Doctor Who: The Also People (21 page)

She wasn't wearing anything, her armour was in a sandy heap in the corner of the bedroom and her blaster was in its carry case by the bathroom door. She could yell for help but she had a horrible suspicion that the sound proofing in the villa was as efficient as everything else.

'I'm going to glow a little,' said the voice.

She saw it from the corner of her eye – she dared not move her head – a soft oval of light bisected by a thick black line, a wavy pattern in thinner lines set over two dark ovals. A drone

'face'. Abstract features set in a worried frown. The glow gave a shape to the darkness in the room. Roz could see an arm flung out of the covers and across her chest. A dark-skinned human arm with the right number of fingers, joints and knuckles in all the right places. A female arm, that ran up to a shoulder taut with muscles. Roz had a good idea whose arm it was, whose cool body was pressed up against her like a child in her mama's bed.

'I'm going to extend a contour field between you and her,' said the drone. 'Once I've done that you should be able to ease yourself out.'

The contour field was imperceptible except for a slight stiffening in the covers and the feeling of separation between her skin and that of the woman. When she was certain it was in place Roz slipped out of the bed and padded over to the door.

'We can talk next door,' said the drone.

AM!xitsa watched Roz carefully as she tied the cord on the silk dressing gown. There was a singular lack of grace about her movements, an impatience that the drone found peculiarly fascinating. It was as if she treated everything as a series of irritating obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. AM!xitsa let its vision drift inside her, noting the healed breaks in her right tibia, the tell-tale discoloration of repaired subcutaneous tissue at no less than twenty-six separate sites on her body. More telling still was the slight enlargement of the medulla sections of both her adrenal glands and her elevated blood pressure, both indications of prolonged stress.

If Roz was a machine, decided aM!xitsa, she was a machine that had been running way over its design parameters for way too long.

There was a microscopic tear in the superior vena cava of her heart that might cause problems during the next ten years – aM!xitsa fixed it with an imperceptible twist of his ancillary manipulator field. The action gave the drone that little thrill of pleasure that always came from doing something benevolently unethical.

'You must be aM!xitsa,' said Roz. 'Make yourself useful and get some coffee, will you?'

AM!xitsa had a long nanosecond argument with House about protocol which resulted in a compromise where aM!xitsa provided the coffee template while House actually boiled water and ground beans. Why House felt it necessary to first synthesize whole beans and then grind them up aM!xitsa was too polite to ask. House had obviously picked up some eccentricities from associating with such extreme characters as the Doctor and his companions. Organic people rarely understood these little machine/machine compromises that were essential to the smooth running of the worldsphere. Nor did organics really appreciate just how blurred the line between sentience and non-sentience was. It was all part of their charm, aM!xitsa supposed.

'And you must be Roz,' said aM!xitsa.

AM!xitsa did another scan of the sleeping woman, noting the elevated activity in the high cognitive sub-structures. It traced the patterns in the steam that rose over the coffee pot in the house food preparation area and thought that they would make a good subject for a mathematical poem. It had a longish conversation with a friend in the Xenobiology Interest Group. Ran another scan on the sleeping woman and this time made a comparative match with Roz's physiology, surprised by the areas of commonality given that one was designed and the other wasn't. It used the scans as the basis for one of its famous unpublished theses:
Evolution vs Design in Hominid
Bipeds
. Wrote it, filed it, unfiled it and changed the title to
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
Made another, slightly shorter, call to another friend, this time in the Weird Cuisine Interest Group, and got some interesting recipes to try out on Roz. Which led to another long argument with House about whose area of responsibility cooking was in the villa. Reread the thesis, decided that most of it was rubbish and filed it in its internal datavore trap that had so far claimed 6,546 similar unpublished theses.

'That's right,' said Roz.

AM!xitsa shunted off the culinary template to House. It was curious to find out how efficient Roz's digestion was.

As far as she could understand the woman in her bed was some sort of mental patient that aM!xitsa was looking after. The drone explained that the woman had got away from it and climbed into Roz's bed while it was thinking about something else. Roz didn't believe a word of it. She had her own suspicions about who, or rather, what the woman was. The whole thing practically stank of the Doctor. No doubt he'd tell her about it in his own good time.

