Chapter 9

"So what is it then?" Rose asked as she looked at the latest artefact that had been brought in by Julia and Jake, looking like a pink, metallic brick, with six small panels, that were flush with the casing.

"Not sure," John said, as he started to scan it with his sonic screwdriver. There was a golden glow, and suddenly, they were standing in the basement store room in Henrick's, where they had first met all those years ago.

"Oh, hello," Rose said with a puzzled smile. She was wearing her black trousers and pink hoodie, and John was wearing the black outfit with cool leather jacket, that he'd worn when he had the face with the ears and the daft grin.

"Hello," he replied. "It seems that something has propelled us into our shared psyche."

"How did that happen then? I didn't know anything could do that."

"It must be the artefact; our subconscious minds may have detected a threat and brought us in here."

"Are we in danger John?" she asked with concern.

"I don't think so, it's a bit like fainting, we're not really unconscious, just stunned a bit. In fact, I think we're coming out of it."

"Oh, hang on then, while we're here." Rose grabbed the lapels of his leather jacket, and pulled him into a passionate kiss as they were surrounded by a golden light.

"Well, that was weird," John said, and then stopped, running his tongue over his teeth; they seemed to be larger than he remembered. And his lips, they seemed to be 'poutier' than normal.

'If I didn't know better, I'd swear that I'd had a regeneration' he thought to himself. It was only when he looked down; that he got an idea of what had happened, because he was looking at a pert pair of breasts.

"JOHN!" he heard his voice say from beside him. He looked up from the pert breasts, to see himself with a wide eyed look of horror on his face. "What's happened?"

"Rose? Are you in my body?" he asked, looking back at the breasts in front of him.

"Oh my God John, this is like one of those sci-fi films where they swap bodies."

"Yeah," he said distractedly, pushing the breast in from the side, and up from underneath.

"John! Will you stop fondling my breasts," Rose said indignantly.

"What?" he said, looking over to his body and seeing a disapproving look on his face. "Oh, sorry, I couldn't help it. It's fascinating to find out that you get as much pleasure out of having your breasts fondled as I do… And anyway, you don't normally mind me fondling your boobs."

"Yeah, but they're not mine at the moment, are they? I mean they are mine, but I haven't got them…, oh, you know what I mean," she said in frustration. "And the question is, how do I get them back?"

"Oh, of course!" John-in-Rose exclaimed, slapping her palm against her forehead. "It's a Teaser ego transplanter."

Teasers are a bunch of spoilt, alien rich kids who take their parents vehicles and fly off to level five planets, flashing the headlights at passing aircraft, drawing patterns in the wheat fields, and pretending to do experiments on unsuspecting locals, they think it's hilarious.

"What, those alien chavs?" Rose-in-John asked. "Is it dangerous?"

"Nah, it's a practical joke," he told her.

"Oh really? They're crackin' me up," she said sarcastically.

"I've not seen this configuration before, but they're prime entertainment on a stag do, I must have set it off when I was scanning…, hang on, where is it?" he asked, looking over the worktop.

"Where's what?" Rose-in-John asked, as she put his arm around her shoulders, to look over the worktop.

"The artefact…, it's gone!"

"That's crazy, it must be here somewhere," she said, as she glanced under the worktop and then leaning over her own body to look under some papers, and behind a box. All this rubbing of his body against hers, had an unexpected effect.

"John, why have I got an uncomfortable feeling in the front of your trousers?" she asked, worried that the body transfer may have caused some damage.

John-in-Rose looked down and saw a bulge in the front of his trousers. He spurted a single laugh. "You've got an erection."

"Wha? But how? I didn't tell it to do that," she said, holding her hands either side of his 'packet' to emphasise what she was saying.

"Ah, no, it will do that all on its own," he said with a grin. "The trick is telling it not to do it."

"Are you tellin' me this things got a mind of its own...? That certainly explains a lot."

"Welcome to my world," he said, as the intercom chirruped on his desk. He walked over, and pressed the 'acknowledge' button. "Hello."

"Oh, hi Rose," Chrissie said. "Is John with you, only the Camera Director, Matt wants to know if he could do some interviews about the artefact he saw recovered?"

"Er, I'm here," Rose-in-John said, pretending to be her husband.

"Can we take a rain check on that," John-in-Rose said. "I'm…; I mean he's having trouble with his equipment." He put her hands on his wife's breasts and gave them a tweak. Rose-in-John slapped her own hands away.

"Okay, let me know when you're available," Chrissie said and hung up. She walked out of the supervisor's office to speak to Matt. "I think they're still trying to identify the artefact, and knowing John, he'll want to show that he knows everything about it before he does an interview."

