BIG BANG

Part II

The Burdens of Management

Ianto Jones knocked on the door frame as he walked into the office of Captain Jack Harkness: three light taps, just as a courtesy. Jack had told him once that he appreciated Ianto's habit of doing that – none of the others did – they would come barging in without warning, usually talking as they entered and rudely interrupting whatever he'd been doing. "Such is the burden of management!" The couple of seconds during the knocking, he'd told Ianto, gave him a chance to properly file away whatever he'd been thinking or doing. To Ianto, it seemed eminently reasonable, and he always knocked first.

Jack looked up and smiled, "What's up?"

"I'm not sure, but something is going on at the Royal Observatory, you might want to connect and have a look."

Jack nodded and returned to his laptop, dismissing Ianto in the same efficient movement. But then he looked over his shoulder and called out, "Who do we have there?"

Ianto turned to look at him, "Alan Kroeker. Not official, mind you, but aware."

Jack was already into the system, looking for breadcrumbs and he found something immediately. Alan Kroeker was texting with someone… someone in the Western United States who'd just contacted him with a piece of improbable news. In real time Jack watched their conversation. The person in the U.S. was clearly alarmed, if not verging on totally freaked. In another computer window Jack was examining the American man's bio. Name of Josh Rasey, resident of Taos New Mexico, emergency room technician, divorced. And… (Jack rolled his eyes) an astronomy hobbyist. "God save me from amateurs!" he exclaimed loudly, the others in the office pointedly ignoring him.

But even as he looked back to his display, Jack's heart was beginning to beat a little faster – something did seem to be odd. Rasey appeared to know what he was talking about and Kroeker seemed to be taking him very seriously….

Jack's train of thought was interrupted -- by Owen coming through the door, and as expected not knocking first. "Jack, I just got a call from the Navy, seems there is something wrong with the tide height on the Thames."

Jack looked at Owen's face and emptied his mind. It was a sort of recalibration he did to clear out his "cache" (as he thought of it) and refocus entirely on the situation at hand. Abruptly, all of the phones at Torchwood started ringing simultaneously. Owen gave an exasperated look and rushed out of Jack's office to answer one of the calls and Jack picked up his own phone, but he really didn't listen to whoever was speaking to him. He stared up at the ceiling and already knew that whatever it was, it was going to be bad. Very Bad.

With his free right hand he lightly touched his heart. "Doctor," he sub-vocalized. "Doctor… I need you."

Something's Burning

Wil was at the gym, working out. She was working out really hard and producing quite a sweat. But she wasn't thinking about sweat, nor was she thinking about the elliptical machine that she was pumping with her legs, arms swinging freely at her side. Instead, she was reliving a rather embarrassing meeting earlier that day in her department at the London School of Economics. The Chair of her department, the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method had mortified her by calling her his "little Wilamena" in front of the rest of the faculty. "My little Wilamena," he'd said, "you can't really expect that we'll let you teach a course called 'The Physics of Sport'! You just have to get that silly notion out of your pretty little head!"

Wil was incensed – not only had he been insulting and condescending, but he'd called her by her given name, and no one ever did that. "Jerk, jerk, jerk…" she chanted to herself as she continued marching on her machine.

Sometimes she wondered what she was doing, instructing at LSE when what she really wanted to be doing was particle physics research at the Large Hadron Collider, not trying to teach physics to snotty-nosed kids who would never be interested in science. "It just burns me," she thought… but then, she noticed through the haze of emotions, she was burning. She was overheated way more than usual. But it wasn't her, she abruptly realized, it was her elliptical. It was warm – hot to the touch, in fact, and she hopped off just in time to see it start glowing a dull orange.

From behind her she heard, "What the hell?" and turned around to see someone else hopping off an exercise bike and patting his legs down, as if trying to put out a fire. She looked around and while she saw, she didn't understand what it was she was seeing – it looked like everything in the room was getting hot as if there was a fire, but there was no fire. The plastic yoga mats began to curl up and… what was it they were doing? Melting?!

The small handful of people who were there at the athletic club on a late weekday morning started moving towards the doors. Other plastic items began to morph into odd shapes: the exercise balls and the small hand weights sagged and pooled. Wil leaned over to pick up her gym bag, but it looked unusual, "Damn! Plastic!" she hissed and decided to leave it and get out… She definitely needed to get out of this place which made absolutely no logical sense… A place that looked more like a Salvador Dali painting than the gym she visited fastidiously every day. Thank God she had, in the pocket of her shorts her keys and her cell phone. The rest of her stuff she could live without.

As she made her way through the door she took a deep breath of cool air and thankfully observed that things appeared more normal outside the gym. But did they? People were filing out of other buildings, more or less calmly although some did look a bit frightened as their eyes did what her eyes were doing – taking in the situation.

A man, a few feet away from her, was tossing his mobile back and forth between his hands as if it were… hot. She pulled out her own cell from her pocket and it was indeed warm – warmer than just her body heat would've made it. But her device was metal, not plastic. It had been designed for rugged backcountry use and how in the world it could be so warm, she didn't have a clue. As a physicist she knew it was a fundamental law of nature that things just did not get hot by themselves.

As she examined it, the mobile rang and Wil stared at it in surprise. If she'd not been so worried, she might've smiled. When she'd gotten her Doctorate from Oxford she'd been contacted by an organization that wanted to pay her a small retainer fee. "Consultant, as needed," they'd said. She would've forgotten about them except for the monthly deposits to her bank account. In over two years she'd not heard a peep, until now that is. Now, as she looked down, she saw the word "Torchwood" on her cell's display and she quickly answered the call with a calm and professional "Here".