PLAGUE
TWENTYSEVEN
They were all sitting around the meeting table.
The Doctor was precariously perched on the back of a chair, his feet on the seat. He was holding his sonic screwdriver in his hands – playing with it actually – and speaking.
"You really don't need to get rid of those 'little robots', you see. They'll get rid of themselves in a few weeks." The screwdriver moved from hand to hand and back again as he spoke.
"They are a sort of automated house-cleaning service. Created eons ago by a race that no longer exists, for a purpose that remains a mystery – they were perhaps either a WMD or some sort of defensive mechanism. Whatever, their goal seems to be a kind of cosmic ethnic cleansing. They arrive, determine the indigenous paradigm, self-replicate in order to reach critical mass and then stop multiplying. They infect all lifeforms, protecting the natives, who become carriers, and killing anything they determine is 'foreign'."
He tossed the sonic screwdriver high into the air with his right hand, watched it spin and caught it on its way down with his left.
"The way they kill is elegantly effective and brilliantly conceived. As Owen already discovered, they mutate, transforming their behavior to match the weaknesses of their intended victims. Once again, Jack, your super-power stopped you from permanently dying. As for me, I owe my continued existence to Wil and the TARDIS. If it hadn't been for her, for them, I'd be dead. Enduringly dead."
The screwdriver flew up into the air again.
"Would you stop that?" Jack interrupted The Doctor's newest sport. "Even though it's just a sonic screwdriver, it makes me nervous to have you tossing it around like a toy."
"Right, sorry," The Doctor said sheepishly. "Any questions?"
"Yeah, why?" asked Jack.
"Well, like I said, we don't know who created them. It's hard to imagine any race with such a high level of technical sophistication being xenophobic enough to purposefully release such a weapon loose into the wild." He sighed audibly.
"I suppose it is possible an accident occurred, maybe they were exterminated by their own creation. Maybe it escaped while the custodians were looking the other way. Occam's razor tells us what happened here probably wasn't intentional, but who knows? I've never seen anything remotely like this plague, and the Time Lord database doesn't mention it. Its transport mechanism is a bit of a mystery, too. Although it's clear in the case of the space station…"
"Doctor," Jack interrupted him. "Is there anything you can do to eradicate them?"
"Well, like I said, they've stopped replicating. In a few weeks…"
"CAN YOU GET RID OF THEM?"
"Oh yes!" He growled and was out the door, calling over his shoulder. "I'll be back in a flash!"
Startled, they all stared dumbly at each other, blinking, and then in unison stood up and followed.