DAY 150

A3-21

Nios

For days now, Nios had not seen Oswin Oswald anywhere except her laboratory. So when she was summoned via text message to Oswin's side without any information of where Oswin's side actually was, she just assumed that Oswin was going to be in her lab again, not sleeping and obsessing over her newest invention. Though, truth be told, Nios thought Oswin's obsessing over devices may have taken a little bit of a backseat recently, because her mood seemed to have generally improved. Whether that was down to anything tangible or just because she was in one of her manic periods, Nios did not feel the need to question it.

Luckily, wild as she was, Oswin's behaviour was sometimes predictable, and Nios found her exactly where she thought she would, poring over something at her long workbench covered in electronics and metals. She was smiling, though; that was a start, and it wasn't unbearably early in the morning at all. In fact, it was getting on for eleven in the morning, so perhaps Oswin had gone to bed at some point.

"Do you live here?" Nios asked without greeting her.

"Hello to you, too, sexy," Oswin said, looking up and giving her a grin. She was in a very good mood, clearly. Dare Nios go over there and risk possibly being touched inappropriately? Not that she had ever actually heard of Oswin being overtly inappropriate with anyone (well, she had, but only in a verbal sense), but Good Mood Oswin might be liable to do anything. "Yes, I do live on the TARDIS, thank you for noticing. If I can be said to live anywhere, that is."

"What would you say instead of 'live'?"

"Infect. With my presence."

"Like a venereal disease?"

Oswin winked, "Exactly." Then she changed the subject very quickly, because she was excited about something. "Do you remember when you caught Jenny and I canoodling in here a few days ago*? She was helping me solder some circuitry because she's better with her fingers than me?" Nios said nothing, but raised her eyebrows, which Oswin took to mean 'yes.' "This is what she was helping me with." Oswin lifted something up on the back of her hand, something that made Nios cringe to look at and was most certainly alive.

"What am I looking at?"

"I told you, honey, I was building an AI," Oswin said, "He's a Synthetically Programmed Robotic Insectoid Terrestrial Explorer."

"Did it take you a long time to come up with an acronym for the word 'sprite' that only makes partial sense?"

"At least five minutes," Oswin said, "But, yes. Sprite."

'Sprite' as Oswin called it was unusual to look at. The lucky thing about being a synthetic organism, and being a synthetic organism was something Nios was expert in, was that when she had been created she had the entire Encyclopaedia Britannia shoved into her internal coding. So, if she were to describe Sprite in more scientific terms, she would have to say it looked like a cross between scutigera coleoptrata and some sort of crustacean. That was to say, it had a lot of legs and scuttled about. It even had large metal apposable claws, though they looked more suited to picking up objects than biting people. And, if she had to, she might say that this 'creature' of Oswin's invention looked… happy. Quite pleased. Which was unusual, because it did not really have a face, per se, merely eyes. But they were some extraordinarily animated yellow eyes, digitally producing expressions. Nios leant close to look at these eyes, and Oswin held up her hand for her to see it better. It was possibly about eight or nine inches long, in total, and golden-bronze in colour with bits of clockwork aiding the movement of the joints and the complex, circuit based nervous system.

"Well?" Oswin asked. Nios kept her eyes engaged with Sprite's. "Do you like him?"

"What's your intention?"

"Like I told you before, to help me. A tiny lab assistant. Look, I can't expect Mitchell or Clary or you or Jenny or whoever might be there to go and fetch me things and do this and that when I haven't got my prosthetic on, or when the bad leg starts to hurt too much to manage, so… Sprite. Like a loyal canine, only I don't like dogs or any other animal at all, really." Oswin moved her hand and put it on the table, and Sprite scurried off. "Get me a screwdriver," she said, and Sprite zipped away down the table and found about three screwdrivers and brought them all back, dropping them in front of Oswin. He really did have the mannerisms of a well-trained dog, without any of the mess or smell.

"Do we really need a new pet on top of the cats?" Nios asked.

"Hey, Sprite is mine. If anyone else wants an AI to bother, Helix is still hanging around and so are you, eavesdropping," Oswin said, "They could just ask you a paradox until you glitch. And I don't like those cats anyway. I nearly fell out with Mitchell when he brought the cat onto the ship to begin with, and look at all the trouble it's caused. Now we have Time Kittens. You couldn't make this stuff up."

