A Tragedy of Time Lords

Chapter 1

The burnt umber of the sunset never looked so cold. It seemed an ice cube had taken the place of the sun. But instead of burning ice blue in the sky, some kindly star deigned to glance through it as if to light the world within. ‘You will not chill this world,’ it said, while the ghostly rays, sponged of all heat, only managed to flicker on the landscape in a mockery of warmth.

Tecteun mentally brushed it aside. She was used to Shebogan summer suns. She was late and that was all that mattered. It was bad enough being drawn away from her research compound, being so far from the city, but the academy campus was so dull. She got out of the tube, climbed the stairs of the station, ignoring a beggar on the street, and walked across the green to the admin building.

She passed a group of doctors hanging about the steps. ‘What? Why are these things here?’ she thought in disgust. The doctors were a sort of low-level species that barely had any culture and hardly spoke at all, except in a low vocabulary drawl. ‘Where’s the campus police when you need them? Despicable blighters,’ she thought and thought of a wash. They mostly did menial tasks of the lifting, shoveling, and pushing variety. ‘Why are those things allowed around a research institution as this?’ she interrogated herself. ‘They are hardly useful, and that only for experimentation.’

The cold sun blinked out. A gold glow came from the sky and bathed the distant hills.

Absent mindedly, she tweaked the nose of the bronze statue in front of the building as she climbed the stairs as was tradition among students for centuries. She was Gallifrey, the Goddess of Entropy. And she had a bright, shiny nose.

She entered the building.

On the fifth floor of the academy the gathering had mostly gathered already, Tecteun excepted, and were in danger of starting without her. There was nothing they liked better than turning time on its head.

Omega would be there. Well, he would have been there first, of course. He liked being the first to every goalpost, whether he was about to score or not. Keep an eye on that one. Numerous chairs of numerous departments filled with numerous heads were also there, an assortment of other academic luminaries, research assistants, librarians, and the usual hangers-on, and… oh, right. And then there was Rassilon. Keep an eye on that one. Or however many eyes your species possesses.

“Researcher Tecteun,” said a voice from the vicinity of the podium.

“Time Master Omega,” she said and was surprised to be recognized by the chair at all let alone while squirrelling in, late, through the back door, in the dark.

“I am glad you are here.”

“Sir?” Suspicion rising.

“We have just been discussing the latest experiments with the rift.”

“The time rift. Curse it. They want to talk about that?” She thought.

“That’s not really my expertise,” is what she said out loud.

“You think not but you might be surprised.”

“Oh?”

She was hardly interested in the time rift. She was by hearts a researcher, which means breaking things apart so she can see how they were put together in the first place, her tools basically a hammer and a bigger hammer. It was hard to break apart time.

“I was about to show this to the group. Let me show you, as well,” a holoimage spouted from the viewer before each member seated at the table. She took her seat as the video mushroom clouds erupted, showing each one seated at the table his own perspective. Tecteun’s perspective was…, puzzling.

“Sir?” she again intoned. Coming from her mouth it generally meant, ‘I don’t trust you.’ Ignoring the intonation, if he observed it at all, Omega continued.

“What you are looking at is an asteroid in the constellation of Kasterborous.” Kasterborous was both a star and a constellation. Ancient mariners had fancied that ink blot of stars in the northern sky looked like a household oil lamp of their day with the flame of the lamp, the star Kasterberous, almost precisely aligned over the planet’s north pole. Every child knew Kasterberous and her brother stars; Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, etc.; and how to use them to find true north. There was an old saying, ‘When lost, use Kasterborous to light your way home.’

“That must be…,” she did some back-brain calculations. “Fifty light years away from here.”

“That’s about right.”

“Looks pretty desolate.” She peered at the image. “Why are we interested in a cold rock in a distant constellation?”

“Because that cold rock caught our attention several years ago.”

“Oh? How?”

“We first noticed it because of some strange energy the constellation was emitting.”

“The constellation?”

“Yes. About ten years ago it seemed to blink on like a signpost in the sky.”

“What did it say?”

“Nothing we could interpret. It went out almost as quickly. We started monitoring the whole region of the sky. Intermittently the energy would resume, which allowed us to track it down to one star, one particular planetary orbit, one region, then one asteroid following in the planet’s path.”

“Sounds almost engineered.”

“Exactly what we thought. It might be some sort of research facility safely segregated from the home world.”

Now Tecteun was fascinated. A research facility on its own asteroid? Completely isolated from any other living influence or interference from pesky ethics review boards? A bigger hammer indeed.

Omega continued, “The nature of the energy is what caught our attention and compelled us to investigate further.”

“Nature? What about the energy? Energy is just electro-magnetism, right?”

“Apparently not always.” She looked at him with a face that said, ‘What are you talking about,’ but her mouth beat her to it.

“It does not have any of the signatures of any sort of energy we have ever encountered anywhere.”

“That’s a lot of any’s.”

“Indeed.”

“Are you saying this is an entirely new natural phenomenon governed by new laws of nature?”
“Quite possibly.”

“And it just blinked on in a neighboring constellation?”

“Apparently so.”

“And we just happened to detect it?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Ah, now that’s the interesting part. Since this ‘new’ energy wouldn’t show up on any spectroscope or through any other form of detection, it was pretty much invisible.”

“Except? It was obviously observed somehow. A billboard saying ‘Eat at Joe’s’ isn’t much use in the dark.”

“Except for the effect it had on the time rift.” The time rift again. That was a natural phenomenon discovered on this planet. One that Omega had made his special study. Time did confusing things around the rift, but as of yet he had discovered no rules that governed it nor techniques to guide it to his will. He continued, “It caused time to flicker.”

“Flicker. You mean like clocks went back and forth?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. We have been noticing time flickers around the rift where our machines will-how can I say it? The time that the instrument is operating in just flickers once in a while.”

“Like a candle? The instrument goes forwards and backwards in time?”

“We have suspected that there is some sort of time energy emanating from the rift and that the flicker is its result. This confirmed it.”

“Does it affect anything else?”

He hesitated. “Nobody dares look into the rift.”

“And you saw the same thing from this asteroid?”

“Yes. This source was much stronger making it easier to measure. Artron made the connection, actually.”

“Fascinating.”

“And we would like you to head up the expedition to discover all you can about it.”

“Me? Why not Artron herself?”

“Artron will oversee your progress and duplicate your results here.” And take the credit, she surmised.

“Yes, sir,” she said in her most unironic voice.

“We have configured an RD to take you there. You will be leaving in the morning.”

