Doctor Who (27 page)

‘Mondy?'

‘Yeah?'

‘It is true.'

He slid down in the seat. ‘Jeez Louise.'

My phone rang again. Peri said, ‘Should we answer it?'

The Doctor shook his head. ‘Mr Mond may not have restored the phone lines to their original state yet. Better to let it ring out.'

They all jumped when my answering machine picked up. Bob grabbed for the stop button, but the Doctor caught his hand. ‘Too late,' he said.

‘Chick?' It was my editor. He named the west-coast journalist he had just been talking to. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, he says you're, uh, a woman. The guy says, he, uh, saw it with his own eyes. Look, this is nuts. Will you call me back? Bye.'

Five minutes later a boggled Mondy and I walked into my apartment. The Doctor was working at the Apple. Peri and Bob were still staring at the answering machine.

Peri and Bob looked up at me, and I knew right away what had happened. I could see their eyes adjusting like the lens of a camera as they saw me for the first time. They both opened and closed their mouths like goldfish.

‘Oh, spit it out,' I said, without taking the cigarette out of my mouth.

‘You're a transvestite!!!' said Bob.

‘Bullshit.' I could feel my hands curling into fists inside my jacket pockets. For God's sake, don't lose it. ‘I'm a man. Same as you.'

Bob said, ‘I think there's a
little
difference –' and then broke off, blushing. Peri actually laughed. The tension in the room broke a little. Mondy sat down next to the Doctor and loaded his cassette tape into the Apple's player.

I pulled my cigarettes out of my pocket. I really needed a smoke. ‘You've got some funny ideas about what makes a man, boy.' I glanced at the Doctor. He was either too embarrassed to join in the conversation, or didn't give a toss. Or maybe he was just disgusted.

Stay cool. Don't give them anything. ‘Where are we at?'

‘We're in,' announced the Doctor. ‘I'm looking at Swan's system right now.'

With relief, Bob shot over to his side. ‘Look,' he said. ‘She's uploading a TARred copy to another system. Maybe a backup? To keep it off her home machine in case the authorities take a look?'

The Doctor was shaking his head. ‘No. Remember what it tried to do to our little computer?'

‘Oh my God,' said Bob. ‘It's uploading itself.'

‘Once it copies itself to that new host, it will seize control. Send more copies of itself to more machines.' He sprang to his feet. ‘There's nothing we can do from here. Quickly! We have to get to her minicomputer and stop it.'

‘You want to break into her house again?' I said from the doorway as they ran into the hall.

Bob said, ‘We've got nothing to lose.'

‘We have the world to lose,' said the Doctor. They hurtled down the stairs.

I stood there alone for about two minutes. My hands shook a little as I lit a new smoke. It was all happening again, Sydney again, Los Angeles all over again. Every time I promised myself
I would never have to go through it again. It was like one of those bad dreams that come back just when you've forgotten the last time.

The phone rang. I snatched it up. ‘Yeah?'

‘I want you,' said Swan, ‘to tell me everything the Doctor knows.'

My voice had turned into a growl. ‘Lady, why the hell should I help you? You've already cost me my job.'

‘Because I can do worse. Your old friend in Los Angeles is still pissed off with you. He's more than happy to tell anyone, any supermarket tabloid, about his encounter with the she-male freak from Aussie.' She pronounced it ‘Awsss-ee'.

‘Jesus, Swan,' I said. ‘The Savant thing is dead. Or broken, or whatever. Its original owners have already taken it back. There's nothing left that I can give you.'

‘All I want from you is information. The Doctor knows a lot more about all this than he's deigned to tell me. I want you to tell me everything you know. Or I make you a star. Take it or leave it.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘All right. Keep your hat on, we'll talk. Where are you right now?'

‘At my house. You know where it is.'

‘Not there,' I said. I named a diner in Rockville. ‘I can be there in half an hour.'

‘All right.'

‘You can pay for the coffee,'

Swan was amused. She could afford to be. ‘My pleasure.'

I chucked the phone into the kitchen, where it knocked a bunch of dirty coffee cups off the counter. It all landed on the floor in a satisfying explosion. When I saw Swan, so help me if I wasn't ready to hit a girl.

