'The Cerberus Protocol'
6. Zero Room
"No!" Sophie shouted, as the Doctor stumbled back. Blood was flowing freely from his wound, as his fingers curled around it. His eyes were wide with surprise.
Sophie, barely able to stand on her injured leg, grabbed him with both hands and pulled him back towards the door. Together, they fell over the threshold, out of the wardrobe, and the door slid shut behind them, sealing the attacking mannequins away.
"Doctor!" Sophie cried, propping his head up on her lap. "Oh, God, Doctor!"
"It's fine," the Doctor said, though he sounded pained. "My ribs deflected the…"
His words trailed off as he suddenly seized with agony, his eyes rolling back.
"Doctor!" she shouted.
He was getting pale. "Sophie," he said, a moment later, as he seemed to recover, "I need you to know something."
"Yeah, Doctor?" she asked. She could barely think with the fear that now dominated her mind; the Protocol had been bad enough, but the possibility of losing the Doctor...
"When I'm hurt," he explained, "when I'm going to die, something happens to me."
"Regeneration," Sophie supplied, nodding. She knew something of the process, that it enabled the Doctor to recover from mortal injuries, but she didn't know what it involved.
He nodded. "It doesn't just heal me, Sophie. It changes me. Every cell of my body is re-written, my entire being is fundamentally changed…"
Sophie shook her head. "You don't need to worry about that, Doctor."
"No," he agreed, "but you do."
"No!" she insisted. "You're not regenerating. You're going to be fine. Your ribs deflected the attack, right?"
"I think I was wrong," the Doctor said, simply.
"No, no, no," Sophie said, shaking her head. Tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes. "You'll be okay. Come on!"
"Maybe," the Doctor said, weakly. He shut his eyes, resting his head against her lap for a moment.
Sophie reached under his arms, and began to pull him towards the wall. She rested him against it. "I don't have a bandage," she told him, "I can't stop the bleeding."
"I can," the Doctor said.
"You're not going to regenerate," Sophie insisted, somewhat more forcefully than she had meant to. Tears were now spilling uninhibited down her cheeks.
"No," the Doctor agreed. "It doesn't seem like I am."
"What do you mean?" Sophie barked, her heart stopping her chest. If he was wounded this badly and he wasn't regenerating, what could that mean? That he was dying? She couldn't let that happen. When he didn't answer, she shouted: "What do you mean, Doctor?"
"I'm an old man, Sophie," he said, his voice obviously pained. He was struggling to speak, and she wondered what damage the umbrella had done. Even in the gloom, she could see the blood spreading from the wound; feel the dampness of his coat. "It's been getting harder for me, this regeneration thing."
"There has to be something we can do," Sophie insisted. She remembered the small medical bay located near the control room. She'd taken a wounded man there after a Dalek attack a few weeks before. "What about the sickbay?"
The Doctor shook his head. "With the Protocol in control of her systems, even the TARDIS' medical technology won't be able to heal me."
"Oh, come on, Doctor!" Sophie howled. "You can't just give in. Not after all this."
The Doctor shut his eyes, and rested his head against the wall. "There is one option. The Zero Room."
Sophie blinked, the tears abruptly stopping. There was, at long last, hope and if the Doctor had taught her anything, he'd taught her that hope mattered. Hope was the most important thing. "The what?"
"The Zero Room," he repeated. "It's a chamber, sealed off from the rest of the universe. It's designed to aid recovery. Even the Protocol won't be able to corrupt it."
"Where is it?"
The Doctor shook his head. "To be honest, I don't know. It could be anywhere."
"And I still need to get my phone and get you to the secondary control room," Sophie added, brushing away the last of the tears. She pushed her fear out of her mind, remembering the mental barriers the Doctor had helped her to erect. If she was anything, now, she was a professional companion, and that meant that she had to approach her situation with professionalism.
When given a problem, she thought, it's my job to find a way to solve it and then to actually solve it.
"You'll be going to the control room alone," the Doctor said, sadly. "I'm sorry, Sophie, I wish I could be of more help, but it has to be you."
Sophie sucked in a breath. "Fine."
The Doctor tried to haul himself up, but he slipped. Sophie caught him, helping him to stay upright. He shut his eyes, adjusting to the pain. He was pale, losing blood fast. "This way," he said, pointing down the corridor. "It's this way."
