Negotiating

Once they'd reached the wheat field, they were able to slow, though they still walked quickly to where they'd left the TARDIS. "Are they coming after us?"

"We're not their problem now that we're out," Adelaide said.

The Doctor opened the TARDIS and gestured for Bill to go inside. "Right. You'll be perfectly safe in the TARDIS. She'll look after you until we..." his gaze fell on Adelaide, "I get back."

"Where are you going?"

"There's a giant smiley abattoir over there and I'm having this really childish impulse to blow it up. Be right back."

Bill frowned. "What, you're going back in? We've only just escaped! I thought we were going home."

"Home? Why would we be going home? That place is a living deathtrap. We can't just leave it with its mouth wide open."

"But they're all dead. We saw them. It's too late."

Adelaide shook her head. "It is almost guaranteed that there is a colony ship on its way. They're expecting to reach paradise. Not become fertilizer."

The Doctor's eyes were wide. "You're going to help?"

"I've been stuck doing nothing on earth for far too long."

When he grinned, it was so real and so beautiful that Adelaide remembered why she'd never quite stopped loving him.

Together, the Time Lords began to move back towards the city. "There's broadband in there," the Doctor told Bill. "Go! Go and watch some movies or something!"

"I get that someone has to do something, but why is it you? Can't you phone the police? Isn't there a helpline or something?"

The Time Lords turned, exchanging another grin as they looked at each other. "And stay away from my browser history!" They hurried beyond Bill's hearing. "You really want to help fix it?"

"Well, perhaps not explode the city. I'm hoping you're open to a different solution."

"What do you have in mind?"

She shrugged. "First, we have to determine why the interface decided to kill all humans. What went wrong."

"Solve the mystery."

"Why would you ever expect something different from me? But we will try to solve it and fix it first. We can't just blow it up."

"But blowing things up is so fun."

"I would never deny that." She pulled out the medallion she'd found and opened it as they entered the city. The Time Lords watched a hologram of a young boy. They had to force their smiles after that.

One of the interfaces walked towards them and the Time Lords turned it up even more.

The Doctor spread his arms wide. "Ah! Good morning! I'm happy! We're happy! Good morning. Look at us, we're happy, happy, happy, happy! What a lovely, beautiful morning, it makes us so happy. I'm happy. She's happy. We're happy. I hope that you are happy, too. See?" both of them turned, showing the interface their mood indicators. "Happy."

The interface's face changed to happy and it continued on. They pressed a hand to the wall, pausing for a moment, before continuing.

The Time Lords were hurrying up a slope when they heard something through the communicator devices. The Doctor touched his ear. "Hello? Is someone there? I can hear you breathing."

Adelaide touched his shoulder a moment before Bill spoke from behind them. "Why are you Scottish? Adelaide's not Scottish, and you're from the same place."

"I'm not Scottish, I'm just cross." They kept walking as they spoke.

"Is there a Scotland in space?"

"They're all over the place, demanding independence from every planet that they land on."

"And he's only developed that accent recently."

"Why are you here?"

Bill shrugged. "Because I figured out why you keep your box as a phone box."

"Adelaide told you, it's stuck."

"'Advice and Assistance Obtainable Immediately'," Bill quoted. "You like that."

"No, I don't." The Doctor's voice was tense. Adelaide knew she was responsible.

"See, this is the point. You don't call the helpline because you are the helpline."

The Doctor started moving again. He stayed far away from Adelaide. "Don't sentimentalize me. I don't just fly around helping people out."

Bill raised her eyebrows. "What are you doing right now?"

"I happened to be passing by, so I'm mucking in."

"You've never passed by in your life," Bill scoffed. "You couldn't even leave me serving chips, so I'm not going to leave you."

Adelaide turned and, given Bill's reaction, shocked the human with her severity. "Look at the wall. Notice everything. Use your eyes."

"The wall?"

"When the Vardy were following us, you asked where they were from. They didn't come from nowhere. They were here all along."

"What? In the wall?"