* * *

The Doctor broke a window, opened a door and pounced on the minicomputer. ‘Where's it sending itself to?'

‘The university's machine,' said Bob.

‘It'll be all over the country in a couple of days. We'll never be able to stuff it back into the bottle.'

‘Is there still enough time?!' said Bob.

‘I think so,' said the Doctor. ‘Look. It's only uploading itself at 300 baud.'

‘My God,' said Bob sourly. ‘We have only hours.'

‘Let's not risk a nasty surprise,' said the Doctor. They bumped shoulders at the keyboard. The Doctor started hammering at the keys. ‘It's useless! The system's ignoring input.'

‘Uh, guys?' said Peri.

They both looked up at her. She was holding up the Eclipse's power cord, which she had unplugged from the wall. They both looked back down at the screen. ‘It's still going!' said Bob.

‘There must be an alternative power source,' said the Doctor.

‘She's got a UPS,' said Bob.

‘Guys?' said Peri.

They looked up again. Now she was holding the modem cord, which she had unplugged from the phone jack. They both looked back down at the screen. ‘That's done it,' said Bob.

The Doctor shuffled through the papers and wires and takeout containers on Swan's table until he found a printout of the program. ‘Bring a soft copy as well,' he told Bob.

‘Already on it,' said the hacker, brandishing a floppy disk. ‘You want me to trash Swan's hard drive? She'll have hidden copies all over.'

‘If she's hidden copies in her computer, she'll have hidden them elsewhere as well. We'll never find them all.'

‘Point,' said Bob. He stashed the floppy disk in his jacket.
‘Now we've got a copy it won't take long to work out how it ticks.'

‘The program should tell us something about the Savant as well,' said the Doctor. ‘How it thinks, what its ultimate purpose is.'

‘Isn't it obvious?' said Bob, as they took off. ‘It's the ultimate hacker.'

I was surprised to see Luis sitting next to Swan, squeezed side by side into one of the diner's red vinyl booths. He didn't look up as I slid into the opposite seat, he just went on staring at the tabletop. ‘What've you done to him?' I said.

‘The Doctor did this,' snapped Swan. ‘When he set off the device which fried the Savant's brain. It almost fried mine as well.'

I looked at Luis. His face was slack, his eyes unfocussed. To me he looked as though he ought to be slumped and drooling. But to the other folks in the diner, he just looked bored or tired.

‘No,' said Swan. ‘You can salve your conscience: the Doctor hasn't destroyed Luis's brain. Instead, he has transformed it.'

I had seen how badly screwed up Luis Perez had been by his contact with the Savant. It wasn't hard to believe he could be screwed up even worse.

A waitress ambled over. Swan put a hand on Luis's shoulder. ‘Look at her,' she murmured. Luis stared at the girl's face while Swan said, ‘We'll each have a black coffee and we'll each have a hundred dollars from the till. And I'll have a slice of Dutch apple pie. No ice cream with that.'

‘Yes ma'am,' said the waitress. She drifted away again without writing our order down.

I was about to tell Swan that not everyone shared her sense of humour when the waitress returned, carrying a pot of coffee
and a stack of small bills. She filled our cups and laid the money neatly out in front of us. ‘I'll be back in a moment with your pie, ma'am.'

My mouth was hanging open, my cigarette dangling from my bottom lip. Swan and I scraped the money off the table into our laps. She neatly tucked hers into her handbag. I didn't know what to do with it, I just wanted to get it out of sight. In the end I stuffed it into my coat pocket.

‘I can convince anyone to do anything,' Swan told me blissfully. ‘I've tested it at the supermarket, and at the gas station, and at a toll booth.'

‘It's a set-up,' I said weakly. But I had seen the people in Ritchie.

‘I could
make
you tell me everything you know. Like, where are your tits, girl? What do you do, bind them?'

If you have ever felt totally helpless in your life – maybe if you've ever been mugged – you know how I felt at that moment. It was like the seat fell out from under me and nothing was holding me up any more. I was more scared than when Swan had the shotgun on me. I would rather have holes blasted in my gizzard than have something reach inside my skull and scramble my eggs. The smell of frying food made my stomach lurch and my bladder felt like a stone.

