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The Age of Paradox 2.5: Miracle Day
As Jack staggered back to the apartment after being thrown out of the building, having taken a series of punches from Danes' thugs, he made one mental note to look over whatever Danes' next broadcast was going to be about, and another to remember to be more cautious in future confrontations.
He had frankly been lucky that Danes didn't even think of suggesting more lethal damage; right now, Jack had to forget decades of operating on the principle that he could take anything anyone threw at him and evaluate his actions based on the idea that he could actually die now and the rest of the world would assume nobody could die. The Doctor might be taking the lead in this investigation, and Jack appreciated his friend taking charge, but at the same time he had to remember that the Doctor was going to need all the help he could get when dealing with something this big…
I just need to work out what the Hell this has to do with me; am I mortal because of a fluke side effect of whatever did this, or because something specifically targeted me?
"What-?" the Doctor began as soon as Jack walked into the small room.
"I know I was an idiot, so don't bother telling me that," Jack cut his friend off, wincing as he sat down. "I tried to confront Oswald Danes, but he doesn't know anything; he might be the face of this movement, but he's just a sick bastard with a death wish,"
"Death wish?" Natalie repeated uncertainly.
"The man has a death wish and he's now immortal," Rex observed. "It'd be funny if he wasn't such a monster."
"Do we… want to know-?"
"You really don't," Jack shook his head at Natalie. "Trust me, I don't want to know, and it takes a lot to make me feel really sick these days."
"And this is the guy talking about free access to drugs because governments screwed us over in coping with this mess?" Amy asked.
"He's probably hoping he'll find some way to get what he's looking for…" Jack began, before he looked around the apartment and realised that the apartment was surprisingly empty. "Where did everything go?"
"We… might have tipped off whoever we're dealing with that we're on to them," Rex said.
"What?" Jack glared.
"We got a phone call on the phone we took from Rex's boss while you were all away and Esther and K9 tried to run a trace on it," Amy clarified. "We got cut off before we got through more than a few vines, but… well, K9's working on it for future reference."
"Still, even if there's a risk it tipped off whoever's after us, it at least gave us a more practical lead than anything else we have right now," the Doctor conceded.
"We didn't get anything from the PhiCorp download?" Jack asked.
"So far just a few relatively vague comments," the Doctor shook his head as he patted a laptop bag slung over his shoulder. "I managed to look over a few files before we had to pack everything away, but it was mostly generic observations and public theories. Doctors have observed the risks of people becoming germ incubators as diseases multiply and spread in bodies that will remain contagious as long as they exist, and tests have confirmed that even severed body-parts are still aging and pregnancies aren't aborting-"
"Pregnancies abort?" Amy asked. "I mean, you're not just talking about mothers getting abortions, right?"
"Correct, Pond; if they reach a certain stage and the body determines that the pregnancy isn't viable, the mother's body will just… get rid of the baby on its own," the Doctor clarified, his tone particularly solemn as he continued. "But as far as anyone can tell, those self-abortions aren't happening right now; if this immortality isn't ended soon, we run the risk of children being born… I mean, I value life, but there are some conditions that nobody should have to face just to experience it."
"I guess we don't want to know?" Natalie asked apprehensively.
"Probably not."
"Anyway," Gwen said, her face twisting in uncertainty, "right now we don't know how PhiCorp know anything, but we do know that they've got something to do with the charge, which at least gives us a target."
"Quite," the Doctor nodded, the brief smile on his face the only outwards sign of his gratitude for Gwen giving them a more defined goal. "We don't know what PhiCorp have to do with all of this, but they had to know something was about to happen, and now we have a convicted killer preaching about the benefits of free drugs and companies talking about the possibility of dumping contraceptives in the water supply in India…"
"OK, I get the practicalities of that, but that's just sick," Amy observed, her face twisting in an uncomfortable expression.
"Just one of the many long-term complications caused by this 'Miracle' that we need to take into account. Right now the question of PhiCorp stockpiling drugs is a smaller problem, but it's the best clue we've got to anyone having advance knowledge of the Miracle, so the question becomes how we deal with it."
