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The Age of Paradox 2.5: Miracle Day
With the preparations made in the storeroom, the Doctor and Jack led the way towards what was apparently the heart of the Blessing, Danes and Gwen close behind and K9 basically in the middle. If any of them became aware of an approaching guard, K9 quickly moved forward to stun the guard as the others continued; at this stage it was best to be quick and discreet so that they were ready to 'attack' once they reached their final destination. By the time they reached the lift that was apparently at the heart of this complex, the Doctor wondered how he'd managed for so long without a model of K9 as a companion; the dog was a technical genius and he made it so much easier to deal with obstacles in a non-lethal manner.
"Right," the Time Lord said, as he stopped at a corner, a security camera just visible in front of the lift further down. "K9, you stay up here."
"Master?" K9 asked.
"We can't give these people too many reasons to ask too many questions about me; if you come down, they'll immediately start wondering where I got a robot dog like you and someone might get too jumpy too soon," the Doctor explained. "You stay up here and keep an eye on the exit; if anyone else comes up that lift who isn't us, or tries to use it from this end, stun them before they can get away."
"Affirmative," K9 responded.
"Good," the Doctor grinned at his old friend before he turned to the others. "Shall we?"
After exchanging a final grim nod, the three humans and the Time Lord walked down the corridor and into the elevator, Jack pressing the button for the lowest level as he and Gwen waited by the door, the Doctor and Danes behind them.
As they descended, the Doctor was slightly let down to see that the area at the bottom of the shaft didn't even seem to be any kind of finished construct at all. As far as the Time Lord could see, they were standing amid a mass of scaffolding that seemed to have been designed to serve as a 'building' in its own right and nothing else, with a few large cans the only sign of 'furniture' in the area. The strange cleft at the other end of the room was certainly an unusual feature, putting the Doctor in mind of an organic structure despite being several miles underground, but he would analyse that later.
When the elevator opened, the Doctor wasn't surprised to find that they were faced by a group of men in blue uniforms holding guns, along with an older woman in a grey suit that somehow managed to look modern and ancient at once with close-cut blonde hair. He noted a red-haired woman in a red coat and black dress behind the other woman, but once he confirmed that was Jilly Kitzinger he decided to ignore it; Kitzinger wasn't important now.
"Captain Jack Harkness," the woman said in the cool tone of someone who thought they were always in control. "At last."
"No, no, no, no," Danes said, carefully advancing forward. "This isn't about Jack. No, ma'am. Excuse me, but it's not at all. My name is Oswald Danes. Well. Hmm. Good evening, Miss Kitzinger. You've been promoted. And this is the new empire you're servicing? My, my, my, my, my, my, my."
"With all due respect, Mister Danes," the woman said with a cool tone in her voice, "you're a by-product of the Miracle. Not really relevant at all."
"That's what the Captain said," Danes retorted (the Doctor chose to just be grateful that the killer wasn't mentioning his own contributions to that particular confrontation; right now there was nothing wrong with staying low-key). "He tried to tell me that my life has become a very small thing- tiny- and yet right here, right now, at the very end, I would describe myself differently. I would call myself… vital."
With that statement, Danes opened his coat to reveal the plastic explosives Jack and the Doctor had strapped to his chest, the trigger on display in his hands as he looked around the room.
"Madam," Danes said, as Jack walked up to stand alongside him, "you're a fine woman. You should be careful now, very careful indeed. It seems like you've been planning some kind of an explosion, but I'd love to make sure you're still inside."
"Advantage, Torchwood," Jack said, looking firmly at the woman.
"Well, I'm afraid we have a major disagreement here in Buenos Aires," a new voice said over a radio. "I'd say Advantage Families. Say hello to your friends."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Jack called out.
"He means us," Rex's voice said, the American's voice sounding strained.
"Rex?" Gwen said. "Oh my God. And the others?"
"All here," Esther's voice said. "They caught us."
"Just glad to hear you're alive," Gwen said, unable to stop herself grinning (the Doctor had to admit that he was fighting down the urge himself).
"I'll swap your standoff for my standoff," the first unfamiliar voice said.
"Don't you do it," Rex said, as the sound of guns clicking into action was heard.
