.Day 7
He packed a torch, a handful of measuring instruments, some of which (such as his Yoyo and a box filled with jelly babies) might also be repurposed to alleviate any spontaneous boredom he might experience, a few potentially useful contraptions that looked like they had been screwed together from random objects on the fly (probably because they had been), including some that he'd been waning to test for a while, a sightseeing guide for the lower city that he'd picked up in the university dorms he'd previously visited, a change of clothes, and a few provisions – judging by his scans, the greater infrastructure down there seemed mostly intact, but there was no sure way to know whether all sections of the lower tunnels would be just as hospitable as the upper towers without being able to ascertain the state of the cables and relays themselves.
He'd probably find out soon enough, probably the moment he stepped foot in a given section when the light flickered to life... or perhaps rather didn't, but if the power grid should indeed be working all the way down, he might want to take a look at its architecture and the materials used one way or another, just to satisfy his curiosity.
As the denizen of a millenia-old spaceship, he wasn't exactly flabbergasted, but one of these days, he would like to know how the Fabronian engineers had constructed their surprisingly durable machinery, or at least, he'd like to know if he'd guessed right with respects to their method – some sort of self-replicating component, perhaps? Possibly a pseudo-biological gel used as either a preservation layer or partially crystallized to serve as the conductive agent?
That might be self-sustaining for a long time, but would not be immune to suffering contamination, individual segments spoiling or corrosion at the junctures with the metallic parts, and therefore require at least some maintenance now and then (not unlike the afore-mentioned millenia-old spaceship), but for all he knew he might find a few sections of the city down there where the power lines were distinctly out of order; After all, the surface towers were the newest parts of Xalax right now.
In any case, he could no depend on having electricity available at every step of the way, and his relative interest in the power line question kept him mindful enough of the issue to inspire him into bringing some provisions, which involved him producing a simple suede bag from his pockets that, perhaps fittingly, looked like something out of a medieval fantasy RPG, and stuffing a good helping of those nutrition cubes, an even mix of the orange "day of hard work" ones and the juicy-dark-green-with-olive-spots "light sugary snack" ones.
He also took a bigger-on-the-inside canister of drinking water, a selection of teabags (the easiest means to make water less boring) and a light blanket, then he made way for the nearest major elevator.
He'd used some of those before to get around in the city; There were large public ones with enough space to hold a small crowd and seats around the walls, most likely for the elderly, the infirm and the exceptionally lazy, at times there were several of them lined up in the same wall, not all of them with the same height and depth available, a place sort of like a tram station with announcement screens indicating when each elevator would be arriving, and several ones to chose from and change between if the last one you rode didn't bring you all the way to where you were going – At Xalax' height, this must've been a loud and crowded place filled with daily hustle and bustle, with sharply-dressed businesspeople, little old ladies, parents with small children and longtime bachelors on their morning commute to work all colluding, but now, everything was standing still.
At least for this particular microcosm, the day had come when all the clocks stop ticking, except they didn't; In this particular instance, the clocks had outlasted their makers.
Bess the efficiency and prudence of those Fabronian engineers, too: The screens in question, all lights and machines had turned themselves off to preserve power, but once some tiny sensor detected a person stepping through the spacious door arch, all of it flickered to life with hardly a delay, telling him exactly where most of the lifts had spent their lonely centuries; As one might imagine, most of them had been left close to the surface layer after one last trip of ferrying the populace they had carried day in day out into the daylight so they could follow through with the evacuation.
After a quick glance at a wall-mounted diagram with a comforting similarity to a 20th century Earth subway chart, he determined which of them would take him the furthest down, sonicked it open, pressed the key at the very bottom of an ample selection of available buttons and waited for the automaton to hum into motion.
He felt a surprisingly gentle shake at the lift accelerated, the last protests of inertia, and then, both he and the elevator were on their way down.
The city's pomp was once more apparent in the interior design, the tiles of red marble and dark granite still shone underneath him, the handrail looked like brass but felt smoother, almost like some kind of plastic or ceramic, and above him, several lavish lamp illuminated what was basically just a place to people to stand still in while they were being conveyed upward or downwards, albeit one that was the size of a small ballroom.
If one were to rearrange all of its area in strictly rectangular shape, he had no doubt that the entirety of Clara's apartment would have fit here snugly.
Its effect might have been different when it was thickly packed with the multitudes of Fabron, when all the bling of this prosperous city might have been contrasted with the diverse crowd, but with just one passenger loitering near its center, the spacious cabin couldn't look anything other than pointlessly huge.
Another aspect of its fastidious bragging were the walls – shiny tiles matching the floor up to the handrails where they weren't covered by brown leather seats, then, huge one-piece mirrors that were probably intended to make the room look brighter in addition to their obvious shininess – He'd have preferred any kind of windows that let him have a look at the walls, and perhaps the mechanisms that drove this thing or the kind of structures this passed through, the layers of city in-between.
But even the barest, most boring wall might have been preferable to the silent, solemn company of his own reflection.
He already knew what he looked like, he could do without the reminder.
Even the doors and buttons were somewhat reflective, their shiny copper-like surfaces matching the handrails.
When the doors finally opened, the different design and make of the corridors made it apparent that it was the work of a different time with different sensibilities or concepts for aesthetics.
The strong rusty-red coloration of the walls and the preference for sharp edges over curves made everything look smaller and darker despite the high ceilings – the elevator opened up into a huge, semicircular hall with various large corridors branching out from it like sunbeams, and in it's center was another thing that was taboo to the people who'd built the surface, but left here as a witness of the past and a warning, with an engraved metal plate on the side of its pedestal explaining its history: It was a large statue out of something that resembled but probably wasn't bronze, depicting a middle-aged man with long bushy hair, a long, flowing cape, laden with heavy jewelry including large elaborate earrings, light vambraces whose design clearly indicated that they were more for decoration than protection, a coronet with the basic shape of two interconnected rings through which the wearer's forehead spots might have been visible, and the long specter that went all the way from the pedestal to an arm he was somewhat stretching forward.
He was, according to the inscriptions, a wealthy and influential entrepreneur who had once sponsored renovations to this part of the city; As this had occurred in a time period where electronic information storage and digital images were already available, the right side of the pedestal held names, pictures and brief biographies of both the artist and the person depicted.
