Tangled Memories
After a brief, intense discussion, the Doctor maintained he wanted to drop all the subterfuge and confront Jordan directly; so it was that as the patient groggily opened his eyes, groaning at the pain in his thick skull, the first face he saw was the Doctor's own natural brown-eyed visage. He stared for several long moments, as he fought to place the image, then his eyes narrowed. "You! Who the hell are you?"
"I'm the Doctor. And I'm no threat to you. I'm a friend," came the calm reply.
Jordan shook his head, wincing a second later at the renewed pain from the motion. "I have no friends. I..." His eyes widened again as his most recent memories caught up with him, and he gasped. "Jenny? Is she all right? I've got to..." He began to struggle to sit up.
The Doctor nodded as he reached out to gently pushed him back onto the pillow. "She's OK. She's fine. You stopped the sniper in time. No bullets were fired – except at you. And you're lucky you didn't get hit."
"I stopped..." Jordan went limp again, then grimaced painfully, his face wretched. "You mean I stopped myself in time."
At those words, a gasp from a different quarter of the room attracted Jordan's attention, and he turned to focus on... himself. He froze, staring unbelievingly at Jack.
"So it was me?" Jack whispered, returning the stare intensely.
"Don't you remember? You look older, you must be my future self. Don't you know?"
"That's right, Jackass, I'm your future. But no, I don't remember. I have a hole in my memories, centered around you right there."
The Doctor had turned, face twisting in ironic amusement. "You call yourself Jackass?"
"Yeah. It's my secret handshake. Come to think of it, though, this is the first time I've ever actually gotten to use it."
They turned back to Jordan, who strangely looked gut-punched. "You don't remember any of this?" Jack shook his head, and Jordan looked bereft. "I was hoping you'd tell me what the hell is going on."
The Doctor broke in. "And we were hoping you'd tell us. Why can't you?"
"My head's all fragged up. It's like someone took all my memories from the past two years and dumped them into a blender, and then poured half of the fragments off. Nothing in there makes any sense, nothing's connected to anything else. All I can see are snatches of scenes, with no rhyme or reason." He swallowed, hard, and then went on in a hoarse, horrified whisper. "I remember... Gods help me, I remember shooting down into the crowd. But I don't remember why, or how I got there, or what happened after that. I don't remember being interrupted, either. I just see the view down into the plaza, through the rifle sights, picking them off, one by one..." He moaned, and then lay back and closed his eyes again, exhausted.
Horror-struck, the two men stared down at him for several long seconds, not daring to look at each other. Then, remembering, the Doctor asked him, "And the bomb? Do you remember setting the bomb?"
"What bomb? No..." came the hoarse reply.
*Doctor?* Rose's telepathic whisper threaded through his mind from the next room, where the other three were monitoring them. *He's telling the truth. Josh says he can't make heads or tails of the 'mishmash' either – what he can see past Jordan's mindshields; they're pretty strong.*
*Thank you, love.* The Doctor pondered the problem for a few seconds before making a decision. He stepped closer to the bed and leaned against it. "Jordan? Jack? – I've gotten too used to calling you by your cover name," he added wryly. "Which would you prefer just now?"
"Jordan's easier, as long as there's more than one of me," the man on the bed whispered pragmatically. "What was your name again?"
"Just 'the Doctor'. Listen, Jordan. I'm a Time Lord. I know that doesn't mean anything to you now, but it will soon. What you need to understand right now is this: we've got a major situation on our hands, paradoxes on top of paradoxes. We – this Jack and I, and a few others, are here to try to keep history going on track, the way it's supposed to be. And every one of us has a personal stake in this. Are you listening?"
Jordan opened his eyes. "I'm listening."
"Good. Understand this. Jenny – Colonel Starr – is my daughter." He paused for a moment to let that sink in.
"You mean she's a time traveler, too? She never told me..."
"Not yet, not at this point in her life. She won't be until she and I meet up again, a few years into her future. And my number one priority here is to make sure that she makes it to that meeting, just as she should. You understand that? I want my daughter safe. And, almost as much, I want the grandson that she's going to give me." He saw and heard both Jacks react to that revelation with twin gasps, but he didn't bother to turn to his friend.
"Second, in a few years you are going to meet me, too – and as much as it pains me to admit this, you're going to save my life, several times. And since I'm rather fond of living, I'd prefer that you make it till then, too – which means that I'm going to keep you safe, as well. You got that?"
"Yes, sir." Jordan wasn't sure why he slipped into military speak, but it seemed appropriate. This man, the Doctor, was obviously in charge at the moment.
"Good. Now, listen. I'm also a high-level telepath. Let me help you. Lower your mindshields and let me in, let me try to straighten it out – or at least see if I can figure out what happened to scramble your memory."
Jordan lay still for a moment, considering. He turned to his future self – and Jack broke in with an emphatic "Completely!" before he could even open his mouth to ask the question about trust. A moment longer, and he turned back to the Doctor and simply nodded, exhausted from the strain he'd been under for months, just trying to keep his head above water long enough to understand.
