Okay, finally some proper exposition! I realize that this story is moving quite slowly... I guess I can't really account for that, except to say, it got away from me! I started incorporating a lot of stuff, the biggest of which is Colin, so it's taking a lot of time and a lot of chapters to tell my story. Hope you're still enjoying it. :-)
So... the Time Lords are involved! What more is Donna going to find out about this time capsule business, from her perch in the ladies' loo?
NINETEEN
"Imagine, if you will," Buford Greene had said to his captive audience, "Two titanic conglomerates, working together to police their world. It's as if Disney decided to pair up with Microsoft, to right the wrongs of, say, North Korea."
This was met with a few muttered comments, and guffaws.
"Only, they're not policing the world, but rather, the universe. They are the Heimat Squad of the Kyriarch System, and the Gallifreyan High Council. Also known as the Time Lords."
"Oh, shit," Donna muttered, hearing this.
"And instead of North Korea, they are attempting to right the wrongs of the Earth," he continued. "The human race."
This declaration was met with more than a few muttered comments, angry questions, curses, and no response from Greene.
"To that end, my friends," he said, when the noise died down. "Burch and Bradley are in the employ of the Heimat Squad – no longer a strictly mergers and acquisitions firm, but now also engaged in special projects such as this. Creating an oxbow in time, so as to contain the avarice, wrath, and recklessness of the human race."
More uproar from the room.
"As you already know, the firm has been involved in a time capsule project, that has received some public attention. The time capsule was buried on the corner of Earl's Court Road and Bolton Gardens, and is scheduled to be opened in two days' time. The assumption has been, of course, that there would be some artefacts from 1938 to be gawked at, oohed-and-aahed over, to give us a slice of life back then," Greene said. After a brief pause, he continued, "But that is not at all what the capsule contains. Its lessons about the last seventy years of life on this planet shall be imparted in a completely different way.
"In fact, the capsule itself exists on a different plane of reality, you might say, slightly out-of-sync with the time stream we are on," he went on. "It has to be. Because the capsule contains time itself."
"What the fuck are you on about?" a harsh male voice said. "With all due respect, sir."
"Well, of course, it's not all of time itself," Greene corrected, with a little bit of a laugh. "But a slice of time. It contains the year 1938, captured in a bubble, if you will, waiting to be released, and to encompass the planet. This will reset our reality back seventy years, and time will march forward from there. Here in Britain, it's just after the abdication, and we will go very shortly into World War II. Then, we rediscover television, the swinging sixties, the "me" generation, the internet, mobile phones… then we'll start over again."
"So, if any of this were real, and I'm not sayin' it is," said the same rough voice that had questioned Greene previously. "That means, we never advance beyond this Wednesday?"
"That's right," Greene said, incongruously cheerfully. "The human race ends in about forty-eight hours. But it doesn't end, exactly… it just resets itself on a seventy-year loop. No one dies. They just sort of come to the end of their existence, and then the potential for their existence becomes realised again."
"That's ridiculous."
"Perhaps that's the way it sounds," Greene conceded, a bit condescendingly. "And you are entitled to your opinion. But you are under contract, sir. As are all of you. There will be consequences, if you do not cooperate."
"What bloody consequences?" the rough voice asked, amidst a low roar of other voices. "If there's no life after Wednesday, what has any of us got to lose?"
"The next forty-eight hours made extremely unpleasant for you," Greene answered.
"Yeah well, I'm thirty-eight. Two days at the end of my existence is a pittance. I'll take my chances."
"What makes you think that the large oxbow between 1938 and 2008 is the only time loop we are capable of creating, dear sir?"
A longish pause ensued, during which only people shifting in their chairs could be heard in the conference room, and the man with the rough voice seemed to be thinking things over. Forty-eight 'extremely unpleasant' hours… capable of creating time loops.
"So you're going to imprison any non-compliant employees in a two-day torture bubble that will last forever," the man said.
"Essentially," Greene told him. "You are a clever man. You see, folks, the two conglomerates that were involved in the initial idea to create the oxbow, they complemented each other perfectly. The Heimat Squad are the principal police squad for the Kyriarch System, which is in another part of the universe, but they make great strides in the area of artificial intelligence. The Time Lords of Gallifrey, they were able to wield and govern time itself. They agreed that Earth, post-World-War-II, was too dangerous to be allowed to exist unchecked. The Heimat Squad had the military precision, the man-power, the organisation to pull off a large-scale containment, and the Time Lords had the know-how, as far as manipulating time. On the scale of seventy years, or of two days – depending upon what is needed. Are we understanding each other?"