"One of them attacked the Tenth Doctor," Nios said. And then Oswin was interested.

"Oh really? Which one? What did it do?"

"The black one," Nios said, "The Maine Coon. Donna told me it's a nasty piece of work, but he seems fine with me. It went for Mickey, as well, and Martha."

"It's not even a week old."

"It didn't do much damage," Nios said, "Very determined, though. The first one whose eyes have opened. Your boyfriend said that's unusually early." Oswin turned her nose up at the mention of her boyfriend. "What?" Nios asked.

"Hmm?"

"You didn't seem very happy when I mentioned him."

"You've cracked it. We're having an enormous fight and have practically broken up and I've moved into the lab to get away from him. Right now he's bawling his eyes out somewhere and wishing I would take him back, but he's just too horrible," Oswin said monotonously. Nios said nothing, just watched her until she gave up with the sarcasm. "It's nothing, I just don't understand his obsession with these… creatures. All they do is eat and poo and make noise."

"That's all humans do."

"And I'm not the biggest fan of most of those, either, but at least I was once a kindred species," Oswin said, "They're practically vermin. We didn't have any animals on Horizon, you know, none at all."

"So you haven't had a fight?"

"No, why? Were you getting excited?"

"More like worried. You would break without him."

"I'm broken already, but annoyingly enough, you're right. Anyway. Why would I ever lose him? I have to tell him at least twice a day that I am the smartest girl in the universe, I am gorgeous, and that yes, I am his girlfriend and have been for months. He's not here right now because he's spent the last few days setting up an orphanage and changing his bank accounts so that he makes huge regular donations to a hundred different charities. He is a billionaire, you know," Oswin said, a smile playing on her lips as she discussed Adam Mitchell, "Do you know, he can sing, too? But he gets so embarrassed about it."

"You're more affectionate towards him than you usually let on."

"I'm a master of disguise. You do realise you've been standing up this entire time? Feel free to take a seat," Oswin offered.

"No thanks, I'm quite alright."

"Overheard anything interesting recently with those robotic ears of yours?"

Nios narrowed her eyes, "Tons."

"Oh, really? Like what? Come on, Ni. Give me some gossip. I'm parched and it seems like nothing's been going on lately, everyone's too obsessed with the stupid cats."

"Jack's engaged," Nios said.

"Jack's what?" she exclaimed in horror. Sprite, by her side, mimicked the expression as best he could with his eyes. It was cute. "He can't be! Jenny would have told me if they were back together! What's she messing my sister around like that for!?"

"I don't think Ravenwood thinks of you as her sister, and it isn't Jenny he's engaged to. Apparently, Jenny disappeared," Nios said.

"You're leaving stuff out, mate. Spill." Now Nios did sit down, giving Sprite a careful look as she did, moving slowly. She did not know how it may act in regards to someone other than its creator, but she did find it rather interesting he displayed no resent towards Oswin for being made. Then again, automatic resentment towards creators would mean every human being would despise their own parents on principle. It was behaviour which formed the majority of interpersonal opinions, really. And prejudice.

"I didn't hear everything when I was charging in the console room, you know."

"Pretending to be asleep? As always? You're such a dark horse, honey," Oswin said wryly.

"His dead boyfriend got brought back to life by Liam Kent," said Nios, "Went to find him, sounded like he got Jenny and River involved in it somehow."

"What? And now Jenny's disappeared?"

"No. They think she has, but she came through the TARDIS as well and spoke to the Doctor about an alien device they found and said he needed to destroy it. Then she went and got her spaceship from wherever she left it and I saw her go again with an old restored sports car." Oswin had seen this beat-up car in the garage in the last few days when she had been trying to sort out a new yacht for Adam Mitchell. He had told her the car was a Porsche 356, and she had told him she didn't care.

"But where is Jack's dead boyfriend now?" Oswin said, and Nios paused before answered. Oswin worked out exactly what that pause meant in a nanosecond. "No way! He's not-? On here? But Eleveny is going to kill him. He'll throw him into the sun for upsetting Jenny. I'll throw him into the sun for upsetting Jenny."

"Jenny can throw him into the sun herself."

"Jenny is probably much too busy with her tongue in Clara's mouth to care about what Jack's doing at the moment," Oswin said, "Since that's obviously where she's gone. I've got this theory about them, you know, about Jack and Jenny."