In the Doctor's opinion, the second one was kind of superfluous, given that the rich guy was already immortalized in this huge statue up there that left little doubt as to what he looked like, but he supposed that having it there for comparison did at least allow attentive observers to appreciate how closely the artist had matched him.
In the picture, the man didn't look nearly as strict or lordly as his metallic likeness made him look; He presented himself not with the stern forward gaze the artist had given him, but a wide smile that radiated confidence, but hadn't completely lost a natural, youthful quality despite the creases at the corners of his mouth and the gray streaks in his otherwise dark bush of fine, tightly coiled hair. Various decorative clips topped off with precious stones adorned his mane, his robes were dyed in strongly saturated purples and blues, its upper portion parting to reveal a strip of his broad chest, his skin a warm shade of dark brown, and unlike his statue, he wasn't wearing a cape, at least not at the time this picture was taken. Despite his conformity with the fashions of his time, he didn't seem to have lost sight of the humble beginnings alluded to in his biography, and spent a lot of his new-found fortune on projects that were meant to benefit the public.
The artist, by contrast, was a lanky, slim thing who didn't seem to have figured out in time what to do about having to be in a picture: The photograph had probably tried their best, but the man, a young, peachy-skinned individual with long, honey-colored hair, a simple ring-like headdress and clothes that would have looked unremarkable if not for their odd, almost luminescent shade of blue, just generically smiled into the camera with visible hints of embarrassment in his face.
The Doctor recognized his name, though.
This fellow was mentioned in quite a few books and texts, he'd even looked up some of his paintings to get the references. Awkward as he looked, this youth had gone on to become quite the influential artist and architect in his day – When these pictures were taken, they were probably part of something that was supposed to signify and display prosperity and hopefulness, but later historical events tinged their sight with the uniquely bitter taste of irony that only regret for past foolishness could procure – And this was something he knew very well, and kept in mind as he proceeded through the lower city.
It's splendor must have felt quite ambiguous to its inhabitants; Too illustrious to bury or destroy in a dramatic manner, but too loaded with implications and associations to be rejoiced in. The many many visitors this plaza must have seen every day probably felt rather ambivalently about the giants whose shoulders they walked on, awed by their power and achievements, but ever-conscious of the warning contained in their atrocities – and like all who as much as whitewashed history, they had been damned to repeat it.
And this wasn't a sentiment he would have been a stranger to; He didn't need to come all the way to the Nevetina-Galaxy, nor even make himself suffer through some far too nostalgia-tinted civil war reenactment on Earth – All the way back on Gallifrey, they'd had the Death Zone and the Tomb of Rassilon inside, a barren stretch of rocky land that had remained undisturbed for ages yet perfectly functional at the time(s) he ended up wandering around in it, much like the non-ruins of Xalax.
They had been to frightened, too full of misplaced respect to dismantle, deal with or even breach a relic from a time when they would kidnap the universe's other residents and make the fight to the death for cheap entertainment; The one person who did breach it – Borusa – didn't do it to show the public the implications of their ancestor's more problematic legacy, but to emulate those bygone days.
But was it a wonder that they'd pick themselves leaders like that, or the sort that wouldn't think twice of annihilating most of the universe, the decision that spelled all of their doom?
One truth remained inescapable for Humans, Fabronians and Time Lords alike: Those willing to forget, or as much as whitewash history, were damned to repeat it.
Aside from the vastly different aesthetic, though, the lower city was ultimately a continuation of the upper one, or the other way around, a growth of more of the same stuff that there hadn't been enough of, and as such, it was still filled with basic city things: Shops, housing, various public buildings, offices, workplaces, transit, all the things one could find on the surface just with another flavor of pompous grandiosity; In the end, it was all just rooms people had stood around in at various times of the day, carried things in and out of, or listened to other people to – and he was somewhat disappointed with himself, to fall prey to this kind of fatigue just as he'd descended to what many might deem, the most mysterious part; For it wasn't even disappointment. With River to one-up, Rory to assure or enthuse, or Amy to share the sense of wonder and adventure with and have their energy feed off each other, he thinks he might have maintained his capacity to absorb and keep absorbing with openness and appreciation, but he's no longer fully sure, simply because their days together lay so far in the past by now, and having humored that thought just made it all worse.
He didn't that the wide glittering in his eyes was ever truly faked, but that didn't mean that it didn't require some effort,or perhaps rather a form of supply to keep it going.
In spite of the cold, dampening feeling floating downwards past his shoulder blades, and the way it made Xalax' corridors seem more constricting than the endlessness he'd felt before, he pushed onwards as if to prove himself wrong.
It was like having gigabytes of music available, but having thoroughly worn out the few songs he could think of at the top of his head, and like with that particular problem, one potential solution could be to pick something at random; So he marched down the corridors without aiming for anything in particular, driven mostly by moody foolishness and frustration about the fact that he kept sabotaging himself at his attempts to get himself lost so he could explore and find a way, always solving the puzzle too early before it acquired a satisfying degree of difficulty because his experience and vigilance worked against him there and were too rooted in habit to be turned off when it was convenient, their none too rare lapses following completely whimsical patterns.
He could still have traced the way back to the elevator he'd arrived in by the time he decided to do what he'd been meaning to do for a long time, and found himself a power line to break open; So far, he hadn't come across any section of the city that was out of commission, not even down here – from doorways to machinery to computers and smaller individual robots, everything inside Xalax had obeyed each of his wishes like his own limbs, and that gave him a good idea of how the Fabronians must have seen themselves, not just as rulers living comfortable lives, but as masters that shaped the world around them according to their whims, a world that had ended up melting away because it had been unable to withstand something as dynamic and inconstant as a person's will, the erosive weather of their ambition and fury, and the warring visions of multiple people who wanted to make their hopes manifest in physical reality – they would all have needed an own world to themselves, but they all wanted this one, it wouldn't do to remodel one of the countless barren rocks out there in their own image.
This city, however, had been built to comply and be malleable to their wishes, a vast biome of their own, as different from forests, seas, mountains and savannahs as those were to each other.
There was probably still a list of restrictions in place, at least in times of stability, a fixed list of privileges assigned to every citizen that was automatically enforced and administrated through the computer systems, to prevent things like young children turning off the city's main power generators.