Adelaide shook her head. "Not in the wall. They are the wall." She turned and soniced the wall, making it shimmer and ripple in reaction. "The microbots did not simply build this city, they became it. The entire structure is built from interlocking microbots. They can be part of the wall in one moment, chasing people in the next."

"Smile," the Doctor said. "You're in the belly of the beast."

"So what do we do?"

"Well, the obvious. We find a real wall." The Doctor began moving and frowned at Bill's expression. "Oh, you really are smiling, aren't you?"

"Do you know why? You're both awesome tutors."

"Adelaide's taught me well."

"Just for the record," Adelaide told Bill, without looking at the human, "the Doctor may have a tendency towards interfering and helping out, but I am not him. I observe and I make notes, but I am no helpline."

Bill said nothing, but when Adelaide looked back at her, the human was still smiling.

"When the Vikings invaded," the Doctor said after they'd walked for a little longer, "they used to pull their longboats out of the water, turn them upside down and live in them as houses until they'd pillaged and looted enough to build new ones."

"So?"

"You didn't see a space ship outside, did you? When the settlers first landed, they must have lived in it and built out from it, so it's still here, somewhere inside this building. Ah," he turned, stopping to face a wall with enough imperfections that it stood out from the rest. It looked much more like a traditional human ship. "Bits of meteor damage. Flecks of rust. Rivets. Oh, I love rivets. A wall. A real, honest wall. Not made of tiny robots but made of any old iron."

Bill nodded. "Every spacecraft needs a door." She tried to pull the handle, though the door didn't move.

Right next to the handle, the Doctor pressed a button that officially opened it. "Not even locked. They were expecting to live in peace."

The interior of the ship looked like a human ship as well, not quite dark enough to make Adelaide nervous.

"Wicked," Bill breathed.

"We'll lock it after us, shall we?" the Doctor closed the door behind them. They could hear transformers turning on around them. "Its life support systems are starting up. It knows we're here."

Bill eyed the pipe above them. "Whoever did the interior decoration in here needs to take lessons from whoever did it out there."

"This was built by humans," Adelaide said, "that was built by Vardy."

"Wet brains, dry brains." They ducked under a staircase, moving across a landing. The Doctor, spotting something in the distance, grinned. "Ah! Good, old, universally compatible, incorruptible maps." They stopped before a map of the ship. The Doctor pointed at the red dot. "You are here."

Adelaide came up to his other side, pointing at another section of the map. "This is where the Doctor and I are going. The main records. Perhaps there's a record of when and what changed."

"Where am I going?"

"You're staying here and you will be guiding us to here, using this map." The Doctor pointed at his ear. "We'll hear you through the thingumabob."

With another nod, the Time Lords left her.

"I'm on a space ship," Bill said. "Like, for real. A proper one."

"Left or right?" the Doctor asked.

"Ow. Er...right."

The Time Lords obeyed, finding a cargo bay full of what appeared to be a mess of objects. "Well, they were certainly planning to make themselves at home here. They brought all their favorite knick-knacks."

"There should be a door..." Adelaide spotted it. "That leads onto a corridor." Bill sighed. "I really am on a spaceship."

"Yes. Which we are not about to blow up." He looked at Adelaide and nodded.

"How are you allowed to do that?" Bill asked. Adelaide decided that she did still quite like the human. "Like, if you were trying to blow it up right now, how are you allowed to do that and not get into trouble? I mean, blow something up, get into trouble. That is a standard sequence."

"He should get in trouble," Adelaide said. "He tends not to consider likely consequences."

"It's a moral imperative." The Doctor gestured at the space around them. "This is a murder machine."

"Which we may be able to fix without destroying it."

"Beautiful, though, I mean, the whole place," Bill said, speaking quietly. "You should be able to see a staircase."

Adelaide shrugged. "All traps are beautiful. That's why they're effective."

"Up or down?"

"Up."

"Attention," the system's computer announced. "Attention. Erehwon systems initiated."

The Doctor looked up. "The ship's systems are set to respond to human presence. It was sleeping. We walked in, now it's waking up."

"Er...there should be another door."

