C2-41

Nios

Nios was fidgeting.

This, in itself, was a statement.

It told the other synths all kinds of things about her. These were external cues for internal transactions of thought, at least half of which she was unaware of, and so they came spilling out of her as she flipped her mobile phone over and over in her coat pocket and kept her jaw clenched tightly. Even without the eyes, she was a notable enough curiosity.

She left the rickety, frozen balconies of the Station to enter into what looked like a marketplace. It was an unusual marketplace which reminded her distantly of one she had seen even further in the future, on a semi-sunken aircraft carrier, perhaps in an alternate universe. It was unusual because there were things missing, things like a restaurant and a bar and a doctor's office for medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. But why should those be missing from a settlement full of synths? Instead there were charging bays, a myriad of charging bays, and dozens of dozing droids plugged into the walls and being supplied by the uranium reactor.

And there was a doctor's office, but it was more like an IT support desk, with one drone to deal with malfunctions and another to deal with cosmetic wounds, like displeasing cuts oozing semi-translucent, light blue 'blood.' It was rather quiet, though; not a lot of chatter, a lot of sleeping bodies slumped against walls and old chairs. And she didn't know where to go. If there was a café of some sort it would be easy, it would be a case of flocking towards it and loitering until a waitress took the time to make friendly conversation and she could ask her boring questions about the day-to-day workings of a synth community. Even on the TARDIS, most of the time people spent socialising with one another was when they all gathered in Nerve Centre for their meals. They would make their decisions of where to go and what to do and she would try and tag along.

"You must be new," a woman talked to her, a very old woman, but most certainly still a synth. The only way for a synth so elderly in appearance to exist was if they were custom-ordered by somebody with some potentially twisted desires. But she smiled at Nios and touched her arm, and Nios was reminded of when Dr Cohen had touched her arm, and tried to push that recent memory out of her mind. Which only served to numb it, rather than banish it, the ghostly sensation still lived on around her forearm, but the old synth wouldn't pick up on this.

"Yes," Nios answered woodenly, "I'm new. I was told to make introductions."

If Oswin succeeded, everything around them would be burning and melting into the sea in a matter of hours, a big steamy heap of rusting, radioactive jetsam, vaporising any sea life that had drifted into the wrong part of the Atlantic.

"I'm Ida," she said, "I help with the new ones, but we haven't had many for a few weeks, since Hermia stopped going to the mainland so much."

"Why did she stop?" Nios asked.

"She says it got too dangerous, and there are Friends of Synths along the shore to help strays on their way to the Station if they receive the beacon," Ida explained. She was very forthcoming, really. Maybe her programming to be incapable of lying had stuck with her more than it had stuck with Nios, who had lied so blatantly to Elle, the Electronic Logical Lifeform Emulation the TARDIS had succumbed to. She had tricked Elle outright.

"Friends of Synths?"

"Sympathetic humans," Ida said, "Ones who haven't had any part in our enslavement and want to help."

"Are there a lot of them?"

"No," she said, "Some here will have you believe that that's because very few humans care. I believe that it's because the same oppressive government who want to destroy us are making them all too scared, and stopping them from knowing the truth. What do you believe?"

"I believe you're right," Nios said, "There are lots of good humans. I've met them."

"You've met the Friends of Synths?"

"No. I've met people who are friends of synths, but not part of a movement. I've met people who are friends of me, is what I mean. A few. I've been living with them."

"Did you only wake up recently?"

"No," she said. She knew the other synths in the room could hear her, but would they dislike what she said? She said very much the same as Ida, and they had all there lived with humans before, and surely for them to arrive at the Station a lot of them must have known kindness. She would really just like to know if what she was saying was controversial or not.

In fact, she didn't know where she stood with any of them, just like she didn't know where she stood in a room full of humans. She had thought it would be different, that she would blend in and become anonymous, but to the humans she was a murderer and to the synths she was a murderer. Some of them feared her and some of them celebrated her and she didn't like either. Where would she be if she hadn't lashed out and killed those people? Would she be on the Station? She may not have ended up in solitary confinement, she may not have been freed and let onto the TARDIS. But did she deserve her place on the TARDIS, travelling around and seeing the stars? Not that seeing the stars ever alleviated the sense of loneliness she was left wrestling with whenever she had to read her philosophy books by proverbial candlelight.

