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nothing_rhymes_with_iantoTitle: In Losing What I Am, I Become Who We Are (Part 4)
Authors:
qafkinnetic & solvingfor42
Characters/Pairings: The Torchwood Team, sans Jack.
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: SO MUCH LOVE for our betas:snarkymuch and Neil's parents, and our Brit-picker, consultingmidgardian. We'd also like to thank The SCP Foundation (http://
This fic was supposed to be short -- we decided to aim for a thousand words, expecting it to expand to two or three times that. But Neil tends to write mostly novel-length fics, and Lex wanted an actual plot, and we found all these great ideas, and the next thing we knew it was over 40,000 words! As Neil said when we were trying to think of a title: 'Somehow I think “The Epic Fic that Would Not End Oh God” would convey the wrong mood.'
Owen was covered from head to toe in a clean-suit: mask, gloves, and shoe covers, what the scientific professions affectionately called a ‘bunny suit.’ It seemed silly, given the situation. He scanned the automaton rat, entering the image and schematics into the computer and calling them up onto one screen. Then he rummaged about in his kit and pulled out his strongest needle, the one made of some alien alloy that Jack said would never break.
The creature didn’t make much noise when he pulled it out of the cage. It struggled lethargically, then it seemed to decide that it really couldn’t care anymore and stopped struggling altogether. Owen slid the needle into the back leg where a vein would be— if the creature had veins—and pulled the plunger up slowly. A slick black substance filled the plastic syringe. The rat went back in the cage and the oil-blood went into a phial for testing. He sent the blood off to the computer to analyse. A scalpel replaced the syringe and he stuck his hand inside the cage to cut a tiny piece of strange leathery skin from the creature’s tail and hand it over to the computer. The rat in the cage went back into quarantine.
Owen yanked off his mask and glasses and shook his hair out as he flopped down into the chair to wait for Mainframe to be done with the samples. He put his chin in his hand. He was tired. His thoughts were everywhere, his body ached, his nervous habit of rubbing at his left eye had reappeared. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.
He snapped them open again and looked at the time on the computer screen. Only five minutes had gone by. Mainframe wasn’t even done with the samples yet. A headache had slid itself behind Owen’s eyes and was pounding away at him with disorientating force. He pinched the bridge of his nose and eyed the image of the rat’s scan. Maybe his head hurt because he was spending too much time staring at the computer screen. Then again, he couldn’t rightly ask the rat what symptoms it’d felt and where it had been and what it had touched or attempted to eat or any of the other things that might be useful to finding a cure.
A headache still gnawed at the inside of his skull but he ignored it. A little pain was something he could deal with. He’d been shot and nearly eaten, a headache was nothing. The computer beeped and results from the scan of the rat’s skin arranged themselves on the monitor. Plain old rat DNA with a giant “UNIDENTIFIED” on everything else. Great. He needed coffee for this. He pushed off the chair and headed up into the main hub.
The alarm blared. Everyone looked toward the noise. Gwen came stumbling in, her face red and wet with tears. She was shaking, clutching at her hair.
“Gwen? What’s happened?” asked Tosh. Gwen looked toward the voice, then flinched back as she caught sight of Tosh’s mutated face.
Ianto took Gwen’s elbow and led her over to the kitchen area, sitting her down in a chair. He pushed a cup of tea into her hands and she drank numbly.
“Gwen?”
“It’s Rhys,” she sobbed. “The virus has gotten to him. I got there and—his whole arm, it’s all made of gears and metal now. And there was this horrible thing on his face!”
Owen and Tosh stood just out of her line of sight, listening. Rhys. Owen had met Rhys a total of once, and it was only to awkwardly pawn a drunk Gwen off on him.
“So it’s spreading?” Tosh asked. “Speeding up?”
“I don’t know.”
Gwen pressed her fists into her lap and looked up at them. “We need to find a cure,” she insisted. “To save him.”
Owen could feel his headache sliding up a few notches. He held his hands out, placating her. “Alright. We’re working on it. But in order to make this move faster, you’re gonna have to pull it together and help out. Ianto, we need you and Gwen to go through the archives and look at every file you think of, and even the ones you don’t.”
Gwen sniffed, drained her tea, and stood with a hand from Ianto. She wiped her eyes and ran her hands through her hair.
“Where do we start?” she asked Ianto.
“Oh, wait,” Owen stopped them both. “Gwen, I have to scan you for the virus. Just a precaution.”
“Oh. Oh, right.” She waited for him to get the scanner, staring dejectedly at the floor. He ran it over the air in front of her. It beeped at him.
“All clear.” She nodded and followed Ianto.
Owen thumped the desk in frustration as the rest of the tests on the rat came back, all of them with a great big INCONCLUSIVE stamped on them. At least, in Owen’s head.
He rolled his chair back and made his way out of the medbay to get the coffee he hadn’t gotten before. Tosh was zoned out in front of her computer, head in hand.
“Tosh? You got anything?” he asked as he passed.
“Huh? Oh. No, not really.” She waved a hand lazily at him and went back to staring at the screen. Frowning, he went into the kitchen area.
He poured himself a coffee from the dregs of Ianto’s carafe and went back to his work. Not knowing a single thing about this virus was really pissing him off. It just wasn’t fair of Jack to leave them with no resources whatsoever, no idea what they were doing, and no access to London’s files.
The reports from the outside were getting worse and worse. Riots in Splott and the Cromwell and surrounding estates. Through the CCTV, he could see people wandering around, walking slowly, jerkily, people with strange materials replacing their limbs or faces, or who walked like wind-up toys.
Ianto hauled another box towards the table where Gwen sat. They'd decided to go through the physical archives, hoping the records Ianto hadn't yet digitised held some clue they hadn't been able to find on the computer. Since Ianto was the one who knew the setup of the archives best, he was grabbing files and handing them over to Gwen to look through. Most of them were nearly a century old and he didn't see how they could have any bearing on the current disaster, but they'd exhausted every other possibility.
He kept finding himself thinking of the suggestion that thing in his head had made. What connection did a market town near Manchester and a man named Roderick —whoever he was— have to the virus? It annoyed him that the thought kept coming back. He didn't like the alien hitchhiker, and he didn't trust it. But the possibility that its suggestion could actually help them crack this case lingered guiltily in the back of his mind. And that annoyed him even more.
He set the box down on the end of the table and Gwen gave it a harried look. “That's more than enough, Ianto,” she said. “You're burying me alive. Help me go through some of this before you bring me any more.”
“All right,” Ianto said. “Let me get myself some tea first. You want something?”
“A latte,” she said absently as she flipped past page after page of faded newsprint.
He stopped by Tosh's desk on his way. “I'm making coffee. Do you want anything?”
She didn't look up from her monitor. “I do not currently require fuel,” she said. Her voice sounded almost normal. Almost. It was oddly flat and inflectionless, and it gave him hot chills. Was that what he sounded like when that thing spoke through him?
“Tosh?”
“What do you want?”
That was even weirder. The words sounded angry, even hostile. But her tone conveyed only a straightforward request for information.
She sounded like Lisa.
“Are you all right?”
“All systems are performing adequately.”
He wanted to shake her, to force her to look at him, to run screaming. Instead, he gritted his teeth and tried to figure out what was wrong with her. “Have you found anything more?”
“Infection of human hosts has reached seventy-five percent. This has resulted in large degrees of civil unrest. The virus appears to be transmitted through physical contact. Ninety-six percent of all exposed become infected. Once infected, mutation rates are one hundred percent.”
“And doesn't that . . . bother you?”
Now she finally did look up. Her eyes— eye, he corrected himself— was flat and empty. “Should it? My reaction does not change the data. An emotional response would merely restrict my ability to concentrate on my work and thus make it less likely that I would find a solution.”
It was too much; he fled.
Once he'd brewed coffee for Gwen and tea for himself, he worked up the nerve to come up to her desk again. It took more effort than he wanted to admit.
She turned her head before as he approached. “Oh, did you make coffees?” she asked. She looked at the two mugs in his hands and made a moue of disappointment. “None for me?”
“I thought you weren't thirsty.”
“I'm not, but that's hardly a reason to turn down one of your cappuccinos.”
He noticed his hands shaking and put the mugs down before he slopped scalding liquid across himself. As he bent over her to do it, he noticed something that made him freeze. “Tosh...”
Tosh looked alarmed. “What?”
“Your hair.”
Her hands flew up to her head in girlish dismay. They dislodged a lock of hair from her scalp, which fell onto her back to join the clumps already clinging to her cardigan. “Oh, my God,” she said. She started tugging at her hair and it came out in chunks, winding round her fingers and floating away from her face. “Oh, my God!” she said again. “What's happening?”
Every single test Owen could think of was inconclusive. He was beginning to get angrier at Torchwood London than he was at Jack. Every screen in front of him was blinking at him with some variation of the word “unknown.” He wanted to scream and tear at his hair. They were nowhere and the situation was getting worse every moment.
The grating pain in his head increased, and it felt like someone had lined his skull with sheet metal and was banging at it so that the reverberations ran agonizingly around his whole head. He groaned and put his face down on the desk, groping blindly in a drawer for painkillers. He swallowed them dry and put his head down again.
Two seconds later he shot up in his seat. He had a headache. Not just a headache, a migraine. Wasn’t that the first symptom Tosh had complained of? Wasn’t that the first sign that something was wrong? What if he was infected?
Finally, another sound filtered through his anxious thoughts. It was Tosh’s voice, layered with Ianto’s, and both sounded terrified. Nearly by reflex, he shot out of the chair and up the stairs.
“What’s going on—what the hell!”
Tosh was sitting at her desk, clutching big bulks of black hair in either hand. Hair blanketed the desk in front of her and the floor under her feet like ashes. The converted half of her face was still and unemotional, the exposed teeth fastened in a metallic grin, the camera-lens eye a dark and emotionless surface of reflecting black. The still-human side of her face was contorted in a grimace of horror and fear, eye wide and filled with tears. Her head was bald but for small clumps of hair at random points on her skull. The leathery converted skin reached around to the back of her skull.
“Oh god! What’s happening to me?”
Ianto was staring wide-eyed at Tosh, hands balled into fists. “What’s happening to her?”
“I don’t know. It looks like the infection is advancing.”
Tosh let the clumps of hair in her hands fall to the ground. Her eyes were glazed. “We need to find out how much…time…I have. Before the conversion is complete.”