The coffee was rich, aromatic and very bitter, much better than the stuff House normally came up with. Roz drank most of one cup while she studied the drone.

'You're the same make as vi!Cari,' she said.

AM!xitsa's face icon simulated an amused expression. 'I'm the original,' it said. 'Vi!Cari was part of the second batch of militarized defensives.'

'But you've got the same capabilities?'

'All of us have our strengths and weaknesses,' said aM!xitsa. 'It's less a question of what you've got than of what you do with them. I'm sorry, did I say something funny?'

Roz shook her head, sipping the coffee to hide her smile.

'I'm geared more towards remote sensing and point defence,' said aM!xitsa. 'Drones like vi!Cari were produced at the start of the war, primarily to provide forward and aggressive defensive postures.'

'So you never actually attacked anyone,' said Roz. 'You just defended yourselves in an aggressive manner.'

'Towards the end of the war we did have to pre-emptively defend ourselves because our enemies got a bit wary about attacking us.'

'Could you, hypothetically speaking, have pre-emptively defended yourself against vi!Cari?'

AM!xitsa's face ikon went interestingly blank. 'That would depend. I'd have to have the element of surprise and even so the fireworks would have been pretty spectacular. The blow-back from vi!Cari's shields would have produced at least a six-gigawatt flash, even with suppressors. That sort of thing tends to attract God's attention.'

'Do drones keep their shields up all the time?' asked Roz.

'That's a very personal question,' said aM!xitsa.

'This is a murder inquiry.'

'Really,' said aM!xitsa. 'I thought you didn't consider the destruction of a machine as murder.'

'Who told you that?'

'KiKhali.'

'When?'

'One point three seconds ago.'

'Tell it to mind its own business,' said Roz. 'Have you told it?'

'KiKhali says you are the rudest person it's ever met.'

'That's a shame,' said Roz. 'I cry myself to sleep at night over my lack of manners. I'm a simple kind of woman, aM!xitsa. I play by the rules: you people say it's murder, so it's murder. What I think doesn't matter, does it?'

'But we don't have rules, or laws,' said aM!xitsa.

'You have a general consensus on morality?'

'Yes.'

'Then you have rules.'

'That's an interesting argument.'

'No, it isn't,' said Roz. 'Are there any circumstances under which vi!Cari would have had his shields down, or in standby mode?'

'Shields can interfere with certain scanning modes,' said aM!xitsa. 'If vi!Cari was looking for something it might have shut down everything except its core integrity shield. It would have to be looking for something very small, down at the submolecular level.'

'You know the Doctor's theory?'

'I do now,' said aM!xitsa. 'Yes, it would work. He's got a devious mind, that Doctor.'

'You don't know the half of it.'

'God scanned the area pretty thoroughly after the storm. There was nothing out there for vi!Cari to be looking for.'

'Unless it got washed away,' said Roz.
Washed away?
She scratched the invisible scar under her breast. Why is that important? She had a nagging sense that her unconscious was putting things together behind her back. Policeman's nose, adjudicator's hunch, the little itch in the scar that wasn't there. Perhaps vi!Cari only
thought
there was something to find, something that had been washed away? Or perhaps it had been washed out to sea?

'I've made you some breakfast,' said aM!xitsa.

A serving tray hovered by her elbow.
Damn.
Lost it. 'What's this?'

'That's grain porridge, that's fried strips of meat and boiled avian embryos,' said aM!xitsa.

'Tuck in, you need the protein.'

Roz was tempted to tell aM!xitsa that she hadn't eaten breakfast since she was a novice but then she realized how hungry she was. Ignoring the porridge she started on the bacon and eggs.

'Some bread with this would be nice.'

The bread took another minute to arrive.

'Tell me,' said Roz, ripping off a crust and dipping it into the yolk, 'why haven't you machines taken over?'

AM!xitsa sounded surprised. 'Taken over what?'

'The sphere, the galaxy, everything,' said Roz.

'What would be the point?'

Roz explained between mouthfuls about Cybermen, Daleks and Movellans. About how the first thing any computer seemed to do once it achieved self-awareness was plot to take over the world. AM!xitsa's face ikon grew more and more appalled until suddenly it flickered out completely, presumably because the drone had run out of suitable expressions: Roz was back on the coffee by the time she'd finished.

