Feedback
by Nicholas Nada
The Doctor stepped out of his TARDIS and took a deep breath.
"Now, this is just the ticket," he said, spreading his arms appreciatively as he took in the view. "Pre-history! A world in its infancy. Fresh air, wide open spaces, when everything was shiny and new."
He turned, only to remember that this was one of those rare occasions when he was travelling alone.
"Ah, yes," he said, a little sadly. "Well, all the more sightseeing for me."
He walked on for a bit, pausing every now and then to study the rocks and vegetation, and soon he came to a low ridge from which he saw a series of caves with little fires smoking before them.
"Primitive dwellings," he mused. "Perhaps best not to get spotted by the natives, however. After all, the primitive mind can be quick to anger and I wouldn't want to end up in some dank cave waiting to have my skull added to the pile. I am rather attached to it."
He chuckled and turned back, only to be stopped in his tracks by a young woman wearing a roughly-sewn collection of animal skins as she stared at him from beneath a heavy brow caked in dirt.
"Now," said the Doctor, carefully, holding his hands out to show they were empty, "I don't want any trouble. I can assure you, I'm quite friendly. In fact, I'll just walk away and it will be like I was never here. How does that sound?"
He backed away. "Do you understand? No trouble. Me, friend."
The woman cocked her head and frowned at him.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Can you help me? I'm having a rather odd day."
The Doctor stepped out of his TARDIS and took a deep breath – which quickly turned into a racking cough.
"Ah yes," he said to himself, once he got his breath back. "The unmistakable odour of a civilisation crawling out of its middle ages. Still, just the thing when one wants to add a little… texture to one's travels."
He paused to wipe something unpleasant from his shoe and then set off down a rough, cobbled alleyway which looked like it might lead somewhere interesting. He hadn't gone far when he was stopped by a weak voice from the shadows.
"Spare a coin for an original thought?"
"I beg your pardon?" said the Doctor, turning to see a woman huddled in a doorway.
She sat up and drew her shawl around her shoulders. "I know what you must think of me," she said, "selling my mind on the street like this, but I do have excellent ideas if you have the coin."
"I'm afraid I haven't any local currency," said the Doctor. "Is there anything else I can do to help?"
The woman slumped back down. "No, it's no use. I'm trying to get into the Academy of Science, you see, but I haven't the coin for a spot at the forum."
"Are there people at this forum who could help you?" asked the Doctor.
The woman regarding him sharply. "No public presentation, no review of ideas, as you well know. No review of ideas… well, those ideas may as well not exist. So here I am, and if all you can do is mock me, I will ask you to be on your way."
"No, no! Not at all," replied the Doctor, hurriedly. "Shouldn't have said that. Thoughtless of me."
The woman shrugged and huddled herself into the doorway again. "Doesn't matter anyway. It's not like I'll ever-"
She stopped. "Hold on a minute," she said. "I've just had an idea!"
The Doctor stepped out of his TARDIS and took a deep breath.
"Ah, yes! This is more like it!" he said, looking around at the sleek, tall buildings amongst which he had landed. "The future! Scientific progress and a whole new vista of exciting possibilities!"
He turned to lock the TARDIS door, and narrowly missed colliding with a young man who was evidently in a hurry.
"Sorry," called the man, waving a flyer but not slowing his pace. "I don't want to be late for the time travel lecture!"
"Time travel?" scoffed the Doctor. "In this technology?"
Looking around, he noticed many other people hurrying in the same direction, towards a low building of much older architecture than the glass and steel towers which surrounded it.
"Still," he considered, "a lecture could be interesting. Find out what theories they have and how very wrong they are. It's refreshing to find a planet whose people are so enthusiastic about science, if nothing else."
He followed the crowd to what looked to be an old university lecture hall which was already packed with people. Banners at the doors announced the lecture of Professor Julia Fatou: the Theory and Practice of Time Travel.
"Excuse me!" said the Doctor, elbowing his way into and through the throng. "Pardon me! I'm a doctor; they'll want me near the front. Health and safety, you understand. Excuse me!"
In this fashion, and ignoring the angry murmurs behind him, the Doctor secured himself a position with a good view of the stage, which he saw comprised a lectern and microphone, a large display screen, and a podium with a wire-entangled headset resting on it.
After almost an hour of standing about while ever more people packed into the room, a middle-aged woman in a neat grey suit walked out onto the stage to the kind of applause people on other planets might reserve for rock stars.
"Thank you," she said into the microphone, and the crowd fell silent almost at once. "Thank you all for coming."