The Doctor shut his eyes for a moment, running through the ancient mantra for focusing all his attention on a single point in the time it took to take a single deep breath. Then he placed his hands lightly on either side of Jordan's face, looking into his eyes. "Just try to relax." There was a momentary struggle, then the last barrier went down, and he was aware of Jordan's... Jack's... mental apology. *Sorry. Forgot about that one.* The Time Agent had obviously had some experience with mind linking before, though his own telepathic powers were too low to register consciously.
*If there's anything you don't want me to see, just throw a blanket over it, all right? Like THAT!* he added, flinching away from a glimpse of Jordan and Jenny in a very private moment. He waited a beat, and suddenly a fur rug was over the scene. *Where did you – never mind.*
Interesting, he thought to himself. Where Rose's memory was overlaid with the imagery of a never-ending castle, with wings and halls and rooms of memories, Jack's was mostly laid out in an open landscape, apparently sorted by both personal time and place. He glimpsed a range of mountains in the distance that felt like 'home', wherever home was - *the Boeshane Peninsula, where I grew up* Jordan supplied, following his thought. He went on, identifying various other locations in the landscape: forests, fields, waterways, scattered towns and distant cities. There were very subtle lines drifting through every scene, like a high-tide mark surrounding pools of action – and suddenly the Doctor recalled Jack's earlier flustered words. Mental tree rings for age lines, eh? I get it, now...
Then the Time Agent mentally turned them around to face another direction. *This is the last two years...* The land before them was crumpled, fractured, and topsy-turvy, resembling nothing so much as an M. C. Escher lithograph. Glimpses of scenes, fragments of memory, were scattered around like cake crumbs, but a single step into the nightmare and the Doctor couldn't tell up from down, and couldn't connect any two crumbs together. Even the 'age lines' were chopped up and tangled together like short strands of spaghetti. The entire scene was overlaid with an oily, metallic tang entirely missing from the rest of Jordan's memory-landscape, a tang that told the Doctor volumes.
"'Scrambled' is definitely the right word," he commented aloud this time for the other listeners. "Your memory has been tampered with, Jordan, very clumsily. But effectively enough, and thoroughly enough, that I can't tell what's real and what isn't. Nor can I put them back into the right order."
He suddenly caught a whisper of cool music sliding next to his own awareness, and realized that Joshua was also listening in. So he poked around a little more to give the young man time. *Anything?* he sent towards the whisper, and heard a faint mournful dirge in reply, before the words *No... too fragmented...* floated back from the receding awareness.
He began to disengage, coming back to awareness of the physical world, when suddenly Jordan clutched at both his arms, a panicked look stealing into his eyes. "The last three months? Doctor? Were they real?" The Doctor eased back in to the other man's mind, and looked again at the area now littered with blankets. They were all clear, laid out in between their mental vantage point in the present moment and the Escher nightmare.
"Yes. They're real."
"Thank the gods..." Jordan collapsed back onto the pillow again, eyes sinking closed, clearly past the point of exhaustion.
Jack had one more question for his former self, and he slipped it into the air in a low, urgent voice, just enough to penetrate. "What are your orders now, Agent Harkness? What's the mission?"
"Supposed to... assist Devron... take out... opposition leaders..." Jordan mumbled. "I couldn't... Jenny... she means everything..." And he was out cold.
(Rose, standing in the next room between Joshua and Jenny, slipped her hand into the younger woman's and squeezed. Jenny squeezed back, but then with a sob she turned and ran out and down the corridor to her own room, tears streaming.)
The Doctor puttered around for a bit, setting up an intracutaneous saline drip, then adding a sedative to the saline to keep Jordan under. Then he checked the monitors and the TARDIS' mind again, and left the room, shooing a still-astonished Jack out before him and locking the door securely once more.
He gathered the others up and led them back to the kitchen, where they silently arranged themselves around the table again. After few minutes for them all to digest what they'd heard and seen, he looked around at them all – only then registering Jenny's absence. Rose caught his thought and shook her head. *Let her be, love.*
He nodded. "Well, people? Do we have anything more to go on than we did before?"
One by one, the others shook their heads. The Doctor sighed, and then turned to Jack with a question. "Jack? Is there any way he could have – you could have tampered with your own memory? Does the Agency have any method for doing that to yourself, or any reason why you would?"
Jack shook his head. "I've never heard of any. There've been whispers about memory tampering, but not on Agents. And I've never heard of anyone doing it to themselves. If he did – if I did, it was by accident. But I've no memory of ever even seeing that kind of equipment, let alone using it."
"Then we're left with one fact, high probability. There's still someone else out there pulling his strings: whoever scrambled his memory, and then sent him back here again."
They sat at the table for another very long time, mostly silent, broken occasionally by a comment or question, or Joshua relaying from the news feeds that the Planetary Defense Force had finally arrived, breaking up the demonstration at last and beginning to make arrests, completing the day according to Jenny's memory. Everyone around the table breathed a sigh of relief at that. One more hurdle down.
Suddenly Jack slapped his hand on the table, eyes alight. "Of course! Of course! That's what we're forgetting!" He turned to the Doctor, his old manic grin creeping across his face. "Shimmers, Doc! Shimmers!"
The Doctor's jaw dropped.