CHAPTER 5: The Chain of Command
The Doctor steeled himself as his fingers inched towards the door's latch. Knowing the savage threat that existed beyond seemed to make those fingers fight to resist their orders, and a tense moment passed before they finally made contact. He turned to Rory. "Ready?"
Rory gestured to the two Amys in response. "What about them?"
There they stood, side by side, but crossed arms and angled shoulders suggested that each of them would rather be anywhere else than in the other's presence. The Doctor looked at the pair and shrugged.
"Stay. Talk. Swap some stories. Though given they've both got the same memories, that might get boring pretty quick. Still, that's beside the point - ladies, you're safe right here."
One Amy curled her lip at the other. "You want me to stay with her? You're out of your head!"
The other Amy sneered. "I'd rather take my chances out there than with someone pretending to be me."
The Doctor sighed, exasperated. "Yes, let's start this again. No ifs or buts, though - you're staying put. Both of you. Just don't scratch each other's eyes out and you'll be fine."
"Can't we take them with us?" asked Rory.
"That's a bit morbid, isn't it? What would you want with four eyes, apart from two sets of glasses?"
"I don't mean their eyes. I mean, them. We could, you know, look after them?"
An Amy leaned her head forward in a transparent gesture of pseudo-secrecy. "A chivalrous and totally innocent idea, I'm sure."
The other Amy looked at the two, aghast. "Oi!" she exclaimed. "If you're me, I'm you, and I know what you're thinking - so get away from my fiancé!"
The Doctor stepped in. "Okay, I can see where this is going. Change of plans - since you're not going to let this she-said-she-said thing go, you're both coming with us. Yes, I know, stupid idea, and one that'll most likely kill the four of us rather than just two-"
Rory's eyes bulged.
"-but if that's what it'll take to shut each of you up, then bring on the Bankses!" He leaned in to Rory. "Don't worry about that 'kill' stuff. Had to make it sound dramatic." A pause. "Which, I suppose it is. And I suppose they might. Anyway. Babbling won't get us out of this room, will it." The Doctor turned his attention back to the door and took a deep breath. "Come on, let's do this."
Rory looked at the two Amys, both seemingly silenced between them. He still couldn't believe it - they looked exactly the same. Exactly. Right down to the finest detail, the smallest mannerism. Everything that the original Amy was, the duplicate was, too. He let his eyes float from one to the other, making a conscious effort to avoid weighing attention too heavily on one, lest it upset the other. "Let's stick together," he said. And then, pointedly: "All of us."
Click! The Doctor flicked the latch and the pneumatic door slid open. He cautiously poked his head out into the stark white hallway, looked left then right. Nothing. No movement, no sound. Save for the ambient humming of the dim light bulbs overhead, the base was dead silent.
Even so, the Doctor's gaze remained on alert. He beckoned the three with a flick of his wrist, and they joined him at the door's threshold, muscles tensed and ready to move. "Go!" the Doctor whispered, and immediately all of them darted down the corridor, keeping their bodies close to the wall as they rounded a corner, then another.
"Which way?" the Doctor asked Rory.
"Left here, past his office," he replied.
"Past his office?"
"Past who's office?" an Amy whispered from behind.
What greeted them served as answer enough. Showing obvious signs of stress and force battered upon it from the other side, the four found themselves facing the door to Banks' personal office, with the Doctor taking distinct measures to distance himself as far away from it as possible. Rory looked perplexed.
"What happened here? Why is the door all... bulgy?"
"Banks Prime," the Doctor said. "The man himself is... not himself. Best we stay out of his way altogether."
A booming force thundered against the door, flexing it sharply outwards. A strangled growl. Another thud. The Doctor stared to back away.
"And I suggest we start now."
A final assault caused the door to explode open in a fragmented shower. Amid the carnage, the bedraggled spectacle of Joseph Banks - eyes wild, hair limp, face scratched with deep claw marks - stood in a pounce-like stance, heaving like a rabid animal. He gargled a guttural bark from deep within his lungs - any semblance of man had long left his body; this was an untamed beast looking for blood.
The Doctor was intent on not shedding his, and broke into an immediate run. "Now!"
