Doctor Who: Spore by Scarrow Alex

Author:Scarrow, Alex
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

4

‘What’s happening?’ called Chan as the Doctor’s body jerked suddenly. ‘Doctor, are you OK?’

Chan looked over her shoulder. The beetle-like creatures were beginning to gather threateningly close. More of them were emerging from the nearby market stalls, where the deflated rinds of melons and husks of corn cobs merged into dark soup, and from a florist’s where hanging baskets drooled tendrils of oil-black slime. The creatures shuffled slowly towards her.

‘Doctor! They’re getting close out here,’ she called.

No answer.

‘I mean reeeeally close!’

No answer. She shone her torch back into the truck. All she could see was the back of the Doctor’s head. He was standing perfectly still now, almost as if he were in some kind of trance.

‘This is not looking good! Doctor?’

She aimed her torch back out at the creatures just as one of them suddenly lashed out towards her with a spiked tentacle. The tentacle wrapped tightly round her leg. She felt its firm vice-like grip contracting, beginning to crush her ankle. Then there was a painful pricking as sharp barbs cut through her biohazard suit and pierced her skin.

‘Oh no! Doctor! It’s cut through my suit!’ she whimpered. ‘It’s broken my skin! I’m infected!’

The Doctor remained perfectly still. His mind was far, far away. His vision was filled with an image of another world. He glimpsed a purple sky, twin suns with a blue hue to them. Another image: a different world, with heavy tumbling clouds and many dozens of twisted pillars of a resin-like substance reaching hundreds of metres towards the troubled sky. It resembled a city of termite mounds. Then another world of green skies, methane gas and floating balloon-like creatures.

Trace memories of worlds this strain of the Spore must have visited before, worlds it had visited, absorbed and moved on from. Worlds visited how many countless millions of years ago?

Then … something resonated in his head. It was not something he could truly describe as a voice. And yet somehow it was. Deep inside his brain he heard a sexless, ageless voice. A whisper of consciousness penetrating his mind. A thought that was distinctly not his.

You seek communication?

I do.

You represent entity?

I do.

Represent of this world?

Yes.

Fleeting images filled the Doctor’s head: a slideshow of species from Earth. Species that the Spore had already touched and absorbed and decoded. Thousands of microbes that it must have first encountered in the dry dirt of the Nevada Desert. Hundreds of insects: an ant, a beetle, a many-hued dragonfly. Now more complex forms: a tan-coloured rodent, a rattlesnake, some small species of desert fox. Now larger: a cow, a dog and finally … a human. A record of the Spore’s journey up the food chain.

Then the procession of images ceased. The Doctor had his vision returned to him.

Not represent entity of this world. From another world.

Yes. I have travelled, as it seems you have.

You have resistant structural code.

The Spore was referring to his inherited immunity. A few lines in his genome that prevented this pathogen from being able to absorb him and render him an amorphous organic soup.

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