Chapter note: This chapter has been split into two parts. Due to content restrictions on this site, the second part will not be posted here but will be available on my dreamwidth account of the same name.
Martha rubbed at her eyes, lifting her head as she heard the crockery on Henry's tray clinking. She checked her watch. Lunch time already? She heaved out a deep sigh. She took the slide off the microscope and dumped it into the biohazard bin. After tossing her gloves, she washed her hands. She'd been staining samples all morning, trying to recreate the 'poorly stained sample' where the strange bacteria was noted on Jake Oliver's blood smear. So far, she'd had no luck. Before she went downstairs for a new bin, she'd get herself some coffee. She picked up the mug to go fill it but Ianto must have been by and filled it at some point. Bless him…
Gwen was walking down the autopsy bay stairs carrying a small bag. "Fuel for the tireless soldier. Ianto went to that new sandwich shop." She peered into the bag. "I think yours is skip jack."
Martha chuckled a bit. "I don't know how he always knows what I'm in the mood for. Boardroom?"
"It's a gift of his. He knew I wanted cheese today," Gwen said, walking side by side with Martha, smiling. They sat down at the boardroom table and set out their food. Gwen handed Martha a bag of crisps.
"So how was the honeymoon? Where did you go again?" Gwen asked.
"Cassis," Martha said with a smile. "Jack and Ianto recommended it. It was beautiful."
"We were all sorry we couldn't make the wedding," Gwen apologised. "Miranda was beside herself when that nasty bit with the alien parasite ruined your honeymoon."
"She said." Martha shook her head. "It was fine, really. We only lost one day."
"So is it Doctor Smith now?" Gwen laughed.
Martha laughed. "No, still Jones, thank you very much, Gwen Cooper."
The two of them dissolved into a fit of giggles.
"I wonder if Rhys and I should think about Cassis."
"Oh you should go! It was a bit pricey but worth it." Martha waved over her shoulder. "It's important to get away from all this once in a while. Remind yourself there's a life outside."
"Don't let it drift, Jack's always saying," Gwen said, shaking her head. "So, are you and Mickey thinking about kids yet?"
Martha waved her hand. "Oh, God, no. It's always the next question after you get married isn't it?"
"Rhys is on me about it all the time," Gwen groaned. She waved around the room. "I don't know what I'd do having a baby with all this."
Martha chewed at her sandwich, thoughtful. She heard the truth behind Gwen's light tone. Seriously, she said, "You'd do the same thing everyone else does. You'd do your best. Don't let all this hold you back, Gwen. I think you and Rhys'd be brilliant."
Gwen coloured and returned to her lunch. Maybe Martha was right, she was letting it drift. At Torchwood, they fought so that people could survive, could live their every day lives but what about Torchwood themselves? What about what Rhys wanted for his life… their life? She was about to say something when Jack jogged into the room.
"Fish's got something guys," he said and then darted back out.
Martha and Gwen both dropped their sandwiches onto the table and bolted after him, wiping their mouths and hands as they went. Everyone was gathered around Fish's workstation, peering at the screen. To Gwen's surprise, it wasn't Fish sitting there, it was Ethan Donovan.
"Ethan found it so I'm going to let him do the honours," Fish said, clapping Donovan on the shoulder. He let out a small laugh. "They grow up so fast…"
A small snigger rippled through the Torchwood team.
"Yeah, so you all know I've been working with Joe to figure out which one of the Wilsons is the patient zero. Now, from that Scottish doctor at the hospital, we know that Barbara Wilson was a good mom and a good mom like her would've had everything at home she needed in case her kids got sick. But, on a long shot, I checked her credit card receipts and that was when I found this," Donovan said. He tapped a key sequence and an image came up. "This is Barbara Wilson at a pharmacy buying cough drops. This would be the point that the adults got sick. You don't give your kids cough drops."
"This made me assume that her or her husband is our actual patient zero," Fish said. "I ran with that and started following them on the camera system, backwards."
"But," Ethan said, tilting his head, "Joe doesn't have kids. So on a hunch, while Joe was was checking the parents, I looked at the kids cos every parent knows that the first people in the house to get sick-"
"Are the kids," Jack supplied.
"Bingo," Ethan said, snapping his fingers and pointing at Jack. "The kids get sick, infect their siblings and then before you know it Mom and Dad are sick too. So, I followed the oldest, Sandra, around on the CCTV. Nothing much there, school, piano lessons and a few sports but here," Donovan said, pointing at the calendar, "she missed her piano lesson and her soccer… football practice, sorry."
