Doctor Who (21 page)

The Doctor nodded. ‘I should have realised at once. She could have hidden it anywhere. But she's beginning to withdraw into herself, losing her trust in everyone else – not only trust that they are on her side, but trust that they can do anything as well as she can. She has become the only person she can rely on.'

‘Is that good or bad?' said Bob. ‘I mean, from our point of view. If she's paranoid, does that make her more isolated and vulnerable, or more careful and dangerous?'

‘Perhaps a little of each,' said the Doctor.

WE PULLED INTO
the parking lot behind my apartment building in Arlington at around six o'clock that night. I went up first, then flashed the lights a couple of times to let them know it was OK to come on up.

Peri looked around dubiously. My flat is a bunch of horizontal surfaces covered in stacks of books and newspapers and in-trays made out of cereal boxes. ‘You sure nobody's been searching in here?'

‘Relax. I have my own filing system. If they'd moved one piece of paper I would have spotted it right away.'

‘Where can we set up, Chick?' said Bob, who was clutching his much-travelled Apple in its protective cardboard box.

I unplugged my IBM Selectric typewriter and hauled it off my writing desk with an ‘oof'. Everything else had to come off as well, to make enough room for the computer and its peripherals: the stacks of paper, my Walkley award, the statue of a raven on a branch. I relocated it all to the kitchen counter, where Stray Cat was stealing leftovers from a dirty dish. She gave me a cynical look and one of her monotone meows.

I phoned for takeout while Peri took a shower and borrowed some of my clothes. (I had to stall her long enough to hide the porno mags in the bedroom.) She emerged from the bedroom in high boots, a cowboy shirt, and jeans that were slightly too tight. She stopped towelling her hair, and gave Bob a meaningful look.

He sniffed at his tuxedo tee. ‘God, I better change this thing,' he said. He pulled it up to reveal another T-shirt underneath that said FLEX YOUR HEAD and went back to the keyboard.

I put
Ghost in the Machine
on the turntable. It seemed appropriate.

‘Hey, Doctor,' said Bob, a few minutes later. ‘Come and have a look at this.'

The Doctor grabbed a kitchen chair and sat down next to him at my desk. He gazed over Bob's shoulder at the screen.

It was literally gibberish – a great block of random characters. I could see from the headers that the computer in Swan's kitchen had sent all this garbage to her email account at the office. Bob tapped the keys. There were more of the gibberish messages. Dozens of them.

‘They're all exactly eight K,' said Bob.

‘Maybe it's camouflage,' suggested Peri. ‘She's deliberately sending nonsense messages to confuse us.'

‘Maybe it's the aliens talking to one another,' I said. I expected a sarcastic response, but Bob and the Doctor were too intent on their new discovery to notice either of us.

‘It must be some form of encryption,' mused the Doctor.

‘Oh! Slaps forehead! I know what this is!' Bob started hammering the keys. ‘It's uuencoded binary data. No problem. Just let me uucp a copy of uudecode over to my account.'

We waited while he copied the key program that would turn the garbage back into some kind of information. The Doctor had assured me there was no way their calls could be traced to my number. Tired of running back and forth, he and Bob had come up with a way of confusing their trail through the phone system. Anyone trying to trace them would find a succession of connections between trunk lines, bouncing back and forth like reflections in a hall of mirrors.

‘I think it's some kind of graphics file,' said Bob. ‘Wait, I'll see if I can display it in Applesoft.' The Apple's screen manifested something that looked like a spray of coloured dots.

‘I know what it is,' said Peri. We all turned to look at her. ‘It's pictures from Swan's security cameras. Look, that's the edge of a table, that's the window over the sink. Move back to where I'm standing and I bet you can see it better.'

She was right. It was like looking at a newspaper photo up close, all those dots and blobs. But with a little distance, and you could make out what the picture really was.

‘Good heavens,' muttered the Doctor. ‘Swan has invented the Webcam.'

Now we all looked at him. The Doctor fluttered his hands in a ‘never mind' gesture. ‘It appears Swan has fed the output of her cameras into her personal mainframe. It then encodes the images so they're compatible with email, which can only carry text, and sends them to her work account.'