There was not a cough nor a murmur as she went on. "My name is Julia Fatou, professor of temporal physics here at the university, and I would like to share with you the work my department has been conducting and our most recent theories on time travel."
As she spoke, the screen behind her showed page after page of dense equations, which the audience absorbed in reverent silence.
The Doctor watched and listened. The basics of the professor's theories were sound, but as he had suspected, this civilisation would need to discover a completely different style of mathematics before they would come close to cracking the real practicalities of time travel. It was all still so… four-dimensional, he thought.
"It is my belief," announced the professor, "that by eschewing the physical model and instead implementing a purely psychic, mental transference, one could overcome the temporal constraints and transmit the conscious mind back along one's own timeline."
"A real quantum leap in scientific thinking," scoffed the Doctor, then apologised to the man in front who had turned around with a sharp glare.
The Doctor realised then that the whole room had somehow become even quieter. Pointedly so. He looked towards the stage and saw Professor Fatou staring back at him.
"You have some feedback, sir?" she asked.
The Doctor waved a hand, graciously. "No, no. Carry on. Don't mind me."
Fatou continued to glare at him. "An eight-year-old student of scientific ethics and etiquette knows one only interrupts when one has something of worth to add."
The crowd murmured darkly in agreement, so the Doctor frowned, threw back his shoulders, and prepared to deliver something of worth.
"Very well then," he said. "You cannot send your consciousness back along your own timeline. If you did, one of two very nasty things would happen: either it will be a temporary visit which completely overwrites your younger self's brain, leaving it an empty shell when your consciousness returns and resulting in a paradox where you couldn't have conducted the experiment in the first place; or it's one-way, and you have to stay in the body of your younger self, trying to relive the years up to now doing everything exactly the same as before so as to not corrupt the timelines, which is absolutely impossible to do."
Fatou regarded him coldly. "I don't recognise you, sir. I think I would remember someone with such a… vivid dress sense. How is it that you claim knowledge of temporal theory when you haven't conducted a single public presentation?"
The Doctor gripped his lapels and glared around room. "I happen to be a Time Lord," he announced.
The room erupted into laughter.
"I'm the Duke of Lunchtime!" shouted someone from the back.
"And I'm the King of Waking up Late!" called another, to more laughter.
"If you've quite finished," said Fatou to the Doctor, causing the audience's mirth to die back to a guilty silence almost in an instant. "Whatever title you invent for yourself, I am the professor here and I will have you removed if you interrupt without cause again."
"Without cause?!" spluttered the Doctor, but he could see the mood of the whole crowd turning against him and he held up his hands and backed down. "Okay, okay, not another word. I've said my piece."
"Thank you," said the professor, with firm civility. "Now, if no one else has anything to add, we can move on to the practical demonstration."
On hearing there was to be an actual test of whatever crude lash-up they had created here, the Doctor fought down the instinct to protest again. It wasn't as though the experiment would be a success, he reasoned. The equations were flawed and any more commotion would only see him thrown out. Better to let this fizzle out naturally instead.
The professor lifted the heavy helmet. "Don't be fooled by the apparent simplicity of this device," she said. "Rest assured that each of these wires connects to a super-computer which is worth every penny of the grant money awarded to us."
The audience laughed and the professor placed the device on her head and pressed a button on the podium. Nothing. No dramatic flickering of the lights. No sparks flying from the helmet. The only indication that the experiment was running was the output to the screen, which showed not a flicker in the results.
"Well," said Professor Fatou, removing the helmet with a wry smile. "I'm sure you're as disappointed as I am, but I'd like to thank you all for coming and I'm sure we can all agree that the premise as outlined today has merit and the work we do here will move planet Brot into a brighter future – or indeed past."
The crowd chuckled good-naturedly and gave the professor a round of applause, although it was noticeably less enthusiastic than the one which had greeted her.
The main doors opened, and the people began to disperse.
The young woman in the animal skins gestured for the Doctor to follow her.
"Come on," she said. "I've just had an idea."
It only took a moment for the Doctor's surprise to turn to curiosity. "Lead on," he said. Intrigued, he followed her down a steep path which led towards the caves.
When they got there, however, the two were immediately surrounded by the caves' inhabitants, some of whom were pointing stone-tipped spears in a menacing fashion. They grunted an obvious warning at the Doctor.
The young woman stamped her foot in the dust. "Honestly," she said. "The day I'm having, I do not need you lot chasing off the first interesting visitor we've had in ages. Or ever, for that matter."
The others looked at her and then at each other, confused by the speech.
"Go on," she insisted. "Clear off!"
