both tipped their heads upwards, and instinctively moved closer together as the water overtook the last few remaining inches. He felt her chest expand against his as she took one last deep breath, and he wrapped his free arm around her. The less effort she'd have to exert to stay anchored to the spot, the less oxygen her body would need.
The world went muted and foggy, the sound of the turbines and pumps below much more audible through the water. He opened his eyes, his face inches from Rose's. Unable to speak to one another, all he could do was impotently watch the look in her eye move from determination, to uncertainty, to anxiety and panic. He gripped her more tightly as her hold on the shelving weakened, a small stream of bubbles emerging from the corners of her mouth.
Time was passing. He felt every fraction of a second, counting up to one minute and beyond. There was no movement of the water, no sound of barriers lifting or doors opening. At one minute and twenty-three seconds, Rose began to thrash in his arms, clawing above her at the ceiling as he tried to calm her and keep her from wasting her last precious lung-full in a futile effort to escape.
Seconds continued to tick by. Her eyes closed, her movements slowed, and still no sign of the water being drained. She would begin to inhale water at any moment, the reflex to breathe trumping the knowledge that there was no air to be had. The Doctor wedged their bodies into a corner in order to get another free hand, held her nose shut and covered her lips with his. There wasn't much air remaining in his own lungs, and it would take time for his body to manufacture more out of the available gases in the water around them, but he needed to buy her time. He breathed in to her and felt the slight rise of her chest.
In the part of his mind that was not ticking off seconds or calculating how much oxygen the human brain needs lest it begin to die, he thought he could taste the vortex still on her lips, even now. As he pulled back he realised that while in this embrace something had changed.
There was silence. The water whoosed in his ears, but beyond that, nothing. The sound of the pumps pulling seawater in from below was gone. A flame of hope lit in his chest, and there was a series of clicking sounds, as the machinery started up again. The top of his head hit the air, followed alarmingly quickly by the sudden thought that they were wedged into a corner about 12 feet above the floor, and about to have the buoyant rug pulled out form under them.
The roar of the water was deafening as it rushed through the doorway that was now open and unblocked, and he soon found himself falling and then being carried by the current, his hold on a still-unconscious Rose tenuous and slipping fast. The world went upside-down, then right side-up again, water going up his nose and down his throat as he struggled to find purchase and hang on to Rose. They were close to being swept along and possibly into an even more dangerous situation when he managed to reach up and grab the handle of the forced-open door. He tightened the grip of his arm around Rose's waist and waited for the water-level to even out enough to lessen the current. It would soon begin to fill up again to make up for the water displaced by the new section being opened, and there wasn't much time.
His chest heaving from the exertion, he swallowed hard and looked down at Rose, fearing the precise assessment of her welfare that his brain would make instantly, even though he would prefer to hear comforting lies. What he saw, however, was her eyelashes fluttering, heavy as they were with caked make-up and droplets of water. She writhed weakly in his arms and he helped her turn to the side, where she coughed up a few tablespoons of water and gasped loudly.
The current ebbed enough that he could help her stand, with water swirling around their calves. She continued to cough and splutter, holding a finger up when he tried to ask how she was.
"Bit close for comfort," she finally said, her voice hoarse. "I wouldn't mind going somewhere dry now. I feel like a sponge that's been left in the sink after the washing-up."
The Doctor peered through the open aperture and grinned. "I think that can be arranged."
≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈
The Doctor had let her go ahead of him as they climbed flight after flight of metal stairs. The rush of water below echoed loudly, making any sort of conversation impossible. She was sure he was right behind her, fretting over her well-being, and she hated it. The future of her entire species still hung in the balance, and the puzzle of what stops the war if not Dr. Bhekithemba Mabuza still remained unsolved, but she could feel the Doctor brooding over her fragility from three steps above him. And so, even though her lungs burned, and her clothes were sodden and heavy, she didn't let up in the pace of her climbing. She couldn't give him any reason to doubt her durability.
"Aha!" she cried cheerily when she saw the door at the top of the last flight. Inside, she was just praising all the saints and angels for there finally being an end to the climb. "Here we are."
This doorknob was amenable to a blast from the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor jauntily twirled the device in the air before pocketing it again.
"Now this is more like it!" he enthused as they entered the darkened room. "Let this be a lesson to you, Rose Tyler: If you ever build a home controlled by a central computer, put terminals in easily-accessible locations."
