![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nothing_rhymes_with_iantoTitle: In Losing What I Am, I Become Who We Are (Part 2)
Authors:
qafkinnetic & solvingfor42
Word Count: 43,192
Rating: R
Warnings/Spoilers: Warning for violence and major character death.
Beta:snarkymuch, Neil's parents, Tumblr user consultingmidgardian.
Summary: The discovery of a mechanical Weevil beneath Cardiff starts a chain of events that threatens to destroy Torchwood. Jack is still missing, Ianto seems to be going mad after an injury and Owen is forced to confront his worst fears. When the people of Cardiff start turning into clockwork automatons, things seem hopeless. And then, when Owen decides to investigate Ianto’s strange behaviour, they get worse.
Authors' notes don't fit on this post.
“But what does it mean?” Tosh asked for what must've been the fifth time.
“I don't know, okay?”
Owen sounded pissed off and exhausted, and Ianto knew exactly how he felt. The four of them were huddled around one end of the table in the conference room. They'd called Gwen back from the archive and filled her in on what had happened, and she kept looking at Ianto with a mixture of horror and pity that made him want to snarl at her. Instead, he sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. It was only infuriating because it reminded him that right now he kind of deserved both.
“All right,” she said at last, “let's go over this again. Owen, can you show us the scans themselves?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” Owen stood and went to the terminal that controlled the overhead monitor. “Okay, this is a transaxial scan of Ianto's brain, and we're looking at slice 8. It shows the clearest image of the anomaly.”
Ianto found he could look at it with some degree of equanimity as long as he pretended it wasn't his own brain up there on the screen. It looked like a normal, healthy human specimen, except for the dark tangle that wrapped around the brainstem and sent tendrils questing across and through the rest of it. It had infiltrated almost every lobe, Ianto saw. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tried not to think about the ramifications of that.
Gwen leant forward and tapped her fingers on the table. “And that isn't the same anomaly as you found in the Weevil?”
“Definitely not.” Owen called up another image. “This is the Weevil's brain scan.”
“That's a brain scan?” Tosh asked.
Ianto shared her disbelief. It looked more like a schematic for the mechanism of an old-fashioned clock or loom. Dozens of gears interconnected in a complex pattern, attached to levers and several metal plates that had circular holes punched through them in random patterns. As Ianto looked closer, he noticed that there were still a few masses that looked like brain tissue, linked to the apparatus with small tubes or wires.
“That's what's inside the Weevil's skull. When I saw the results, I opened the skull just to be sure.” He brought up several more photos, these showing the mechanism in place in the skull and partially disassembled on the autopsy table.
Tosh got up and moved closer to the screen, her lips moving soundlessly. She ran a finger over parts of the image in a pattern that only made sense to her, and her gaze unfocussed in that besotted look she only got around new tech. Then she spun, her face breaking into a delighted grin. “It's a difference engine!”
“It's a what?” Gwen asked.
“Well, not exactly. The use of punch cards implies this may actually be closer to the analytical engine, or even something like the Mark I, though using steam instead of electricity. I can't even make out the function of some of these components. The design is beautifully complex.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Tosh, I realise this is like showing porn to a sex addict, but you need to focus. If you need to step out for a quick wank before you can make sense, we can wait.”
“Owen,” Gwen said warningly. “Tosh, what are you talking about?”
Tosh had turned bright red at Owen's comments, but she turned away from him without responding and addressed Gwen. “It's a computer.”
“A . . . computer? But it's just gears and such.”
“Exactly! Not a microprocessor. The first computers were wholly mechanical. The Antikythera mechanism, probably used for computing astronomical positions, dates from the first century B.C., and Charles Babbage designed the difference engine and the analytical engine in the early nineteenth century. They use gears and punch cards to perform the same types of algorithms a modern computer processes with electric—”
“Tosh,” Gwen interrupted. “Thank you, but that's probably all that the rest of us need to know.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry.”
“Owen, you said Ianto sounded ‘like a computer’ when he spoke.”
“Yeah, he did. Like a bad sci-fi rendition of an android. But there's no correlation between the changes to the Weevil's brain and the inclusion in Ianto's.” Owen switched the image on the screen back to the first scan.
Tosh made a small sound of bereavement, then consoled herself by examining the new image.
“So you're saying we have two different conditions here, completely unrelated, that are both somehow changing people into robots?”
“It looks that way.”
“Wait," Tosh said. “This hardware in Ianto's brain—”
“It's hardware?” Owen asked sharply. “Not a tumour? Or–or an alien organism?”
“Sort of,” Tosh said. At Owen's glare, she went on hurriedly. “It's definitely tech. See, there, that's metal, not organic material. It fades out on the scan— I think it attenuates into a semiconductor nanowire. There are also several diodes— here, here, and here, for example.”
“So this is some kind of implant?”
“I don't think so. Or at least, the core of it may have been implanted, but this kind of cellular integration would be impossible to achieve through physical insertion. I think it's grown in place. Look, this structure here is distinctly biological. The density is way too low to be inorganic matter.”
“It's nearly isodense,” Owen muttered, leaning in closer. “But these lighter areas— bone? An internal skeletal structure?”
“Metal would show up as a brighter white.”
“You're right.”
Gwen cleared her throat. “As fascinating as this is, you two, could we get a summary? In English?”
Owen straightened and turned. “Essentially, I believe Tosh is right. Whatever's in Ianto's head, it's both some kind of electronic equipment and alive.”
“Biotechnology in the most literal sense of the word,” Tosh added.
“So where does that leave us?”
“I'm not sure,” Owen said. “We still don't know enough. I'll add what we've discovered here to my search parameters and see if it returns anything. So far I haven't had any luck.” He started entering data into the computer.
Tosh sat back down and put her elbows on the table, rubbing at her temples.
Ianto leant over and asked, “Are you all right?”
She looked up and smiled at him, but she was much paler than she had been a moment before, and the skin round her eyes was tight. “Just a headache,” she said.
“Ianto,” Gwen said, catching his attention. “Can you describe again what you experienced in the autopsy bay?”
Anxiety leapt back up, clogging his throat. He'd been managing to ignore it, sitting back and watching Tosh and Owen dissect the case, pretending this was just another Torchwood enigma. Gwen's question reminded him it was happening to him, and his professional distance disappeared like the illusion it was. “I didn't experience much,” he said. “Just blackness and the voice, like I told you earlier.”
“What did the voice sound like to you?”
“I didn't hear it, exactly. It was almost more like I felt it. But it was huge. Overwhelming.”
Gwen patted him on the arm, and it was humiliating that his fear and unhappiness were so apparent. She smiled, and used that gentle croon he'd mentally dubbed her “victim voice” as she asked, “Did it sound like a computer to you?”
He sighed, pulled his hand away and clasped it together with his other one on the table in front of him. You could only see the knuckles turning white if you looked closely. “No. Yes.” He chuckled, then realised that made him sound even more nervous and swallowed. “It was toneless, yes, but I could . . . sense something. A presence. I sound mad, don't I?”
“No, Ianto, of course you don't. Go on.”
“I can't really describe it much better than that. I guess . . . it sounded like a computer, but it didn't feel like a computer. I'm sorry.”
Owen spoke up before Gwen could respond. “Bloody hell, I found something!”
Ianto jerked in his seat. “What? What is it?”
“Hold on... Shit!” He typed frantically for a second. “It's not giving me anything. Just a reference number. When I try to open the file, it just says ‘Restricted’.”
Ianto stood. “Here, let me try. I have Jack's access codes.”
Owen smirked. “Oh, you do, do you? Perks of the job?”
“Ha bloody ha,” Ianto said. He logged in as Jack, tried to open the file again. Still nothing. He used a keyboard shortcut he was sure no one but Jack was supposed to know about and entered the override code. Still nothing. “That's strange...” he said.
“Maybe I can hack into it,” Tosh said.
Ianto made room for her at the keyboard. Owen turned away to talk to Gwen, following her out of the room— he'd never had much interest in the computer side of things. Tosh opened one of her batch files and started recoding it to target the file Owen had found. She was going much slower than normal, so slowly that Ianto could actually follow everything she was doing. He frowned. She paused whilst it ran, finger hovering over the break key. Her hand was shaking.
“Tosh, what's wrong?” he said.
She shook her head, not looking away from the screen. “It's nothing.”
“It's not nothing.” Ianto looked at her more closely, pulled out of his looping dread about what was wrong with him by the sudden concern that there was something wrong with her. She was even paler than she'd been before, and her face glistened with sweat. She kept blinking, like her eyes wouldn't focus right, and her breath came shallow and pained. “Toshiko...”
“I'm just feeling a bit lightheaded all of a sudden, that's all. It's been a long day and I forgot to eat lunch. Oh, hell! It didn't work! I can get anywhere in this system. There can only be one reason I can't access this file.”
He let her distract him for the moment and glanced at the screen, which still read ‘Restricted’. “What's that?”
“It's from Torchwood London.”
“But—” Whatever he'd been about to say was forgotten when he looked back at her. Her face cramped into a grimace of pain, she swayed and blindly reached out a hand to balance herself. He grabbed at it, but before he could get a good grip her eyes rolled back in her head and her knees buckled. “Owen!” he shouted as he lunged forward to catch her before she hit the ground.
Tosh’s computer monitor showed minor amounts of chaos scattered about the city. Owen turned it off. It was useless to think about when they didn’t have the cure.
“This is getting out of hand,” Gwen said quietly.
“You’re telling me.”
He was about to sit down on the couch, put his feet up for a moment, when Ianto’s voice rang out across the Hub, sounding frantic. In the conference room, Ianto was kneeling on the floor with Tosh draped across his lap like some twisted modern-day renaissance painting. This was shaping up to be one of the worst days of Owen’s life. And he’d had some really, really bad days.
“She just collapsed.”
“She said earlier that she had a headache,” Gwen supplied. “Is there something in her head too?”
“I bloody well hope not.”
“Maybe she just has a fever.”
“We’re Torchwood, sweetheart. It’s impossible for us to be that lucky.”
Owen helped Ianto lift Tosh up and carry her to the medbay. They placed her on the table and Owen rifled through a cabinet for a saline drip as Ianto settled her, grabbing a towel and folding it under her head. He slipped the needle into her hand and attached the drip, hoping to keep her hydrated and keep an IV line open for whatever medications might be needed.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know, Gwen, let me use my newly developed psychic powers to find out.” Owen gestured rudely with the ear thermometer. He was frustrated. Gwen had a tendency to push and get fussy and he wasn’t a superhero. He couldn’t solve everything for her. She needed to learn to wait or to live with disappointment.
“You don’t need to be an arse about it.” Gwen grumbled, moving to the stairs. “I’ll get her a blanket and pillow or something.”
“What’s going on? Why does everyone go bleedin’ mad as soon as Jack swans off and leaves us to fend for ourselves? It’s not fair.”
“Karma,” was Ianto’s dry reply. “I think it’s been building up.”
“Wonderful. Hand me that,” Owen commanded, pointing to the Bekaran scanner on the desk. “I’m gonna scan her with it; it’s faster.”