As Bill said it, the Doctor pushed the door open for Adelaide. "Got it." As they stepped into the room, an alarm went off. They hadn't reached the computer room yet, but it was clear they were close.

"Hang on, I'm being thick," Bill said. "I can come with you."

"Took that long to think of photographing it?"

"You'd already memorized it, hadn't you?"

"Both of us."

"Stop trying to keep me out of trouble."

The Doctor studied a control panel. "There's no trouble. We're finding a computer. This is going to be a stroll in the park." He frowned. "Deadlocked."

"Why did people come here?" Bill asked. "Did something terrible happen? The people who came here, were they the last people? Were they our last hope?"

He worked at hacking the control panel, though it just made another alarm go off. "Earth was evacuated," he explained. "But there were a number of ships. I've bumped into a few of them over the years. Adelaide too."

"You're making it worse," Adelaide told him.

The Doctor glanced at her. "Well, if we were trying to explode the engine, we'd already be finished by now."

"Then it is a good thing that we're not trying to explode it."

"Do you want to give this a try?"

"You're the technological expert."

The Doctor turned away from Adelaide and made a face just as the door finally opened. "There we go."

They'd just entered the room, Adelaide moving up to the terminal when Bill spoke again. "There's something you need to know."

"What is it?" Adelaide asked.

"There's a...boy."

The Time Lords froze and looked at each other and Adelaide was incredibly thankful that she'd convinced the Doctor not to explode this city. Especially as, when the computer signaled that it had found the records she'd searched for, they realized the truth of their current situation.

"He wants to know where everybody is?"

"Doctor, the colony ship isn't on its way." Adelaide gestured him over. "They're already here."

"My very good people," the computer system began to announce, no doubt triggered by at least one of the two pairs, "we will soon be beginning an emergency disembarkation. Good people, please prepare for disembarkation. We wish you a happy new world."

The Doctor's eyes widened. "Bill, I'll come find you." He rushed out of the computer room. "Where are you?"

"Cryostore."

Adelaide pulled out her sonic, plugging it into the computer to transfer all of the information she could, and then followed the Doctor out. She managed to find the Doctor and Bill just as the two converged together, the Doctor beginning to explain exactly what everything meant.

"The colonists are all around us, cryogenically frozen." He gestured around at the pods surrounding them, filling the entire space. "What's in these pods, Bill, is the surviving population of Earth." He turned, looking at Adelaide. "And I might have killed all of them."

"Welcome to your new world," the computer repeated. "Be happy."

Bill stepped closer to one of the pods. "They're waking up, aren't they?"

Adelaide nodded. "We must have triggered the process at some point within this ship."

"So what happens now?"

"Now? Now they're all going to leave this ship, and find their friends and family mulched in the garden. And if they don't smile about it, it's going to be the end of the human race." He looked at Adelaide. "Thank you."

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing. The Doctor admitting that he was wrong shouldn't have meant something, it shouldn't have been surprising. But it did. It was.

"Oh!" a voice said, making the group turn as a young man came up to them, emerging from further down the row of pods. "Oh, those pods, eh? Not much headroom." He frowned at them. "I thought I'd be first up." He held out a hand. "Steadfast, MedTech One. What day is this?"

"The end of the world."

Steadfast smiled. "Again? We've only just got here."

The Doctor stepped back. "Bill, with Adelaide and me."

"What's happening?"

The Doctor pointed at Steadfast. "What's happening is nobody leaves this ship until Adelaide or I tell you otherwise. Clear? Nobody leaves." He turned and walked off, matching pace with Adelaide automatically.

Bill hurried after them. "Where are we going?"

"No idea. But if we look purposeful, they'll think we've got a plan. If they think we've got a plan, at least they won't try to think of a plan themselves."

Adelaide had to bite her tongue.

Bill frowned. "But you two don't have a plan."

"We'll be able to determine how to stop what happened from happening again if we can determine what happened last time." Adelaide held up her sonic. "Hopefully, I have the necessary data here."

Bill paused. "I think I can show you something better." She gestured for them to follow her.

