Not even the static of the air could be heard inside the empty, cold passageway to the tunnel that was apparently leading away from the lower deck. The pair crept quietly along, Amy recoiling at the faintest echo while the Doctor remained unflinching; his eyes filled with a mix of determination and curiosity. Amy suddenly started sniffing.
''What's that smell?'' she asked. The Doctor halted in his tracks the second he paid attention to the air.
''Irrodium,'' he alleged. ''But no, it can't be. They cleared it all away…''
He shot his sonic into the air and clicked. Nothing happened.
''Oh, don't do this to me now,'' he said irritably.
''What is it?'' asked Amy. ''What's wrong?''
''It won't say if it's real or just another trick,'' he moaned, putting the sonic away in disappointment. ''We're Schrodinger's cat,'' he added.
''Schrodinger's what?'' inquired Amy.
''Well I was expecting 'who's cat?', but anyway… Schrodinger was a philosopher. He put a cat in a box that was set to be filled with poison at a completely random time, thus the cat could be said to be both alive and dead at once, since no one knew if the poison had been released yet.''
''That's awful!''
''All hypothetical of course. I probably should have led with that.''
''Perhaps, yes,'' said Amy scathingly. ''Well, our situation seems to be a little less than hypothetical. How long do we have before we can open the box and find out?''
''It'll be more like trying to crack a safe underwater, while partly unconscious and strapped to an anchor. So about fifteen minutes, unless I can beat my record.''
''Great. Come on then,'' said Amy, swaggering off.
''One day somebody will believe that story…'' the Doctor muffled to himself and followed after.
...
Amy and the Doctor, after rushing through the tunnels as time was definitely not on their side, eventually made it to their destination. Cautiously pushing open the last door on their trip down below, they crept inside to find themselves coated in pitch darkness. A flick of the sonic later and the room was activated. A single blue light oozed out of the ceiling, slowly wound its way down vein-like wires that slithered along every wall. In the centre of the room, a small, circular platform sat underneath its twin which resided on the roof.
A smooth, textbook figure of a human being flickered into view between the two panels, like a hologram but appearing more solid. The character had no face, no features; just a grey, metallic looking outline. As the Doctor and Amy paced around it, gazing at it fixatedly with a mixture of adoration and fear, a hole in the vague shape of a mouth freakishly opened up in the centre of the figure's 'head'. The shape remained motionless as monotonous words came spewing out, echoing around the room.
''Assistance Android one-three-three-six-two-eight of star-ship designation 'Bueller', how may I assist you?''
''Ooh, working on your day off, are you?'' Amy sniggered. The Doctor shot her a deathly stare.
''What?'' she asked innocently. ''It's called Bueller. Don't act like you weren't thinking it.''
She crossed her arms and leant against the wall in a huff.
''Repeat last status report,'' said the Doctor to the grey figure.
''Status report: eleventh of October, twenty-two-fifty-four,'' said the android.
''About three days ago,'' the Doctor pointed out, to keep Amy informed.
''One more life-form required for successful teleportation,'' the hologram finished.
''Repeat status report from the day this ship arrived on Earth.''
''Status report unavailable. Services were not activated at your requested time. Visual recording will be displayed instead.''
The figure flickered away and the room plunged into total darkness. Another hologram appeared between the two panels. It was a silhouette of the event it was displaying: that of half a spacecraft travelling out of what appeared to be one end of a black hole. The Doctor and Amy watched on in reverence as the lower deck of the police craft from the Doctor's story shot out of the sky and plummeted towards the ground, oddly devoid of the hotel, and slamming into the field under which they now stood.
''Fast forward to the construction of 'The Vaconian','' commanded the Doctor. Again, the hologram obliged. The recording sped up to a remarkable speed. The ground which was torn apart by the landing of the lower deck was filled by nature's course; the field grew back over the hole and over the ship.
A few moments of nothing, before a swarm of people arrived on the scene a few dozen metres away from where the ship was buried, with an armada of construction machines and equipment. They erected a skyscraper before the Doctor and Amy's very eyes. Up it grew, lightning fast. It was like watching a jigsaw puzzle box being tipped upside down and every jumbled piece falling perfectly into place. With extra pieces. Not only was the hotel constructed, but a car park and an incredulous amount of scenery and features surrounding the hotel were built that took away the illusion that it was in the middle of a baron field.
''The ship landed first,'' Amy muttered. ''Doctor, how long was the hotel open for before it got destroyed?''
''About three hundred years,'' he answered. ''They waited three hundred years before they made their move…''
''Why?'' asked Amy. Before the Doctor could answer, the android's simulation skipped ahead to another scene. The lower deck of the Bueller, buried beneath the earth not too far from the three-hundred year old hotel, was as silent as 'The Vaconian' was large. Like a film playing on a three-dimensional screen, the simulation panned up above the ground and circled around the hotel as the first signs of a storm began to show from every direction. Bright figures of storm clouds gathering and meeting each other filled every void in the computer-generated sky, culminating in a tremendous bolt of lightning pummelling the ground where the ship was lying.
Inside the lower deck, lights were turning on left, right and centre. The ship had reactivated three-hundred years after it crashed.
''The storm?'' Amy chimed in. ''The storm woke it up?''
''It's not just any storm,'' said the Doctor. ''The ship's other half is on its way. Show the hotel's destruction,'' he added to the android, which obliged, showing the scene in fast-motion. The other part of the ship blasted out of the clouds and struck the hotel like a bullet, passing straight through without appearing to cause much damage. But 'The Vaconian' was reduced to rubble before Amy could look away. Years passed in the simulation as the wreckage and bodies were cleaned up. A huge fumigation tent was set up and lasted for a long part of the simulation, as people coated head to foot in safety gear walked in and out of the tent across several seasons.
''Okay, show me what happened in the black hole,'' spouted the Doctor. Followed was a quick, clustered clip of an intact ship zooming into a broken star, gliding down a shoot into nothingness. Lightning abounded inside, striking the ship at every turn and sending it spinning through the black hole. Eventually, the ship split in two and the lower half rocketed ahead and out of sight, while the top half slowed to an astonishing halt. Everything stopped with it: the lightning; the mess of other pieces of the universe that had been sucked in to the black hole as well. All that was left was the top deck of the Bueller, stuck in the centre of nevermore.
Out of nowhere and from beyond everything, something arose from the darkness and latched on to the ship. Several somethings, in fact. From each corner of the black hole, the unidentifiable shapes were attracted to the ship like a magnet and became a part of the top deck. They did not change its shape or add to it, but instead made it shake and rumble and fight against the stillness.
''What's that, what's it doing?'' enquired the Doctor.
''Irrodium. The highest concentration ever recorded in one place.''
''But what is it doing? What's the actual effect?''
''It's alive,'' came the android's dull, droning voice.
''''It's alive'', what do you mean it's alive? How can a ship be alive?'' spewed the Doctor.
''It's alive,'' repeated the automaton.
''How is it alive?'' asked the Doctor again, getting more frustrated with each word. The simulation ended again, once more to be replaced with the textbook figure of the android. Its face convulsed like it was melting upwards and the mouth appeared, this time in the shape of an actual human mouth.
The gooey metal that formed the hotel drooped out from the top panel and rose up from the bottom one, meeting in the middle and covering the hologram, which flickered away. The newly formed humanoid was just like the hologram, but physically in the room with the now terrified Amy and the startled Doctor. It leant down towards the latter and contorted its freshly formed face into an angry expression, before speaking with the light voice of a woman.
''I'm alive.''