The scanner beeped and flashed blue lights along its sides as he panned it up and down above Tosh’s prone figure. A triple beep and an image of Tosh’s body rotated on the little screen. Owen sagged. His capacity for shock and fear were being severely depleted today. He wanted to curl up into the foetal position and whimper his way to normality. He was having a really bad day.
“What’s wrong with her?”
Owen handed Ianto the scanner. “Looks like she got infected. Probably when you guys were out chasing that second creature.”
“Shit.”
“My sentiments exactly. It looks like the virus has gotten to parts of her limbs, a couple vertebrae, and her occipital lobe. She may wake up, but she won’t be able to see. Or she will, but it’ll be a machine. Or…something. I don’t know. She seemed to understand the weird thing posing as a brain better than I do.”
“Can we see what happens if we do surgery on her? Take out part of it in her arm or something?”
“It’s replacing her arm bone, but I suppose we could try. There’s all sorts of tech here that can grow a bone back.”
“I think it’s worth a shot.”
Gwen came down with a blanket and pillow as Ianto was rubbing iodine on Tosh’s arm and Owen was carefully injecting a short-term sedative. They both had masks and gloves on.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying something.” Owen informed her shortly. Ianto acted as nurse, standing by with a tray of gauze, forceps, and other tools.
“Thank the lord for the laser scalpel.”
One pass of the laser scalpel and Tosh’s left arm was open down to the bone. Or, what used to be bone, anyway. Brass gears of varying sizes had replaced the elbow joint, and steel bars wrapped with leather and spongy tan-coloured rubber had replaced bones, muscles, and ligaments.
“Jesus.” Gwen breathed as she peered down from above. Ianto was already pressing gauze to the edges of the wound to stem the blood.
“You said it.”
Owen gently slid a couple of gears off their axles and dropped them into a separate dish that Ianto held out for him. The Welshman put a lid on the tin and put it on Owen’s workstation. Owen accepted the proffered laser scalpel and bent over Tosh again.
“Shit shit shit!”
“Owen?”
“Look.” Ianto leaned over to follow Owen’s gloved finger. The little brass gears Owen had removed had quickly been replaced by bigger, thicker steel gears, and he could see new layers of rubber had slid up the arm. “It looks like, if I damage it, it simply grows back more rapidly.”
“And bigger, too.”
“So let’s not mess with it.” He closed the arm back up with a pass of the scalpel. “It seems like her body is ossifying, reconstructing itself with things other than bone and tissue.”
They put the tools away and Ianto handed off the gears to the mainframe for analysis. Owen injected Tosh with a medication to wake her from sedation, and they moved her to the sofa. Twenty minutes later, she was making little waking noises, eyelids fluttering.
“Tosh?” Ianto murmured gently. He stood above her. Owen was kneeling beside her, his fingers wrapped doubtfully around her wrist, taking her pulse and feeling incredibly suspicious of whether or not it was a real pulse at all. Tosh woke slowly, rubbing her eyes with her free hand.
“Ianto? Why am I seeing funny? What happened?”
“Seeing funny?” Ianto sounded worried, as worried as he had when he’d been afraid for himself.
“Everything’s….geometric. Calculated, sectioned off. Like–like it’s in binary or something. I…I can’t explain it.”
Owen glanced at Ianto, his expression asking for help. He shrugged lightly. Owen really didn’t know how to break the news gently. There was nothing gentle about it. Ianto frowned but nodded, a silent understanding and go-ahead to say it bluntly.
“Tosh,” he spoke slowly, voice soft and careful in a way he hadn’t used since his days at A&E. “You’ve been infected. It’s affecting your left arm, some of your spine, and your occipital lobe, the part of your brain used for sight.”
“Oh.” Tosh looked shocked. But really, there was no other reaction to be had to information like that. “Can I at least get up and help look for a cure or something? I don’t want to be stuck lying around being useless. I feel alright.”
“Thought you had a headache.”
“It’s gone now.”
Owen chewed his lip. “I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. But I agree. It’s better to have you working rather than lazing around. We’re already one man down.”
Gwen joined them, sitting in her desk chair. Ianto took Tosh’s chair, and Tosh was seated on the sofa. Owen was seated in his own chair, rolled out into the middle of the space.
“So what happens next?” Gwen asked.
“I say we research the archives. We need to see if there was anything like this ever.” Owen grabbed a pen off his desk and tapped it against his teeth.
“I already did that!”
“Not really, though. We had other stuff to worry about. We need to dig deeper.”
“You could run some tests on me,” Tosh suggested. “I don’t mind.”
“We are not running tests on you. I’m not risking someone else.”
Tosh shrugged, accepting it. “Just offering. I had a program set to trawl the internet for similar things to this. Maybe that found something.”
“Half the time those things turn up conspiracy theorists and half-baked ideas that are only sort of right. This is happening fast and we need something fast.”
“Who died and made you first in command?” Gwen grumbled. Ianto blinked rapidly, his face somewhere in the halfway point of a frown.
“This is a medical-based case. Therefore, it’s my case. Now, can we please get back on topic?”
“Why don’t we catch something that’s infected and run tests on it?”
“A living thing?”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Well, seeing as how we don’t know how to kill it, Gwen, yes. That sounds like a good idea, Tosh.”
Tosh smiled crookedly. “I’ll even make sure it’s not a human. Or wasn’t a human.”
“But what about all the infected people out there? We can’t just leave them, Owen. They’re people.”
“Not at the moment, they aren’t. And we can’t do anything if we don’t have a cure. Quit bugging me about it.”
“Owen,” Ianto interjected suddenly from where he’d been quietly sitting. “I had a thought.”
“Alright, you want to put your two cents in, too?”
“No, I mean, I had a thought. Wasn’t mine.”
Ianto looked round. All three of his teammates were staring at him with shock and concern. They'd been doing that a lot today. Frankly, it was getting old.
Gwen broached the subject first. “So it was…” She made a vague, questioning shape with her hands.
“Yes. Well, it didn't speak. But it was the same presence.”
Owen broke in, impatient. “So, what was the thought?”
Ianto shook his head. “It's gone, now. If I ever had it in the first place. It was more like, I don't know, like I felt something click. Like when you get an idea out of nowhere? But I didn't get the idea itself. It felt like . . . the presence recognised something.”
The others were still staring at him: Gwen concerned, Tosh intrigued, Owen annoyed.
Ianto shrugged, feeling defensive and irritated about it. “It happened right when you were talking about the archives.”
There was a long, considering silence, and then Tosh abruptly said, “This is more important.”
“What?” Gwen protested. “But the virus is spreading like wildfire all over Cardiff!”
“Tosh is right, Gwen,” Owen said. “We need to stop this, to save everybody, but the team has to come first.”
“But, Tosh, you—”
Shaking her head, Tosh interrupted her. “This thing in Ianto, it said death was imminent. I'm not dying, at least not yet. I have some time. Besides, we don't have any evidence that this virus is going to kill me at all. Not really.”
“What it's doing to you is worse than death.”
“Is it?” Tosh smiled, a little too brightly. “One could argue that it's only natural I'd turn into a computer.”
Ianto reached out and squeezed her hand. Her smile wobbled, but she squeezed back. “We can work on both,” he said firmly, cutting off Gwen's rising panic and the dark rage gathering in Owen's eyes.
“Right.” Tosh let go and stood. “I'm off to get you a new test subject, Owen. I'm thinking something small.”
“Oi! You're the last person that should go traipsing about after those deadly clockwork wankers!”
“Actually, I'm the perfect person for the job. I can't get infected again, can I?”
Tosh won, as she always did once she'd firmly made up her mind about something. Once she'd gathered up her equipment and left, Gwen headed to her workstation to try another search of the electronic files with the new data.
Ianto looked at Owen, who rubbed his hands together and said, “And that leaves us to figure out what's in your head.”
“So how's that supposed to work, exactly?”
“I was sort of hoping you could tell me.”
Ianto touched his skull gingerly. It felt the same as it always had. “Maybe we could just take it out. You know how to do neurosurgery, right?”
“No,” Owen snapped. His voice was harsh, and he looked almost like he wanted to run for the toilet again. “That's too risky. Who knows what it might do if it feels threatened. It could kill you.” He started to pace in short, jerky movements, hands clenching and unclenching by his sides.
“That's how she died, isn't it?” Ianto asked. “Your girlfriend.”
It looked for a minute as though Owen wasn't going to answer. But then he nodded once, sharply. “Fiancée,” he said. “But yes. Now, can we move on to the matter at hand, Dr. Freud, or did you want to ask me about my mother?”
“No, I'm sure she was a lovely woman. But I don't have any other ideas.”
Owen halted and visibly calmed himself. “Hold on, let me think.”
“While you think I'll go make us some more coffee.”
Ianto hung over the espresso machine, the hollow screech of the steam wand creating an insulating bubble of sound that pushed the rest of the world away. Inside of it, everything smelt of coffee and everything made sense. He wished it could last forever.
But life didn't work like that. He dropped Gwen's coffee off at her desk and found Owen in the autopsy bay, sweeping up the remains of Ianto's last coffee mug. Ianto regarded the shards with regret— that had been one of his favourites. Jack had brought him an absolutely foul-tasting cappuccino in it the first time Ianto had spent the night with him.
Owen dumped the last of it into the bin and took his coffee from Ianto. “It's proven itself willing to communicate. Maybe we should just talk to it.”
Ianto raised an eyebrow. “Simple and elegant. But how do you propose to manage it?”
“It can hear, right? It heard us talking about the archives?”
A horrible image flashed through Ianto's mind, a bizarre pantomime where Owen pranced around in front of him, shouting inane questions into Ianto's face in hopes of being heard by the hitchhiker in his brain. He shuddered. “No, we need a better plan than that.”
Owen frowned and sipped his coffee.
Ianto watched him swallow. “Wait...”
“What?”
“Maybe we can induce another episode. Like before."
Owen looked sceptical. “We've no idea what caused the last one.”
“No, but I have a theory. Right before it happened, I drank my entire mug of coffee.”
“Coffee? That's your idea?”
Ianto shrugged. “It's a stimulant. It changes brain chemistry.”
Owen ran a hand through his hair. “Ah, hell, why not. It's not like we have any other ideas.”
They moved out of the autopsy bay to the couch on Ianto's suggestion. Considering how off-balance he'd been last time, sitting somewhere comfortable seemed like a good idea. Once he was settled he took a deep breath and chugged. A shameful waste of good coffee, that—
He felt the presence wrench consciousness away from him, but this time he was expecting it and he held on with a vicious grasp. He wasn't shunted away into darkness. He had no control over his body, no sensation, but he could see and hear— vaguely, like he was watching a film through dingy glass.
[CRITICAL ERROR]
Owen looked shaken, but he reached out and took the mug from Ianto's numb fingers before it could fall. “Yeah, we got that the first time. What are you?”
[INTERFACE FAILURE]
“What do you mean, interface failure? Is Ianto the interface?”
The presence didn't respond. Ianto couldn't even be sure it was still there. He tried to move, tried to talk, but it was as though he were trying to levitate a pen with the power of his mind. There was just no connection to his body at all. Panic flooded him, all the more intense for having no means of expressing it. What if he were stuck like this? Forever? He was dimly aware of Owen repeating himself, voice sharp.
