Nothing in the Doctor Whoniverse belongs to me, until I find a way to steal my own time machine and go back to the 60s to sell the BBC on my totally not stolen idea.
The Doctor stomped down the street, pushing his way through the snow – six inches deep and soaking cold at his ankles. Rose hurried to keep up. She had given up trying to understand his angry mutterings. Gateway was locked against them, and even though the sonic screwdriver could deal handily with any (metal) lock, it was little help against the guards and security cameras that they would find inside. This wasn't one of their usual adventures; they had no easy enemy to fight, no clear answer to the problem at hand. There were no plastic mannequins come to life; no aliens, real or fake, trying to take over the world; no ghostly apparitions begging for release.
Rose frowned. She had a feeling she knew why the Doctor was angry, why this adventure was hitting so close to home, and had little to do with their helplessness in the face of an impenetrable brick wall.
She had always wondered, always questioned somewhere deep down, what exactly had happened in that cellar in Cardiff. The Doctor had promised that he wouldn't leave Gwyneth while she was in danger, and Rose believed him when he said afterwards that she'd been dead from the moment she stepped into the arch. But Rose also knew that the young servant woman might never have been in danger if the Doctor hadn't encourage her to use her psychic abilities to open the rift, a gateway for the Gelth. The Doctor knew it too, and it didn't matter if Gwyneth was dead or alive when she struck that match. She had been trapped in the rift, and the Doctor couldn't save her.
And now this place, another Gateway, another young woman trapped between two worlds, and it didn't matter whether the Doctor put her there or not. He was determined not to let this one die.
Lost in thought, Rose's steps had slowed and now she had to skip a few paces to catch up with him. "Doctor, wait," she called, tired of both the walking and the mood he was in. "Look, there's a pub still open. Come on, Doctor, it's freezing out here and I'm starving!" She caught his arm and pulled him out of the road.
The pub was actually a small bar and grill restaurant. Old and out of date, the place was still clinging to its turn-of-the-century décor; the heavy wood and metal motif harkened back to the North Dakota oil boom of the early 2000s, before fossil fuels went the way of the dinosaurs and solar batteries took over. These days, of course, solar batteries were falling out of vogue. The climate wars were being waged on view screens all across the globe, but that could last only so long. The human race was hungry for energy, and if Dr. Kuri promised them a brand new, untapped, sustainable power source, what capitalist government would stand in his way?
Or, so the Doctor had said, muttering under his breath, while they were seated at a small table in the corner near the bar, handed menus by an indifferent server in blue shirt and stained apron, and looked over the selection. Rose tried to remember what they called chips in this country, but decided to order a chicken salad sandwich instead. The Doctor took tea and nothing else. Rose smiled; even she knew that American restaurants couldn't brew a cuppa if their liquor license depended on it. She asked for coffee instead. It was going to be a long night.
The bar was used to late-working researchers and hard-drinking students of the Institute, and no one batted an eye at the two of them when they entered. An elderly man and woman were seated together at a short table near the door, half a dozen young men stood clustered around the bar, jeering at the late-night, live broadcast of some ballgame being played half a world away. Another man sat alone in the shadows at the other end of the bar, staring mournfully into his beer mug. Rose watched him for a moment; he was the closest to them, and the only person who could possibly hear what they were talking about, but the man was so lost in his own unhappy world that she didn't think he heard even the raucous sports fans, let alone their quiet conversation.
She turned her attention back to the Doctor. He had finished his history lesson – Rose began to suspect that it was more of a nervous tic for him to show off that way, rather than a deliberate effort to be insufferable – and he tapped his fingers erratically on the table, watching her expectantly.
"I'm sorry, what?" she said. She hadn't heard him ask anything.
"Isn't this where you say, let's try… something?" he said, spreading out his hands to encompass all her hypothetical suggestions.
"You shot down my last idea," she said, but she was glad to see that he had finally moved on from his sulk and was ready to take action again.
"We've got to find a way back into Gateway," she said. "I'll look out for guards while you get Carmen out of that energy, time field thingy. Once she's safe, we blow up the equipment, erase the computer hard drives to destroy their backup files, then we nip back up to the Tardis and disappear. They'll never know we were here."
The Doctor smiled fondly, and then he frowned.
"You can't get her out, can you?" Rose said, seeing the look in his eye.
"What? Yes. Maybe… Probably, if I had the… time." He leaned toward her, looking at her intently. "Why did you say that?"
"Say what?"