He'd previously assumed that those were somehow programmed into those mysterious key crystals the locals had used to open doors and access computers and devices, but after he'd finished cracking open that power line, he was certain – and surprised.
He'd guessed wrong, no organic material, not here. Perhaps his mind had defaulted to that option because it was the solution the Gallifreyan engineers had found to that problem, inspired by the amazing capacity for self-repair and self-organization exhibited by living beings, and especially those native to Gallifrey. But he could see how others might reject that approach for the creation of durability, after all, life's processes of regrowth, while seemingly autonomous, could also be material-consuming and was ultimately finite.
Instead, the Fabronian's solution was akin to another thing that, while objectively as finite and mutable as everything else in this universe, was often thought of as a symbol for something hard and persistent: Jewel and Stone.
The cores of the conduits consisted not of biological goop, but of semi-crystalline material alike if not identical to the key crystals themselves, the process of activating the former with the latter the result of an induced resonance within the material due to its similar makeup.
From observing the line reacting to input from his screwdriver, he could guess that the pattern of sonic pulses he'd found to work as an acceptable substitute after a lot of tweaking and refining of something that yielded an initially quite minor response was a good emulation of what the signal from an actual key crystal would be.
Of course he'd researched the material pretty early on, longing to understand the one thing that baffled his experienced understanding most persistently, but even though each and every Xalaxian must have used them constantly in their daily lives, information on them was scarce, and that was bizarre. It was like no one in 21st century earth knowing what plastic was; It held the stench of a rotten secret, something with an answer along the lines of "You don't want to know", something satisfying enough for people to rob themselves o the contentment born from ignoring it, perhaps even an open secret they collectively didn't ask about, given the ubiquity of those stones – Judging by the documents, it was something that had once been classified and possibly still been at the time Xalax was abandoned, unknown enough for the technology to be lost – for one thing, no one on "modern day" Fabron (meaning the time of his first visit, the age after human colonists) seemed to use them anymore.
From what little he'd been able to scrape together, they had been in use since late in the First Period of Florescence but not fully mastered until the Second, that people had tended to wear them integrated somewhere into their bucketloads jewelry, in spots that denoted importance like in crows, necklaces or gauntlets on the wearer's favored hand, that their composition and likely the process of how to make them had gone unchanged for long periods of time, and that one of the central plants for making the material was located on the lowest levels of Xalax.
For something that had existed so long, mythologizing was unavoidable, so a vague association with the "Resting place of the goddess" legend existed in literature, a stylized term for the things was something the TARDIS first rendered as 'divine amber', like how amber is the hardened form of something that flows out where a tree is "wounded" – the actual term, now that he understood it in its native dialect, was a more technical-sounding word denoting 'body liquid released upon damage', a general, abstract term that could also contain blood or ichor as a subset, the word term a bit of an oxymoronic exospeak gag that combined religious with detached, pseudo-scientific language, something almost like an euphemism for something suspiciously convnient.
All this... not so much explicit secrecy but sheer lack of mention was beginning to make him think that there might have been some true kernel to that 'goddess' legend after all, obviously no actual divinity, but something down there that had been an inexplicable black box for the Fabronians who had nonetheless come to rely upon it in their daily lives.
The Doctor supposed that he would have to dig a little deeper to find out... literally.
The answers may or may now be further down in this underground complex, if only he could keep any silly cynical listlessness from slowing his gears to a halt, or he might never find out.
Sure, he'd been known to let himself fall into the habit of telling him he could always come back later, especially when it came to postponing a story's ending, but after having escaped his 'sheduled ends' at Lake Silencio and Trenzalore, he was quite aware that even a life that could stretch on for thousands of years was ultimately finite, and that he had no time to waste.
He didn't know exactly why he made sure to leave the the wall plating he'd opened to get access to the power duct neatly closed up, as it was highly unlikely that anyone was ever going to walk through this corridor ever again, let alone use the facilities that this crystalline conduit supplied with electricity, and leaving at least the outer wall plating open might've been helpful in recognizing this place for the sake of orientation. It was one of these things that seemed like the "proper" thing to do before you started to question why you were doing them.
He'd imagine that Clara might joke about the remainder of his very vestigial respect for other people's property acting up, although a more likely culprit was the force of habit born from centuries of having to cover his tracks during covert investigations of all sorts, during many of which he'd had to sneak a peek at the insides of various technological devices without anyone noticing that he'd been here before he'd had the chance to escape.
By the time he was sonicking the last few bolts back in, he'd remembered that there was no one in this entire city who could possibly have chased after him, but stopping halfway through would've felt even sillier, despite the afore-mentioned lack of spectators.
It's not that he was opposed to silliness, per se, but he'd really really prefer for it to be always deliberate.
Leaving his pointlessly finished work behind, the lone wanderer continued on his lack of path, putting one foot in front of the other and focusing his observations on nothing more than that.
The little corridor he was following led to a large metal bulkhead, and it, once persuaded by a swipe of his dear old screwdriver, opened to reveal an eager darkness that excitedly lit up like Christmas decorations, outlining what had been a street lined with little shops.
Stepping into the confounding mundane sight, he became surrounded by perfectly even surfaces stretching on to his right and his left, doorways, shop windows and colorful advertizing lights arranged like tiles, but, apart from that unifying aesthetic choice, not much more refined or unique in their attention-grabbing techniques than comparable businesses on earth.
Starting from the section he'd entered, the bright letters of shop signs flickered to life forwards and backwards from his position, along with the square lights on the ceiling and the flood lights illuminating the odd statue in the center of what was once a wide avenue that was still somewhat removed from the hustle and bustle of the main streets, an inviting, cozy place to buy lunch or clothes in a lively but not crowded atmosphere and what passed for urban flair on a planet where that didn't involve noisy vehicles and the night sky.
In some ways it was not unlike the promenade of a space station with it's completely closed-off structure in completely man-made surroundings, bar the feeling of being a small, mildly remarkable part of a greater whole that hadn't merited a higher than average level of ceiling height and showyness; Even the pompous statues of wealthy benefactors or sponsors were fairly spaced apart, not because anyone had deliberately held back from showing off, but because this was not the primary place to do it – this was where you went for an agreeable but no extraordinarily remarkable afternoon of drinking with your co-workers or the monthly shopping trip with your regular circle of friends.
