"You can see James ..." said the PA, clickety-clacking on a keyboard as she spoke. "... a week today. Four 'o' clock." The hail of clicks and clacks stopped, and she smiled at him politely – as politely as her robotic skin would allow, anyway. To the casual observer, she would look as human as the next ... well, human ... but once you got closer and saw how she moved and the way her rubber skin was so perfectly smooth and painted, you knew she was a robot. It unnerved Jack.

"Are you sure I can't see him today?" he asked. He couldn't use his normal charms on the emotionally dead hunk of metal in front of him to get what he wanted, and he was fairly certain bribery wouldn't be accepted either. The robot would be perfect at keeping everything organised, no surprises. No last minute visitors, no unauthorised guests. No unwanted Captains blagging their way in. James had an ounce of cleverness at least. A robot PA instead of human. Jack had heard he liked his efficiency, and what was more efficient than a program?

The droid had started clicking her keyboard again. "Sorry, sir." she said. "A week today. Five 'o' clock."

Jack growled his annoyance, but the robot just smiled politely and waited for his response. "You said four 'o' clock before." he pointed out.

"James is the head of the Torchwood Institute as well as New Torchwood Three. While you were waiting, someone else was booked in to that slot. Would you like me to reserve this slot, or would you like me to search again?"

"I'll have that slot." said Jack.

"My apologies, sir. That just went. Would tomorrow at three be okay?"

"YES!" he nearly shouted.

She clicked and clacked, and a printer whirred behind her. Out of it popped a little card, with the date and time of his appointment neatly printed beside the Torchwood logo. The robot handed it to him.

"Lucky we had the cancellation, sir." she said, smiling her fake smile.

"Very." grumbled Jack, pocketing the card.

He moved away from the droid, searching for Diana with his eyes. "Got an appointment." he mouthed to her across the room. She gave him the thumbs up, disentangled herself from the conversation she was having and made her way over.

"When for?"

"Tomorrow. Three."

"What!!!" she stared at him. "How did you get an appointment so early? He's booked up at least two weeks in advance, usually!"

Jack shrugged. "Droid said a cancellation."

Diana grinned, then faltered. "Hang on ... that gives us just over 27 hours to get a pitch together!" she touched her ear. "Lennie? Yeah ... I'm gonna have to come down. Drop whatever you're doing. I'll bring the Captain. We have an appointment for the pitch ... tomorrow, three 'o' clock ... I know! ... Cancellation, apparently. Haha I doubt James would change his schedule for ... haha 'personal reasons' – that's one way of saying it. ... No. Well ... yeah ... you know what he's like. I bet he even has sex to a schedule!" she sniggered, then remembered Jack. "Anyway ... gossip later. I'm coming down. Did you manage anything with that photo? You did! – great! Yeah ... okay."

"Well?" asked Jack, as he was jostled by a team of Operatives in jumpsuits charging past him. Was there really a need for so many people in Torchwood Three?

"She says she's managed to salvage part of your photo." said Diana, giving an encouraging smile. "Hopefully she'll be able to piece together some of the rest. Now, you'll have to come this way ..."

She led him through corridors Jack assumed must have been built quite recently, as he had no memory of them. They led past rooms filled with computers, desks and chairs. Conference rooms, projection rooms – even something that looked like a massive underground barracks. Diana stopped them outside a medium sized office/tech lab. It was, in Jack's opinion, the most 'Hub' like room he'd seen so far. The walls were hidden behind monitors and cabling, sparks were flying from overheating computer towers and bits and pieces of all kinds of technology were piled around the floor. In the centre of the room was a beige hunk of metal that Jack assumed was a thrown-together robot. The parts were from all kinds of different makes and models, patched together then sprayed the same colour. Currently welding on a new side panel was a short, plump brown-haired girl, squinting in concentration through her goggles.

She looked up when she'd finished, putting the goggles on her head and smiling brightly. "Hello. You must be Captain Harkness." she said.

"Yep. And you must be ... Lennie? The Tech Wizard-ette?"

Smiling sheepishly, she shook the hand he offered. She turned to Diana and jerked her head in the direction of the haphazard robot. "Archiver's down again. Bastard thing won't stay together."