"As well as can be expected," the rough voice said.
Greene's voice returned to its boisterous meeting-running, PR-guy resonance. "The biggest hiccup in the project occurred when the planet Gallifrey was destroyed, and along with it, all of the Time Lords. All, that is, except for a single specimen. He has been brought into the fold, thanks to intelligence work on the part of Burch and Bradley. After all, our firm are the project's Earth-bound liaisons. Having this Time Lord in our midst is definitely something to celebrate."
Greene applauded, and there was mild, obedient applause briefly in the conference room, from the others.
"You arseholes," Donna whispered. "In your bloody midst. Whatever."
"You see, the time-block of 1938 was confined to the capsule by the Time Lords, before the destruction of their planet. No-one else knows how they did it, nor how to do it again, once we approach the end of the time loop. That is to say, the next time we reach the end of the twentieth century. To maintain the oxbow, we need to know how to continue to contain and re-contain the year 1938, so that we can open the time capsule again, on the next cycle of 2008. And again on the next cycle, and the one after that. So, we've turned to a man who calls himself the Doctor."
"One question, sir," a woman's voice said. "Why? I mean, why is humankind, or the Earth, or our society, or whatever, too dangerous to continue after Wednesday?"
"To be honest, I'm not sure," Buford S. Greene said.
"So, you're just following orders?" asked another voice.
"Why would you do that? Why would you sell yourself into a project like this? And us?"
"Why?"
"Why, sir?"
"Why, indeed?" Donna asked herself.
After the meeting was over, Donna removed all of the duct tape, and took it with her in a wad inside of her bag, not wanting to leave any trace that she was there. She used the surface cleaner that she had brought to remove the sticky residue that duct tape tends to leave. When she left, the place was precisely as she had found it.
She ducked out of the building as inconspicuously as she could, walked a few blocks, then phoned for a taxi. While she waited, Colin phoned.
"You all right?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she said. "Got an earful at the meeting today."
"You mean… using the hyped-up stethoscope to eavesdrop through the plumbing?"
She sighed. "Yes, Colin."
"What sort of earful?"
"Would you believe it if I told you about it?"
"I dunno," Colin said cautiously. "Is it about aliens and time travel?"
"Yes."
Now it was his turn to sigh. "I'm sorry, Donna. I'm still having trouble with all of that…"
"Okay," she said, shrugging. "Then let's talk about something else. Like dinner. Fancy it?"
"In general, yes," he said, brightly. "But if you mean with you, then I'm in, with both feet!"
They decided to have a casual dinner at a mock-1950s diner – it was not to be a heady, elaborate date. Just fun. With milkshakes.
"Come with us, Martha," Colin said, waiting in the foyer as Donna checked her lipstick. "They have these gorgeous, messy sandwiches…"
"No, I just got home – I still smell like antiseptic," Martha said. "You guys have a good time. I've got some leftover lasagna in the fridge, and a glass of wine calling my name."
She took a breath as they walked out the door, trying not to feel so acutely how the tables had turned.
She wandered immediately into the kitchen, and extracted a wine glass from the cabinet, and set it on the counter. She had not yet pulled the cork from the bottle when her mobile phone rang, from somewhere in the pile of stuff she'd dropped just inside the front door, upon arriving home.
She cursed as she dived into the pile and searched her bag for the phone, listening to it ring and ring, with each ring sounding more insistent.
Once she found it, she saw that it was a scrambled-up, probably extraterrestrial number.
"Agent Pym?" she asked, by way of greeting.
"No, actually," said the Doctor's voice. "But he's right here, if you'd like to speak to him."
Her heart soared. "Oh my God! It's you! Hi! How are you? I mean…" she fumbled. Then, she took a breath and forced herself to calm. "I mean, hello, Doctor, it's so lovely to hear your voice."
He laughed at her mock-seriousness, then said, "It's lovely to hear your voice as well."
Martha melted into laughter of her own. "Sorry… I got a bit carried away, I guess. So stupid. I just saw you yesterday…ish."
"It doesn't matter," he said. "Forced separation… the uncertainty is exhausting, isn't it?"
"It is," she breathed. "It really bloody is."
"At least now I'm exhausted in my own clothes, thank you very much."
"You're welcome."
"So, how did Donna's meeting go?"