“I’m… overwhelmed.”

“You can inspect the craft to insure you have all the necessary equipment to evaluate whatever you find. Meet the crew.”

Choose the quarters with the best view. This whole thing disturbed her. Notwithstanding the haste of the adventure, it seemed cartoonish in its utter lack of preparation. Why the hurry? Why now? They’ve known about this for years, he had said. Why the rush? And another thing…

“Is the system inhabited?” she asked.

“Kasterborous? Not at all.”

“Then what are we looking for? How do we know it’s not just another time rift like the one on this planet?”

“We don’t know and we won’t know until you go there and look at it. Then you can tell us what you find.”

“Terrific,” now she knew she was being set up. “One more thing, the planet. The one that the asteroid is following? What is it called?”

“Gallifrey.”

Chapter 2

Entropy is the killer of all. Every sentient creature knows this, to their chagrin. It’s only those who are conscious of the moment and nothing else who are eternal. Tecteun’s people knew this and had come to their grudging peace with it. Peace, but not acceptance. The presence of a time rift, which for millennia had provided fodder for god spawning and hero creation, being the source of every fairy glade and enchanted spring, every entrance to the underworld and every subject of ‘Once upon a time’ ever written, was now under the imaginative and instrumental mythology of science. Big hammer had come for old myth.

Entropy cannot be reversed, but perhaps it can be persuaded to slow down, pause even. That was the best they could come up with. The result, their Relative Dimensions capsule, the craft Tecteun was now about to inspect, allowed them to travel at superluminal speed. Actually, time was not running at all, so their RD machines were traveling at unlimited kilometers per zero seconds. Technically it did not violate laws of nature while actually insulting all of them at once. They had to rewrite ten thousand years of mathematics and physics and still couldn’t make it work, so they just chalked it up to, ‘Don’t ask, it works,’ and left it to the philosophers to sus out.

“Romana!” Rassilon himself came to see her off.

“Ah, Provost Rassilon.”

“I was hoping to have a word with you before you left.”

“Very kind of you, Sir.”

“You can skip the formality, Romana. And I know what ‘Sir’ means to you.” Her blush was slight but sincere. So was her smile. “How long do you think you will be away?” he said, changing the subject.

“If it is a standard field study? Two years, maybe more if I get lucky and find something. Less if I get luckier and find nothing.”

“Don’t count on it. I think Omega has other ideas.”

“When doesn’t he?”

“Do you remember the Epsilon expedition?”

“To the outer rim? That was-what? Twenty years ago? Quite the tragedy as I remember.”
“Hmm. What do you remember about it?”

“Only that it was an expedition to the outer solar system to establish a research colony away from the solar wind. That’s all.”

“And what happened to it?”

“Everyone knows that. The colony was destroyed due to an explosion. Something about methane leaking from the planet and the colony’s oxygen supply, which was not a factor in the planet’s evolution until we came along, factoring into everything we touch, as always.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Of course I believe it! I believe whatever comes with grant money.”

“Of course. But really?”

“Of course not. I suppose you are going to tell me what really happened to it?”

“Omega needed a place he could conduct his own research.”

“In time mechanics?”

“Yes.”

“And he wanted to make sure he could do so without interference?”

“He published a story about the facility’s destruction, then quietly kept it in operation for the past twenty years.”

“I wish I had thought of that. But why go to all that trouble?”

“He has spent his whole life studying the rift. And not just studying. He’s looked into it more than any other person.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Mostly superstitious, but dangerous? Yes. It’s dangerous also.”

“So I’ve heard. How dangerous is it, exactly?”

“It effects a man’s mind. That’s why there are so many rumors about the rift and how it drives people mad. Heroes of old turned to stone. Sinners looking at the face of god driven mad.”

“Nobody over 12 believes them.”

“Sure. They’re just children’s stories and doctor tales. But we still avoid the dark forest.”

“The Time Beast?” Every child knew that boogie man.

“If you will.”

“I know Omega is the patron saint of paranoia. This just showcases it. But to cover up the destruction of a research facility so it can be his own personal chemistry set? Why not just do it out in the open? He basically controls all funding for the Academy.”

“Omega wanted his research to be entirely restricted.”

“Well, that’s like him, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“What did he want it for?” she said. Rassilon must want something. He wouldn’t be telling her this for nothing.

“Omega has been staring into the void for all his life. Since he was a child. And it whispers to him. He calls it the Untempered Schism and he claims it shows him things. It speaks to him.”

She noticed that he failed to answer the question.

“And does it tell him to dominate the universe?”

“What would insanity be without it?”

“At least he’s not pulling wings off of flies.”

“Yet,”

“If this has been going on for years, what does he want now? And what does he want from me?”

“Omega believes he can rule over time and in the process create a new race. A race of Time Lords.”

“Time Lords? A bit pretentious, don’t you think? I prefer my petri dish and gene splicer, thank you.”

“Which is exactly what he wants you for. Omega believes that this new energy that Artron has discovered can be manipulated to allow full mastery of time, not just hopping on and off the subway while it is stopped at the platform and catching a free ride to anywhere and anywhen.”
“And he thinks I can help him? Remember me. I’m the geneticist?”

“The rift we have on this world is much too small to do more than just show what’s possible. The past, the present, the future.”

“And drive someone insane? Yes, I got that part.”

“That, too. But he has found some useful things in the process.”

“Experimentation, yes. But it’s mostly theoretical.”

“And he has been able to create a few working models.”

She was familiar with Omega’s ‘demonstrations.’ They were mostly eighth grade paper mache volcanoes.

“Proof of concept. OK.”

“He needs more of it to make anything useful.”

“And this Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous and its asteroid research facility? This is going to help him to gain this mastery?”

“He hopes so, yes.”

“Why not just open up about it? Why the secrecy?”

“Omega is trying to create a new society, but not just that. He hopes to create a new empire. Time Lords to rule the universe and any other universes that might exist.”

“That’s insane.”

“All scientists and statesmen are insane.”

“And so are all lunatics.”

“The best ones are. The rest are more pragmatic. Can you see that no one would go along with a scheme like this? By pretending to study time and improve our ability to travel great distances in space and time he is portraying our destiny as peaceful.”

“Wise and peaceful Time Lords whizzing around through space and time?”

“To look but not interfere.”

“Time tourists? Can’t wait for the T-shirts. Wouldn’t the temptation to interfere be too great? We couldn’t pretend to be time travelers looking for a better way to teach history?”

“No, we couldn’t. And yes, the temptation would be too great.”

