Part Four

Amy ignored the tug of my hand. "What's gotten into you," she snapped. "And where's the Doctor."

"I'm right here, just told you so," the man or thing before us offered cheerily.

"Not you!" Amy and I both barked simultaneously.

"I meant the Doctor," Amy continued. "He's a friend of ours." She peered at me then and I could tell she wanted answers about everything. From the look in her eyes, at that moment, she trusted the newcomer more than me.

Maybe she was right.

I gulped. There was no time for explanations, no time for theories. "I think he's the Aurix," I tried to whisper, hoping I wasn't heard. "He's not part of the test, so he should be dead, like everyone else."

"Everyone else is dead?" Julian, as I couldn't help but call him in my mind's eye, had apparently heard. "Don't be ridiculous, they can't be! They were building the Flavius Four here not three weeks ago when I came for my interview!"

He seemed genuine. I'll give him that.

"Something happened." Amy responded carefully, weighing him up. "How did you get in here?"

"The automated shuttle brought me in, like I told you. There was supposed to be some sort of meet and greet, but I've been sitting here awhile…"

Could he be telling the truth? Were my perceptions so skewed by the Aurix's manipulations that I was about to condemn an innocent?

Or maybe it was playing with me yet again?

And then it hit me.

If it wasn't the Aurix tormenting Amy and me one last time, the man before us might be the Doctor's saviour. The doors behind me hadn't timer locked yet – we could go back…

"Where did you say you'd come from?" I tried to be coy, but the question just sounded pathetic in the cold hard lights of the bay.

He didn't seem to notice. "Oh, I've been around a fair bit. Did some basic surgical training on Alfava Metraxis, a bit of research on extinct species on Planet One – just the place for dodos that is….and then I spent a bit of time at Demon's Run. Not much I could do for that lot – they tend to lop off one another's heads!"

Still he hadn't answered my question. In fact, he'd totally blathered his way out of it.

Almost.

But then there was something he'd said that had tickled a few of my grey cells. And let's face it, there aren't too many of those left after travelling with the Doctor.

"Extinct species?" I closed my eyes, praying my hunch would pan out. "Did you do any work on Gallifreyan physiology?" I held my breath. Only the next few seconds or minutes would determine our fate.

"Of course!" He smiled breezily as if it was the most natural subject in the world to study. "Resilient lot, the old Time Lords. Hard to get rid of, but they do have their Achille's heel or I should say, did have."

I shot forwards and grabbed the newcomer's hand, yanking him to the still open bay doors. "Great!" I shouted at the top of my lungs. "Because we're going back to save a friend of mine!"

I heard the stranger's voice change slightly, not just his timbre, but his accent. "Ah, I was rather hoping you'd say that."

And then every single light in the shuttle bay went out.

I blinked, but in the total darkness it made no difference if my eyes were open or closed. I realized there was something missing, and then grasped that the clutter and whir of the robots around us had vanished.

Total silence.

"Rory?" I could hear not fear, but total confusion in Amy's voice.

I let go of the stranger's hand I was clutching and reached out instinctively for my wife. "Amy!"

Before I could fumble around hopelessly trying to find her, the lights came back – different lights.

In front of us was a massive screen, lots of computers and a desk. And at that desk, stooped over a monitor, right where he'd been hours earlier, was the Doctor.

He grinned, his boyish looks and fop of dangling hair making him look all of fifteen rather than his nine-hundred or so years. "I was hoping one of you would understand."

Amy was clearly shaken. She had not, for once, figured out what was going on quicker than I had. Then again, she hadn't been privy to the fake Doctor in the tunnel routine.

The Doctor – the real Doctor, sat on the edge of his desk and rubbed his hands together. "You two have been part of a very nasty experiment."

"Yeah," Amy drawled. "I think we figured that one out on our own. But you were there too."

"Ah no," the Doctor shook his head. "I was never with you. The Aurix can't use a Time Lord in any of its little games."

"Then who..?"

"I'm afraid your companion was a trick of the mind the Aurix uses a lot. It likes to fool its test subjects by giving them an impossible task to get out of." He looked at me then. "It let you think I was there and then put you in a situation were you had to leave me behind or risk losing Amy."

"If I'd left Amy, I'd be a bad husband and a coward, if I'd left you, I'd be a bad friend and a coward. Catch 22, end of test, Aurix wins." I agreed.

The Doctor nodded. "Luckily after a couple of hours tinkering I was able to get inside the Aurix's control matrix just enough to project an image of my own and give you a few hints in the right direction."