[INTERFACE FAILURE]
[UNFORESEEN . . . COMPATIBILITY ISSUES]
The voice was no less all-consuming, but it felt slower, almost hesitant, like it was trying to feel its way through an unexpected circumstance. Ianto clung to it, too relieved at that moment about not being stuck alone in the back of his own mind to care that it was an interloper.
[NONSUSTAINABLE SYMBIOSIS]
“Symbiosis? You're an endosymbiont?” Owen leant forward, made a gesture like he wanted to reach out and grab Ianto's shoulder but thought better of it.
[DEATH IMMINENT]
“Why? Are you going to kill him?”
There was another pause. To keep from panicking, Ianto told himself the presence was thinking. If it could think, if it could respond... He decided to try something.
[Can you hear me?] he thought at it. He felt a small shock of surprised recognition, not his. [You can,] he thought. [What do you want?]
Another pause, this one longer. Owen was starting to look frantic, desperate, and Ianto silently urged him not to interfere.
[HELP]
This time Ianto could sense an emotion attached to the toneless voice.
[HELP ME]
It was afraid.
“Help me.” The flat, computerized timbre of Ianto’s voice echoed in Owen’s head. The thing inside Ianto was speaking. And it sounded desperate. Owen could barely wrap his head around the fact that he’d just held a conversation with the alien thing inside Ianto. Ianto, who was still staring fixedly at a distant point past his shoulder. Could he get out? Was he stuck inside his own body while the alien computer thing talked? Was he okay? Did he have any control at all? Is this what it’d felt like for Katie?
Ianto’s eyes closed and he jerked slightly then opened them again. He seemed far closer to calm than Owen felt.
“What the hell was that?” Owen demanded, barely reigning in the urge to grab Ianto and shake him.
“Owen? Ianto? I found something. Sort of.” Gwen stopped when she got close enough to see the look on Owen's face.
"What happened?"
“What did you find?” Ianto asked. Owen glanced at him; the Welshman seemed to be okay. Owen looked at his own hands. He was trembling. He had to get himself under control. He clenched them into fists and looked back up.
Gwen looked uneasily back and forth between them, but answered. “I got a hit with the new search parameters. Reference number two-seventeen: restricted. Just like the file we found referencing Ianto’s condition.”
“Shit,” Owen muttered. It certainly summed up just about everything at the moment.
“Right before Tosh collapsed, she said the only reason she wouldn’t be able to read the file was if it were Torchwood London. But I thought we had access to all their files.”
Owen shook his head. “They shared their low-clearance stuff with us, but they kept a pretty tight lid on anything sensitive. Tosh managed to pull some of their files over, but they had their sensitive files locked with some alien device even Jack hadn’t seen before, and she couldn’t crack it. When the Battle happened” —he glanced at Ianto, looking apologetic— “the whole system toppled so fast Tosh couldn’t get into it. A lot of the records were destroyed for good. Nearly everything physical was destroyed and even the motherboards and hard drives were twisted wrecks when we got there. There was nothing we could restore.”
“So we have nothing on this.”
“Unless Ianto’s read something on both of these conditions, no, not really.”
“What about Torchwood House? Or Two?”
“Torchwood Two is basically a crazy guy with some technology and a sonic blaster. Archie’s good at getting aliens off the street, but he’s no good with computers or information. And Torchwood House only holds the really old archives, the stuff you’ve got to use gloves and wear masks for, and it controls the four main satellites that scan for alien ships. And miss most of them.”
“We really do have nothing,” Ianto conceded.
“We need to wait for Tosh to get back with our specimen.” It was depressing, indeed. With Jack missing, most of the time they seemed to only have half the information. Usually less. It made Owen miss Suzie, who was an all-around genius and delighted in figuring things out far faster than the rest of them could.
“Listen, I’m hungry. I could do with some lunch. You two up for some takeout?”
“Yeah, all right.”
“I’m going to go make sure Rhys is all right and tell him to stay inside. I’ll pick up some Chinese on my way back. Sound good?”
“Sure.” Ianto shrugged. Gwen gathered her bag and coat.
“Hang on!” Owen called. He handed her a mask. “Just in case. Take your gun with you, too. I know it won’t stop them but it’ll at least slow them down a little.”
“Good thinking. Ta, boys.”
“You think she’ll be all right out there?” Ianto asked as they watched the cog door scream itself shut.
“It’s not as if we could stop her if we wanted to. She gets an idea in her head, she won’t let it go.”
Owen rolled back to his desk and kicked his feet up onto it. Ianto set his elbows on his knees and clenched his fingers in his hair, pulling at the clumps, knuckles white.
“I can’t stop shaking.”
Owen chewed the cap of his pen. “I’m not surprised. We’ve been through hell today. You especially.”
“I dunno. I think I’d rather be me than you.” Ianto looked up from between his arms. “Between me and Tosh and everyone—everything—in Cardiff getting sick…I just have to worry about myself. You have to worry about everybody.”
“Ianto, I’m Torchwood’s only doctor. I always worry about everybody. It’s my job. This one’s just a little more immediate. I have to say, though, you and Tosh one after the other had me freaked out.”
Ianto’s head dropped to his chest. Owen could see his fingers trembling, tearing out strands of hair. His breath was coming out in tiny little pants, his eyes unfocussed as they stared at his knees. He was going into shock. Owen slid his feet off the desk.
“Owen,” Ianto started, his voice soft and nervous, shaking and tiny in a terrified way. “This thing in my head…Does it make me not human anymore?”
Owen thought of an exposed brain, tentacles waving lazily. No, can’t think about that, not now. He pushed it away. Ianto needed support, not a freaked out doctor. He decided this would be a good time to take a leaf out of Gwen’s book.
“I wouldn’t go that far, mate.” He gave a little smile, hopefully more confident than he felt. At Ianto’s sceptical look, he let it fall from his face. “You’ve got that thing inside your head, but you’re still acting like you.”
Ianto stared at him for a moment, then went back to contemplating his knees. The silence wasn’t as awkward as Owen thought it would be. He tapped his pen against his teeth. Ianto sucked in a breath, then another.
“Do you remember Lisa?” he asked in a voice too strained to be conversational. “My–my girlfriend?”
Owen hadn’t thought about her since the team-wide meltdown that had caused the Rift to open. He wasn’t sure what this was about. He hadn’t known much about Lisa, except that she’d tried to kill them all. That grudge had all but faded away, though, now that he had far more to think about.
“Yeah, I remember her. Why?”
“Human 2.0.” Ianto said flatly, and Owen jerked a little. Ianto’s eyes were glazed over and he was staring vaguely in Owen’s direction without looking at anything. “She wanted me to be like her. Upgraded. More machine than person. And now I’ve got a computer in my head, don’t I? And it’s controlling me. Making me…not human.”
Owen gritted his teeth. Best not to think about that. “Ianto, you’re still a human being. People get tumours and calcifications, hydrocephalus, cancer, all sorts of things in their heads and they’re still human. This isn’t really any different.”
Ianto wasn’t paying attention. He was frowning and rubbing his arms. “I’m cold.”
The shock was setting in. “Why don’t we get you a blanket? And some tea. No coffee right now.”
Ianto shook his head jerkily, blinking rapidly, obviously trying to keep himself from drifting off. “A blanket would be good. Thank you.”
Owen nodded. He remembered Tosh conjuring up a couple of blankets when they’d returned from rescuing Gwen from Suzie. They were in the bottom of a steamer trunk sitting by one of the entrances to the lower levels. He pulled one out and returned to Ianto, who had moved to the sofa.
“Here.” He shook the blanket out and draped it over Ianto’s shoulders, making sure he was well wrapped. “I’ll go make you a cuppa.”
Owen leaned against the counter as he waited for the kettle to boil. He was properly worried about all of this, and he felt like he was in far, far over his head. It was down to him to be the strong, stable, clever one, and he couldn’t rightly claim to be any of those things. The kettle beeped. He poured the water and dropped in the teabag, remembering at the last minute that Ianto didn’t like sugar, and went back to his friend.
Ianto took a sip of the tea and spluttered. “This tea is horrible!”
“It’s medicinal! It’s supposed to help you. Vitamins and stuff.”
“It’s awful.”
“Fine.”
A moment later and Ianto was taking a sip of a different cup of tea. He wrinkled his nose. “This is bad too.”
“Bog standard Earl Grey.”
Ianto frowned. “You’re just bad at fixing tea. Remind me again how you live?”
“You make the drinks around here, not me. Drink it anyway.”
“Fine.”
Owen sat down again, eyeing Ianto as he grimaced and sipped his tea. He put the cup down on the table, expression solemn. “I’m scared, Owen. I don’t know how we’re going to fix this one.”
“We’ll figure it out. I bet Jack was winging it half the time, too. He’s just better at faking it than us.” He shuddered as a thought came forward. “At least we can talk to whatever this is. I wish I’d been able to do that before.”
Ianto scoffed bitterly. “Jack’s a con man. He’s good at faking everything.”
Owen was still angry. It didn’t matter— there was a niggling thought in the back of his head, the idea that he may have messed things up, that he may have totally deserved it. “Jack’s an arse for leaving us. We deserved it, but he’s still an arse.”
Ianto drained the dregs of his tea and gestured defensively with the empty cup. “He doesn’t owe us anything. He’s a free man.”
“He’s our leader. He knows more about this stuff than we do. He can’t just go swanning off to punish us for getting him killed.”
Inexplicably, Ianto laughed. Owen frowned, resisting the urge to check him for concussion again. “How the hell did we end up here, where shit like this is normal?”
Owen sighed, his thoughts abruptly brought back to damp cemeteries and his dead fiancée’s head open on the operating table. He grimaced and rubbed at the corner of his left eye, a nervous habit. “It’s not like any of us are here of our own free will. Jack makes sure the people he picks are already broken.”
“Owen, what happened to you? How did—”
Owen gave a relieved sigh inwardly as the blaring alarm of the cog door cut off whatever Ianto was going ask him. As weirdly comfortable as he was around Ianto, he didn’t want to talk about that, not now.
“I’m back,” Gwen announced, tugging her mask down.
“Yes, we can see that.”
“Tosh called me. She said she’s on her way back, too.” She sat in her chair. Ianto looked at her with pleading eyes.
“Gwen? Will you make some decent tea, please? Owen’s rubbish.”
“Sure, sweetheart.” Gwen smiled indulgently.
Owen snickered at Ianto’s flinch at the pet name as he watched Gwen leave. “That’s what you get for calling my tea rubbish.”
“It really is.”
“Thanks, mate.”
Their silence was companionable, the awkward question of moments before mutually ignored. Tosh blew in as Gwen was handing around the tea. She had one of Owen’s containment boxes in her arms. She smiled hollowly at them as she passed.
“Got one.” They followed her to the medbay, where she pulled Owen’s glass terrarium and dumped a small creature about the size of a rat inside. Nearly the entire body was made of metal and gears and wood and glass. The eyes were no longer eyes, but tiny camera lenses that rotated to zoom in and out as the thing looked around.
“What is that?” Owen asked.