"Which we can work on once we're in our new base of operations," Rex cut in. "For all we know some asshat could be after us any moment, or did you forget why we're packing up?"
"New car?" Jack glanced over at the Doctor.
"We'll take it as it comes," the Doctor replied. "In the meantime, we have a couple of things to deal with before we move on."
A part of Esther felt that she should feel guilty, but even without the fact that parties in the CIA had already sold her out even before she knew anything significant about the current conspiracy, the current team was showing more concern for her as a person in a week than the CIA had shown her in the last few years. She'd been tempted to look in on her sister before they moved on, but Amy had insisted on taking on that particular job herself, arguing that nobody really knew what she looked like apart from those who'd been involved in their initial extradition and she doubted anyone would be looking explicitly for her yet anyway. Esther had given Amy a couple of 'passwords' so that she could assure Sarah that Amy knew her, but it had still taken an effort to convince herself to accept the argument that this was the best way to check on her sister…
Still, as they drove towards California, Esther tried not to think about the references Amy had made to some of Sarah's rants. Her news that someone had come to Sarah's house asking about Esther was worrying, but the way Sarah had been talking about infections in various other parts of the country…
God, we need to find a way to stop this soon, before Sarah does something she'll regret…
As they drove into Venice Beach, towards Jack's latest chosen safehouse, Esther wondered if she could afford to take time out to have a day or two off and enjoy the sunshine. She appreciated that they had to stay alert and ahead of whatever they were trying to track down, but it had been so long since her last vacation, and they had K9 to help with the computer stuff…
"Wow, look at that horizon," Gwen grinned as they got out of the car and walked towards the beach, Rex's earlier complaints forgotten. The town was relatively small, with various small food joints along both sides of the street and elaborate graffiti on some walls, but it at least gave them easy access to a nearby beach. "We've reached the edge of America."
"Decades since I last saw the Pacific," Jack said, as the group took in the sight of the ocean. "Must be about seventy years."
"May be about that for me, give and take," the Doctor mused.
"Are you… kidding what you say things like that?" Esther looked uncertainly at the two men she was surprised to find had won her over as leaders in a manner even Rex had never managed to achieve.
"It's best to leave it," Amy grinned over at Esther. "The Doctor… well, sometimes he likes to be mysterious just because."
"Incredible…" Natalie whispered, looking at the long expanse of sand, the people walking around in swimsuits and carrying surfboards, and the palm trees along the edge.
"Oh yeah…" Amy looked over at the blonde with a wistful smile. "You've… never been to the beach, have you?"
"The water back… where I was born… wasn't exactly the kind you could swim in," Natalie acknowledged, her smile faltering before she looked back at Amy. "Could we… go there later?"
"We have things to do-" Rex began as he walked up to join them.
"Which aren't always going to require all of us, and while you're doing research like that you don't exactly need us," Amy indicated herself and Natalie while giving Rex a cool stare. "Feel free to call us when we're ready to go into PhiCorp itself, but I think you can spare Natalie and I for a bit while you're doing background research, right?"
"You don't just get to-!" Rex began indignantly.
"Natalie is going to have the chance to enjoy herself," the Doctor said firmly, before he smiled over at Amy and pulled a few notes out of his pocket. "Get yourselves something for the beach; everyone only gets one first day at the seaside, after all."
"She's never been to the beach before?" Esther looked between the Doctor and Natalie in surprise.
"I… had a rough childhood; I just didn't have the time," Natalie explained with a shrug. "Before… the Doctor… found me, I didn't really have… well, I never had the chance to just…"
"Say no more," Esther nodded at Amy and Natalie before looking back at Rex with a firm glare. "Amy's right; they can't do anything right now, and this girl deserves a break if she's never seen the beach before."
"…Fine," Rex rolled his eyes in exasperation before he looked over at Jack. "Is this how Torchwood works?"
"We try to offer good vacation opportunities," Jack shrugged. "Gwen got to go to Cuba for her honeymoon."