"You said time-energy field. Why?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. She just looked… frozen in there, not moving or blinking or anything. And those stasis pods we found, you said the seed was trapped in a time loop. What if Dr. Kuri was working on both projects? If Carmen is frozen in time… Dr. McNeal said they're looking for immortality."
The Doctor stared at the bits of stem floating in his mug of tea. "She's not frozen in time," he said. "Not frozen. Those computers were monitoring her vital signs. It's measuring her heartbeat, but not beats-per-minute; her pulse was being measured in nanoseconds."
"So she's scared," Rose said, and then she realized what he was saying. "But that's not possible. A human heart beating as fast as that, it would explode."
"Unless it wasn't," he said, smiling at her confusion. "It's not an energy field, Rose, not even a time-energy field." He looked down at his tea instead of at her. "It shouldn't be possible, but somehow they've tapped into the Time Vortex itself. That machine, it really is an electromagnetic energy converter, or at least that's what it used to be. Most people have given up magnetics by now. The energy is too weak for anything but parlor tricks, but somehow, Dr. Kuri must have altered the locator circuits on the field generator. He was trying to tap the Earth's magnetic field, but he found an opening into the Time Vortex instead. And it's my fault."
He sat back and looked at her with haunted eyes. "It's all my fault."
"Doctor, we just got here. It's not…"
"We just got here, yes, but I've come to Earth so many times, materialized out of the Time Vortex hundreds… no, thousands of times over the years. If the interface is weakening, how do I know it's not me that's weakened it? It's my fault."
Rose sighed. No, it wasn't, she knew, not this time. But he wouldn't believe her if she said that. "It doesn't matter how it happened, Doctor. Time field, energy field, none of that matters. How long can Carmen live inside that machine?"
"She shouldn't be alive at all. The energy field that Dr. Kuri has created, it's like a bubble sitting on top of a bubble." He spread his hands out on the table. "You see, there are two adjacent time continuums running side by side but at different rates. The Time Vortex is the… no, wait, there are three bubbles. One inside the other, and the other outside them both… You understand?"
She shook her head.
He sighed and ran his hands over his face. Sometimes it was so much easier not have to explain these things to someone else. "Look," he dipped his fingers into his mug of lukewarm tea and began drawing on the table. "This bubble is our timeline, where we are now. This bubble here, on top of that one, is the Time Vortex – only it's not a bubble, it's a more like a long tunnel or, no, an inverse funnel, a maelstrom that loops infinitely back into itself…" He smeared a few more lines.
"Back to the point, Doctor," Rose interrupted. "Where's the third bubble?"
"Hm? Right. The Time Vortex, here." He swiped his wet fingers along the side of the first circle and then drew a second, smaller circle at the intersection of the two. "The third bubble, Dr. Kuri's energy field, is this. It's a piece of the Time Vortex pulled into this timeline and twisted off. The magnetic field generator is designed to contain a large amount of free-range energy within a set radius of neutral space." He saw Rose was beginning to look confused again and sighed, "Within the circle of the energy field, the bubble, if we must continue this ridiculous metaphor. But if that bubble were to pop…" He wiped a smear through the swirls of tea on the table.
"…the Time Vortex would open into this world," Rose said. "What happens then?"
"Nothing," he said.
"What, nothing at all?"
"Quite literally, nothing. At all. Poof. Possibly the implosion would be limited to this corner of space, a few dozen galaxies, a few million lightyears, but who knows? Once the tear is open, it could spread along the whole length of the Vortex until there's nothing left. All of time and space, poof."
Rose sat back in her chair. You would think that after a dozen or so times, saving the world would get less exciting, less frightening, but it didn't. Someone was building a doomsday machine, and the only two people who could stop it were blocked by a single locked door. And twenty or so guards with thirty or so guns. And a state-of-the-art security system. But who was she to quibble of something like that. They were stuck.
"Doctor," she said slowly. "You said that Mia Chen was dead?"
He looked up but didn't speak.
"Are you sure?"
He nodded. "I think that Mia went into the energy field just like Carmen did."
"But Carmen is alive. So if she's…"
"But she shouldn't be," the Doctor interrupted. "I told you, you can have two adjacent time continuums running side by side. We are in one, Carmen is in the other. Hers is going faster than ours, but something, I don't know what, is holding her in place, keeping her safe like the tree in the stasis field, but the time around her is still moving. She should have been dead before she crossed the interface.