“I think it used to be a rat.” She nodded as Gwen joined them at the railing. “Took me a while to find it. But it was really easy to catch. I could…understand it.”
“Like, talk to it?” Gwen asked.
“No. I mean, I could understand its behaviour. I know how it works now, on the inside, so I knew what I needed to do to disable it. It was annoyingly complicated. At least, it would be for all of you.”
“All right. Come on, then, there’s tea while we talk.” They made their way back to the stations and Owen settled himself on his chair. “Now that we’ve got a live specimen, I can run some tests and see what affects it medicinally and physically and all that. Gwen, I suppose you can act as my assistant. While I’m doing that, we really do need to figure out how to stop this ‘death imminent’ thing.”
Ianto’s head came up. “Uh, Owen?”
Oh no, Owen thought, please don’t add something else to this mess. Please don’t. “Yeah?”
“I don’t think the thing in my head is talking about killing me.”
“What else could it mean, then?”
“In my head, I could hear it when it talked. I could feel it, sort of. It felt desperate. And scared. I think—I think it’s dying. And I don’t think it wants to die. I think it wants help. The imminent death isn’t mine; it’s whatever’s in my head.”
Everyone had seemed relieved by Ianto's announcement. Owen was in the autopsy bay, whistling cheerily as he poked at his clockwork rat, Gwen was on the phone with the police, managing to sound optimistic and reassuring, and Tosh was at her workstation, trying to find data linked to the restricted files and build it into a pattern that might show them the shape of the information they couldn't see directly. She wore the fierce smile she only got when she was going mano a mano with a particularly stubborn technical puzzle.
Ianto wanted to feel relieved, too. It was good news, right? He wasn't going to die. And to get rid of this thing in his head, all he had to do was . . . nothing. He should be ecstatic. But he still felt shaky all over, and fear had left an oily, bitter residue in the back of his throat, and something about the whole situation still just didn't feel right. He shied away from analysing why, finished tidying up after lunch and went to make coffee.
Not for him, unfortunately. He looked longingly at the Sulawesi and dropped a bag of Glengettie into his mug. After he'd delivered Gwen and Owen's coffees to them, he set Tosh's down on her desk and leant up against it. He'd drunk a quarter of his tea (and she almost half of her coffee) before she noticed him.
“Sorry.” She gestured at her computer. “I got kind of caught up.”
“Don't worry about it.”
“What do you need?”
Ianto smiled. His own fears were always easier to manage when he could take care of someone else. “I want to know how you're doing.”
Tosh looked a bit startled. “It's going slowly— I just started, but I have found some data. Here, I can pull it up—”
“Tosh, I meant I want to know how you're doing. How are you feeling?”
“Oh.” She flushed slightly and looked away. “Better. The fever seems to have gone, and my head doesn't hurt so much. I think the infection's moved to a secondary phase.”
He nodded and made a mental note to update Owen on the medical aspect. “And how are you coping?”
“It's nothing I can't handle.” Her smile was bright, but she couldn't maintain it.
She tried so hard to show how tough she was, to prove to all of them —and possibly herself— that she never needed coddling or rescuing. But she was probably the most emotionally fragile of any of them.
No, he was wrong. He thought of Owen, of the broken look he had in his eyes even as he raged at the world. Toshiko wasn't as tough as she wanted to be, but she was strong. Stronger than she realised. She’d had her heart broken over and over again, but she healed. Owen, he suspected, was the sort of person who broke once and never really healed.
And Ianto himself? What would it take to break him?
“No, you can't,” he said to Tosh. “None of us can. We're all asked to deal with more than we can handle every day in this job. There's no shame in admitting when it's too much.”
She gave him a look too knowing and too sympathetic to be comfortable. “And you? Is it too much?”
He forced himself to keep breathing evenly through the sudden tightness in his chest. “Maybe,” he said quietly.
She opened her mouth as if to ask him something more, then suddenly went white and folded forward in slow motion with a nearly silent grunt.
“Tosh? Toshiko!” He turned to call for Owen, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“I'm fine,” she gasped. “Really,” she said when she saw his obvious doubt.
She sounded stronger, so he relented and merely supported her until she could sit upright again. “What's wrong?”
“Just some sharp pains in my torso. They've been coming and going all afternoon. I can only assume it's caused by the conversion of internal organs.”
It crashed over him without warning. The Hub disappeared and he was back in the smoke and terror of London, hearing the deadly clatter of the conversion machines and the screams of their victims. He sucked in a breath, could feel the grit of soot on his tongue.
“Ianto.”
He snapped back to reality to see Tosh's stricken face. He hadn't had a flashback like that in nearly a year. Why did it have to happen in front of someone else?
“Ianto, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have used that word.”
“Not your fault.” He took a deep breath and swallowed the last of his tea. “It's the whole situation. It just brings back bad memories.”
She watched him, face serious. “What's happening to me, it's really nothing like the Cybermen, you know.”
Distance. That was the key. He could get through this if he just concentrated on the immediate, the tangible. How he felt about it didn't matter, it just got in the way. He needed to take all those emotions and lock them away in a back corner of his mind, where they would stop tripping him up and making him fall apart, and he needed to find the appropriate distance again. He'd become very practised at it after Canary Wharf. Things had been too good the last few months, filled with Jack's passion and life. He'd let too many of his barriers fall. But Jack was gone. The rest of the team needed him. If he let himself keep falling apart like this, he wasn't even going to be able to help himself. He smoothed his waistcoat, adjusted his cuffs and focussed on Toshiko.
“What is it like?” He asked quietly.
“It's . . . fascinating. If I could prevent the rest of me from changing, or if I could be sure I'd still be me at the end of it, I think I'd actually be happy about it.”
“You're an amazing woman, Toshiko Sato,” he said. She beamed, and he abruptly realised that that was something Jack would say. The thought made him uncomfortable in a way he didn't want to examine too closely. “Why, though?”
She lit up, the way she always did when she got to explain some new technological marvel to the rest of them. “So the virus has con—has altered my vision, right? Well, it's not actually changed the optic system, it's just modified the way I process the visual input from my eyes. It's not a lot different when I look at ordinary stuff— the walls, or people, or that sofa— but when I look at anything mechanical, I can see how it works. How it's put together. It's like . . . like I can see the schematic as well as the object, underneath or alongside normal vision. It's hard to describe. But when I found that infected rat, I saw it run and knew immediately that if I put a bullet just underneath the bronze plate along its back I would split the belt that moved its back legs. And I could do the same with the gun. I could see exactly what angle and velocity the bullet would be at as it left the barrel, and how much recoil would result. So the shot was easy.
“It doesn't seem to do quite as well with electronics, but it seems to be improving the more work I do on the computer. I've always had an instinct for computers, an ability to kind of read between the lines. Sorry, I don't mean to brag.”
“That's an understatement,” Ianto said, enjoying her enjoyment of the subject.
She blushed but continued. “Anyway, this is almost like that times ten. I'm just noticing more about the way the data links together, and I'm able to see what the results of code I'm writing will be as I'm writing it, ten to twenty steps further out than I normally can. It's amazing.”
“And I just got stuck with a mysterious voice that kicks me out of my own body and has a bizarre liking for coffee,” Ianto said dryly.
“Speaking of,” Tosh said, and stopped. She bit her lip hesitantly.
“What?”
“Would you be willing to let me talk to it? I've been gone both times it's happened, and I was thinking maybe this new sense of mine might give me some insight.”
He crossed his arms and said, “Not to mention that it's driving you mad that there's a new piece of tech in this place that you haven't been able to interact with yet.”
“Well... All right, fine. Maybe a little.”
The last thing Ianto wanted to do was let that presence take over again. He wanted to forget it was even there, not keep trotting it out like some kind of parlour trick. “Don't you think we should concentrate on the virus? Apparently this parasite, whatever it is, isn't an immediate danger. And the problem might end up solving itself in the end, if it's dying.”
“But that's just it. We don't know for sure, do we? How do you know it's not going to take you with it when it dies? All you have is a few cryptic messages and a feeling. Why would you bet your life on so little?”
Because he didn't want to think about it anymore.
But that was a childish, irresponsible reaction, and Tosh was right. They really didn't know enough to dismiss the problem out of hand, and the thing with Torchwood was that what you didn't know always ended up hurting you. Besides, there was still that feeling of not-right-ness, that sense of unease when he thought about the easy solution of doing nothing. He sighed. “Okay.”
Authors:
qafkinnetic & solvingfor42Word Count: 43,192
Rating: R
Warnings/Spoilers: Warning for violence and major character death.
Beta:
snarkymuch, Neil's parents, Tumblr user consultingmidgardian.Summary: The discovery of a mechanical Weevil beneath Cardiff starts a chain of events that threatens to destroy Torchwood. Jack is still missing, Ianto seems to be going mad after an injury and Owen is forced to confront his worst fears. When the people of Cardiff start turning into clockwork automatons, things seem hopeless. And then, when Owen decides to investigate Ianto’s strange behaviour, they get worse.
Authors' notes don't fit on this post.
“But what does it mean?” Tosh asked for what must've been the fifth time.
“I don't know, okay?”
Owen sounded pissed off and exhausted, and Ianto knew exactly how he felt. The four of them were huddled around one end of the table in the conference room. They'd called Gwen back from the archive and filled her in on what had happened, and she kept looking at Ianto with a mixture of horror and pity that made him want to snarl at her. Instead, he sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. It was only infuriating because it reminded him that right now he kind of deserved both.
“All right,” she said at last, “let's go over this again. Owen, can you show us the scans themselves?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” Owen stood and went to the terminal that controlled the overhead monitor. “Okay, this is a transaxial scan of Ianto's brain, and we're looking at slice 8. It shows the clearest image of the anomaly.”
Ianto found he could look at it with some degree of equanimity as long as he pretended it wasn't his own brain up there on the screen. It looked like a normal, healthy human specimen, except for the dark tangle that wrapped around the brainstem and sent tendrils questing across and through the rest of it. It had infiltrated almost every lobe, Ianto saw. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tried not to think about the ramifications of that.
Gwen leant forward and tapped her fingers on the table. “And that isn't the same anomaly as you found in the Weevil?”
“Definitely not.” Owen called up another image. “This is the Weevil's brain scan.”
“That's a brain scan?” Tosh asked.
Ianto shared her disbelief. It looked more like a schematic for the mechanism of an old-fashioned clock or loom. Dozens of gears interconnected in a complex pattern, attached to levers and several metal plates that had circular holes punched through them in random patterns. As Ianto looked closer, he noticed that there were still a few masses that looked like brain tissue, linked to the apparatus with small tubes or wires.
“That's what's inside the Weevil's skull. When I saw the results, I opened the skull just to be sure.” He brought up several more photos, these showing the mechanism in place in the skull and partially disassembled on the autopsy table.
Tosh got up and moved closer to the screen, her lips moving soundlessly. She ran a finger over parts of the image in a pattern that only made sense to her, and her gaze unfocussed in that besotted look she only got around new tech. Then she spun, her face breaking into a delighted grin. “It's a difference engine!”
“It's a what?” Gwen asked.
