When I left that afternoon, I understood Rose's agitation. She explained to me about the ancient race of men and women who used to regulate the laws of time and space (and who called the void the Howling) for the whole universe, and how only one of them was left after a great and terrible war. She told me about how she'd met him, how they had travelled together, and even attempted to explain to me how she'd wound up engaged to a cloned version of the actual Time Lord known as the Doctor. However, by then, I was so caught up in the adventure, I didn't care about the science. Besides, she was explaining it to me as though she were talking to Stephen Hawking, and I had never been very strong in physics.
And now, here I was, somehow psychically connected with a woman who had died, and who would appear to be the Doctor's wife. This woman who had been haunting my visions for the past ten years was the wife of the man Rose said she'd loved so hard, it had nearly crushed her.
But what neither of us still understood was why, oh why, was I having the visions? Why me? We now understood who at least some of the players were (Rose was pretty sure that the man with the bowtie who appeared in the bulk of my visions was a different incarnation of the Doctor), but what was my connection to any of it? Over the next few days, she ran other tests on me, and all she could find was a tiny bit of residue of what she called "void stuff," the remnants of the Howling that stick to me as a result of the visions coming across from the other universe. There was no indicator that I had ever crossed the void myself, or that I had any particular psychic abilities, electromagnetic anomalies or ties to any other planet.
Back in her office, I said, "I don't know, Rose. I don't get any of it, any more than I did when I first came here. In fact, I feel like I know even less."
She nodded. "By revealing more clues, often the mystery only deepens. It's one of the hazards of dealing with time and relative dimensions..." she chuckled and stopped speaking. I assumed she was remembering something again.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I was feeling discouraged, dead in the water. I felt deflated from the high of knowing who the people in my visions were, only to find, so frustratingly, that I still had no idea what to do about any of it. So I asked Rose the only question I could think of: "So, now what?"
"I don't know," she answered. "I suppose, we wait for you to think of other details, and go from there. Have you had any kind of vision since the death?"
"No, nothing. Usually, I have at least a flash every couple of days, something that connects me to the visions, but... nada. It's like the visions died with her."
"Yeah, well, if you were experiencing parts of her life, and she died, then..."
"But there were two others, there was a little girl and teen. They're not dead! And we still don't know who they are!" I sighed heavily. "So seriously, now what?"
She looked at me squarely. "What do you think, Reed?"
"What do I think? Yikes, what a question!"
"No, really. If you were me, what would you do?"
"I suppose I would try to find a way through the void," I said. "Send me back to Dimension Alpha or whatever it is."
She nodded slowly, contemplating. "And if you were you, and you could get there safely, what would you do?"
"I suppose, I'd try to find the Doctor."
Rose gulped. She was silent for a long time, and then she said, "Let's do it."
"Do what?"
"Let's try to get you through to the other side, so you can find the Doctor. He'll know how and why this is happening, he'll know what to do about it, and he'll know how to get you back here... that is, if you want to come back."
"What if he doesn't know?"
"Eventually, he'll work it out. Trust me."
"Why wouldn't I want to come back?"
Rose just smiled, and shook her head.
I didn't see Rose for a week, but she contacted me periodically concerning her progress. She had met with people in the applied physics department at Torchwood, trying to talk them into "lending" her some equipment and labour to get me to the other side. She said some of them owed her a favour, for not telling the government about some very dodgy, possibly world-ending experiments that they had done without clearance. She had told me that the Doctor had slammed all the portals shut when he'd dropped her here back in 2008, but reckoned that if the visions were getting through, then that meant weaknesses were likely appearing again. And, she said, if there was any possibility of getting through, the applied physics department would know about it, and wouldn't have any choice but to help her.
As I understood it, the first day had been about the negotiations, and the other four days had been about logistics: coordinating the time, space, resources to do it without getting caught. Files had to be accessed in a basement twenty-seven stories below street level with forty different passwords and sixteen armed guards. Parts of a machine had to be brought in from the far reaches of God-Knew-Where, surveillance equipment had to be strategically disabled, and people had to be bribed for their silence.
Nothing was asked of me during this time. I reckoned Rose was self-motivated enough, and probably felt that she was doing it for the Doctor, in whatever incarnation he may be now. If the visions were a message from him, and he needed me for something, she was bound and determined to deliver.
Over that week, I visited my parents just about every night. I never knew which day I'd be leaving, and given what Rose had told me, I wasn't at all sure I'd be back (and secretly, I wondered if I'd survive the journey). So I spent the time saying goodbye, though I never let my mum and dad know that. Each night when I left after dinner, I gave them both a hug, told them I loved them, they looked at me, and then at each other, with concern, and told me they loved me too. I continued to go to my orthopaedic surgery rotation, ate, slept, read, watched telly, and thought about the Doctor.
And then the call finally came. It was a Monday morning and I was still in bed. Rose was asking if I could be down at Torchwood with a bag packed by noon. In a text, she told me to go to a different entrance than usual, and she even gave me a code word to say to the guard at the post. I was suddenly very, very nervous, and wondered, since I hadn't had any visions in over a week, whether I had been imagining the whole thing, and this was all a great big farce.
But ten years of my life didn't lie. And I hadn't imagined the photo in Rose's office of her late fiancé in the tux, the man who looked exactly like one I had already known and seen inside my mind.