Not knowing what else to do, they cleared off, albeit in a grudging, bewildered sort of way.
"Thank you for that," said the Doctor. "I'm afraid we haven't had time for introductions. I'm the Doctor."
"I like your clothing," said the young woman.
The Doctor was rather pleasantly taken aback. "You'd be surprised how few people tell me that," he said.
When the young woman said nothing, the Doctor recognised she had changed the subject and he changed it back: "and you are?"
She looked embarrassed. "If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd have told you quite happily. Although," she added matter-of-factly, "I'd probably have you run you through with my spear first."
"And today…?"
"Today got complicated. Look, okay, my name is Hurrrr" she said, drawing the sound out like a low growl, "but today I'm not feeling very Hurrrr for some reason and I don't know why."
"Just now, you said you had an idea," said the Doctor. "Was it about whatever happened to you?"
Hurrrr brightened. "No," she said. "Even better. Watch!"
She practically skipped into the mouth of a nearby cave, picked up a sharp rock from the ground and dragged a short line down the cave wall. She stepped back proudly.
"That's a one," she said.
The Doctor looked and agreed. It was indeed.
"But wait," said Hurrrr, "it gets better." She scraped a circle next to the line.
"That is…?" asked the Doctor, knowing what it looked like but wanting to hear it from Hurrrr.
"That's a nothing!" said Hurrrr, excitedly. "I call it a 'zee-row'. That's the real big idea – when I put it there, it makes that one into ten ones!"
She held up all ten fingers excitedly, looked at them, and then lapsed into silence and turned to the scratches on the wall for a moment. "Or it could make it two, I suppose, if you think about it differently. If that's a column for ones and that's for twos."
The Doctor gawped at her. "I'm sorry," he said, "did you just invent binary on a cave wall?"
"Come on if you're coming," said the woman, hauling herself to her feet and making her way down the cobbled alleyway.
The Doctor was taken aback by the sudden change in her demeanour. "Where are we going?"
"The forum," said the woman, as though this had already been agreed. "What's your name, by the way?"
"I'm the Doctor."
"Hello, Doctor, I'm Mandel. I like your coat."
"You do?" he replied, struggling to keep up with her pace and her train of thought. "I mean, thank you, Mandel."
They headed out of the alleys and into a main street full of carts and people. Mandel pushed her way through the crowds with the Doctor in tow until they reached an open square filled with upturned boxes and large blackboards. On each box stood someone who was chalking up an idea and explaining to anyone who cared to stop. Those who did stood in polite silence, occasionally jotting down a note or two. Whenever an idea was particularly clever, someone in the crowd might toss a coin in a basket at the speaker's feet.
Mandel strode to the middle of the crowd and, without breaking her speed, pushed a man from his podium.
"I'm invoking the Information Imperative!" she cried, as the man on the ground howled in protest and the people around her cried out at the impropriety. "I'll pay you your coin back, sir. Two coins – three, for the push!"
She turned to the crowds. "The Information Imperative," she reminded them, as they jeered at her interruption, "means that I have data that I must share for the good of all. I call it aerodynamics."
In the lecture hall, the Doctor started to push his way through the departing crowd, hoping to talk to the professor, but as he got closer and caught sight of her again he saw she was now wearing a very familiar, brightly-coloured patchwork overcoat.
"Where did you get that coat?" he called up to her.
She turned and frowned. "Oh, it's you," she said. "Where do you think I got it?"
"But it's my coat!" said the Doctor.
"What are you talking about? It's mine!"
"Okay then, why are you wearing it?"
The professor rolled her eyes. "Why am I, the senior professor of temporal physics at this university, wearing the department colours?"
The Doctor groaned. "Oh, no. I don't think I like the sound of this."
She snorted. "At least we agree on that, sir!"
She turned and began packing away her equipment. Behind her, the large display screen showed a wall of equations – a different set of equations from those that were shown during the lecture.
The Doctor looked at them in stunned awe and stammered, "this is – I don't – if these are – you're brilliant!"
Fatou sighed, clearly wishing the Doctor would go away. "Well, thank you. The university has a proud history of scientific endeavour, and I'm merely standing on the shoulders of -"
"No, but that's the thing," interrupted the Doctor, "you're not brilliant!"
"Well! Make up your mind, sir! If it is your intention merely to insult me -"
The Doctor stepped up onto the stage. "During the lecture, not five minutes ago, all of these equations were… well, they were promising, at best. The demonstration you gave was a failure."