“And you’re trying to recruit me to help stop him?” Rassilon hesitated for just a beat. “You can’t approve of what Omega is doing, can you?” she added. He moved his hand as if to hush her.

“Omega thinks he is doing what is right for our people.”

“By building a race of Time Wranglers?”

“He won’t go along with the ‘Wise Observer’ role.”

“No time bureaucrats? No living history?”

“No.”

“Why haven’t I heard anything about this before?”

“It’s been a secret observation,”

“Secret? And now it’s not?

“Well, it’s been unofficial. We didn’t want to let it become general knowledge.”

“It exists unofficially? But officially it’s not there?” She was liking this less and less the more she heard.

He nodded his head. “Another DNE academic program.”

“DNE?”

“Does Not Exist.”

“No, of course not. No need letting the other senior researchers in on the juicy bits until you can’t get along without them…”

“Now, Romana…”

“…Or you can control them with your superiority.” Now he looked like he was hearing something treasonous and feared he was being recorded. “So. You’ll just send me in on a shoestring budget. Hush, hush, you know. It’s a secret. Let’s see what she finds out. And if I find anything important. Well. This needs a formal study. We’d better form an official investigation. Fully funded. Department approved. And all that. You’ll just send in the big guns, is that it? No need for minor, unofficial investigators to get in the way. Run along now, Romana.”

“Romana,”

“Don’t Romana me.”

“All I am saying is to be aware of his intentions.”

“I think I’ve been around the block enough to know that.”

“And let me know first if you find anything interesting.” Finally, there it was. He wanted a spy. She just looked at him. “And don’t trust anybody,” he finished and walked away.

That was a lesson she could always use a refresher in.

Rassilon had given her more to ponder on her way, though there would be no space or time in, or during, with which to ponder anything. Space travel was like that. Romana Rosalinda Susan Tecteun didn’t like modern travel. It was that whole, click your fingers and you’re there, bit that gave her the willies. Like one of the good fairies in old fairy tales. What, no time for the safety speech? It was too much like dividing by zero. And her decidedly greater than zero mind would have none of that. What was going on in the interim? There had to be something. The part where she wasn’t there when everything else around her was whizzing about at theoretical light speed? Divided by zero, that is. Taking no time at all? That part. It wasn’t natural. She couldn’t help but feel that people were talking about her behind her back.

“Idris,” she said to the Helmsman to give herself something to do.

“Yes, Mum?” she said, likewise.

“Where are we, exactly?”

“Gallifrey. In the constellation of Kasterborous.” The goddess of Entropy. Also of fixed places, tables, and obstacles. Some said she was the goddess of annoyance. “Well, actually an asteroid in the orbit of the star Kasterborous and a little bit behind it.”

“So we just got here.”

“Yes.”

“And we just left our planet fifty light years away?”

“Yes.”

“And nothing happened in the rest of the universe while we were taking our time getting here,”

“Taking no time to get here, Mum. But, yes.”

“Because of entropy?”

“Yup,” she said, enthusiastically, while glancing at some dials and turning some knobs.

“Lovely,” Tecteun said. And part of her believed it. The corner of her mouth involuntarily twitched. ‘Lovely,’ she mirrored in her mind. ‘I still would have liked time to sit on the deck in a beach chair,’ she thought.

Chapter 3

While still in orbit and jockeying for a good place to survey the planet below using conventional travel of distance divided by time, their instruments found some noteworthy things. For one, the asteroid had an atmosphere and the atmosphere had a suitable amount of oxygen in it, even though it was a rock in space. Secondly, there was evidence of roads, bridges, and buildings. So much for uninhabited, if only in the past.

Where she landed looked familiar. Like a gravel pit back home. She wondered if the council and Omega knew this already, too? And Rassilon’s hesitation at their last conversation had been a shout in the dark.

What, exactly, does Omega expect to accomplish? How do we undue entropy? How can we take what was painstakingly done in the past to create the present and rewrite it? What’s done is Here in the form of the Now. Nobody has the right to scribble all over it and do it again.

“Omega believes that time is fluid,” Rasillon had said. Well, elastic at least, with node points here and there joining the oogly bits together. Like a fruit cake. Omega had called these, ‘Fixed points in time,’ with the rest being fluid.

‘Fixed points in time? What does he mean by that?’ she thought. ‘Once we allow time travel, we are just jumping from puddle to puddle in our yellow mackintoshes and our rubber boots while it’s raining seconds. Time might as well not exist. Or just be a nightingale flitting from flower to flower, never fixing on a single blossom…’ This occupied her fixed points in time while she readied a car to take a quick look at the terrain.

She followed a major road toward what had appeared on their scanners to be a large structure at the center of what was clearly a compound of some kind. Maybe the campus of an institution with a monument to some famous philosopher or a monastery with dormitories for the acolytes and a temple in the center. Either way it had appeared like a giant eye with a dark pupil staring into the sky.

The remains of a lawn, now dry and scorched, outlined the foundations of buildings with the tower of steps and columns standing gracefully, though fragmenting, in the center. They didn’t look weathered, as such. They were cracked as if someone had taken a big hammer and hit the asteroid. All of the buildings on it had cracked at the shock.

A sound drew her to the central monument. It was almost human. Or maybe wind in the widening cracks of the stone walls. She ascended the steps, expecting to see a statue to the god of annoyance and entropy playing a lyre. She wanted to tweak her nose. Instead, she saw someone hiding behind the columns. It was a child amongst the Corinthians.

She had been found by the sound she made. She was standing gracefully. No, that’s not it. Peacefully, on one of the columned staircases by an open arch. A childish melody is what had drawn Tecteun to the place. She looked around. The rotunda was empty and provided a view of the campus in all directions. She looked back at the girl who appeared to be maybe eight years old. She had been… singing. The amphitheater shape of this part of the building had projected it to Tecteun’s ears.

It brought her back to somewhere she never thought she would revisit. It was a folksong. Or a jumble of words and sounds pretending to be language, that the doctors back on her world used to make. They were a crude lot who made garish costumes that they only used to amuse themselves with dancing and singing during primitive festivals. It’s a wonder they had any time left. Their masters weren’t getting enough work out of them, it appeared.

Tecteun had followed the whispered rhythm from stone to stone and from pillar to post. Until she found it. Halfway up the steps of a cracked and forgotten temple, between fluted columns standing in rows of irrelevance. A child, a girl. What did it matter? What did it mean?