I followed her instructions, and found myself in a circular room, all white, with a sliding door that was nearly invisible to me. Rose was with me, holding onto my arm so tightly, I thought she might cut off my circulation. We could hear commotion going on, from the other side of the door, and we stood side-by-side, clutching each other, though never looking at each other.
"This is highly secret," she reminded me nervously. "Mum's the word, yeah?"
"Of course," I assured her. "I've known that from the start."
"I could go to prison for this. So could everyone else who has helped us."
"I know. Thank you, so much, Rose, really."
"You're welcome. Tell him I said hello, will you?"
"Absolutely."
"You understand, you're going to be looking for the bowtie, not the pin-stripes."
"Yes, I understand."
"Okay. How will I find him?"
"I've discussed that with they applied physics guys," she told me. "We think it won't be hard. We feel that if the visions of the Doctor's wife are finding you, then there's got to be, or will be, some kind of residual energy that will attract you together."
"Wow. That's not nerve-wracking or weird at all."
"Take this," she said, and handed me a business card with a phone number written on it. "My Doctor, the pin-striped Doctor, had a mobile phone that one of his friends had given him, so he could be reached in an emergency. This is the number. I really had to go diving in my basement boxes of painful nostalgia to find that. Oh, and don't give it to just anyone. Although, I don't think it will work anymore, given that you're going to be seeking out a different Doctor, and we don't know how long it's been for him."
"Okay," I sighed, shoving the card into my pocket.
"It might be worth a try, though. And if all else fails, go where there's something bizarre happening. He's bound to turn up eventually. Look for the TARDIS."
"The what?"
She looked at me for the first time since I'd entered the room. "The TARDIS. His spaceship. It's disguised as a blue police box. It's meant to be inconspicuous, though, so you might have to look hard. But it's the first, best indicator that he's about."
"Oh, yeah," I said, my eyes growing big. "Now that you mention it, I have seen that in my visions... never registered."
"You'll probably find that a lot of stuff will surface and come to the forefront, stuff that you never registered before. Once you find him, it will be sensory overload... even more so than it was for me. Hm. I sort of don't envy you."
"You don't?"
"Of course I do. I said only sort of."
"Do you want to come with me?"
"No, no," she replied without hesitation. "Talk about a ship that has sailed. Twice. No, just... tell him I said hello, okay?"
"Okay."
We resumed our positions, clutching arms, staring at the door, waiting for the applied physics and mechanical engineers to usher us through.
"Back in '08 there was an attack, it's sort of how I wound up here with the Doctor's clone."
"Yeah, erm... Daleks, right? You told me about that last week."
"Mm. Well, they had a reality bomb that was breaking down the barriers between universes and destroying everything. In spite of my best efforts at the time, Torchwood sat back and let the Doctor handle it, knowing he would eventually take down the Daleks from his side of the void. Which he did, of course. But meanwhile, they were studying and harnessing the reality bomb technology."
I gasped. "Oh my God. Is that what they're using to send me over there?"
Rose nodded. "That's what was in those files buried so deep in the ground. And the parts of the machine... someone had tried to build a smaller version of the reality bomb about fifteen years ago, but abandoned it and sent it into secret storage."
"Holy shit," I spat.
"Yep. Now, they're dialling it down, of course, so it won't destroy the universe."
"Well, gee, that's a relief," I said with sarcasm on the edge of my voice.
"It's still a volatile and dangerous process, though."
"You're trying to tell me I might not make it."
"Well, if you don't make it, that means possibly I won't make it either, and maybe others..."
"Just stop right there," I interrupted, turning again to look at her. "Do you want me to do this or not?"
"Yes, I do."
"Then, don't tell me what could happen. I'm all right with dying, I'm not all right with destroying the universe. So, what I don't know can't give me an ulcer."
She smiled. She stroked my hair once with both hands, in a motherly way. Tears came to her eyes, and she said, "The Doctor is going to love you."
As if on-cue, the door opened and a portly man with glasses stood there in a white lab coat. "Reed?"
"Yes."
"It's time."
"Is this going to destroy the universe?" I asked him.
"It's highly unlikely."
"Holy shit," I repeated.
"Highly unlikely."
Well, the universe remains, and I am, as far as I can tell, in Dimension Alpha.
Actually, when I arrived, I had no way of knowing that. I simply found myself in a room very much like the one I had just left, only without the scaled-down reality bomb in it, without the guys in lab coats, without Rose, without anything. It was old and in total disrepair.
In fact, it didn't take a genius to realise it was the same room, only in a different universe.
I laughed out loud when I came to this knowledge...
...until a sound cut my laughter off short, and stole my breath.
It was the sound of footsteps, coming down a corridor, quickly, as though someone was running. It was someone heavy-footed, but swift. The sound grew louder and louder and louder, and I wondered, who the hell was in this building? Clearly, it was not in use by Torchwood in the same way as in my home world, so...
And then the door opened. A shadow appeared in the doorway, and a familiar voice said, "There you are! Now you have one chance to surrender before I turn you in to the big, bad, intergalactic police... if I can get hold of them, their phone lines have been down. Now who are you?"
"Doctor?" I asked, stunned.