Doctor Who: BBC Past Doctor Adventures [059] - Blue Box by Kate Orman

Author:Kate Orman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563538592
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 2003-10-26T23:00:00+00:00

Two

Piece by piece, diskette by diskette, Swan put together the story of the supercomputer and its components.

The computer’s owners had lost their grip on it somewhere in West Virginia, close to the border with Maryland. (Cobb had no information on where it might have been before that.) Somewhere in the countryside, apparently; although the emails were vague on this point, Swan guessed that a vehicle carrying the device had run off the road, and a local – possibly a farmer – had got hold of the pieces of the machine. There were five parts. Swan guessed input, storage, CPU, memory, output – although if this really was a new kind of computer, the old architecture might have been irrelevant. Which parts had she and Luis bought?

The hypothetical farmer had looked to make a quick buck from his find. It hadn’t been quick after all. Swan had long been familiar with the underground of collectors, spies, and suspicious types who traded in esoteric and forbidden technology, but of course the farmer had never heard of them.

His initial efforts to sell the components had got him nowhere.

It was almost two years before news of their existence trickled out to the grapevine.

Over the following months, a gaggle of collectors and suspicious types turned up, looking to beg, borrow, or steal the components. The farmer quickly realised that what he had given up on as junk had a real value. He played coy, pretending he had already sold some of the items, making sure that each customer only got one piece of the puzzle.

Swan was surprised when she put these events onto a timeline. The computer had fallen off the back of the truck, or what have you, in 1970! All this time, its bits had been out there, becoming more and more separated. Why had its owners waited so long to retrieve their property? The only explanation was that they simply hadn’t known it was there.

When it fell off that truck, to them, it became invisible. That was a bit of luck for her imagined farmer. One of Cobb’s pals hinted darkly that the owners had visited the original finder and they hadn’t exactly brought him candy and flowers.

1970. Swan spun the chair back and forth, thinking. One hell of a lot had happened in computer technology since then.

Could the components really still be valuable after all this time? The auctioneer had certainly thought so, and she had learned to trust his judgement. An awful lot of freaks and hobbyists thought so too – they had pursued the components from one end of the country to the other.

That clinched it. If the technology was outdated and worthless, they’d never have bothered to come after it eleven years later. Perhaps losing it had stalled a research project, something truly revolutionary which could now continue.

More likely, the research had continued, and now there was a risk that the secrets of a new computer might be revealed if the early prototype was reassembled.

Swan closed her eyes for a few moments, massaging her eyelids.

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