If he allowed himself to let the insignificant details blend together, he could easily picture Clara sitting on one of the many empty tables behind the glass doors and walls of a locality, consuming a variety of caffeinated beverages alongside P.E., the bowtie-wearing history teacher and perhaps a few other co-workers whole faces he hadn't bothered to retain, never mind that most cafés on 21st century Earth didn't have doors that opened by sliding upwards or synthesizers behind the counters, though certain phases of earth fashion would have been very capable of producing such chairs that were basically gaudy miniature thrones decorated with unabashedly synthetic imitations of precious stones, metals and jewels, which were the tried and true thing here on Fabron, unlike the artistically bent rods of metal that passed for furniture in some of the more "modern-styled" establishments on the surface.
Those specifics weren't a significant part of the fundamental nature of this place as a space for activities and interactions it had payed host to, or the kind of place it was now that all tables were empty.
There was no use in pretending that the empty localities were merely closed – even if you didn't get close enough to their doors to notice the total lack of any signs announcing opening hours, or without the knowledge that the Xalaxians had valued their independence from the sunlight and implemented a system of shifts, there were places on Earth where cities this big tended to have businesses open all around the clock, if not all of them, then at least different types at different times.
As in any true metropolis, the streets in the city center never came to be fully abandoned – Even in the middle of the night, there should be music booming from night clubs and drunk revelers shambling from one locality to the next until the bakeries opened at the cusp of dawn – instead, the garish, colorful lights were completely at odds with the complete lack of sound and activity, among which even the steps of a single man seemed like a sacrilege against the ghostly silence of a graveyard, only a great deal more impressive, an entire necropolis without the advantage of showing just enough sighs of decay for raiding it to become archeology instead of grave-robbing, though the chronological age of the place would certainly have qualified it as the former.
The mannequins in the clothing shops were still stocked with the clothes that the store owners probably still thought of selling back when they didn't know when exactly the order for the evacuation would be given – some might not have believed that it would really happen until the very instant the alarm bells had made themselves audible and have been correspondingly optimistic about the amount of products they might have gotten to sell that day, or about the chance that they might one day return – there were absolutely no signs of any plundering, no spiders that would have crawled all this way through the complex to leave their cobwebs here, or anything to witness to the fact that those shops had not been abandoned just yesterday.
The only logistical hindrance to a smooth, effortless and uncomplicated return of the multitudes that had once filled this place was the fact that they had all lived, died and been buried in some places apart from the city most of which had been forgotten for centuries by now.
And here he was, a complete outsider alien to this world, witnessing this place just as they would have recalled it on their deathbeds: That one table left with only two chairs because the occupants of another had taken the rest and inserted them into a crowded circle, that one screen advertizing a special discount on household robots of a certain brand, that one mannequin standing empty in a shop window, surrounded by some of its fellows that were displaying slight variations of dark green tunics, perhaps indicating that another such tunic had been among the last things to be sold here, unless some kind of phantom had somehow broken in and stolen it, and discounting that possibility, there was a good chance that its purchaser was forced to leave his brand new robe sitting in a drawer somewhere to escape with little more than what they were carrying on their person the moment the alarm bells sounded.
This road had probably led some other place other than nowhere, and signified more than just an endless straight line to the people who'd been walking up and down its length, on their ways to places that, to be something beyond than empty spaces, steel and concrete, required the presence office clerks and business owners that had been it's lifeblood, it's pulse that pumped sounds, smells and conversation from residential areas to business districts, to party facilities and back to the residential areas once again, their motion uniting into big streams and highways to spread out into little capillaries again as each individual took they place between the cogwheels of society, each of them feeling small and insignificant inside the city's massive expanse, but without them, Xalax was nothing but skeletal, calcified remains of something that had skipped the early stages of being a cadaver all together.
In a few billion years, when this planet's burnt up remains were kneaded into a smooth dough by its expanding mother star, a large structure of metal and concrete would break apart and scatter into the orbit, and the onlookers, if any, might wonder what it might have been and never find out; Never again would these streets fill with song; Never again would the signs denoting the names of the streets pay host to meaning.
Even to a curious outside visitors, they explained little more than where to find more of the same, and what ever points of interests had accounted for the direction and positioning of this street were now empty and abandoned, leaving nothing to keep him following its direction for longer than he could sustain that one whim, and before long, he turned and followed the next smaller alley he came across, following those capillaries to their ever finer extensions, away from those larger vessels that lacked everything else that would have identified the busy streets they one were.
The tiny alleyways he continued on instead again reminded him of Venice, and its central island completely covered in city. It, too, has small crooked alleyways that were as packed with souvenir shops and hotels as the larger ones, the buildings towering like large walls on either side – The alleyways of lower Xalax were straighter, but at least Venice had still had the sky above and the strips of space above the waters, beside the bridges. The "outskirts" of Venice were located on other islands, many of which had been assigned specific functions back in the day – In Xalax, streets and facilities closely hugged, and were partially built into, the outer walls of the sphere. The poor neighborhoods ranging into the neighboring caverns might have been counted, but the caverns were hardly any more open or wide than the tunnels and lacked the benefit of regularity, at that.
But because even the Xalaxians needed to keep all the quieter, less important stuff somewhere, all the backs of buildings and access panels to regulate the supply of water and electricity, an analogous bit of convention established itself, the centers away from the centers, or the atriums, backdoors and structures in the squares in-between the criss-cross of major roads.
The businesses might've fit neatly into the walls of the street, but one of them that was flanked by two doors and had therefore piqued his curiosity enough for the Doctor to chose those specific exits, turned out to have a large, greenhouse-like structure in the back where customers could sit "outside" on tables and chairs (amid decorative plastic plants, no less) without taking up space on the main streets. Both access-ways actually unified at the back of it, and continued into the structure, the walls frequently interrupted by metal grids behind which one could see the various supply pipes that the architecture of the Second Period of Florescence had otherwise so efficiently hidden away, the bowels and sweat glands of Xalax.
What seemed so advanced that it had become indistinguishable from magic – not for him, but perhaps for some of his acquaintances from the 20thand 21st centuries – was, ultimately, the graceful coordination of many complimentary sleights of hand.