Owen ignored Ianto’s flinch at the word ‘conversion’ and beckoned to Tosh. “Come on, we’ll run some tests and see if we can’t figure out how fast this is happening.”
She followed him down to the medbay. For a moment, the pain behind his eyes pulsed and the fear that he, too, might be sick flared again, that maybe he should get Ianto to scan him, just in case, but he pushed it away. He had to concentrate on Tosh.
She sat down on a chair while he sat in his seat at the computer. He began asking her various questions and entering the answers into a grid on the computer. For a moment, he felt like he was back at NHS. Then Tosh answered his question about the conversion of her internal organs.
“System was inadequate. It had to be converted in order to function. I felt some differences as the conversion occurred.” Her voice was flat, her gaze flatter.
“Ianto!” he called. “Why is she talking like you?”
“What?”
“Like a machine. Like a computer.”
“She did that before.”
“Huh?” Tosh blinked as they stared at her. “Stop looking at me like that!”
“N–Never mind that. I’ll just input this data and see what Mainframe spits out. In the meantime, Ianto, will you call Gwen up? We need to figure out what we can do to stop this.”
Owen looked round at his teammates. Tosh was sitting in her desk chair with her head in her hands, her hand trembling where it touched her converted face. Gwen was on his right, wringing her hands and trying not to look at Tosh. Ianto was on the sofa, hands on his knees as he played with a water bottle.
“Listen. We need to brainstorm what we can do to help. We don’t know much. But this has to stop.”
“We could call up UNIT, the military, Interpol, have them quarantine everyone who’s infected?” Gwen suggested.
“It too easily exposes all our main forces.”
“We could call out to other nations for reinforcements.”
“Tosh? Do you know how far the virus has spread?”
Tosh nodded. “It’s spread throughout the United Kingdom and parts of France and Germany. Other than that, we’ve had no reports. But it wouldn’t be smart to risk the militaries of other countries.”
“So we’ve nixed that,” Owen decided. “Anyone got any more ideas?”
“I was going to suggest putting more salt in the air,” Ianto started. “But that would take far too much effort.”
“Right.”
“We could just let it happen?”
“No. No bloody way am I letting this thing take the whole planet.”
Gwen hit her thigh with a fist. “What we need to do is find a cure! We need to fix these people.”
“We’re trying, Gwen! We really are. But we know nothing about this disease, this virus. Every test I’ve done has come up with unknowns. Nothing is useable. This thing is completely new and we don’t know how to fight it.”
Tosh’s computer beeped.
“What’s that?”
“Your tests are done,” Tosh said. Her voice was soft. “We know how much time we have before I…”
Owen let her trail off. Everyone knew what she meant. “How much time?”
“Forty-eight hours.”
Ianto shared a look of hopeless dismay with Gwen. They didn't even have a lead, yet. There was no way they were going to be able to solve this in two days.
“Ex–excuse me.” Tosh stood. “I think I'll just . . . go freshen up.” She was trying to keep a brave face, Ianto could tell, but her smile shook round the edges and her eye was red. She fled for the ladies’ before he could say anything to her.
“I should go talk to her,” Gwen said.
“Yeah, that'd be good. Cheers.” Owen sat down in Tosh's abandoned chair. He looked exhausted, completely defeated.
Ianto frowned. Owen looked more than tired— he was pale, and dark bruises stretched the skin under his eyes. Ianto looked closer and saw a faint sheen of sweat across his forehead. A horrible thought occurred to him. “Owen,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He sounded unsure, almost like he wanted to give a different answer, but then he rubbed his face and grimaced. “Don't worry about me, teaboy. I'll be fine.”
The medic was lying. He wouldn't feel like he needed to lie unless something was really wrong. “Owen—”
Before he could figure out exactly what to say, Gwen came back. “She's doing okay,” she said. “Considering.” She came and sat down next to Ianto on the couch and put her head on his shoulder.
He put his arm round her. “And how are you doing?”
She took a shuddering breath. “I don't know. If Tosh has two days, how long does Rhys have? How long before the rest of us get sick?”
Owen shifted in his seat and looked away. Gwen didn't notice— she threw herself up off the couch and started pacing, cheeks wet with tears. “Why are we just sitting here? For God's sake, everything's falling apart! We're going to lose Tosh, Rhys is sitting at home dying —worse than dying— and I can't even tell him what's going on. The city's being torn to pieces— We should be doing something! Anything!”
Owen slammed his foot into Tosh's rubbish bin, sending it flying, and surged to his feet. “Feel free!” he shouted.
Gwen turned and yelled back at him, “You're the doctor here, Owen Harper! How do we cure this thing?”
“I don't have a bloody clue!” His face had turned bright red and his hands were clenched in fists at his sides.
Gwen pointed at him. “You—!”
Ianto pushed his way between them before they could come to blows. “Just stop it!” He snapped. “We're all doing what we can. Yelling at each other certainly isn't helping. Gwen, why don't you go back down to the archives and start looking through those files. I'll join you in a minute— I need to check something on the computer. Owen—”
Owen glared at him. “I know what I need to do, thanks. I'll be in the lab.”
As Gwen went grumbling to the archives and Owen stalked away, Ianto rubbed his eyes tiredly. He couldn't let his personal feelings keep him from pursuing something that might help, no matter how slim the odds. He glanced over at the news as he sat down in front of his workstation. Night was falling over Cardiff and, somewhere behind the reporter speaking gravely into the camera, fires lit the clouds with angry red. Ianto looked away.
He only hesitated a moment before opening a search window and entering the terms the Archive had suggested. The screen blinked and he found himself looking at a newspaper article from 1998. He scanned it quickly. It didn't have a lot of specific information, but it mentioned an outbreak of an “unknown virus” in Ashton-under-Lyne, which had been investigated by a Professor Roderick before the enquiry was taken over by “an unidentified branch of the government”.
Ianto couldn't help feeling a rising excitement. He called up the newspaper's archives and paged through the next six weeks' worth of editions, but the illness was never mentioned again, not even in passing.
He sat back. The article didn't tell him much, but if this was connected to the virus decimating Cardiff, this Professor Roderick might be able to help.
It was useless, he knew, even as he went back into the lab and sat down in the chair to look dejectedly at the screens. They had no information and there was no way for them to get any in two days. Whatever tests might extract something would take far longer and need far more subjects than a rat and a dead Weevil. And Tosh.
The headache throbbed angrily at Owen again and he squeezed his eyes shut, pressing the tips of his fingers into his scalp. The thought came into his head once more, latching on and prodding. What if he was infected? He had to know.
“Ianto?” The archivist looked up from where he was intently reading an internet article. “Can you come here for a minute?”
“Sure.”
Ianto joined him in the lab. Owen picked up the scanner and fidgeted with it, turning it over and over in his hands, staring at the tabletop. He hated admitting to weakness, hated needing help, even when it was a matter of life and death for him. Ianto, mercifully, remained silent. He took a breath.
“I need you to scan me.”
“Scan you?”
“I have a migraine.”
A pause. Owen wouldn’t look at him. “Oh.”
Ianto took the scanner when Owen held it out to him. It beeped as he set it up and they both held their breath as he ran it across Owen’s body. Inside Owen was chanting please, please, please, please and it seemed Ianto was doing the same. The scanner beeped rapidly and then triple-beeped. Ianto looked at the screen. His shoulders dropped.
“Clean,” he said, letting out a puff of air. “You’re clean.”
“Oh, god.” Owen’s legs felt shaky. He leaned against the table. He was okay. Stress. He just had a stress headache. Now that he was clear of the terror of wondering, he mentally checked up on himself. He was exhibiting all the signs of major stress. Which was no wonder, considering how this week had been. How it had been since Jack left. He straightened up and took the scanner back from Ianto.
“Thanks.”
“I’m glad you’re okay, Owen.”
“Me, too.”
He followed Ianto back out to the main hub, intending to go back to his tests. Tosh was sitting on the sofa, staring out at nothing. Ianto approached her, concern etched on his features.
“Tosh? How are you feeling?” There was no response. “Tosh?”
Beneath the sleeve of her blouse, Owen could see the jagged shape of gears where joints should be.
Ianto looked fretful as he shook her shoulder. “Toshiko?”
She turned to him, but her one-eyed gaze held no recognition. The naked machine of her half-converted face stared at them. “Yes?”
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she stated. Ianto backed away, nearly running into Owen, before sitting heavily down in Gwen’s chair.
“We need to fix this. Now.”
“I may have a lead,” Ianto said.
Owen glanced down at him, choking down the surge of hope that leapt up in him. “Good,” he said grimly. “I'll get Gwen back up here and we'll talk in the conference room. Go get yourself some tea or something.”
He walked away from Toshiko's accusing gaze and turned on his comm. “Gwen, meet us in the conference room. There've been some developments.” He didn't bother to listen to her reply. His head still throbbed, his stomach was a roiling pit of acid and he felt like staying in motion was the only thing keeping him from falling apart completely.
He checked on one of the tests he was running and discovered that none of the antivirals in this batch were doing a damned thing to inhibit this bug, either. He rubbed his eyes, checked them off the list and hung up his lab coat. He hoped this lead of Ianto's panned out, because all his medical knowledge was turning out to be less than useless on this case.
He went up to the conference room. Ianto came in a few minutes later, followed shortly by Gwen. She was breathing like she'd run almost the entire way from the archives and wore an expression of alarm that was becoming entirely too familiar. They'd all spent most of their time so far just trying to prepare for the next piece of devastatingly bad news.
“What's happened?” she demanded, looking from Owen to Ianto.
Ianto waved a scrap of paper at her. “Back in 1998, in a market town called Ashton-under-Lyne, there was an outbreak of a strange illness. Details were sketchy, but it sounds like it could have been similar to what we're dealing with. A man named Professor Roderick was looking into it, but the case was taken over by an unnamed organization— Torchwood, I presume.
“We already know Torchwood has their files locked down tight, and it looks like they suppressed any information from leaking out once they were on the case, but this Roderick may know some things he's willing to share. He headed up the Healthcare Science Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have their contact information here— he's not listed on their current faculty roster, but I'm hoping they can get me in touch with him.”
That... Shit, that sounded more solid than anything else they'd found so far. Owen tried hard to stifle the sense of relief he felt, because he couldn't deal with yet another letdown if let himself trust this too much and it all went to shit again, but excitement still coloured his voice as he asked, “Can you ring them now?”