They didn't need to be asked twice. Rory and the two Amys followed behind him on furious heels, and right behind them, Joseph maintained frightening speed. A quick-thinking Amy, seeing an approaching medical cart positioned against a corridor wall, flung it out behind her and into Joseph's path, but it merely caused him to stumble. The clutter brought him to his knees for only the briefest of moments as he maintained momentum on all fours before returning the pursuit on two legs. He snarled through heaving breaths. Rapid. Relentless. There seemed to be no stopping him; only efforts to delay him.
"Straight ahead!" shouted Rory. "It's the door straight ahead!"
The Doctor hurled himself towards the approaching latch with an extended arm, flicking it upwards as soon as his fingers made contact. "Inside! Quick!" Even as it slid open the four scrambled to get inside, and the moment they were, the Doctor pulled the latch again to close. His pulse swelled in his throat as he looked through the gradually sliding gap to see Joseph charging forth - the door seemed to take forever, and he drew closer, and closer, and closer...
The door kept sliding. Closer.
A furious roar. Closer.
A heavy thud. The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut, not daring to look.
And then, nothing.
An uncomfortable moment passed before the Doctor cautiously opened a crack of eyelid. The door had shut completely. They were safe. Out of breath and nerves shaken to breaking point, but safe.
"Hah!" the Doctor laughed nervously. "The thrill of the chase, huh? Even more thrilling when you're the one being chased! Is everyone alright?"
Rory and the two Amys nodded in the affirmative. One Amy pointed at the door. "Will that hold?"
"It might not need to," noted the Doctor, pressing his ear to its surface. "It sounds like... he's gone."
"Gone?"
"Well, not 'vanished' gone - that'd be one heck of a party trick - but it seems like he's given up on lil' ol' us. You saw how he broke out, yet here we are with a perfectly intact door and four perfectly intact selves."
"I don't get it," said an Amy, brow furrowed. "Why doesn't he want to come in here?"
Rory pointed into the room. "Maybe it's because of him."
All three looked to his target, and it was only then that they heard the beeping. A rapid, high-pitched beeping - one clearly designed to attract attention or alarm - was coming from one of the multitude of machines gathered around a single bed, and on that bed lay a wrinkled, withered body. Flailed limbs had strewn a simple bedsheet so wildly that it barely covered anything, revealing equal amounts of mottled skin and festering tumours.
"This is the man I saw last night," said Rory as he approached the array - slowly at first, then urgently. Bedside, he pressed two fingers to the underside of the man's jaw, feeling for a pulse, but the beeping from the life support machine said it all.
"He's... dead."
The Doctor rushed to the bed, sonic screwdriver in hand. Even without it, there was no doubt - the man's chest remained still, lifeless. His glassy eyes stared up into nothingness, a puckered mouth hung agape to expose yellowed teeth. And those tumours - they were everywhere. Arms, hands, chest, legs. His elderly body, completely ravaged with sickness.
As Rory reached up to gently switch the machine off, the Doctor activated the sonic. "Who is he?" he asked, scanning the body up and down.
"I don't know," said Rory. "If I were to guess, I'd say maybe he's Joseph's father. About the right age, similar features. Maybe his only relative, which might explain the effort to install all this medical equipment to keep him here." He paused, shook his head in disbelief. "You should have seen him, Doctor. Each breath was a desperate gasp; he was practically dying when I found him. But these machines kept bringing him back. He'd be dead long ago if it weren't for them. It was as though he was... being forced to live."
The Doctor flicked the screwdriver up to read the results. He looked puzzled, and immediately flicked it down and up again, as if to check for a mistake. "Time of death is only a few hours ago," he said, frowning. "But here's where it gets pear-shaped. Rory, say again: who do you think this man is?"
"Joseph's father?"
"Right, and on any other day I'd say 'yes, fair enough, makes sense,' and off we'd go to play Boggle. But I scanned Banks Prime in his office, right when he turned all growly-snarly, and his DNA signature is identical to the DNA signature of this man. Sure, you'd expect some genetic similarities from father to son, but this isn't just a hereditary match, this is one hundred percent identical. The exact same DNA, down to the last G."
"Wait a minute," said an Amy, stepping up to better inspect the body. "You're saying that the old man in this bed is..."
"The original Joseph. Yes. Seems the man we first met, the schmoozy guy with the plush office, was just another copy. The man right here... this is, or was, the real Joseph Banks."
All four took a moment to look down at the festering, elderly wretch before them; poles apart from the smooth suit and killer smile that greeted them when they arrived.