At first it probably would have looked somewhat impressive to see some pompous Fabronian extend their arm, all the heavy jewelry obscuring that the little stone on their vambrace actually fulfilled a non-decorative purpose, and watch the walls recede and open at their wishes, but this being a commonplace technology that was casually used every day, the Xalaxians would eventually just have seen it as "how we open doors", and gotten used to do it with the same casual swipes that humans of Clara's era used on their smartphones, annoyedly fussing over devices that would have been science fiction just two decades prior, seeming to barely register their swooping advance.
Sometimes it seemed ungrateful or pretty silly that they'd invented pocket-sized computers and used them mainly for social posturing and finding new ways to get on each other's nerves, the Doctor could never resist rolling his eyes when confronted with the results of that, the endless barrages of photographs with vaguely fowl-like expressions, and as much as he'd stubbornly insist on his indignation in the heat of the moment, in some of his quieter moments he considered that maybe it was his outsider's perspective that was partially to blame – After all, to the humans, their rapid development would be normal and mundane -
And both Fabronians and Time Lords could have profited from not taking themselves so seriously all the time and seeing themselves in a more relative, balanced light.
After all, they hadn't all been so different in the end, humans, Fabronians and Time Lords – there were a lot of beings out there with far greater disparities to any of the three, and for all that separated them, they shared many significant universals – the Doctor was reminded of this when he found out where many of those 'alleyways' he'd been following ended up ending: A cylindrical room with many narrow entrances, it's foundations resembling a simplisticly-drawn sun whose beams turned into a labyrinth somewhere along the way – But as with the street before it, the particularities of how it was made and what advanced technology had gone into creating it were, at best, secondary to what it was.
What it was could be recognized with a single glance: A playground for children.
And now: An abandoned playground which no children.
Since Fabronians weren't descended from tree-dwelling apes, there was somewhat less emphasis on climbing-based toys – the big, colorful structures instead seemed to carter to anyone wishing to play hide-and-seek, a distant, much simplified distillation of Fabron's plains with their rocks, shrubs and boulders.
But the idea that spinning motion was somehow funny or entertaining – there were a row of metal seats shaped to accommodate a tin posterior, that could be spun around like Earth office chairs, and two elevated platforms of different heights that would spin around their own axis, the higher of which was also slightly tilted, not exactly a merry-go-round and likely to have been a balance-based game for slightly older children, but under different circumstances, he might've found it inviting enough to give it a try –
Now, however, the ghostly emptiness of the place seemed to decree an unspoken law against it.
There you could see the influence of one's viewpoint and perspective, for had it simply been too late for children to be out, this place would have been just as empty but not forbidding in the least – the same elements of its design that were once supposed to make it inviting made it melancholy now, the bright colors, the cartoonish faces painted here and there, the fact that this place's main attraction were once playthings for children, even what looked like a skylight, but couldn't possibly be,given how deep underground this level was.
It was a fairly good artificial substitute that, as one scan with the sonic revealed, closely mimicked the properties of moderate daylight, but in this context, it looked more like a spotlight shining on a witness stand or court exhibit, a silent accusation that those responsible for the city's ruin would never see.
But the Doctor was here to see it, not that it told him anything he didn't know before.
There were places like this in any city that had ever been abandoned.
There had been places like this on Gallifrey, too.
Also in this "room", if that was the word to describe it, was the obligatory pompous statue, mounted onto the wall and sharing its pedestal with two columns of marble, almost an entire monument or shrine with a lengthy inscription underneath , which he felt somewhat resembled the interior decorations of a baroque-era church. The square, block-like geometry of the pedestal and its decorations resembled the other statues he'd seen, but the art style was subtly different, and while most of the other statues had been uniformly cafted from the same material and not even painted, this one was composed from various types of polished, valuable stone material – Most likely, the different parts of the monument – which depicted two adults and two children – had been carved individually and then stuck together.
The white marble used for the columns was probably the same material that was used for three of the hairpieces, their skin was approximated by a darker material, their robes, a variety of stones with colored patterns on them, the little girl, for example, was "wearing" something a lot like lapis lazuli, while the boy next to her – not necessarily her brother, given that he was the only one depicted with lighter skin and brown hair – was "draped" in a red gown.
Their ample jewelry was pretty much made of the same materials as actual jewelry, except that it, like everything else about the statues, was carved in exquisite detail. While the knowledge that the Fabronians could artificially manufacture precious stones with relative ease made all of this seem vaguely less wasteful, the poses of the adults and the way they held what might have been specters or ritual spears made it abundantly clear that they were depicted as rulers here – a piece of propaganda and yet, an artifact almost anyone would recognize as a work of art, an important witness to the history of this city, and a monument to its former glory.
But no city or nation was ever just "glory", or "bling" or a complex of ideas, weapons and creeds – those were what remained in legends of lost empires, but as a time traveler, he knew very well that there was much more to the authentic experience of a city – the many little hidden places, the characteristic slang and accents, the people's ways to say hello, the many little particularities that the living, breathing people would miss when they had business somewhere else, the details that looked tiny in panorama pictures.
In the end, time made monuments of everything once all other functions and purposes had been drained away, and the Doctor sincerely believed that this playground deserved to be regarded as as much of a piece of history as those statues, that it had been a vessel for just as many dreams and ideals.
And with that thought in mind, he departed from this place with a solemness speaking of reverence, and disappeared back into the shadows to continue his wanderings, following no aim other than to absorb whatever would be reflected in his eyes behind the next doorway, his unhurried pace never increasing not slowing, taking in the incomplete, fossilized impression of the city that time had left behind.
He presumed that this might be one of the few things that he could appreciate better than Clara – Sure, his outsider's perspective, his detachment from even his own world and his freedom to move about this city's history as he pleased made it nearly as abstract to him as something he'd only read about in a book. But that his background was so removed from Earth and its vicinity that he could look at it as an albeit fond and enthusiastic outside observer didn't mean that he didn't have any background at all;
While Clara could conceptualize, understand and even feel the implications of this place's final abandonment, only limited amounts of it would connect to the early memories that shaped her core self and affect her in an immediate, primal way, just as a person from the 19th century would see an early-2000s pop-song referencing the use of a mobile phone in a very abstract light even after receiving an explanation – In the map of her experiences, the roads of Xalax would most closely resemble a mere empty hallway, and those weren't anything unusual or disturbing outside of business hours. To her, buildings were usually frequented by smaller groups of people than the streets surrounding them, and streets involved the open air – As far as 21st century humans went, the denizen's of Southeast Asia's mega-cities might actually have come quite close to being immediately able to tell how this picture was supposed to look like; Even in their time, people on Earth had already coalesced into dense oceans whose waves their citizens had to wade through every day, but also, places where you could never possibly want for someone to talk to; Of course, few places on Gallifrey had ever been truly bustling, and both it and Fabron lacked the liveliness and makeshift-but-still-working nature of human settlements.