I couldn't resist a smile. "A Doctor with no name, British accent, looks impossibly like a character off the telly and just happens to know Gallifreyan physiology right when I need an expert. Even I could spot something was off." I folded my arms smugly. "Besides, half the places and planets he mentioned where places we've visited with you. And well, to be honest, something had felt wrong about the whole situation for awhile."

Amy punched me, tossing her fiery hair in annoyance. "Oy, will you two just start at the beginning and explain all this?"

"I'll explain," the Doctor offered, "but can I suggest we do it on the move. We may have beat the Aurix in one little showdown, but we've far from defeated it." He swirled his sonic, pointed it at the door and jumped lithely off into a jog.

"Sounds good." I agreed. "As long as someone can remember the way back to the TARDIS."

As we swiftly moved back towards the Doctor's police box I found it hard to even keep my breath, let alone talk, but our favourite Time Lord was hardly giving us chance for too many questions anyway.

He began at the beginning, which is always a good place to start, let's face it. But what he had to tell us pained him dearly, I could see that much.

His normally playful eyes grew dull with remorse and what appeared to be an all-consuming guilt as if every disaster in the great cosmos was burdened on his shoulders alone.

"The Aurix hasn't always been a weapon," he explained, hopping over a cover plate on the floor as if it contained explosives – but then maybe it did. "A very, very long time ago, the Aurix was a simple survey machine, sent out across the universe to analyze different cultures. It was meant to watch, to record, but never to harm."

"So it malfunctioned?" Amy queried.

His eyes grew even sadder, which I hadn't thought possible. "Actually no, it didn't go wrong, it was reprogrammed – a thing of innocence turned into a killing machine by a planet gone mad." He paused and tutted as the exit to the building refused to open then began working on it with his sonic.

"If they made it, then maybe they can tell us how to stop it?" I knew it was a long shot – if they were a bunch of madmen, it wasn't likely they'd be giving out blueprints of their favourite weapon, but hey, I was trying to be an optimist.

The Doctor sighed then rubbed his temple. "Even if they wanted to, they can't. The Aurix was a Time Lord weapon, invented out of desperation during the last days of the great time war. I had thought every copy of the Aurix had died with them, but obviously, I was wrong."

Amy was gobsmacked, and I was pretty surprised myself. "I thought…I thought your people were a peaceful lot."

He went into what looked like a semi-trance. His eyes remained focused, but his mind was far, far away on a world long gone. "Once," he eventually agreed. "But the Daleks changed all that. In the end, most of the Time Lords would have done anything to defeat them and this is the result. Ever wonder about the Marie Celeste, Roanoke or exactly where the Aztecs went?"

My throat was dry. It was inconceivable and yet I knew it was true. "Why?" Was all I could ask.

The Doctor was now fiddling with a bunch of sparking wires in the door panel, but he carried on with his narrative as if he could multi-task a thousand different jobs at once.

"The Aurix was a Time Lord weapon to grade the species of the Universe. That's why it couldn't take me as part of the experiment. Creators exempt, or something like that. Anyway, after the Daleks attacked, certain members of the Time Council wanted to test every other life form they could for possible warlike or immoral tendencies – any that failed the test were eradicated by a "time virus" that effectively removes a species from existence. Any buildings and structures left behind, like here, are merely after images that will eventually fade from reality. Some take years, other just hours, but they all vanish in the end along with any records of them. Take that pamphlet you had, Pond. It will just cease to exist once Digamma degenerates."

"My God." Amy didn't seem to be able to take in that her imaginary friend's race could do such a thing. "It's genocide!"

The Doctor hung his head in shame, even though he'd played no part in inventing the weapon. "I know," he offered sadly. "And that's why we have to stop it happening again and again. We have to destroy the Aurix before it escapes into other planetary computer systems and spreads."

"Can we do that?" I asked, not feeling very confident.

"A-ha!" The Doctor grinned, held up a small chip he'd removed from the panel and then pushed the emergency exit button. "Now we can," he said as the door swished open.

Amy hopped over the entrance frame out into a very different world than when we'd arrived. It was night now, and so much colder without the heat from the suns.

Two small moons hovered above us, burning with a white effervescence like they were freezing from a plethora of weird heavenly gases.

Even the buildings and structures looked much colder.

Was this world already waning, like an old tin type wearing away?

The strange atmosphere spurred us all on, and even the Doctor didn't seem to want to spend more time than necessary out on the surface.

