Doctor Who MA18 - Downtime by Marc Platt

Author:Marc Platt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T02:21:49+00:00

13

Shapes

rush of stale air and the approaching roar of another Aengine.

The presence inhabiting Travers pushes his shape into the low angle between the wall and the floor. A niche for itself, confined to the extent of the body’s substance, anchored by gravity to the Earth.

The sound of bodies moving. A threnody of a thousand footsteps clattering, dispersing, echoing away.

The thing in the blind old man’s body listens to their shapes. Light and heavy shapes, clumsy, old and young shapes.

A human voice shouts, ‘Mind the doors.’

A shrill alarm of bleeps. A slide. A thud. The engine’s roar fading into the distance and a rush of air pressing against Travers’s surface skin.

Footsteps approach and pause. A chink of metal pieces on the ground in front of it. The footsteps move on again.

The presence feels itself in every region of Travers’s body, held in the stasis it has imposed. It knows every ancient blood cell moving sluggishly in every ancient vein. Every hair and follicle, every nerve-ending. Its own pounding thought-beat overwhelming the dull double thud of Travers’s heart. It can make him jerk with spasms as it flexes inside his body. But laughter, cruel and mocking, is exhausting. And it is still so weak. A scooped-out pulp without its own shell.

It has no shape. That was lost long ago. Does it recall what it was once? Was it huge with massive claws to crush and maim? A bloated spider-mind filling every cavernous gap with billowing web? Was it a mountain? A bank of mountains looming and rumbling like clouds in another sky or on another continuum? A comet scattering thoughts when it surges through the junctions and circuits of the New World computer?

It is there now, resting while it projects out of that body into Travers’s body, where it has had a hold for years.

In truth, it cannot remember what it once was. That was so far off, in another dimension, another form of now.

It struggles to hold its thoughts together. A mass of thoughts is all it is. But such substantial thoughts. More than just an idea. A mass of thoughts with one single thought. The Doctor reversed the energy flow. Reversed everything. The power that enabled it, It, the Great Intelligence, now binds it.

Now it is the pawn. It is blinded. It cannot escape.

It is still weak, but it has a new web now: a web of wires and fibres where it has soothed and healed its wounded mind.

The new web reaches and connects with other webs. The Intelligence has spread slowly, bridging interfaces, breaching firewalls, hiding in other commands and texts. The new web already circuits the Earth. All systems are converting to one command system. Search and retrieve that focus that binds it.

That Locus must be recovered and destroyed!

And that is not enough. The rigid web binds it too. It must have solid form and substance. Not to exist solely as blind impulses of data. But does it have the strength?

Something squeaks nearby.

The Intelligence feels a shape brush against its foot –

against Travers’s foot encased in soft animal skin.

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