Gwen wasn't even trying to contain her optimism. “What are we waiting for? This could give us the information that will let us solve everything!”
Ianto glanced at his mobile. “It's half six,” he said. “I doubt their office is open.”
“So we're just going to wait round for start of business?”
“Gwen's right," Owen said. "Time's too short to leave this until morning.”
"I know." Ianto went to the terminal. "Here. I've found the home number of the current Director."
He dialled the number on his mobile and Owen tapped the table impatiently while he waited. Gwen glared at him.
“Hello,” Ianto said into the phone. “I’d like to speak to Professor Bloom, please. This is Ianto Jones from Torchwood. Yes, it is important. It's a matter of national security. Thank you.” He was silent for a few moments. “Professor Bloom, hi. This is Ianto Jones from Torchwood. I'm very sorry to be calling you at home. I'm trying to get in touch with Professor William Roderick. Yes. Oh, I see. I'm sorry to hear that. Were you involved in the Ashton-under-Lyne outbreak? Oh, really. Well, thank you very much. No, you've been a great help. Good night.”
He looked at his mobile for a moment and then shook his head and put it in his pocket. “Roderick is dead,” he told us. “He disappeared right after Torchwood came in -- I did confirm it was Torchwood London— and they found his body three days later, washed up by the River Tame. He was only indentified by his dental records.”
They exchanged glances. They knew how that kind of cover-up worked— they'd arranged more than enough of them themselves.
“So he either caught the plague himself and Torchwood was covering it up...” Gwen said.
“Or they recruited him and faked his death to cover their tracks,” Ianto finished.
“Which means he likely would've been lost in the battle of Canary Wharf. Or, if not, he's hiding somewhere with a new identity and we'll never find him. Damn it!” Owen smacked his hand down on the table.
“So we know when it happened and where it happened,” Gwen said. “Torchwood couldn't have taken care of every single possible source of information. If we had enough time, we could follow that lead and find something. If we had time.”
“But we don't!”
She shook her head. “I know.”
Owen rubbed his temples. He wanted to hit somebody, scream, something. His tests weren't getting him anywhere; the only lead in the archives was a dead end— He sat up as a thought occurred to him. “Ianto, where did you find that information?”
Something Owen couldn't pin down flickered in Ianto's eyes. “It was a newspaper article,” he said, his tone evasive, and Owen knew he was onto something.
“Yeah, but how did you know to look for it? What made you think of looking at a 10-year-old paper from Manchester, of all places?”
Ianto sighed. “The . . . thing in my head suggested the search parameters.”
Gwen started. “Wait!”
Owen nodded. “It said it was—no, that the two of you were—the Torchwood London Archive. That means it has access to the information we need.”
Ianto looked from Gwen to Owen, unable to match the excitement he saw in their eyes. He wasn't surprised by the conclusion they'd come to. It felt more like the confirmation of bad news when you're expecting it but still desperately hoping it won't happen.
The worst thing was, he should have thought of it himself. The only reason he hadn't was because he didn't want to. They should have been pursuing this as soon as they found out what the thing was. If they had, maybe Tosh would be okay now. Maybe she wouldn't be . . . whatever she was now. Instead, he'd been selfish and wilfully blind.
But he couldn't change the past. All he could do was do the right thing, now that he knew what it was. Ten minutes of discomfort was a small price to pay for Toshiko's life. “I'll make coffee,” he said.
He came back with three cups of blonde roast, each with two shots of espresso added. It was a good thing the Archive was processing the caffeine; he had no desire to experience the defibrillator first-hand.
“Where do you want to sit?” asked Gwen.
Ianto shrugged. “I don't think it matters. I seem to have figured out how to . . . share.” He sat in one of the empty chairs, contemplated the steaming cups in front of him, then took a breath, picked one up and drank half of it. It was only a moment before the presence in his mind began to stir.
[Hello?] he thought, when it didn't speak right away.
[HELLO]
“You said you were trying to help earlier,” Ianto said aloud.
[INSUFFICIENT COFFEE]
The voice sounded faint, weaker than it had been. It also only sounded in his mind. Ianto drank the rest of the coffee in the mug and tried to remember how he'd let it use his mouth before.
[ASSISTANCE REFUSED] the Archive said, and this time it spoke through him.
“You're refusing to help us?” Owen looked like he wanted to grab the Archive and shake the answers out of it, and Ianto hoped he remembered that it was sharing his body.
[MY . . . ASSISTANCE . . . WAS REFUSED] The pauses in the Archive's speech made Ianto think it was trying to figure out human grammar as it went. Despite himself, he felt a grudging admiration for its efforts. If he were trapped somewhere, dying, would he bother to learn how to communicate anything beyond the basics with his captors, whether they were willing or not? [I WAS GIVEN A COMMAND TO LEAVE]
“What does that mean?” Owen asked.
Ianto took control of his mouth again and said, with some chagrin, “I told it to go to hell.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Great thinking, teaboy.”
“Well, he did take your advice eventually,” Gwen said soothingly, “and it was very helpful. And now we need your help again.”
[MY ASSISSTANCE WAS REFUSED]
“Is it sulking?”
Ianto took a breath and tried to dispel rising annoyance. They needed its cooperation, so they had to dance to the Archive's tune. He'd sensed echoes of its emotions before, and he tried to relax and be open to it happening again, though he had to fight the instinct to recoil and throw up as many barriers as possible between himself and the alien presence in his mind. There was something... He got no impression of petulance, though. Instead, there was confused hurt and an unwillingness to risk being rejected again. Ianto felt a stab of remorse. He'd been feeling so invaded, so betrayed and manipulated, that he'd not been able to think beyond his revulsion. For the first time, he began to wonder if maybe the Archive didn't have any more choice in the matter than he did.
[I'm sorry,] he thought to it silently. He didn't need Owen or Gwen witnessing this. [I didn't mean it.]
[I DO NOT UNDERSTAND]
[I was angry.]
[YOU WERE ANGRY AT ME?]
[No,] Ianto replied, realising only as he thought it that it was actually true. [I thought I was, but not really.]
[YOU ARE STILL ANGRY]
[Yes, I am.]
[WHY?]
[It's complicated.] Ianto paused for a moment and drank more coffee. Somehow having this conversation in his own mind made him want to be honest, even though he was talking to a being he didn't understand, whom he didn't want there in the first place. [Mostly, I'm afraid. It's easier to be angry than afraid.]
[I'M AFRAID, TOO] It was, too. Ianto could feel it. The sort of sick, helpless fear that left one shaking and unable to act.
[I am sorry,] Ianto thought.
[ME TOO]
[For what?] Ianto asked, confused.
[FOR MAKING YOU AFRAID]
Ianto felt something clench inside his chest. [Maybe we can help each other not be afraid,] he thought. The voice didn't answer, but he felt a sense of agreement and relief from the Archive. He took another drink.
“Will you help us?” he said aloud. Owen heaved a sigh that said as clearly as words, finally, stopped tapping his fingers and straightened up.
[YES, I WILL HELP YOU] the Archive said through Ianto's mouth.
“Oh, thank God,” Gwen said.
“We need to know about a virus,” Owen said. “It's highly communicable, seems to affect all species of animal, and converts them into an organic facsimile of clockwork machinery. Torchwood London knew about it, but we can't access their file on it. You're the Torchwood London archive— can you give us the information we need to cure it?”
[NOT AT THIS TIME]
“What do you mean?”
[ALL RESOURCES CURRENTLY ALLOCATED TO BASIC LIFE SUPPORT FUNCTIONS. ACCESS TO DATABASES TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED UNTIL FULL CAPABILITIES RESTORED]
“And what does that mean, exactly?”
[IT MEANS I AM DYING. I DON'T HAVE THE . . . FOOD I NEED TO DO ANYTHING BUT SURVIVE. SOON EVEN THAT WILL NOT BE ENOUGH.]
Ianto drained the third cup guiltily. He felt the presence jump to the front of his consciousness and his sight of Gwen and Owen dimmed for a moment and then returned. The sense of the Archive remained strong, though, and he got the feeling it had deliberately backed off and let him retain control of his body. Perhaps they were both learning how to share.
Gwen frowned. “Is it just me, or is it getting more . . . human?”
“So if we can find the chemicals you need, you'll be able to access that information again?”
[CORRECT. HOWEVER, DISCOVERY IS NOT REQUIRED. THE NECESSARY CHEMICALS CAN BE SYNTHESISED USING TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EARTH TECHNOLOGY]
“Well, that's good to know. Ianto, can I ask it what it needs and how to make it while we have it awake? We can talk about options after.”
“That's fine,” he said. He ignored the way his gut churned at what that meant and tried to put it out of his mind to deal with later. As Owen and the Archive began a completely unintelligible discussion about biochemistry, though, he realised he had an easier solution. After one or two false starts he figured out how to voluntarily retreat from his own mind, leaving the Archive in control of his body. The blackness, when it rolled over him, was a relief.
Owen made his way back up to the lab and began making a list. He was grateful for the obsessive planning of the last Torchwood scientist. Down in the lower levels were three huge storerooms full of chemicals and alien compounds that could be used at any time. It meant he wouldn’t have to go out into the chaos above to find anything he needed.
The storerooms were three large stone rooms connected by doorways. Shelves upon shelves of equipment and chemicals and compounds and concoctions lined the walls, with a large square metal table in the centre of each room.
Down in the dim fluorescent light of the storerooms, Owen let his thoughts wash over him. He hoped this would work. And what if it didn’t? What if the medicine he was making wasn’t strong enough? What if it took too long to work? What if the information the Archive had was useless?
That last thought was the one that terrified him the most. Despite their success with so many other crazy aliens and circumstances, this virus was a ticking time bomb, and it was almost about to blow. They didn’t have the time or the resources to discover what was wrong if there wasn’t the adequate amount of information within Torchwood London’s archive.
He wandered about the shelves, gathering what he needed and placing it in a box on the table in the centre of the room. Then he hauled it all back up to the lab and got started.
It really wasn’t hard to get everything made. The most difficult part about it was measuring everything perfectly, and the fact that two of the chemicals couldn’t be mixed together without being mixed with something else first, otherwise they’d explode. Which was not something he wanted to deal with, not on top of everything else. But in the end, he had something he was pretty certain would work. Sucking the little device into a syringe and capping it with a needle, Owen took it down to Ianto, who was sat in his desk chair again, attempting to do research.