“Well, not exactly. The use of punch cards implies this may actually be closer to the analytical engine, or even something like the Mark I, though using steam instead of electricity. I can't even make out the function of some of these components. The design is beautifully complex.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Tosh, I realise this is like showing porn to a sex addict, but you need to focus. If you need to step out for a quick wank before you can make sense, we can wait.”
“Owen,” Gwen said warningly. “Tosh, what are you talking about?”
Tosh had turned bright red at Owen's comments, but she turned away from him without responding and addressed Gwen. “It's a computer.”
“A . . . computer? But it's just gears and such.”
“Exactly! Not a microprocessor. The first computers were wholly mechanical. The Antikythera mechanism, probably used for computing astronomical positions, dates from the first century B.C., and Charles Babbage designed the difference engine and the analytical engine in the early nineteenth century. They use gears and punch cards to perform the same types of algorithms a modern computer processes with electric—”
“Tosh,” Gwen interrupted. “Thank you, but that's probably all that the rest of us need to know.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry.”
“Owen, you said Ianto sounded ‘like a computer’ when he spoke.”
“Yeah, he did. Like a bad sci-fi rendition of an android. But there's no correlation between the changes to the Weevil's brain and the inclusion in Ianto's.” Owen switched the image on the screen back to the first scan.
Tosh made a small sound of bereavement, then consoled herself by examining the new image.
“So you're saying we have two different conditions here, completely unrelated, that are both somehow changing people into robots?”
“It looks that way.”
“Wait," Tosh said. “This hardware in Ianto's brain—”
“It's hardware?” Owen asked sharply. “Not a tumour? Or–or an alien organism?”
“Sort of,” Tosh said. At Owen's glare, she went on hurriedly. “It's definitely tech. See, there, that's metal, not organic material. It fades out on the scan— I think it attenuates into a semiconductor nanowire. There are also several diodes— here, here, and here, for example.”
“So this is some kind of implant?”
“I don't think so. Or at least, the core of it may have been implanted, but this kind of cellular integration would be impossible to achieve through physical insertion. I think it's grown in place. Look, this structure here is distinctly biological. The density is way too low to be inorganic matter.”
“It's nearly isodense,” Owen muttered, leaning in closer. “But these lighter areas— bone? An internal skeletal structure?”
“Metal would show up as a brighter white.”
“You're right.”
Gwen cleared her throat. “As fascinating as this is, you two, could we get a summary? In English?”
Owen straightened and turned. “Essentially, I believe Tosh is right. Whatever's in Ianto's head, it's both some kind of electronic equipment and alive.”
“Biotechnology in the most literal sense of the word,” Tosh added.
“So where does that leave us?”
“I'm not sure,” Owen said. “We still don't know enough. I'll add what we've discovered here to my search parameters and see if it returns anything. So far I haven't had any luck.” He started entering data into the computer.
Tosh sat back down and put her elbows on the table, rubbing at her temples.
Ianto leant over and asked, “Are you all right?”
She looked up and smiled at him, but she was much paler than she had been a moment before, and the skin round her eyes was tight. “Just a headache,” she said.
“Ianto,” Gwen said, catching his attention. “Can you describe again what you experienced in the autopsy bay?”
Anxiety leapt back up, clogging his throat. He'd been managing to ignore it, sitting back and watching Tosh and Owen dissect the case, pretending this was just another Torchwood enigma. Gwen's question reminded him it was happening to him, and his professional distance disappeared like the illusion it was. “I didn't experience much,” he said. “Just blackness and the voice, like I told you earlier.”
“What did the voice sound like to you?”
“I didn't hear it, exactly. It was almost more like I felt it. But it was huge. Overwhelming.”
Gwen patted him on the arm, and it was humiliating that his fear and unhappiness were so apparent. She smiled, and used that gentle croon he'd mentally dubbed her “victim voice” as she asked, “Did it sound like a computer to you?”
He sighed, pulled his hand away and clasped it together with his other one on the table in front of him. You could only see the knuckles turning white if you looked closely. “No. Yes.” He chuckled, then realised that made him sound even more nervous and swallowed. “It was toneless, yes, but I could . . . sense something. A presence. I sound mad, don't I?”
“No, Ianto, of course you don't. Go on.”
“I can't really describe it much better than that. I guess . . . it sounded like a computer, but it didn't feel like a computer. I'm sorry.”
Owen spoke up before Gwen could respond. “Bloody hell, I found something!”
Ianto jerked in his seat. “What? What is it?”
“Hold on... Shit!” He typed frantically for a second. “It's not giving me anything. Just a reference number. When I try to open the file, it just says ‘Restricted’.”
Ianto stood. “Here, let me try. I have Jack's access codes.”
Owen smirked. “Oh, you do, do you? Perks of the job?”
“Ha bloody ha,” Ianto said. He logged in as Jack, tried to open the file again. Still nothing. He used a keyboard shortcut he was sure no one but Jack was supposed to know about and entered the override code. Still nothing. “That's strange...” he said.
“Maybe I can hack into it,” Tosh said.
Ianto made room for her at the keyboard. Owen turned away to talk to Gwen, following her out of the room— he'd never had much interest in the computer side of things. Tosh opened one of her batch files and started recoding it to target the file Owen had found. She was going much slower than normal, so slowly that Ianto could actually follow everything she was doing. He frowned. She paused whilst it ran, finger hovering over the break key. Her hand was shaking.
“Tosh, what's wrong?” he said.
She shook her head, not looking away from the screen. “It's nothing.”
“It's not nothing.” Ianto looked at her more closely, pulled out of his looping dread about what was wrong with him by the sudden concern that there was something wrong with her. She was even paler than she'd been before, and her face glistened with sweat. She kept blinking, like her eyes wouldn't focus right, and her breath came shallow and pained. “Toshiko...”
“I'm just feeling a bit lightheaded all of a sudden, that's all. It's been a long day and I forgot to eat lunch. Oh, hell! It didn't work! I can get anywhere in this system. There can only be one reason I can't access this file.”
He let her distract him for the moment and glanced at the screen, which still read ‘Restricted’. “What's that?”
“It's from Torchwood London.”
“But—” Whatever he'd been about to say was forgotten when he looked back at her. Her face cramped into a grimace of pain, she swayed and blindly reached out a hand to balance herself. He grabbed at it, but before he could get a good grip her eyes rolled back in her head and her knees buckled. “Owen!” he shouted as he lunged forward to catch her before she hit the ground.
Tosh’s computer monitor showed minor amounts of chaos scattered about the city. Owen turned it off. It was useless to think about when they didn’t have the cure.
“This is getting out of hand,” Gwen said quietly.
“You’re telling me.”
He was about to sit down on the couch, put his feet up for a moment, when Ianto’s voice rang out across the Hub, sounding frantic. In the conference room, Ianto was kneeling on the floor with Tosh draped across his lap like some twisted modern-day renaissance painting. This was shaping up to be one of the worst days of Owen’s life. And he’d had some really, really bad days.
“She just collapsed.”
“She said earlier that she had a headache,” Gwen supplied. “Is there something in her head too?”
“I bloody well hope not.”
“Maybe she just has a fever.”
“We’re Torchwood, sweetheart. It’s impossible for us to be that lucky.”
Owen helped Ianto lift Tosh up and carry her to the medbay. They placed her on the table and Owen rifled through a cabinet for a saline drip as Ianto settled her, grabbing a towel and folding it under her head. He slipped the needle into her hand and attached the drip, hoping to keep her hydrated and keep an IV line open for whatever medications might be needed.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know, Gwen, let me use my newly developed psychic powers to find out.” Owen gestured rudely with the ear thermometer. He was frustrated. Gwen had a tendency to push and get fussy and he wasn’t a superhero. He couldn’t solve everything for her. She needed to learn to wait or to live with disappointment.
“You don’t need to be an arse about it.” Gwen grumbled, moving to the stairs. “I’ll get her a blanket and pillow or something.”
“What’s going on? Why does everyone go bleedin’ mad as soon as Jack swans off and leaves us to fend for ourselves? It’s not fair.”
“Karma,” was Ianto’s dry reply. “I think it’s been building up.”
“Wonderful. Hand me that,” Owen commanded, pointing to the Bekaran scanner on the desk. “I’m gonna scan her with it; it’s faster.”
The scanner beeped and flashed blue lights along its sides as he panned it up and down above Tosh’s prone figure. A triple beep and an image of Tosh’s body rotated on the little screen. Owen sagged. His capacity for shock and fear were being severely depleted today. He wanted to curl up into the foetal position and whimper his way to normality. He was having a really bad day.
“What’s wrong with her?”
Owen handed Ianto the scanner. “Looks like she got infected. Probably when you guys were out chasing that second creature.”
“Shit.”
“My sentiments exactly. It looks like the virus has gotten to parts of her limbs, a couple vertebrae, and her occipital lobe. She may wake up, but she won’t be able to see. Or she will, but it’ll be a machine. Or…something. I don’t know. She seemed to understand the weird thing posing as a brain better than I do.”
“Can we see what happens if we do surgery on her? Take out part of it in her arm or something?”
“It’s replacing her arm bone, but I suppose we could try. There’s all sorts of tech here that can grow a bone back.”
“I think it’s worth a shot.”
Gwen came down with a blanket and pillow as Ianto was rubbing iodine on Tosh’s arm and Owen was carefully injecting a short-term sedative. They both had masks and gloves on.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying something.” Owen informed her shortly. Ianto acted as nurse, standing by with a tray of gauze, forceps, and other tools.
“Thank the lord for the laser scalpel.”
One pass of the laser scalpel and Tosh’s left arm was open down to the bone. Or, what used to be bone, anyway. Brass gears of varying sizes had replaced the elbow joint, and steel bars wrapped with leather and spongy tan-coloured rubber had replaced bones, muscles, and ligaments.
“Jesus.” Gwen breathed as she peered down from above. Ianto was already pressing gauze to the edges of the wound to stem the blood.
“You said it.”
Owen gently slid a couple of gears off their axles and dropped them into a separate dish that Ianto held out for him. The Welshman put a lid on the tin and put it on Owen’s workstation. Owen accepted the proffered laser scalpel and bent over Tosh again.
“Shit shit shit!”
“Owen?”
“Look.” Ianto leaned over to follow Owen’s gloved finger. The little brass gears Owen had removed had quickly been replaced by bigger, thicker steel gears, and he could see new layers of rubber had slid up the arm. “It looks like, if I damage it, it simply grows back more rapidly.”
“And bigger, too.”
“So let’s not mess with it.” He closed the arm back up with a pass of the scalpel. “It seems like her body is ossifying, reconstructing itself with things other than bone and tissue.”
They put the tools away and Ianto handed off the gears to the mainframe for analysis. Owen injected Tosh with a medication to wake her from sedation, and they moved her to the sofa. Twenty minutes later, she was making little waking noises, eyelids fluttering.
“Tosh?” Ianto murmured gently. He stood above her. Owen was kneeling beside her, his fingers wrapped doubtfully around her wrist, taking her pulse and feeling incredibly suspicious of whether or not it was a real pulse at all. Tosh woke slowly, rubbing her eyes with her free hand.
“Ianto? Why am I seeing funny? What happened?”
“Seeing funny?” Ianto sounded worried, as worried as he had when he’d been afraid for himself.