Slowly but surely, they walked in the direction the Doctor had indicated. The sound of the TARDIS engines was growing louder and louder, and Sophie's heart was quickening its pace. They were running out of time.
After a few minutes, they reached a hexagonal lobby, with two more exits leading away into the bowels of the TARDIS. There was, however, an enormous set of double doors against the far wall. Unlike the usual gold and bronze and burnished orange colours of the TARDIS bulkheads, these doors were a strange, pearlescent white that glowed faintly.
"I've got it from here," the Doctor said, and slipped out of Sophie's arms, struggling towards the doors. He got a few steps before his legs failed him.
"Oh, don't be an idiot," she said, helping him up again. "We're in this together, even if you are about to quit on me."
She injected a note of humour into her tone, but it wasn't enough to mask the fear and disappointment. It wasn't his fault, she knew, but the Doctor was abandoning her, leaving her to face the Protocol alone.
"Only I can open the Zero Room doors," the Doctor said, "and you won't be able to come inside."
"Wouldn't want to anyway," Sophie replied, trying to keep her spirits up. "I've got stuff to do, remember. But, Doctor, what about my ankle? I can't run on this."
"I'll do my best to keep the Protocol busy," the Doctor said, a note of danger in his voice. "You just get your phone and get to the secondary control room."
Sophie nodded. "All right."
The Doctor stepped away from her again, leaning against the Zero Room doors. They seemed to pulse beneath him, ever so slightly. He handed her his sonic screwdriver. "Use this to power up your phone. Take it to the control room, and find the input link."
"What does that look like?" she asked.
"Like an iPod dock, obviously," he said, as though the question was ridiculous. "Plug your phone in, and the Matrix will do the rest."
Sophie suppressed her annoyance at his flippancy. "And what about the sonic screwdriver? How do I use that?"
"Psychic circuitry," the Doctor explained. "Usually it's keyed exclusively into my neurochemistry, but all you need to do is point it at your phone and activate it. It'll know what you want it to do."
Sophie nodded, and clutched the sonic screwdriver in both hands. She stared at it.
"Sophie," the Doctor said, quietly. "Look at me."
She tore her eyes from the screwdriver, and met the Doctor's piercing gaze.
"You can do this, Sophie," he told her, and for the first time she realised that she was shivering, a reflex that had nothing to do with the cold. "I know you can do this. You faced the Trickster's Brigade alone. You survived the Daleks alone. You helped save New Tokyo and Siena. This Protocol? It's nothing. Nothing compared to you."
The Doctor wasn't smiling. He wasn't being encouraging, wasn't trying to buoy her spirits. He was simply being honest.
And that's what made Sophie smile, wide and genuine, tears glittering in her eyes.
"All right, Doctor," she said, and nodded towards the Zero Room. "Good luck."
"I'd wish you luck in return," the Doctor said, still not smiling, "but I don't think you'll need it."
With that, the Doctor finally pressed his hand against the doors. They didn't open; rather, the Doctor pressed against them and, like a semi-permeable membrane, the doors began to stretch inwards beneath his touch. As though walking through honey, the Doctor slowly slipped through the doors in a literal sense, and disappeared into the Zero Room.
Leaving Sophie alone in the corridor.
Sophie dragged herself towards her room, trusting her instincts. She kept one hand on the wall, using it to keep herself upright and moving. The pain in her ankle was a dull, throbbing ache, but she still couldn't put her full weight on it.
The TARDIS didn't get colder and the lights stayed constant, but the engines changed pitch again. The entire ship shook around her, and warning lights flared to life along the corridor an instant later.
The deck bucked beneath her, throwing her to her knees, but she kept going, pulling herself along the corridor.
She didn't really know where she was going, simply trusting her innate sense of direction. Fighting her way back up to her feet, she gritted her teeth against the pain in her ankle and pushed on.
The TARDIS didn't stop its shaking, though, and the going was tough. Whatever the Protocol was doing to the ship, she was lucky that it wasn't just falling apart around her.
"Sophie," a voice spoke suddenly.
Instantly, the TARDIS stopped shaking and the lights went off, plunging the corridor into darkness. Sophie straightened, whipping her head about. The voice was distant but clear and remarkably familiar.