"But nobody dies," the unknown voice said. "She'll keep on living, just perforated."
"Threaten me, you coward, not her," Rex said. Whoever he was defending, the Doctor was almost prepared to forgive Rex's past attitude for that one act of courage.
"Rex," Esther said, which affirmed who was currently in danger. "Hey; I'm OK."
"If you hurt her, we've got explosives here ready to go," Jack said resolutely.
"And don't imagine I won't," Danes called out with a mocking edge. "Whatever happens here tonight, there's no place on Earth that I can go, and I wasn't planning on coming out of here alive."
"So who's gonna lose their nerve first?" the other voice said as the Doctor heard guns heing clicked off.
"The thing is," Jack pointed out as he walked down the stairs, "we don't need explosives or guns or threats, because I've got the most powerful thing of all…"
"Jack?" the Doctor looked at his friend in surprise as the ex-Time Agent began to slow down, looking around to find that the world around him had also come to a halt. For a moment, the Doctor could only look around and wonder what had just happened, but then the answer came to him when he found himself looking at the bald, one-armed figure of the Grandfather.
"You again?" he said critically.
"Where else would I be?" the Grandfather smirked at the Doctor, the other self standing just behind the blonde woman. "It's always so much more satisfying when your enemy knows just how thoroughly you've won."
"Because of that?" the Doctor indicated the cleft that was apparently the Blessing. "What even is that, anyway?"
"One of the mysteries we've never been able to solve," the Grandfather grinned, and even that smile was a twisted version of the grin the Doctor was used to seeing on his own face three bodies ago. "We don't even know why it's not a volcano if it passes through the centre of the planet; we just know that it works."
"What happened to letting your future selves tell you how things worked once they found the answers?"
"One of those policies we have to be… frustratingly careful about utilising these days," the Grandfather said with a dismissive shrug (the Doctor chose not to mention that he recognised that particular quirk as the way that particular body spoke when he was trying to avoid a question he didn't want to answer). "In any case, finding it meant that we had to be sure that we had the information necessary to put the pieces together, which forced us to wait until information exchange would allow us to process the numbers. The pieces started to fall into place when the right people noticed that the people living within a particular two mile area were always living to the same age of the average life expectancy of the world, whatever that might be."
"As though something in those areas was calibrating a matrix to subsist in harmony alongside the human race," the Doctor observed. "And from there the Families took control and put this all into action?"
"Buying up the relevant property wasn't that hard for our agents after everything they'd invested over the decades," the Grandfather said dismissively. "The only hard part was keeping you out of the picture long enough to actually do something about it."
"Hence using Rose to send the TARDIS to the other realities?"
"It was a complex endeavour, but well worth the attempt. Once we were sure you were out of the picture, all we had to do was plant the right ideas in the right minds and let it all unfold."
"I see," the Doctor nodded, waving a hand at the group already gathered in the cavern. "How many of these people are Faction?"
"Oh, it's a Faction affair for the key players, but for the majority… they're all related, but they don't all know the bigger picture," the Grandfather shrugged. "Sometimes it's easier to let humans become monsters all on their own. What was it you said about the self-proclaimed Doctor Knox? You knew he was human because of his sheer inhumanity?"
"Something along those lines," the Doctor acknowledged with a brief nod. "And let me guess, you're only telling me this now because you think I can't stop it?"
"Of course you can't stop it," the Grandfather waved a dismissive hand. "Just wait to see what else the Mother has to tell you about how the Blessing works."
"The Mother?"
"Her title," the Grandfather waved his hand at the woman in grey in front of him. "And now I think it's time for you to see how much trouble you're in."
"It wants me," Jack said, as time restarted and the Grandfather vanished, the former leader of Torchwood Three holding up a cut finger to watch as the cleft drew the blood towards it. "Mortal blood. The only one in the whole world. So I suggest you're very careful with me, OK?"
"And if you fail to take the Captain's advice, you can certainly come to oblivion with me," Danes said, glancing back at the Doctor before he turned his attention back to Jack, standing before the Blessing as Kitzinger and the Mother stood around Jack. "So, you're the future men. You've seen wonders beyond this world, so tell us of these Blessings and Miracles."
