Unfinished Symphony-E3-Walking in my Shoes-Part Two
Prelude
Part One
Unfinished Symphony Episode Three
Walking in my Shoes-Part Two
It took approximately three danishes for her Lawyer to arrive.
The door wooshed open and a rather boring looking man wearing glasses appeared in the doorway. He wore an average black suit with a white shirt and had a briefcase in his right hand. He was the very epitimy of a normal looking Solicitor. He seemed to take the room in and then asked, “You are Ms. Noble?”
“I am”, she said through her danish. She swallowed it and got up, “And you are?”
“Your lawyer”, he said walking in, “Do you mind if I make this more formal?”
She had no idea what he was talking about but as he moved towards the bed the room transformed itself into a small office with a desk and two chairs. He placed the briefcase down on the desk and opened it up. Donna took the seat across from him, “How did you do that?”, she asked looking around the room.
He kept rifling through his papers, “The room is physco reactive”, and he looked up briefly at her and amended it, “It means it responds...”
“...to thoughts. Yes I know, thank you.”, she said crossing her legs. In fact she didn't know when he said it but it made sense the instant she heard it.
He sat down and crossed his hands and looked at her, “What can I do for you Ms. Noble?”
“Where am I?”, she asked, her tone all business.
“You are in a courtesy suite being supplied by the Shadow Proclamation in their private sector of space.”
It was the perfect answer she noticed. Just enough information to answer the question without one letter extra to give anything else away. She smiled and asked, “Where is the Doctor?”
Again his expression didn't so much waver, “I am sorry Ms. Noble but the Doctor is being held for crimes against The Macra. He is being held in a detention suite right now.”
“What crimes?”, she asked leaning in.
“You are not a part of either side of the lawsuit, so that information is not relevant to you.”, she said not even glancing at the papers under his hands.
“Ok then”, she said thinking, “How did I end up here then?”
“I must apologize, you were accidentally brought in by a Judoon squad that had been ordered to bring in a fugitive from intergalactic law. You were accidentally apprehended in that process.”
It was almost word for word from what the hologram told her. “And how does that happen? The Judoon pick up a lot of extra people?”
There was a slight pause for once. It was less than a second but it was the most he had thought about any answer so far, “The Judoon are not familiar with the varieties of carbon based life forms, they can be a bit zealous in their desire to see justice done.”
“Familiar with carbon based life forms?”, she repeated, “Are you saying we all look alike to them?”
“In their defense Ms. Noble, you were wearing his coat. It was a simple mistake.”
“You're telling me your rhinos can't tell the difference between that bag of skin and bones and my figure because of a coat? Seems to me you need to send them back to...army school or wherever they get their training. Because all I know was one second I was talking to my friend and the next I was blasted viscously by one of your men.”, she said looking at her nails, “It was horrible I tell you. I might have a mind to sue.”
By the several second pause this time, she knew she had his number. Middle of bloody space or not, the rules never changed. When in doubt...threaten to sue.
“We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced Ms. Noble but..”, he started to say.
He slammed her hands on the desk, “No buts!”, she bellowed, “Am I a prisoner?”
“Of course not”, he said instantly.
“Then why won't that door open? You know keeping me here against my will is illegal also.”, she said enjoying the widening of his eyes, “So far I have your goons blasting me for no reason and then being kidnapped and held against my will. Tell me Mister Lawyer...how does that sound so far?”
He actually swallowed and looked down at his papers for a second. Donna smiled and leaned back into the chair.
“The door was sealed to prevent you from wandering into sensitive areas...”, he sounded almost pleading now.
“And does every one of your guests have their doors sealed?”, she asked casually.
Another swallow, “No...but...”
“No buts. Suing. Now.”, she said with firmness.
“That won't be necessary Ms. Noble, I am sure we can come to some arrangement...”
And she had him.
“I want to see the Doctor. Now. And no buts, no possibly, no I have to check. I want you to stand up, open that door and take me to him now.”, and she leaned into him, “Or I swear to, I will make this the biggest stink you have ever seen in here. And trust me Poindexter”, she said getting in his face, “I am the woman to do it.”
