Through the Looking Glass
Nios
Behind the hidden glass wall lay a maze of interconnecting tunnels with colourful wires running up and down the walls. Nios felt as though she was physically within a computer with all the plastic cabling and connections, many wires hanging low from the ceiling above and creating unusual shadows in the artificial lights pressed into the metal which turned on as they walked underneath and turned off again as they left the vicinity. The Doctor, at the front, was having to push the wires out of the way like they were stray pieces of foliage making the dense passage feel even more claustrophobic. It did not appear like people were supposed to be present and even she was having to stoop at some points while the Doctor was practically hunched over. Practically a crawlspace in some regards.
Was this Max? Were these cables how he kept his control of the station, the dispensary? Plumbing and transparent, slime-filled tubes also ran the lengths of the walls, slime she recognised as being part of the bland, paste rations served to the people in plastic tubs. She wanted to follow those wires and find out where the miscellaneous 'sustenance' was being source from but wasn't entirely sure she would like what she found. Probably a big vat of ambiguous gunk with bits being sucked out by those very plastic tubes she could now see – then again, maybe having nutrition paste delivered pneumatically was the height of efficiency. However, just because Nios couldn't consume food in any kind of meaningful way didn't mean she didn't appreciate it – after all, she was fascinated by the things Jenny could do with a sparse handful of ingredients, even if she would never truly know how effective the fruits of her labour were.
The Doctor and Adam Mitchell were arguing about various things, like if the stubble on Adam's face was cut short or if he just wasn't capable of growing a real beard, and about Ten and Rose's wedding. She only half-listened to Adam briefly panic about the fact he had yet to get Rose a wedding present (the Doctor suggested rather callously that he just go buy her some flash car and deliver it to her with a bow on top like she was a rich American girl having a sixteenth birthday party) and that he also hadn't heard from the girls when they were all going to get their nails done because they apparently wanted to join him. Nios's nails were made out of an incredibly resilient metallic alloy and never broke nor needed cutting, but the topic turning to the wedding was getting her mind working on other things, and those things had a name: Dr Hayley Cohen.
Her phone was still dead, and the message thread was void of any replies she had been thinking about sending. Every time she checked it her heart sank more and more, and her thoughts began to spiral as she repeatedly read Cohen's most recent words: If you don't want to come over you should just tell me. Still, an appropriate response escaped her, because after such a long absence simply saying that she would like to didn't feel good enough. She was certainly going to have to explain herself and it would take some time to come up with an appropriate apology and excuse for her shoddiness. Unless trying to solve a mystery on a space station in the distant future was acceptable enough as a reason why she hadn't quite managed to reply.
"Stop, stop, stop," the Doctor managed to say something important enough for her, at the back of the trio with Sprite filming hanging onto her shoulder, to listen. It was so low and narrow in there that she couldn't see what he was talking about as he pressed himself flat against the wall. Adam copied him and then she saw something which made Sprite drop down to the floor: a pair of robots.
They were little things with treadmill-tracks running around their wheels so that they looked like miniature, black tanks with large three-pronged claws protruding from the end of a metal arm on top of them. Sprite, the fast-moving many-legged curiosity that he was, approached them with a trademark scuttle. They were taller than him – though Sprite in his resemblance to a house centipede was very flat – but not much bigger overall. The robots didn't stop when he got in their way, however, which gave him a tremendous fright and he leapt back onto Nios for safety, scurrying all the way up until he was right on top of her head (which was not very comfortable for her) and cowering. She moved aside to let the robots pass and they continued on their way.
"What were those?" she asked.
"Just scutters, I think," Adam said.
"You mean all the upkeep on this space station is carried out by non-autonomous, non-sentient robots? That doesn't attest to the operators of Eutopia Bay caring an awful lot about what happens, leaving those in charge. They hardly even have basic motion detectors." She watched them disappear down the other end of the long tunnel they had been wending their way through, off to fix a leak or something. "Surely it's more useful to have something that can actually think? Make decisions?"
"The lack of thinking and making decisions is exactly what's necessary to keep this place running," said the Doctor, "You've already proven that even an AI with the coldest temperament is capable of empathising with the people in this situation." She wasn't an enormous fan of the judgement that she had a cold temperament, but there was certainly something in his logic. Just like humans, very few AIs bore the psychotic tendencies of a machine like ELLE, more likely than not they would break their programming in order to end the mass suffering and inequality. She hoped that she would, at any rate.
"So, an AI can develop empathy for these humans but whoever's watching from three-hundred-thousand miles away can't?" Adam questioned.
