AN: You guys, sorry my pacing is so whacked with this storyline. I haven't planned it out super in-depth so I'm playing it by ear, really.

K1-98

Nios

"I wouldn't tell you this at all if it weren't for Victory saying she trusts you; a recommendation from her comes very highly regarded indeed, especially if you're telling the truth about being behind the Liberation and the South Tram Massacre," Hermia explained, hands behind her back, talking calmly and authoritatively. Nios didn't know anything about her, but already she was filled with an awesome sort of respect. "I can see even Xander must approve because he isn't objecting. It's very hard to impress him. Well done."

"Thanks," said Nios without meaning to speak. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Oswin continue to smile, looking perfectly amicable and sweet as she always did before she opened her mouth and spat out filth. And yet, she hit Nios in the ankle with her cane, as though to make her shut up. Maybe it was just an indication that she was making a fool of herself.

"You want us to help find this, uh-?"

"Charade," said Hermia, "The Charade. A government synth, secret model. Newly manufactured, off the existing synth registry we stole in the last few months. Adapted specially for infiltration – we think it could even be conscious, like us, which would make it especially dangerous to us and much harder to detect than their basic drone synthetics."

"Huh," said Oswin. "So, Nios and I, the newcomers, we'll find this Charade for you?"

"You two are new, you asking questions wouldn't alert suspicion. If I sent Victory to do the rounds, everyone would work out something was wrong. At the moment, all of the synths except the ones in this very room think the lockdown is a result of a fault with the uranium extractor."

"And is there a fault with the big, sexy uranium extractor?" Oswin asked, leaning both her hands on her cane in front of her, "Do you want me to take a crack at it? I could optimise it, or something. Did I mention my IQ of three-fifty-two yet? It's hilarious, because I have terrible social skills, as you can probably tell. Honestly, I really just get by on what people tell me to do."

"The reactor isn't operating a the most optimum level, now that she mentions it," a synth said to Hermia.

"Very well," she said, "You can deal with the uranium, and our new sister, Nios, can get to know the others on the Station while looking for anything out of the ordinary."

"Sounds great," Oswin beamed, before Nios could say anything at all in objection to this. She didn't want to be separated from Oswin, she didn't think that leaving Oswin on her own with a nuclear reactor was a good idea at all. The last time that had happened she had rigged it to explode and had to be talked out of it by the Tenth Doctor, but Nios was not the Tenth Doctor and didn't know if she could manage to stop Oswin if it came down to it. And though Oswin seemed to be in high spirits, she was acting very unusually.

"I'll just go with her, for now," Nios said, "So I know where she is, in case she needs something." Luckily Oswin didn't argue against this. Didn't say anything about Nios apparently now treating her like an invalid. But she was an invalid, so what was Nios to do?

"Don't speak to anyone else," Hermia advised, "If you find anything, come directly to me, and me alone."

"Okay," Oswin agreed immediately.

"Victory, show them to the uranium reactor." Victory nodded and took her gun and pointed for them to leave through a different door to the one they had come through initially.

"Is something wrong with you?" Nios asked Oswin.

"Usually," Oswin answered brightly. "Do you think Clara's a good liar?"

"Excuse me?"

"Clara."

"Yes?"

"Do you think she's a good liar?"

"How would I know? Has Clara lied to me?"

"Would you know if she had?"

"Maybe. Humans have biological responses to being dishonest."

"But you've never really noticed before? She's got this great tell where she twitches one of her fingers, you know. It's funny, isn't it? Like the body is rejecting lying, it just has to alleviate the anxiety of being dishonest somehow. Good how neurology works, really." She was speaking total nonsense, Nios was sure of that.

The room with most of the machinery for the uranium extractor was very warm and quite dark, but that wouldn't really be a problem for either of them. It had one lonely synth in it, too, who was quickly ordered to leave by Victory. He didn't put up any argument, and vacated the squalid workshop immediately. It was rammed with all kinds of machinery Nios didn't know the use for. Hopefully Oswin could work it out, though half of it didn't even seem like it was working.

"Feel free to go and make introductions whenever you're ready," Victory said to Nios directly, "Don't mention anything about the Charade, though." Nios just nodded, and they were left alone.

A good few seconds passed until Nios immediately rounded on Oswin, "What is the matter with you?"

"Ah, it's all a big mystery, isn't it? Everything?"

"I think you're full of it," Nios said, "You go around purveying this image of yourself as a socially defunct lunatic, when really you're more keyed-into what's going on with other people than anybody."

"Ha!" she laughed, "You're the only one who's worked that out, honey. I mean, admittedly I am clearly unhinged in some severe regard, otherwise the whole suicide-attempts-thing wouldn't keep happening. You'd think the whole successful relationship would clue people in, right? Now, anyway, there's a lot of stuff going on, Ni. Have you worked it out yet?"