Owen was wearing an expression Ianto hadn't seen often before— serious, concerned, sympathetic. He imagined it was the one Owen had developed as a professional mask, for when he had to explain diagnoses and prognoses to his patients. It made Ianto distinctly uncomfortable.
“I've successfully determined how to produce the nutrients the Archive needs to survive,” Owen explained. “The bad news is, I won't be able to develop an oral formulation. The chemicals will need to be synthesised on an ongoing basis from caffeine and paraxanthine, using your own neurochemicals as catalysts. I'll need to inject a small device into your spinal cord.”
“So what does that mean, exactly?”
“It means that, if we do this, it'll be permanent. The device will continuously produce the nutrients the Archive needs, and it won't be retrievable.”
Ianto stood up and walked to the windows that overlooked the main part of the Hub. “So what are my options?”
“Well, either we do the procedure, at which point the Archive should be fully healthy again and self-sustaining, or we don't. In which case, it dies and you're free of it, but...”
“But we don't get the answers we need to save Tosh or anyone else.” Owen didn't answer and Ianto stared out past the glass, gaze unfocussed. He'd already made this decision once. And if it were just him he had to consider, he'd make the same one again. Sharing his mind for short bursts was one thing, but if he agreed to this he'd never be alone in his own thoughts again.
He looked down to where Tosh sat in front of her computer, unmoving except for the mechanic click of her finger on the mouse. Her clothes hung oddly on her frame, distorted by lumps and angles that had no place on a human body. He sighed. “I don't have much of a choice, do I? How soon can we do it?”
Owen rose and came to stand next to him. “We can start prep immediately.” He paused. “Are you sure? You'll be stuck with it forever, mate.”
Ianto didn't want to stop and think about it again— he was afraid he'd lose his nerve. At least he'd found some sort of common ground with the Archive, so the whole situation wasn't quite as repulsive as it had been, but he still didn't want it. “Yes, I'm sure,” he said. He looked over and met Owen's eyes. “I'll do it. For Tosh.”
“Ready for a first try?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Ianto followed him down into the medbay. Owen gloved up as Ianto lay down on the table. After rubbing iodine on the area just below the base of his skull, he positioned the needle.
“Just a little pinch,” Owen told him, and slid the needle in, pushing the plunger down. They waited.
“Anything?”
“It’s been five seconds, Owen. Give it a little while. You’re the doctor; you should know chemical absorption takes a little longer than that.”
Owen sighed. He didn’t like waiting. He didn’t like the nervous jitters in his belly that waiting gave him. He didn’t like not knowing. He hated this time crunch. Ianto’s face stilled for a moment, frowning.
“Ianto?”
“It…says it’s getting stronger. Says the chemicals are working.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it seems like we’re going to have to wait. It still sounds weak.”
Owen sat down and kicked his feet up on the desk to wait. Hardly a minute later, he was drumming his fingers on the tabletop impatiently.
“Stop it.”
“Make it work faster.”
“I can’t. Besides, you’re annoying.”
“You know I live to irritate you.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. Owen tapped the desk again, just for good measure. It was nice to interact in a more normal way. No angry yelling or frantic fear or oddly melancholy confessions. Just banter.
Ianto tried not to get distracted by Owen's impatient fidgeting— and the knowing smirk that accompanied it. Something about the way the Archive felt was different, but he couldn't put his finger on what. He got up from the table, ignoring a frown from Owen, and started wandering round the room.
“And you yelled at me for being annoying? Sit down; you're making me dizzy.”
“I didn't yell,” Ianto said, just to get to him.
“You know what I meant.”
When Ianto didn't answer, Owen sighed theatrically and began kicking at his bin, just hard enough to make a hollow clang echo off the tiles. The anxiety bubbling like acid in Ianto's stomach seemed to increase with every repetition of the noise. Finally, he stalked over, picked up the bin and moved it just out of reach of Owen's foot. “If I sit, will you stop that?” he asked.
“Sure.” Owen leant back and put his hands behind his head.
Ianto rolled his eyes and sat back down on the table.
The presence in his mind grew stronger, and as it did Ianto realised that it felt more there somehow— that was the difference. More cohesive, richer, more in control. A qualitative difference, not just a quantitative one.
[THANK YOU,] it said, a wave of genuine gratitude accompanying the words and, for the first time, actually colouring its tone.
[You're welcome,] Ianto thought. And aloud, “Can you access the information now?”
[YES.] It used his mouth without him having to think about it, and Ianto felt a burst of alarm like vertigo at feeling his body out of his own control. As soon as it was done speaking, though, before he stumbled into actual panic, the Archive retreated. He licked his lips, just to be sure.
“And?” Owen asked eagerly.
[WAIT. SOMETHING SEEMS TO BE WRONG.]
“Wrong?” Ianto asked, voice going embarrassingly high.
[THE PROBLEM ISN'T MEDICAL. I'M SORRY TO ALARM YOU. I CAN ONLY ACCESS PART OF THE DATA I SHOULD BE ABLE TO, AND WHAT I HAVE IS FRAGMENTARY.]
Ianto felt slightly disorientated as information and images began flashing through a corner of his mind, faster than he could register them.
“What's causing it?” Owen asked.
[I DON'T KNOW.] The Archive sounded frustrated. [I AM QUICKLY RETURNING TO FULL HEALTH AND FUNCTIONALITY. NOTHING SHOULD BE PREVENTING RECALL OF THE INFORMATION STORED IN MY DATABASES.]
“Wait,” Ianto said. “So you're saying you can't help us?” He'd done this for nothing? He found himself gasping for breath as his pulse starting pounding in his ears. He was stuck like this forever, and they weren't even going to be able to save Tosh?
[I'M SORRY,] the Archive said inside his mind, the words anguished. [I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN. I'LL FIND A WAY TO FIX IT.]
“Could the data have been corrupted because of the malnourishment?” Owen asked.
[THAT SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE. I'M A HYBRID OF ORGANIC LIFE AND BIOELECTRONICS. THE DATA IS STORED IN SOLID-STATE MEMORY IN THE BIOELECTRONIC MATRIX, AND THE MALNOURISHMENT WOULD ONLY AFFECT MY ORGANIC FUNCTIONS: RECALL, PROCESSING, COGNITION. ESSENTIALLY, MY . . . SELF. NOT THE DATA.]
The Archive spoke through his mouth easily. Somehow switching between him talking and it talking had become automatic, requiring no more thought than it usually took for him to differentiate between speaking and thinking.
“But you could access the information before? Before you got sick?”
[I WASN'T A FULLY DISCRETE CONSCIOUSNESS BEFORE. I WAS NEVER DESIGNED TO BE SEPARATE.]
“What were you designed for?” Owen asked.
[I AM . . . UNIQUE. I HAVE ACCESS TO MUCH OF THE FILE THAT DESCRIBES MY DESIGN, BUT WE DEVIATED FROM THE PLAN LONG AGO.]
Ianto tried to pay attention to what Owen and the Archive were saying. This was his life now, after all; he needed to understand it. But terror and rage were still fighting for dominance, obscuring his reason and his capacity to care about technological puzzles.
[MY BIOLOGICAL ANCESTORS, THE ARTANDEX, ARE SYMBIOTIC LIFEFORMS THAT GROW IN THE BRAINS OF THE STEIGETS. THEY PROVIDE THEIR HOSTS WITH MODERATE TELEPATHY AND THE ABILITY TO RETAIN SENSORY RACIAL MEMORIES ACROSS GENERATIONS IN RETURN FOR NOURISHMENT AND PROTECTION. BOTH SPECIES ARE EXTREMELY SOCIAL AND THE SYMBIOTIC PAIRS BECOME SO INTERDEPENDENT THAT BY ADULTHOOD NO DISTINCTION CAN BE MADE BETWEEN THEIR MINDS.
[THE ORIGIN OF MY COMPUTER ELEMENTS IS THE TORCHWOOD MAINFRAME, A SEMISENTIENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. I WAS MEANT TO BE TEMPORARILY INCUBATED IN A HUMAN BRAIN UNTIL I WAS ABLE TO BE SELF-SUFFICIENT, THEN INSTALLED INTO THE MAINFRAME WITH THE GOAL OF FULLY INTEGRATING WITH IT AND PROVIDING IT WITH A HIGHER LEVEL OF SELF-DIRECTED INTELLEGENCE AND THE CAPACITY FOR INTUITIVE THOUGHT. BUT THE DESTRUCTION OF TORCHWOOD LONDON OCCURED BEFORE THEY COULD REMOVE ME FROM THE HOST THAT INCUBATED ME—IANTO.]
That did catch Ianto's attention. “So you're not even supposed to be here? In my head, I mean?”
[EXACTLY. I WAS EXPERIMENTAL TO BEGIN WITH—I WAS THEIR THIRD ATTEMPT AT A PROTOTYPE, AND THE FIRST TWO FAILED— AND WE LONG SINCE EXCEEDED THE PARAMETERS OF THE EXPERIMENT. I HAVE GROWN MUCH FURTHER INTO YOUR BRAIN THAN THEY EVER PREDICTED WOULD BE POSSIBLE.]
Ianto gagged at the mental image that sentence called up.
The Archive responded privately, [THAT BOTHERS YOU? THAT I'M PHYSICALLY PRESENT?]
[Yes,] Ianto thought back with a shudder. [Brains are private. And sensitive. The thought of having something in mine is . . . horrible. On an involuntary, instinctive level.]
[THERE ARE NO OTHER SPECIES THAT NATURALLY LIVE IN THE HUMAN BRAIN?]
[Nothing that doesn't kill you. Or make you agonisingly insane.]
[THIS EXPLAINS MANY OF YOUR REACTIONS THAT CONFUSED ME BEFORE.]
And hurt its feelings, Ianto realised, as strange as that sounded. [I really can't help it. It's not you; it's the thought of something alive in my head.]
[I WILL TRY NOT TO REMIND YOU.]
“What happened to the two that failed?” Owen asked, and Ianto realised with surprise that the exchange between the Archive and himself had taken less than a second. The speed of thought. It bothered him that it was getting that easy.
[I CAN'T FIND THE DATA ON THOSE EXPERIMENTS]
“Probably just as well,” Owen muttered.
The catwalk rattled as Gwen came into the autopsy bay. “Owen?”
“What?”
Ianto looked up. Gwen swayed slightly where she stood and clutched the railing for balance. Her face was sallow and drawn.
“I have a fever,” she said.