"It most certainly was not!" said Fatou, indignantly. She pointed a device at the display and hit a switch. "Look, all the data points to a successful transfer of a small packet of data back in time. 0.0026 digifractals of information delivered. I may not have experienced the past myself as I'd hoped, but there is no way you can call that a failure."
The Doctor looked at her figures. "That number's rising," he pointed out.
Fatou glanced at the screen. "No it's not," she replied. "It still shows 0.0028 digifractals."
"It's 0.0031 now," said the Doctor.
"No," said Fatou, with exaggerated patience. "It still says 0.0035, as before."
The Doctor groaned. "There's something very wrong going on here."
The wall of the cave was soon covered in little scratches, as Hurrrr wrote down every idea which occurred to her. Numbers gave way to arithmetic which turned to lengthy and more complex equations, some of which were scored out whenever she came up with a more elegant solution.
"How are you doing this?" asked the Doctor, incredulous. "A moment ago, you were delighted by the number one, now you're sketching up quadratic equations!"
Hurrrr didn't stop her work. "It just comes to me," she said, scratching a series of concentric rings into the wall. "When I awoke this morning, my head was filled with sounds, with words. At first I couldn't make any sense of them and I thought I had been taken by some devil and driven mad, like when Hargur ate those mushrooms and we had to bash his head in with a rock so he'd stop trying to eat us too."
"Terrifying," said the Doctor. "Go on."
"Soon though I began to understand. I knew then that this was a gift, that I could use those words to make new ideas. I knew I could revolutionise life on Brot!"
The Doctor looked around. "And Brot – that's this place?"
Hurrrr nodded, carving an X at precise points in each of the rings she had drawn.
"These caves?"
She stopped. "No," she said, and tapped an X on one of the rings she had drawn, "this planet."
The crowd around Mandel had grown substantially as she talked. The man she had knocked over had even thrown a handful of coins into the bucket for her. She had long since moved past aerodynamics and was now describing the storage, principles, and usage of electricity.
"Given enough fuel to burn," she said, "we could power large turbines, which would generate…" she paused as she saw blank faces in the crowd.
"Turbines are like huge waterwheels," she explained, "only they're turned by…" she trailed off again as another thought occurred.
"Water," she said, half to herself. "If we use water to turn the turbines we can generate power without burning fuel. That would be cleaner."
"What is going on here?" shouted the Doctor, ignoring the crowd as they shushed him angrily. "Don't you see? You're developing clean fuel before you've even invented steam power! That can't be right! I mean, well done and all, but there's usually an order to these things!"
Mandel ignored him and started chalking up calculations on the board. "Burning fuel," she muttered to herself, writing some figures above a drawing on a steep arc, wiping them out, and then rewriting them with corrections.
A man prodded the Doctor in the shoulder. "you know the rules. If you have feedback, you need to back it up scientifically. What's wrong with these ideas?"
"Well, nothing," admitted the Doctor, to general scorn from the people around him. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with the calculations. There's something very wrong with all of these ideas appearing like this, right now."
As he spoke, Mandel finished her writing and turned back to face the crowd.
"And that," she announced, pointing to the chalkboard triumphantly, "is how we could send a vessel from Brot to the surface of our nearest moon!"
"Look, who are you?" demanded Professor Fatou. "You wear the colours of our university, but I have never laid eyes on you until today."
"Yes," said the Doctor, "that's another thing that's bothering me. When we spoke earlier you were quite dismissive of my attire, now my coat is somehow the official emblem of your faculty – doesn't that strike you as odd?"
"I'll admit they're a little garish for my taste, but people have been wearing these colours here since before you and I were born. I don't see what relevance that has to you."
"Well, you would think that. Wait a moment," said the Doctor, pacing the stage.
"Earlier, during the lecture – what did you say this planet was called? Brot?"
Fatou sighed. "Don't tell me. First you say you're a time traveller and now you're going to claim you're not even from this planet?"
"Of course!" cried the Doctor, ignoring her. "I've been here twice before! I didn't think anything of it at the time – no offense, but each visit was rather uneventful – but now! Now I can feel the timelines changing. I can feel new memories of those times! Oh, this is so much worse than I thought. The original experiment couldn't have worked on its own, but it could in the presence of a localised source of Artron energy: me! I must have acted like a lightning rod, anchoring that time energy at key points in your history. You're even dressed like me, because that's what was in your mind right before you conducted the experiment!"
Fatou laughed dismissively. "Even if I were to believe that you travelled in time and visited the past, you also expect me to believe that every one of our scientific advances was caused by my experiment? You insult me. Worse! You insult our entire scientific community – our history!"
