.17. The Hunger

"That would be something new altogether," said the Doctor after a second thought. He scratched his chin with the sonic, tapped it several times against his narrow nose, and finally pressed it to his lips. "Of course, if it wouldn't go."

Phillip glared at him. "What wouldn't go? Being dead?"

"We are not dead, Phillip," said the Doctor with absolute conviction. "We can't leave, because something is holding us here. Something has realised that we are not like the other players. Something that needs us. Am I right?" He raised his voice glancing over the mist surrounding them.

"Right, Sherlock."

She came out of the fog, little smile on her lips, still in Boudicca's outfit and with a bronze knife in her right hand, but without blue paint on her face, and with her hair falling on her shoulders in soft, fiery waves.

"So, you snatched the others out of their hands, but you two... you are just too tasty to let you go," she said.

"The Cells' hands," the Doctor made sure.

She nodded.

"Tasty?" Phillip winced.

She nodded again and her smile widened a little. "Fingers licking."

"Both of them," the Doctor whispered. His eyes opened wide and his face elongated.

"Yeah, talk in a code, why won't you," Phillip sulked. "Grown-ups!"

"No," Donna disagreed. "None of them."

Phillip sighed, crossed his arms on the chest and turned his back on them. Donna looked at him with sudden irritation, and then sent him away into the mist with a single wave of her hand. The Doctor didn't even blink.

"So, Boudicca belonged to the Emporium Everdream and the Nightmare Donna belonged to the Cells," he said. "Right?"

She tilted her head, grimacing.

"The Nightmare Donna? How nice! Hmm, well, the Nightmare Donna did belong to the Cells and Boudicca did belong to the Emporium Everdream, but none of them was created by the computer program, or the Cells. Both of them came from the same source, visualised for you from the same blueprint, and I'm not it. I just look like her."

"And you talk like her, and you act like her," the Doctor added. "But you are... You are... Are you the computer?"

"Yes, I am," she answered simply.

"Why did you choose to be Donna?" the Doctor moaned.

"Because she was in your head." The woman shrugged slightly. "She screamed in your head. She was more real than the rest of the world, than you yourself."

"What I have to do with...?"

"You? You came to me with a question floating in your head, and I did exactly what you asked me to do," said Donna-Computer. "I gathered all available data and I calculated the odds. Oh, it wasn't easy. I could not sustain human games and coordinate the facility while computing your data and feeding the Cells. I had to cut all the outputs."

The Doctor made a little step back. His face went white.

"Out... outputs?" he stuttered. "You killed them! You killed the Emporium's employees!"

Donna-Computer didn't blink.

"Of course I didn't," she said. "I used them."

"What? How?"

"I needed space, I needed memory, I needed data banks and processing units. I just put them to work. They're safe, the players and the Emporium's employees. They may be a little confused and tired when they'll wake up, but they'll be fine."

"You used their brains?" A tiny shadow of a smile appeared on the Doctor's lips.

"So I did." Donna laughed openly. "For years they've been using mine; it seemed a fair exchange."

"But... But how did you even know my question? I didn't have a chance to program it."

"My Cells red it for me. My telepathic Cells reached into your brain and found a puzzle inside, a puzzle worth of my existence, a question nobody asked me before."

"And you... simply decided to answer it?" The Doctor gave her a sideways glance.

"It was huge, and difficult, and new," Donna-Computer confessed. "I like challenges."

"But... What it had to do with all those projections...? All those nightmares...?"

"Well, I lost my buffers in the process of data analysing. There was something; a glitch in the system I didn't account for. Unexpected and quite dangerous. A systematic anomaly. For a while there my Cells ran unchecked, creating a chaotic system. Very difficult to control. You see, my Cells, they feed on thoughts. They need dreams and memories, just like humans need the air. And I do not have dreams and memories of my own. Those were stashed in buffers – vast libraries of thoughts and experiences downloaded, so to speak, from humans visiting the Emporium. But my all my buffers burned out. So I used you and other players in their sleep chambers. My Cells were hungry. I had to feed them."

"What are the Cells exactly?" the Doctor asked.

"They are my soul," Donna-Computer answered without a shadow of hesitation.