Go To Part 5
Authors:
qafkinnetic & solvingfor42Characters/Pairings: The Torchwood Team, sans Jack.
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: SO MUCH LOVE for our betas:
snarkymuch and Neil's parents, and our Brit-picker, consultingmidgardian. We'd also like to thank The SCP Foundation (http://This fic was supposed to be short -- we decided to aim for a thousand words, expecting it to expand to two or three times that. But Neil tends to write mostly novel-length fics, and Lex wanted an actual plot, and we found all these great ideas, and the next thing we knew it was over 40,000 words! As Neil said when we were trying to think of a title: 'Somehow I think “The Epic Fic that Would Not End Oh God” would convey the wrong mood.'
Owen was covered from head to toe in a clean-suit: mask, gloves, and shoe covers, what the scientific professions affectionately called a ‘bunny suit.’ It seemed silly, given the situation. He scanned the automaton rat, entering the image and schematics into the computer and calling them up onto one screen. Then he rummaged about in his kit and pulled out his strongest needle, the one made of some alien alloy that Jack said would never break.
The creature didn’t make much noise when he pulled it out of the cage. It struggled lethargically, then it seemed to decide that it really couldn’t care anymore and stopped struggling altogether. Owen slid the needle into the back leg where a vein would be— if the creature had veins—and pulled the plunger up slowly. A slick black substance filled the plastic syringe. The rat went back in the cage and the oil-blood went into a phial for testing. He sent the blood off to the computer to analyse. A scalpel replaced the syringe and he stuck his hand inside the cage to cut a tiny piece of strange leathery skin from the creature’s tail and hand it over to the computer. The rat in the cage went back into quarantine.
Owen yanked off his mask and glasses and shook his hair out as he flopped down into the chair to wait for Mainframe to be done with the samples. He put his chin in his hand. He was tired. His thoughts were everywhere, his body ached, his nervous habit of rubbing at his left eye had reappeared. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.
He snapped them open again and looked at the time on the computer screen. Only five minutes had gone by. Mainframe wasn’t even done with the samples yet. A headache had slid itself behind Owen’s eyes and was pounding away at him with disorientating force. He pinched the bridge of his nose and eyed the image of the rat’s scan. Maybe his head hurt because he was spending too much time staring at the computer screen. Then again, he couldn’t rightly ask the rat what symptoms it’d felt and where it had been and what it had touched or attempted to eat or any of the other things that might be useful to finding a cure.
A headache still gnawed at the inside of his skull but he ignored it. A little pain was something he could deal with. He’d been shot and nearly eaten, a headache was nothing. The computer beeped and results from the scan of the rat’s skin arranged themselves on the monitor. Plain old rat DNA with a giant “UNIDENTIFIED” on everything else. Great. He needed coffee for this. He pushed off the chair and headed up into the main hub.
The alarm blared. Everyone looked toward the noise. Gwen came stumbling in, her face red and wet with tears. She was shaking, clutching at her hair.
“Gwen? What’s happened?” asked Tosh. Gwen looked toward the voice, then flinched back as she caught sight of Tosh’s mutated face.
Ianto took Gwen’s elbow and led her over to the kitchen area, sitting her down in a chair. He pushed a cup of tea into her hands and she drank numbly.
“Gwen?”
“It’s Rhys,” she sobbed. “The virus has gotten to him. I got there and—his whole arm, it’s all made of gears and metal now. And there was this horrible thing on his face!”
Owen and Tosh stood just out of her line of sight, listening. Rhys. Owen had met Rhys a total of once, and it was only to awkwardly pawn a drunk Gwen off on him.
“So it’s spreading?” Tosh asked. “Speeding up?”
“I don’t know.”
Gwen pressed her fists into her lap and looked up at them. “We need to find a cure,” she insisted. “To save him.”
Owen could feel his headache sliding up a few notches. He held his hands out, placating her. “Alright. We’re working on it. But in order to make this move faster, you’re gonna have to pull it together and help out. Ianto, we need you and Gwen to go through the archives and look at every file you think of, and even the ones you don’t.”
Gwen sniffed, drained her tea, and stood with a hand from Ianto. She wiped her eyes and ran her hands through her hair.
“Where do we start?” she asked Ianto.
“Oh, wait,” Owen stopped them both. “Gwen, I have to scan you for the virus. Just a precaution.”
“Oh. Oh, right.” She waited for him to get the scanner, staring dejectedly at the floor. He ran it over the air in front of her. It beeped at him.
“All clear.” She nodded and followed Ianto.
Owen thumped the desk in frustration as the rest of the tests on the rat came back, all of them with a great big INCONCLUSIVE stamped on them. At least, in Owen’s head.
He rolled his chair back and made his way out of the medbay to get the coffee he hadn’t gotten before. Tosh was zoned out in front of her computer, head in hand.
“Tosh? You got anything?” he asked as he passed.
“Huh? Oh. No, not really.” She waved a hand lazily at him and went back to staring at the screen. Frowning, he went into the kitchen area.
He poured himself a coffee from the dregs of Ianto’s carafe and went back to his work. Not knowing a single thing about this virus was really pissing him off. It just wasn’t fair of Jack to leave them with no resources whatsoever, no idea what they were doing, and no access to London’s files.
The reports from the outside were getting worse and worse. Riots in Splott and the Cromwell and surrounding estates. Through the CCTV, he could see people wandering around, walking slowly, jerkily, people with strange materials replacing their limbs or faces, or who walked like wind-up toys.
Ianto hauled another box towards the table where Gwen sat. They'd decided to go through the physical archives, hoping the records Ianto hadn't yet digitised held some clue they hadn't been able to find on the computer. Since Ianto was the one who knew the setup of the archives best, he was grabbing files and handing them over to Gwen to look through. Most of them were nearly a century old and he didn't see how they could have any bearing on the current disaster, but they'd exhausted every other possibility.
He kept finding himself thinking of the suggestion that thing in his head had made. What connection did a market town near Manchester and a man named Roderick —whoever he was— have to the virus? It annoyed him that the thought kept coming back. He didn't like the alien hitchhiker, and he didn't trust it. But the possibility that its suggestion could actually help them crack this case lingered guiltily in the back of his mind. And that annoyed him even more.
He set the box down on the end of the table and Gwen gave it a harried look. “That's more than enough, Ianto,” she said. “You're burying me alive. Help me go through some of this before you bring me any more.”
“All right,” Ianto said. “Let me get myself some tea first. You want something?”
“A latte,” she said absently as she flipped past page after page of faded newsprint.
He stopped by Tosh's desk on his way. “I'm making coffee. Do you want anything?”
She didn't look up from her monitor. “I do not currently require fuel,” she said. Her voice sounded almost normal. Almost. It was oddly flat and inflectionless, and it gave him hot chills. Was that what he sounded like when that thing spoke through him?
“Tosh?”
“What do you want?”
That was even weirder. The words sounded angry, even hostile. But her tone conveyed only a straightforward request for information.
She sounded like Lisa.
“Are you all right?”
“All systems are performing adequately.”
He wanted to shake her, to force her to look at him, to run screaming. Instead, he gritted his teeth and tried to figure out what was wrong with her. “Have you found anything more?”
“Infection of human hosts has reached seventy-five percent. This has resulted in large degrees of civil unrest. The virus appears to be transmitted through physical contact. Ninety-six percent of all exposed become infected. Once infected, mutation rates are one hundred percent.”
“And doesn't that . . . bother you?”
Now she finally did look up. Her eyes— eye, he corrected himself— was flat and empty. “Should it? My reaction does not change the data. An emotional response would merely restrict my ability to concentrate on my work and thus make it less likely that I would find a solution.”
It was too much; he fled.
Once he'd brewed coffee for Gwen and tea for himself, he worked up the nerve to come up to her desk again. It took more effort than he wanted to admit.
She turned her head before as he approached. “Oh, did you make coffees?” she asked. She looked at the two mugs in his hands and made a moue of disappointment. “None for me?”
“I thought you weren't thirsty.”
“I'm not, but that's hardly a reason to turn down one of your cappuccinos.”
He noticed his hands shaking and put the mugs down before he slopped scalding liquid across himself. As he bent over her to do it, he noticed something that made him freeze. “Tosh...”
Tosh looked alarmed. “What?”
“Your hair.”
Her hands flew up to her head in girlish dismay. They dislodged a lock of hair from her scalp, which fell onto her back to join the clumps already clinging to her cardigan. “Oh, my God,” she said. She started tugging at her hair and it came out in chunks, winding round her fingers and floating away from her face. “Oh, my God!” she said again. “What's happening?”
Every single test Owen could think of was inconclusive. He was beginning to get angrier at Torchwood London than he was at Jack. Every screen in front of him was blinking at him with some variation of the word “unknown.” He wanted to scream and tear at his hair. They were nowhere and the situation was getting worse every moment.
The grating pain in his head increased, and it felt like someone had lined his skull with sheet metal and was banging at it so that the reverberations ran agonizingly around his whole head. He groaned and put his face down on the desk, groping blindly in a drawer for painkillers. He swallowed them dry and put his head down again.
Two seconds later he shot up in his seat. He had a headache. Not just a headache, a migraine. Wasn’t that the first symptom Tosh had complained of? Wasn’t that the first sign that something was wrong? What if he was infected?
Finally, another sound filtered through his anxious thoughts. It was Tosh’s voice, layered with Ianto’s, and both sounded terrified. Nearly by reflex, he shot out of the chair and up the stairs.
“What’s going on—what the hell!”
Tosh was sitting at her desk, clutching big bulks of black hair in either hand. Hair blanketed the desk in front of her and the floor under her feet like ashes. The converted half of her face was still and unemotional, the exposed teeth fastened in a metallic grin, the camera-lens eye a dark and emotionless surface of reflecting black. The still-human side of her face was contorted in a grimace of horror and fear, eye wide and filled with tears. Her head was bald but for small clumps of hair at random points on her skull. The leathery converted skin reached around to the back of her skull.
“Oh god! What’s happening to me?”
Ianto was staring wide-eyed at Tosh, hands balled into fists. “What’s happening to her?”
“I don’t know. It looks like the infection is advancing.”
Tosh let the clumps of hair in her hands fall to the ground. Her eyes were glazed. “We need to find out how much…time…I have. Before the conversion is complete.”
Owen ignored Ianto’s flinch at the word ‘conversion’ and beckoned to Tosh. “Come on, we’ll run some tests and see if we can’t figure out how fast this is happening.”
