"Trust me," said Jack, leading everyone out of the office and into the main room of the Torchwood complex, "You want to see this."
Away above them the cement sides of the circular hub stretched up towards the roofing streets and sidewalks of Cardiff. The silver central column loomed over them as they entered the main room, a monolith to the existence of the rift and all the problems it had caused. Blue patterns flashed over its shining surface from the itinerant spinning screen saver laser shapes flickering off of rows upon rows of top of the line computers. The room spiraled out from the center into workstations that varied in their complexity and messiness based upon who among the team they belonged to. Everywhere, half empty coffee cups competed for space with stacks of case reports and bits of alien technology. Wires hung from every available cross beam and screen bank, curling about each other in a hopeless tangle. Walkways criss-crossed almost randomly throughout the space; allowing for navigation of the area, but studiously avoiding the sterile, hard-cornered arrangement of cubicles. In the one fairly open space, a decrepit basketball backboard hung stood forlornly next to a battered futon and a cluttered coffee table.
Tucked away in one corner was a work-bench littered with scraps of metal and spare wire. Behind it was a cork board almost completely hidden behind pages and pages of drawings of various complex machines that were tacked to its surface. A welding mask sat upon the table, leaning against a work lamp and staring sightlessly back at the three visitors, who wandered like wide-eyed tourists through the vast open space that constituted Torchwood central.
"It's huge!" Donna said, spinning in place on the grate covered floor and staring upwards in childlike awe. "But," she started, turning quizzically towards Jack, "There's only five of you."
Gwen snorted. "You need a place this big to fit Jack's ego."
"Hey!" Jack protested, "I resemble that remark!"
"Do you all live here?" asked Martha, who had wandered over to the little sitting area they had set up, and was sifting through the pizza boxes layering the table. Ianto, seeing what she was doing, hurried over and, with many muffled apologies, started picking up. Jack momentarily considered telling him not to bother, but decided to leave well enough alone. Ianto certainly had a good excuse for his lax treatment of the common room; the past few days had left little time for breath, let alone cleaning detail.
"No, thank goodness," Tosh answered, helpfully tossing a spare coffee cup into a bin with a less than pleasant grimace at its congealed contents.
Donna picked up the basketball that was sitting on Owen's desk, and bounced it once experimentally. It made a halfhearted twang against the metal floor and barely rose back up to her waiting hands. The team had been in the middle of a heated two-on-two game, with Ianto watching from the sidelines and timing it all with his stopwatch, when the rift alarms had started going off and everything had gone quickly to pot. The ball would need a refill before they played again. If they ever played again. Donna quirked an eyebrow at him.
"The boys and girls play together here," Jack noted in a slightly husky voice. He couldn't stop himself from flashing her a sultry smile, and was pleased to see her blush and return it.
"Oi!" the Doctor admonished, his face dark over the computer screen he was examining.
"Sorry," Jack said, sauntering over to type in his password. The multicolored line graph of rift activity disappeared and Jack began opening the files that his team had spent the past several days decrypting and deciphering. "Couldn't resist."
"Here," he continued, opening up the program he was most interested in showing his guests. "Take a look at this." He shifted away from the screen and motioned the Doctor towards the chair directly in front of it. The Doctor slipped the thick black glasses from their position on top of his head, and slid them into position on the bridge of his nose. Martha and Donna hurried over to the console, followed more slowly by the remainder of the Torchwood team who had seen the whole thing before.
The screen was open to a basic video program, and the initial scene of an eventual playback was frozen in a blur upon its surface. Although difficult to make out with particularity, it appeared to show a young blonde woman, sitting uncomfortably in a tan business suit that fit her poorly across the shoulders, and staring out of the screen from across a wide expanse of wood desktop. Her hands were folded carefully before her, and her hair pulled back in a rather severe pony-tail. She looked, for all the world, like a high powered solicitor about to slide her final offer of settlement across the table. She appeared prim and focused, and anyone who didn't know her would have called her frighteningly stern. However, two people in the room, at least, knew her better than that.
The Doctor's eyes narrowed. For a moment he said nothing, then turned disturbingly dark eyes upon Jack. "What is this?" There was accusation, tinged with anger in his voice.