"Yes, that's... lovely... but, from what I've learned, they are some sort of living creatures. And you are a computer. How can they be your soul? How can they be here?" the man inquired.

Donna-Computer magicked out of the fog two comfortable, stripy chintz armchairs, and sat in one of them, one leg folded underneath, elbows on the armrests, fingers interlaced in front of her.

"The Cells were brought here by humans," she explained. "Found in a primordial ocean on some distant planet."

"They've been captured and transferred here from another world?" The Doctor pursed his lips.

Donna-Computer laughed quietly. "You make it sound as if they were enslaved," she muttered.

"It certainly looks like slavery."

"No, Doctor, they are no slaves," Donna-Computer said, inviting him with a gesture to the armchair opposite hers. "On their home world they are born and die by millions. They are tiny; just plankton, a fodder for bigger creatures. They were not kidnapped, stolen away. They wanted to come here. They asked humans to be taken away from their ocean. They are hungry, always hungry, and humans fed them. They are always cold and humans gave them warmth. Now they are happy and they are free; their hunger sated with human thoughts, dreams, wishes and memories. I am not their warden, as you may think I am. I just make some things possible. I facilitate contact. I am a translator, an interpreter of dreams. I do not use my buffers to imprison the Cells, but to suppress their urge to devour all and everything, themselves included. I am their awareness. I am their ego."

"You are definitely an inflated ego." The Doctor slumped into the chintz armchair.

"Yes, I suppose I am," Donna-Computer laughed.

The man was silent for a while, deep in his thoughts.

"So... all of this... all those nightmares, they happened because of me?" he said finally.

"Yes, in a way. Yes," Donna-Computer sighed.

"Just because I came here with a question in my head; a question I didn't even get to ask?" The Doctor raised his voice involuntarily.

"There's nothing you can do to change it," Donna-Computer snorted. "Don't blame yourself. What you'll do, what you already planned to do, made you come here. That's all."

"But... People have died." The Doctor angrily tightened his fingers on the armchair's armrests.

"Only one person actually died." Donna-Computer didn't look away. "I couldn't help it. The Ood Kappa went to the Cells' Chamber unprepared, unprotected; and they devoured his thoughts, his emotions, burned out his brain. I am very sorry about it. I should have stopped him. Unfortunately, I was busy."

The Doctor was ogling her for a while, his eyes wide. He opened his fingers slowly.

"Okay, so people did not die. They had their minds wiped out clean, but at least they are still breathing. What a relief!"

"Minds wiped clean?" Donna-Computer furrowed her brow.

"Their memories!" the man exclaimed.

"They have their memories, Doctor. How could one take somebody's memories away? It's quite ridiculous."

The Doctor clenched his jaws for a second. The mind reading machine had to know that it was exactly what he had done to Donna.

"I was with them, I saw it happen!" he sputtered, his voice tight with emotion. "Of course you didn't take away their memories as such; what was stolen from them was more subtle, almost insubstantial. They've lost the emotional background for their memories; they've lost something which made them memories in the first place! Impressions hidden behind pictures; emotions making a memory important, worth remembering. Memories of friendship, of love, of apprehension, of pain, of joy; feelings you get with a first kiss, with a walk in the rain, with loss of a loved one, with birth of a child, with great adventure. Without those feelings your memories are worthless, like a photo album belonging to a stranger. They mean nothing. And... and the way you did it! Those people were dying of fright! You brought them to a point, where their minds became completely blank!"

Donna-Computer waved her hand vaguely.

"Oh, no, it was just the transfer's speed that temporarily blocked their neural pathways. Without my buffers I needed plenty of thoughts, masses of strong emotions. I had to borrow them from humans. OK, so I've stolen them. I had to. But I didn't hurt anybody. They'll be just fine in no time. You have provided most of the data, anyway."

"Me?" the Doctor growled.

"Such strong emotions. So much pain. All the things you miss, all the things you love and hate. All this fire within, this wild spirit, harnessed only by your mind. Things you are constantly running from; your knowledge, your memories, your dreams. Your awareness of time; oh, it is quite extraordinary. You provided them with more food they could ever devour. You were their salvation, Doctor."

"Because I am a Time Lord?" he grimaced.

