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The Age of Paradox 2.5: Miracle Day
"He was fine," Gwen said, looking at Amy in exasperation as they stood on the outskirts of one of the main desks. Rhys had left to try and keep up his current cover of working for the camps, leaving Gwen and Amy to continue posing as nurses while they tried to find Gwen's father. "Then I sweep in like I'm gonna solve everything, and we cause this."
"Just because he had a heart attack doesn't mean it's your fault-"
"He had that heart attack because I made him get up, and now we're just…" Gwen shook her head in frustration, before she walked up to a desk with a computer on it just as a real nurse was standing next to it. "Excuse me, hi; don't want to bother you, but the man who had a heart attack, Geraint Cooper, he's my dad-"
"Sorry," the other woman said abruptly. "Your father's being reclassified; he's Category One."
"Excuse me?" Amy looked at the nurse sharply. "Category One? He's had a heart attack, but he's not going to die of that right now; he just needs time to get over it!"
"I'm sorry, the doctor decides, not me."
"Well, where is this doctor, because I need a word, OK?" Gwen said firmly. "Because my father is not dead."
"Well, you've got till tomorrow morning because then we have to move him," the nurse explained. "Those are the instructions, I'm afraid. All Category Ones go to the Module."
"And what happens there?" Amy asked.
"Sorry, it's not my area; try asking Admin."
"…Oh God," Gwen looked at Amy with anxiety practically stamped on her face as the nurse walked away. "If he's back there… we have to get him out; he's not-"
"I know," Amy said, looking at Gwen with a sense of caution. "But you have to stay calm; we're still working out what's happening to the Category Ones, remember?"
"You seriously think-?"
"I don't think it's good, but we still have time to stop your father being sent on to… whatever happens in the modules, right?" Amy said, clearly trying to sound encouraging. "Just don't do anything…"
"Anything stupid, right?"
"I wasn't going to say that-"
"I get it," Gwen patted Amy on the shoulder, her expression awkwardly apologetic as she looked at the younger girl. "Just… thanks for helping out."
Amy would have felt better about that if she was sure she was doing anything more than providing a sounding-board for what Gwen had to know already. For all that Amy had been trained by the Doctor for the last few years, Gwen had learnt how to deal with things in the field, and the Doctor himself had often observed that experience was the best teacher…
Then again, we never anticipated something this screwed-up; when you get down to it, all we can do is keep trying and hope we don't end up in too big of a mess before we can get Gwen's dad out properly…
As he got out of the bed he'd been dumped on when the Category Ones had been left in the module, Rex was becoming increasingly sickened at the scale of what was going on here. He'd been prepared to just humour Doctor Smith's 'take-charge' attitude because at least the young man seemed to genuinely know what he was talking about where the rest of his team just seemed to be good for shooting or hitting things (and he wasn't even sure if the redhead could do either), but when the man talked about facing the son of Adolf Hitler and a woman who destroyed planets to keep herself alive…
If anyone else had made those speeches, Rex would have thought they were crazy. Coming from the Doctor… he still didn't know who the other man was or how he could make such grandiose claims, but the more Rex thought back on the Doctor's words, the harder it was to shake the idea that he should believe the young man in tweed.
"I'm in the module," he said, thoughts of the Doctor dismissed as he studied the area with his camera. "As you can see, they, er, they treat the patients like… objects."
He was trying to keep his manner controlled, but everything he saw here frankly left him feeling more disturbed about this system. Most of the patients here admittedly didn't look that healthy, given such details as a bloodstained head wound, but at the same time, could they have been saved if the Miracle hadn't happened and people had been given a chance to treat them?"
"This wall is cold," he continued, trying to find something else to focus on as he felt his way along the wall. "I was thinking it might be brick, but… ceramic, maybe?"
Unable to get anything else from that, Rex turned his attention to his 'companions' in the module, occasionally getting the camera up close to confirm their physical condition as he continued his narration. "These people are still alive. I'm starting to think I'm in a refrigeration unit. A lot of these patients are injured, so I can't tell if they've been experimented on or not." A thought occurred to him and he reached out to examine a man's wrist. "And just for the record, this man is warm, which feels strange in this cold place."
Satisfied that there was nothing else he could find out here, Rex turned back to his 'bunk' and pulled out the shirt and jacket Esther had left him earlier.
"I'm gonna go outside and see what I can find in this area," he addressed the camera as he got dressed. "God knows what PhiCorp is doing, but why the hell would they have all these bodies in one place?"
When Rex reached the door, it was almost disturbing how easy it was to get out of this place; clearly nobody was expected to be capable of walking out of these places once they were put inside. Looking around, Rex found two other modules on either side of his one, their doors 'labelled' with a 3 and a 7 respectively. Rex confirmed that his module was listed as 5, which at least confirmed there was a kind of sequence in play here but didn't explain why anyone had come up with it in the first place. Walking carefully away from the module, Rex noticed a distinct lack of cameras looking inward, which again made things easier for him but didn't make him feel that much better about this situation.
As Rex walked around this part of the camp, the more he saw of it the less comfortable he became with this whole situation. On a pragmatic sense, he could tell himself that these people were doing the best they could with limited resources, and it wasn't as though any of the patients they were examining were at risk of dying if they went without treatment for too long, but viewing this from a purely personal level, particularly when he would have been so close to qualifying as a Category One…
"All right," he said, his attention back on the camera after he was satisfied he'd taken in the full area. "There are a total of three buildings in this module, but the capacity is small. There's no way in hell that they'll be able to accommodate all the Category One patients coming in; it's impossible."