Rory shook his head. "But it doesn't make sense. This man's at least eighty or ninety years old. The duplicates out there are, what, mid-thirties? Why are they so much younger?"
"Why doesn't the subject of a photograph age with that person?" The Doctor tapped a finger to his temple as one thought rapidly linked to another, and he writhed in revelatory glee. "Come on, humans! Look at the evidence! The man in the bed? The copies he spawned? They're younger because that's how old Joseph was when he created them! Duplicates remain in genetic stasis. For the original person, life goes on - he gets old and wrinkly and things start to smell and fall off, but the spin-offs remain minty fresh."
"That line from the promo reel," an Amy noted, snapping her fingers. "'Always there, always yours.' A duplicate is 'always there' because it doesn't age."
"But then," the Doctor said, "there's the question of all this." He looked around the room at the multitude of machines that surrounded the frail figure. "Why go to so much effort to keep the original person alive when, clearly, he's seen better days?"
Rory studied the tumour-riddled body before him, slightly needled by the Doctor's words. Comeon,humans. He wracked his brain, determined to link the pieces - determined to show that he could. The answer was there, somewhere. The machines; what about them? They were all working to keep alive a man whose body had long since given up, making him live longer than he had any natural right to. A dying body that housed a still-conscious mind.
Time of death is only a few hours ago...
Only a few hours...
"It was him!"
The Doctor, Amy, and the other Amy all looked at Rory, the stunned silence that ensued only served to highlight the volume of his exclamation. "I'm sorry?" said the Doctor.
"The copies," he said, this time slightly more composed. "The copies of Joseph. They only started to decay when the original Joseph died. His body had long gone, but his mind was the glue that held the copies... together..." He trailed off, unsure of whether or not he believed his own words.
The Doctor, on the other hand, was rolling them around in his head; taking apart each link, examining it, and putting it back together. "Mr Williams," he said. "That's not half bad." He punctuated with a hearty thump to Rory's back, catching him off-guard, and began to pace the room as he explored the scenario. "Life's a tricky thing to get right, especially when you're an energy flow in an underground cave on a planet that no-one knows exists. So you go with what works - you rely on a psychic link to the original lifeform in order to power each copy. Kill the link, kill conscious thought, and you're left with beings that can only fall back to their most primal, innate urges." He paused, rewound a few steps. "Or maybe it's deeper than that. The energy flow can only replicate matter, not life itself. Not in the truest sense of the word, anyway. If there's such a thing as a soul - and I'm not saying there is, but if there is - maybe it's beyond its capabilities. Either way..." The weight of the situation seemed to suddenly press upon him from above; the Doctor's shoulders visibly slumped as he heaved a resigned sigh. "Dozens of speeding cars, with no-one behind the wheel. And we're right in the middle of the crash."
No-one said anything. No-one could. And it was in that moment of silence that one of the two Amys heard an almost inaudible shuffling. The faintest movement of one surface against another. She turned her head around the room, looking for the source of the sound. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. True to form, the Doctor's mind didn't seem to register; he was still lost in thought, his face one of concern. "There's still something that doesn't add up," he mused.
"Doctor," said Amy.
"The source needs to be kept alive in order to sustain the copies... but what about the-"
"Doctor!"
He turned his head to see the alerted Amy cupping a hand behind her ear: Listen.
He stopped mid-breath, and he heard it too: a repeated shuffling noise, now growing in volume, that seemed to come from no direction in particular, yet every direction at once. Rory and the second Amy were similarly puzzled, and all four scanned the room for its source.
"What is that?" Rory asked. "And where?"
The room offered no answers - not until they heard the creaking. And this time, the origin was unmistakable. The Doctor's blood ran cold as he craned his neck to look at the ceiling, and saw that the white panels above were moving intermittently downward from a force exerted from above. But the weight was too much, and in what seemed like slow-motion the panels began to crack, peppering dust onto the floor as the Doctor started to back away.
"One of these days," he said, "humans will have evolved beyond the need for poorly secured ventilation ducts."
CRASH! The ceiling panels collapsed as a torrent of powder, debris and tattered bodies rained down from above. Rory, the two Amys and the Doctor pressed against the wall as a pile of Joseph copies - each still wearing the attire of their assigned duties - landed sickeningly atop one another, writhing with laboured movement. Their hunt had not stopped; they'd found a way in - and as soon as a Joseph near the bottom of the stack made eye contact with the Doctor, it heaved a guttural groan that instantly alerted the rest.