'It occurs to me,' said aM!xitsa, 'that Daleks aren't really machines, Cybermen are descended from organic humanoids and Movellans were designed by an organic race in their own image.'

'You're claiming it wasn't their fault?' asked Roz. 'They were designed to be megalomaniacs?'

'Influenced, Roz,' said aM!xitsa, 'not designed. Seeking to subjugate or destroy all other life forms is hardly a form of rational behaviour, is it? What would be the point of creating this sphere, giving it viable biosphere, if only machines were going to inhabit it? Who would I talk to, what would there be to talk about?'

'So what you're saying,' said Roz carefully, 'is that you machines wouldn't take over because without humans around there wouldn't be anything to gossip about?'

'I don't think you understand the kind of collective resource that two trillion sentient individuals represent. However fast I think and however smart I am, the probability is that someone out there has thought of it too, probably millions of people. And even if only a tiny fraction of those people actually
do
anything with that knowledge then we're still talking about thousands of people. Not to mention, and this is the kicker, because they are all individuals they're all thinking about it in a different way. Collectively, the two trillion organic individuals that live here are smarter than God.'

Roz stared at the drone.

'Oh, all right,' said aM!xitsa. 'It's because life is more fun with humans than without them.'

'So what was all that business about collective intelligence in aid of?'

'Oh, that's all true,' said aM!xitsa, 'theoretically.'

Roz heard Bernice calling. 'I can definitely smell coffee. For God's sake, somebody lead me to it.' She came down the stairs and into the living room.

'I'll get another mug,' said aM!xitsa.

Bernice flopped down next to Roz and held out a bare arm. 'Never mind a mug, just give it to me intravenously.' A mug of steaming coffee slapped into her palm. Bernice took a sip and sighed appreciatively. 'So who's Mr Efficiency?' she asked Roz.

'A friend of the Doctor's,' said Roz. 'AM!xitsa.'

'Hello, aM!xitsa,' said Bernice. 'Where's Chris?'

'Didn't come home last night.'

Bernice raised an eyebrow. 'The little devil,' she said. 'Is it my imagination or is this coffee better than the normal stuff?' She caught sight of the breakfast tray. 'Is that bacon and eggs? I didn't know they had bacon and eggs here. Pass it over . . .'

'Watch it,' said Roz. Coffee was spilling from Bernice's mug on to her leg. 'Benny, that stuff's hot.' Then she realized that Bernice wasn't listening. Instead the younger woman was staring past Roz towards the stairs. Quickly Roz lifted the cup from Bernice's hand and turned to look.

'Oh dear,' said aM!xitsa.

The woman was crouching halfway down the stairs, one hand resting lightly on the banister, her head cocked slightly to the left. She was staring back at Bernice.

'Wait,' said Bernice.

The woman vaulted over the banister, ran lightly but with astonishing speed across the living room and out onto the balcony. Bernice tumbled out of the sofa and scrambled after her.

'Kadiatu,' she cried, 'wait.'

The woman somersaulted over the balcony railing and vanished. Roz caught up with Bernice as she ran into the sunlight. AM!xitsa overtook both of them and accelerated downwards and out of sight. Bernice's hands grabbed at the railing and leaned as far as she could go, looking wildly for some sign of the woman. Roz, cursing and trying to keep the hot stain on her dressing gown away from her leg, hobbled out to join her.

Bernice was angry. Roz had never seen her that angry before and it was kind of impressive.

'You overbearing multi-lived bastard,' Bernice yelled. 'I'm going to rip out your hearts and stuff them up your nostrils.'

He waited for Bernice on the balcony, knowing that she would seek him out. He faced the sea, chin propped on the back of his hands which rested on the handle of his umbrella. The case was on the table; beside it was the black rose in a small crystal vase with a fluted neck – he had expected this confrontation and planned for it. He felt her walk on to the balcony behind him and sit down. Her calm breathing was like an accusation.

'I assume,' he said, without looking at her, 'that we're finished with the furious-hurling-of-obscenities stage and are into the eye-of-the-storm-icy-calm-demanding-answers stage.'