AUTHOR'S NOTES: I'm sorry. I know it's been four whole months since I updated this, and a lot of you have probably forgotten this even existed, or perhaps gave it up for dead. I'm sorry. I had to iron out the plot and my schedule didn't really allow for updating, let alone working on the story...I'm afraid this will be quite the roller-coaster ride in regards to updates.


REC ME069/0842-MAIN ENTRANCE, SETI CAMPUS, OKLAHOMA

THE DAY OF THE INCIDENT

Blerp. The card reader's indicator light flashes crimson as the interviewer passes his card over it, triggering the device's 'locked' message. Irritated, he pulls his hand back and begins to clean the card on his sweater front, scrubbing away at the thin layer of condensation that apparently confounds the machine.

He didn't prepare for this, not today. Going through the cumbersome auxiliary ID protocol would mean breaking the good mood he's eased himself into. And he was in a good mood. The TV set in his office is still waiting for him, and Taxicab Confessions is due to start in the two-hour setup period before he has to start on the new unexplained absence case for the janitorial head.

"Come on," he mutters, as he once again prepares to do intellectual battle with his new, unreliable partners, the ID scanners. Now, unwilling to spare this machine the utmost condescension, the interviewer holds the card perfectly level, magnetic strip-side down, and moves it through the scanner with glacial speed, snatching it back as soon as it passes out of the scanning range. He waits for the machine's move, readying himself for the worst.

The interviewer does not need to wait long. He can feel his synapses fry as soon as he sees the machine's yellow 'checking' light appear.

Breathe, he reminds himself, sucking up a lungful of air tasting of cold, wet and dead leaves. You're still ten minutes early.

He carefully sheaths the card in his pocket, and turns around in his ponderous way to scan his surroundings for a security guard or an early arrival (not that the latter has ever-in his years of working here-shown itself likely), preferably one of the old group, who tended to hand out their ID cards like company merchandise. To the right, he takes in a huddle of pigeons around a woefully deflated hamburger bun. To the left, a weepy row of persimmon trees, in all the colors of a bruise.

At times like this, it's actually a shame that their head janitor, Maurice, has been missing all this time. His older keycard, being a Wiegand, could get anywhere in the building and never seemed to fail like these cheap magstripe cards.

As for Maurice's absence, the inconvenience was somewhat lessened by the janitor's condition; he was a borderline disability pensioner, therefore absences were to be expected. Still, protocol was protocol; all misconduct cases required investigation.

And looking at half-dead trees in an empty parking lot is a waste of his time and observational skills.

Sullenly, the interviewer turns back towards the doors...and the flushed card reader, clinging defiantly to the handles. It seems that he has no choice but to start up the auxiliary ID protocol.

(_has been_)


-REC NOT AVAILABLE-LOCAL TIME 0856

-TARDIS INTERIOR SURVEILLANCE-EARTH-B13/1997/LOCAL TIME 08.56 OF 24

The Doctor wakes up on the jumpseat, his upper body forming a sort of bridge between the seat and the console. His face aches from having control buttons jammed up against them for the last hour and fourteen minutes, and will probably have some funny red imprints from the bits that stick out, but he makes no attempt to move.

What is there to move for, anyway? He's already cleaned the temporal feedback coils, glanced over the braking system, turned off the heater now that he was alone, taken a swing at the-thing-that-goes-beep and gotten his customary shock for his button-pushing, which the TARDIS did not consider innocent testing. There's nothing useful to repair.

Worse (though the Doctor can hardly bear to admit it), he's been noticed, and effectively trapped by, what seems to be an elderly human male with at least partial immunity to the TARDIS perception filter (whose circuitry was fine when he checked) and access to this utility room. He can't feasibly leave the room without taking the man onboard, and the man showed no signs of complying the last time he popped out for a look. Yet if he takes off now, the old-fashioned heater he's parked on top of, and effectively flattened, will leak gas faster than that ship that looked like the Hindenburg, resulting in a similarly explosive end for the room, plus anything and anyone in it. Naturally he'd survive the explosion, but the man was nowhere near as fast, and therefore had to be the first to just leave this room.