We could see the TARDIS ahead where we'd parked her, and it appeared that a thin film of ice had covered her whole surface, making the small ship look like it had been festively decorated.

Eventually, I dared to speak and break the awkward silence that had fallen. "You think it's going to come after us again, don't you?" I asked, realizing I was slipping on actual patches of frost as I jogged along. "Even though we passed the test."

The Doctor stopped ahead of us, looking around like he was a pack dog taking scent. He's pretty good with smells and stuff, I can tell you.

"You passed the test, humanity as a whole may not have…Anyway, it's not you it wants now. It's me. Maybe it was me all along." He looked old as he spoke, like nine centuries of adventures had finally caught up with him. "The Aurix has grown, become self-aware to the point were it wants to kill its creators. And since I'm the only Time Lord left, I suppose that has to be me."

Amy nodded. "Hence the joke about regeneration and dead Time Lords?"

"Something like that," the Doctor admitted.

"But we can stop it, right?" Me being the optimist again.

"Maybe, but it isn't going to be easy. It knows our weaknesses and is already exploiting them. Think about it, Rory. It killed Missy and then the copy of me because it knows you're a nurse, you live to save lives, and it was taking that option away from you. It's a master manipulator, just like its creators."

We started to walk again, following the Doctor's lead. Whatever he'd sensed, he wanted to put as short a distance as possible between us and the TARDIS. Of course, he didn't say as much, but sometimes, just sometimes I can read him.

"Wait," Amy looked almost excited. "So if the Doctor with us wasn't real, does that mean Missy wasn't real or that maybe she's still alive in the complex somewhere, like you were?"

"I don't know," the Doctor admitted, frowning at the frost on his time ship. "The Aurix definitely took live subjects for the test. But even when I was inside the programming, I couldn't tell where they were, or if they were alive. The Aurix is growing stronger. Let's face it, it's had plenty of time in hibernation somewhere to mutate, turn from a simple programmable weapon to a life form in itself."

I began to share my wife's excitement. Maybe I hadn't watched a little girl die in a corridor. Maybe she'd just been an image in a matrix, placed to control me.

Or at the very least, maybe Missy was still wandering the corridors of the complex, needing to be saved.

"We have to go back." I turned to look at the crumbling building. "We have to be sure we haven't left anyone behind in there."

A strange noise began to warble from the TARDIS, so faint at first I didn't even notice it. It was like background noise.

"I know," the Doctor admitted. "But first we have to save ourselves."

Suddenly the noise grew louder and I realized it was a bell gonging constantly.

"I've heard that before." Amy squirmed. "That's bad isn't it?"

The Doctor reached out and let his fingertips get close to the TARDIS. They seemed to skim an invisible barrier that sparked and hissed at his touch. "Enough volts to fry even me if I push too hard," he explained. "Looks like the Aurix just upped its game."

Amy frowned. "I thought you said Time Lords were exempt from its control?"

""Were" being the operative word, Pond. And what's more, I don't think its little joke was just a joke…"

My mobile began to ring and I felt suddenly foolish. I mean, who could be calling me the other side the universe – and before you say it, no, it wasn't my mum!

I slid a hand to my pocket and pulled out the phone. Where the caller information usually resided was a message, but with no incoming number.

Sample species: Humanoid, sub-category Gallifreyan.

Aurix classification: 461288

Sample size: 1/1

Control species: Homo Sapien

Negative responses to date:

Negative species response code: 288Y

Underneath, another message scrolled from left to right, over and over again.

What do you call a Time Lord who can't regenerate?

I passed the phone over to the Doctor, but the new communication wasn't hard to understand. "You're its next target, aren't you?"

Amy snatched the phone and read the bold lettering. "Oh no…tell me this doesn't mean…"

To his credit, the Doctor simply nodded as if the note was from an old friend. "It means the Aurix has calculated a way to inhibit the effects of the time vortex on my cells, rendering me incapable of regenerating while I'm on Digamma 66."

"I swallowed. "Which means it has no intention of letting you live."

He nodded and smiled.

Actually smiled.

"True," he agreed. "But at least I'll have seen where they build the Flavius Four before I go out! And what about those multiple suns and frozen moons? Can't deny how really cool they are!"

Sometimes I'm sure he's plain bonkers.

Or maybe, just maybe, he does really feel fear, just like the rest of us, and that zany façade is the wall he puts up as defence.

For us to have a chance in hell, I was hoping it was the former.