He shook his head. "Crossing from one time continuum to the other, it creates a sort-of whiplash effect. If you're going from a slower continuum to a faster one, you age forward into dust; if you go from faster to slower time, it's like being flattened across a brick wall. In theory, anyway. Obviously, no one's survived long enough to find out," he laughed uncomfortably.
"It's basic temporal physics," he said, looking down at the smeared tea soaking into the table. "Without a field-interface stabilizer, you can't cross from one continuum to… the… other…"
Rose looked up as his words trailed off. His eyes had widened and had a wild look in them. She knew that look. He had figured it out.
"Doctor, what…?
"Excuse me?" A voice spoke from beside their table. Rose looked up and recognized the young man who had been sitting alone at the bar. He was Asian, Chinese, she guessed, and his dark hair was uncombed, pushed back from his creased forehead. "Excuse me," he said again. "How do you know my sister?"
Rose blinked at him. "Your sister?"
"Mia Chen. I heard you say her name. I heard you say that my sister is dead."
.
Andrew Chen sat with a fresh cup of steaming coffee clenched between his two hands. The Doctor was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed and head turned to one side; he was pretending to be interested in a display of local art on the wall next to their table – art that a lesser connoisseur would have called a stack of rusty license plates nailed to an old board.
Rose sighed. When Andrew had sat down with them, she had successfully not rolled her eyes at the Doctor's huff. She never had understood why he felt the need to sneer at every other man she talked to. He was overprotective, but she liked to think that her dad would have been the same, if he hadn't…
She pushed those thoughts aside. "Andrew," she said. "We thought… I mean, the way Carmen talked about you, I thought you lived in Iowa."
"Mia said it was better that way, if no one knew I was here," he said. "Our parents died a year ago, and a few months after that, I came up to visit Mia, to see how she was." He shook his head. "She was messed up, working long hours, not eating or sleeping. She had applied to Gateway because she knew it would make our parents happy. They always said she'd do great things." Andrew tried to smile but failed miserably.
"I wanted her to come home with me, but she wouldn't leave Gateway. She'd just been assigned to Dr. Kuri-Hunt's team, researching magnetic fields, and she was so excited. She was stressed out and miserable, but excited, and no one in that place cares about you as long as you hand in your work on time." He looked at Rose, and she smiled reassuringly.
"You work for Gateway," the Doctor said, not a question but an accusation.
Andrew stared at him. "How did you…"
"You've got one of their badge-things there, under your coat."
Andrew looked down. Sure enough, the corner of his Gateway ID card was poking out from under the edge of his coat. "Oh. Right." He tucked it back again. "They had an opening for an electrician, so I applied. I wanted to keep an eye on my sister, but she made me swear not to tell anyone that I was her brother. She didn't want anyone thinking that she'd got me the job, and it was Gateway. Nobody there has any family, not that they talk about. That would distract them from their work."
"And no one figured it out?" Rose said, surprised. "You've got the same last name."
He shrugged. "It's a pretty common name. Like Smith or Hernandez. Ever since the Great Firewall fell in China, there've been a lot of Chens applying to American universities. There's been five Dr. Chens at Gateway in the last three years."
"Did Mia tell you what Dr. Kuri has been working on?" the Doctor asked.
Andrew shook his head. "She said it was secret, but she didn't like it. I didn't see much of her the last few weeks, though. Her and Carmen were spending a lot more time together, and since Carmen didn't know who I was…"
"The two of them were pretty close," Rose said, trying to be subtle.
He gave her a strange look. "They were dating," he said. "Carmen practically lived at Mia's apartment until…" He hesitated.
Rose tried to appear encouraging, the Doctor only looked impatient. Andrew looked back and forth between the two of them as if wondering why he was trusting them with so much, but eventually he shrugged and went on.
"About a week ago, Mia showed up at my apartment. She was crying and a mess. I hadn't seen her like that since our parent's died. She said that Dr. Kuri had done something, she say what exactly, but it had something to do with a dog, some stray that Kuri had picked up. Mia loved animals. She's not usually squeamish about the dissections and all that, she knows its part of the process, but this one really shook her. She said that it went against nature."
"That's when she decided to confront Dr. Kuri," the Doctor said, nodding. It made sense. "He's trying to find a way to cross the time field interface. The stasis pods were part of the experiment, but I had it backwards. He wasn't trying to keep the time loop inside the pod. He wanted to build something that would keep the time winds out. And he's moving up in the food chain. First trees, then a dog. Mia was probably just an accident, but she was a convenient first step into human testing."
The Doctor was frowning at his own thoughts, not paying attention to them, but Rose winced and glanced at Andrew.