"Sophie," it repeated.
She recognised that cadence. It was the Doctor's voice.
"Shut up," she said into the darkness. There was no response, so she decided to push on. "I know you're not the Doctor. I know you're using his voice, piping it through the ship's intercom or something."
A holographic image coalesced in the corridor, scattering thin blue light through the darkness. The Doctor was watching Sophie closely, his eyes narrowed. The semi-opaque visage of her friend stared at her imperiously.
"You're going to fail," the Protocol's projection said.
Sophie almost laughed at the transparent attempt to distract her. "Do you really think this is going to work on me?"
The hologram at least had the decency to blink as though in surprise, though the Protocol said nothing.
"I know what you are," Sophie said, squaring her shoulders. "You're a bully. Sure, you're just a few lines of Time Lord code but this whole thing, everything you've done, has been an attempt to scare the Doctor. To hurt him. You're trying to take the ship back to Gallifrey, but the fact that you haven't yet should tell you that you can't! So why are you still trying?"
The Protocol didn't answer.
"Because you don't know what else to do!" Sophie roared in answer to her own question. "If you could, I know you'd try and get inside my head like you did before but you can't. If you could, you would drive me to distraction by telling me how helpless I am, how hopeless and weak, but guess what? I have faced down the Daleks. I have seen my entire world disappear from under me. A few months ago, what you're trying to do might have had some effect but now? Now I know that am Sophie Freeman and you're nothing."
The image of the Doctor morphed into a hideous caricature of her friends face and lunged towards her, hands out-stretched.
But Sophie was already running as fast as her injured ankle could carry her.
The hologram slammed against the wall of the TARDIS corridor and dissipated. The sounds of the engines picked up immediately, and the lights returned to normal. The roaring alarms came back and the TARDIS bucked once more, throwing Sophie to her knees.
Red waves of agony sang through her body, but she ignored it. Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself up. Her ankle was getting numb, and she realised with a start that she might be going into shock.
In the corridor behind her, she heard an animalistic roar.
Memories of the holographic creature that had chased her and the Doctor before they'd reached the wardrobe only a few minutes before came rushing back.
Not daring to look behind her, Sophie continued to pull her way down the corridor as quickly as she could managed. She reached an intersection, and took a left; a pair of holographic entities, both them bizarre alien boar-wolf-tiger monsters, leapt right past her, as though they had just been about to pounce when she'd turned the corner.
They both dissipated into nothingness, only to reform a second later. They bared their teeth, both of them staring directly at Sophie.
She swallowed.
The Doctor had mentioned before that the holograms might be electrified or something. To her surprise, though, she wasn't afraid. Indeed, despite her situation, she was smiling, Suddenly it all made sense. Everything the Protocol had done.
"You can't hurt me," she announced to the creatures. They continued to growl menacingly, but she ignored them. "Oh my God, how did I not see it before? You can't hurt me. Not physically, at least. You've been using tricks and distractions to keep us off-balance. You got inside my head, made me see things and feel things, but that was telepathic trickery. You animated those mannequins, but you just got lucky that one of them had an umbrella. You've been running around us around in circles, and we've been letting you. He's been letting you. What exactly did you say to the Doctor up in the control room, huh? What did you scare him with? Just that nonsense about Gallifrey? I bet you can't even get the ship anywhere near it."
The monsters vanished, replaced by the familiar holographic image of the Doctor.
"There is a Time Lock," the Protocol said, and to Sophie's ears it sounded defeated. "The ship cannot reach Gallifrey."
"Okay," Sophie said, nodding, "then why don't you just… stop? Shut down the whole thing? You can go back in your box and leave us be."
"That is not in my programming," the Protocol answered.
"Was animating mannequins?" Sophie asked pointedly.
"My programming allows me to take any and all measures necessary to detain criminal entities," the Protocol explained, "or to remove any alien detritus from the interior of the capsule."
Sophie blanched. "You mean me. I'm the alien detritus."
"Yes," the Protocol intoned.
She frowned. "Okay, fine, so I'm alien detritus. Why are you talking to me, then? Why haven't you hurled me into the Time Vortex or something?"
The Protocol was silent.
And then it dawned on her. "Oh my God. You can't! You can't even do that! You're useless, aren't you?"
