Part 20 (1/2)

'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 s.p.a.ce craft, which was lurking in one of the Earth's LaGrange points6. They were able to transmit and receive by hijacking communications satellites, hiding their own messages amidst the flood of traffic pa.s.sing 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 6 A stable orbit point between the Earth and the sun, ideal for placing satellites.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.l.u.t she was. 'Can I a.s.sume 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 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 b.u.mbling 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.'