"What the hell is that thing?" Gwen asked, standing beside Jack as the Doctor kept a careful distance from the edge. Now that he was paying direct attention to the cleft, there was definitely some kind of psychic presence behind it that he couldn't explain. His own mental barriers were enough to protect him from the worst of its effect, and he had a feeling that the fact that he wasn't a native of Earth was also helping him deflect it, but he wouldn't like to do more than this.
"Can you feel it?" Jack said.
"Yeah, I can feel it," Gwen said, closing her eyes and nodding. "Oh, yeah. God, I can. Okay, God. Oh, my God."
"It is said that it reflects your own self back at you," the woman the Grandfather had identified as 'the Mother' said, leaning on another railing and looking at Gwen with the kind of sick interest that put the Doctor in mind of the Rani. "What can you see?"
"Enough guilt to last me a lifetime," Gwen replied, before she swallowed and collected herself. "But that's okay. I'm a working mother. I don't need the Blessing to tell me that."
"And you, Jack?" the Mother said (the Doctor chose to be grateful that she assumed he wasn't worth paying attention to right now; he wasn't sure how he'd answer that question).
"I've lived so many lives," Jack said. "And now I can see them all. Hey… Not so bad."
"Well, you might want to question your choice of weapon, soldier," the redhead the Doctor had recognised as Jilly Kitzinger said, walking down the stairs to indicate Danes. "Let's see. You brought the world's biggest bastard, wired him up to a bomb and then showed him his soul. Hmm, that's good work. You know, I feel really safe right now."
"Says the woman working with the people who put us in this position in the first place?" the Doctor glared over at the redhead as Jack moved over to Danes. "If you're going to criticise our methods, keep in mind that your side drove us to go this far."
Kitzinger just glared back at the Doctor, but he returned the stare with a cool glare of his own. She might want to think she was an intimidating figure, but the Doctor had encountered so many twisted people over the years this woman just didn't compare. Given how conflicted he already felt over relying on someone like Danes for this part of the plan, it was good to be able to focus that hostility on someone else.
"…guess I'm accustomed to sin," Danes said, after spending a few moments reeling from having the 'attention' of the Blessing focused on him, reinforcing the Doctor's own decision not to get too close.
"Thank you," Jack said to the murderer before he turned back to the cleft.
"I still don't get it," Gwen shrugged. "What are we looking at? The Blessing, is it the rock or is it the edge? What?"
"It's the gap in between," Jack said. "The nothingness… the space… It's alive."
"It's like… they broke the world," Danes said with an almost wistful expression.
"I don't suppose the expert has any ideas?" Gwen looked over at Jack while directing her gaze just a bit towards the Doctor in the process.
"The world's been turning for over four billion years," Jack said, the Doctor's mind racing to see if he could think of something that Jack didn't mention. "There's so much buried under its skin; I've heard tales of Silurian mythology, Huon particles, Racnoss energy… an expansion of their hibernation matrix, maybe…"
"You don't bloody know, do you?" Gwen said.
"No," Jack replied, the Doctor shaking his head as Gwen had a brief laugh.
"It's been here since Earth began?" Gwen turned her attention back to the cleft.
"Quite possibly," the Doctor put in, looking at the Blessing with a thoughtful smile. "That's what I like about my life, really; the chance to see all these remarkable things nobody ever even considered could exist before we found them…"
"Yeah, yeah, that's great," Rex's voice cut in over the radio. "So you found the Blessing and you worked out this morphic field?"
"The Blessing exists in a symbiotic relationship with the human race," the same unknown male voice spoke up at the other end. "It transmits a morphic field around the planet, binding us together like magnetism, like sunlight."
"And then you decided to experiment on it, right?" Amy observed with a bitter edge to her voice that left the Doctor hoping she wouldn't push them too far.
"To be exact, we fed it," the Mother corrected the Doctor's friend. "We fed it the blood of an immortal."
"…And this is why people wonder at the intellectual potential of the human race," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "It's like a certain author once wrote; if people put a sign on a door saying 'Do not open if you don't want to end the universe', someone is going to open the door to see what the fuss is about, and then someone else has to clean up the mess."