Back in John's workshop, they started frantically searching for the absconded artefact. "C'mon, we've got to find this thing and reverse it," he said, getting on Rose's hands and knees and looking for hiding places. "Ooh, these skirts are a bit impractical when you're doing stuff like this."

Rose-in-John looked down and saw the skirt of her uniform, up around her thighs, as her bum stuck out from under a desk. "Oh, that's alright then," she said distractedly.

"What is," her muffled voice said from under the desk.

"My bum really doesn't look big in that uniform."

There was a 'bump' and 'oof' from the underside of the desk. "Rose Smith, you're supposed to be looking for that pesky artefact, not admiring my bum," he said with a hint of humour in his voice.

"My bum," she reminded him as she looked in various storage containers. "God John, there's so much junk in here, have you ever thought of havin' a clear out?"

"It's not junk, it's all potentially useful equipment, and I know where everything is, I have an inventory in my head… Uh-oh," her voice said from under a worktop in the corner of the lab, and it wasn't a good 'uh-oh'.

"What...? What?" Rose-in-John asked with concern, she'd picked up on the fact that it was a bad sounding 'uh-oh'.

Rose's very nice bum reversed out from under the worktop, and John-in-Rose stood up, holding the grating of the air conditioning duct. "It's escaped."


Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

2005.

Daniel Walton walked from the staff car park, towards the entrance of the futuristic, metal and glass building where he worked as a clerical officer. He passed through the reception area to the security desk, where he emptied his pockets and had the metal detector wand passed over his body. He then held up his ID badge on the lanyard for inspection, before looking into the retinal scanner and passing through the turnstile into the inner sanctum of his workplace.

He may have just been a clerical officer in an office, but when your office happened to be in one of the most secretive government institutions, then it took a bit longer to get to your desk than normal. The General Communications Headquarters, monitored radio, video, and telephone traffic from all over the world, and analysed it to see if there was any information that threatened the stability of western civilisation.

Danny had performed well at college, and left with a number of A level GCSE's, with maths, english, and geography being particularly strong subjects. He had completed some work experience in the office of a local firm of solicitors, and made a very good impression on the office manager. When he applied for a job at GCHQ on the off chance, he interviewed very well, and the job reference they had given him was very useful in securing a job.

He entered the large open office, and said good morning to a number of his friends who were also making their way to their desks. He sat down and logged on to his computer to read his emails, before looking at the in tray on his desk. His job was to log the report transcripts, and make sure that they were sent to the correct department for analysis. Some people would find the work boring, but Danny was the kind of person where 'that will do' wasn't in his vocabulary. He had an almost obsessive compulsion to do things accurately and to the letter, so that he could say, 'that is it'.

He noticed a white envelope on the top of the in tray, and picked it up to inspect it. It had his name typed on it, and no other information, meaning it must have come through internal mail.

"Has anyone else had an envelope?" he asked the office in general.

"Yeah, it's some kind of staff satisfaction survey," one of his colleagues said, holding up what looked like a multiple choice questionnaire and a return envelope.

"Oh, right." He put it to one side, he might have a look at it later when he had a break. He started trawling through the reports, categorising them by country of origin, perceived threat level, and various other criteria.

Before he knew it, his desk neighbour, Jenny, was standing in front of him. "You ready for a coffee?"

"Is it that time already?" he asked looking up at her and smiling. "Yeah, you go on and get them, I'll see you in the cafeteria in five minutes."

"Okay, five minutes," she said. "No longer, I know what you're like for forgetting the time when you get involved with something."

Danny laughed. "Right, this is the last report, as soon as I've filed it, I'm right behind you."

Four minutes and twenty seconds later, he was sitting at a table with Jenny and a few other people. He'd brought the staff survey with him, and was casually looking at it as they chatted. Apparently, it was an anonymous survey to see how public sector employees felt about working for the government, and if they got job satisfaction and felt valued. The instructions said not to dwell too long on the answers, and just be honest and candid.

The first section of questions were about gender, age group, and interests, such as intellectual pursuits like chess, scrabble, sudoku, or more physical activities like skydiving, rally driving, kayaking etc. After that, there were more job specific questions; 'do you work within the confines of The Official Secrets Act 1989 (c. 6)' being one of them, to which he ticked yes. There were questions about whether his job was clerical, administrative, supervisory, technical, and so on.

Danny was not a fan of multiple choice questions, because what if all of the options were not an accurate representation of his answer. Being a stickler for accuracy, he had a solution to that, he would write his own answer, and tick that instead. It might invalidate the questionnaire, but so what? If they wanted his opinion, they were going to get it, not some psychologist's interpretation of his opinion.

"You're not putting your own answers in again are you?" Jenny asked, with a lopsided smile.

"Too right I am, these are my answers, not what someone wants me to answer for their convenience," he said with a grin.