“Everything’s….geometric. Calculated, sectioned off. Like–like it’s in binary or something. I…I can’t explain it.”
Owen glanced at Ianto, his expression asking for help. He shrugged lightly. Owen really didn’t know how to break the news gently. There was nothing gentle about it. Ianto frowned but nodded, a silent understanding and go-ahead to say it bluntly.
“Tosh,” he spoke slowly, voice soft and careful in a way he hadn’t used since his days at A&E. “You’ve been infected. It’s affecting your left arm, some of your spine, and your occipital lobe, the part of your brain used for sight.”
“Oh.” Tosh looked shocked. But really, there was no other reaction to be had to information like that. “Can I at least get up and help look for a cure or something? I don’t want to be stuck lying around being useless. I feel alright.”
“Thought you had a headache.”
“It’s gone now.”
Owen chewed his lip. “I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. But I agree. It’s better to have you working rather than lazing around. We’re already one man down.”
Gwen joined them, sitting in her desk chair. Ianto took Tosh’s chair, and Tosh was seated on the sofa. Owen was seated in his own chair, rolled out into the middle of the space.
“So what happens next?” Gwen asked.
“I say we research the archives. We need to see if there was anything like this ever.” Owen grabbed a pen off his desk and tapped it against his teeth.
“I already did that!”
“Not really, though. We had other stuff to worry about. We need to dig deeper.”
“You could run some tests on me,” Tosh suggested. “I don’t mind.”
“We are not running tests on you. I’m not risking someone else.”
Tosh shrugged, accepting it. “Just offering. I had a program set to trawl the internet for similar things to this. Maybe that found something.”
“Half the time those things turn up conspiracy theorists and half-baked ideas that are only sort of right. This is happening fast and we need something fast.”
“Who died and made you first in command?” Gwen grumbled. Ianto blinked rapidly, his face somewhere in the halfway point of a frown.
“This is a medical-based case. Therefore, it’s my case. Now, can we please get back on topic?”
“Why don’t we catch something that’s infected and run tests on it?”
“A living thing?”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Well, seeing as how we don’t know how to kill it, Gwen, yes. That sounds like a good idea, Tosh.”
Tosh smiled crookedly. “I’ll even make sure it’s not a human. Or wasn’t a human.”
“But what about all the infected people out there? We can’t just leave them, Owen. They’re people.”
“Not at the moment, they aren’t. And we can’t do anything if we don’t have a cure. Quit bugging me about it.”
“Owen,” Ianto interjected suddenly from where he’d been quietly sitting. “I had a thought.”
“Alright, you want to put your two cents in, too?”
“No, I mean, I had a thought. Wasn’t mine.”
Ianto looked round. All three of his teammates were staring at him with shock and concern. They'd been doing that a lot today. Frankly, it was getting old.
Gwen broached the subject first. “So it was…” She made a vague, questioning shape with her hands.
“Yes. Well, it didn't speak. But it was the same presence.”
Owen broke in, impatient. “So, what was the thought?”
Ianto shook his head. “It's gone, now. If I ever had it in the first place. It was more like, I don't know, like I felt something click. Like when you get an idea out of nowhere? But I didn't get the idea itself. It felt like . . . the presence recognised something.”
The others were still staring at him: Gwen concerned, Tosh intrigued, Owen annoyed.
Ianto shrugged, feeling defensive and irritated about it. “It happened right when you were talking about the archives.”
There was a long, considering silence, and then Tosh abruptly said, “This is more important.”
“What?” Gwen protested. “But the virus is spreading like wildfire all over Cardiff!”
“Tosh is right, Gwen,” Owen said. “We need to stop this, to save everybody, but the team has to come first.”
“But, Tosh, you—”
Shaking her head, Tosh interrupted her. “This thing in Ianto, it said death was imminent. I'm not dying, at least not yet. I have some time. Besides, we don't have any evidence that this virus is going to kill me at all. Not really.”
“What it's doing to you is worse than death.”
“Is it?” Tosh smiled, a little too brightly. “One could argue that it's only natural I'd turn into a computer.”
Ianto reached out and squeezed her hand. Her smile wobbled, but she squeezed back. “We can work on both,” he said firmly, cutting off Gwen's rising panic and the dark rage gathering in Owen's eyes.
“Right.” Tosh let go and stood. “I'm off to get you a new test subject, Owen. I'm thinking something small.”
“Oi! You're the last person that should go traipsing about after those deadly clockwork wankers!”
“Actually, I'm the perfect person for the job. I can't get infected again, can I?”
Tosh won, as she always did once she'd firmly made up her mind about something. Once she'd gathered up her equipment and left, Gwen headed to her workstation to try another search of the electronic files with the new data.
Ianto looked at Owen, who rubbed his hands together and said, “And that leaves us to figure out what's in your head.”
“So how's that supposed to work, exactly?”
“I was sort of hoping you could tell me.”
Ianto touched his skull gingerly. It felt the same as it always had. “Maybe we could just take it out. You know how to do neurosurgery, right?”
“No,” Owen snapped. His voice was harsh, and he looked almost like he wanted to run for the toilet again. “That's too risky. Who knows what it might do if it feels threatened. It could kill you.” He started to pace in short, jerky movements, hands clenching and unclenching by his sides.
“That's how she died, isn't it?” Ianto asked. “Your girlfriend.”
It looked for a minute as though Owen wasn't going to answer. But then he nodded once, sharply. “Fiancée,” he said. “But yes. Now, can we move on to the matter at hand, Dr. Freud, or did you want to ask me about my mother?”
“No, I'm sure she was a lovely woman. But I don't have any other ideas.”
Owen halted and visibly calmed himself. “Hold on, let me think.”
“While you think I'll go make us some more coffee.”
Ianto hung over the espresso machine, the hollow screech of the steam wand creating an insulating bubble of sound that pushed the rest of the world away. Inside of it, everything smelt of coffee and everything made sense. He wished it could last forever.
But life didn't work like that. He dropped Gwen's coffee off at her desk and found Owen in the autopsy bay, sweeping up the remains of Ianto's last coffee mug. Ianto regarded the shards with regret— that had been one of his favourites. Jack had brought him an absolutely foul-tasting cappuccino in it the first time Ianto had spent the night with him.
Owen dumped the last of it into the bin and took his coffee from Ianto. “It's proven itself willing to communicate. Maybe we should just talk to it.”
Ianto raised an eyebrow. “Simple and elegant. But how do you propose to manage it?”
“It can hear, right? It heard us talking about the archives?”
A horrible image flashed through Ianto's mind, a bizarre pantomime where Owen pranced around in front of him, shouting inane questions into Ianto's face in hopes of being heard by the hitchhiker in his brain. He shuddered. “No, we need a better plan than that.”
Owen frowned and sipped his coffee.
Ianto watched him swallow. “Wait...”
“What?”
“Maybe we can induce another episode. Like before."
Owen looked sceptical. “We've no idea what caused the last one.”
“No, but I have a theory. Right before it happened, I drank my entire mug of coffee.”
“Coffee? That's your idea?”
Ianto shrugged. “It's a stimulant. It changes brain chemistry.”
Owen ran a hand through his hair. “Ah, hell, why not. It's not like we have any other ideas.”
They moved out of the autopsy bay to the couch on Ianto's suggestion. Considering how off-balance he'd been last time, sitting somewhere comfortable seemed like a good idea. Once he was settled he took a deep breath and chugged. A shameful waste of good coffee, that—
He felt the presence wrench consciousness away from him, but this time he was expecting it and he held on with a vicious grasp. He wasn't shunted away into darkness. He had no control over his body, no sensation, but he could see and hear— vaguely, like he was watching a film through dingy glass.
[CRITICAL ERROR]
Owen looked shaken, but he reached out and took the mug from Ianto's numb fingers before it could fall. “Yeah, we got that the first time. What are you?”
[INTERFACE FAILURE]
“What do you mean, interface failure? Is Ianto the interface?”
The presence didn't respond. Ianto couldn't even be sure it was still there. He tried to move, tried to talk, but it was as though he were trying to levitate a pen with the power of his mind. There was just no connection to his body at all. Panic flooded him, all the more intense for having no means of expressing it. What if he were stuck like this? Forever? He was dimly aware of Owen repeating himself, voice sharp.
[INTERFACE FAILURE]
[UNFORESEEN . . . COMPATIBILITY ISSUES]
The voice was no less all-consuming, but it felt slower, almost hesitant, like it was trying to feel its way through an unexpected circumstance. Ianto clung to it, too relieved at that moment about not being stuck alone in the back of his own mind to care that it was an interloper.
[NONSUSTAINABLE SYMBIOSIS]
“Symbiosis? You're an endosymbiont?” Owen leant forward, made a gesture like he wanted to reach out and grab Ianto's shoulder but thought better of it.
[DEATH IMMINENT]
“Why? Are you going to kill him?”
There was another pause. To keep from panicking, Ianto told himself the presence was thinking. If it could think, if it could respond... He decided to try something.
[Can you hear me?] he thought at it. He felt a small shock of surprised recognition, not his. [You can,] he thought. [What do you want?]
Another pause, this one longer. Owen was starting to look frantic, desperate, and Ianto silently urged him not to interfere.
[HELP]
This time Ianto could sense an emotion attached to the toneless voice.
[HELP ME]
It was afraid.
“Help me.” The flat, computerized timbre of Ianto’s voice echoed in Owen’s head. The thing inside Ianto was speaking. And it sounded desperate. Owen could barely wrap his head around the fact that he’d just held a conversation with the alien thing inside Ianto. Ianto, who was still staring fixedly at a distant point past his shoulder. Could he get out? Was he stuck inside his own body while the alien computer thing talked? Was he okay? Did he have any control at all? Is this what it’d felt like for Katie?
Ianto’s eyes closed and he jerked slightly then opened them again. He seemed far closer to calm than Owen felt.
“What the hell was that?” Owen demanded, barely reigning in the urge to grab Ianto and shake him.
“Owen? Ianto? I found something. Sort of.” Gwen stopped when she got close enough to see the look on Owen's face.
"What happened?"
“What did you find?” Ianto asked. Owen glanced at him; the Welshman seemed to be okay. Owen looked at his own hands. He was trembling. He had to get himself under control. He clenched them into fists and looked back up.
Gwen looked uneasily back and forth between them, but answered. “I got a hit with the new search parameters. Reference number two-seventeen: restricted. Just like the file we found referencing Ianto’s condition.”
“Shit,” Owen muttered. It certainly summed up just about everything at the moment.
“Right before Tosh collapsed, she said the only reason she wouldn’t be able to read the file was if it were Torchwood London. But I thought we had access to all their files.”
Owen shook his head. “They shared their low-clearance stuff with us, but they kept a pretty tight lid on anything sensitive. Tosh managed to pull some of their files over, but they had their sensitive files locked with some alien device even Jack hadn’t seen before, and she couldn’t crack it. When the Battle happened” —he glanced at Ianto, looking apologetic— “the whole system toppled so fast Tosh couldn’t get into it. A lot of the records were destroyed for good. Nearly everything physical was destroyed and even the motherboards and hard drives were twisted wrecks when we got there. There was nothing we could restore.”