Three and half minutes later she was being lead to the Doctor's room.
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The Doctor sat on the fake couch and read.
The Architect had left the charges with him to read over, and he was quickly becoming nauseated. The charges read like a list of the very worst crimes a time traveler could do to an unassuming race. It was the very thing that the Time Lords used to police, and now it seemed the Shadow Proclamation did.
It seemed the Macra, at some future, would begin developing time travel technology. The thought of The Macra, a violent and overbearing militaristic race possessing time travel just made The Doctor's blood chill, but he read on. The experiments that the Macra were running revolved around creating time bubbles around test subjects and sending them forward in time. Which wasn't quite true, the Doctor reasoned. The affected individual didn't so much as move forward, he simply stood still as time passed him by. It was temporal stasis as opposed to time travel, but it was the first step. They had built a physics lab on a large hollowed out asteroid that had been caught in Macra Primes gravity field, far away from civilian life. Scientists had done several thousands tests with objects and lower life forms, and they began to send members of their own race ahead. At first only minutes ahead. The subject would vanish from view and then appear in the same place at a predetermined time. They kept pushing the time limit out farther and farther...seeing what the machine's upper limit was.
Finally they decided to see if they could go as far as a month. It meant the subject would be out of time for almost a week his time as the time stream moved around him thirty days. They designed a suit that had nourishment and mental entertainment such as digital books and an interactive database for him to read as time passed. The subject, a military officer of course, sat on the time platform and saw his world blink out of existence.
For a week he sat in the void. Reading historical documents and works of fiction by the Macra when his suit alerted him he was entering back into real time. When he jumped back he appeared in a place he had never seen before. Instead of a state of the art scientific facility he found himself in an abandoned cave with very little atmosphere. The suit was designed to protect the wearer from exposure into space, in case the large temporal jump created a spacial rift as well. There was no use in sending a subject through time just to have him die in the cold harshness of space because they didn't think ahead. Making his way through the cave he found no sign that it had ever seen intelligent life. No tool marks, no footprints, nothing. He wandered through the internal maze of tunnels until he found open space. And as he walked out of the cave he realized that he had in fact not traveled spatially at all. As he stumbled out he realized he was on the same asteroid, it simply had no laboratory on it. Believing he had been thrown back in time the officer began to compare the star positions with the suits database to determine the time period.
He was shocked to learn he had indeed moved a month forward.
He sat on that asteroid and tried in vain to contact anyone on Macra Prime. But the planet was silent, it was devoid of any radio signals whatsoever. The officer activated his emergency beacon and was picked up by a nearby Polonard freighter. Being the closest civilized culture to the Macra the officer thanked the captain and asked him if he knew what had happened to his planet. The Polonard captain not only didn't know what race the officer was talking about, he didn't know of the Macra at all.
After a series of travels the officer made contact with the Shadow Proclamation and explained to them his plight. According to galactic records, the Macra were indeed once an intelligent race that spanned their empire across several galaxies. But after a massive civil war, the races last survivors had crashed on a distant planet on the edge of M87 galaxy.
Scanning a civilized population already on the surface, the Macra landed on New Earth and hid themselves deep underground. There they spent the next few years recovering from the war and assessing their situation. Realizing it would fall to them to rebuild the Macra, the survivors began to attack the surface dwellers, grabbing technology and personal to work for them. The police force of New Earth had nothing even close to the Macra's impressive arsenal of weapons and found themselves quickly on the losing side of what was becoming a war. Things looked bleak...
Until the Doctor came.
According to several witnesses on New Earth the Doctor appeared with Donna's unconscious form and asked for medical attention for his companion. Not having any form of payment, the Doctor heard about the invading Macra force and struck a deal. Taken straight from the Mater Superior's statement it said the Doctor used the New New York medical materials and concocted what could only be described as a devolution complex. Synthesized in gas form, the compound would read the creature's RNA base sequences and begin retrofit a virus in the organism to revert it back to a simpler form. The Doctor then took his vanishing box deep underground where he released the gas on the Macra. Within a few hours the surviving Macra had begun to lose the ability of higher thought. Within a day they could no longer possessed language. By the time the procedure was finished on his friend, the Doctor had turned the Macra race into a mindless collection of creatures that had no more idea of military domination than a tomato had of V8 and the Campbell soup company.