"Which we appreciated," Gwen smiled over at Jack before she looked back at Amy and Natalie. "Seriously, though, you two enjoy yourselves for a bit; we'll work on cracking PhiCorp."
"Once we've found somewhere to hide while we plan to go after them, anyway," the Doctor observed. "It's just a few miles that way to PhiCorp headquarters in Los Angeles, but we need to put together a proper plan to get in…"
Amy fully appreciated that they were in a dangerous and unprecedentedly complicated situation right now, and she was fully committed to helping the Doctor and his new/old allies solving the mystery of the missing death (and why was she suddenly reminded of some fantasy novel she'd read once?), but she didn't think it was asking too much to get a break when she and Natalie would just be underfoot. Right now the Doctor was obviously needed in case they found something scientific, Jack and Gwen were good at keeping people on-target, Rex likely had a few CIA secrets he could use or at least better understood the American side of things, and Esther and K9's computer expertise went without saying, but Amy couldn't do much when dealing with computers, and Natalie's skills were more on the physical side of things, so it didn't seem unreasonable to enjoy a holiday.
OK, so she would admit to herself that she'd chosen her blue bikini carefully to find something that looked at least a little like the colour of the TARDIS, but there was nothing wrong with liking the colour, right? That said, she was still going to have a talk with Natalie later about diversifying her wardrobe; this was the first time she'd seen Natalie in anything other than the military clothes she'd apparently been 'created' in, and the other woman had just chosen another swimsuit in a similar shade of green to her usual clothes.
It was certainly more revealing than her usual attire, and Amy didn't feel like she was being too hypocritical to worry that Natalie was showing too much when the girl didn't really know how other people might react to her, but the fact that this was the first time she'd seen the other girl in anything different…
"Do Time Lords have something against variety?"
"What?" Natalie looked curiously at Amy, moving up to lean on her elbows and look at her fellow TARDIS companion.
"I mean, the look works for your dad, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I've ever seen him in something but the tweed and bow-tie unless he absolutely has to change, and this is the first thing I've seen you wearing that isn't that uniform and you…" Amy shrugged uncertainly. "Don't get me wrong, the colour looks good on you, but why didn't you try something else?"
"I… I just liked it," Natalie said, sitting up and looking tentatively over at Amy. "I mean, I tried a few things in the wardrobe room, but the shirts always seemed too loose, some of those shoes left me feeling like I was going to lose my balance, I just wasn't sure about any of the gloves or scarves… is… is that a bad thing?"
"Huh?" Amy's eyes widened in new understanding. "Oh, it's not bad, and it's good to know you gave other clothes a shot and just didn't find something you liked; I just… look, I get that you've had an unconventional childhood and all that- OK, bad choice of… actually, how old are you?"
"A few years."
"A few?" Amy repeated.
"I mean, when I left the colony I travelled for a few months before I found something that would let me travel in time, and then I basically just went jumping around time looking for Dad and helping out where I could, so… y'know, I lost count of exactly how long I was in some places, particularly when I was just drifting and ended up falling through a rift or two…"
"Or two?" Amy looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
"I mean, there was the time I fell into an other-dimensional prison and had to stop a telepathic criminal I'd released by accident, this time I had to expose a conwoman who'd gotten the entire population of her planet addicted to drugs while posing as some warped dragon overlord… I ended up stealing my next means of transport to escape and things got complicated," Natalie shrugged. "I ran into some rough patches while I was getting away, but it's hard to be sure if some of them were just spatial anomalies or if some of them were space-time ones, particularly when I don't know what the date was when I got out in relation to everywhere else…"
"How do you know anything about that stuff?" Amy asked. "I mean, don't take this the wrong way, but… I mean, from what your dad told me, you just got created with a bunch of military stuff before he left…"
"I guess I picked up a bit more on instinct than I realised," Natalie smiled as she leant back. "I mean, I had to get a bit more from Dad than anyone else; I think after a certain point the progenitor machines just started taking knowledge from other people rather than relying totally on what was programmed into it already…"
"That… makes sense, I guess," Amy nodded tentatively, before she smiled. "Some schools would really enjoy having that as an option…"
"What was school like?"