Tecteun had noticed something else, or she thought she did. When she first set eyes on the girl she thought she saw a faint glimmer hovering around her, a halo of gold light evaporating from her smooth chocolate skin. Then it was gone. ‘Must have been a trick of the light,’ she thought. Now she was just a lost girl and in need. Singing like a peasant.

“Who are you?” Tecteun said. The little girl stopped singing. She looked up in puzzlement. “Who are you,” Tecteun said again.

“Hoaiu?” the girl repeated, her voice lyrical.

“Poor dear,” Tecteun thought to herself, and couldn’t help saying out loud. Once she stopped singing the girl looked confused, as if she did not know who she was or where or why. “Come with me,” said Tecteun, with more control and command in her voice, and took the child’s hand.

She had seen no signs of anyone at all around the temple or anywhere throughout the compound. She sent up some flares and used a bullhorn to try and get her parents’ attention. Or whoever should rightly have been with the girl. Or anyone at all. She sat on the steps of one of the building foundations and took another good look at her first archaeological discovery on the asteroid. The child’s clothing was in decent shape, but dirty like she had worn them for some time. Her face was dirty also and she looked hungry. ‘Lost,’ she thought. ‘Lost’ is what the girl embodied. She could have been the goddess of lost souls.

Tecteun took the child back to her car and up to her ship. She brought her to the galley and got a tray of food she thought she might like. Or at least be able to digest. They sat across from each other.

She picked up a fork and showed it to the girl. “FORK,” she said, carefully.

“FORK,” the girl carefulled back.

She poked at the plate of food, piercing a piece of meat. “EAT,” she said, pantomiming putting the skewered piece of meat into her mouth. Then offered it to the child. “Eat,” she said again.

The girl took the food into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Smiled. A universe had just opened to her. Communication had begun on the tines of a fork.

“Friend,” said Tecteun, touching her hand. The girl looked at her hand, the plate of food, and then into Tecteun’s eyes. “Fren,” she said. They had no linguistic common ground yet. Just the omni-lingual sharing of food.

Tecteun had no way of knowing who or what she was, where she had come from or why she had been abandoned. She decided to name her Kasterborous, the flame of the lamp and the North Star. And the constellation, to boot. Kasi for short. Then Kasi made that same humming noise.

Tecteun didn’t like it.

Chapter 4

Months turn into years. They do that on civilization-changing, history-looting archeological missions. The dig turned out to be much more extensive than even Omega had imagined. The original complex that Tecteun found had turned out to be the tip of the temporal iceberg. The asteroid indeed was engineered. It had apparently been towed there and fitted with environmental controls to make it livable to oxygen breathing life forms. No methane existed on this asteroid. The nearby planet, Gallifrey, already had a functioning ecosystem, though primitive, but no indigenous population.

Well, there was evidence of colonies, but they looked too perfect. There were no hamlets or villages clustered on rivers and adjoining fields that were easily accessible and joined by roads obviously built over older paths used by shepherds, merchants, and armies for millennia. These seemed to be for settlers from some other world with no intimacy with the land, now abandoned.

And everywhere she went she found that the structures were cracked as if some mammoth explosion had shaken them to the core in an instant.

The dormitories were repaired and used to house the colonies of doctors which were brought in for labor and laboratory subjects. The legions of researchers, lab assistants, and grad students that were required for what was becoming a city in tow to the giant planet Gallifrey were housed in the dormitories on the asteroid, which Tecteun now called Kasi Minor. It had been a great effort, but the planet and its tag along research asteroid were starting to look civilized.

The process of reclaiming the planet was accelerated by a chance find. Space flight from Shebogan to Kasi minor was instantaneous. They basically disappeared there and appeared here, so they had no idea what was going on between the two systems. Until some unrelated expeditions discovered the shock wave spreading out from the asteroid. It was a tremendous burst of Artron energy, enough to fry a planet. Which is what it had apparently done. Probes and debris were found randomly appearing in space. When analyzed they were found to be intelligent measuring devices, which peeked the scientific community’s curiosity, which was always up for a good peeking. So they were investigated, reverse engineered, theories were made and experiments were devised. They created their own probes to send into the shockwave of energy to explore it. These disappeared. It wasn’t until much later that they realized the probes they found and the probes they sent in years later were the same thing.

The outcome was that there had been a stupendous explosion of Artron energy. It was expanding outward from some source and would encounter Shebogan in less than fifty years. Calculating back to discover where it had come from revealed its source to be…

“Kasterborous,” said Omega. “The blast came from a planet in the Kasterborous system.

“But that’s where…?” Rassilon said.

“Gallifrey is, yes. I know,” said Omega. A steely look concealing panic. “It occurred about four years ago.”

“And it should reach us here in about…”

“46 years,” his agitation turning into constant interruption. Rassilon was too shocked to notice.

“What will the effect be? How bad will it hit us?”

“Judging from what Tectuen has been reporting, and if it is as strong when it hits us as it was in their system, it could be quite devastating. Tecteun reported structures and technology on the asteroid she is studying but much of it was shattered. No higher life forms, only the microorganisms necessary to sustain an ecosystem and an oxygen environment but no men to exploit them.”

“Curious. And this happened four years ago?”

“Right around the time Tectuen first started her expedition.”

“She had reported signs of limited occupation, suddenly abandoned or wiped out.”

“Yes. “

“And it is headed for us?”

Tecteun never mentioned the ward she had picked up in the process.

Chapter 5

“Hey, Kasi-Major!” Tecteun joked, calling to her assistant and adopted daughter, who was now about 12 years old.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to be gone for a few weeks.”

“Where?”

“The other side of the asteroid,” she said. “We found some other anomalies and I want to try out our new equipment. Here, take a look!” Tecteun brought out a strange device. It had dials with no hands and lights that didn’t flash, at least they weren’t flashing right now.

“Wow!” said Kasi. Then cautiously, “What is it?”

“It’s a time dilation detector,” said Tecteun.

“What?” said Kasi.

“It’s a time dilation detector,” repeated Tecteun, emphasizing herself like she had said the most obvious thing ever.

“It’s a clock.”

“What?”

“It’s a clock.”

“It’s a sophisticated temporal scientific instrument,” she insisted trying to sound slightly hurt. “It detects subtle changes in the temporal field.”

“You say it detects the change in time.”

“Yes,”

“Backwards, forwards, upwards, and downwards.”

“Broadly…”

“So, it’s a clock.”

“Well... Yes, yes... I suppose it is.”

“So. What time does your dilation detector thingy say it is?”

“Clock,” she corrected, tweaking Kasi’s nose.