"A message," Jack replied, "From across the rift." He glanced up into the confused faces of Martha and Donna. "From another universe."
"It can't be." The Doctor said heatedly, turning back towards the image splayed across the computer's face. "It's impossible." There was less heat in the latter comment, though, and more honest confusion. "The rift to Pete's universe should be closed." He closed his eyes then, and slipping his fingers beneath his glasses, rubbed tiredly at his closed lids as if trying to squeeze away the image on the screen. "We closed it at Canary Warf."
"Well whatever you did it sure hasn't stopped everyone and their brother from coming across the rift around here." Jack looked crossly at Owen. He was standing somewhat away from the group, a perpetually pissed off frown on his face and his arms crossed defensively before him. "Weevils, people from all sorts of time periods, technology pretty much guaranteed to drive you bonkers if you ever use it, crazy-ass alien-"
"Owen!" Jack cut off his rant before he could really get going. The two men stared at each other in open challenge for a moment, before Owen mulishly dropped his eyes and looked away, sulking.
Martha had been watching the interaction between the two attentively, but Donna, it appeared, had been observing the Doctor's reaction. Jack saw a spark of realization cross her face and she stepped closer to the computer desk. "That's her," she breathed. The question was aimed at the Doctor, but as he seemed unable, or unwilling, to answer her query, Donna turned to Jack instead for confirmation. "That's Rose." Jack nodded, and watched silently as Martha turned wide and suddenly concerned eyes back to the screen.
"And this is why you called the TARDIS here?" The Doctor's eyes were open again as he gazed at Rose's image. Dark thunderheads seemed to breed in their depths, though his face remained comparatively expressionless.
"Yes," Jack answered, "And no." Everyone in the room turned to him for an explanation. "All I did was call Martha. I knew you'd want to see what we'd found and that you needed to be here. I've no idea how the TARDIS actually got here…how she managed to find us three stories below Cardiff proper…how, or why, she came at this particular time…" He trailed off letting them form their own understanding of the strangeness of the situation.
"She did it herself," the Doctor mumbled to himself, apparently forgetting, for the moment, that he was in company. "Clever girl." He was playing with the computer mouse, obviously trying to figure out how the prehistoric piece of technology worked. Jack reached over his shoulder and took the device from him. With not a little bit of trepidation, he clicked the playback on, and listened as anticipation sucked the collective breath out of the room.
The playback began with Rose clearing her throat.
"Greetings people of alternate Earth."
"Well, that's not at all over-dramatic," quipped Martha, under her breath.
"I am speaking to you from a parallel universe across the rift in space time which currently exists between both our worlds in the locations of London, Cardiff, Glasgow and various other localities across the globe." Rose smiled. "I know that may be a bit hard to believe, but it's the truth. And if you have any memory of what happened at Canary Warf - and I think you do - you'll know that what I say is not only possible, but likely to be true. I know that many people, on both sides of the rift, fought and died that day to ensure that the connection between our two worlds remain closed forever. To prevent any further nightmares from slipping through."
The Rose on the video shifted uncomfortably in her seat, but her eyes didn't waiver from the screen, as if she were reading from prepared notes on a teleprompter.
"I am contacting you today because your world…our worlds, really…are in grave danger. At this very moment, the rift is breaching. A tiny hole is being poked in the membrane between the universes, and though it is currently small, it will soon grow; and grow at an exponential rate. Right now it is all we can do to send you this weak signal across the breach, but quickly it will become large enough to allow for considerable mass and energy to pass through. And, if it reaches that point it will start to collapse our two universes upon themselves and…" Rose stopped there. "Well, I don't have to tell you how bad things were last time. To say the least, this would be significantly worse."
Rose paused to let that disturbing information sink in, then pressed a button recessed into the table before her. On the screen, above her left ear, a three dimensional diagram appeared and began slowly revolving. At first glance it appeared to be a mess of glowing blue lines and curves, but Jack, who had some training in these matters, recognized that part of what it was intended to depict was an event horizon.
