Doctor Who PDA72 - Spiral Scratch (6th) by Gary Russell

Author:Gary Russell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T02:42:36+00:00

* * *

So, there they were – the TARDIS having made its uncomfortable landing – stood in the Reading Room with Rummas, and Misters Woltas and Huu. Telling them everything that had happened.

A look passed between the two Custodians and the professor and then Rummas sighed. ‘Doctor, I think I need to show you something. Please follow me.’

Mel was going to follow them out when she saw Tungard spot the computer system she’d tried hacking into earlier.

He’d already grasped the basics of it by the time she wandered over. ‘Is this the future?’ he asked her quietly. ‘A future of time machines, displaced temporal monsters and this box of tricks?’

‘It’s a PC,’ Mel said quietly, trying to remember how she’d felt when first confronted with technology way beyond her 1989

experiences. ‘A Personal Computer.’

Tungard laughed. ‘What is it really?’

Mel just squeezed his shoulder and felt him sag.

‘This,’ he said after a few moments, ‘this is a computer? But...

but...’

Mel tried to think what computers meant to someone from 1959, thirty years before it meant ALGOL, IBMs, BBC Micros and LocoScript 1 to her. While travelling with the Doctor, Mel had quickly become acclimatised to developments in technology, but that’s because her background was in that field. As a chemist, albeit one who seemed to have harnessed whatever it was Monica Lamprey needed, Joseph’s grasp of microcircuitry was going to be limited and the leap of technology she had taken would be more a leap of faith for poor Joe.

‘What does this... PC do exactly?’ he asked.

Remembering her attempt to cheat the future earlier, Mel considered lying, but in the end she just hoped he would be stronger than she’d been and accept that the future was best left a closed book.

So she told him.

And before she could breathe, he’d typed his own name in.

Mel, at least, could be reassured that he’d learn nothing other than the fact that his life was destined to be unremarkable.

At least that’s what Rummas had said earlier.

The computer screen, however, said something entirely different:

Joseph Piotr Tungard. (B) 1924, Earth Prime. Romanian chemist, fled Soviet persecution to Great Britain in the 1950s where he began teaching at a London college. Whilst there, he discovered three new atomic elements that, when combined, opened the causality loops, enabled unfettered access to the space-time vortex and unleashed the Lampreys previously imprisoned in the Spiral at the apex of the Vortex. As a result of his discoveries, the Lampreys gained unlimited access to all of time and space across the multiverses, reaching back to the creation, or forward to the destruction, of each universe, plus every interstitial point in between, wherein they wreaked havoc and unravelled reality whilst feeding on the chaos energies released as each divergent universe self-destructed. As such, to the few trillion survivors within the eighteen known surviving universes (out of the unrecordable amount that existed previously), he is known as the Architect of Chaos.

Many attempts have been made by surviving time-sensitives to go back through time and assassinate

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