Though the Fabronians had probably been closer to humans in that one regard; Silent as they were now, these streets had once been filled with sound more than comparable places on Gallifrey had been – well, not this back alley perhaps, but the larger streets that could never be far in a place like this.
So in a sense, while he was 'seeing Xalax', he wasn't really seeing Xalax as it had been when inhabited; He could guess at what it had been like, down to the actual 'feel' of the city in its glory days, in large parts due to the amount of literature he'd checked out and vast experience in extrapolating from the sights; In a way, he was encountering the Legend of Xalax, an empty, foreboding Xalax where everything was heavy with implication.
And perhaps it was only because he made a deliberate point of trying to cultivate appreciation and allowing himself to 'get into' the feeling, he was beginning to feel its shadow and history looming above him, found himself imagining what these thought-to-be-sacred halls might mean to one of this world's inhabitants or some impressionable young soul if they were here alongside him, though never without a part of his mind remaining detached, distinctly less impressed for its ability to put this place and its history into a much, much larger perspective even as he strode calmly from one magnificent sight to the other.
One advantage of exploring a foreign place as a stranger from a faraway, advanced place was that few things of the worlds he crossed through could keep him wherever he wanted to go, and the mischievous boy inside him could never resist trespassing through the spaces that would otherwise have been forbidden, the secret, the mysterious, those normally reserved for the rich and the important and whoever else thought themselves above their fellow man, mocking their hubris by 'profaning' what was, ultimately, just another bit of regular space,
As such, it may have been no small wonder that the lone traveler diverted his path to the city Governor's fortress once he realized that it ought to be close to the level he was in now.
It had been a complex of thoroughly pragmatic purpose from the 'austere' period or whatever that meant by the Xalaxians' standard who'd defined the Style of the time mainly as being opposed to the Second Florescence's excesses. Though the creativity of sentient minds did a honorable job at circumventing this limitation as much as possible, the minds of beings such as humans or Fabronians were ultimately still bound to the words and images by which they expressed their thoughts, and the works of those who had come before them to look for inspiration, comparison and a context in which to put their works.
And for the architects who had build the black building structure, their context had been the city of Xalax as an already well-explored, long-existing reality, the familiarity with & necessity for three-dimensional engineering that came with vast underground complexes of which Xalax was only one of the vastest and most famous on a world that mastered them in its need for underground shelters, and the Xalaxian love of innovation that meant that if vast rebuilding in the center of and around the pipes, cables and pillars of a larger structure was necessary to make it more efficient, it would be done with little consideration for momentary comfort and a gaze clearly turned toward the larger future in which the building would be of use.
It helped, perhaps, ironically, that the Fabronians lived longer than some of your average humanoids, so that periods of change comprised smaller percentages out of their lives, and that they thus could expect to spend much longer enjoying the fruits of each innovation, in contrast to some civilizations where that had led to stagnation.
In that sense, the Fabronians could be said to be somewhat in-between humans and Time Lords, which renewed the traveler's however distant and primarily playfully-situational sense of affinity for these halls.
And despite the architect's desire to get away from Second Florescence doctrines and aesthetics their design was nonetheless inspired by that Era's fondness of space-module-like design, but in a stripped down, efficient form that could only have come in the more somber time after it: Though it was a 'Governor's Fortress', it never served the purpose of some of the more rococo creations of its predecessor, it had never housed halls for banquets or balls, nor the cultural facilities that were relegated to other places, not least the still existing pompous buildings lower in the city, but had been constructed strictly for the nitty-gritty of administration and organization, to give it one centralized point from which to operate – Large parcels of space were allotted to computer hardware, and even the actual parts intended to become the governor's dwelling were optimized for security, not comfort.
Markedly, the 'governor' mentioned here refers to the governor of the city proper, who would be equal in rank (and perhaps superior in prestige) to the governor of the various imperial provinces; The political leadership of the whole empire were situated elsewhere.
The greatest downside of centralization was, of course, the vulnerability incurred if the central site were somehow blocked or taken out, so copies of all physical and digital files as well as secondary personnel were stationed in several smaller but similar sister-buildings throughout the complex to service citizens closer to their homes and substitute for their colleagues in the central block.
The resulting building was, physically, an assemblage of dark blocks each of them the height of one of the city's levels, forming two step-pyramids on top of each other, one pointing up, one down, each component block a black, labeled cube with rounded edges and sometimes, discrete doors and windows embedded in the structure.
What initially attracted him as a long-time abhorrer of boring administrative tasks to this sphere was something by the unassuming name of 'Third Imperial Archive', the number here being unrelated to the time of its inception or its overall significance compared to other buildings, but denoted its function. As everything in that building complex had been intended for loal governance, it wasn't even the Third Imperial Archive for the entire Empire, but specifically that of middle and central Xalax, though up-links of the other such archives were obviously present to make it easier to sift through them all in a comprehensive manner. Frequently maintained backups of the other two Xalaxian archives were also present, and while the large number of such archives might, at first glance, be ascribed to the city's size and population, the technology present at the time would have made a centralized storage possible, nor would Fabronian culture lead the citizens to cling to older systems out of convenience –
A clue to the real reason could be found in the location of those other archives, fancy demonstrative buildings largely dedicated to public entertainment, education and other uses of lavish public properties – One shared its home with a famed and much mythologized community center near the surface, housing a library, speaking rooms, restaurants, an opera hall and facilities where life skill courses were made available to the populace, another was deeper down in a structure that housed among other things, an assortment of swimming pools and wellness facilities, a gymnasium, an arena for sports and extensive pleasure gardens, both of them prestigious constructions and social gathering points.