“So we have nothing on this.”
“Unless Ianto’s read something on both of these conditions, no, not really.”
“What about Torchwood House? Or Two?”
“Torchwood Two is basically a crazy guy with some technology and a sonic blaster. Archie’s good at getting aliens off the street, but he’s no good with computers or information. And Torchwood House only holds the really old archives, the stuff you’ve got to use gloves and wear masks for, and it controls the four main satellites that scan for alien ships. And miss most of them.”
“We really do have nothing,” Ianto conceded.
“We need to wait for Tosh to get back with our specimen.” It was depressing, indeed. With Jack missing, most of the time they seemed to only have half the information. Usually less. It made Owen miss Suzie, who was an all-around genius and delighted in figuring things out far faster than the rest of them could.
“Listen, I’m hungry. I could do with some lunch. You two up for some takeout?”
“Yeah, all right.”
“I’m going to go make sure Rhys is all right and tell him to stay inside. I’ll pick up some Chinese on my way back. Sound good?”
“Sure.” Ianto shrugged. Gwen gathered her bag and coat.
“Hang on!” Owen called. He handed her a mask. “Just in case. Take your gun with you, too. I know it won’t stop them but it’ll at least slow them down a little.”
“Good thinking. Ta, boys.”
“You think she’ll be all right out there?” Ianto asked as they watched the cog door scream itself shut.
“It’s not as if we could stop her if we wanted to. She gets an idea in her head, she won’t let it go.”
Owen rolled back to his desk and kicked his feet up onto it. Ianto set his elbows on his knees and clenched his fingers in his hair, pulling at the clumps, knuckles white.
“I can’t stop shaking.”
Owen chewed the cap of his pen. “I’m not surprised. We’ve been through hell today. You especially.”
“I dunno. I think I’d rather be me than you.” Ianto looked up from between his arms. “Between me and Tosh and everyone—everything—in Cardiff getting sick…I just have to worry about myself. You have to worry about everybody.”
“Ianto, I’m Torchwood’s only doctor. I always worry about everybody. It’s my job. This one’s just a little more immediate. I have to say, though, you and Tosh one after the other had me freaked out.”
Ianto’s head dropped to his chest. Owen could see his fingers trembling, tearing out strands of hair. His breath was coming out in tiny little pants, his eyes unfocussed as they stared at his knees. He was going into shock. Owen slid his feet off the desk.
“Owen,” Ianto started, his voice soft and nervous, shaking and tiny in a terrified way. “This thing in my head…Does it make me not human anymore?”
Owen thought of an exposed brain, tentacles waving lazily. No, can’t think about that, not now. He pushed it away. Ianto needed support, not a freaked out doctor. He decided this would be a good time to take a leaf out of Gwen’s book.
“I wouldn’t go that far, mate.” He gave a little smile, hopefully more confident than he felt. At Ianto’s sceptical look, he let it fall from his face. “You’ve got that thing inside your head, but you’re still acting like you.”
Ianto stared at him for a moment, then went back to contemplating his knees. The silence wasn’t as awkward as Owen thought it would be. He tapped his pen against his teeth. Ianto sucked in a breath, then another.
“Do you remember Lisa?” he asked in a voice too strained to be conversational. “My–my girlfriend?”
Owen hadn’t thought about her since the team-wide meltdown that had caused the Rift to open. He wasn’t sure what this was about. He hadn’t known much about Lisa, except that she’d tried to kill them all. That grudge had all but faded away, though, now that he had far more to think about.
“Yeah, I remember her. Why?”
“Human 2.0.” Ianto said flatly, and Owen jerked a little. Ianto’s eyes were glazed over and he was staring vaguely in Owen’s direction without looking at anything. “She wanted me to be like her. Upgraded. More machine than person. And now I’ve got a computer in my head, don’t I? And it’s controlling me. Making me…not human.”
Owen gritted his teeth. Best not to think about that. “Ianto, you’re still a human being. People get tumours and calcifications, hydrocephalus, cancer, all sorts of things in their heads and they’re still human. This isn’t really any different.”
Ianto wasn’t paying attention. He was frowning and rubbing his arms. “I’m cold.”
The shock was setting in. “Why don’t we get you a blanket? And some tea. No coffee right now.”
Ianto shook his head jerkily, blinking rapidly, obviously trying to keep himself from drifting off. “A blanket would be good. Thank you.”
Owen nodded. He remembered Tosh conjuring up a couple of blankets when they’d returned from rescuing Gwen from Suzie. They were in the bottom of a steamer trunk sitting by one of the entrances to the lower levels. He pulled one out and returned to Ianto, who had moved to the sofa.
“Here.” He shook the blanket out and draped it over Ianto’s shoulders, making sure he was well wrapped. “I’ll go make you a cuppa.”
Owen leaned against the counter as he waited for the kettle to boil. He was properly worried about all of this, and he felt like he was in far, far over his head. It was down to him to be the strong, stable, clever one, and he couldn’t rightly claim to be any of those things. The kettle beeped. He poured the water and dropped in the teabag, remembering at the last minute that Ianto didn’t like sugar, and went back to his friend.
Ianto took a sip of the tea and spluttered. “This tea is horrible!”
“It’s medicinal! It’s supposed to help you. Vitamins and stuff.”
“It’s awful.”
“Fine.”
A moment later and Ianto was taking a sip of a different cup of tea. He wrinkled his nose. “This is bad too.”
“Bog standard Earl Grey.”
Ianto frowned. “You’re just bad at fixing tea. Remind me again how you live?”
“You make the drinks around here, not me. Drink it anyway.”
“Fine.”
Owen sat down again, eyeing Ianto as he grimaced and sipped his tea. He put the cup down on the table, expression solemn. “I’m scared, Owen. I don’t know how we’re going to fix this one.”
“We’ll figure it out. I bet Jack was winging it half the time, too. He’s just better at faking it than us.” He shuddered as a thought came forward. “At least we can talk to whatever this is. I wish I’d been able to do that before.”
Ianto scoffed bitterly. “Jack’s a con man. He’s good at faking everything.”
Owen was still angry. It didn’t matter— there was a niggling thought in the back of his head, the idea that he may have messed things up, that he may have totally deserved it. “Jack’s an arse for leaving us. We deserved it, but he’s still an arse.”
Ianto drained the dregs of his tea and gestured defensively with the empty cup. “He doesn’t owe us anything. He’s a free man.”
“He’s our leader. He knows more about this stuff than we do. He can’t just go swanning off to punish us for getting him killed.”
Inexplicably, Ianto laughed. Owen frowned, resisting the urge to check him for concussion again. “How the hell did we end up here, where shit like this is normal?”
Owen sighed, his thoughts abruptly brought back to damp cemeteries and his dead fiancée’s head open on the operating table. He grimaced and rubbed at the corner of his left eye, a nervous habit. “It’s not like any of us are here of our own free will. Jack makes sure the people he picks are already broken.”
“Owen, what happened to you? How did—”
Owen gave a relieved sigh inwardly as the blaring alarm of the cog door cut off whatever Ianto was going ask him. As weirdly comfortable as he was around Ianto, he didn’t want to talk about that, not now.
“I’m back,” Gwen announced, tugging her mask down.
“Yes, we can see that.”
“Tosh called me. She said she’s on her way back, too.” She sat in her chair. Ianto looked at her with pleading eyes.
“Gwen? Will you make some decent tea, please? Owen’s rubbish.”
“Sure, sweetheart.” Gwen smiled indulgently.
Owen snickered at Ianto’s flinch at the pet name as he watched Gwen leave. “That’s what you get for calling my tea rubbish.”
“It really is.”
“Thanks, mate.”
Their silence was companionable, the awkward question of moments before mutually ignored. Tosh blew in as Gwen was handing around the tea. She had one of Owen’s containment boxes in her arms. She smiled hollowly at them as she passed.
“Got one.” They followed her to the medbay, where she pulled Owen’s glass terrarium and dumped a small creature about the size of a rat inside. Nearly the entire body was made of metal and gears and wood and glass. The eyes were no longer eyes, but tiny camera lenses that rotated to zoom in and out as the thing looked around.
“What is that?” Owen asked.
“I think it used to be a rat.” She nodded as Gwen joined them at the railing. “Took me a while to find it. But it was really easy to catch. I could…understand it.”
“Like, talk to it?” Gwen asked.
“No. I mean, I could understand its behaviour. I know how it works now, on the inside, so I knew what I needed to do to disable it. It was annoyingly complicated. At least, it would be for all of you.”
“All right. Come on, then, there’s tea while we talk.” They made their way back to the stations and Owen settled himself on his chair. “Now that we’ve got a live specimen, I can run some tests and see what affects it medicinally and physically and all that. Gwen, I suppose you can act as my assistant. While I’m doing that, we really do need to figure out how to stop this ‘death imminent’ thing.”
Ianto’s head came up. “Uh, Owen?”
Oh no, Owen thought, please don’t add something else to this mess. Please don’t. “Yeah?”
“I don’t think the thing in my head is talking about killing me.”
“What else could it mean, then?”
“In my head, I could hear it when it talked. I could feel it, sort of. It felt desperate. And scared. I think—I think it’s dying. And I don’t think it wants to die. I think it wants help. The imminent death isn’t mine; it’s whatever’s in my head.”
Everyone had seemed relieved by Ianto's announcement. Owen was in the autopsy bay, whistling cheerily as he poked at his clockwork rat, Gwen was on the phone with the police, managing to sound optimistic and reassuring, and Tosh was at her workstation, trying to find data linked to the restricted files and build it into a pattern that might show them the shape of the information they couldn't see directly. She wore the fierce smile she only got when she was going mano a mano with a particularly stubborn technical puzzle.
Ianto wanted to feel relieved, too. It was good news, right? He wasn't going to die. And to get rid of this thing in his head, all he had to do was . . . nothing. He should be ecstatic. But he still felt shaky all over, and fear had left an oily, bitter residue in the back of his throat, and something about the whole situation still just didn't feel right. He shied away from analysing why, finished tidying up after lunch and went to make coffee.
Not for him, unfortunately. He looked longingly at the Sulawesi and dropped a bag of Glengettie into his mug. After he'd delivered Gwen and Owen's coffees to them, he set Tosh's down on her desk and leant up against it. He'd drunk a quarter of his tea (and she almost half of her coffee) before she noticed him.
“Sorry.” She gestured at her computer. “I got kind of caught up.”
“Don't worry about it.”
“What do you need?”
Ianto smiled. His own fears were always easier to manage when he could take care of someone else. “I want to know how you're doing.”
Tosh looked a bit startled. “It's going slowly— I just started, but I have found some data. Here, I can pull it up—”
“Tosh, I meant I want to know how you're doing. How are you feeling?”
“Oh.” She flushed slightly and looked away. “Better. The fever seems to have gone, and my head doesn't hurt so much. I think the infection's moved to a secondary phase.”
He nodded and made a mental note to update Owen on the medical aspect. “And how are you coping?”
“It's nothing I can't handle.” Her smile was bright, but she couldn't maintain it.
She tried so hard to show how tough she was, to prove to all of them —and possibly herself— that she never needed coddling or rescuing. But she was probably the most emotionally fragile of any of them.