Tecteun spent the next two weeks on the other side of the asteroid while Kasi Major attended the school that had been established for the children of the researchers. Living here for the duration of the project paid highly, plus there was ongoing work on making the neighboring planet, Gallifrey, livable. Already there were permanent settlements, not just the ghettos for the doctors, not to mention plans for great cities. Recently there had been an uptick in activity. Suddenly great cities were sprouting from the ground, some of them enclosed in fishbowl domes. She had no idea what the rush to colonization was all about.

Kasi had a friend named Sylvester whom she dearly loved. They sat together in school and talked of the day they would go to the academy back on Shebogan. That was before the new academy was founded on Gallifrey. After school they would play games with the other children, their favorite was Researchers and Doctors. They would pretend to be making great advancements in science and timey stuff. They argued about who would be the researcher and who would be the doctor. Eventually, they just gave up and did something else.

Tecteun came home after a fruitful time on the other side of the asteroid. It appears there was an even stronger time rift on that side, but the Artron radiation had been naturally shielded and it remained hidden. Clearly somebody had been experimenting with it.

*  *  *  *  *  *

“Sly,” Kasi said. “Come here. I think I found a hole in the time raft.”

“Time rift,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s a time rift.”

“Whatever,” she said and ran out of sight.

 Sylvester followed her around the playground and past the swings where the other children were playing and along a path behind the school. It led through some terrain that got rougher and rockier the further away from the school lot it went, eventually leading to the cliff face looking into a valley with a paved road at the bottom. Tecteun and her car were currently a bright spot crawling along that road some distance away. The car and the driver were intently focused.

 “I’m here, Kasi,” Sylvester said. He was trying to keep up with her who, though only three months his senior, was taller and more muscular. She was also the more rambunctious player in their games.

“Boo!” she said, jumping out from behind a precisely Kasi sized rock. She giggled and tweaked his nose before running away. “Bet you can’t catch me!” Sylvester determined to prove her wrong.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Tecteun thoughtfully drove down the gorge, the cliffs on either side narrowing and drawing together as if they would squeeze both her and her car until they popped up onto the high ground like a wintermelon seed. She was not interested in the geography. Three weeks studying the ‘hidden anomaly’ on the other side of the asteroid had revealed more about temporal and special dynamics than four years at the ruins. And someone had not been inattentive.

She had a revealing conversation with Omega the night before, inspired, even. Omega had proven to be familiar, intimate, even, with her regular reports. He was particularly interested in what she had found recently, even though she had not filed a report in three weeks. The last one being of the, ‘Found something interesting. Going to investigate. Talk to you latter,’ variety. That Omega already knew something about it troubled her.

“Tecteun, I need to know exactly what you have found,” he had requested. No, demanded, last night. Tecteun was startled by his urgency.

“And how’s life on Shebogan?” she didn’t say in response. Instead, “It’s hard to tell.”

“We sent you the LHTI device.” The Liquid Hydrogen Temporal Interferometer. A temporal etch-a-sketch. What Kasi had called her ‘clock.’

“Yes, yes,” she said. “That’s the thing.”

“What thing? The thing about what?”

He really was impatient, she thought. “Well, you know how we are always supposed to trust our instruments?”

“When they are working properly, yes.”

“Well, let’s put it this way. Either this one is completely doctored or the far side of the asteroid is harboring a massive black hole just below the surface held in check by the rift.” Omega paused for a long time. “Sir?” she said.

“That sounds astounding, if true.”

“It is. Astounding that is. The truth remains to be seen.”

“What have you found out so far?”

“It seems that the energy from this union is powering the asteroid and its governing planet.”

“This is possible?”

“It’s not. Not without some serious engineering.”

“How does one engineer a black hole? And who?”

“Well, how does one engineer anything? You take known laws of nature, use them to create mathematical instruments and then tools.”

“Thus spoke engineering.”

*  *  *  *  *  *

“Ka-Si!” shouted Sylvester. He hadn’t learned the word ‘precocious’ yet. But if he had he’d have to ask Kasi’s permission to use it.

“I’m here!” the edge of the path shouted back at him. Sylvester rounded a boulder and found her, sitting by the side and pulling up handfuls of grass. She proceeded to twist and weave them into a crown. He sat by her side. They could just barely see over the cliff edge. Dust was churning up in the distance.

*  *  *  *  *  *

“And someone used those tools to shape the raw material,” Tecteun continued.

“You mean someone built a lathe that could turn a black hole into a battery?”

“True. The interesting part is what they engineered. No, not just interesting. Downright contradictory.”

“What do you mean by that?” He sounded cautious.

“Well, someone found the rift on this asteroid which was large enough to emit quantities of Artron energy sufficient to hold anything in a stable state no matter how massive.”

“Sounds delicate,”

“I’m just getting started. They then found a black hole just forming… somewhere and brought it to the source of the Artron energy. The energy supplied by the rift stabilized and focused the energy of the black hole, which in turn acted on the rift to keep it stable, as well.”

“What, in some sort of time-space teeter-totter?”

“Precisely. The rift focused the black hole and the black hole, now focused, locked onto the rift. The rift was then focused enough to concentrate the black hole. Without one the other wouldn’t be effective.”

“Chicken and egg.”

“It was worse than that. If I’m reading the instruments correctly and if my surmises are correct, the only way to achieve this spectacular balance is through a massive release of energy. It’s like those holo-images we watched in Astro-Dynamics in the academy, the ones where a cloud of chaotic gas is just getting to critical mass? There’s just about enough mass to start the nuclear reaction in the core. Fusion begins. There’s a sudden, tremendous burst of energy which blows off whole planet loads of material from the new sun’s atmosphere, then it settles down into a stable state.”

“Chicken, egg, and fricassee.” He was trying to control his panic.

“Exactly. I think this explosion, this primal spark of spatial energy from the black hole and temporal energy from the rift, is what fused it into something else entirely.”

“A paradox,” Omega’s mind raced ahead, thinking of the possibilities.

“Yes. A center. A moment.”

“Like a hurricane’s center?”

“Yes. Like the eye of a hurricane. Only different. It’s holding everything in balance. It’s an eye of harmony.”

*  *  *  *  *  *

Sylvester settled back and watched the distant puff of dust gathering up in the trough of the gully. In a minute it disappeared behind the edge, leaving just its wake. “Look,” he said. “Someone’s coming.” Kasi glanced where he was pointing, uninterested. “I wonder who it is?”