"It's a 3-D representation of the rift," he explained, for Donna and Martha's benefit. The Doctor glared sideways at him for interrupting and Jack cut his explanation short.
"Our scientists have been working on this matter from some time now," Rose went on. "As you can see, the Hole, as we've been calling it, appears to have started on our end of the rift and is drilling its way towards you." In the diagram some of the otherwise unintelligible lines appeared to move in response to Rose's comments. Martha could see that it did look like something was boring its way through something else. Or perhaps funneling through was a better description, since the Hole appeared to be significantly wider on one end. "We don't know what started it, but we began seeing the increased rift effects caused by the Hole approximately 9 months ago. You, however, should only start experiencing them now." Rose pushed the button again and the diagram disappeared.
"Our scientists are unsure exactly how much time you will have until the Hole is wide enough on your end of the rift to allow a breach like that you experienced with the Cybermen." Jack noticed Ianto's shudder at that last comment. "However," the Rose in the video went on, "They are fairly certain you will have nowhere near the amount of time we have had."
Though she kept her face blank and professional, Rose's eyes darkened with the knowledge of what she had to say next. "For nine months the best minds of our world have been working day and night, trying to find a way to stop this breach in the rift, or even to slow it, but to date, all of our efforts have been in vain. It has become clear that the best efforts of our best people are not going to be good enough."
"It is time we reached out for help."
Rose pushed another button on the desktop. A screen opened again above her left ear, this time it appeared to flash through hundreds of documents. Plans. Charts. Tables full of numbers and readings. Margins filled with desperate handwritten notes. "We send you now, all our information. All our work. The sweat of all our collective brows, in the hope that maybe adding the best minds of your universe to the mix will lead us to a solution." Rose's fist clenched briefly and a hopeful spark lit in her eyes. "Perhaps," she said solemnly, "Working together, from across space and time, we can find the answer and save both our worlds."
"However," Rose continued, "This is not the only reason we are contacting you today."
"We have reason to believe that the transmission of this communication may make the rift even more unstable, that it may contribute to the advancement of the Hole and give both our scientists less time to work on the problem. But we felt it was worth the risk," Rose arched her eyebrow, "Because your universe possesses a necessary advantage which our lacks, and which we both desperately need." Again, Rose reached out across the desk, and deliberately tapped the button. Immediately, the flipping pages of data and drawings were replaced by a single picture.
It was simply drawn in basic colors. The artist, though not a master by any stretch of the imagination, had managed to capture his subject fairly well in simple colored pencil lines; which was especially impressive given the fact that the artist had almost certainly never seen his subject in real life. The picture showed a man, tall and lanky with lopsided brown hair, dressed in a rumpled pinstripe suit overtopped with a long tan colored coat. His hands were stuffed roughly into the pockets of the coat and he leaned with a brooding air against what looked like the corner of a blue colored building. The eyes were too small in the picture, and too overshadowed by the dark brow ridges the man peered from beneath, to tell their color; but there was no doubt that the gaze of the man was intense. Nor was there any doubt among the individuals crowded around the small computer screen as to the accuracy of the man's features; they had the living, breathing model sitting right before them.
Donna wondered how the artist had managed to so perfectly capture the Look.
Rose took an audible breath, and the group as a one returned their attention to her face; they had almost forgotten, in staring at the picture before them, that she was there.
"This man," she started slowly, as if having to steel herself to her own explanation, but picking up momentum as she swung into her tale, "Is the Doctor. He has had many faces, at many different times, but as of our most recent information, this is how he appears. He has significant expertise with the rift and a great knowledge of inter-dimensional travel. He is also, not a bad shakes at fixing things." Rose gave a half smile at the last comment. "If anyone can complete the models of rift strengthening devices that our scientists have been working on, if anyone can find a way to patch the Hole, if anyone can save our two universes from imminent destruction," Rose paused for emphasis, her eyes flashing with fervent belief, "He can."
For a final time, Rose jabbed at the button on the desk and the image of the Doctor disappeared. "Find him," she said, seriously, "Find a way to bring him to your Earth. He may be the best chance that any of us have to survive. Good luck, and may God help us all."
And with that, the playback came to an end.