No, he was wrong. He thought of Owen, of the broken look he had in his eyes even as he raged at the world. Toshiko wasn't as tough as she wanted to be, but she was strong. Stronger than she realised. She’d had her heart broken over and over again, but she healed. Owen, he suspected, was the sort of person who broke once and never really healed.
And Ianto himself? What would it take to break him?
“No, you can't,” he said to Tosh. “None of us can. We're all asked to deal with more than we can handle every day in this job. There's no shame in admitting when it's too much.”
She gave him a look too knowing and too sympathetic to be comfortable. “And you? Is it too much?”
He forced himself to keep breathing evenly through the sudden tightness in his chest. “Maybe,” he said quietly.
She opened her mouth as if to ask him something more, then suddenly went white and folded forward in slow motion with a nearly silent grunt.
“Tosh? Toshiko!” He turned to call for Owen, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“I'm fine,” she gasped. “Really,” she said when she saw his obvious doubt.
She sounded stronger, so he relented and merely supported her until she could sit upright again. “What's wrong?”
“Just some sharp pains in my torso. They've been coming and going all afternoon. I can only assume it's caused by the conversion of internal organs.”
It crashed over him without warning. The Hub disappeared and he was back in the smoke and terror of London, hearing the deadly clatter of the conversion machines and the screams of their victims. He sucked in a breath, could feel the grit of soot on his tongue.
“Ianto.”
He snapped back to reality to see Tosh's stricken face. He hadn't had a flashback like that in nearly a year. Why did it have to happen in front of someone else?
“Ianto, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have used that word.”
“Not your fault.” He took a deep breath and swallowed the last of his tea. “It's the whole situation. It just brings back bad memories.”
She watched him, face serious. “What's happening to me, it's really nothing like the Cybermen, you know.”
Distance. That was the key. He could get through this if he just concentrated on the immediate, the tangible. How he felt about it didn't matter, it just got in the way. He needed to take all those emotions and lock them away in a back corner of his mind, where they would stop tripping him up and making him fall apart, and he needed to find the appropriate distance again. He'd become very practised at it after Canary Wharf. Things had been too good the last few months, filled with Jack's passion and life. He'd let too many of his barriers fall. But Jack was gone. The rest of the team needed him. If he let himself keep falling apart like this, he wasn't even going to be able to help himself. He smoothed his waistcoat, adjusted his cuffs and focussed on Toshiko.
“What is it like?” He asked quietly.
“It's . . . fascinating. If I could prevent the rest of me from changing, or if I could be sure I'd still be me at the end of it, I think I'd actually be happy about it.”
“You're an amazing woman, Toshiko Sato,” he said. She beamed, and he abruptly realised that that was something Jack would say. The thought made him uncomfortable in a way he didn't want to examine too closely. “Why, though?”
She lit up, the way she always did when she got to explain some new technological marvel to the rest of them. “So the virus has con—has altered my vision, right? Well, it's not actually changed the optic system, it's just modified the way I process the visual input from my eyes. It's not a lot different when I look at ordinary stuff— the walls, or people, or that sofa— but when I look at anything mechanical, I can see how it works. How it's put together. It's like . . . like I can see the schematic as well as the object, underneath or alongside normal vision. It's hard to describe. But when I found that infected rat, I saw it run and knew immediately that if I put a bullet just underneath the bronze plate along its back I would split the belt that moved its back legs. And I could do the same with the gun. I could see exactly what angle and velocity the bullet would be at as it left the barrel, and how much recoil would result. So the shot was easy.
“It doesn't seem to do quite as well with electronics, but it seems to be improving the more work I do on the computer. I've always had an instinct for computers, an ability to kind of read between the lines. Sorry, I don't mean to brag.”
“That's an understatement,” Ianto said, enjoying her enjoyment of the subject.
She blushed but continued. “Anyway, this is almost like that times ten. I'm just noticing more about the way the data links together, and I'm able to see what the results of code I'm writing will be as I'm writing it, ten to twenty steps further out than I normally can. It's amazing.”
“And I just got stuck with a mysterious voice that kicks me out of my own body and has a bizarre liking for coffee,” Ianto said dryly.
“Speaking of,” Tosh said, and stopped. She bit her lip hesitantly.
“What?”
“Would you be willing to let me talk to it? I've been gone both times it's happened, and I was thinking maybe this new sense of mine might give me some insight.”
He crossed his arms and said, “Not to mention that it's driving you mad that there's a new piece of tech in this place that you haven't been able to interact with yet.”
“Well... All right, fine. Maybe a little.”
The last thing Ianto wanted to do was let that presence take over again. He wanted to forget it was even there, not keep trotting it out like some kind of parlour trick. “Don't you think we should concentrate on the virus? Apparently this parasite, whatever it is, isn't an immediate danger. And the problem might end up solving itself in the end, if it's dying.”
“But that's just it. We don't know for sure, do we? How do you know it's not going to take you with it when it dies? All you have is a few cryptic messages and a feeling. Why would you bet your life on so little?”
Because he didn't want to think about it anymore.
But that was a childish, irresponsible reaction, and Tosh was right. They really didn't know enough to dismiss the problem out of hand, and the thing with Torchwood was that what you didn't know always ended up hurting you. Besides, there was still that feeling of not-right-ness, that sense of unease when he thought about the easy solution of doing nothing. He sighed. “Okay.”
§
He made himself a triple espresso whilst Tosh went to get Owen and Gwen. They arranged themselves round the couch where he sat holding his steaming mug and feeling uncomfortably on display.
He couldn't bring himself to chug it. The desperation that had let him fling away his control all in one go last time was gone, and even though he'd committed to doing this he was still reluctant enough that he couldn't seem to stop himself from stalling. So, instead, he sipped. He let the coffee roll over his tongue, dark and complex and bitter, and tried to pretend it was just another cup.
He almost didn't notice the sensation of another personality gathering inside his mind. It was no sudden displacement, this time, just a gradual swelling of the presence. The sense he got from it was one of confusion, as if it were still half-asleep and surprised to find itself peacefully coexisting beside him in his head. It surprised him, too. He took another sip of coffee. [Hello?] he thought at it.
He felt . . . something, but no voice echoed in his mind and his lips didn't form any words.
“Is anything actually happening?” Owen asked. “Because it's not like I left some very important tests behind in the lab to come watch this or anything.”
Gwen frowned at him. “Shh. Don't distract him.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “I'm pretty sure it's not actually possible to distract Ianto when he's drinking coffee.”
Intrigued now despite himself, Ianto drank the rest a bit faster, not quite chugging it but not lingering, either. The presence grew stronger, but now that Ianto wasn't shoved aside into a back corner of his own mind it didn't just feel like a monolithic invader. It felt . . . familiar.
[Hello?] he tried again. [Can you hear me?]
[ERROR]
His lips didn't move. He frowned. This wasn't going to work very well if the others couldn't hear what it was saying.
[ERROR /HELP / ERROR]
[Why aren't you speaking aloud?]
A pause.
[PERMISSION NOT GRANTED]
Like that had stopped it before? But they were both present in his body at the same time, this time. Just to test it, he lifted his mug and swallowed the last bit of coffee. It was cold and slightly gritty. Finding grounds left in the bottom stung his pride, but he had been in a hurry when he brewed it. [How do I grant permission?] he asked. There was no answer, just a sense of frustration. He couldn't tell if it was his or its.
He thought back to what it had felt like to be shoved aside by the presence and tried to make it happen again, just to a lesser degree. His lips started to tingle, but he was pretty sure that was just because he was thinking at them so hard. Nothing else happened.
[Is that better?] he asked.
[PERMISSION NOT GRANTED]
Ianto gritted his teeth. Well, it was a computer, at least partially. Maybe he was making this harder than it needed to be. [Permission granted] he thought at it.
The silence felt uncertain this time, and then the voice said, hesitantly, [THANK YOU]
Ianto dropped his mug. His skin shivered all over, like it was trying to crawl off his body. This wasn't just a piece of tech in his head, it was something alive. Something alien. Hearing it attempting human pleasantries with his mouth hammered that home in a way Ianto couldn't ignore.
“Okay...” Gwen said. “Why's it saying that? That's a strange message for it to give.”
Ianto wrestled down nausea and tried to keep from violently shoving the interloper out of his mind. Not that he had any real idea of how to do that, or any reason to think it would work. But the need to get it out of his head was so visceral he nearly gagged on the effort of suppressing it. The taste of blood filled his mouth and he realised he'd bitten his tongue. He swallowed. Maybe if he went back to treating it as a computer it would help.
Finally he found enough equilibrium to go on. [Query: identify yourself], he thought at the thing in his brain.
[PROTOTYPE 2L5C.3]
Owen folded his arms and scowled. “It's not making any sense.”
“Maybe it's glitching,” Tosh said with a small frown. “There could be a broken loop, causing it to return random or scrambled data.”
This wasn't working. They needed to be able to hear both sides of the conversation. Ianto licked his lips and spoke aloud whilst still trying to direct the thought at the presence in his mind. A dull ache began to throb behind his eyes from the strain. “Please identify yourself again.”
“Was that Ianto?” Gwen asked.
[PROTOTYPE 2L5C.3]
Tosh's eyes widened. “They're both talking. He's sharing his body somehow, I think.”
Having his mouth bounce back and forth from his control to the thing in his head and back was disconcerting, and the comments from the audience weren't helping. He closed his eyes to shut out some of the distraction. “Clarify,” he commanded.
[AN EXPERIMENTAL DATABASE SYSTEM CREATED BY MERGING SEMISENTIENT MAINFRAME TECHNOLOGY WITH ALIEN LIFEFORM ARTANDEX]
Dread began to congeal in his chest. “Who created you?”
[CREATED BY RONALD F. WALLACE, SENIOR TECHNICIAN, ID NUMBER 2058433]
“When were you created?”
[GENESIS OCCUR-]
[GENESI-]
[ERROR]
“What's wrong?” Gwen asked.
[CRITICAL ERROR]
Ianto felt the alien presence in his mind begin to flicker and fade. “I'm losing it,” he said.
“Go get him more coffee!” Owen snapped.
A moment later someone thrust a hot mug into Ianto's hand. He brought it to his mouth and hastily gulped a few swallows of the contents. The precarious balance in his head stabilised. He didn't know how much longer he could keep this up, and he abandoned his methodical series of questions to ask the one that really mattered: “How did you get in my head?”
[IMPLANTATION OF EMBRYONIC FORM FOR INCUBATION PERFORMED ON SUBJECT 7026593 ON MAY 18, 2005]
The dread spread into certainty, the cold knowledge of something so terrible his mind hadn't yet acknowledged it. It filled his lungs, made it hard to breathe. 7026593 was his employee ID number.
“Who did Wallace work for?”
[TORCHWOOD]
“Oh, my God,” Gwen said.
Ianto forced himself to ask the next question, squeezing the words through his throat by force of will. “What is your purpose?”
It felt as if the room was holding its breath. Tosh and Gwen and Owen were completely silent and even the Rift Manipulator ceased its beeping and humming.
[WE ARE THE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE]
Go To Part 3