"That's when Ethan brought it to my attention so we stopped investigating the adults and focused in on the kids and that's when we found this… or rather when Ethan found this," Fish said, pointing at the screen.
Donovan started to play the video footage. "It's a playground Barbara Wilson brought Stephanie regularly. This the day before she bought the cough drops and Sandra started missing her activities. Watch."
He clicked and the video began to play. Stephanie was climbing on the bars for a bit and then, bored with them, she began running back and forth around the pitch, pretending to be an airplane. Her arms were stretched out from her sides and she was gleefully running back and forth.
"And… there!" Donovan said freezing the image. "That flash by the ground is a rift spike."
Jack asked, annoyed, "Why didn't we investigate?"
"We did," Fish said. He brought up another screen with the readout for that day. "You and Ianto show up at this playground in about fifteen minutes."
Ianto swore under his breath in Welsh. "I remember this. We scoured that park. We didn't find anything."
"And this is why," Donovan said with a sad sigh. He clicked and the video footage advanced.
Stephanie saw the flash of light and, curious, went to investigate. They all watched as she picked up a circular pane of glass. Her mother noticed immediately, rushing over to her and ripping it out of her hands. The clear pane smashed on the ground. After dragging her daughter a small ways away, she produced a bunch of hand wipes and sanitizer, squirting it onto her daughter's fingers. So vigorous was Barbara Wilson's scolding that Stephanie began to wail and tried to rip herself out of her mother's grasp. The poor girl tried to run off but slipped and fell, cutting her leg on the broken glass and skinning her knees.
"It's like that fucking reliquary all over again," Fish muttered under his breath.
"What a senseless tragedy," Henry said, softly.
Fish turned to Ianto and said, "You and Jack would have found nothing but bits of broken glass. A bunch of kids were trampling the pieces."
"Bloody well lucky they didn't infect themselves!" Gwen exclaimed.
"Ethan? Can you enhance that image any?" Jack asked. "I want to see what she picked up. It didn't look mauve."
"It just looked like a clear piece of glass," Martha said.
"There's a better angle for that, Jack," he said. "I used this one just because it gave a wider picture."
Donovan began clicking and tapping out on the keyboard and a closer angle of Stephanie Wilson came into view. He stood up so that Fish could sit down at the workstation. Fish's more expert hand quickly enlarged and enhanced the video still. There was an image etched into the glass but it was too pixelated to really be clear. "That's as clear as it's going to get Jack."
Jack leaned in. He had a strange look on his face - recognition. "Can you have the computer extrapolate?"
"That program isn't very good, Jack," Fish warned.
"It's a hunch, Fish," Jack said. "All I need it to do is clear it up a little. That symbol looks pentagonal."
Fish put the image through the correct program. It only took a few minutes for it to process the image. Jack tilted his head and squinted at the screen. The symbol still wasn't clear but it was, roughly, pentagonal. Jack sighed.
"That's what I was afraid of," Jack said, shaking his head. Everyone turned and looked at him.
"Well?" Gwen asked, loudly. "What is it, Jack?!"
Jack threw a nervous glance at Donovan. "It's the corporate symbol for a pharmaceutical and biotechnologies group from the fifty first century. It was their cover for the manufacture of illegal weapons."
Donovan gaped at Jack. "How the fuck do you know that?"
Jack ignored him. "We had a whistleblower. They were shut down but the worst stuff was never found - the stuff that would have meant special charges."
"Special charges?" Donovan asked.
"The fifty first century equivalent of war crimes," Jack said, trying to sound nonchalant. He rolled his eyes a bit. "'Crimes against the spirit of the Empire'. It carried the death penalty."
"There's still a death penalty in the fifty first century?" Donovan asked, surprised.
Jack ignored the question. "The Time Agency got involved because they thought that some of the tech had been disposed of by sending it back in time."
Gwen groaned. "Like a dealer flushing his stash during a drugs bust!"
"And now it's on our front door," Ianto said, angry.
"What kind of weapons did they make, Jack?" Martha asked. If it meant the death penalty, she almost didn't want to know.
"All kinds of biological weapons. The worst were genetically engineered illnesses but their speciality was… was weaponised nanotechnology…" Jack said, trailing off. The realisation dawned on him slowly and then the lightbulb went on over his head. He grinned and turned to Gwen. "Haha! You had it right all along, Gwen! We should have looked at why Will is sick! She's not sick because of a disease, she's sick because a million microscopic machines are attacking her! She's been infected with nanopaths!"