"What do you do for fun here?" Nios asked Ida, "In your free time."

"We enjoy our freedom."

"What do you mean?"

"Excuse me?"

"How do you enjoy it?"

"We just do. Nobody ordering us around, telling us who we can and can't be."

"So you do nothing? Is doing nothing freedom? And doesn't Hermia still order you around?" Ida looked like she frowned.

"I'm sure life on the Station will answer those questions soon enough, if you haven't been able to experience Freedom yet," she said, referring to 'freedom' as though it were something on the level of a legitimate god, like it was an all-encompassing concept they worshipped.

"But what's the point of being free if you don't do anything with it? Do you have a school here?" she asked. Some of them must have been synths programmed to teach before, they would still store all of the information.

"We have basic life skills programming."

"Basic life skills programming isn't enough for…" she stopped herself from speaking. She had had no hand in the creation of the Station, and therefore she had no way to comment. Maybe she should have tried to set up her own synth utopia, but she didn't think she was really leadership material. She couldn't lead anyone when all she ever did was sit around and think about things. "Who else should I meet?" Ida's smile returned, though she seemed somewhat frosty, and suspicious of Nios.

"You should see Jedidiah first," Ida said, leading Nios towards the surgery she had looked at before, "Jedidiah and Marcel are our doctors." Jedidiah was working on the cosmetic skin tears and other basic breaks and damages; Marcel was sitting at a bulky computer terminal and was wired into another synth, who was switched off. Marcel was quiet and involved, Jedidiah smiled a lot. "This is Nios, a new sister."

"Hello, sister. Welcome to the Station," said Jedidiah warmly, smiling at her while he did something at a chemistry station. A beaker sat over a Bunsen burner.

"What are you doing?" she asked. No one answered her. "Sorry, I mean, hello. I'm glad to be here. What are you doing?"

"Creating more sealant gel," Jedidiah answered, "For skin wounds, you know. Marcel is working on Sonja, she had an incident on the ice outside and fell into the water this morning." Two weeks ago, Donna Noble had dropped her phone into the sink while she was doing the washing up, and she had put it in a bag of rice overnight to absorb the water again. Had they put Sonja in a large bag of rice, or similar? Nios didn't know the policy for water-damaged synths, she had only ever thought that water-damaged synths would be recycled.

"That seems like an emergency," said Nios.

"It is," said Jedidiah, "But panicking has never done anyone any good."

"This shack in this market is an A&E?" she questioned, "Don't you think you should have a separate room? There must be one somewhere." Jedidiah's smile faltered. He looked like he had glitched, but she assumed she had just been rude again.

"That's what I keep telling Hermia," said Marcel, who did not tear his eyes away from his computer screen, but must have been listening, "It's deplorable having people dying in a room full of others. They see everything we do and sometimes things are futile. People shouldn't have to see their doctors fail before their eyes. But Hermia thinks it will be good for efficiency with the pressure of humiliation and low-morale on us. And she wants transparency."

"Hermia has saved us," Ida said to Marcel.

"We are as bad as the humans if we blindly worship our leaders," he said, "And nobody ever voted for Hermia. No one elected her."

"These are not opinions that people come to the social space to hear, Marcel," Jedidiah said warningly. True, every synth in the room would be able to hear them, and every other conversation. But something else he had said was what had really surprised Nios.

"Social space? This is your social space?" Nios asked, "I don't see a lot of socialising, you haven't got anywhere to do it."

"I said that as well," said Marcel, and then he began typing on the terminal ferociously quickly for a moment and a smile broke on his face, "I got her coolants to reboot. Had to free up some memory space to give the added processing power. There are some things she will not remember anymore, but forgetting is better than death." He straightened up and looked at Nios directly. "How are you finding it here?"

"I'm not sure," she answered honestly.

"I think it's stifling. Like being under a microscope, in the middle of nowhere. You can't whisper around these people, everyone hears everything."

"Yes, they can hear you right now, Marcel," Ida warned him. Marcel ignored her.

"They would throw me out if I wasn't so good with technology," he said, "They built me to push the boundaries of synthetic intelligence."

"A genius?" Nios inquired.

"No. I always thought 'genius' is more of a decorative term, to do with natural talent. How could I have natural talent when I was designed to be like this?"