“Maybe it’s a monster,” she said. “Or a dump of dirty doctors who will take our school away! Come on! Let’s get out of here. We can’t let them catch the queen!”

“Queen,” he said. “What queen?”

“ME!” She took her crown, placed it on her head, then got up and dashed away.”

Sylvester jumped up and followed. “Hey, wait up. You didn’t make me a crown!”

*  *  *  *  *  *

“That must have been what wiped out the inhabitants,” Omega said, reaching a conclusion just before Tecteun arrived.

“Yes,” She said, stretching the end of the syllable into a prolonged ssssssss! ‘But not all of them…’ she added to herself.

“What do you plan on doing next?”

“Do? Well,” she puzzled. “I’ll do what I’m here to do, I guess. Research.”

“I need to know everything about this… Eye of Harmony, you’re calling it? What can it do? How can it effect time and space on this side? Is there another side? Is there anything looking through this eye?” Omega had more direct experience with rift energy, having wrestled with the rift on Shobogan his whole life. It was starting to show… affects.

“Yes, yes. There is much to do. Make plans. Devise experiments.”

“There’s no time to write grant proposals! I need to know now. What can this eye do?”

“Yes, fine,” She said. She had not seen this side of Omega before and had taken Rassilon’s warnings only figuratively. She assumed Omega was nothing more than an academic shark and a terror to grad students. She stumbled as she tread the fine line between stalling and agreeing.

“And I want you to start live experiments.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You have a population of laboratory subjects you can use.”

“Doctors.”

“I require a detailed study of the effects of this Eye on living flesh, bone, and mind!” he practically shouted.

“As you wish,” she said. It was no skin off her teeth.

*  *  *  *  *  *

“Kasi!” Sylvester shouted. He soon found her. She was sitting on an oblong and curved stone, resembling a seat. Or a throne. “

“Who is this ‘Kasi’ of which you speak?  I am Queen Kasterborous Major, the Mega-Magnificent! Bow before me and weep with terror.”

“Can I just sit?” he said, hardly any terror in his voice. “And I’m kinda all weeped out for today.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. She stood up regally instead. “I will inspect my realm.” She spread out her arms and started turning around what she assumed was regally. Her heal caught on a wrinkle in the rock, just a ripple, causing her to lose her balance. Being unable to regain it she tumbled off the back of the rock. Sylvester heard a sharp scream, cut off abruptly, then a soft swishing noise like a sack falling over. “Kasi?” He heard nothing.  “Kasi! What are you doing? Are you OK?”

Sylvester jumped up. Ran to the rock. Looked. Saw the sudden, yawning drop of the cliff. Something was tumbling down it and raising dust clouds as it fell until it reached the bottom where another, larger dust cloud was stopping abruptly near it. The small figure of a woman jumped out of a vehicle. Stopped. Clamped her hands to her mouth. Fell to knees.

Sylvester wept.

Chapter 6

Tecteun was in horror. The normal, shock mechanism which prevents us from feeling things that could kill us just couldn’t materialize in this case. It was just too immense. She kneeled in the gravel, choaking back the sobs, for what seemed like an eternity.

Eternities end. But this one ended in no way imaginable. Tecteun had stopped staring at the body of her daughter, choosing to stare at the ground instead. The sun, long hidden from the bottom of the cliff, filled the sky in a saffron glow. Something caught Tecteun’s suffering consciousness. A glow. A shimmer. A saffron candle seemed to light in the gloom in answer to the sun’s dying light.

That reminded her of something. Looking up at the body of her daughter, she saw a very faint glow, a golden light, come off her skin like a mist over a dead swamp. It pooled and dissipated, gathered, then spread over her face and hands. It swelled until it seemed to glow through her skin and her clothing and finally lifted her off the ground, throwing her body back in a parody of a puppet on a string. It intensified and became a Kasi shaped body of glowing gold shooting out from her arms, her legs, and her head in a fountain of light. Then it was over, except for eddies and whisps of translucent vapor from her fingers, her mouth, and in her eyes.

That was it. That was the odd thing Tecteun thought she remembered. The first time she saw her daughter, in the ruin, on the first day of her endless research project on this accursed asteroid. Kasi, when she was just a girl in a ruin, had had that same, golden glow about her. Tecteun thought it was a trick of the light. She stretched, twisted her neck, opened her eyes, and looked at Tecteun. “Who am I?” she said.

But the voice was that of a boy.

Chapter 7

Omega combined time independent space travel with the rift which was more than happy to supply all the time energy he could ever wish for, and in a neat package that he could dispense from as he wished. In so doing he created the first time capsule which he designated Type 1. It was a crude affair. For one thing the older time machines did still technically exist in this universe, so they couldn't get around the awkward bits of dragging inertia and entropy in their wakes. Or piling it up in front of them. They didn't notice it at once, well. How could they? How could they be expected to see the car crash outside of their own cone of causality? It was an honest mistake. Could have happened to anybody. And could again in the future, for that matter. And the past… And the future…

Omega’s first attempt at temporal manipulation was more of a concept model which allowed one to move through time in an immense cylinder. It could move through time and space but only one or the other, not both. So if you were on a planet and moved, say, one day backward or forward, when you got there (then?) you were floating in space. The planet had moved. You then had to engage the Relative Dimensions engine to move around in space. It was a temporal-spatial two-step.

Gradually he added improvements and issued later series and types.

Chapter 8

After the shock of seeing her daughter fall to her death, followed by the shock of seeing her come back to life again, followed by the shock of seeing her come back as a little boy, Tecteun was not just shocked. She was completely turned inside out.

She took the-she couldn’t say it. She took her dau-no, not that. She took the child back to her research lab. Not home. No. Ka-the child was confused and fell asleep on the ride there. She placed her on an operating table and stared at her-him.

“Oh, Romana,” said a voice from the hall. It was her assistant, Jamie. “I see you’re back-WHO IS THAT?” suddenly seeing the body on the table. “Is he OK?”

“She-He is fine. Just resting.”

“Where did he come from?” Great question.
“I found him. Lying by the side of the road. On my way back today.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. There’s nobody on this planet except for us.”

“I know.” Then she thought of something. “Look, Jamie. Can you keep a secret?”

“I’ve signed enough non-disclosure agreements. I think so.”

“Good.” This child was found near the anomaly I went to investigate. Some sort of refugee or transportee that came through a portal. Do you understand?”

“No,” he said.

“What matters is that she’s here now and there’s nothing we need to do about it.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“It’s not my fault,” Tecteun glared at him. “Do you understand?”

“Yes…, no.”

