Dressed only in a shapeless white smock and loose, baggy trousers, Jasmine was barefoot, and snatched her feet up from the chill, metallic floor, and struggled in the machine's irresistible grip to turn back, towards the white-coated scientists clustered over the computer readouts by the examination table.
"Please," she called out in desperation. "Please, just tell me, what do you want from me? What am I doing here?"
They ignored her, and the droid pulled her towards the door.
"Just tell me why I'm here!" Her own voice tore painfully at her throat. "Why are you doing this to me? How much longer is this going to go on? I'm begging you, say something." She was screaming as she was dragged out into the corridor. "Won't someone please just talk to me?"
The laboratory door slid shut, and in despair she fell silent and allowed herself to be led down a series of blank grey corridors, each faceless metal door identical to the last. She couldn't even tell which one was hers, but eventually the droid halted, opened the door with a touch of its finger against the pressure pad on the wall, and pushed her, not roughly, into the empty, featureless white plastic cube which had been her home now for over a month. She shivered at the sound of the door hissing shut, sealing her up in the confined, coffin-like space and fell weakly to her knees. She looked up and cried out:
"Doctor?"
--------------------
She was sitting hunched in a corner, face buried against her drawn-up knees, when the doorway slid open once more. She didn't stir. She knew she would be dragged off for the next session anyway, but this passive resistance was better than no resistance at all.
There was a pause of a few seconds, then a familiar voice said:
"Well, if you don't want to be rescued I'll just push off, shall I?"
Jasmine straightened with a jolt, banging her head against the wall. It was him! The lean, angular features, the vivid dark blue eyes, the long black coat with the coils of gold braid about the cuffs and buttonholes. He stood casually in the entrance, one hand in his pocket, the other resting against the doorframe.
"Doctor!"
It was all she could say. Dumbfounded, she stared at him as if he were some kind of apparition. He raised an eyebrow.
"Yes. Correct. Well, it's good to see you don't have concussion but I'd envisaged this escape as a reasonably fast-paced affair. Would it interfere with your plans for the rest of the evening if we got under way now?"
She gaped at him for a moment longer before leaping to her feet and running to join him in the doorway. He grasped her hand.
"Come on, Jasmine."
They were away, tearing off side by side up the empty corridor. The Doctor's long legs drew him ahead and he pulled her along after him. A sharp left turn, then a right, then another right, then another left.
"Not far now."
She didn't care how far it was. She had been locked in a plastic cube for a month. She was happy just to be running. Alarms began to ring through the corridors, and she laughed at the knowledge that her captors feared what had happened. Booted footsteps behind them, and she rejoiced at having broken their arrogant complacency and made them run. The ringing whine of gunshots, and she knew they must be desperate. The people who were controlling this, the shadows she sometimes glimpsed at the observation windows above the lab, were worried, perhaps dragged out of bed to deal with the crisis, perhaps shouting at each other, perhaps arguing over who was to blame...
The Doctor's grasp on her hand loosened and slipped away. Jasmine stumbled to a halt, cast about in search for him, and found he had tripped and fallen to the floor. She leaned to grasp him by the elbow and pull him forward, but found herself dragging at an immobile dead weight.
His face, pale and shocked, lifted to meet hers, and the hand he had clasped to his chest fell limply away soaked in sticky red fluid. With a look in his eyes of hurt disbelief at what was happening to him, the Doctor sagged forward into her arms and rolled onto the floor, mouth hanging open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Still and empty as a bundle of old clothes.
"No." Jasmine said the word quietly, in a puzzled tone. She tweaked at the Doctor's sleeve, expecting him to sit up, shooing her irritably away. "No," she said again, louder, when there was no response. "No. No. No no no!" Suddenly she was screaming, dragging at his arm, trying to make him get up, say something, do something. "You can't! You can't! You can't!"
He lay there, heavy and unyielding. The blood pounded in Jasmine's temples, a red mist filmed her eyes, and then a bright white flash blotted out the scene.
"Oh, thank God."
She shivered with relief. All just another illusion. She waited for the sensation of the table underneath her, and the dispassionate voice of the scientist ordering her to be returned to her cell. The crushing, sickening memory of what she had just been through weighed down on her and she covered her eyes wearily with one hand.
"Be brave, Jasmine."
Her head snapped up. For some reason the white flash that usually took her straight back to the lab was still flaring around her, and the Doctor was here. He stood watching her closely, dressed as before, hands in his pockets, the blood still flowing from the wound in his chest.
"You're not real," she said.
"Then why are you talking to me?" She had no answer, and he went on. "But you're right of course. I can't believe you were taken in, it's not even a good likeness. Where's the noble proportion of the brow? And have you seen the stupid beaky nose they've given me?"
"It's not really beaky," she found herself saying. "It's just sort of pointy. That's how your nose really looks."
"Nonsense. Anyway, enough of this, we have very little time. How are you?"
She drew breath to tell him, then stopped herself.
"You're not real," she insisted.
"You know perfectly well I am. Not in the flesh of course, this is a mechanically induced hallucination taking place solely within the confines of your own head. I thought the best way of getting to talk to you would be to hack into the system and take over one of the characters. Tempted as I was by the opportunity to play one of the brutish guards, the Doctor seemed the most sensible option."
Against her will, Jasmine allowed herself to hope, and once that chink of light had been let in blind belief came flooding in after it. She ran to him, and flung her arms about him with a kind of desperation, as if clinging to a life raft.
But his coat felt like plastic, and his hands against her back were like cardboard. She pulled back, and saw his face was resolving into a simplified, two-dimensional version of the real thing.
"Sorry," he said. "I can't have those pseudo-scientific thugs realising what I'm up to. All this is taking place in a fraction of a second in real time, it's your dream-state perception of it that gives us a chance to talk, but there's still a limit to how far I can extend it. I'm afraid you have to go back now."
"But you haven't done anything!" she protested. "You haven't told me anything!"
The representation of his face was now too crude to convey any emotion, but from his stoop he looked a little hurt.
"I thought you'd be pleased to know I was somewhere near. That I was working on the problem."
"But no one will talk to me here! They won't tell me where I am, what they want from me, anything."
The featureless, stick-figure Doctor paused, placed the ends of its arms where there would be pockets if it had any.
"You're on the Gorro Amari space station. It's a famous scientific research centre at the cutting edge of technology in this quadrant. As for what they want from you, I know they're making you experience these hallucinations to provoke an emotional response, and then recording your thought patterns. I don't know why yet."
"Doctor, I... you've got to get me out of here. I can't take any more of this."
"One thing I've come to realise about you, Jasmine, is that you're capable of taking more of everything than most people think, including you."
Jasmine lowered her eyes miserably. The last thing she needed just now was to be told how strong she was. All she wanted was someone to tell her everything was going to be all right.
"And on top of that," came the voice, thinning now to a distorted electronic reproduction. "Whatever else happens, you'll always have me."
She looked up in plaintive appeal.
"You will get me out of this, won't you?"
"Who has got you out of every mess you've got yourself into over the past four years?"
She should be throwing that back in his face, telling him he was the one who'd got her into most of those messes, but instead she felt a reluctant smile cutting through her unhappiness.
"You have."
The barely visible thing spread its arms.
"Then what are you worrying about?"
Jasmine blinked, and she was on the examination table again, the towering machines pulling away and the heavy-footed sentinel droid coming for her. She had to remind herself not to look cheerful as she was pulled up into a sitting position and then dragged away.