Bob was decoding one image after another and displaying them on the screen. ‘These are screen dumps from another Apple II. It handles the graphics and the mainframe does the rest.'

Peri said, ‘So she set up the cameras to send her a picture every so often, so she can keep an eye on things while she's out of the house?'

‘Looks like it,' said Bob. ‘Look at the time stamps on the messages.'

‘They don't all match, though,' said the Doctor. ‘She may be using motion sensors to trigger the emails. If someone broke into the house, she'd see a sudden rush of messages. It would act as a very simple alarm system.'

‘So if Swan isn't home, what was moving in those extra images?' said Bob. Again his fingers went chocka-chocka-chocka
and brought up one of the rough pictures. There were only six colours in them, making me think of those fluoro hippie posters.

‘Kind of looks like the bathroom,' said Peri. We all stared into the image, trying to work out what was important about it.

‘It's a still frame, of course. Wait until I bring up a couple more,' said Bob.

There was something disturbing about seeing the inside of someone's house like this. I've looked through enough windows and listened in on enough extensions that my stomach no longer tightens when I drop myself invisibly into someone else's private life. What was creepy was the idea of pointing cameras at your own house. At the front yard, sure. But the kitchen? The bathroom, for God's sake? Swan had become her own Big Brother.

‘She could watch herself walking around in there,' I muttered. ‘See what she did the day before. You know, where did I put my keys? Just rewind the tape and see.'

‘There,' said Peri. ‘There's something in the tub.' She used the same tone of voice you might use to say
There's something in my sock and it's moving
.

A quick succession of possibilities – a corpse – but it's moving – flies? – a visitor?

‘Look at the timestamps,' said Bob. ‘Whoever's sitting in the bathtub, they've been there all day. I think the curtain is drawn, over to about here. We get a snapshot whenever they move back far enough that the curtain isn't in the way and the camera sees them move.'

He tapped a key, and the bathroom images cycled. There was something wrong about the shape in the tub. Peri had seen it at once, but I was having trouble making it out.

‘It looks like a crippled kid,' I said. ‘Maybe an injured dog. No arms. Or no legs, maybe. It's probably trying to get out of the tub.'

‘It's what Swan took from Luis, isn't it?' said Peri.

‘Take another look at the times,' said Bob. ‘A group of images every fifteen minutes. Then, for about the last four hours, nothing.'

The Doctor sat back, steepling his fingers. Sometimes his face would go blank for a few long moments, as though his eyes were seeing some internal chalkboard where he was mentally writing out equations, trying to solve some problem. Peri had obviously learned to wait for him to snap out of it. Bob and I exchanged annoyed glances.

‘Bob,' said the Doctor abruptly, ‘see if you can hack into Swan's account. Check if she's removed our email forwarding program.'

‘Right. What are you going to do?'

‘I'm going to give the Eridani a call,' he said.

The Eridani, apparently, had retired to their space craft, which was lurking in one of the Earth's LaGrange points.
¹
They were able to transmit and receive by hijacking communications satellites, hiding their own messages amidst the flood of traffic passing through. Supposedly, then, the Doctor's conversation with his alien pals was travelling along a channel that started with a satellite at one end, meandered through the international phone system like breath through a tuba, and emerged from a speakerphone on my desk. Not exactly a Close Encounter.

The Doctor seemed to have a lot of trouble getting the connection to work. There was that annoying delay you always get with satellite phone calls (supposedly made a lot worse by the Eridani being around five light seconds away) but there were also a bunch of whooping and shrieking noises. The
Doctor listened patiently to these, like a blind phreak listening to the phone system's language of clicks and clunks.

Finally the conversation got going. The Doctor brought the Eridani up to date. They seemed relieved that we knew where the missing component was, even if it was in Swan's hands. And they confirmed what we thought we'd seen in Swan's crude camera pictures: it was alive. The ideal way for their colony to make more of the machines, they said, was for at least part of it to be able to reproduce itself.