"She told me a little bit about it, but it's not clear yet…"
"What did she tell you?"
"Is it okay to… you know?"
The Doctor's voice went a bit muffled. "Pym, what's the protocol here? Can Dr. Jones whisper sweet nothings to me, or do you think she should refrain?"
Martha didn't hear anything for a few long moments, then she heard a familiar voice say, "Now, she can say whatever she likes."
"Thank you. I'll show you how to make it look like a malfunction," the Doctor said to him. His voice cleared, and to Martha, he said, "Pym just switched off the recording equipment. So, what do you know?"
She sighed. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Donna found out that the Time Lords were involved at the inception of this little project. They started all of this, by stuffing the year 1938 into a capsule and apparently putting a portal to it under a sidewalk in London."
The Doctor's end of the line went silent for an uncomfortably long interval.
"Doctor? Are you still there? You okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm here," he said, as though she had just jostled him out of a stupor.
"Are you surprised?"
"Yes. But no," he replied.
"I'm sorry," she said, sensing his discomfort.
"Why are you sorry? No need to be sorry. Why are you always apologising for things?"
"It's just… you seem… distressed."
"They're gone, Martha," he said. "The Time Lords are gone, but they're still fucking things up."
"Then, I guess it's a good thing you've been kidnapped and forced to get involved."
"Sometimes, I just…" he sighed. "You know, in the old days, I used to think sometimes that I would renounce my Time Lord status. They were basically peaceful, but dogmatic to a fault, which would, more often than not, in my view, make things worse. Or at the very least, didn't help anyone. I went rogue for that reason – I was tired of their hierarchical way of thinking. After they all died, I… I dunno, I felt guilty for ever having thought that way… even though I still pretty much believed it. But now, I'm all tied up in knots again, Martha, and ashamed to call myself one of them! Do you know, just the impact of releasing something like that upon the Earth, just opening that portal, that capsule, could – and probably will – flatten the city?"
"It will?"
"In 1938… yeah, there's a really good chance, depending on what methods my so-called brethren used to bind the time block. They most likely used the Vortex Filo method. If I'm right, then a year may have been compressed into a theoretical space the size of a beer keg. It's going to be like a backdraft, as soon as that churning time gets a hint of the space it could occupy. It will turn inside out and essentially explode."
"Oh, God," she groaned.
"London can ill afford not to have solid buildings standing when the war breaks out."
"Wait, I thought the Time Lords were hands-off," she said. "Didn't you tell me that? That they believed in non-interference?"
"They must have had their reasons," he said, with a tired breath. "Some kind of crap logic, that would allow them to convince themselves that what they're doing is non-interference."
"How would that work?" she wondered, sceptically.
"Don't know yet. What else did Donna find out?"
"Well, it wasn't just the Time Lords, it was some type of police organisation as well, and they are attempting to carry it forward even though Gallifrey is… you know."
"But why?" he asked. "Why the hell would they do something like this? I mean, the High Council could be idiotic, and their reasoning could be shoddy, but… this just doesn't feel like them. What were they thinking?"
"Something about our civilisation, or civilisations plural, between 1938 and 2008, being too dangerous to exist – or at least, to exist beyond 2008. So, they wanted to put us on an eternal seventy-year loop."
"What?" the Doctor spat. "That's rubbish! Although it might give some insight as to how the Time Lords could call this non-interference. In a time loop, in theory, nothing changes. Anyway, what does that mean, too dangerous to exist? What does the human race do between 1938 and today, that warrants a time-prison?"
"Donna didn't say."
"Well, is she there? Put her on!"
"She's with Colin."
"Have you got her notes?"
"Yeah, they're on the kitchen counter," she said. "But they're in shorthand."
"And you can't read them?"
"Of course not."
"Have you tried it?"
"No. I just know I can't read shorthand."
"Give it a go."
She grabbed Donna's notebook and looked at the writings she'd done today.
"I can read some of it... like a few distorted words and letters are forming, but..."
"Get closer to the TARDIS."
Martha walked through the mudroom and headed for the back door, and to her astonishment, the words came into focus, in more or less plain English.
Standing just inside her flat, she breathed, "Whoa!"
"Yeah, translation circuits. Read it to me, beginning to end. Don't leave anything out."
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who was kind enough to feed my needy side and leave a review last time. Please consider doing it again! It is truly a motivator to keep writing and posting, when I know someone is out there reading and enjoying!