You could hear a plastic spoon hit the floor in the tea rooms. Rory, Amy and River all sat there, as silent as a person could be while drinking a hot beverage and trying to ignore the ever building tension. They were used to tension, but not this kind. This was the kind of tension that smothered, it crept in slowly, taking its time to fill up the entire room until it was all a person could breathe, like a noxious gas. The tension was so strong that the trio could barely taste their synthetic brews over the anticipation of trouble to come.
It was Amy who broke first. She might have been the girl who waited but that did not make her the girl who liked to wait. Her chair screeched on the floor as she stood up, instantly pacing back and forth as Rory and River sat at the table, staring deadpan around the room.
"What's going on?" Amy said instinctively "Look, I can feel it, we can all feel it. Something's wrong here." Rory opened his mouth to suggest something, but Amy cut him off with a firm "I'm not in the mood for 'I told you so'."
Rory, who was mildly insulted, particularly because he wasn't going to tell his wife 'I told you so', decided to remain quite, and crossed his arms with a frown. He swirled his faux-coffee in his cup, eyes scanning the room for even the vaguest hint of a threat; he'd gotten rather good at it since his roman days. Not that he was a centurion any more, or a robotic figment of his wife's imagination. He decided to avoid pondering his life right now, it would lead to strange places, and he needed to be alert.
River watched the others act like, for lack of a better word, an old married couple. It was around the second time that Amy turned to Rory and asked him why he wasn't doing anything about the strange circumstances that River decided she couldn't take it any more.
"I suppose," she said, barely over her usual speaking volume, but somehow causing an echo in the empty tea room "We could always... ask someone?" She sipped her glorified leaf-water and grimaced at the taste, pouring in another artificial sweetener as she purposefully ignored the incredulous looks Amy and Rory were giving her. When Amy's temper threatened to flare up again she added "I mean, there's no people around, but there are robots. Probably plenty of them. And I'm sure that they'll be more than happy to help, since that very motto is practically carved into half of them."
"Not a good idea." the Doctor said as he stepped silently into the room. The effect was immediate, with a snap the tension caused Rory, Amy and River to all jump simultaneously. Cups spilled and mostly tepid liquid seeped down Rory's trouser leg. The Doctor didn't seem to notice that both River and Rory had snatched their hands to their hips instinctively, each reaching for a gun and sword respectively.
"Did you like that? Old trick I picked up from some Tibetan monks." the Doctor seemed pleased that he'd managed to surprise his companions, approaching them with a little smile and avoiding Amy's piercing glare.
"Shouldn't you be in the middle of your appointment?" River said pointedly.
"I think we all know there is something more important going on right now than the cleanliness of my molars." the Doctor said as he placed his knuckles on the table. He was holding his sonic screwdriver in his hand. That wasn't a good sign. It meant he was prepared, prepared for anything, in case anything popped round the next corner with a big hammer and a grudge.
"The robots around here aren't robots anymore." the Doctor said calmly, explaining the situation in that calm, slow method he used, as if explaining something to a child "And by that I mean the true meaning of robot, rabota, meaning worker, or servitude. They are no longer... slaves. To put it simply, they are not doing what they are told. They are not doing what they should be."
"So, what, they're taking breaks and talking back to their supervisor?" Amy said with a half shrug and a look of forced calm. She was trying hard to disguise the fact the Doctor had made her jump, and that made her belligerent at best.
"What I'm saying, dear Mrs Pond, is that they might have made sure their supervisors took a rather extended break themselves. Perhaps in the neck department, and I'm not talking Orthopaedics." despite the situation, or maybe because of the high tension, Rory couldn't help but give an awkward smile "Of course... it could be worse."
Amy and Rory shared a glance. They didn't want to ask what could be worse than a snapped neck, but they'd been with the Doctor long enough to know it existed, whatever it was.
"So, what do we do? If we don't know what's going on, but all we know is that the robots-" the Doctor held up a finger to pause River mid-sentence, River rolled her eyes slightly and said "machines are acting out? What's our first move?" She couldn't help but feel a little exposed right now, four people, what felt like an empty planet, and perhaps millions of angry machines. The odds were not with them. Then again, when were the odds ever truly with them?
"Well, my dear River, that's where I've had a stroke of genius." the Doctor seemed to be back to his chipper self, grinning that wide grin of his, fiddling with his screwdriver. "See it's quiet ingenious." he said , bobbing on his feet "We're going to ask one of the machines."