The Third Archives, so one might conclude, were of some social significance, and, if one had spent the last few days familiarizing themselves with all things related to Fabronian civilization, such as the Doctor had, one might conclude that it was an interesting consequence of the particular quirks of this world's society –
As a world that praised both innovation and the industrious individuals that created them, yet also respected power, mystery and a concept of freedom, it was almost a necessary consequence that they had very strict laws against electronical spying and the selling of information – Otherwise, new advances would have come with new ways of controlling others and the ideals of the Empire would be tarnished – it was strictly because they so believed in progress that they refused to let it be 'vilified'. (though the Doctor privately mused that they ought to have applied that same ideal to the development of weapons; If they had, Xalax may still be standing in its original, populated state, or more likely, would have evolved further still)
To ward off suspicion and reluctance toward new technology, the people's rights were guaranteed right out of the door rather than to leave a grey zone that those in power either exploited or failed to adapt to – otherwise, the Xalaxian system could not have functioned, and like anything that existed for long enough, it had thus accumulated a notion of sacredness around itself.
Of course, that a society praised and espoused certain values did not necessarily mean that they followed them, and in this heavily mechanized world, the knowledge that could be gleamed from that particular sacrilege were often all-too tempting, so despite ongoing efforts by law enforcement, there was usually some degree of privacy violations going on at any given moment, though this was usually one of those things that the Xalaxians would generally not forgive their employers or politicians and a line they insisted on drawing even in some of their more corrupt eras, with the discovery thereof frequently leading to resignations or at least a clear loss of reputation where particular slimy individuals succeeded in weaseling their way out of the responsibilities, most often with the justification that the empire mustn't appear weak or divided in wartime – Again, the Doctor found it to be a predictable but nonetheless regrettable waste or chances for peace as some of those supposed 'divisions' had indeed been concerned with changing the warlike course o the world – it was not that the Fabronians had somehow lacked the potential for settling their differences, examples of individual stories of understanding abounded – It was just that few had found a way to transform their ideals and idols to suit such values, and those that did didn't find the means to popularize their ideas enough for them to catch on in a pervasive way.
But even so, companies and researchers still needed data, information on consumer behavior, health statistic, transport use, political opinions and so on.
And this is where the Imperial Third Archives come in: There, you could chose to donate specific and clearly delineated packets of personal information, and, since it was done in the name of progress, advancement and increased comfort, numerous people were actually willing to line up with their personal computer terminals and key crystals in order to 'donate'.
Of course, one might doubt if everything the residents 'donated' was really put toward such grand purposes and not simply to help commercial interests, or whether less informed citizens always knew just what they were giving away and potentially laying open, but nonetheless, the system had worked for a long time.
He pictured that some of his human associates may have found this shocking, and he'd have quipped about London's many CCTV cameras and how cultural reasons let the citizens of the Netherlands to be open to the point that they didn't mind having large windows through which one could see into their living rooms – besides, just hearing that others want to get it very badly can lead people to treasure and withhold something.
His imagined remarks were rather going to waste for lack of an audience, and so was the surprise he encountered down there.
It was fairly well-behaved as far as surprises went, for one thing it did not actually interfere with or thwart his initial goals – He did find those archive rooms and had a merry time feeding his vast storage of impractical knowledge with unlikely life stories and interesting statistics about a long lost civilization – but then again, most civilizations eventually met their end, and besides, this might yield insight into the nature of humanoids as a whole.
But as he was already rather familiar with humanoid nature (or well – in some ways, he might never be) this is not where the surprise was to be found – Instead, he found it on the pursuit of a mere afterthought, after noticing a sign delineating the way to the city council chamber and decided to pay it a visit, just out of curiosity and to get a slight kick out of sitting in the big chairs of important people, that sort of thing - He didn't think there'd be too much to see.
– He found that the meeting chamber held some surveillance and control devices, presumably so that problems could be detected and displayed in real time and fixed just as swiftly once the responsible personnel and the AIs at their disposal had reached a conclusion, but distantly, the engineer in him might have been interested in the city's control systems and layout maps but inspecting them in person would not tell him very much that his earlier investigations had not already turned up.
The control systems themselves were indeed nothing too special, imposing perhaps to someone not used to mega cities of the magnitude and the sophisticated technology contained therein, but altogether rather consistent with the overall 'look' of this facilities – save for a door in each of the four walls, the room was an almost perfect cube with rounded corners, and smaller than a place like this could have been, had it been intended for showing off. Its dimensions were indeed smaller than some of the enormous elevator carriages he'd ridden today, and the walls were completely blank, deceptive in the simplistic, smooth, plastic-like surface that an expert glance revealed as a sophisticated 3D VR screen – When operational, this entire room including the floor and roof would have essentially served as a holochamber, covered in numerous displays, surveillance feed and data about everything from traffic to the status of environmental controls and reports of both local crime and the ongoing war fronts, with various personalized sub-displays and information feeds being available to be activated by each individual user in accordance with their function and clearance level, which, when activated, might well have made the modestly sized chamber appear like an open space in which the central table and the minimalistic yet stylish silver chairs with their round, black cushioning and slightly curved T-shaped backrests would appear to float.
The table itself, another large square to match the room's greater layout, was a large touchscreen on which documents, controls and plan proposals would have been displayed and typing and access could be done – On the sides of it, there were various ports for personal crystal keys and all manner of other secondary devices. The center of the square, which was too far in to be reached by humanoid arms, was spared from going to bed by housing a 3D projector that displayed, perhaps among other things, plans of the city.
That last detail should have been a little harder to find out, even for a well-traveled expert with universe-wide experience with various technology – It should not have taken much effort, perhaps just as little as taking a good look at the projector and pointing his sonic tool at it, but even if his experienced eyes could immediately recognize the projector itself for what it was, it would still need to be turned on for anyone to see what it typically displayed – and that, it was, but, and this was the crucial point: It was so without any contribution of the Doctor's.
When he entered the room, the display walls had been in their dark, unused state, resembling shiny black plastic, the touchscreen table had been dark, but the central projector illuminated it all with a hard orange glow, displaying some holographic city schematics as it had presumably been doing for a long, long time.
By itself, that did not mean much.
So it had been left on when the place was evacuated in a hurry; So what? In a control room designed for continuous round-the clock use in a city that spited the dictates of the surface's diurnal cycle and brimmed all day long with the activity expected of a world's capital, a standby function that would turn the projector off if it wasn't used for a particular time would not have been considered, especially if Fabronian engineering ostensibly had so little trouble keeping things running for a very long time without running out of energy.