‘Don't faint.' Swan was having way too much fun. ‘I'm going to give you a chance to tell me of your own accord.'

‘Yeah,' I mumbled.

‘Yeah what?'

The back of my neck was burning. ‘I bind them.'

Swan slapped her hand on the table. ‘Not about that. Tell me about the little yellow guy.'

I took a deep breath. ‘I'm gonna tell you what the Doctor told me. Don't blame me for it.'

‘Go on,' said Swan. Sweat trickled down the back of my collar.

‘He says the Savant, the original creature, was from outer space. I'm only telling you what they told me, I don't believe it myself. It was supposed to go to another planet, but it came here by mistake. It's part of a computer. So was the other device you found.'

Swan was nodding. ‘What do you believe, Mr Peters?'

‘There's been talk about biological computers for a long time,' I said quickly. ‘I think it was stolen from a lab. Maybe in the States, maybe somewhere else.'

‘You know what I think happened?' said Swan. ‘I think the Doctor was just too late. I think the Savant was programming Luis's mind all along. To control a human brain, you need another human brain. You need the right hardware to run your program.'

I was trying not to look at Luis. Would that make any difference? ‘What are you going to do?' I said.

Swan smiled. ‘Anything I like.'

‘Take over the Capitol?'

She looked at me blankly. ‘I'm going to get myself some supercomputers,' she said. ‘I've installed the Savant program across the network, so I'll always have access to whatever machines I choose. Access and power, that's what I'm all about.'

‘But not political power?'

‘I never read even the politics in the paper,' she said. ‘I can't remember the last time I voted. Why are you so interested in politics?'

‘I can't help it,' I said, in a voice like chalk. ‘I'm a Washington reporter.'

‘Oh . . . you mean, why don't Luis and I take over the world.'

‘Uh, I didn't mean to give you ideas.'

‘I will have to push the authorities around a little. I'm going
to need total access to the phone system, for example.' She gave a loopy grin. A smile didn't belong on that face. ‘Luis is a blue box,' she said. ‘A blue box for the human mind. All you have to do is press the buttons, and you get access to the system. Open wide. And I've got it.'

My heart had just about jumped across the diner a moment ago. But Swan really couldn't see the potential of her mind-control device. Or, more likely, she really wasn't interested in world domination. Not the real world, anyway: her megalomania was confined to the world inside the computer.

The waitress returned with Swan's apple pie. Her eyes brushed over us, but her mind was far, far away. It was the look of Ritchie.

Swan was never going to stomp the world like Godzilla. Instead, she was going to leave a slow trail of collateral damage, like a man walking around with a radioactive rod in his pocket.

‘You know,' I said, ‘I miss summer in Sydney. I miss Avoca Beach. Maybe I'll put this hundred dollars towards a ticket home.'

‘You do that,' said Swan. ‘Go on home to your family, little lady. Buy yourself some pretty dresses and go for a walk on the beach.'

‘Like you say,' I told her, standing up, waiting for her to make Luis stop me from going. But she didn't. She was enjoying the apple pie too much.

This would have been the moment to run. I had already crossed the line from observer to participant. Doing that had made me a target for the thing sitting in the diner.

I should have got on the road that instant. There was nothing left for me in Washington, not now the cat was out of the bag. There wasn't anything I could do to help the Doctor. It was time to do another of Charles Peters' vanishing acts, get on the
road, drive until I couldn't stand the flash of the highway past my eyes any more.

I walked through the parking lot, crossed the road, and went into a phone booth. The traffic would hide me, and I was pretty sure Luis couldn't somehow detect me at a distance. One last call before I left. Luckily, by then the Doctor had returned from burglarising Swan's house.

I related her theory – that the Savant had been programming Luis as some sort of hypnotist, all along. ‘No, no, no,' said the Doctor. ‘It hadn't done anything to him except to create that intense bond. OF COURSE. When the interrupt pulse hit the Savant, it reacted by making a backup of itself. Right into poor Luis's mind.' His voice sagged. ‘If he was aware of what was happening, he may even have welcomed it. The ultimate protection for the Savant – inside his own skull. It might have been better if I had simply let the Eridani kill the Savant. A sudden and painless death instead of this
infection
.'