A moment of silence passed through the group, like a growl of a particularly angry feral cat, but without any sound at all, and certainly without any feral cats in the vicinity.
"Ask a machine?" River said, her voice somewhere between arctic and restaurant freezer level of cold "The idea I had five minutes ago, before your little speech?" The Doctor gave a nod, fingers playing with his bowtie. "The idea you said was, I quote, not a good idea?" River continued on, refusing to let this drop.
"Yes." the Doctor said with a little nod, his hands refusing to stop playing with at least something on his outfit.
"And what, exactly, makes it a good idea now?" River said.
"Well... I had it." the Doctor grinned his chipmunk grin.
"Well there's only so much a woman can take." Amy said, kneeling beside the Doctor as he stared off blankly at a wall with one hand over his other eye.
"She hit me!" the Doctor exclaimed. His cries were more from shock than pain, he'd certainly had pain in his time, but the sucker punch that River had landed on him had put his world in a rather desperate spin.
"Well you've hardly been cooperative throughout this entire thing, have you?" Amy said with a tut, standing over the Doctor like she was explaining to a child why pulling the dresses of little girls got you one to the face.
"But she didn't have to hit me!" the Doctor said, turning his one good eye to Amy. Rory, who had been concealed from view thanks to the hand clamped over the Doctor's right eye, new swung into view.
"Think it's funny seeing people getting beaten up my pink backpack when he was twelve?" the Doctor said immediately, his bruised ego trying to inflate itself again.
Rory stopped laughing, a scowl drooping over his brow instead as he was reminded of those dark times. "It was a hand-me-down." he said defensively, a well repeated line from his childhood.
"It doesn't matter. " Amy said, though part of her giggled childishly as the boys fought "We have bigger fish to fry here." She reached down, lifting the Doctor to his feet with care, since the Doctor seemed a little unstable on his feet.
"Yeah, like my eye!" the Doctor said with a firm nod.
"No, not like your eye. Not like it at all." Amy said curtly to the Doctor "I'm talking about River. Leaving. A moment ago, remember?"
"It's all fuzzy." the Doctor said with a dismissive wave "And my eye could be serious. She might have dislodged it. Or burst it. Or done all kinds of... bleergh..." He waved his hand that wasn't cupping his eye, clearly showing his lack of anatomy.
"River might get in trouble!" Amy said firmly, almost stamping her foot but deciding not to go down to that childish level "We just figured these robo- machines are running mad and now she's stormed off because you made her angry."
"River's a big girl, she can handle herself. Anyway, I need to see a professional about my eye." the Doctor said, fully aware that what he was saying was completely futile. River could be in danger. She didn't know what it was like out there, what lengths the machines would go. She might have a gun, but they had knives, and bone saws, and needles, and a thousand more machines just waiting to backup every of their brethren that fell.
"I'm a professional." Rory replied to him, still mildly sulking.
"You're a nurse."
"He's the best you've got." Amy said flatly "Now, you two, go over there and make friends again. Rory, check his eye. Doctor, think of a way to find River, and how to make it up to her." The two men turned to complain, their mouths flapping open in unison to utter distaste at this idea. Amy stuck one firm finger into the air and said in a soft Scottish hiss "And if you don't go over there and be pally right now there will be three more black eyes before we leave this room." That did the trick.
Amy was sure there was a reason River had left the map behind when she'd stormed out. That was why she was looking over it as the two men sorted out their personal issues in a corner. She turned the electronic map over in her hands, searching for some kind of power button, an indicator of how to turn it on; the Doctor would know, he'd find it in a heartbeat. Half a beat even, a semi-beat of his two hearts. Right now though, Amy didn't trust the Doctor. He was being so childish over all this, so defiant over every little thing. This was even before River had hit him, before they'd known about the machine problem. What was it that was making him act so out of character? Rory was practically bearded lumberjack level of manliness next to the Doctor at the moment, and the chance troubled Amy.
There was a soft "bwip" as Amy pressed down a button, the map lighting up and proudly displaying "you are here" among the twisting white corridors that lay beyond the tea room. There were also several moving pink dots that throbbed softly as they moved around – the machines, most likely, since nothing else could be moving out there. There was something else though, something Amy hadn't expected. As they'd been walking around, River had been making notes.