The Doctor looked among his companions, eyes wide. "Why is no-one running for their lives? Get out of here!"
They opened the door and spilled back back into the hallway, and with his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor aimed at the latch, causing it to elicit a high-pitched tone and sending a small plume of smoke billowing out from the mechanism inside. With the door locked, the Doctor sprinted ahead to lead the group down the hallway and back to the battered doors of Joseph's office.
"They just won't stop," said a breathless Amy, looking back over her shoulder.
"With the host signal dead, they're just ids on legs," the Doctor replied. "They're pack animals."
"But what about the original Joseph?" asked Rory. "Not the 'original' original - the one we first met. The one who did..." He motioned to what remained of the office doors. "...this."
"Yes." The Doctor frowned. "That one's a worry. He wasn't back there, which means he's somewhere around here. The lone wolf, still on the loose."
An Amy gave the Doctor a wry smile. "I didn't know the TARDIS picked up so many nature documentaries."
The other Amy cast a blackened gaze over her double. "You're making jokes at a time like this? We're in the middle of a feeding frenzy here, in case you haven't noticed!"
"Hey, I was just trying to lighten the mood." She paused. "Wannabe me."
"Why you-"
The Doctor stepped in between the two, putting a hand on each Amy's head and forcing their gaze to his. "You two. Ginge and Ginger. Take a bit of shush and times it by a billion. That's how much shush I want from each of you right now. Two billion bits of shush, plus whatever bits of shush you've got hidden down the back of the couch." He let his words sit for a moment as he looked from one Amy to the other, then back again. Then, inexplicably, his eyes wandered beyond them to the destroyed office doors, a mess of fragments and shards. Lightning fast, a plan formed. Could they? Should they?
They should.
"Actually," said the Doctor, "I've got an even better idea. You're splitting up."
"What?" Each Amy spoke in unison.
"Doctor," interjected Rory, but he was waved away with a dismissive hand.
"We need answers. Solid facts. That's the only way we're getting to the bottom of what's going on here - right now we're just playing a guessing game that's got a nasty habit of running after us and wanting to eat our faces. There's something off about this whole Joseph duplication thing, but I can't put my finger on it - and given that I've got ten fingers and an extraordinarily clever brain, that says something."
The Doctor wandered among the group, piercing through Rory and the two Amys with a determined gaze. "You," he said, pointing to the nearest Amy before pointing into the destroyed office nearby. "You're going with Rory in there. Search everything, search everywhere. I need to know more about the person we're dealing with - Joseph's past, Joseph's plans, Joseph's favourite thing to do on a Saturday night. Anything that can give us some insight. I'd say feel free to make a mess, but it looks like you've been beaten to it. Do you understand?"
They both nodded, not daring to get in the way of the Doctor's train of thought - and right now, not daring to question it.
The Doctor then pointed to the other Amy. "You. You're coming with me. We're off to find out more about this base - how long it's been here, whether anyone else has ever had access to it, and most importantly, how to get to the energy flow that creates Joseph's duplications. I need to see it for myself - I need to know it works. And then maybe, just maybe, once we've done all of that, we'll stand a fighting chance of getting out of here alive."
The plan hung in the air like a pointed balloon, and all three returned complying nods to the Doctor before exchanging awkward glances, like a group of school children on the receiving end of a stern lecture. The Doctor seemed to register the change of tone, and offered a weak smile - an olive branch. "And when we do," he said, "how about we go to that ice cream planet? Double scoops on me?"
All three gave a light chuckle, the tension easing. The Doctor beamed. "I promise you, one of these days we'll look back on all this as just another one of those things that happened. And I trust each and every one of you to help get us there." He held up his left wrist, displayed his watch. "One hour. Rory and Amy, we'll meet you back here then. Other Amy, let's go find us some stuff."
The appropriate Amy joined the Doctor's side, and the two started making their way down the white hallway before the Doctor stopped mid-step. He looked back at Rory and his assigned Amy. "Look after each other," he said simply. He lingered his gaze, and then, satisfied, resumed his stride and rounded a corner - the group of four now groups of two.
The Doctor produced his sonic screwdriver from his jacket and, without slowing, scanned each passing doorway. "First things first," he said, "is for us to find high energy readings. That'll give us a clue on how to get down to the underground flow. Keep your eyes peeled for..." Awkwardly, he realised where his sentence was leading. "For energy."