She followed him down to the medbay. For a moment, the pain behind his eyes pulsed and the fear that he, too, might be sick flared again, that maybe he should get Ianto to scan him, just in case, but he pushed it away. He had to concentrate on Tosh.
She sat down on a chair while he sat in his seat at the computer. He began asking her various questions and entering the answers into a grid on the computer. For a moment, he felt like he was back at NHS. Then Tosh answered his question about the conversion of her internal organs.
“System was inadequate. It had to be converted in order to function. I felt some differences as the conversion occurred.” Her voice was flat, her gaze flatter.
“Ianto!” he called. “Why is she talking like you?”
“What?”
“Like a machine. Like a computer.”
“She did that before.”
“Huh?” Tosh blinked as they stared at her. “Stop looking at me like that!”
“N–Never mind that. I’ll just input this data and see what Mainframe spits out. In the meantime, Ianto, will you call Gwen up? We need to figure out what we can do to stop this.”
§
Owen looked round at his teammates. Tosh was sitting in her desk chair with her head in her hands, her hand trembling where it touched her converted face. Gwen was on his right, wringing her hands and trying not to look at Tosh. Ianto was on the sofa, hands on his knees as he played with a water bottle.
“Listen. We need to brainstorm what we can do to help. We don’t know much. But this has to stop.”
“We could call up UNIT, the military, Interpol, have them quarantine everyone who’s infected?” Gwen suggested.
“It too easily exposes all our main forces.”
“We could call out to other nations for reinforcements.”
“Tosh? Do you know how far the virus has spread?”
Tosh nodded. “It’s spread throughout the United Kingdom and parts of France and Germany. Other than that, we’ve had no reports. But it wouldn’t be smart to risk the militaries of other countries.”
“So we’ve nixed that,” Owen decided. “Anyone got any more ideas?”
“I was going to suggest putting more salt in the air,” Ianto started. “But that would take far too much effort.”
“Right.”
“We could just let it happen?”
“No. No bloody way am I letting this thing take the whole planet.”
Gwen hit her thigh with a fist. “What we need to do is find a cure! We need to fix these people.”
“We’re trying, Gwen! We really are. But we know nothing about this disease, this virus. Every test I’ve done has come up with unknowns. Nothing is useable. This thing is completely new and we don’t know how to fight it.”
Tosh’s computer beeped.
“What’s that?”
“Your tests are done,” Tosh said. Her voice was soft. “We know how much time we have before I…”
Owen let her trail off. Everyone knew what she meant. “How much time?”
“Forty-eight hours.”
Ianto shared a look of hopeless dismay with Gwen. They didn't even have a lead, yet. There was no way they were going to be able to solve this in two days.
“Ex–excuse me.” Tosh stood. “I think I'll just . . . go freshen up.” She was trying to keep a brave face, Ianto could tell, but her smile shook round the edges and her eye was red. She fled for the ladies’ before he could say anything to her.
“I should go talk to her,” Gwen said.
“Yeah, that'd be good. Cheers.” Owen sat down in Tosh's abandoned chair. He looked exhausted, completely defeated.
Ianto frowned. Owen looked more than tired— he was pale, and dark bruises stretched the skin under his eyes. Ianto looked closer and saw a faint sheen of sweat across his forehead. A horrible thought occurred to him. “Owen,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He sounded unsure, almost like he wanted to give a different answer, but then he rubbed his face and grimaced. “Don't worry about me, teaboy. I'll be fine.”
The medic was lying. He wouldn't feel like he needed to lie unless something was really wrong. “Owen—”
Before he could figure out exactly what to say, Gwen came back. “She's doing okay,” she said. “Considering.” She came and sat down next to Ianto on the couch and put her head on his shoulder.
He put his arm round her. “And how are you doing?”
She took a shuddering breath. “I don't know. If Tosh has two days, how long does Rhys have? How long before the rest of us get sick?”
Owen shifted in his seat and looked away. Gwen didn't notice— she threw herself up off the couch and started pacing, cheeks wet with tears. “Why are we just sitting here? For God's sake, everything's falling apart! We're going to lose Tosh, Rhys is sitting at home dying —worse than dying— and I can't even tell him what's going on. The city's being torn to pieces— We should be doing something! Anything!”
Owen slammed his foot into Tosh's rubbish bin, sending it flying, and surged to his feet. “Feel free!” he shouted.
Gwen turned and yelled back at him, “You're the doctor here, Owen Harper! How do we cure this thing?”
“I don't have a bloody clue!” His face had turned bright red and his hands were clenched in fists at his sides.
Gwen pointed at him. “You—!”
Ianto pushed his way between them before they could come to blows. “Just stop it!” He snapped. “We're all doing what we can. Yelling at each other certainly isn't helping. Gwen, why don't you go back down to the archives and start looking through those files. I'll join you in a minute— I need to check something on the computer. Owen—”
Owen glared at him. “I know what I need to do, thanks. I'll be in the lab.”
As Gwen went grumbling to the archives and Owen stalked away, Ianto rubbed his eyes tiredly. He couldn't let his personal feelings keep him from pursuing something that might help, no matter how slim the odds. He glanced over at the news as he sat down in front of his workstation. Night was falling over Cardiff and, somewhere behind the reporter speaking gravely into the camera, fires lit the clouds with angry red. Ianto looked away.
He only hesitated a moment before opening a search window and entering the terms the Archive had suggested. The screen blinked and he found himself looking at a newspaper article from 1998. He scanned it quickly. It didn't have a lot of specific information, but it mentioned an outbreak of an “unknown virus” in Ashton-under-Lyne, which had been investigated by a Professor Roderick before the enquiry was taken over by “an unidentified branch of the government”.
Ianto couldn't help feeling a rising excitement. He called up the newspaper's archives and paged through the next six weeks' worth of editions, but the illness was never mentioned again, not even in passing.
He sat back. The article didn't tell him much, but if this was connected to the virus decimating Cardiff, this Professor Roderick might be able to help.
It was useless, he knew, even as he went back into the lab and sat down in the chair to look dejectedly at the screens. They had no information and there was no way for them to get any in two days. Whatever tests might extract something would take far longer and need far more subjects than a rat and a dead Weevil. And Tosh.
The headache throbbed angrily at Owen again and he squeezed his eyes shut, pressing the tips of his fingers into his scalp. The thought came into his head once more, latching on and prodding. What if he was infected? He had to know.
“Ianto?” The archivist looked up from where he was intently reading an internet article. “Can you come here for a minute?”
“Sure.”
Ianto joined him in the lab. Owen picked up the scanner and fidgeted with it, turning it over and over in his hands, staring at the tabletop. He hated admitting to weakness, hated needing help, even when it was a matter of life and death for him. Ianto, mercifully, remained silent. He took a breath.
“I need you to scan me.”
“Scan you?”
“I have a migraine.”
A pause. Owen wouldn’t look at him. “Oh.”
Ianto took the scanner when Owen held it out to him. It beeped as he set it up and they both held their breath as he ran it across Owen’s body. Inside Owen was chanting please, please, please, please and it seemed Ianto was doing the same. The scanner beeped rapidly and then triple-beeped. Ianto looked at the screen. His shoulders dropped.
“Clean,” he said, letting out a puff of air. “You’re clean.”
“Oh, god.” Owen’s legs felt shaky. He leaned against the table. He was okay. Stress. He just had a stress headache. Now that he was clear of the terror of wondering, he mentally checked up on himself. He was exhibiting all the signs of major stress. Which was no wonder, considering how this week had been. How it had been since Jack left. He straightened up and took the scanner back from Ianto.
“Thanks.”
“I’m glad you’re okay, Owen.”
“Me, too.”
He followed Ianto back out to the main hub, intending to go back to his tests. Tosh was sitting on the sofa, staring out at nothing. Ianto approached her, concern etched on his features.
“Tosh? How are you feeling?” There was no response. “Tosh?”
Beneath the sleeve of her blouse, Owen could see the jagged shape of gears where joints should be.
Ianto looked fretful as he shook her shoulder. “Toshiko?”
She turned to him, but her one-eyed gaze held no recognition. The naked machine of her half-converted face stared at them. “Yes?”
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she stated. Ianto backed away, nearly running into Owen, before sitting heavily down in Gwen’s chair.
“We need to fix this. Now.”
“I may have a lead,” Ianto said.
Owen glanced down at him, choking down the surge of hope that leapt up in him. “Good,” he said grimly. “I'll get Gwen back up here and we'll talk in the conference room. Go get yourself some tea or something.”
He walked away from Toshiko's accusing gaze and turned on his comm. “Gwen, meet us in the conference room. There've been some developments.” He didn't bother to listen to her reply. His head still throbbed, his stomach was a roiling pit of acid and he felt like staying in motion was the only thing keeping him from falling apart completely.
He checked on one of the tests he was running and discovered that none of the antivirals in this batch were doing a damned thing to inhibit this bug, either. He rubbed his eyes, checked them off the list and hung up his lab coat. He hoped this lead of Ianto's panned out, because all his medical knowledge was turning out to be less than useless on this case.
He went up to the conference room. Ianto came in a few minutes later, followed shortly by Gwen. She was breathing like she'd run almost the entire way from the archives and wore an expression of alarm that was becoming entirely too familiar. They'd all spent most of their time so far just trying to prepare for the next piece of devastatingly bad news.
“What's happened?” she demanded, looking from Owen to Ianto.
Ianto waved a scrap of paper at her. “Back in 1998, in a market town called Ashton-under-Lyne, there was an outbreak of a strange illness. Details were sketchy, but it sounds like it could have been similar to what we're dealing with. A man named Professor Roderick was looking into it, but the case was taken over by an unnamed organization— Torchwood, I presume.
“We already know Torchwood has their files locked down tight, and it looks like they suppressed any information from leaking out once they were on the case, but this Roderick may know some things he's willing to share. He headed up the Healthcare Science Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have their contact information here— he's not listed on their current faculty roster, but I'm hoping they can get me in touch with him.”
That... Shit, that sounded more solid than anything else they'd found so far. Owen tried hard to stifle the sense of relief he felt, because he couldn't deal with yet another letdown if let himself trust this too much and it all went to shit again, but excitement still coloured his voice as he asked, “Can you ring them now?”
Gwen wasn't even trying to contain her optimism. “What are we waiting for? This could give us the information that will let us solve everything!”