“Look, it’s important. She is an alien life form that somehow came to this planet.”

“He.”

“What?”

“He. He’s a boy.”

“He. Right. I don’t know who she is or where she-he came from, but I need to study her to find out. She-he’s important to my studies.”

“OK,” said Jamie, backing away from the table. The child on it looked more like a specimen now. She found him lying by the side of the road? she said. Who’s lying now? “I’ll just go clean some lab equipment,” Jamie said and hurriedly left the facility.

In Tecteun’s mind a plan was born. Here was a being; alien, after all; who possessed the power to come back from the dead. And not just wake up as if from sleep, but to resurrect into a new body. She could learn from this body. A twinge of grief entered her scientific mind.

“But she is my daughter,” she thought.

“Was,” the thought thought back at her.

“She’s all I have.”

“She’s dead,” her mind answered back. “Your daughter is dead. See? The child in front of you is not even a girl.”

“But Ka-”

“NO! Don’t say her name.”

“I can’t just study her. Like a laboratory animal.”

 “Why not?”

“Well, OK. I can check her metabolism. X-ray her. Verify her physiology is in good shape and look for anomalies.”

“HIS metabolism. HIS physiology. You can X-ray HIM.”

“But-”

“No buts. You’re a researcher. A specialist in anatomy. You’ve dissected plenty of those miserable doctors since high school. All in the name of science. And look what good that’s done you? Do you want to test vaccines for the rest of your life? Here’s someone who survived the explosion of a black hole. You saw yourself that child was more like a peasant girl than a time lord.”

So spoke the snake in her mind.

In the end Tecteun gave in to ambition. She had bigger vortices to fry. Something inside of her had died that day. She had no idea what had been reborn in its place.

She ordered the entire support staff living on the asteroid sent back to Shebogan. On sabbatical, she said. Or because… I say so. She wished for no questions, suffered no accusing looks, offered no solace, paid no respect, and proffered no explanations. The thing reborn inside her was a creature of scale and callous. She did it as quietly as possible. She would have made it look like it was the academy’s fault if she could. Routine, even. You know. You can’t fight the bureaucracy. The paper pushers will have their way. Wink, wink.

In the end she just issued the orders, signed the papers, and went back to work on the other side of the asteroid until it was over. Coverups are flawless when no one looks under the covers. Other people had their mysterious explosions at the outer rim that were spoken of only in whispers, quickly muffled, it seemed. Her coverup was messy but, eventually, it was done.

She couldn’t avoid one visitor. Sylvester came to see Tecteun. He insisted on it and his mother, an expert on hydroponics and an even better mother, insisted even harder.

“Ma’am,” he said. After stalling and appealing to authority and generally not being available, even Tecteun had to give in to sentiment. He was her friend, after all. “Kasi’s friend,” she thought. She could barely come to say her name. Kasi was dead to her and that little boy locked in a room in the institute…

“Hello, Sylvester. I know you must be as shocked as the rest of us.”

“I saw her. Kasi. I couldn’t help,” he trailed back into the tears that had started in front of an empty stone throne on top of a cliff lacking a queen.

“Shhh. I know,” she said, soothingly. “We are all shocked and saddened.” She sounded like a sympathy card.

“Where is she now? Can I see her?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Why not?”

“She’s… not here.”

“What?”

“Her body… Kasi was sent back to Shebogan. As a precaution.” Sylvester’s grief now looked puzzled, bordering on betrayed. Tecteun had not counted on him being clever.

“I don’t understand.”

“Kasi’s death was a tragedy. One we all must mourn,” she said like a eulogy that was about to be cut short for brunch. “But she was not one of us, after all,” choosing her words carefully. The conversation was going through a swamp now. One step on the wrong stone and she would be up to her neck in...

“I…” he started but a sob was all that came out.

“An alien,” she said, like speaking to a lecture hall from a dais in an operating theater, the body of a homeless man, mugged and sold to the institute, on the table. “And we need to… find out all we can about her.” It sounded cruel even in her own words. And she had not intended to say as much, but what else can you say to a grieving child? ‘I’m sorry. Now go away?’ Tecteun wished this interview was over. “There, now. The grownups will take care of all of this for you. No need to worry.” It was lame beyond compare.

“Oh,”

“And you’ll be going back home soon. Won’t that be grand?” Lame blossomed into patronizing.

“Yes,” if ever an agreement sounded like an accusation, this was it. But there was nothing else to do. She was the ’grownup’ as she said. And grownups get there way.

Sylvester’s mother came for him later. “Thank you for talking to my son. They were so close.” Tecteun could sense the confusion in her voice. But for now it was merely shared sympathy. There was time enough for resentment and accusation later.

“I know, Sarah Jane,” she said. “I hear you will be going home soon?”

“Yes,” she said. “A two-year assignment ends quick.” Some of the researchers had been easy to dismiss, like her. Just don’t renew their contracts. The rest? Well, some needed to be kept on and replaced on some pretext later. She’d think of something.

“Good luck, Sarah Jane.”

Chapter 9

Tecteun used electric shocks to kill her children. Her children. They all unfolded into an infinite string of pearls, each one a person, each one a chance to decode the person she was, each one a murder. Each murder produced a different resurrection. Each resurrection a tear. Each tear a soul.  Each soul weeping. Her grad assistants came to call her the Angel of Weeping.

Every time the same thing. The murderous shock. The life draining from the eyes. That gold glow. Turmoil. Then peace with whisps of gold vapor trailing away. Then the eyes reopening, confused but aware. They looked at Tecteun. Then the terror.

Tecteun then felt the only emotions she was still capable of feeling: Cruelty and cowardice.

For decades Tecteun experimented on her single subject. Each renewal created a new body, sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes male, sometimes female. Each time different. “Yes,” she thought. “Different. But I must find out what is always the same!”

Gene sequencing went only so far. She took cells from some of the renewed specimens, she had long stopped referring to them as people. They were renewed specimens. She took cells with hopeful genes and grew them into stem cells. These she spliced into one of her test doctors and tried the same renewal procedure on them. That is what she came to calling electrically shocking her daughter to death repeatedly: Renewal procedure. The test subjects died. But she could always go back to the well.

Tecteun had exhausted every technique she possessed, mapped every genome her specimens; she couldn’t refer to them as people, and certainly not as Kasi; contained, and plotted every chemical and physical reaction taking place in their bodies, over and over again for thousands of renewals. She tried vacuuming up some of the gold vapor, but it couldn’t be contained. You can’t bottle reincarnation like a soda pop. She tried cloning but that never worked. The cell zygotes in the dish just grew into complicated shapes like stampeding snowflakes, then died. She used whole villages of doctors in her research. Planting them in doctor embryos produced no better. Trying to divert some of the gold energy into doctor fetuses or infants at first appeared to work, but then produced monstrosities. Many had to be disposed of. She wondered what she would do if they came back, too?