"I've put mine in the bin," someone said.

"I might have a look at mine later," said another.

"Mine's already gone to the mailroom," said someone else.

On his way back from the cafeteria, Danny popped into the mailroom and dropped the envelope into the out tray, where it would be delivered to a Post Office Box number at a London sorting office.

In the London sorting office, a day later, a motorcycle courier, dressed in black leathers, black crash helmet, with tinted visor, collected the envelopes that had been returned from government departments all over the country. She placed them in a satchel, and left the sorting office, to mount the black motorbike, and ride back to One Canada Square, Canary Wharf.

In the Computer Sciences Department of the Torchwood Institute, the anonymous questionnaires were being fed through a retro engineered scanner that looked at the microscopic ink crystals, and decoded the digital information that had been encoded into it. The digital information contained demographic information of who the questionnaire had been sent to, and the name, date of birth, and address was then printed onto the top of each questionnaire.

The computers then sorted out the responses into those who were already under the Official Secrets Act, and also into personality profiles, highlighting those that may be suitable for interview and an offer of employment. There was one final category that a few questionnaires dropped into; these were questionnaires that had been 'spoiled' by being written on.

Instead of being rejected though, these were sent to the psychologists for closer scrutiny, because they were an indication of non conformist, free thinkers, who were not afraid to defy convention to get to the truth. Danny Walton's cleverly disguised psychometric questionnaire was forwarded on to the head of the Special Operations Unit, where Captain McNab read the psychologist's summary, and prepared to travel to Cheltenham.

Where Yvonne Hartman would conduct interviews for clerical and scientific staff alongside the section heads of each department, Andy conducted his own interviews. If he was going to put his life and the life of his team in the hands of someone else, then he wanted to know he'd got the right person, with the right 'stuff'.


Torchwood Tower.

2005.

Alice DiMaggio sat in the glass fronted office, on the top floor of One, Canada Square, admiring the view.

The blonde woman in front of her raised her eyebrows and smiled a greeting, as there was a gentle knock on the door, and an elderly man in a dark grey suit entered.

"Ah, Dr. Bernstein, thank you for joining us, this is the young lady I was telling you about," Yvonne Hartman said.

"Alice DiMaggio isn't it? You've been making quite a name for yourself," he said, shaking her hand as she stood to greet him.

"Thank you Doctor and your reputation precedes you," Alice replied. "But I must say that I'm a bit puzzled as to why you wanted to meet me." She had received a very nice letter from him, complimenting her work with Scotland Yard and MI5 as a profiler. It was praise indeed from a man who had been a guest lecturer when she was studying for her degree, and he had asked if she would meet him here for a discussion about forensic psychology.

"Oh, that was me," Yvonne said. "You cleverly spotted some of the Doctor's work that we commissioned…, please, have a seat."

Alice gave her a puzzled look as she sat down, before Yvonne lifted a multiple choice questionnaire off her desk.

"Remember this? It's your response to the government employee satisfaction survey," Yvonne said with a lopsided smile.

"Oh yes, I'd forgotten about that. I hope I didn't invalidate your experiment," she said, looking sheepishly at Yvonne.

Yvonne gave a single laugh. "Hah! Not at all, in fact, the experiment worked perfectly, and I quote," Yvonne said, reading the written response at the bottom of the questionnaire. "Hey guys, exclamation mark, I'm a psychologist, I can spot a psychological evaluation in my sleep, even if it is cleverly disguised as a satisfaction survey..., unquote."

The doctor of psychology chuckled to himself. "I'm the guy you're saying 'hey' to," he told her.

"Oh, I am sorry, I didn't mean any disrespect," Alice said apologetically.

"No offence taken," Bernstein said with a smile. "It was refreshing to see someone spot the subterfuge."

"And who could take offence at these credentials," Yvonne said. "First class degree with honours in psychology after a gap year at the Behavioural Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where you met your husband. And when you were awarded your degree, you joined the Criminal Profiling Unit at Scotland Yard, with an occasional secondment to MI5."

"So what was the questionnaire for?" Alice asked, a bit unnerved by the amount of information Yvonne had on her.

"Recruitment..., it's for recruitment," Yvonne told her with her professional smile. "The Torchwood Institute is looking for new talent, and while you're here, we were hoping you'd consent to an interview for the post of psychology profiler."

Alice had taken the time to look up the Torchwood Institute before she came, and had seen that they supplied laboratory services to various clients. She had wondered why Dr. Bernstein, a renowned psychologist, had asked her to come to a privately owned scientific laboratory; she presumed that he must be a benefactor of the institute or something like that.

"Excuse me, but what does a forensic laboratory need with a profiler?"

"Ah, yes, about that…" Yvonne started to explain.