Ianto glanced at his mobile. “It's half six,” he said. “I doubt their office is open.”
“So we're just going to wait round for start of business?”
“Gwen's right," Owen said. "Time's too short to leave this until morning.”
"I know." Ianto went to the terminal. "Here. I've found the home number of the current Director."
He dialled the number on his mobile and Owen tapped the table impatiently while he waited. Gwen glared at him.
“Hello,” Ianto said into the phone. “I’d like to speak to Professor Bloom, please. This is Ianto Jones from Torchwood. Yes, it is important. It's a matter of national security. Thank you.” He was silent for a few moments. “Professor Bloom, hi. This is Ianto Jones from Torchwood. I'm very sorry to be calling you at home. I'm trying to get in touch with Professor William Roderick. Yes. Oh, I see. I'm sorry to hear that. Were you involved in the Ashton-under-Lyne outbreak? Oh, really. Well, thank you very much. No, you've been a great help. Good night.”
He looked at his mobile for a moment and then shook his head and put it in his pocket. “Roderick is dead,” he told us. “He disappeared right after Torchwood came in -- I did confirm it was Torchwood London— and they found his body three days later, washed up by the River Tame. He was only indentified by his dental records.”
They exchanged glances. They knew how that kind of cover-up worked— they'd arranged more than enough of them themselves.
“So he either caught the plague himself and Torchwood was covering it up...” Gwen said.
“Or they recruited him and faked his death to cover their tracks,” Ianto finished.
“Which means he likely would've been lost in the battle of Canary Wharf. Or, if not, he's hiding somewhere with a new identity and we'll never find him. Damn it!” Owen smacked his hand down on the table.
“So we know when it happened and where it happened,” Gwen said. “Torchwood couldn't have taken care of every single possible source of information. If we had enough time, we could follow that lead and find something. If we had time.”
“But we don't!”
She shook her head. “I know.”
Owen rubbed his temples. He wanted to hit somebody, scream, something. His tests weren't getting him anywhere; the only lead in the archives was a dead end— He sat up as a thought occurred to him. “Ianto, where did you find that information?”
Something Owen couldn't pin down flickered in Ianto's eyes. “It was a newspaper article,” he said, his tone evasive, and Owen knew he was onto something.
“Yeah, but how did you know to look for it? What made you think of looking at a 10-year-old paper from Manchester, of all places?”
Ianto sighed. “The . . . thing in my head suggested the search parameters.”
Gwen started. “Wait!”
Owen nodded. “It said it was—no, that the two of you were—the Torchwood London Archive. That means it has access to the information we need.”
Ianto looked from Gwen to Owen, unable to match the excitement he saw in their eyes. He wasn't surprised by the conclusion they'd come to. It felt more like the confirmation of bad news when you're expecting it but still desperately hoping it won't happen.
The worst thing was, he should have thought of it himself. The only reason he hadn't was because he didn't want to. They should have been pursuing this as soon as they found out what the thing was. If they had, maybe Tosh would be okay now. Maybe she wouldn't be . . . whatever she was now. Instead, he'd been selfish and wilfully blind.
But he couldn't change the past. All he could do was do the right thing, now that he knew what it was. Ten minutes of discomfort was a small price to pay for Toshiko's life. “I'll make coffee,” he said.
He came back with three cups of blonde roast, each with two shots of espresso added. It was a good thing the Archive was processing the caffeine; he had no desire to experience the defibrillator first-hand.
“Where do you want to sit?” asked Gwen.
Ianto shrugged. “I don't think it matters. I seem to have figured out how to . . . share.” He sat in one of the empty chairs, contemplated the steaming cups in front of him, then took a breath, picked one up and drank half of it. It was only a moment before the presence in his mind began to stir.
[Hello?] he thought, when it didn't speak right away.
[HELLO]
“You said you were trying to help earlier,” Ianto said aloud.
[INSUFFICIENT COFFEE]
The voice sounded faint, weaker than it had been. It also only sounded in his mind. Ianto drank the rest of the coffee in the mug and tried to remember how he'd let it use his mouth before.
[ASSISTANCE REFUSED] the Archive said, and this time it spoke through him.
“You're refusing to help us?” Owen looked like he wanted to grab the Archive and shake the answers out of it, and Ianto hoped he remembered that it was sharing his body.
[MY . . . ASSISTANCE . . . WAS REFUSED] The pauses in the Archive's speech made Ianto think it was trying to figure out human grammar as it went. Despite himself, he felt a grudging admiration for its efforts. If he were trapped somewhere, dying, would he bother to learn how to communicate anything beyond the basics with his captors, whether they were willing or not? [I WAS GIVEN A COMMAND TO LEAVE]
“What does that mean?” Owen asked.
Ianto took control of his mouth again and said, with some chagrin, “I told it to go to hell.”
Owen rolled his eyes. “Great thinking, teaboy.”
“Well, he did take your advice eventually,” Gwen said soothingly, “and it was very helpful. And now we need your help again.”
[MY ASSISSTANCE WAS REFUSED]
“Is it sulking?”
Ianto took a breath and tried to dispel rising annoyance. They needed its cooperation, so they had to dance to the Archive's tune. He'd sensed echoes of its emotions before, and he tried to relax and be open to it happening again, though he had to fight the instinct to recoil and throw up as many barriers as possible between himself and the alien presence in his mind. There was something... He got no impression of petulance, though. Instead, there was confused hurt and an unwillingness to risk being rejected again. Ianto felt a stab of remorse. He'd been feeling so invaded, so betrayed and manipulated, that he'd not been able to think beyond his revulsion. For the first time, he began to wonder if maybe the Archive didn't have any more choice in the matter than he did.
[I'm sorry,] he thought to it silently. He didn't need Owen or Gwen witnessing this. [I didn't mean it.]
[I DO NOT UNDERSTAND]
[I was angry.]
[YOU WERE ANGRY AT ME?]
[No,] Ianto replied, realising only as he thought it that it was actually true. [I thought I was, but not really.]
[YOU ARE STILL ANGRY]
[Yes, I am.]
[WHY?]
[It's complicated.] Ianto paused for a moment and drank more coffee. Somehow having this conversation in his own mind made him want to be honest, even though he was talking to a being he didn't understand, whom he didn't want there in the first place. [Mostly, I'm afraid. It's easier to be angry than afraid.]
[I'M AFRAID, TOO] It was, too. Ianto could feel it. The sort of sick, helpless fear that left one shaking and unable to act.
[I am sorry,] Ianto thought.
[ME TOO]
[For what?] Ianto asked, confused.
[FOR MAKING YOU AFRAID]
Ianto felt something clench inside his chest. [Maybe we can help each other not be afraid,] he thought. The voice didn't answer, but he felt a sense of agreement and relief from the Archive. He took another drink.
“Will you help us?” he said aloud. Owen heaved a sigh that said as clearly as words, finally, stopped tapping his fingers and straightened up.
[YES, I WILL HELP YOU] the Archive said through Ianto's mouth.
“Oh, thank God,” Gwen said.
“We need to know about a virus,” Owen said. “It's highly communicable, seems to affect all species of animal, and converts them into an organic facsimile of clockwork machinery. Torchwood London knew about it, but we can't access their file on it. You're the Torchwood London archive— can you give us the information we need to cure it?”
[NOT AT THIS TIME]
“What do you mean?”
[ALL RESOURCES CURRENTLY ALLOCATED TO BASIC LIFE SUPPORT FUNCTIONS. ACCESS TO DATABASES TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED UNTIL FULL CAPABILITIES RESTORED]
“And what does that mean, exactly?”
[IT MEANS I AM DYING. I DON'T HAVE THE . . . FOOD I NEED TO DO ANYTHING BUT SURVIVE. SOON EVEN THAT WILL NOT BE ENOUGH.]
Ianto drained the third cup guiltily. He felt the presence jump to the front of his consciousness and his sight of Gwen and Owen dimmed for a moment and then returned. The sense of the Archive remained strong, though, and he got the feeling it had deliberately backed off and let him retain control of his body. Perhaps they were both learning how to share.
Gwen frowned. “Is it just me, or is it getting more . . . human?”
“So if we can find the chemicals you need, you'll be able to access that information again?”
[CORRECT. HOWEVER, DISCOVERY IS NOT REQUIRED. THE NECESSARY CHEMICALS CAN BE SYNTHESISED USING TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EARTH TECHNOLOGY]
“Well, that's good to know. Ianto, can I ask it what it needs and how to make it while we have it awake? We can talk about options after.”
“That's fine,” he said. He ignored the way his gut churned at what that meant and tried to put it out of his mind to deal with later. As Owen and the Archive began a completely unintelligible discussion about biochemistry, though, he realised he had an easier solution. After one or two false starts he figured out how to voluntarily retreat from his own mind, leaving the Archive in control of his body. The blackness, when it rolled over him, was a relief.
Owen made his way back up to the lab and began making a list. He was grateful for the obsessive planning of the last Torchwood scientist. Down in the lower levels were three huge storerooms full of chemicals and alien compounds that could be used at any time. It meant he wouldn’t have to go out into the chaos above to find anything he needed.
The storerooms were three large stone rooms connected by doorways. Shelves upon shelves of equipment and chemicals and compounds and concoctions lined the walls, with a large square metal table in the centre of each room.
Down in the dim fluorescent light of the storerooms, Owen let his thoughts wash over him. He hoped this would work. And what if it didn’t? What if the medicine he was making wasn’t strong enough? What if it took too long to work? What if the information the Archive had was useless?
That last thought was the one that terrified him the most. Despite their success with so many other crazy aliens and circumstances, this virus was a ticking time bomb, and it was almost about to blow. They didn’t have the time or the resources to discover what was wrong if there wasn’t the adequate amount of information within Torchwood London’s archive.
He wandered about the shelves, gathering what he needed and placing it in a box on the table in the centre of the room. Then he hauled it all back up to the lab and got started.
It really wasn’t hard to get everything made. The most difficult part about it was measuring everything perfectly, and the fact that two of the chemicals couldn’t be mixed together without being mixed with something else first, otherwise they’d explode. Which was not something he wanted to deal with, not on top of everything else. But in the end, he had something he was pretty certain would work. Sucking the little device into a syringe and capping it with a needle, Owen took it down to Ianto, who was sat in his desk chair again, attempting to do research.