"Not caused by, no, but every one of your ideas has poured back to the dawn of your civilisation, creating a base of knowledge far earlier than the time in which it was discovered naturally, which your people then build upon for thousands of years until it comes back to now, the present day again, when your experiment, your new, improved experiment sends all of that new and improved information back to the start. Come on! You're an intelligent woman – exponentially more intelligent than you were when I walked in here – I need your help to shut this down!"
She raised her arms to gesture around the now-empty, silent auditorium. "This is your terrible catastrophe?" she asked, her voice echoing.
"I'll admit, it's not the most bombastic near-apocalypse I've ever been a party to," said The Doctor, before trying to appeal to Fatou's scientific nature, "but at least consider the hypothesis!"
"Oh, the hypothesis? Okay, let's be scientific. Where is your evidence?" she said, firmly. "Our scientific progress? This past base of knowledge you speak of is nothing more than the proud and strong tradition of scientific rigour that we have always held paramount."
"Please, you'll just have to trust me! What this experiment is doing," he insisted, "is exactly what you'd expect a massive feedback of energy to do. It's going to build up until it reaches capacity, and then it's going to breach. It's not only knowledge which is looping and building, it's time energy as well, hurtling back through the ages and colliding with itself on the way. That much energy build-up is going to tear a hole in the fabric of space and time from which this universe may never recover!"
"Right, that's it," said the professor crossing to a telephone mounted to a wall at the edge of the stage. "I've indulged you quite enough. You clearly have no intention of being properly scientific and your theories become wilder by the moment. You are a buffoon, sir."
"If you could only," began the Doctor but Fatou cut him off.
"A buffoon!"
Hurrrr continued scratching at the cave wall while the Doctor marvelled at her work.
"Simply astonishing," he murmured to himself. "Not to mention worrying. All this information must be coming from somewhere. But where?"
It was then he noticed that the scratching had ceased. He turned to see Hurrrr stepping towards him with a dark scowl.
"You," she snarled, "are a buffoon!"
"Steady on," said the Doctor, backing away. "Where did this come from?"
"A buffoon!"
The noise drew the attention of the other cave-dwellers, who may have lacked the vocabulary but certainly understood the tone. This strange visitor had outstayed his welcome and fallen from favour.
The Doctor took to his heels and sprinted back to the TARDIS, heavy spears thudding into the dirt mere inches from his feet.
"The moon!" cried the Doctor. "What next? A steam-powered space station?"
Mandel turned. "A space station," she mused. "Interesting. We'd need some way of…"
She stopped, her face clouding over as though a sour notion had occurred to her.
"You're a buffoon," she said.
"I'm a what?" spluttered the Doctor.
"A buffoon!"
"Yeah," agreed a man in the audience. "If you've nothing to add, why don't you clear off?"
The others agreed, loudly and angrily, and the Doctor was forced to sprint back to the TARDIS before they decided to throw anything heavier than coins after him.
The Doctor didn't wait to be escorted out by the university guards, and instead hurried out and back towards his TARDIS. He realised it had been futile trying to reason with Professor Fatou. Fluid as it was, this moment was her reality, the changing past was to her the way things had always been.
But that was okay: all this talk of lightning rods had given him an idea of his own.
The Doctor stepped out of his TARDIS and took a deep breath before dragging a heavy piece of equipment through the doors.
"Better make this quick," he said to himself as he strained to pull the makeshift antenna across the muddy ground. "If I've calculated everything correctly, this should be far enough into the planet's past that I can hijack the time energy before it hits either of my past visits, and ground it here where it can't do any harm. I just needed a bigger lightning rod than myself, and what better than a TARDIS?"
"Sorry about this, old girl," he called through the open doors of his craft. "I'm afraid there's going to be a massive blast of time energy in…"
He pulled a fob watch from his pocket and counted the seconds with a wave of his finger. "Four… three… two… one… and-"
Nothing appeared to happen. There was no blast of lightning from the sky, no tearing clap of thunder, only the ringing sort of silence you get in the absence of a sound you hadn't noticed was there until it was gone.
The Doctor looked around, satisfied, and hoisted the antenna back out of the dirt.
"Well done," he said, patting the side of the TARDIS as he went inside and closed the door. Moments later, with a slow, rumbling roar, the craft disappeared.
In the squelchy square impression left by the departing TARDIS, shoals of primitive, microscopic organisms continued to swarm and consume and reproduce and die, all of them unperturbed by the brief visit of a traveller from a different time and space. All, that is, except for one, which had something new; something that was a first for the planet Brot.
It had an idea.