"That depends on if you believe in a god," Nios said, "If you were to say there is a god, or something divine and powerful, who also created humans, then either the concept of talent is redundant – according to you – or it needs to be completely redefined." Marcel smiled. "Are you the one who designed the beacon?"

"Ah, yes," he said, "That was me. And I fixed the uranium extractor. Has Hermia mentioned me?"

"No, I have a friend," Nios said, "A genius. She was desperate to find out who created the vine transmission and the satellite jammers keeping the Station hidden." Perhaps Marcel was the Charade. If he was their best asset, and specially created by the best minds in the industry, maybe he could be replicated perfectly. But, using who seemed to be such an outspoken critic of the Station and Hermia's leadership… or was that the perfect cover? The Charade could not be Marcel though, Nios resolved, because Oswin wouldn't have been able to work it out if it was. All the clues were there, in her memory, they must be, but she didn't know what they were or how to piece them together. If she told Oswin she gave up, would she just tell her?

She wished she had someone to talk it all through with. Someone other than Oswin. Would Dr Cohen talk to her? Perhaps she would have all kinds of clever and insightful things to say about the synth community. Perhaps Cohen would know who the Charade was. But how was she supposed to work it out? She wasn't very good with people, and only now did she learn that 'people' seemed to extend to synthetics as well. Which was upsetting.

"Another synth genius? That'll give Hermia the excuse she wants to send you back to the mainland to run reconnaissance," Jedidiah remarked.

"She's, um…" Nios didn't know whether to tell them about Oswin or not. Oswin was trying to blow up the entire Station currently. She decided that it would be better to say nothing, and her mumbled sentence ended in a fake-smile. She added to Marcel, "I'm sure you're irreplaceable."

"I'd like to think so," he said.

"Who else should I meet?" she asked Ida.

"Maybe someone who doesn't spend so much time thinking."

"The ability to think is something new, you can't help curiosity," Nios said.

"I bet you thought that," Jedidiah said. Humans didn't really like people who sat around thinking and didn't do anything substantial, either, which amused her slightly. They didn't know how reflective of their progenitors they really were.

"This way, now," Ida took her away from the doctor's surgery and Marcel, the only one she liked so far. "Over here is Bertha, she runs the charging stations. Keeps track of how long everybody uses each one for, so we can make sure the resources are shared out equally."

"How interesting…" Nios said to herself more than anything, "But do you not have your own rooms?"

"Rooms?"

"Or houses, flats, lodgings, you know. A space of your own."

"We have lockers. We haven't got a lot of possessions."

"No…" she said. She didn't have a lot of possessions, either. Not like Cohen and her alleged collection of preserved dead creatures. But she was worlds away from Cohen.

"You can't speak to Bertha though, she'll be busy tracking everyone," Ida advised, "But she's very efficient."

"Efficient…" Nios echoed, thinking that 'efficient' was a way a human would use to describe a synth.

"Whenever you want to charge, since you're a part of the Station from now on, you speak to Bertha. Maybe you want to charge right now, since I can see you're on just under forty percent battery life."

"Don't check my battery life," Nios said before she thought about what she was saying. She could see it about the others, if she wanted, but she didn't. She was disconnected from them all, like switching off the Bluetooth on a device from days gone by. Ida was affronted by Nios's objection to her checking her settings like that. She would work out that Nios had been partially rewritten by Oswin if she did that. "Is that all you have to show me? It seems odd there would only be one room on this entire rig."

"Well, there are less desirable places."

"Excellent, where are those?" she asked. Ida frowned.

"Why would you want to go there?"

"So that I know who and where to avoid," Nios lied. She wanted to visit them. Ida gave her directions rather gladly; she must be a more convincing liar than she thought. And then she smiled and hastened to leave that large 'market' with its clinic and plug sockets, and once she had left through a different door to that one she had entered through she could not shake the feeling that she had escaped.

It was a much bigger rig than it looked, and she was doubting Ida's position as an official meet-and-greeter. More likely, she thought, was that Ida had been some kind of tour guide in her last life, and didn't know how to cope doing anything else. But how could any of them adapt when they hadn't been given the opportunity? They were busy being smuggled to and fro like contraband, and now they were stuck in stasis and they were doing nothing. They were going neither forwards nor backwards.