"Section A34, reanimation sequence commencing."

Bill brought them back through the cargo bay to a separate door from the one Adelaide and the Doctor had hurried through earlier. This room was notably different, as it had a dead woman in the middle of it. There was no computer terminal in the room, but there was a book that served primarily as a summary of the woman's life. Adelaide flicked through the pictures as the Doctor leaned against the other end of the stone.

"The spacecraft landed," Adelaide began. "Most of the colonists were kept in cryogenic suspension. A select few..."

"The best ones," Bill added. "The brave ones."

She nodded. "They woke to help shepherd the Vardy robots." She looked down at the pictures. "These images are of her with the other shepherds."

Bill shook her head. "She came here. She was happy. And they're all dead."

Adelaide typed. "If the records are rearranged to reflect the time of death..." Bill and the Doctor came to either side of her, looking at the tree that the data created.

"That's her."

The Doctor nodded at the body. "This woman died. There's no sign of violence."

"She died a natural death. Humans still die from natural deaths in the future."

The Doctor moved up the tree. "Then a few more people died at the same time, and then a lot more died just after, and then, the rest. Dozens."

Bill's eyes widened. "A virus? A virus that went, well, viral?"

The Time Lords looked at each other. "Grief," the Doctor said after a moment.

"Grief," Adelaide repeated.

"Grief as plague."

"But how?"

Adelaide held up her sonic. "The Vardies." She plugged it into the book and handed it to the Doctor to search through.

He nodded. "Their job was to maintain happiness. At first, that meant making sure there was enough oxygen and water. That's what the badges are meant to communicate. Satisfaction, a positive mental state. But the Vardy are smart. They learn, try to be good servants, so they expand the definition of happiness until..."

"She dies."

"No one had ever died here before this lady. The Vardies, they'd never heard of grief before." He gestured at the room. "This place is all about hope and the future, and happiness. No one ever thought about the opposite."

"The Vardies weren't prepared to handle it," Adelaide continued. "They identified grief as the enemy of happiness and everyone who experienced grief became a problem. Thus, they became..."

"Compost."

Adelaide nodded. "And all those dead people had friends and family, so..."

"Even more compost."

"And so on, and so on, and so on. And what you get is a whole grief tsunami."

Bill frowned. "And all of this took how long? One morning? All of these people were slaughtered in a day?"

Adelaide nodded. "Slaughtered for their own good because the Vardy think differently than human minds. It's not bad, not good, just different."

"Like the magic haddock."

Bill looked between the Time Lords. "So, what will happen when the new people meet the robots?" Adelaide handed Bill the medallion she'd found. "That's the boy. The first to wake up. Where did you get this?"

"We think it's his mother's, don't you?" the Doctor asked.

"Yea, or his Nan's. Well, he'll find her, when she wakes up in her pod."

Adelaide raised her eyebrows at Bill. "I found it in the fruit garden, Bill."

The human's eyes widened. "Oh."

"I would say that a lot of the colonists had friends or family who were working here as shepherds. When they find out what happened..."

"They'll be grief-stricken."

"And after that..."

"A massacre." The Time Lords exchanged another look and turned to leave. It was almost refreshing that, even after so long apart, even after everything that had happened, what they'd developed back on Christmas still held strong. "Okay, where are we going?"

"What's the opposite of a massacre?"

Bill took a moment to think. "Okay, what?"

The Doctor grinned. "In my experience, a lecture."

|C-S|

There were quite a few humans awake by the time that the time travelers returned to the Cryostore. Adelaide did not like that they had to lecture to the humans, but she'd rather they make an informed choice about how to proceed with the Vardy than wander in blind.

It was still disappointing when the humans turned around and began to arm themselves.

"You need to listen," Bill tried, rushing after Steadfast.

"I did listen. What did I miss? The Vardy have killed our families."

The Doctor shook his head. "But you need to understand why that happened."

"I don't care why."

"Then you will die," Adelaide said. "And everyone on your ship will die. Yet, the Vardy are not your enemy."

Steadfast frowned. "They want to kill us."

