Torchwood Three's black box had been stored away safely in The Black Archive for quite some time now. So it wasn't exactly a black box – but I'll get to that. It was dug up the in the Cardiff bay explosion of July '09 and since then it had been in several hands; first the British government, then a collector in Salt Lake City before being 'confiscated' by UNIT, living the last few years under lock and key in a vault far beneath The Tower Of London.
You see – everyone knew about what was really going on in Cardiff Bay. There were the Pizza Deliveries and figures seen stood on top of buildings, not to mention a highly suspicious black windowed SUV constantly tearing around the city. When the explosion went off, it was deemed a gas leak or something; there were some old railway structures down there – or that's what the news said – but for the people of Cardiff city, there was only one word on everybody's lips: Torchwood. And sure thing…The pizza's stopped. The sightings stopped. The SUV was not seen – for a while anyway.
Torchwood One was massive. Huge. It was based on the top seven floors of Canary Wharf for fucks sake. There was a London wide battle for control of the human race between two genetically deficient, armoured, super mutants 100 foot above their main base of operations and what was the excuse? Mass hallucinations. Christ. But that's the English I s'pose, we didn't get away with it in Cardiff.
So back to this black box. It wasn't a black box. That's just what people thought. Van Statten bought it for sake of it – he did have too much money – but it was Torchwood's; therefore it was surely alien, therefore he wanted it. Kate Stewart wanted it as she had picked up fragments of intel from what had been worked on, which she suspected was highly dangerous. They were both right of course.
Think way back to the naughties again, now deceased Torchwood technician Toshiko Sato worked on a variety of projects – the more I learn about this woman the more I like her – anyway one of those was some form of temporal technology. It was dubbed a 'Time Lock' but the effects are closer to what we have on record as a 'Temporal Displacement'. Still it was mad powerful and came in useful on more than one occasion. But the thing was not even Toshiko knew the extent of what she made; she had just spliced together what fell through The Rift.
UNIT worked it out first. Within a week it was in The Black Archive. And for those of you who don't know, it is legitimately the most difficult room to get into in the western world. Now when Torchwood finally twigged – which I will admit was embarrassingly slow – talks were set up to amicably retrieve the device. Those plans went to shit when Kate wiped our minds while we were there, and again, embarrassingly it took us a few go's before we noticed. They thought they could dick us around just because they are an international organisation and we have four A-levels and a degree between us, but HA! They were wrong.
We are getting to where this extremely informal mission de-brief is going. Okay picture the scene: I rock up to The Tower Of London with an ear piece in and sunglasses on, looking the part - but my ears are a weird shape so I cant use an ear piece and to be honest it was overcast so I wasn't wearing shades – so there I am by The Tower Of London pretending to be the next dumb member of Torchwood out for our 'Black Box'… but this time I have a temporary cyber implant that reboots my short term memory every couple of minutes. You should have seen my acting, it was class. I managed to pass of the reboot off as a nervous twitch – I should have got an Oscar. So anyway I point a gun at Kate and then walk out with our 'Black Box' among other things *ahem* CLASSIFIED And I know this is where I am suppose to retell events to the letter but if anyone ever reads this it will be a great mystery and I'll sound really cool.
So I leg it back to Cardiff with our box and everyone's suspicions are completely correct. It is indeed what created the old hub's time shifting among other things and this is the really cool part. The temporal displacement doesn't just 'move' reality, it overwrites it. To us mere mortals the actual difference is superficial, but in theory that means there is a base copy. No pun intended.
Anyway that's the debrief up to speed somewhat and I have an idea.
Trys-out.