Amy just stopped herself from reacting in shock to that question; she appreciated on a practical level that Natalie had never been to school herself, but it was another thing to be faced with that fact all of a sudden…
"It was… well, it could be rough," she said at last. "I mean, I had a bit of a difficult time of it, but that was just because I was… I mean, I established a reputation early on as a strange kid who believed in your dad even when everyone else said I was crazy for it."
"They really thought you were crazy?"
"It wasn't that extreme," Amy observed, not wanting the Doctor's daughter to get a negative impression of humans in an unconventional situation. "I mean, it was hard at the time, but you have to realise that kids can be cruel without meaning it; they just don't think about how what they're doing will really affect other people…"
"That seems-"
"It's not," Amy cut her off. "Kids aren't naturally bad, but they're not naturally good either; you lucked out in getting a great moral example from your dad, but most normal kids need to grow up the hard way and learn how to tell right from wrong with good examples. I had the Doctor's example to help me learn those lessons, but these kids… they just thought I was the weird girl who enjoyed telling a strange story…"
She leant back on her towel with a sigh. "That's what gets me worried about what might happen when we move on…"
"Move on?" Natalie looked at Amy sharply. "You mean leave? You want to leave Dad-?"
"No," Amy said firmly, looking reassuringly at Natalie. "I don't want to leave, but… look, did I tell you about Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith?"
"I think I heard those names…"
"They were old companions of your dad. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but they were each with him for a while a few centuries before us, but… well, Jo decided to move on with her life and become an environmental activist, and Sarah started tracking alien activity as a freelance journalist…"
Noting Natalie's uncertain stare, Amy shrugged. "There might be a few others I don't know about, but at least they had good lives after they moved on from their time with your dad, right?"
"And you expect that to happen to you?" Natalie asked anxiously. "You really think you'll just-?"
"Your father would never make us leave," Amy reached over to place a reassuring hand on Natalie's shoulder. "I mean, I can't say what's going to happen in the future, but I know your dad; he'd never just… kick us out because he's bored, and I'm not going to leave you and him just for the sake of it."
She resisted the urge to comment that most people left the TARDIS to get back to their normal lives; she wasn't sure she'd ever had a 'normal' life since she was seven years old and the Doctor appeared in her garden for the first time, and Natalie had never really had a 'normal' life since hers began.
It wasn't as though Amy wanted to leave, but for the first time she could recall, she suddenly wondered what would make her stop travelling with the Doctor. Would she find some particular planet she wanted to focus on helping, would she just become tired of life with the Doctor, would she decide that she…
"Break's over."
"Doctor?" Amy looked up at the Time Lord in surprise, smiling slightly at the sight of her old friend standing between her and Natalie, looking even more conspicuous than normal wearing his traditional attire in the middle of a beach full of sunbathers. "What's up?"
"Things are getting difficult," the Doctor said, looking between Amy and Natalie as though he was trying to focus on their faces rather than anything lower. "We've managed to find a place, and Esther and K9 are setting it up for computer access by hacking a Chinese satellite network, but… well, have you heard the news?"
"What about the news?" Natalie asked.
"Not only is the health care system being threatened, but apparently there's a small-town mayor arguing that those who've sustained normally death-inducing injuries should be treated as dead and basically ignored."
"Excuse me?" Amy looked at the Doctor in outrage. "What the Hell-?"
"It's the darker part of human nature, Pond; people are faced with an unpleasant truth, and decide that it's easier to ignore it," the Doctor observed grimly. "With some people complaining that they should still be allowed to work as 'sick leave' isn't an issue when they can't die anyway, it was only a matter of time before somebody started speaking out against the technically deceased…"
Amy appreciated that it was somewhat morbid that she preferred thinking about something this twisted to facing her own feelings for the Doctor, but everyone had their own way of coping with things.