"Help her, Doctor, please." Her voice was weak now, and tired, and sad.
"You're right, she is my daughter…and she's dying."
"I know. I've seen this technology before. It was crude then, underdeveloped, but now," he gestured, impressed, at Aine. "Now it's really showing some promise."
"Then why isn't it working?" Camille asked helplessly.
"I know yet, but I'm working on it, now, Aine," he moved his hands carefully to either side of her face and spoke softly.
"You know something's wrong with you,"
One
"Do you know what's happening to you then?"
A pause. Two.
"Ah," he touched his forehead to her gently. "I can help you, Aine. I can try to make you better. Will you let me try?"
Another pause, longer this time…One.
"Trust me," he said with a small smile, grasping the hand that lay over her eyes, and carefully moving it away.
Camille didn't look. She couldn't. She had done this to her own daughter. It was her fault.
Amy's hand rose to cover her mouth, and Rory just stared in disbelief. The Doctor's expression was grim as he explained.
"Nanobots. Teeny tiny microscopic little robots designed to heal and mimic the human form, and they're eating her alive."
Aine's face where her eyes should have been was nothing but a hole. It was grotesque in that her brain was quite visible, all but the parts that had been chewed away.
"Aine!" Camille cried. "Why didn't you let me know it was getting this bad!" she fell to her knees and sobbed into her hands.
"Doctor?" Amy finally found her voice. "What…what exactly is happening to her?"
"The human part of Aine has an advanced form of cancer, the incurable kind that destroys you from the inside out. But Camille is clever, and connected. Is this legal? Do they even know she's here? Nevermind. The nanobots are programmed to heal based on what they know about the human body, but this is different, these aren't healing her, they're not even keeping her human," with a quick glance at Camille, he continued, sure of the truth.
"Aine was already a cyborg when the nanobots were introduced, and knowing nothing of the human anatomy before encountering her non-biological parts, they assumed that's how humans were built. But they should have known." This time he looked pointedly at Camille, who was trying to avoid his glare.
"What did you do to them? I fixed this years ago! This was never supposed to happen again, so what did you do?" Camille's eyes finally swam with tears as the truth came out.
"I-I wiped their memories. I wanted them to know no one else but her. I wanted her to be perfect, not have her cells get accidentally mixed up with someone else's so I just…I reset them all and injected them into her blood stream."
"They're killing her—"
"Don't you think I know that!" Camille screamed. "Before she was perfect! She was happy and always smiling and running. She was real. Then when her heart went bad…"
"It was easy to upgrade to a more dependable option. The nanobots found her artificial heart and went to work, didn't they? No discrimination between living cells and circuitry, what should be real and what should be mechanic. They're rebuilding her, and when they're through, she'll be nothing but a metal statue."
A small movement made all four of them turn to look at Aine, who was holding up two trembling fingers.
