Genesis Of The Doctor - A Doctor Who Story

07 - Coordinates

The silence was astonishing. Encountering pure soundlessness made the girl appreciate a lifetime living with the constant background hum of machinery.

The next thing she noticed was the cold. When the instantaneous matter transporter (or "transmat") had deposited her inside the walls of the Northern Time Node towering far above the planet's surface she had expected it to be warm inside but instead it seemed to be almost as cold as the space outside. She stepped off the transmat pad and looked around the small atrium surrounding her: its walls appeared to be made of an oily black plastic moulded into an irregular jumble of bumps, spikes and tendrils. Shivering, the girl moved towards a plain metal inner door inset into the wall facing her and took a deep breath of freezing air. She wondered to herself, "There's no heating but there is light and air. Weird."

"Better move fast," she instructed herself as she checked where to go next. Bringing a digital compad that could have been traced was a risk so instead the girl had brought a sketched layout of the Time Node on a paper scroll. "Up and left," she said. She realised that she was talking to herself to belay the fear that she felt rising within.

Facing the door she consulted her sketched schematic again before typing a code into a digital keypad. The door opened with a hiss, revealing itself to be almost as thick as it was wide. It opened on to an elevator chamber, walls and ceiling covered with the same black tendrils. The girl took the lift straight up the tower and after a few seconds it came to a smooth stop, its doors opening out onto a spiral staircase. "So far so good," muttered the girl and began to climb.

On the planet's surface, far below the great tower of the Northern Time Node, Borusa sat at a pale-green multi-faceted computer console covered with many glowing switches and dials. The console dominated the otherwise featureless tiny booth in which it sat, acting as its sole light source. Borusa's cubicle was surrounded by many other identical booths, all containing Time Lords hunched over their own consoles, intent on their own pursuits.

Borusa started as a quiet alarm chimed and a holographic display lit up above the console showing the girl as she ascended the stairs within the Time Node. Borusa leaned through the hologram to reach a control and covered it with his palm, shutting off the alarm and extinguishing the display.

He looked furtively around him but no one had noticed him or paid him the slightest attention. He got up and left the booth and the control room, his task completed.

The girl continued up the red carpeted steps after walking for much longer than she had been expecting. The walls to left and right were composed of the same oily black textured surface that she had encountered in the atrium, punctuated by small portholes displaying the blackness of space outside. Overhead, dim white light blocks provided just enough illumination for the girl to make out the floor below her feet. Doors would appear to her left and right but she ignored them and carried on climbing upwards through the gloom. She realised with some satisfaction that the exercise had warmed her up and she no longer felt the cold.

Reaching the top of the staircase the girl came to a small landing with three doors. She consulted her hand-written schematic to decide on her next move. Her notes indicated that she should choose the door in front of her but she decided instead to push against the door to her left with her shoulder to see what was inside. It opened easily.

Inside, the small room turned out to be a musty, darkened store cupboard packed with various tools and cleaning products. Always on the lookout for useful kit, she rifled through a box marked "sonic tools" and pocketed a hammer, a lance and a shiny silver screwdriver. "You never know when a screwdriver might come in handy," she observed.

Conscious that she was wasting precious time, she pushed open the door again and took the second door from the landing, entering a large, well-illuminated spherical room. A central column went from floor to ceiling. The walls were again made of the oily black material but here many of the tendrils extended into the room sprouting from the walls and formed a network linking a number of glowing elliptical pods. The tendrils themselves were pulsing with light and reminded the girl of the neurons of a brain.

She took a small white ring-like device from her pocket, selected a tendril at random and fastened the device around it. She consulted a simple mechanical timepiece on her wrist and then whistled to herself while she sat down to wait.

After what felt like a long time waiting, she picked herself up and started to jog around and around the room in an attempt to warm herself back up again. She blew on her hands and slapped them together to keep the circulation going. As she was doing this a chime from the device attached around the tendril indicated that it had collected the spatiotemporal coordinates she had come for. She detached part of the device and then headed back along the way she had come, her own task complete.