The Protocol seemed incensed when it spoke. "The control interfaces of this capsule have been modified and changed so many times. There are systems that are off-limits."
Sophie snorted. "Yeah, whatever. Excuses, excuses. So what's the plan, then? If you can't reach Gallifrey and your programming won't give you up…" she trailed off when she realised she could answer her own question. "You're going to destroy the TARDIS."
The Protocol said "Yes."
Sophie shivered. "But what good would that do? You'd just destroy yourself along with the Doctor and me!"
"Yes," the Protocol repeated.
"But the destruction of a TARDIS…" Sophie said, thinking back to everything the Doctor had told her about his miraculous, endangered time machine. "Wouldn't that, like, punch a hole in the universe? Wouldn't that destroy a lot more than just the lot of us?"
The Protocol sounded almost gleeful when it said "Yes."
"Oh my God," Sophie said again. "Destroying the TARDIS would break the Time Lock around Gallifrey, wouldn't it?"
"Yes," the Protocol said, one last time.
"You're insane! The Doctor told me what would happen if the Time Lock was broken. You'll destroy the entire universe!"
"I will fulfil my programming," the Protocol intoned. "There is nothing you can do to prevent the outcome. I have distracted you for long enough."
And in that moment, Sophie's heart broke. Because, she realised, she had been right. The Protocol could affect the ship's systems, could use its power to animate the mannequins in the wardrobe, could use its telepathic circuits to invade her mind, but its number one weapon had always been illusion and distraction.
She'd played right into its hands.
"Oh, screw you," she said, and stuck her middle finger up at the holographic Doctor before her. "I'm not giving up so easily."
"You have no choice."
"Of course I do," Sophie said, limping away down the corridor. Her whole body was hurting now, the pain radiating from her ankle threatening to drown her.
The Protocol followed her, trying to talk to her, but she ignored it. Instead she hummed a song to herself, blocking out the incessant drone of the mad computer program's holographic avatar. She kept her head down and her attention forward.
After what seemed like an eternity, she reached the ring corridor that led to the bedrooms. Her door was the first on the left. The Protocol disappeared from behind her, and reformed standing directly in front of her.
"Stop this," it told her, doing its best to sound authoritative.
"Go away," she moaned, and leant against the doorway. "Seriously, just leave me alone. I'm in enough pain without having you natter on."
"It is pointless. You cannot win."
Sophie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, whatever."
She pushed on, stepping right through the holographic image before her. Her skin seemed to tingle, but she wasn't electrocuted. Its matrix disrupted, the avatar vanished. Sophie reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. Remembering what he had told her, she pointed it at the door and thought the word "open".
Sure enough, with sparking actuators and a reluctant groan, the door to her bedroom slid open.
The room was very familiar to her by now, but she most of her time in here had been spent fast asleep. Running away from Daleks and Vrigillians and whatever else had a singular way of making one tired.
An antique wooden four-poster bed dominated one half of the small chamber. A pair of mismatched bedside tables, one that looked like it had come from IKEA and the other made of a beautiful black rock-like substance, an exquisitely crafted chest of drawers and an ultramodern desk, complete with a computer terminal that linked into the TARDIS' main systems, rounded out the complement of furniture.
The walls were the familiar burnished bronze, gold and orange that matched the rest of the TARDIS interior's colour scheme, including the familiar roundels. Sophie went to her bed and was happy to lower herself onto it. With her weight off the injury, the pain in her ankle subsided for a second. She opened the drawer in the IKEA bedside table, and found the bag she'd first brought aboard the TARDIS.
Ignoring the books for university, she fished out her mobile.
The iPhone 3 was one of the few luxuries she'd afforded herself back in Newcastle, but since she'd been travelling with the Doctor she'd had no use for it. Its battery was dead. Pointing the screwdriver at the phone, she activated the Doctor's signature device.
Immediately, the silver apple logo appeared on the black screen.
Sophie grinned.
She pulled herself off the bed, gingerly stepping on her injured ankle, and made for the door. Before the reached it, the Protocol reappeared. Once again, it wore a holographic depiction of the Doctor's body.
"What are you doing?" it demanded.
"What does it look like?" Sophie asked. "I'm going to save the day."