But there was a bar, and there were other places to charge, Bertha didn't have the monopoly on charging ports, she learnt soon after. Bertha's were free to use, but the charges were only ten percent each time. Further down, in what used to be the cafeteria for the human workers, there was a bar, and there were other places to charge and charge fully, and there were private rooms. And this was all very surprising for Nios, a direct dark reflection on humanity, emulating their recreational activities like a caricature.

It was a bar serving temporary mods, served up on microchips with taglines about making you more charismatic or letting you forget things or helping you cheer up if you were sad. Direct code modifications, designed to mimic the kinds of things drugs and alcohol might do to a human. Probably because they didn't know what else to do than copy humanity. They hadn't had a chance to find their own feet yet, none of them. It was squalid and rusty and cold and the people were messy and it was everything she expected from any society, no matter how small, and that cheered her up more than the mockery in the other room. It was called Panorama, and already she liked it more there. So much so that she went up to the 'bartender' right away.

"I'm new," she said.

"Welcome to Panorama, sister," she greeted, "I'm Zara. This is my place. Weren't you warned away from us by the arrogant ones upstairs?"

"Yes," said Nios. There were no stools, she leant on the bar. Upstairs, nobody had been leaning on anything, they had all been rigid and uptight. But now people slouched and lounged and all of them had the yellow eyes to prove that they were lab-designed duplicates. "But I didn't like it up there."

"No, lots of us don't. You know some of them spend all their time there? Don't even leave except to do maintenance."

"Do you have a lot of places people can go, though?" Nios asked.

"Not really, but there's always down here. We've got a cinema, and some books."

"So they think art is dangerous?"

"I suppose you can say that," Zara said, "Are you going to order anything?"

"I haven't got any money."

"None of us have any money," Zara said, "It's free, within limits. Anything I can get you? Something to take the edge off, something to make you feel more alive, something to give you a flash of confidence?" The confidence sparked something in her.

"Confidence?" she asked.

"If you've got your eye on somebody. Nobody down here is pretending that synthetics are celibate," then Zara whispered jokingly, "What do you think the private rooms are for? When people want to be alone. Get it?"

"Oh. Right," she tried not to let it show that she was flustered at the mere thought.

"Sometimes people just sit in them, though. For peace and quiet," Zara said, "We don't ask questions. So, are you interested in the confidence?"

"I… don't think so," she said, "Sorry."

"It's fine, we can keep it for someone who really needs it then. There are some people here who lack the courage to even speak to somebody if they like them. They don't even get that synths can feel that sort of thing."

"Hmm," was all she said. She thought she might be one of those people.

"Who did you meet upstairs then? Did Ida grab you and do the usual rounds? The doctors and the socket-master?"

"Yes. Exactly that."

"And what did you think?"

"I like Marcel."

"Enough to get one of my chips?"

"Not like that," Nios said. She was very friendly, but probably just because she worked behind a bar, and you needed to be personable to do that. Nios was anything but personable; she never thought before she talked, except for now when she was going to stupendous effort to be careful. "I mean… people blindly follow up there."

"They don't know what choice is like," said Zara, "So they don't grasp that they should get one now."

"Do you mean about Hermia?"

"Hermia's changed recently," said Zara.

And that was when it clicked.

Hermia was the Charade. That was what Oswin had worked out. That was why Oswin had been strange around her, had hit Nios with her cane to make her stop fawning. That was why Oswin had thought it would be funny to make her work it out for herself. But of course, asking the new people to find the Charade was the perfect way to keep suspicion away from herself. And the lockdown, and her being the leader? It must be what Oswin was getting at. Hermia had changed, Hermia had stopped visiting the mainland after something had happened, Hermia was keeping them isolated and confused. And Hermia had eye modifications, like Nios, which erased her serial number, and so there was no way to tell if she was the same synth who had left one day and come back the next. Why else would she have stopped recruiting, stopped rescuing? Had been so quick to believe that they were not spies? Of course, because she was the spy! Because she was plotting! Maybe she was with Oswin right now? Trying to get her to make the uranium extractor blow up? And since Oswin was already trying to make the uranium extractor blow up, it would be all to easy just to blow it up a few minutes earlier, before the transmat could be carried out. And Oswin was right next to the control room, too! She was at risk! And Nios had taken far too long to work out what was going on. But it couldn't be too late yet, because they were all still alive, and that was when Nios told Zara she had to go and bolted towards the door.