"This is a calculated plan of attack; there is no mess-" the unknown male said
"He's right," Natalie said with a satisfied tone to her voice. "Who seriously thought that adding the blood of an immortal man to something linked to the whole human race just to see what would happen was a good idea?"
"But it worked," the Mother said, with the self-satisfied grin of a woman who would never listen to contradictory views.
"I think you hurt it," Jack glared over at the Mother. "It saw the blood as an attack, so it took the blood pattern and made it a gift. It's exerting itself to sustain every person on the planet. This whole Miracle, it's trying to be kind."
"But why keep doing it?" Esther said. "We've seen the camps, and there are people like Rex dealing with serious wounds; why would you want this?"
"This is only stage one," the unknown voice at the other end said.
"You ruined the world out there!" Gwen protested.
"The Miracle shocked the economy," the Mother countered with a cool shrug. "The economy collapsed. We tear down in order to rebuild, and now it's almost within sight. The new world."
"A world with no room for the poor, the weak, or the ones that don't fit in?" Gwen said bitterly.
"That's the way the world works," the Mother said, demonstrating the same cool indifference that the Doctor had always disliked more than hatred; at least when people hated something they cared enough to acknowledge it. "Now we're just making it official. The families have just been waiting. Now we can step in to control the banks. The banks control government. The government controls people. Soon we'll be able to decide who lives, how long, where and why."
"It's about time!" Jilly Kitzinger said.
"Says the woman who thinks she'll be at the top of the pile when the world ends," the Doctor glared at the woman in the red coat. "You eliminate freedom and liberty and think that all that matters is that you and the people like you are the ones calling the shots, because only your opinion could ever matter regardless of who's going to get hurt while building your 'perfect world'."
"Except that we're going to get it right-!"
"A claim I've heard so many times before," the Doctor rolled his eyes as he looked at Kitzinger. "And that's what always disappoints me about your masters; considering their origin, I would think they could come up with something more original than smashing stuff and killing people while saying they're doing it to make something new."
The Doctor privately acknowledged that he basically did that himself on past occasions, but there were still differences. Not only did he try to minimise the deaths involved to only those who were actively hurting people rather than let innocents get caught in the crossfire, but his goal was always to stop active villains and allow the oppressed to take charge afterwards. Right now, the Families' only plan was to topple a naturally developed system and then put a specific group in charge of the result, rather than return power to the people, and he had his doubts that the Faction would let it get that far anyway.
"So this is all about the world according to Kitzinger, right?" Gwen rolled her eyes at the redhead. "I'm not impressed."
"Listen, you can bleed your liberal heart all over the place, but are you really gonna tell me the world was working before?" Kitzinger said as Gwen turned to glare back at her. "Because I have worked for the rich and the powerful and the obese. I have stared into the high end of Western society and let me tell you, it is like shoveling an open sewer. These families, they want to make the world fitter, more compact, more disciplined. And I like the sound of that. That sounds like salvation."
"Up until the moment when you become so old and decrepit that you're going to be going into those pods yourself," the Doctor cut in with a glare.
"They need me-"
"For now, and even if you're extremely careful and manage to stay useful, eventually your luck will run out." The Doctor shook his head as he stared at the young woman, once again struck by how supposedly smart people could be so short-sighted. "The human body is like any system; eventually it will wear down to a point where even the energy of the Miracle can't keep you going because you're all just too old. Did any of you stop to think about that, or are you just focusing on how you'll get to be in power right now and never think about anything further than a few years in advance?"
"We'll work something out by then," the Mother smiled. "After all, with the dead weight eliminated, we'll have time to explore new forms of immortality that avoid the negatives of the current system."
"But first you had to deal with me, didn't you?" Jack put in. "Since I'm the reason you have all this, you can't launch this brave new world if I'm here to endanger the plan."
"Which is why you sent the Torchwood e-mail after the Miracle started," Esther observed.
"And now I'm here in Shanghai with the only mortal blood on the planet," Jack said, holding up his wrist and placing a knife against it. "If it gets into the Blessing, life switches back. I can make the whole world mortal-"
"It's not that simple," the Doctor cut in, taking care to sound grim as though he'd only just begun to suspect this himself.