‘The component forms a close bond with its user,' said Ghirlain's voice through a background hiss of space static. ‘Swan won't harm it. She will have an instinctive sense of how best to take care of it.'

The Doctor was scribbling comments on a bit of paper for our benefit. ‘INSTINCTIVE?' he wrote, and underlined it a couple of times. He was impatiently doodling up and down the margin of the sheet while Stray Cat lolled in his lap like the slut she was. ‘Can I assume you will collect your property at the first available opportunity?' he asked.

A few moments of static. Then: ‘Breaking the bond may damage both the component and the organism to which it has bonded. It would be safer to wait for the component to mature.'

The Doctor sat forward. ‘And precisely what happens when it reaches maturity? Do we have any alarming physical transformations to look forward to?'

Ghislain seemed to be groping for the right terms. ‘It is a nymph, not a larva. There is no metamorphosis. Only, the development of its nervous system will be complete. It will be ready to interface with the other components of the system.'

Bob cut in. ‘Will it be sentient? Come to think of it, is it sentient now?'

Crackle. Hiss. ‘Not in the sense that you understand the word.'

The Doctor pounced. ‘And just what do you mean by that?'

‘Its nervous system is extremely specialised,' said the Eridani. ‘It is expert in certain tasks, but incapable of others.'

‘If we're going to contain this situation until it's safe to wean the creature away from its foster “mother”, I need to know precisely what it's capable of,' said the Doctor.

‘Without the other components, its abilities are limited,' said Ghislain. ‘Its task is to analyse systems and adapt itself to them, or them to itself.'

The Doctor didn't like the sound of that at all. ‘What do –'

The voice cut him off. ‘There is a further cause for concern. The component will have initiated its own gestatory process while still
in ovo
.'

‘It's parthenogenetic?' said the Doctor.

‘As will be its offspring.'

Peri saw me looking lost. ‘It's born pregnant. And its kids will be born pregnant. I guess they wanted to get their factory conveyor belt rolling,' she added bitterly.

The Doctor was saying, ‘Not only have you unleashed a mind-altering living computer on this bumbling little planet, but you've placed a miniature horde of them into the hands of a sociopath!' He stabbed at finger at the speakerphone. ‘You said the creature can adapt systems to itself. There's more to this than a clutch of baby components running about. That “specialised” creature can modify machines. Computers. Heaven only knows what Swan might be able to do with it.'

Bob said, ‘What does that mean, it can modify computers?'

‘Think of it as the ultimate programmer. It can acquire computer languages the way an infant acquires a human language. A native speaker of hexadecimal. Hacking a system – in either sense – would be as natural to it as playing with blocks. As natural to it as giving birth.'

Bob slowly said, ‘Do you mean it could make a copy of itself into a computer? A machine language version of itself?'

‘That's precisely what I mean.'

‘It is true,' admitted the Eridani's crackling voice.

‘The human race is just entering a phase of its history in which it relies heavily on computers,' the Doctor told the speakerphone. ‘And you have introduced this spanner into those delicate works.'

‘The device will not operate without commands.'

‘Swan is right there to give it those commands. Intuitively, remember? Your ham-fisted contraption –'

‘All right, CUT IT OUT!'

The Doctor swung around. Stray Cat leapt out of his lap and ran for the safety of the kitchen. Peri was standing with her fists planted firmly on her hips. ‘I can't believe I'm hearing this!' she said. ‘You're both as bad as each other.'

‘Peri, I'm in the middle of a very delicate negotiation,' said the Doctor.

She emitted an exasperated hiss. ‘Listen to you, talking about that poor little thing in the tub as though it was a machine.'

‘It is a machine,' said the Doctor. ‘Of sorts.'

‘You wouldn't talk about some poor kid like that. You know, one of those autistic kids who's a mathematical genius. Whatever that little alien guy can do, it's still a living, breathing creature. It's got rights. I mean, for heaven's sake, it's just a baby.' The Doctor's shoulders were progressively slumping in the blast. ‘It's not a stolen computer, it's a kidnapped kid. And you and those other guys have to get it back before it gets hurt or sick or Swan makes it do something awful. And that goes for its babies, too.'