Doctor Who: Interference: Book Two by Lawrence Miles

Author:Lawrence Miles
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction:Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563555827
Publisher: BBC
Published: 1999-10-15T10:00:00+00:00

* * *

Travels with Fitz (XI)

Anathema, 1801

Fitz stood on the highest level of the tower, gawping down at the floor several hundred feet below. The media was throbbing away above his head, and the ant-people were mumbling to themselves as they wandered in and out of the dome buildings. Fitz doubted either the people or the media had noticed him, but he imagined that they were both saying don’t jump, on the grounds that it made him feel better about himself.

He couldn’t really do this.

Could he?

Theoretically, it made sense. These last few months, it had seemed like the only thing to do, like the final, inevitable part of the plan. It hadn’t even been an issue. Now, with the vertigo chewing up his stomach lining and the ground bobbing up and down in front of his eyes, things were starting to catch up with him. This was death, for God’s sake. Not your first time doing something exciting and dangerous, not the day of your driving test, or the day you lost your virginity, or the day you took the exam that you were a hundred per cent sure settled your destiny once and for all. Two minutes more, two minutes of sweating and gulping and heavy breathing, then zip. Nothing else.

Fitz couldn’t even imagine that. He felt like he was waiting for the cop-out, for death to say ‘only joking, here’s the afterlife’ at the last minute.

He had to die. Nothing else made sense. He’d die, then Guest and Tobin and all the others would remember him, and in a couple of days he’d be hanging around the city again. Except that it wouldn’t really be him, of course. It’d be someone like him, someone close enough to the original to make the sacrifice not matter. One day, the new version would die, and be replaced by Fitz part three. And Fitz part three would die, and so would part four, and part five, and… and eventually, Anathema would get to Earth, and whatever version of Fitz was left could find the Doctor again. It was the only possible way out.

He didn’t have to die now, though, did he? He could live out the rest of his life in Anathema, surely. Hang around the place, get lost in the transmissions –

No.

He’d already thought this through. It had to be now. He was changing already, becoming more like the other colonists, getting caught up in the culture. If he died in ten years’ time, or twenty, or thirty, then his ‘friends’ in the Remote would remember somebody else, not him. People’s memories of him were already going to be flawed, memories of someone he didn’t quite recognise. If he died of old age, then it wouldn’t be Fitz who’d be regrown in the tanks. It’d be… who? ‘Code-boy’? If he died now, every version that came after him would still have some Fitz-ness built into it, a little nugget of his true self buried somewhere in the biodata. Simple as that.

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