"Or just always live in a slightly psychic space ship," she added, followed by an awkward pause in which she found something extremely interesting on the toe of her shoe and he went about exploring the back of his neck with a twitchy hand.
"Right," he said. "Handy, that. But for now..." He approached a screen and pulled out the sonic again. "Time to do something about this minor flooding problem we seem to be experiencing."
Rose peered over his shoulder as he worked. "It's that easy?"
"'Course it is, if you're me. Which I will note that you are not, but I've never held that against you."
"Ha ha. But there's still this war- I don't think I understand what part Dr. Mabuza's wife was playing. I mean, have you ever heard of any of this? You made it sound so straightforward."
"Evidence seems to suggest that there's a slight chance that I was..." He trailed off and mumbled as he tapped a few keys on a nearby keyboard.
"That you were..." Rose prompted. "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you."
"Well, you know how time is, always in flux, things changing and all that. I didn't even know he was married, and you'd think that the wife of such a great man would be something you'd hear about. There!" He backed away from the computer with a flourish. "That should do it. Reversed the pumps, opened the drains, everything back out again."
"So now we just have to stop a global nuclear war," Rose said wryly.
He sat down on a table cross-legged and furrowed his brow. "So it would seem."
"Can't we just, I don't know... use the TARDIS, land right in the middle of some missile silo and tell them to all sod off, war's over?"
The Doctor's brow wrinkled further and he began to run his hands through his hair. "But what I don't get is how history has changed this much. I mean, little things change all the time-someone's middle name is Fernando instead of Alastair, the words someone speaks are slightly different, that sort of thing. But this is huge, and I didn't feel anything amiss when we landed."
"There's nothing for it, though. Dr. Mabuza never made a broadcast and he's not coming back from the dead to do it." Rose felt a chill go up her spine as she was forced to recall the very moment of his death, and what his warm blood felt like as it spilled onto her.
"I know, that's what I can't figure out. If not him, then who?"
Rose blinked, and wrinkled her nose at him. Was he really that dense? He just looked back at her, biting his bottom lip and nearly igniting his head on fire with how hard he was thinking.
"Well," she said finally, convinced he wasn't going to get it, "like I said when we landed... there's you."
He swallowed and gave a little sigh. "I told you, it's not me."
"How do you know it's not you? You said something huge has changed, and maybe what's changed is you being here."
He stood and approached her, getting much closer than friendly decorum would really call for. "Well, you're here too. What if it's you?"
She gave a little snorting laugh at the very thought. "Me? You must be joking. You think the leaders of the world are going to listen to a teenaged shop girl?"
"Well, I listen to you, and I'm more powerful than all of them put together." He laid a hand on the side of her arm and beamed a lopsided smile at her.
"And so modest, too," she laughed. "All right, but listen... you, or me, we're no one. We don't belong here. Either of us talking it would just be... it would be like spam email. No, there's something else here. Something with his wife-Su-Jung, was it? She was up to something and he thought she failed, but what if she didn't? What if it's her that needs our help, not him?"
"That," the Doctor said drawing her in for a suffocating hug, "is a brilliant thought. See? You are worth listening to."
She didn't care how many times it happened to her: being told she was brilliant by the Doctor was the most unsettling feeling she'd ever felt. She didn't know whether to feel proud, or patronised to, or what. All she knew was that the swirl of emotions involved were unique to his presence-no one else had ever caused such a crashing torrent of conflicting thoughts in her head.
"And here we are all cozily logged in to the mainframe. All right... email."
He continued to mutter to himself as he scrolled by screens at a dizzying rate, toggling the sonic on and off at various intervals and tapping his toe annoyingly. Rose looked around for some way to be useful, though she was afraid of dripping all over the electronics. Instead she started fishing through her pockets, taking an inventory of all of her personal items ruined by their soaking. Her lipstick had been partially eaten away by the salt-water that got inside its case, and she found a tenner that looked like it had been through the washing at least eight times. From her back pocket, she extracted her 23rd century camera, wincing as she pressed the "on" button, expecting it to be dead, or to blow up in her hand. To her great surprise, it did neither, but turned on just the same as always.
"Wahey!" she cried triumphantly, scrolling through all of her snaps and films. The Doctor ignored her, engrossed as he was in his work for the moment. Her jubilation was short-lived, however, as she opened a file and found that she'd accidentally filmed the entire conversation they'd had with Dr. Mabuza, including his tragic death. She clicked the device off again hastily.