Owen was wearing an expression Ianto hadn't seen often before— serious, concerned, sympathetic. He imagined it was the one Owen had developed as a professional mask, for when he had to explain diagnoses and prognoses to his patients. It made Ianto distinctly uncomfortable.
“I've successfully determined how to produce the nutrients the Archive needs to survive,” Owen explained. “The bad news is, I won't be able to develop an oral formulation. The chemicals will need to be synthesised on an ongoing basis from caffeine and paraxanthine, using your own neurochemicals as catalysts. I'll need to inject a small device into your spinal cord.”
“So what does that mean, exactly?”
“It means that, if we do this, it'll be permanent. The device will continuously produce the nutrients the Archive needs, and it won't be retrievable.”
Ianto stood up and walked to the windows that overlooked the main part of the Hub. “So what are my options?”
“Well, either we do the procedure, at which point the Archive should be fully healthy again and self-sustaining, or we don't. In which case, it dies and you're free of it, but...”
“But we don't get the answers we need to save Tosh or anyone else.” Owen didn't answer and Ianto stared out past the glass, gaze unfocussed. He'd already made this decision once. And if it were just him he had to consider, he'd make the same one again. Sharing his mind for short bursts was one thing, but if he agreed to this he'd never be alone in his own thoughts again.
He looked down to where Tosh sat in front of her computer, unmoving except for the mechanic click of her finger on the mouse. Her clothes hung oddly on her frame, distorted by lumps and angles that had no place on a human body. He sighed. “I don't have much of a choice, do I? How soon can we do it?”
Owen rose and came to stand next to him. “We can start prep immediately.” He paused. “Are you sure? You'll be stuck with it forever, mate.”
Ianto didn't want to stop and think about it again— he was afraid he'd lose his nerve. At least he'd found some sort of common ground with the Archive, so the whole situation wasn't quite as repulsive as it had been, but he still didn't want it. “Yes, I'm sure,” he said. He looked over and met Owen's eyes. “I'll do it. For Tosh.”
“Ready for a first try?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Ianto followed him down into the medbay. Owen gloved up as Ianto lay down on the table. After rubbing iodine on the area just below the base of his skull, he positioned the needle.
“Just a little pinch,” Owen told him, and slid the needle in, pushing the plunger down. They waited.
“Anything?”
“It’s been five seconds, Owen. Give it a little while. You’re the doctor; you should know chemical absorption takes a little longer than that.”
Owen sighed. He didn’t like waiting. He didn’t like the nervous jitters in his belly that waiting gave him. He didn’t like not knowing. He hated this time crunch. Ianto’s face stilled for a moment, frowning.
“Ianto?”
“It…says it’s getting stronger. Says the chemicals are working.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it seems like we’re going to have to wait. It still sounds weak.”
Owen sat down and kicked his feet up on the desk to wait. Hardly a minute later, he was drumming his fingers on the tabletop impatiently.
“Stop it.”
“Make it work faster.”
“I can’t. Besides, you’re annoying.”
“You know I live to irritate you.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. Owen tapped the desk again, just for good measure. It was nice to interact in a more normal way. No angry yelling or frantic fear or oddly melancholy confessions. Just banter.
Ianto tried not to get distracted by Owen's impatient fidgeting— and the knowing smirk that accompanied it. Something about the way the Archive felt was different, but he couldn't put his finger on what. He got up from the table, ignoring a frown from Owen, and started wandering round the room.
“And you yelled at me for being annoying? Sit down; you're making me dizzy.”
“I didn't yell,” Ianto said, just to get to him.
“You know what I meant.”
When Ianto didn't answer, Owen sighed theatrically and began kicking at his bin, just hard enough to make a hollow clang echo off the tiles. The anxiety bubbling like acid in Ianto's stomach seemed to increase with every repetition of the noise. Finally, he stalked over, picked up the bin and moved it just out of reach of Owen's foot. “If I sit, will you stop that?” he asked.
“Sure.” Owen leant back and put his hands behind his head.
Ianto rolled his eyes and sat back down on the table.
The presence in his mind grew stronger, and as it did Ianto realised that it felt more there somehow— that was the difference. More cohesive, richer, more in control. A qualitative difference, not just a quantitative one.
[THANK YOU,] it said, a wave of genuine gratitude accompanying the words and, for the first time, actually colouring its tone.
[You're welcome,] Ianto thought. And aloud, “Can you access the information now?”
[YES.] It used his mouth without him having to think about it, and Ianto felt a burst of alarm like vertigo at feeling his body out of his own control. As soon as it was done speaking, though, before he stumbled into actual panic, the Archive retreated. He licked his lips, just to be sure.
“And?” Owen asked eagerly.
[WAIT. SOMETHING SEEMS TO BE WRONG.]
“Wrong?” Ianto asked, voice going embarrassingly high.
[THE PROBLEM ISN'T MEDICAL. I'M SORRY TO ALARM YOU. I CAN ONLY ACCESS PART OF THE DATA I SHOULD BE ABLE TO, AND WHAT I HAVE IS FRAGMENTARY.]
Ianto felt slightly disorientated as information and images began flashing through a corner of his mind, faster than he could register them.
“What's causing it?” Owen asked.
[I DON'T KNOW.] The Archive sounded frustrated. [I AM QUICKLY RETURNING TO FULL HEALTH AND FUNCTIONALITY. NOTHING SHOULD BE PREVENTING RECALL OF THE INFORMATION STORED IN MY DATABASES.]
“Wait,” Ianto said. “So you're saying you can't help us?” He'd done this for nothing? He found himself gasping for breath as his pulse starting pounding in his ears. He was stuck like this forever, and they weren't even going to be able to save Tosh?
[I'M SORRY,] the Archive said inside his mind, the words anguished. [I NEVER MEANT FOR THIS TO HAPPEN. I'LL FIND A WAY TO FIX IT.]
“Could the data have been corrupted because of the malnourishment?” Owen asked.
[THAT SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE. I'M A HYBRID OF ORGANIC LIFE AND BIOELECTRONICS. THE DATA IS STORED IN SOLID-STATE MEMORY IN THE BIOELECTRONIC MATRIX, AND THE MALNOURISHMENT WOULD ONLY AFFECT MY ORGANIC FUNCTIONS: RECALL, PROCESSING, COGNITION. ESSENTIALLY, MY . . . SELF. NOT THE DATA.]
The Archive spoke through his mouth easily. Somehow switching between him talking and it talking had become automatic, requiring no more thought than it usually took for him to differentiate between speaking and thinking.
“But you could access the information before? Before you got sick?”
[I WASN'T A FULLY DISCRETE CONSCIOUSNESS BEFORE. I WAS NEVER DESIGNED TO BE SEPARATE.]
“What were you designed for?” Owen asked.
[I AM . . . UNIQUE. I HAVE ACCESS TO MUCH OF THE FILE THAT DESCRIBES MY DESIGN, BUT WE DEVIATED FROM THE PLAN LONG AGO.]
Ianto tried to pay attention to what Owen and the Archive were saying. This was his life now, after all; he needed to understand it. But terror and rage were still fighting for dominance, obscuring his reason and his capacity to care about technological puzzles.
[MY BIOLOGICAL ANCESTORS, THE ARTANDEX, ARE SYMBIOTIC LIFEFORMS THAT GROW IN THE BRAINS OF THE STEIGETS. THEY PROVIDE THEIR HOSTS WITH MODERATE TELEPATHY AND THE ABILITY TO RETAIN SENSORY RACIAL MEMORIES ACROSS GENERATIONS IN RETURN FOR NOURISHMENT AND PROTECTION. BOTH SPECIES ARE EXTREMELY SOCIAL AND THE SYMBIOTIC PAIRS BECOME SO INTERDEPENDENT THAT BY ADULTHOOD NO DISTINCTION CAN BE MADE BETWEEN THEIR MINDS.
[THE ORIGIN OF MY COMPUTER ELEMENTS IS THE TORCHWOOD MAINFRAME, A SEMISENTIENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. I WAS MEANT TO BE TEMPORARILY INCUBATED IN A HUMAN BRAIN UNTIL I WAS ABLE TO BE SELF-SUFFICIENT, THEN INSTALLED INTO THE MAINFRAME WITH THE GOAL OF FULLY INTEGRATING WITH IT AND PROVIDING IT WITH A HIGHER LEVEL OF SELF-DIRECTED INTELLEGENCE AND THE CAPACITY FOR INTUITIVE THOUGHT. BUT THE DESTRUCTION OF TORCHWOOD LONDON OCCURED BEFORE THEY COULD REMOVE ME FROM THE HOST THAT INCUBATED ME—IANTO.]
That did catch Ianto's attention. “So you're not even supposed to be here? In my head, I mean?”
[EXACTLY. I WAS EXPERIMENTAL TO BEGIN WITH—I WAS THEIR THIRD ATTEMPT AT A PROTOTYPE, AND THE FIRST TWO FAILED— AND WE LONG SINCE EXCEEDED THE PARAMETERS OF THE EXPERIMENT. I HAVE GROWN MUCH FURTHER INTO YOUR BRAIN THAN THEY EVER PREDICTED WOULD BE POSSIBLE.]
Ianto gagged at the mental image that sentence called up.
The Archive responded privately, [THAT BOTHERS YOU? THAT I'M PHYSICALLY PRESENT?]
[Yes,] Ianto thought back with a shudder. [Brains are private. And sensitive. The thought of having something in mine is . . . horrible. On an involuntary, instinctive level.]
[THERE ARE NO OTHER SPECIES THAT NATURALLY LIVE IN THE HUMAN BRAIN?]
[Nothing that doesn't kill you. Or make you agonisingly insane.]
[THIS EXPLAINS MANY OF YOUR REACTIONS THAT CONFUSED ME BEFORE.]
And hurt its feelings, Ianto realised, as strange as that sounded. [I really can't help it. It's not you; it's the thought of something alive in my head.]
[I WILL TRY NOT TO REMIND YOU.]
“What happened to the two that failed?” Owen asked, and Ianto realised with surprise that the exchange between the Archive and himself had taken less than a second. The speed of thought. It bothered him that it was getting that easy.
[I CAN'T FIND THE DATA ON THOSE EXPERIMENTS]
“Probably just as well,” Owen muttered.
The catwalk rattled as Gwen came into the autopsy bay. “Owen?”
“What?”
Ianto looked up. Gwen swayed slightly where she stood and clutched the railing for balance. Her face was sallow and drawn.
“I have a fever,” she said.
Go To Part 5