"Quite," the Mother observed with a grin. "Polar dynamics, Captain Harkness."
"Everything on this axis operates in a polar dynamic field," the voice on the other end said, clearly enjoying the idea that their enemies had failed this close to the end.
"You could reset the Blessing," the Mother acknowledged, still laughing. "Captain Harkness's blood could make the whole world mortal again… but only by introducing it to both cities at once."
"Blood in Buenos Aires," the unknown male said.
"Blood in Shanghai," the Mother affirmed.
"Entering the Blessing simultaneously," the other voice said.
"That's how we fed it."
"That's how we made the world immortal."
"And for you, I'm sorry, it's impossible."
"You did very well, almost worked it out," the other voice said. "But all that spare blood of yours went up in flames."
"So I'm just gonna have to kill you all," the Mother said, giving an order to her henchmen.
"You don't want to do that," the Doctor put in with a cool grin; if his plan had worked, everything would kick in soon.
"I know how Captain Harkness trained Torchwood," the Mother said mockingly. "I'm sure that even now you're all ferociously calculating how to get his blood to the other side of the world, but I can't allow that-"
"But it's already here," Natalie said, and the Doctor could literally hear the grin in his daughter's voice as his allies exposed the next stage of their plan.
"What?" the other voice and the Mother said simultaneously.
"Just watch this," Rex said, and the Doctor could almost picture the CIA agent somehow cutting his finger and letting the blood flow towards the Blessing at the other end of the radio connection.
"What was that?" the Mother said, as something shook at both ends of the Blessing. "What happened?"
"That's impossible," the other voice said, confidence replaced by shock. "No way; there's nothing special about you."
"Oh, but there is," Rex retorted. "I've got Jack's blood flowing through my veins. It's inside me."
"What?" Gwen said.
"We knew the blood was important, so we transfused it into Rex as soon as we were somewhere secure and private over here," Amy put in, clearly grinning like Natalie. "And the really amusing bit? It only works because of what you all did to the human race first."
"Since everyone thought the blood was gone, no one even suspected," Esther continued. "All we did was keep one final bag to make it look like we still had Jack's blood there, and filled the rest with Rex's real blood."
"Leaving us free to just walk in here," Rex said, still sounding ill but clearly confident.
"Which means Advantage: Torchwood," the Doctor clapped his hands together as he looked at the room, staring mockingly at the guns still pointing at his friends. "Shoot Rex and Jack, and the blood will return to the Blessing. Shoot anyone else and they will cut themselves-"
"And die," the Mother said. "Is that what you want? The Blessing will take every last drop. You'll both die, gentlemen. You'll both kill yourselves. Captain Harkness will die in a pit in Shanghai and Agent Matheson will cease in Buenos Aires. Is that what you want?"
If this was any other situation and he had more time, the Doctor would have tried to find another way, but he was fully aware that he didn't have the luxury of his usual morality right now. Jack and Rex were both independent, strong-willed men capable of making their own decisions to end this threat; if they were going to die, this was their choice.
"I think I've lived long enough," Jack said. "Are you ready, Rex?"
"Wish I'd never met any of you idiots, but…" Rex sounded like he swallowed. "Good times, huh?"
"Yeah," Esther said.
"We're up for that," Amy affirmed; the Doctor was satisfied that only his long experience with Amelia Pond betrayed the fear in her voice.
"We can do this," Natalie said, and once again the Doctor had never been more proud or afraid for someone.
"Just one last thing, Jack," Gwen said.
"What is it?" Jack turned to look at her.
"You're never gonna be a suicide," Gwen said, taking up a position where she aimed the gun at Jack as he stood on the edge of the pit before the Blessing.
"Thank you," Jack said, before he looked at the Doctor. "And thank you for everything."
"I didn't do much-"
"You did everything," Jack said, giving the Doctor a warm grin before he turned back
"This is it, Rex."
"Nothing's gonna stop me," Rex affirmed.
"I think this might," the unknown male voice said at the other end.
The Doctor heard a desperate yell followed by a gunshot, and he felt as though his hearts had stopped.