Prologue: The Message

One evening, a Dalek found a message written on a wall.

I suppose, really, that this story should have started with how the Daleks came to be, and all the hundreds of thousands of millions of lives they destroyed, and how they spread across the universe like a disease, until, one day, they vanished in a storm of flames. But, then again, that story has been told too many times before.

It might even be helpful, to explain what a Dalek was, for the charmed generations who did not know. For now, I shall let a single adjective suffice: "evil".

I suppose to be more specific I should have begun with the day that this particular Dalek, made a foolish mistake, which led his followers to doubt him and spelled certain death to our kind. It was a story that my kind did not know, and would have preferred to forget. I knew the story all too well, and frankly, I found the details rather embarrassing. It was an untidy incident, where few of the individuals involved came out unscathed, or unchanged in some way. It would have been a wonderful way to start a story. It answered a lot of questions, and raised several more, to which I and I alone happened to have all the answers. But no.

I start this story, with the day that one of the only surviving Daleks found a message written on the wall of an abandoned subway tunnel under New York City. It took me a long time to reach him, because I wasn't looking for a Dalek. I was searching for a Dalek hybrid. And of course, something that is only half Dalek is barely Dalek at all, according to their creed forged from hundreds of years of manic xenophobia.

I should not have been surprised. To an extent, I already knew what had happened to him. When I had last saw him, he had been a monstrosity, and if anything to see his true body once more confined within the prison of his black casing was of a great comfort to me.

Oh, how I had hated him.

But, when I found him that evening, all I could do was laugh.

So, on with the story. One evening, a sort-of-Dalek found a message written on a wall. It was written in scrawled white letters in a slightly Grecian script by an unsteady hand, and it said, quite simply:

CAN YOU HEAR THEM WAITING?

I imagine that this Dalek was rather vexed in finding these letters. He had taught me how to imagine. He would have been so proud. He was vexed not least because it meant that a human, creatures that are abundant in New York City, had been present, but for petty matters. This tunnel was a rare example of preserved beauty. The chipped porcelain tiles and the stained glass station sign dated from the Art Nouveau period. The meaning of the message was vague and pretentious. The style was crude, but most of all, he felt as though his territory had been invaded. It was he who journeyed down to the forgotten roots of the city night after night. It was his underground kingdom. For almost thirty years, it was he who had charted the secret rivers and artificial caves that lay empty in the dark. He felt, somehow, that he possessed something of importance, and the under city was his secret land. Although he knew, more than anything, that this was only a fantasy. New York practically bled humans. They had built it after all, and wherever you went you were bound to find them. The humans who did not have houses were the ones he had seen most in the tunnels. Sometimes, he saw the kind that wore head torches.

He looked at the message for a whole minute. Then, he drifted onwards, becoming another part of the darkness.

The very next day, he found the same message a second time. Strangely, he was the only person to notice it. This was surprising, as it was written in a far more prominent place.

It was scrawled, thirty metres in length, across the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the pink morning light, as the sun crept through the haze, the Dalek hovered under the bridge, as the traffic rumbled continuously above him, reading the message over and over again.

CAN YOU HEAR THEM WAITING?

The same white letters, stretched impossibly over the browning girders of the belly of the bridge. Such was the position, that it could only be read when the reader was exactly thirty metres above the water below. No human could have written it. It was too large. No assembly of cables or climbing equipment could have allowed a person to write the message. Its appearance was a mystery. And the Dalek, abnormally intelligent though he was (far too intelligent for his own good) could not fathom how they had come to be there.

The Dalek then, rather disappointingly, did not destroy the bridge. The iconic monument did not then combust and collapse into the Hudson. As I said, he was not an ordinary Dalek.

Instead, he simply glided onwards, out from under the darkness of the bridge and up, up, over the hazy skyline of Manhattan. And as I watched, he rose higher and higher into the air, a tiny black speck against the pink of the rising sun. He pirouetted, and began at once a tiny, private air display. He plunged, like a tremendous weight, towards the gleaming river, only to swoop into ascension at the very last second, as if he weighed little more than paper carried on a thermal. He revolved slowly as he rose once more, round and round, and the motion was at once clunky and strangely graceful. He then flew in a pattern, rinsing and dropping at random intervals, carving untraceable shapes into the air. The acrobatics were too early in the morning, to discreet, to have been for the humans on the bridge, in the skyscrapers, or on the shore. The flight had no purpose but for the pure enjoyment of the performer. In a world full of grounded beings, he could fly, and break free from planet to which he had been bound. In the past, such frivolities would have disgusted me.

But now, all I could do was laugh.

I had known him well, once. He had been the deep sort, and often quiet. Far more quiet or deep than was average for our race. Now, years later, he was still deep and all the more silent. But humanity had shaped him. He had dwelt among it too long. It had clung to him, like a bad scent. And time too, had twisted his body and made him impossible. As I watched him fly, I thought of how careless it seemed, how illogical, how unlike the individual I had known so long ago.

But I had changed too. If the Supreme One knew what I had become, of the things that I had seen, how I had grown in mind, would he have risen, like a feather in an updraft, into the sky?

Would he have forgotten those pretentious words written under the bridge?

Because still, they waited. And in a paradox, by waiting, they came closer and closer, like a beating heart becoming faster and faster when engorged with fear.

And still, when I looked into the swaying veil of the future, I saw Manhattan burning.