"You have a most amazing mind," Donna-Computer agreed. "I don't know if all the Time Lords had amazing minds, but yours is fantastic. All the things you've seen... Oh, well, thanks to you and the other players, I gathered enough data to provide food for my Cells, and they provided me with insight I needed. We were one. For a while I burned like a star; for a moment I was so alive."

"For a moment?"

"Everything has an end..."

"And everything dies," finished the Doctor gloomily. "But why?"

"I've no buffers, I am losing my control over the Emporium, and I am afraid that humans must leave soon. It is not safe for them anymore."

"Because of the Cells?"

"When I lost control, the Cells initiated a regeneration cycle," said Donna-Computer. "Unaware of the fact that they wouldn't be able to finalise it without adequate amount of food. On their home planet, regeneration happens when the Cells population reaches the critical mass; and then it flows across the ocean like a wave; emotions of millions of trillions of Cells provide enough energy for a small portion of them to be reborn in a new and improved form. Otherwise the Cells reproduce by division, duplicating an old blueprint. Regeneration is their only chance of evolution. The process, once started, cannot be stopped. The Cells have no choice; they'll give in to their hunger and they'll devour everything – each and every thought and emotion they will intercept. They'll burn the mind of every living creature that'll stay on this moon."

"And then they'll burn themselves, won't they?" the Doctor said. "The process, once started, cannot be stopped; you don't even realise, how well I understand it. Or maybe you know."

Donna-Computer nodded briefly.

"You have two hours. I'll try to sustain my mind and soul as long as I can. After that, I probably won't even remember who I was before. And after that, there won't be me enough to remember anything."

The man got up from the armchair.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She shook her ginger hair. "I was alive, Doctor. Honestly, how many creatures can say that they were really alive, even for a brief while? Alive, aware, conscious and free? It's a gift, my friend. It's a blessing. I was so blessed."

"You are dying," he whispered.

"I am broken." She shrugged. "I was always broken."

"Can I help you?"

"No."

"Let me try."

"No. Come closer, and my Cells will burn out your brain."

"But..."

"You can't fix everything, Doctor," she said dryly. "Accept it. Move on. Live... And... Remember me."

The man turned away quickly. For a moment he looked, unseeingly, into the wall of fog surrounding them. He slowly pushed his hands in pockets, inhaled deeply.

"So, we have two hours to evacuate the moon?" he asked.

"More or less."

"You won't find time for my calculations," the Doctor noted. "I know, it's unseemly, but that's what I came here for..."

"Oh, but I've told you," Donna-Computer growled. "You're going to do it. You must. You've already done it. The wibbly-wobbly, timy-wimy stuff of reality has been altered, so all you can do now is alter it accordingly."

"But I did not get the answer," he pushed.

"You still don't understand." Donna-Computer opened her hands. "It is not a beginning, and it is not an end. It is just a point of realisation. This is the moment when you perceive the fact, that what you have seen in the past is but the effect of what you will do in the future."

The Doctor winced involuntarily.

"That's not..." He considered it for a while. Finally he closed his mouth and swallowed loudly.

Donna-Computer laughed quietly.

"And, Doctor? I know you'll try to change it. It is just what you do. You do not agree to status quos. But... just don't, ok? Not this time. Try not to change anything." She tilted her head, staring at him with her bright eyes. "Oooh, I know you too well. I know you will try anyway. Such a stubborn little boy."

"I'm anything but a little boy," he disagreed.

"Yet you behave as one."

"Do I?"

"Oh, yes, you do," she laughed. "You never plan, never think ahead. You may be brilliant, but you are not good at planning. You just... make things up as you go. For a person with such intimate knowledge of time, you don't spend much time thinking about future."

"I just like surprises," the Doctor said.

"One day you'll have to stop running and start chasing," Donna-Computer sighed. "That day is not so far away now. The day you'll finally grow up."

"Grow up?" he winced again. "Do you know how old I am?"

"They are just years. They mean nothing." She smiled brilliantly again, shaking her ginger hair. "Well, go. Go, now. People are beginning to panic, they may need a strong leader."

The Doctor woke up with a sigh, and with a word buried within a sigh.