"You mean this? About you?"

"No, not this. Not about how I'm a genius in every single way it's possible to actually be a genius, including when it comes to deducing that you're a giant lesbian who wants to ram Dr Cohen."

"Ram? What's 'ram'? Is that something disgusting? Don't talk about ramming her. In fact, don't ever talk about an even mildly-aggressive sounding adjective in conjunction with her name. Just don't talk about her, really."

"I've asked out four girls today and they all rejected me," Oswin said, "Did you pay attention to that?"

"It's hard not to pay attention to someone so annoying," Nios said coolly. Oswin just laughed again. "What are you trying to prove?"

"That rejection is nothing to be frightened of," Oswin said, "That you have to go out on a limb, take risks-"

"Easy enough to say when you already have a boyfriend, so you wouldn't have made any commitment to any of those girls regardless."

"One of them was you! I could commit to you. Or Cohen."

"Stop it. She doesn't like you. She probably doesn't like me, either."

"Don't be stupid, she thinks you're cute."

"How do you know?"

"Because who wouldn't think you were cute when you got so flummoxed when she grabbed your arm," Oswin said, her voice getting very breathy near the end of the sentence while she mimed swooning. She mimed it a bit too much and her mangled leg gave in and left her falling backwards into a large, rusty computer console. She accidentally snapped a level with her elbow. "Whoops." Nios glared at her. "Alright, already. I'll stop talking about her."

"There are more important things to worry about, anyway. We have to find this 'Charade.'"

"Done it."

"Excuse me?"

"I said I've done it. Found the Charade."

"Well who is it?"

Oswin shrugged, "Work it out for yourself. No rush as long as we're covert, be on your guard. You've had access to all the same information as me, you're just not quite putting it together fast enough – but view it like a… mental exercise. A challenge. Talk to me again when you solve it, it's quite good. Now, I've got stuff to do, and you have to go chitchat with other synths. It'll be good for you, going out and socialising. Might make you come out of your shell."

"I haven't got a shell."

"Ninety-percent of your body is made of shell you're so closed off, honey," Oswin said, "Go for a walk, I'll stay here and do my magic on the reactor."

"And what 'magic' is that? Your IED related magic?"

"Potentially, yes, some IED related magic. Look, forget about that."

"Forget!? You just said-"

"I know what I said and I'm lying, I'm going to have to do something a lot more complicated than just build an IED. Do you know how easy it is to trick a nuclear reactor into exploding? Give me thirty seconds and a wrench and I could blow this place so bad all the fish in a hundred-mile-radius would grow a dozen extra eyes. But I won't do that. Mainly because I don't think the fish need all those extra eyes. The sea is quite dark, you know?"

"I don't understand what you're-"

"I'm making a bomb. I'm going to kill the Charade with it, and this entire place," she said, "But not before I use all this junk here to jury-rig a teleport relay. That's the good thing about you lot all being electronics, you know? With registered root codes and all this stuff that makes you very traceable. Do you know how easy it would be for me to do a mass transmat? Very. I can make teleporters work with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back."

"A transmat? Where to?"

"I don't know yet. I'm going to have to make some calls. But none of that matters, you don't need to bother yourself with it."

"But they're my species, of course I do."

"And you don't trust me with their lives now? Nios," she grew seriously, "I've never heard anything when I'm from about synthetics like you. All I know is that for thousands of years, AI experimentation has been outlawed and illegal. But I'd never heard of Earth building conscious synths, which is a little bit like how Rose Tyler has never heard of the massive genocides carried out by the British Empire. Buried history. And I've never looked into it, but now I have a chance to make it. And the only way for you synths to actually prosper is to leave, to go far away, and for the government to realise that the Station has been destroyed. They've already got an undercover operative here, alright? As long as we make sure that the undercover synth dies, we can fake the mass-murder of everybody on here and take them somewhere safe. They either vanish, or die, because they're not around when I come from."

"So this is your grand plan? Run away from adversity?"

"These people won't agree to leave Earth," she sighed, "And, on a level, they're right not to, because they're really just as native to the planet as humans are. But at this point you're all too scary to integrate properly, and humanity are too violent. One uranium reactor, if I get it up to full capacity, is more than enough to power a transmat. They're not very complicated. You're going to save face and I'm going to stay here and rope my brother-in-law into finding somewhere and putting down a closed beacon I should be able to connect to pretty easily with a mobile phone."

"You're going to phone in a teleport?"

"No, it's just for the relay to work. Look. Do you trust me?"

"I'm worried that you'll hurt yourself in the process of building this IED, Oswin."