"Of course they can, it's easy. How many people in rich countries in your century actually do something about what's going in poor parts of the world? How many rich people in your own country just ignore the homeless on the streets? And that's when they walk past them. You'd never walk past the people here. An AI couldn't avoid them like that, it would be responsible for them completely." Again, Nios thought the Doctor had a point. She actually liked the thought that an AI would care more about those people than other humans might, and the acknowledgement from the Doctor – who was usually so quick to grill her and find out her motivation for everything she did and said – that AIs were not inherently bad, when so many people were wary of them.
The wires grew more and more condensed and soon they were all trying to duck out of the way of thicker and more numerous wires hanging from the walls and above, but it was only Nios who noticed something out of the ordinary, something on the floor below them. The floor was also covered in wires, but these wires were underneath a thin layer of glass to stop them being trampled and to help aid passage. Except for in one spot where all the wires were bunched up around the edges to leave it empty. The glass seal also left this one oblong patch of metal empty, but Adam and the Doctor hadn't noticed walking over it.
"Hold on," she said, and they awkwardly turned back to try and see, "Look at that." She indicated the floor.
"Good catch," said the Doctor, elbowing Adam Mitchell out of his way so that he could crouch down and examine it. Adam grimaced, unhappy about this. Sprite leapt from her shoulder again and joined the Doctor. "Looks like a trapdoor, almost."
"A secret maintenance hatch inside a secret maintenance hatch; it's like a double cliché," Adam said.
"If it's a double cliché wouldn't that cancel out the presence of any clichés at all?" Nios challenged him.
"Would you two keep it down? I'm trying to be clever, and it's hard to be clever with all this noise."
"You can't be that clever then because we're hardly making any noise," Nios quipped. He looked at her like he was shocked, then shook his head and went back to what he was doing.
"Unbelievable…" he tutted. She couldn't be bothered arguing further. She took the opportunity to check her phone while he got his sonic out and began messing around with the panel on the floor. Adam eyed her as she did this.
"Did you text her back yet?" he asked, consciously lowering his voice after the Doctor's indignant comment about the volume. Nios clenched her jaw and, after seeing she predictably had no new messages, put the mobile away in her pocket again.
"No."
"You should. I mean, I think you should, obviously I don't know her. I don't really even know you that well… My point is, that it's okay to be nervous about someone you like. It's normal. Even Oswin gets ridiculously nervous when she's around somebody she has actual feelings for, despite her going on about being Cupid all the time."
"Open sesame!" Nine announced before Nios could respond to either Adam or, even, to Cohen herself. The trap door swung open and revealed a gloomy darkness punctuated by blinking yellow lights, as though it were infested with fireflies.
"That looks like a long drop…" Adam said warily, eyeing the space.
"You're not scared, are you?" Nine mocked him.
"No, but I have a bad ankle. Sprained. Doesn't heal."
"Does look like quite a narrow gap," said the Doctor.
"Well if neither of you are going to go first," Nios grumbled, and lowered herself into the hole and dropped with no hesitation whatsoever. Sprite jumped onto her shoulder as she fell and landed lightly, then she called up through the square of light just over a foot above her, "Leave it to the machines to do everything." She stepped out of the way and started to look around the room, while the other two fumbled at trying to descend as well – which was quite a dramatic event considering Adam's bad foot and the Doctor's love of showboating, though she didn't pay them any notice.
The room was relatively small for what it contained, possibly no bigger than Nerve Centre on the TARDIS and the same circular shape, and full of large blocks covered in those same lights. She didn't need to be a machine herself to recognise a computer mainframe, but – like she had suspected – it wasn't nearly big enough to house an actual artificial intelligence. Not one capable of controlling every part of a space station. The mainframe spread around in a circle in large chunks, all around one central point in the room which was a very bizarre piece of equipment Nios didn't recognise, a large chair with a device hanging down above it. Computers couldn't sit in chairs, and nor could those basic robots they'd seen.
Sprite crawled over to get a better look at the chair in the centre of the dark, amber room, but did not appear to find anything of much note. Something about it made Nios inherently uneasy, though, but she could not quite place her finger on it.
"Don't go near that," the Doctor suddenly warned from behind her, done having his minor scuffle with Adam Mitchell after begrudgingly helping him get down through the trapdoor without damaging his ankle any further.
"What is it?"
"An infospike," said Nine, "Pretty boy here knows all about them, don't you?" Adam suddenly looked highly uncomfortable.
"What's an infospike?"