"No, they want to help you. Killing you is merely a side-effect."

"Get out of my way." Steadfast pushed Adelaide away, which made the Doctor glare at him.

"You're facing a living city, and you believe that guns will be effective?" Adelaide asked. "At all?"

Steadfast didn't respond.

Bill looked around them, growing panicked. "That little boy, where did he go?"

|C-S|

Thankfully, the Doctor, Adelaide, and Bill found the boy rather quickly. Regrettably, they also found him standing in front of two interfaces.

"There he is!" Bill cried, pointing.

Steadfast, who'd led the armed awakened colonists, raised his weapon. "Step away from the kid."

"They're not armed," Bill tried. "You don't need to do this. You just need to..."

"What's wrong?" the boy asked, looking around the group. "What's going on? Where's my mum? Where's everyone? Where's everyone?" His eyes began to tear up and one of the interfaces took the boy's wrist.

Bill rushed forward. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Don't cry, don't cry!" She took the boy's shoulders. "Hey, hey. Look, everything's going to be okay. Look, this is your new house. Isn't it lovely?"

The boy shook his head. "I want Mummy."

Bill forced a smile. "Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile. Everything's going to be fine if you just keep smiling."

The interfaces' expressions changed to skulls.

"Get away from the kid!" the colonists shot one of the interfaces. The other one beeped and its display changed, flickering.

The Doctor frowned at it. "What's that? Rage? Revenge?"

Steadfast shook his head. "It's one robot."

"It's not one robot." Bill looked at the Time Lords. "Doctor, what do we do? Adelaide, what's happening?"

A section of the roof transformed into a swarm of Vardies, making the colonists move back in shock. "Cover fire, now!"

Adelaide's eyes widened. "Oh, I'm really out of practice."

Bill looked at her. "Why?"

"The Vardy are identifying as under attack. This means that they have learned to identify as something separate from the beings that created them. They have become self-aware."

The Doctor looked extremely excited. "They...they're alive!"

"They're going to kill us!" as Bill said that, some of the Vardies killed one of the colonists. The Doctor, catching Adelaide's sonic when she threw it at him, bent down to the shot interface and pulled off its center plate. "What are you doing?"

"I really hope this doesn't hurt." He winced. "Adelaide, why do I always win at chess?"

The Time Lady flashed a smile. "You kick over the board." He'd taught it to her, after all. It had helped defeat the Cyberplanner.

"Here it comes!" He soniced the interface and sent out a shockwave of white light, knocking all of the humans down. The only people who weren't affected were the Time Lords, who were left staring at each other.

"You're going to wake them up to the story of the magic haddock, aren't you?"

He stood. "Wasn't this fun?" She didn't respond, but he knew the answer. "Once, long ago, a fisherman caught a magic haddock. The haddock offered the fisherman three wishes in return for its life. The fisherman said, 'I'd like my son to come home from the war and a hundred pieces of gold.' The problem is magic haddock, like robots, don't think like people. The fisherman's son came home from the war in a coffin and the King sent a hundred gold pieces in recognition of his heroic death. The fisherman had one wish left. What do you think he wished for?" The colonists, Bill included, began waking up, rubbing their foreheads. "Some people say he should have wished for an infinite series of wishes, but if your city proves anything, it is that granting all your wishes is not a good idea."

The colonists scrambled away from the interfaces as they noticed them again. "Don't worry, it doesn't even know who you are," Adelaide said.

"What happened?" Steadfast asked. "What have you done?"

"In fact," the Doctor continued, "the fisherman wished that he hadn't wished the first two wishes. You see, in a way, he pressed the reset button."

"What the hell did you do?"

The Doctor frowned at him. "Aren't you listening? It's polite to listen, you should try it sometime."

"He pressed the reset button," Adelaide explained. "Every computer has one."

"And anyone can find it, especially if they happen to be a scary, handsome genius from space." The Doctor grinned. "I re-initialized the entire command structure, retaining all programmed abilities but deleting the supplementary preference architecture."

Bill's eyes widened. "He turned it off and on again."