And after all, this would have been where the final mass exodus would have been organized from? That a large megacity like this could even be evacuated was nearly a miracle, and making it happen in an orderly fashion, without gridlocks or stampedes, demanded a little more precision than just hoping for the best – It follows, logically, that this mammoth project of an evacuation would have been orchestrated from this very room,allowing the legendary city's sophistication and advancement to shine one last time, and thereby mandating that the last occupants of this room would have been among the very last ones to leave, leaving no one to turn off anything they might have left on.
Almost anyone else, apart from extremely nosy trivia lovers, would probably have walked by and continued their investigations about making a brief mental note about the projector being left on.
But as the people of this universe had come to learn time and time again, he wasn't anyone.
At the time, he considered his choice to take a closer look the mere following of a casual whim, but something did pique his interest: As mentioned before, the projector was left displaying a three-dimensional map of some of the city's schematics, somewhat zoomed in because a complete image would not have been of very much use.
But, if this place had been abandoned in the course of the evacuation, one would expect the section being displayed to have something to do with evacuation – instead, it was zoomed in on a random power duct midway through the underground complex, far away from any elevators, the surface, or any major concentrations of population, nor even something of military-strategic value and other things less deserving but more likely to have attention, such as a rich person's belongings or some politician's last known location.
That, by itself, had incidentally caused him to wonder just who had zoomed it in to that last position and why, but what he expected to be a brief inquiry into a triviality that would quickly be solved once he acquired himself a little more input for his deductions instead ended up unearthing a mystery:
The last known access, which the long-suffering machine had dutifully recorded throughout all this time after its onetime masters had long ceased to care, had been made by a system override, same as his own, leaving no authorization code to mark the user's identity – that in itself would have been par for the course for some strange counter-intuitive focus that could likely have to do with something that should have remained hidden, indeed, his initial suspicion had been something about hidden artifacts or possibly some ancient defense mechanism dating back millenia that was intended to spring a trap if anyone were to return to the city without the goodwill of its former inhabitants.
What was actually remarkable was the listed time stamp. So remarkable, indeed, that the Doctor spontaneously pulled out a notebook to do the calculations by hand, to confirm the equivalent human dates and peek at his prior notes to assure himself that he correctly understood the Fabronian dating system, before realizing the folly of such in a room linked to cruise ship sized high-end computers.
But both his manual calculations and the results produced after sonicking the touchscreen table back online were in perfect agreement: This last zoom-in had been done as late as a month before him. The actual access session amounted to simple homework, a very basic superficial maintenance check of some key structures and some minute adjustments to the environmental controls that pertained to some of the park areas further down in the city, but its banality was largely offset by the fact that there should have been no one here at that time.
Nowhere in this city was there any sign ofactivity, apart from the occasional service robot, and this place wasn't designed to be operated by robots – indeed, there were a couple of high-end AIs wired right into the same mainframe that fed into this room's displays which could automatically adjust to equipment failures and changing environmental conditions, so there was no use in having some lesser robot use the input terminal.
He checked the long and there were further such entries, on something of a regular basis every couple of months, which meant that it wasn't just himself on another visit. At the same time, they were so irregular that an automaton was not the obvious explanation – they could be, if there was some arcane algorithm at work that initiated these accesses at certain intervals depending on some external conditions, but despite his ample background in mathematics, he could see no obvious pattern or series at work here other than this mysterious user casually checking in every every few months. His mind reminded itself to maintain a healthy skepticism, but his instincts told him that it was a person.
Just to be safe, he made sure to erase his own access from the logs, no longer so certain that it would have been the last entry ever made.
Could there still be someone living down here?
He'd made sure to thoroughly scan for life, but, if whoever it was had managed to hide during the evacuation, they must have concealed their biosigns somehow, and though the equipment he'd used ought to have been vastly superior to most things in this galaxy, he'd seen with his own eyes how advanced the Fabronians had been, how bits of their technology had still been able to baffle him – Humanity had taught him not to underestimate younger races, and he was not about to start with the Fabronians.
If he'd seen anything over these last few days, then that it would have been very easy to survive her for generations, to keep all the comforts of this entire mechanical kingdom all for oneself, the logistical concerns that would have existed in any other circumstances were not a question down here; What he'd seen of the Grand City was quite amenable to the concept that there might have been something left in her.
But who could it be, and how could they be still alive, after all these years?
Sure it was possible that there might have been someone left behind, some entrenched zealot who refused to leave their holy site behind, or perhaps some unlucky straggler who hadn't found the way in time and dared not to make their way through the newly announced neutral zone on foot. But anyone who'd stayed behind would have been long dead by now, the city had lain abandoned for many centuries by now, amounts thereof that would span many generations even for Fabronians and would constitute a long, long time even for Time Lords.
Then again, the thought was not so impossible, not when his own marooning on Trenzalore was still so recent in his mind.
And moreover, perhaps the idea stuck in his head because it had happened before, when the now long-buried dome of Xalax had sunk into the ground during the Second Apocalypse – but then, there had been a city's worth of people to perpetuate the bloodline, and if you'd gone down to Xalax in these days, you would not find it largely abandoned.
Of course, there was no need for whatever intelligence remained down here to be strictly Fabronian, or even humanoid...
The possibility was small, but it was most certainly not zero.
Perhaps it was just a service robot after all. Perhaps it was a system error, inevitable after all these years of disuse.
Perhaps, he was just seeing things, or simply missing Clara. Perhaps he should just had taken the TARDIS and popped straight to whenever Clara would be done doing her thing with Soldier Boy, like he had originally meant to, but no, he had to go and get distracted. He always got distracted and finding himself in his second millennium, he was beginning to think that old age wasn't doing his already compromised attention span any favors, indeed, he'd been beginning to wonder if Clara could tell, which had probably created the need for distraction in the first place.
He'd bet PE was all focused and thoughtful and never took more than a few minutes to procure caffeinated beverages.
Either way, the hypothesis was far-fetched, outlandish and right in line with the biases that the minds of pack animals might be prone to, but experience had taught him never to confuse the unlikely with the impossible.
He figured that all he could do was to keep investigating; If there was anyone there, they would probably find him.