"That's why no one is responding to any treatments. Medications are meant to attack organisms, not machines!" Martha cried. "What do we do, Jack?"
"Normally, a master control unit would be able to reprogram the nanopaths but we don't have one," Jack said, frustrated.
"Like nanogens," Martha said.
Jack shook his head. "Nanogens are different."
"We could reprogram one by hand and then use it to reprogram the others," Fish said.
"We can't even isolate them in any of the samples or see them under the microscope. If we can't even see them, how can we manage to reprogram one?" Martha lamented.
Jack shook his head. "Nanopaths doesn't work that way. They're not as sophisticated as nanogens."
"How do you know it's nanopaths we've got and not nanogens?" Donovan asked.
"Exactly what Martha said, we can't isolate them. Nanogens are meant to cure illness or treat injury. They communicate with each other. They adapt. They change. Nanopaths are invasive and elusive. They're intended as weapons and a weapon you can't see, that you can't isolate is more powerful. Nanopaths don't communicate with each other for safety. There are other precautions to make sure they don't get out of control. Biological nanotechnology outside of the medical field is illegal, especially weaponisation like this. Even medically restricted nanocells can easily get out of hand. They can wipe out whole planets - cause mass genocide…" Turn people into crazed mummy seeking gas mask wearing zombies…
"Why would they care about that? They're already making illegal weapons that can get them the death penalty," Donovan said.
Jack shook his head. "Some terrorist group trying to make its own nuclear weapon is still going to handle plutonium in a radiation suit."
"Perhaps something could be built to reprogram these nanopaths?" Henry asked.
"Nanotechnology is big money. It's highly patented. Usually each cell is proprietary to each company and there are lots of safeguards to keep someone from just randomly reprogramming them. It would take too long to bypass all that corporate security."
"Good to know human nature never changes," Donovan said, rolling his eyes.
"Doesn't seem like much of a plague," Martha said. "I mean, it's a good thing but it's not infecting anyone else. It's not airborne. It's just sitting in the host until they die."
"Well when…" Jack trailed off as his brain began to connect the dots. "They're not carrying out instructions, they're just multiplying! It's the only thing they know how to do in a biological host when they aren't programmed. They're taking the only available raw materials they can - the cells of the people they've infected - to make more of themselves. They're not stopping until whatever material they need is gone so the bodies are liquifying!"
"Like some sort of bizarre man-made cancer," Donovan said. "Why didn't that snazzy scanner pick this up?"
"That scanner's thirty third century. Nanotechnology wasn't common in medical usage for another few centuries after that," Jack said. "It wouldn't have known what to make of them and I said that thing was a piece of junk."
Over the next few minutes, the team tossed around a few ideas about how to isolate one of the nano-paths so they could learn more. Henry, who'd been largely silent during this exchange, listened but eventually his sixteenth century brain began to throb.
"Excuse me," he said, knocking on Fish's desk. "While all of this is quite fascinating, isn't a simpler solution obvious?"
They all looked at Henry, confused. Henry had to raise an eyebrow.
"I'm certain that maintaining a specimen of this nanopath would be educational but isn't the goal to save these people's lives? Why not simply find a way to disable them? Would not electrocuting Mao-Lin with enough current short circuit them?"
"That'd kill her!" Martha exclaimed.
"Doctor Jones, Mao-Lin is immortal. Unless the electric current blows off her head, she will revive," Henry said, patiently.
"That might work for Evie but it won't work for the others," Fish said, not looking at his lover.
"No! It will work!" Jack said.
"What? Jack, you can't be serious! We can't go electrocuting people!" Gwen shouted.
"No, Gwen! Not an electric shock, an EMP! We create a pulse and it fries the nanopaths! They used one for the Sagittarius Colony Collapse. It sent the whole colony into the Stone Age but it saved millions," Jack said. He turned, kissing Henry full on the mouth. "Haha! You're a genius, Henry!"
Henry stepped back, surprised. Their row might still be unresolved but Fish snapped, "Oi! Hands off, Harkness!"
"What's an EMP?" Gwen asked.
"Jack is referring to an extremely strong burst of electromagnetic energy that causes damage to electronic equipment. It occurs along with a nuclear explosion," Henry supplied. He ignored the fact that everyone was gawking at him and said, "And I'll ask you not to do that again, Captain."
"Hey, don't hate," Jack said, laughing. "You know, maybe the four of us-"
"Shall I search the archives, sir?" Ianto interrupted very loudly.
Jack pouted but said, "I remember something coming through at some point. I'll help you!"