"Any luck?" she asked, trying to sound nonchalant to cover the renewed grief and confusion she felt.
"No, nothing.... wait!" He jumped back from the computer screen and pointed. He made a number of other exclamations like "Yes!" and "Is it?" and "No!" all in rapid succession, leaving Rose with her head spinning, until he turned around to face her with an expression that was simultaneously grave and vain. "I think I've worked it out."
Rose simply raised her eyebrows and waited for him to explain. She knew he would: his ego demanded that she be a witness to his brilliance.
"Su-Jung Choi has barely been here at Aquarius at all in the past six months, and has had almost no contact with her husband. At least, none that was recorded here. But every few weeks, there's an SMS message, all from different phone numbers. There's no name, and they always say the same thing, or almost the same thing."
"So you think that's her, like, checking in?"
He tapped the screen, where the most recent message had been called up. "Not just checking in. She's sending confirmation of... something. Some sort of mission that she's accomplished, but she never says with who, or where, or doing what."
"If she's some sort of spy, then she'll be keeping her contacts a secret from everyone, yeah? Even from her husband."
The Doctor nodded. "Even from each other. First rule of spycraft... or something. A rule at least. But the last one he received from her before she disappeared for good, it's different. It looks encrypted, just a bunch of gobbledygook, and at first that's what I thought was going on. But there's no use trying to decrypt, because that bunch of mumbojumbo is legitimately what she sent. And then I thought it's a code, and if it's a code, I can break it."
"Because you're a genius," Rose said, poking him with a finger playfully.
"I see that you jest, young lady, but here's the thing: I can't break it."
She gave him a sidelong, sceptical look. "How the mighty have fallen."
"Oh, ye of little faith. I can't break it because it's not a code and it's not encrypted. It's a password. It's not meant to be anything than what it is."
"A password for what? Something on this computer?"
The Doctor shook his head and started bouncing on the balls of his feet. "No, this level of security is way beyond what this system would ever need or be able to support. What you're looking at here isn't even a complete password, it's just part of one. That's military security, of the highest order."
Rose wrinkled her brow, trying to convey that she wasn't quite getting how it all fit together, hopefully without having to admit it.
"So here's what I think," the Doctor said, putting his hands into his pockets. "I think that Su-Jung Choi was neck-deep in serious military espionage."
"She was a spy?" Rose was legitimately surprised. Dr. Mabuza didn't seem like the type of man to be taken in by a spy, nor to admire spies just generally.
"I don't think she was. Not working for any actual governments at least. I think she was on her own, gathering intelligence on how to hack in to military computers and disarm nuclear weaponry. That is exactly the sort of woman a man like Bhekithemba Mabuza would fall in love with, don't you think? Brilliant, brave, willing to risk her life for the good of her species." He paused and stared wistfully at the computer screen displaying her last transmission. "And up until recently, she'd been keeping her secrets quite well, transferring the other bits of these passwords to a few select hackers. They'd all be kept ignorant of one another, so that if one got caught the entire network would remain stable. Su-Jung Choi was the only one who had the full picture."
"How does that help us now? She's disappeared and we don't know who, or where, the people she was working with are."
The Doctor bit his lip again and scrunched his face up in thought. "Well, if I'm right, this code here, her last transmission, she sent it to her husband as a last-ditch effort to give it to someone else before she was caught. She trusted him to find a way to get it to her network, even though he didn't know who they were."
"But he didn't. He just... he killed himself."
The Doctor sighed heavily. "He lost hope. I'm sure he tried but... sometimes trying isn't enough."
"If he tried and couldn't do it, how are we supposed to figure it out? I'm assuming our time is severely limited."
"That's what I'm trying to work out. Let me run through those old messages again and see if I can find anything. I'm sorry this trip has turned out so poorly, Rose. I just wanted you to meet someone truly admirable, not some rubbish alien in a stolen ship." He turned and looked at the screen again, flashing hundreds of lines of code before his eyes faster than Rose could hope to process.
"It's okay," she said. "I've got my pictures. I even filmed our whole conversation with Dr. Mabuza by accident. I'll never be able to figure this camera out, it just does what it wants without me even doing anything!"
The lines on the screen stopped scrolling and the Doctor pushed away from the table. "You... filmed it?" He sounded like he might be cross with her. Perhaps he found it disrespectful that she'd caught his last moments on camera.
"Yeah, but just on accident. I set the camera on the table and forgot about it."
