The Present Day…
The sunshine glistened through the windows, across the bedroom.
As Junior Curator Parin hunted for his clothing, scattered across the room. An indignant look on his face.
"Absolutely not!" Parin insisted. Scrambling back into a pair of pants. "That statue is the Third Wonder of the Galaxy. What you're talking about is… vandalism!"
"You said she was still alive in there," said Jack. He crossed his arms. "If you don't let me wake her up, you're condemning an innocent girl to an eternal living death."
"She's just a statue!" said Parin, turning back to face Jack. "Listen, last night was… lovely… but I can't let you deface a priceless artifact like this. The moment she wakes up… she becomes just another person. But when she's like this, she's valuable! A work of art! A piece of history!"
Jack shook his head.
Not letting him get away with that.
"She can't feel anything, anyways!" Parin insisted. "She's good as dead."
"I spent two thousand years being 'good as dead'," said Jack. "Buried beneath Cardiff. If she's going through anything half as fun as I went through, then… we're getting her out. Even if I have to force you."
Parin seemed confused. "Force…?"
Jack produced a small tube-like device. "Recognize this?"
Parin coughed, awkwardly. "I did say last night was lovely, didn't I?"
Jack twisted the top around, and the device opened up. Revealing a hidden bio-imprint device inside.
He set it to play.
The sounds of two men in the heat of passion began to echo through the room.
"Don't stop!" begged Parin. "Please! Anything!"
"Hook me up to that statue and let me revive it?" Jack asked.
"Yes!" Parin shouted. "Yes! Even… oh, Jack! More! Like that!"
Jack shut off the recording. "Neat gadget," he commented. "It edits, too." Pressed a button. "See?"
He played it again.
Same words, but different inflection. Different implications. It sounded like they were speaking in the context of a formal meeting. Jack asking if he could revive the statue, and Parin calmly agreeing.
Parin seemed a little horrified. "But… but… that's not a legal contract!" he insisted. "We were in the middle of… other things. Even though it doesn't sound like it!" He straightened himself, trying to look more official. "And anyways, a contract requires the bio-imprint and voice imprint of both parties. You can't possibly have my bio-imprint on file from when I made that—"
Parin stopped.
Then realized… just where that tube-like device had been, back when the recording had been made.
"Yeah," said Jack, flipping it closed. "I show this to anyone else… and you're going to jail for conspiring to deface a work of art. But if you help me, and we succeed in waking her up… you'll be a hero. Saving a life."
Parin's face was still a little flushed and flustered from the last few moments. As he ran a hand through his hair. "You do realize," he said, in his last desperate attempt to save his job and the priceless artifact he was about to deface, "that there's no possible way to revive her? No one's ever come out of stasis before and lived to tell the tale. Even the few statues we thought were still alive died the moment we tried to revive them."
Jack's eyes twinkled. "You sure about that?"
He grabbed up the journal featuring Professor Effrotz's paper concerning the Resurrection Tales.
"It was a long-shot," said Jack, flipping through the pages. "But I thought… what if he knew she'd end up like this? What if he left some kind of message?"
He landed on the page he wanted.
Then slid the journal over to Parin.
"And then I found that," said Jack, pointing to it.
Parin picked up the journal. Read, out loud, "In nearly every tale, the hero is no more than a stone statue, before a mental or emotional connection is made to them, and the hero magically revives. Grovin finds his lost twin sister. Quorti sheds tears over her long forgotten husband. Perdita and Leontes, after their reunion, discover a statue of the Queen they've wronged. In all these instances, it's the connection that brings the statue back to life."
"You don't know who Perdita and Leontes are, huh?" said Jack. "You recognize all the other stories. But not that one."
Typical Doctor.
"The… Resurrection Tales were never my field of study," Parin insisted.
"Neither are English playwrights from other galaxies," Jack replied. "The Winter's Tale. By William Shakespeare. The Doctor must have shoved that in there to get my attention."
Parin didn't understand.
"You've got neural projection tech, here, right?" Jack said. He spread open his arms. "Well strap me up and project me into her head. She knows me. I'll get her out of there."
"That's mad!" cried Parin. "You'd die."
Jack laughed. "Wouldn't be the first time," he said. Clapping Parin on the back, and handing him his shirt. "Maybe I'll inspire a few Resurrection Tales of my own!"
Parin had quadruple locked the door.
Shifting, nervously, between the equipment hooked up to Jack, and the equipment hooked up to the statue. Getting everything ready for the projection.
And grumbling.
"…going to lose my job," he muttered, "maybe even go to jail…" He clicked open a hypo, then stabbed it into Jack's arm. "Slept with one cute guy, and look where it got me!"
"Bet it was worth it," said Jack, with a wink.
Parin didn't answer.
The flush on his face probably said more than he wanted.
"You know what I think?" said Parin, turning away. "You just want to take the statue for yourself when I'm not looking. This is all some… con!"
Jack sighed.
Let Parin get on with it. Trying not to think about the real reason he was doing this — because he couldn't stand to lose one more person, just after Steven and Ianto…
Ianto…
"You ready for this?" said Parin, getting ready to flip the switch and start the neural projection. "Because it's almost certainly going to kill you."
"Don't unplug me from her head for five minutes, after I die," Jack said. "Just promise me that."
Parin grumbled.
Then flipped the switch.
Jack felt the transfer working through his mind. Compressing his mental essence, transferring it over into another mind, before…
Jack screamed as he struck something, full on, in Seo's mind. Like he was being torn between five different speeds of time at once, and his psyche couldn't cope.
Pain seared through him.
And he died.