"Doctor," ventured Amy. "I wanted to talk to you about the other Amy. About how we don't exactly... get along."
The Doctor looked at her. "Perhaps you never will. You're two of the same poles - the closer you're pushed together, the further apart you repel."
Amy responded with a polite smile. "There are some things in this universe that you can't reduce down with simple science. After all these years, don't you think human behaviour is one of them? Sometimes people just don't like each other. That's just how we're built. It could be because of the littlest things, something greater, or something that can't be defined at all. We're a world of different personalities, each with different tastes, opinions, feelings, and beliefs - the odds are pretty good that we'll clash more than we'll cuddle. And sometimes..." Amy looked at her shoes. "Sometimes the person we clash with most is ourself."
A wordless moment passed - one that was only given sound with the buzzing of the sonic screwdriver, still scanning each doorway. The Doctor appeared to be thinking this over. He leaned in to Amy and started, then stopped, to ask a question. He paused, considered the best approach, then said, almost in a whisper:
"Are you the real Amy?"
She looked back at him and took a moment of her own to consider a response, but before she could deliver it, the buzzing from the sonic screwdriver became louder, its tone much higher. The Doctor looked down at it, then at the door it pointed to. "Aha!" he exclaimed, opening the latch. "We have a lucky runner up!"
"Runner up?"
"Energy is as energy does," said the Doctor. "And we've found ourselves a room that's buzzing with it. No copy waterfall, but we do have a continuous flow of data, radio waves, electricity consumption..."
Amy followed the Doctor inside and examined her surroundings. "A communications room?"
Dozens of video displays occupied a far wall, with each bearing a different form of information to its neighbour - on one, a scattering of rapidly changing number clusters; on another, star charts; on yet another, flight trajectory paths punctuated with various dates. A central control panel, littered with buttons, switches and dials, stood at the foot of the monitor array, and a single seat was positioned in front of the lone microphone that offered audio output amid the barrage of data input.
"The jackpot of the communications room lottery," said the Doctor as he rubbed his hands together, punctuating it with a crack of his knuckles. "Let's have a stickybeak." He lowered himself into the chair and immediately began manipulating the complicated array before him - in the way he seemed to have innate knowledge of the sundry controls of the TARDIS, here the Doctor looked to be one with the machine. His fingers danced over the controls, skipping from one to the next in an instant, and the displays rapidly changed their readouts according to his whims. He glanced up to inspect them, then back down to the buttons and switches, then back up again. "Hmmm..." he muttered. "What kind of show are you running here, Joseph?"
"What is it?" asked Amy.
The Doctor pointed to a list of numbers. "See that? Dates and times of automated shuttle arrivals. Small, unmanned ships - supply ships, looks like. Food, building materials; they've been arriving like clockwork for years. Thousands of ships, all incoming, all returning empty. But then we get to this one entry here - see the different code? Different class of ship. It arrived, but it never left. So why would-"
He was cut off as a sharp burst of radio static filled the room. Microphone feedback. More static. Amy winced. "Argh, turn it down!"
"It's not me," said the Doctor, rotating a nearby dial in an effort to control the volume. "An external signal is syncing into this frequency." He tapped the microphone in front of him. "Hello? Anyone there? Mind dropping that to a dull roar?"
The noise immediately stopped, and an eerie silence replaced it. The Doctor looked stunned, then pleased. "I... didn't think that would work. Is the request window still open? Any chance for a Jammie Dodger? With tea? Just send it to the Doctor, care of the TARDIS."
A moment of microphone feedback. Then, a voice:
"The Doctor?"
It was a female voice; slightly hushed, and somewhat taken aback. It spoke again. "You... are you-you the Doctor?"
His blood ran cold. A chill from the dead. It couldn't be.
"Who is this?" he demanded.
There was no response. Amy approached the microphone, heaving a huff of frustration. "Oi, radio lady. The Doctor asked you a question."
Microphone feedback. The voice spoke again. "Is it... is it you? How can it be-be you?"
That voice. That speech pattern. The occasional word, said twice.
The Doctor leaned forward, beads of sweat forming on his brow. "Who is this?"
"How can-can it be you?" the voice said again. "Amy. You're... dead."
CHAPTER SIX COMING SOON!