There had to be something he was missing about these modules, but what…?
"Attention everyone!" Vera said as she walked into the main office, looking urgently around the room. "Maloney has been dismissed due to negligence of his duty; Doctor Smith and I are taking charge of this camp for the moment!"
"Which means that all activity in this camp is temporarily suspended until we have the time to go over Maloney's operating schedule and decide what works and what doesn't," the Doctor said, clapping his hands together as he stood in the middle of the room. "Further patients can be taken in, but they will be given all due care and attention, and most importantly, nobody should be classified as anything more extreme than Category Twos until further notice; no Category Ones, is that clear?"
"Crystal," Esther stood up with an approving smile on her face, looking around the room in a manner that almost seemed to be daring them to defy her acceptance. "We'll keep it all under control out here."
"Right," the Doctor said as he indicated Maloney's office. "Doctor Juarez and I will be in there for the foreseeable future until we're ready to move on; in the meantime… don't go anywhere."
"And don't do anything to the patients," Vera added as the Doctor walked into the office. "Continue treating them, but they stay in the open; the modules are off-limits, is that clear?"
"Good call," the Doctor nodded at Vera as she joined him in the office, already in position at Maloney's desk and rapidly accessing his computer. "This man had no sense of personal security; would you believe his password was 'Password1'?"
"Was it?" Vera smiled as she closed the door.
"I was checking the obvious ones just to get them out the way before I started trying anything more complicated," the Doctor shrugged as he continued his search. "Still, that's the thing about men like Maloney; they get so comfortable being big fish in small ponds that they don't even realise how small the pond is. I could tell from the moment I met him that we wouldn't convince him to change his ways through more conventional persuasion, so I gave him that quick breakdown of my accomplishments so that he'd just be too busy having a denial-based breakdown to actually argue with us about what we're doing here."
"You deliberately provoked a man into a psychological breakdown?" Vera looked at the Doctor sceptically.
"I told him the truth; is it my fault he couldn't handle it?"
Vera found that she believed him. The tale the other man had told to Maloney sounded impossible on the surface, but the intensity and focus behind the Doctor's words…
"…How old are you?"
"Mmm?"
"You said you've been working for a government task force for longer than Maloney had been alive… you're older than you look, aren't you?"
"I get by," the Doctor shrugged. "Every so often I treat myself to a full-body makeover; it's a remarkably refreshing experience."
"…You know what, I'm just going to go with this," Vera raised her hands in resignation. "It's not like the world couldn't get any crazier right now… anything?"
"Well, for what it's worth, there is enough money here to see about getting these patients something more comfortable without breaking the bank, but beyond that…" The Doctor sighed. "Nothing about who created the modules or explicitly came up with these camps in the first place; PhiCorp is credited as the source, but nothing about who in PhiCorp presented the idea in the first place."
"Hiding behind corporate accountability; why am I not surprised?" Vera observed bitterly. "So what do we do with this?"
"First…" the Doctor began, before his voice trailed off as he stared at the screen in horror. "Oh no."
"What?"
"The modules are furnaces."
"…Excuse me?" Vera looked at the Doctor in growing horror. "Are you saying-?"
"The modules are used to burn the Category Ones," the Doctor confirmed, no trace of joviality in his eyes as he looked up at his new colleague. "Officially it's to prevent the spread of disease and spare people from permanent agony, but I think we all know where things will go from there."
"Because eventually everyone will get ill from something in this new world," Vera nodded in grim understanding. "Or maybe they'll start going after convicts, or someone will decide this is the best way to deal with illegal immigrants-"
"It's like Jack said," the Doctor nodded in acknowledgement. "If we give governments the authority to define life and death, it's only a matter of time before someone else abuses the system. It's the reason why freedom is so important; governments are necessary to maintain order up to a point, but if we give away too many civil liberties…"
"And what are the odds that someone like Maloney could easily have used that as a fucking licence to commit murder if he'd had the time?"
"Let's… not start judging him too harshly," the Doctor said, looking warningly at Vera. "If we start assuming the worst of everyone… well, it sets a poor precedent."
"After everything else he did-?"
"I will not start judging someone because of what they had the potential to do over what they have done to date," the Doctor cut Vera off, standing up to glare firmly at her. "If you have clear evidence that Maloney would have been willing to kill, I'll accept it, but if you're going to start judging people for what they might have done then you might as well get out of here right now. We're just dealing with the middlemen right now, and it's possible that there are people out there who are doing what Mr Maloney did because they genuinely have no idea how to do the job, so help me find the men behind what's going on here so far and then we can work on short-term reform."
"Short-term-?"
"Because I intend to do my best to ensure that's all we need to keep people safe from these camps."
"Because… we're going to stop this? How are you going to do that?"
The Doctor chose not to answer as he continued to search through the files on the computer, wishing that he had something he could pray to in order to increase the chances that he would find something useful.
He would go back to join his other allies soon and re-focus their efforts on finding whoever was responsible for this, but he wanted to be sure that Doctor Juarez had everything she need to mount the kind of campaign he was simply less qualified to organise…