Diana frowned at it, and Jack saw its head move. He hadn't noticed before. It had a Cyberman's head. The metal arches that extended from the ears and across the top had been hacked away and the rest had been sprayed beige, but it was definitely a Cyberman head. Jack shuddered at the hollow eyes that met his, and was thankful it turned away.

"There isn't a ... human brain in it, is there?" he asked, unable to look away as the mish-mashed robot heaved itself off the supports that held it during maintenance.

Lennie gave him a shocked look. "Hell no!" she said. "How ... why would ... that's ... what the hell?" she babbled, at a loss.

"That head was from a race of robots that extracted human brains and encased them in metal, creating more of them. Cybermen. Robots programmed with human brains."

"I. Am. Artificial."

The robot had a Cyberman voice box, too.

"Why would anyone make ... that ..." asked Diana.

"Some psychopath who wanted to live forever. We destroyed them all, though. I'm guessing Torchwood scavenged the parts and just stuck them on that."

"I. Have. Feelings." said the robot, and Jack's blood ran a little cold. "I. Am. Artificial. Intelligence."

"Sorry. But ... hang on ... you have a sentient robot – with feelings – and you don't even bother to give it matching parts? I mean ... you could have stretched to legs that were the same length, at least ..." Jack scolded, noticing the way the Archive droid loped and lunged on its mismatched legs as it heaved itself away. It was an unnerving sight.

"James wants rid of it." said Lennie, setting down her blowtorch. "But because it has AI, it also has a concept of death. We can't turn it off unless it says we can, or it's murder. So James makes it hard – budget cuts, scavenged parts, old wire, primitive circuitry – hoping that eventually it'll ask to be switched off. When I first came here last year, it was top-of-the-range, like James' personal droids. Now it's a hunk of beige metal. And if you ask me, it's depressed."

Diana sighed dramatically. "James doesn't like the idea of the droid pottering about in 'his' Archives. Says it's a job for us humans, and that we should take pride in all that ancient junk. Keep it organised, find what we need by ourselves, keep it tidy. He says that if humans managed it before, we'll manage it now. We just have to wait for the Archiver to give in."

"Is it me, or do you hang on James' every word?" smirked Lennie.

"I'd hang on to him any day." replied Diana.

"It's those eyes, isn't it?" smiled Lennie, drifting off into the middle-distance.

"Yeahhh." sighed Diana, joining her.

"Anyway ... photograph!" said Lennie, clapping her hands as the two women came back to earth. "Here's what I've got. There's you, Captain." She pointed at the wall and a large HoloScreen appeared, a fragmented and broken image peppered over it. Jack could make himself out, dominating the right side of the image. Next to him was a small, caramel-skinned woman. "Face recognition tells me that's Toshiko Sato." continued Lennie.

She stopped there, wondering how to go on. "The thing is ... the other half of the image. I'm guessing that's where who we're looking for was standing, right?" Jack nodded. "Yeah ... I won't be able to process that I'm afraid. It's too ... well, he's gone. I'm running through a couple of other signature tracers, but I don't know if I can restore that part of the image. It eroded ... differently from the rest." she averted her eyes. It hadn't taken her long to realise that it was the gentle touch of tear and saliva-covered lips to glossy paper that had rubbed him away. She decided not to mention it either.

"Not even a bit of him?" whispered Jack.

"I'm sorry. Like I said, there's still a smidge of hope left in my other signature tracers ... but ... I don't know. Here ... look." Jack moved to see, and on the little screen she was pointing at, a collection of status bars were running towards their 100% mark. Just as he was about to ask something, an alarm started blaring.

Diana sprang to action. "Jack, stay here. Don't touch anything. Lennie, get your field pack." she touched her ear and started blaring orders at other Operatives.

Lennie paused on her way out. "If any of those work," she indicated the signature tracers' status bars. "A dialogue box should open with what it can dredge out of the picture. Right click and convert it to binary. Then copy and paste that into the other programme I have open and that will break it down and translate it to the Binary codings we need. Then ... then just don't. Touch. Anything. Okay?"

Jack nodded, and pulled up a stool to watch the status bars. There were four of them in total, organised in the order they would complete. The first one was at 98% ... 99% ... Jack held his breath ... 100% ... FAILED.