"Oh?" Nios prompted, though she was only half-interested. Oswin leant closer like she was bestowing some great piece of wisdom, though Nios doubted it was really all that. Sprite crawled up Oswin's arm and sat on her shoulder.

"Yeah," Oswin beckoned her closer, "Basically, I reckon that the reason they've both switched now to being with people of the same gender is because after they slept with each other and realised their relationship was totally never going to work because they're way too headstrong and similar, they also figured out neither of them was ever going to get better being with someone else of the opposite sex. Like, in terms of that, Jenny is peak woman and Jack is peak man."

"You've slept with both of them to judge, then?" Nios asked dryly.

"In my mind I've slept with lots of people."

"Seems to me like when you were stuck in your mind you spend most of your time sleeping with your own hand."

"Yeah alright, leave it out, there's not a lot to do alone on a spaceship for a year in a weird fantasy world. Anyway. Jenny realises she'll never shag a boy better at it than Jack, and he realises that he'll never shag a girl better at it than Jenny. So the only solution is to break up and switch."

"It's fascinating how creepy you can be sometimes."

"I get bored!"

"I think we've heard plenty about what sorts of things you get up to when you're bored." Oswin glared at her.

"Anyway. I have something important I need to talk to you about. Like, actually important, the real reason I got you down here." While Oswin talked, Sprite moved from one shoulder to the other. She looked a bit like a pirate with a parrot on her arm, but instead of a parrot it was a clockwork centipede. "You see, Ni, Sally Sparrow told me that James Elliott told her that Darling told him that their coroner told her that Undercoll have a dead robot in their morgue."

"The rumour mill has been active, then?"

"Undercoll haven't got any way to contact me directly," Oswin said, "It's a miracle Sally didn't just ignore James Elliott. You see, Jenny told me that Clara told her that Esther told her that Sally and James Elliott slept together."

"So they're going out?"

"No. Sally Sparrow would never 'go out' with someone, she's a nut-job. You're missing out the whole 'dead robot in the morgue' thing," Oswin told her. She had been missing out on it, she hadn't paid it quite the right amount of attention.

"But they're in 2016."

"Yes, and they work with rifts," Oswin said, "It could have come from anywhere, and apparently I've been called in as an 'AI expert.' Since when was I an AI expert?"

"You're in a room right now with three AIs and no people," Nios said, "You're the closest thing to an AI expert I'm sure Undercoll can find. What would you rather they do? Call up a Twenty-First Century chop-shop quack who makes angry twitter accounts that talk about locking humans up in zoos?"

"Do you not want to lock humans up in zoos?"

"A 'zoo' implies voyeurism and spectatorship, but who would want to watch what humans do? They're filthy." Oswin laughed, but Nios had not been making a joke. Sprite crawled on top of Oswin's head, and she lifted an arm to entice him onto her hand instead. He did scurry onto her arm and she put him back down on the table, wherein he resumed his earlier position by scuttling across her back and sitting on her right shoulder again. She left him there this time.

"Anyway, they said robot so I don't really know what it is," Oswin said, "I don't think I've met whoever their tech specialist is properly. And you're right about the chop-shop thing, I don't trust humans in that century not to go messing around in the head of whatever it is they mean by 'robot.' But going by the fact it was their mortician who figured out it wasn't a human, I'm thinking that it looks generally pretty convincing, and we're not going to show up and be faced with an R2-D2 piece of space junk."

"So you think they've caught a dead synth from the future?"

"I think it's a possibility and I think that you should come with me to check it out. And also because I'm not allowed to go places on my own, but I'm not taking Clara because she's still moaning about being hungover from her alcohol binge with Rose the other night. And Mitchell's busy."

"Maybe you should take Jack and his new fiancé to meet New Torchwood officially. See their replacements."

"I don't want to be in a ten-mile radius of Jack and his new fiancé. Besides, I'm not gonna pick hanging out with Jack over hanging out with you; only one of you is a smoking hot, blonde-haired, artificial intelligence. Which I totally have a thing for," she smirked. Nios said nothing. Half the time when she was with Oswin, she didn't say anything. She didn't really need to. "So? What do you say? Just the two of us, doing an autopsy – it'll be so romantic."

"I'll come, but only because of loyalty to my own kind."

"And also me."

"Not really."

"Because you think I'm cute."

"I don't."

"I'm adorable and you know it. Let's go."

*chapter 1078