The Doctor nodded. "I turned it off and on again." He tossed Adelaide back her sonic. "Of course, I wiped their memories. They no longer have the faintest idea who you are and, in fact, they're wondering what you're doing in their very nice city."

Steadfast frowned. "Their city?"

"Yes, their city," Adelaide repeated. "It is made of them, after all."

"It's our city. They're our robots."

Bill shook her head. "They were."

The Doctor spread his arms. "Welcome to your new world. Meet the Vardy. They are, as of now, the indigenous life form. You'd best make friends with them because there's loads of them, and they're the only ones who know how anything works. I'd recommend you be polite. Everyone prefers it when you're polite."

"They killed our people."

He shrugged. "Well, look, they have forgotten about that. They've forgotten about you. They've forgotten that you even made them in the first place. Now, since they have absolute power over this city, and since I'm assuming you all don't want to sleep rough tonight, I have a suggestion for you. Smile."

Steadfast shook his head. "You can't be serious."

"I am serious." The Doctor nodded at Adelaide, though the Time Lady had a limited desire to stop him. "In fact, I'm willing to be a negotiator."

"Are you now?"

"Yes. Watch." He moved up to the interface, waving. "Hello, I'm the Doctor. This," he gestured at the Time Lady, "is Adelaide. A few hours ago, we made the mistake of not recognizing your status as an emergent new lifeform. As recompense for our mistake, please allow me to act as your negotiator with a migratory conglomerate known as the human race. They're looking for a place to stay and they've got their eye on your city. Would you like me to discuss rent?"

The interface's eyes flashed with human pound signs.

|C-S|

When the trio of time travelers made their way back to the TARDIS, Bill managed to get the Doctor away from Adelaide, though away only meant a few steps. "So, what's the deal with..."

"Not now, Bill," Adelaide said, not looking back. "I believe I told you that we can talk about this later."

Bill shrugged, playing at innocence. "Well, you two were alone for a little. I thought you'd talk then."

"You could hear us the entire time. You know that we did not discuss our history."

Bill held up her hands. "Fine, I'll be patient."

The Doctor pointed at her. "Good. Patience is polite, and you should want to be polite, because Adelaide likes when you're polite, and you want Adelaide to like you."

"Good to know that you haven't forgotten that yet, Doctor."

They reached the TARDIS, the Time Lord moving to unlock the door. "Even when you weren't there, I didn't forget it."

"If only you could apply it."

He frowned at her. "I apply it." Adelaide raised her eyebrows. "Sometimes." He opened the door, stepping aside to let the other two in first.

Bill turned to walk backwards up to the console. "So, is it going to work?"

"That's up to them."

"Did you just, well...did we just jumpstart a new civilization?"

The Doctor shrugged. "It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it."

"Did you do this all the time?"

"Do what?"

"Fly around sorting things out, like some kind of intergalactic policeman and woman." Bill looked between the Time Lords. Their shoulders tensed. "Okay, I clearly touched on a nerve."

The Doctor was quiet. "I don't sort things out. I'm definitely not a policeman."

"And I am a scientist." Adelaide held Bill's gaze. "Only a scientist."

Bill shrugged. "Well, the Doctor lives in a police box."

"That's a pure coincidence."

"Yeah, of course."

Instead of responding, the Time Lords worked to pilot them back to earth. Bill gathered that it was not a subject she should push further at this moment.

When the TARDIS landed, the Doctor stepped away from the console. "Back at the exact moment we left. The kettle's boiling, I've got a vault to guard, and everything is exactly as we left it."

Bill went over to the door and leaned out. "Wasn't snowing when we left."

The Time Lords looked at each other and rushed to the door, looking out. "Maybe I do need a steering wheel."

"You don't steer your TARDIS, you negotiate with it," Adelaide repeated.

"Where are we?"

The Doctor stuck out a hand to test the air. "London. And this," he gestured at the crowd around them, "is the Thames."

Adelaide didn't bother repressing her grin.

A/N: Aw, teamwork from the Time Lords is ever so fun :)