"I definitely won't. I'm definitely still around whenever Thirteen comes from, and that's miles away yet. And I'm going to try not to die before I can see the mess that Ten and Rose make of their wedding. Plus, there's Mitchell, and my dad now, and I couldn't hurt Clara like that…" she trailed off, "I swear I'm not going to do anything crazy. Okay?"

I swear I'm not going to do anything crazy.

The words ran around in Nios's head as she skulked away from the reactor core, leaving Oswin behind and decidedly alone and unsupervised. The one thing no one was ever supposed to do was leave Oswin Oswald unsupervised. And herself, too. As long as Oswin was telling the truth… But, was it irresponsible of her? Would people blame her if something happened? Would she be presumed to be just as much of a liability as Oswin? Maybe neither of them were the dangers people suspected them to be. Maybe she was overreacting.

She wished she hadn't changed her eye colour. She stuck out like a sore thumb, with these mods burning away in her metallic skull. Hermia had different eyes, too, another borderline inhuman and vibrant colour, but still enough to disguise her as a human if her acting was good enough. Nios's eyes wiped away any way for her to be traced back to her 'original owners' or 'model manufacturers'; bar codes were marked onto the irises. But she had overwritten that, and gained, very briefly, a crude sense of freedom.

She tried to ignore the prying eyes of other inquisitive synths on the Station, and left their company to return to the snowy outside and go lean on a balcony overlooking the sea. She would like to smell the sea, she thought. Humans always spoke of the smell of the sea, and sea salt, humans like Adam Mitchell and Clara Oswald. It was dark grey and stormy and she wondered how sturdy this ancient uranium extractor really was, because as she brushed the snow away and into the waters far below she saw that the metal supports were rusting. Out there, she was alone, and probably a curiosity.

Since conscious synthetics were criminals by the nature of their mere existence in the eyes of 'modern' law, she assumed that she had been exposed to more humans for greater lengths of time than any of the other synths around her, including the leaders like Victory and Hermia. They had all been workers at one point, yes, but not after they learnt how to think for themselves. Then they were branded and taken away to be 'recycled.' Had they ceased synth production entirely once the awakening had begun? Were these liberated synths, stranded in the middle of the ocean, cold and alone and waiting for an unforgiving planet to acknowledge their frightening autonomy, the last ones? Oswin would be right to transport them away, if they were.

Thinking about all this, she sighed.

"Are you synthetic?" she was asked. She turned around and was faced by an attractive young man. Every synth was attractive and young, though. Why would humans make slaves that were old and ugly, after all. Synths were objects, possessions, and people wanted their possessions to be pretty and empty.

"Sorry?"

"You're not, are you. You're a trick."

"I – yes. I am a synth. Of course I am. Are you implying you're detecting vital signs from me?"

"There's something going on," he said, "This lockdown, and then you showing up. And you act differently, and your eyes."

"Hermia has different eyes too. And she let me stay."

"Hermia needs a disguise, she's the only one of us who ever goes to the mainland. She risks her life for our safety."

"She goes on her own?" Nios asked. The synth narrowed his eyes.

"I heard you sigh," he said, "Why would you sigh? Why would you slouch, and lean? You don't need to."

"It's just… habitual."

"And you pause when you talk."

"Do you hate humans?"

"They enslaved us," he said, "They used us. Now they kill us."

"Have you never met one who was… nice?"

"Nice humans don't exist," he said, "They're parasites on this planet. And you act like one of them. You hide your true nature. You must be ashamed, you must be a sympathiser."

"I'm not ashamed!" she protested. She sounded desperate. She was letting all of these emotions come out in her voice, once she used to keep restrained. Or maybe they didn't exist before? Maybe they were new. Maybe she had learned them, they had infected her opened-up neural passageways. Was it not nature vs nurture? Had she not risked her life for the people on the TARDIS, even when they suspected her of wrongdoing?

"I have to be somewhere away from you," he scoffed, and then he skulked away. She watched him leave. Was she really so different from them?

Humans didn't trust her for acting too robotic. Synths didn't trust her for being too naturalistic. But she was a synth… she decided to listen to Oswin, and be brave, and risk it. And so she ventured inside, in the opposite direction to where the male synth had skipped off to, to see if they all hated her. Had she really once sounded like him, so angry against humans? If so, she couldn't let the same bad taste affect her view of synthetics, of her own species. She had to try some others. Victory seemed okay, seemed not to hate humans on principle. Maybe if they gave humans a chance, like she had done…

Dr Cohen was a human. A cute one, who was practically tall and had glasses that were slightly too big to fit her face just right. And she did not seem to hate synthetics on principle, but she had viewed them with a great deal of intrigue… maybe that sort of intrigue was all natural? Maybe it was the beginnings of acceptance? And she lived a hundred and fifty years ago. Suddenly, a hundred and fifty years seemed like a bigger gap than she had previously considered it to be…