Solipsism

Jack: A Proper Adventure

My God, he is such an easy target. Seriously, The Doctor is even more gullible than poor clueless Ianto, especially when he's in his full-bore pedagogical mode. It's almost too easy…

And the funniest thing, the most fun thing, is that he's not getting any better at it. It still takes him about two full seconds to figure out I'm screwing with his head. Honestly, I watch for the look of revelation behind those dorky glasses of his and it just doesn't get any faster. Two seconds. That's it. He's hardwired with a two-second BS detection delay. He's such a hoot.

"It sounds like something out of pulp science fiction," I decide it's time to get serious and become a full participant in the discussion, "and scarcely believable. Never mind the solid shell, which I agree would take utterly fantastic amounts of building material…"

"An entire multi-planet solar system of building material…" He interrupts, peering at me over his glasses, which as usual have slipped down on his nose; I resist the urge to use my finger and push them back up.

"Right," I continue, thinking out loud as I work through it. "You'd have to excavate, would that be the right word? Consume, I guess, an entire solar system of matériel to come up with sufficient stuff to construct such a shell. And then it'd be vulnerable to all manner of threats such as comets and meteors. And how would you control drift relative to its central star? Obviously such drift could lead to a collision, which would be a very bad thing..."

"Oh, obviously..." The Doctor smiles as he interrupts me, his eyes bright.

I shake my head as much at his silly grin as at the topic at hand. "But even your description of a bubble of satellites seems almost absurd."

"Why?" He's peering at me keenly.

"Well, any such system, whether a solid shell or something less rigid, like your bubble, would inhibit if not totally curtail the light coming from the star…"

"So? That's the whole point," The Doctor shrugs. "To absorb, and re-radiate, all the energy from that star."

"Yeah, I know." Something had been creeping me out there for a second, but I seem to have lost it amidst the overheated academic speculation. I look at him, but there's no help from that direction. He's blinking back at me with his usual inscrutable Time Lord intensity. He's waiting for me to say something clever, damn it. I trawl my mind. "I guess it's the megascale level of engineering – stellar engineering – that makes me uncomfortable. To remodel an entire solar system? To dam up the light of a whole star? It's almost incomprehensibly arrogant."

"A bit too much like terraforming maybe?" His brown eyes are suddenly penetrating.

Something clicks. "You're right," I say to him. "It does have that distinct odor, doesn't it? Filling in wetlands, strip-mining mountain plateaus, and chopping down rain forests is bad enough, but altering an entire solar system to suit one's own needs is seriously pretentious. The power and arrogance behind it disturbs me on a very visceral level."

The Doctor softens his gaze, "You're not alone. It intimidates the hell out of me as well, and our experiences with the Terraformers don't make it any easier to contemplate. The Time Lords, from what I can tell, purposefully chose to stay away from such stellar engineers – that's a good term, by the way! – and there may be good reason for it. Or maybe not… My people tended to be incurious about and easily threatened by those few civilizations they perceived as more advanced and/or more intelligent."

I nod; I'm not sure what else to say at this point because it feels like The Doctor is weighing something important in his mind. I've learned that during times like this he wouldn't hear me even if I did speak. I'm not one hundred percent certain he'd hear a bomb if it went off right next to his head. So I just watch him. It still amazes me to be so fortunate to even be able to say those four words: I just watch him. I wonder if it will ever stop amazing me.

Or if I will ever become accustomed to it; I pray not. I think about all those centuries I searched for him, all those decades I waited for him. During those dark years I would often fantasize what it would be like to find him: first I'd kiss him and then I'd kill him; that's how extreme and powerful my feelings were for The Doctor. When I finally did manage to find him, it seemed for the longest time like he was either always running away from me, or I was always running away from him.

But now that's all changed – and I don't want what I've finally found to ever end.

He's off somewhere else for a few moments, staring into space, and then he tilts his head and smiles wickedly in my direction, "Seems to me if the Time Lords stayed clear of them, that gives us all the more reason to go knocking on the sphere builders' door! What do you think?"

I shrug, "Didn't I hear you say something about a proper adventure?"

"Oh yes!" His eyes light up and I feel a thrill run up and down the skin in the small of my back. Or is it a chill? Whatever, I love it when he gets that look on his face.