He cursed. He moved his eyes to the next status bar. 88%. 89%. 90%. Failed.

Glowering at the next bar as if daring it to fail, every muscle in Jack's body tensed. It was now reaching 97%. 'Come on, come on. I've got a good feeling about you.' Jack thought. He nearly jumped out of his skin when the screen changed and a perfect copy of his photograph – the photograph he hadn't seen for far too long – covered the screen. He pinched the corners of the HoloScreen, making it bigger so that he could drink in the left hand side of the picture.

The He was. Maroon shirt – he really did look good in red based colours – waistcoat, jacket, pinstripes ... coffee cup in his hand. His blue eyes smiled out of the picture, His lips as perfect as Jack had convinced himself they would be.

Jack did as Lennie had told him to, watching as the programmes broke the image down to a series of symbols and numbers that made up Modern Binary. He transferred that into the other program that Lennie had indicated, and watched as it was eventually broken down to the "01" format of the Binary period they would be searching through.

The Captain hit the print button, and the perfect, restored image rolled out of the machine. It was sharper and more perfect that before. Bigger, too. Automatically, he lowered his lips and kissed the ink that made up His face. Folding it up, making sure none of the creases lined His perfect features, he pocketed the picture. No need to tell the girls he'd printed it off. He had, after all, been told to touch nothing else.

Jack twiddled his thumbs, bored. Luckily, before long, Lennie returned. Diana was still busy, she said. Placating James. Jack smirked.

"What is it with everyone and James?"

"Oh ... I've only met him once. Just before he became Director of Operations and Head of the Institute and all that Jazz. I only really saw his eyes, though. We were wearing balaclavas. On a team building skiing thing. He wasn't in my group." she added, disappointed. "He has the most wonderful blue eyes though. And broad shoulders and ... you just knew he was so ... masculine? You know?"

Jack rolled his eyes a little. "One of the filters worked. I've stuck it through the binary doo-dah thing."

Lennie moved to the computer and smiled. "Almost done."

Diana stormed into the room. "Honestly, people just don't respect him!" she spat.

"What happened?" asked Jack.

"Oh ... James has been in a flying rage. I mean ... real rage ... I was a bit scared. He has ... a dark side. I wouldn't like to be on it. Anyway ... some little brat we took on last week just had his brains fried because he didn't listen to him. Said he didn't have to because 'James only got where he is today 'cuz he's the eye-candy', and that was a CCTV quote. So James left the kid to it and he got zapped."

"Eye-Candy ..." muttered Jack. He grinned at the girls. "Y'know ... Ianto Jones used to hate being called Eye-Candy. I doubt he'd approved of a robot in his Archives either. And yeah ... he'd definitely've made everyone wear suits if he was in charge!" laughed Jack. The stored memories of Him were coming back now that he'd had his visual trigger. It was soothing to Jack. "He had the most beautiful blue eyes too." he said, subconsciously patting the pocket where the photo was hidden.

Diana's earphone buzzed again. "Yeah ... right ... I'm coming. Gotta go." she said shortly, turning on her heel.

Lennie bent over the computer that was still churning out zeros and ones. It beeped as the translation completed, and she typed several commands into the prompt as she told the computer to trawl the internet looking for similar coding to that found in the specified part of the image – Ianto Jones' face.

She moved the mouse, and beckoned Jack to come over. He looked down over her shoulder as the status bar inched itself to 0.000000015%. "Looks like it may take a couple of days." she said. "Luckily there's a loophole that says we only need permission for this if we're searching for information. We're looking for an image, so hopefully that will stand before James. Oo! I'll start getting our pitch sorted for tomorrow, too – oh!"

Lennie had flicked back on to the window with the image in. It covered the entire screen, and as she drank in the figure on the left, she frowned. "My ... he does have beautiful eyes, doesn't he?" she breathed.

"Hands off!" joked Jack.

"Hmmm ..." she said, squinting a little at the digital image before her. "Y'know ... he does actually look ... I dunno ...

"Tall?" offered Jack.

"Dark?

Handsome?

Quiet and Brooding?"

"No ..." breathed Lennie. ".... familiar ..."