New Earth had heralded the Doctor as their savior and offered him anything he wanted. All he asked was for his friend's treatment and left them a safer planet in return. Which seemed to be the problem.
According to the records the Macra officer had in his survival suit, the Macra of his time did indeed rise up and destroy New Earth. They used the vast technological and medical resources to rebuild their race and move on to other star systems. Where one day they would invent time travel...sending their officer ahead one month. All of that had been wiped out by the Doctor's actions. Not only destroying his future, but 13 other parallel time streams that had spun off from the Macra war and their struggle. 14 time lines had been changed. Gone forever. And according to everyone there, it was all done by him.
The papers fell from the Doctor's hand as he pressed his hands against his head, “Think, think think”, he said to himself, “Why would I ever do that?”
A door appeared on his blank wall. He looked up in surprise as the door slid open and Donna stood there, “Doctor!!”, she screamed and ran into hug him. His arms hugged her back, but his mind was a million miles away. Wondering if he was indeed guilty after all.
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The Architect sat at her desk, gathering all the information for the coming trial. Though, in practice, impartial she had to admit that, in this case she was going to enjoy seeing the man who claimed he was a time lord be put in his place by the system. It was people like him, who worked outside the law, that just made it harder for actual justice to be served at times. And though most of what she had about his exploits seemed to distressingly positive, she was sure if she dug far enough she would find something.
That was four hours earlier and about a hundred or so personal accounts of heroism and bravery on the Doctor's part from different places and times. Though fairness was supposed to be striven for in hearings like this, The Architect found no use to include these numerous accounts into as evidence, as they had no direct correlation with the case.
And besides who wants to hear all the good things he had done.
She dug and dug, but found nothing that was remotely even close to what he had done against the Macra, she continued to search for anything relevant. She was about to call it a night and try again tomorrow when a box popped up on her terminal screen. It was black with a red, flashing text prompt. The words, “I hope you're not giving up.”, it said.
She typed back angrily, “Who is this? How dare you invade my system!”
She opened another program and begun a data trace for the intruder. How it even found them here in null space was impressive, but to somehow gain access to the Shadow Proclamation's data system, that was serious.
“That won't help you.”, it typed as the trace program closed itself suddenly. She gasped as she reached over to her comm system to call for help, “Don't do that either.”, it typed as she froze, “I am here to help you.”
“Help me how?”, she said out loud and begun to type. But before she could enter a letter it wrote back, “With the Doctor of course. Unless you think you can find what you are looking for...alone.”
The Architect stopped breathing for a second as she realized, whoever this was could actually see and hear her. She looked around her vast office, huge bay windows overlooked the entire universe from here. Someone was watching her.
“I am not outside your window.”, it typed, “Do you wish to know the Doctor's past crimes or not?”
The Architect thought about it for a moment. On one hand she very badly wanted to prove the Doctor was as much a menace she she knew he was. But on the other...she had no idea what this source of information was...how could she trust it? “Past crimes? Where does this magical information come from? Or am I supposed to just not ask?”
“Everything I am going to send you is fact. This is not conjecture or hearsay. These are official court documents.”, it typed as a download bar appeared on her screen. “See for yourself.”
Files began to transfer onto her hard drive at a fantastic rate. There were thousands of files being sent in the blink of an eye. She could see a folder on her desktop that had the title The Doctor on it, as she opened it she could see a series of other folders. Each had a different name on it. She didn't recognize most of the words, but they were obviously names. Non-Interference, Ravalox, Mentors, Vervoids, Skaro, Hand of Omega, and more.
She clicked one of the folders and in it were scans of what looked like documents. As she opened one of them she could see they were all written in what looked like an unfamiliar language. She moved the document over to her translation program and was shocked to see it declare, “--TRANSLATING FROM GALLIFREYIAN--”
As the document unscrambled itself into galactic common, The Architect found herself smiling at her good fortune. She read well into the night...all about The Doctor...and his many crimes.
To be continued....