The Doctor couldn't, for the life of him, understand why the human wouldn't just pack up and go, instead of waiting for him to poke his head out of the TARDIS doors and trying to kill him with cleaning supplies. It's already his sixth day here and the human outside hadn't let up in the slightest. He can almost smell yesterday's hospital-grade lavender-scented bleach on the old girl's doors, and hear the whoosh of those boxes of disposable bin liners as they flew towards (and nearly made contact with) his 'I COME IN PEACE' sign two days ago. And before his recent efforts at diplomacy, he'd taken a more blunt approach, alternately dodging the man's projectiles and using the TARDIS' precarious position as leverage to get him out of the way. Of course, the man loudly called him a lying alien and stayed just where he was, forcing the Doctor to retreat into his Schrodinger ship and contemplate the obstinacy of the human race.

Heaving his head up to address the Time Rotor, the Doctor muses, jokingly, yet with just a slight undercurrent of griping, "How long do you think a fifty-year-old man can survive on a bottle of water and a few packs of Ibuprofen?"

The TARDIS's reply was less than reassuring: a faint shock and beeping. Warning.

What appears on the screen actually causes the Doctor to sit up, all thoughts of one-sided whingeing to his ship driven from his mind. The surveillance system hasn't picked up on any activity from the human in the last 11 hours, where previously (according to the activity log they'd set up, at the Doctor's behest, after the first skirmish with the old man) he would sleep in short bursts of one to four hours and use his waking hours alternately threaten and hurl abuse and office supplies at the Doctor and watch the TARDIS like a hawk from behind the cardboard-and-office-supplies barricade near the door. That was previously, though; now something was really wrong with the man. And of course something would go wrong with him, considering the circumstances. The ship's Jigsaw Room would have told the Doctor as much...except he'd locked it ages ago, so no help there.

"Blimey," murmured the Time Lord, staring at the screens and the human's now prone and pain-contorted form. "And I was feeling sorry for myself."

(_shown_)


The instinctive tension is still there as he sticks his head out the door, dreading and yet hoping that the man will just jump back up and let fly a few cans of spray cleaner or something.

No such luck. The room is as ominously silent as the Kasterborous ruins.

And before the Doctor can take his first step out of the doorway, the lamp on the TARDIS'S roof dims, and with it, the barrier it delineates. The Doctor sighs. He does try to humor the old girl as best he could, and she does, in her own strange way, know the best course of action, but something external to his own temporal sense and his faith in the sonic's scanning and detection capabilities-an old, irrational, abysmal corner of his mind-tugs at him, nudging him away, back.

Back away, the mind corner argues as he crosses the 4 meters to the door in long, efficient strides. In the days of their one-sided battle, the man has stripped the shelves for ad hoc ammunition.

Stay away, as he shoves aside a portion of the impromptu wall. Even for him, these boxes are heavy, and could offer at least some protection from an attack, however unlikely...though, pity he neglected to add a roof. Then again, the Time Lord muses, it must have taken the old man hours to put this together.

You know how this ends, as the heartbeat and lung activity readings from his sonic screwdriver settle at the lower marks, the ones that usually mean that the owner of the readings will die without prompt intervention. Outwardly, the man's face was thin and sallow, with lips like strips of old leather.

It can't end if it never starts in the first place, the Doctor tells himself as he pockets his sonic and hauls the man up, making his way to the now dazzling TARDIS with the man-turned-overgrown-rag-doll slung over his shoulder.

After nearly tripping over the threshold, he makes his way to the nearest corridor, trusting that the med bay will have relocated to the end of it.

His ship does not disappoint. A scanner hovers above the empty bed that stands ready in the middle of the room, onto which the Doctor duly lowers the man, stepping back to let the TARDIS begin scanning.

When the results come in, the Time Lord's rather callous question is answered. No, a fifty-no, wait, upon recording his memory age (his cellular age was a lot older), fifty-four-year-old man-could not get through five days with only a one-liter bottle of spring water and a thirty-tablet packet of Ibuprofen without succumbing to acute renal failure. Prerenal, seeing as he was both dehydrated and had made his way through most of the Ibuprofen, and was currently congested with uric acid levels in excess of 7.4 mg/dL.

Contrite, the Doctor made a beeline for the medication storerooms, calling instructions over his shoulder for the TARDIS to set up an IV suspension point and bring out the dialysis machine.

The lights within flared as he pounced upon his supplies: a drip line and cannula tangled with a catheter, two bloated bags of fluid electrolyte replacer (this concoction similar enough in appearance to a standard Earth saline infusion to elicit minimal suspicion from the invalid when he awoke), an almost-empty roll of medical tape and-just in case the man decided to take a turn for the worse after getting better-a bottle of aerosol-type sedative.

The Doctor, with medical bits and bobs in hand, set out to perform the job he'd named himself for.

(_to cause_)