"I think that might possibly be brilliant," he said, more to himself than to her. "I can't believe I didn't think of that before!"
He hugged her again and this time it was so vise-like that she squeaked.
"That's the solution, right there! Oh, I am an imbecile! Because we've been wondering this whole time, if he doesn't stop the war, if he doesn't transmit, than who does it? How does it happen? But that's just the thing! He does do it! From beyond the grave, mind you, but it's still him. And it's all because of us."
She narrowed her eyes, trying to cut through the waves of triumph rolling off of him. "Okay, you lost me."
"You filmed him talking, and he did say some very profound things down there. The last thoughts of a man who's lost hope and knows he's about to die. Powerful stuff. But not quite powerful enough to stop a war. That's where I made one wrong assumption and all my other mistakes followed from that. It's this code, the final transmission of Su-Jung Choi that stops the war, because that information is embedded into the recording of Dr. Mabuza's last words. What 10 billion people will see is a man appealing for the people of the world to rise up and take the destiny of their species in their own hands. What-I dunno-five or ten hackers around the world will see is a transmission that will allow them to extract the final sequence of the military passwords they've been waiting for Su-Jung to deliver."
Rose felt that lump in her throat that always formed when they were about to do something truly great together. "And how will they know to do that? That they should pay special attention to this transmission?"
"Oh, I dunno, we put some little private code in it?"
Rose found herself grinning back at him, in spite of the fact that they hadn't actually done any of these brilliant things yet. "Like... the last several phone numbers she messaged from. Or the sign-off she used. Or both? We can put it in the timestamp. No one ever knows how to set the timestamps on their cameras properly anyway. I can never figure the bloody things out. It always reads like the 12th of January of the year 3011 or something."
"I like it!" he beamed, running to a nearby computer screen and calling up a map of the building. "We'll need the TARDIS to help us put the transmission together and send it out. You know, I always did wonder how it was that he was able to transmit something to the entire planet all at once."
He pressed a button that turned all the screens in the room off, grabbed her hand and ran out the door, pulling her precariously down the stairs after him.
"Rose Tyler, we're about to stop a nuclear war! How does it feel?"
She ungracefully slammed into a wall at a turning in the stairs. "Bumpy!" she cried, jumping down the next flight, three steps at a time.
***
"You ready?" the Doctor pulled the TARDIS viewscreen over and took a quick look, before turning his warm smile back on Rose, who was putting her jacket on by the front door.
"As ever," she chirped. "Where are we?"
"You'll see," he replied in a teasing sing-song, pushing the doors open with an unnecessarily grandiose gesture which made his coat flutter behind him a bit.
Rose stepped out to find herself in a very familiar park, on a very familiar river, with a very familiar skyline. "London?" she said, but it wasn't really a question.
"If that's all right with you," he said, taking her hand and leading her towards the Houses of Parliament.
"What's that sound?" There was a sort of white noise on the wind, and behind it she could hear a cacophony of instruments.
"Why don't you take a look?"
They exited the park and instantly were nearly run over by a pack of teenagers running at full pelt towards Westminster Bridge.
"Oi!" she yelled at them, and actually found herself literally shaking her fist. She was getting too old, she thought. "Watch where you're going!"
"'S'all right, love!" one of them turned around and called. "Just don't want to miss it, yeah? You'd better hurry up!"
"Miss what?" She turned to the Doctor. "Miss what?"
At that moment Big Ben began to chime its familiar tune, and the sound of thousands of people cheering was unmistakable. She could see a huge crowd up ahead, all of them with their faces raised towards the clock tower. As the chimes marking the time began the crowd began to count along. One... two... three... four... and on to twelve, at which point there was sheer pandemonium. She had to lean in and shout her questions straight into the Doctor's ear.
"What is this, what's going on?"
"It's third November, 2089, just a few weeks after the planet was just minutes from self-destruction. And now, the last nuclear weapon on Earth has just been destroyed," the Doctor shouted back into her own ear. "Congratulations, Rose Tyler: you brought about world peace!"
"So did you!"
The Doctor just grinned and rocked on his heels a bit. Rose found the energy of the crowd to be utterly infectious, and wound up forming a human pyramid with a bunch of the same blokes who'd run by them a few minutes earlier. Kneeling at the top, she looked up into the cloudless sky, and could think of no better way to remember Bhekithemba Mabuza and Su-Jung Choi than to laugh until she cried.