"So it's true," he said. "You really think that she's dead. But she can't be. Where's her body? People don't just disappear, and even Dr. Kuri can't carry a body out of Gateway without somebody saying something!"
"They didn't have to carry her out," the Doctor said angrily and in that voice he used when he was dumbing something down for the lesser alien species. "She fell into Dr. Kuri's energy field and was disbursed by the Time Vortex. She's here!" He snatched up a handful of napkins and threw them into the air. "And here!" He dipped his fingers in the tea and flicked he droplets at Andrew. "Your sister is here, there, everywhere," he said. "A billion, billion atoms scattered across time and space! She's gone."
More than a few eyes were on them now, and Rose could see the bartender watching them very carefully. She smiled nervously, trying to look as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on, and scooped up as many tea-soaked napkins as she could reach.
Andrew stared at the Doctor. His fist tightened. Rose recognized the look of someone about to take a swing, and she wouldn't have stopped him if he did, but didn't. He stood up and slammed his knuckles down against the table. "She is not dead," he said, cold anger in his eyes, and then he turned and walked out of the bar.
Rose sighed and stood up to follow him.
"Let him go," the Doctor said.
"You know, you can be really thick sometimes," she snapped. He looked up in surprise. "He works for Gateway," she explained slowly. "Which means that he can get us back inside. If you hadn't just run him off."
The Doctor opened his mouth, then closed it again. He stood up to follow her, but she stopped him with a hand on his chest. "Nope. You, pay the check." She jerked her head toward the cash register. "I'll catch him up. He definitely doesn't want to talk to you." Smiling to herself, she left the bar, and left the Doctor to sort out their bill.
.
Rose found Andrew not far down the road, standing in the doorway of a closed-up shop. He was crouched down against the cold, his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders shaking as he sobbed. She hesitated and put a hand on his shoulder.
"It's alright," she said, even though it wasn't. "He can be like that sometimes," she said, even though she knew that it was actually most of the time.
"I couldn't even tell anyone," he said, standing up and wiping his tears on the back of his sleeve. "When I heard what they said, that she'd quit and gone home… gone home to be with me! I knew it was a lie, but I had to keep working. I had to find out what really happened to her."
Rose saw the determined look in his eye. "You've been investigating, too," she said.
He nodded. "When Mia showed up at my apartment, she said she didn't want me working there anymore. She said it would be bad enough if they found out I was her brother, but she knew I'd been looking around, reading files I wasn't supposed to – I had access through the IS computer terminal. Mia said there were people who'd come from Gateway who could have you disappeared if they thought you were trouble."
"Dr. McNeal said they were more interested in GMO potatoes," Rose said.
"Yeah, well, that's what most people think. And they are. A lot of their work is good stuff, helping people, curing diseases, but that doesn't bring in the big bucks, does it? That's not what their donors are interested in, or their stockholders. From what I've read, Dr. McNeal used to be a good person. They say she got her start in Africa, in the nineties; she helped find the cure for Malaria, and she was part of the team that developed the new meds they used to treat Ebola. But that was before she came here. You don't get promoted to Head of Projects without knowing how to play to a room of billionaires, and no billionaire is going to write a check for a new kind of potato."
Rose nodded. That sounded like the world that she knew. "You said that Mia and Carmen were dating," she said.
He nodded. "Mia really loved that woman. I don't know why. Carmen seemed like just another intern, nicer than most. She never looked down her nose at me or the other staff, but she was so quiet. Mia was always hearing other people talk at her. I think she liked the quiet." He smiled sadly.
Rose didn't want to push him, but they were short on time. She touched his arm. "Carmen is still in there," she said. "She's trapped in Dr. Kuri's machine and the Doctor and I can't get her out without you."
"Mia really loved her," Andrew said. He looked away down the street, toward the imposing edifice of Gateway Institute. He nodded. "I was getting tired of that job, anyway," he said.
Soon after, the Doctor finally joined them. He was muttering something incoherent about a 400% tip, but fell silent when he saw them.
"I apologize," he said to Andrew, short but sincere. "Now, what do we have for a plan?"
The Doctor had a few more questions for Andrew before they started back toward Gateway. They had a plan, and a way back inside. Now, all they needed now was a little luck and for a whole lot of guards to be out on their coffee break.
Pop Quiz: Who can remember which famous Time Lady first taught us, "You can have two adjacent time continuums running at different rates, but without a field-interface stabilizer, you can't cross from one to the other?"
-Paint
