The Mind of The Daleks

Chapter 28: Future

"It's very odd that we didn't notice earlier - but it must have been because we disconnected the GPS!" the Doctor observed as he plopped into the driver's seat and started the car. "Do you still have that MP3 player, Isabel?"

"Yeah," Isabel sighed and pulled it out of her pocket.

It flickered on and she winced, assailed by a barrage of computer chatter – pointless programming language and only the occasional snatch of almost indecipherable music. It hadn't been made for communication, however, so at least it didn't say hello. She had the feeling that she was talking to it somehow though, and sure enough soon found a file full of confused, stream-of-consciousness junk from her own mind.

"Is it the same effect?" the Doctor asked, glancing over curiously as he drove.

"Yeah." Isabel turned off the MP3 player and put it back in her pocket, cutting the deathly noise off into living silence. "So tell me; what do I do? And what happened? And how long is this going to last?

"I think," said the Doctor slowly, "that this was probably caused by those new neural connections. But the brain isn't designed to do some things. Forming memories is one of the things that a brain should do, even if they are unusually clear and in great quantity. Linking to a computer is not. The very onslaught of the Dalek computer forcing you to work within it created, I should think, a whole new set of neural transmitters and receptors that are extremely sensitive to the electrical signals sent out by computers." He looked directly at her, his sad blue eyes visible in the brief light of a street lamp. "And I'm very much afraid, Isabel, that neural transmitters never completely go away. The neural pathways of your mind that form memories may heal and almost return to normal, but I very much doubt if you will ever stop hearing computers."

Isabel looked straight ahead, her mouth set in a grim line. "The world is full of computers; they're everywhere and there are only going to be more in the future. So am I just supposed to go through life constantly hearing them? And depositing my thoughts straight into anything with a chip in it?"

"Well," the Doctor suggested, "you'll probably get used to the noise, just as you get used to crowds or to traffic. And with a bit of care you could learn to control what you tell a computer - and in any case you should take care in touching them, because that seems to be your method of - er - interfacing with them. But don't be discouraged! Not so long from now, only a couple of hundred years or so, all sorts of people will start to get direct links to their computers. Just think of yourself as ahead of the fashion!"

Isabel gave a short laugh. "Ahead of the fashion? I'll be dead by the time the trend even starts!"

"And in the meantime, you could easily make very good use of it. Think of it, Isabel; you may never have to Google anything again!"

"And that's the only consolation prize you can offer? I might never have to Google anything again? Suddenly, I don't even have to reach out to have a whole world of information at my fingertips – it'll just come pouring into my brain, uninvited. And, as if that wasn't enough, for the next few weeks anything that comes in won't be going out – it's stuck! After that – I'll never be free of computers. It'll never be quiet."

"Well," the Doctor remarked encouragingly, "at least you won't be much worse off than many of your contemporaries. You could, in fact, think of yourself as the ultimate product of the information age. Everyone else in this country, and others like it, is constantly surrounded by a mass of raw information that they never hope to understand. Your predicament is simply the next step."

"That's kind of like telling somebody who just died that there are millions of others with cancer."

"Or," the Doctor remarked seriously, "like telling a teenager that there are millions of children."

"So, my 'predicament' is a growth?"

"A natural progression, shall we say?"

"I thought you didn't like computers."

"I don't." The Doctor smiled slightly. "But they do tend to grow until they fill every corner of the society that built them. From the portable IPod, the next step is implanted chips, and so on."

"And after that, Daleks?" asked Isabel, crossing her arms.

"Well, only if that step is chosen. Even in the direst of circumstances, many societies don't choose to take it. But think, Isabel; a computer is made in imitation of a living mind. It's natural that eventually the experiment of combining technology and biology will be tried. Your own culture, indeed, has started to experiment on those lines."

"Oh," Isabel mocked, "so, since some part of the culture's doing that, you thought it would be fine to wire me into an alien war computer?"

The Doctor sighed with a faint edge of exasperation.

"Yeah. I'm still ticked off about that. I don't really care about having a photographic memory for two weeks or being in tune with every computer around. But you didn't have a right to do what you did!"

"If there had been any other way, I would have taken it!" the Doctor exploded, as energetically defensive as a child. "There was no time for anything else; I had no choice!"

"I said I had no choice when I killed Mackenzie..." Isabel's voice caught. "I guess I deserved it, then?"

"No." The Doctor gave a sideways glance. "I told you, if I hadn't exhausted every other option I would never have considered-"

"Oh, you'd already considered it! And don't try to tell me you didn't, because that's a lie! Even if it was only a last resort. But why? What put it into your head?"

"Well, you see," the Doctor replied, looking straight ahead under his heavy fringe of hair, "that was all your dream's doing."

"My dream!"

"Yes. To have dreamt about the Daleks before having ever seen or heard of them meant that there must have been some sort of link between you. A link, in fact, that transcended time and with deep - even psychic - affects. And as I said before, you have the sort of intelligence that the Daleks like to use. And when we saw what they had contrived with their controller – well! I thought it was just possible that the most effective way to hack into their system would be through someone like you."

"But the Daleks don't time travel. How could I dream about them in the past, before I ever had any sort of link to them? How is that possible?"

"Well, the Daleks will discover a way to time travel. They're very clever."

"I know."

"And if you were connected to their computer, you would leave little bits of yourself in it and it would leave little bits of itself in you. In a sense, you see (but only in a very small way - nothing to worry about) you would remain linked because of these mutual contributions. So when the Daleks do time travel – or if you do – it might result even in something so odd and so ordinary as your dream. Time travel is a very unpredictable thing, you know."

"But, wait a minute," said Isabel slowly; "does that mean that my dream was a prediction of something that will happen in the future, or what?"

"That's a very difficult thing to tell, Isabel," the Doctor replied. "It could be almost anything; a prophecy of the future, a memory of the past, an echo of something happening millions of miles away. Or just your own fantasy."

The realization made Isabel's stomach sink. 

Connected to the Daleks?

What else might she know?