"Backwards piece of technology. Suppose it shouldn't surprise me seeing it here, this is the year 200200, and it happens to be a brilliant way to stop any undesirables accessing this mainframe. Well, most of the time, one such undesirable happens to be right here," the Doctor looked at Adam unexpectedly, and Adam became flummoxed.
"Oh, I – no, I don't think – that's probably not a good idea…"
"Why pay to get a door to your brain surgically put into your head if you don't ever intend to use it?" Nine questioned.
"I mean, it was a whim. An impulse buy. It's not… Cathica died."
"She died killing the Jagrafess," Nine said, "You're just going to have a look at their computer. That's what the seat's intended for. Besides, even if you do die, you're girlfriend's so clingy she's probably got half a dozen backups of your brain saved onto hard-drives 'just in case.'" Nios had heard tell of this brain-door of Adam's, but had never had the pleasure – or displeasure – of actually seeing it. He was now torn between doing what Nine wanted and what the situation seemed to demand, considering it didn't look like there was another way to access Max.
"If I can download ELLE into my head to save you on the TARDIS, you can access this computer and try to save all the people on board," Nios said, which was perhaps not as motivational as she intended. It was a bit threatening with her deadpan tone of voice, really.
"We'll get you out if anything dangerous starts to happen," said the Doctor, very serious all of a sudden, "I wouldn't let you die, not when you're in my care."
"…You better not laugh at me, either of you," he said, fumbling around in his pockets for something. Nios could already see frost covering his fingertips as he got scared about what may happen when he used the infospike. Nios was also quite concerned, especially since it had the word 'spike' in its name; she was really imagining the worst already. Was he going to get stabbed in the brain?
Adam retrieved a little keyring from his pocket and gingerly approached the chair, getting in it and nearly freezing the arms right off in the process. Sprite returned to Nios to observe carefully from her shoulder. The Doctor crossed his arms and waited. It was when Adam clicked the button that Nios got the first of the two big shocks she was about to experience in the space of thirty seconds. A space on the front of his head opened up with four metal, silver doors and left the front of his brain completely exposed to the open air. She was at a loss as to how this was not an extreme risk of infection, and brain infections were lethal. Then she got the second big shock, when Adam counted down from three and then ordered the machine to 'spike.' A vivid stream of blue energy shot out of the device hanging from the ceiling and directly into his head.
"Is that supposed to happen!?" she exclaimed.
"That's how it works," said Nine, "I think it's barbaric. Backwards technology." Nios had to agree.
"What's he doing?"
"I don't know. Controlling it, downloading information? See, he got that thing, and that's why I kicked him off the TARDIS. Abusing future technology. Hope Oswin's careful about what she tells him. He got rich using stolen technology, too." Either Adam couldn't hear them, or it was just difficult for him to hear them or talk, because he was very engrossed in the infospike and didn't both to defend himself at all. Nios began to understand Nine's reasoning behind initially getting rid of Adam now.
A computer terminal illuminated nearby. It didn't have a keyboard or any buttons to use but was set into part of the mainframe and displayed text. She and Nine both went over to it to see what it said and found that Adam had conjured up relevant files for them to read. The writing moved too quickly for even her to read but the Doctor was managing.
"What does it say?" she asked as lines and lines of text whizzed past at a hundred miles an hour.
"It's detailing a study," Nine explained, squinting at the terminal screen and its monochrome letters, "Max isn't an AI, we were right, it's just a supercomputer, capable of being remotely accessed and controlled from this infospike and from an observation station three-hundred-thousand-miles away. That's where the cameras are broadcasting to, this remote base. Primary objective of Max is to 'preserve the integrity of the experiment.'"
"Experiment?"
"A social experiment. Like Stanford – they randomly allocated guards and prisoners out of a group of people and saw how they changed depending on the roles they were given," the Doctor explained quickly, "That's what they've done here, only nobody inherently has any power, they keep the two classes completely isolated from each other. But all that stuff about them being assigned depending on their lives? It's rubbish. They were randomly allocated, all assigned a set amount of rations, and then slowly the diseases were spread, on purpose.
"Here, it says that 'Subject #1549, Jaleah Endem' had her 'individual failsafe protocol' initiated for 'contaminating the variables.'"
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning that she went down into the lower level and started helping people – I suppose that's not the result they want, they don't want to see people develop empathy for their fellow man."
"So what do they want?"
"They want-" All the text on the mainframe disappeared for a moment, and then a new message: Incoming Transmission. "I suppose they're going to tell us what they want…"