There were other peculiarities. Many renewals resulted in a body roughly the same size and apparent age, around mid to late teens. Each procedure progressed roughly the same as all the others. After administering the electric shock and initiating the renewal, the body remained on the table for a period of time, still and completely lifeless. It was quiet. Waiting. Expectant. Eerily peaceful. These times were unnerving. She came to think of them as the dead space in the voice of a clock. That moment between when the melody stops and the roll of the gongs begins. The longest was over an hour, which drove Tecteun nearly frantic.

She could only imagine what reorganizations and regenerations were going on in trillions of cells throughout the body. Then the ghostly gold glow began. The skin, which had started to turn waxy, softened. The limbs grew light and the body floated as if in the womb.

When the process was done the subject woke up as if from sleep. Sometimes she, or he, spoke, asked a question, or sometimes he called for someone, someone Tecteun had never heard of. Mostly he looked confused as if his mind had been blanked out. Tecteun then began the next experiment on her list. Many times the new test specimen never really gained consciousness. Or at least never remember anything. Who he was, where he was, what he remembered of his past lives, who was the woman standing over her, what had she done to him innumerable times before. It was sad when he didn’t remember anything. It was worse when he did.

Those were the thoughts Tecteun struggled to blank out of her mind. She had blanked out the name of Kasi. She never knew her real name, anyway. How odd that she had never learned her true name and now it was all she could do to blot out her Gallifreyen name?

Chapter 10

Omega continued working on his time capsules. He was able to duplicate a smaller Eye of Harmony at home, sparing the planet being annihilated, and place it in the center of a type 20 capsule he was building. It was a hulking affair with a test system that allowed it to exist in a pocket universe, thereby eliminating the problems with entropy wakes. It did have one drawback, though. While taking off and landing it jockeyed backwards and forwards in time and in and out of space making it disappear and reappear as it slowly faded in and out of existence. It also made a god-awful noise. A kind of groaning, wheezing sound. Sort of like, TAR-dzzzzz, TAR-dzzzzz.

“Tardis!” one of his assistants had observed.”

“What did you say?” asked Omega.

“The sound it makes. It sounds like TAR-Dis.”

“So it does. What of it?”

“Nothing I suppose. Does it have a name?”
“This one? You know what it is. It’s a type 20 time capsule.”

“Not the type. There needs to be a name for all, the whole class of them.”

“I hadn’t thought of it. Nothing special. They’re just time capsules.”

“We should call it something. You can’t just say, ‘Hey. Park that time-thingy over there.’ An Interdimensional Space and Time ship? An Entropy Engine? Something catchy like that we can use to refer to all of them.”

“It’s hardly a priority. Something will come up.” Omega brought up the time rotor on the engine he was working on. It went TAR-dsssss.

“Why don’t we call it that?”

“What?”

“Why don’t we call it the noise it makes? How about Tardis?”

“Tardis?”

“Yes. That way we can say, ‘It’s a Tardis. Park it over there,’ and people will know what we are talking about.”

“Tardis,” he rolled the sound around in his mouth. “Yes. That will do.”

Omega soon came to Gallifrey and made it his home, his base of operations, and the pedestal of his will. A hundred years had passed and both he and Tecteun had not been idle. He established the time lord society there, narrowly avoiding the destruction of Shebogan in the wake of the time explosion. Lucky he got all of his own race out in time as well as a breeding population of Doctors for labor and other exploitation. Leaders lead. Followers follow. And the rest are slaves.

His crowning achievement, the type 40 Tardis time capsule, allowed his race to spread out through time and space and discover much of its riches. Time lords branched out in time and space exploring, or looting, the universe for culture, reason, and information. They created a library. A matrix of experience. And placed it deep under the planet of Gallifrey. Where they also build a society structured between those who have and those who have not. Provost Rassilon, who had assumed the role of librarian, the keeper of the matrix, became accustomed to using the phrase, “You have discovered what? Never mind. Put it in the matrix. I’ll look at it later.” He knew that knowledge was power.

And thus Time Lord society prospered.

Tecteun discovered the joint connection between her laboratory specimen’s renewals and the energy of the rift. She found it to be a symbiotic connection not measurable by any device, but lucky for her, repeatable. Well, in one specimen at least. Through timeless iterations and renewals Tecteun had failed to fully comprehend the light that shone through her subject and brought her back to life every time. Maybe the gods have room for only one immortal. The poet in her sensed it. And the scientist in her condemned it to hell.

Chapter 11

“Hello.”

“What?”

“Hello!” said an air grate in the corner of the room near the ceiling.

“I thought I heard that,” the lab specimen said. “Who are you?”

“Oh, God. Thank the gods,” the grate continued to say. “You can hear me.”

“Yes. Of course I can hear you! Why wouldn’t I?”

“It’s just that I’ve been trying to talk to you, all of the yous you have ever been, and none of them ever answers.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense!” the thing on the table said, then he shuddered as if a memory, long suppressed, had erupted in his mind. On this occasion it was the right thing to call it ‘him.’

“Do you remember who you are?” asked the air grate.

He had a point. Hard as he tried, he could not remember anything. Not his past. Not what brought him to where he was today. Not his name even. And where was he, anyway? “No,” he said.

“You’re in the lair.”

Now the boy was flummoxed. He ignored the talking air grate for a while and surveyed his surroundings. He was in a surgical room. Well, it was sanitary, anyway. There was a tray next to him overlaid with medical instruments, some of them connected to a pole on wheels next to it with plastic tubes and wires. Overhead was this monstrosity hanging from the ceiling, it looked far too weighty for the metal arms that supported it and seemed to float in the air, like a ballerina in mid jump, above him. It emitted occasional clicks and bleeps as it detected abnormalities in the specimen below. A glass eye the size of a pumpkin stared at him from a stalk on its side.

Tecteun had left him connected to a time spectrometer. He was strapped down to a table and hovered over by the instrument. Along with the pumpkin eye, there were segmented legs weaving through the air above him. It was a giant metallic octopus. At the end of each tentacle was a glowing white egg-shaped object. He didn’t know it, but these were molecular duplicators, and they were trying to duplicate the knife edge chemistry that was occurring in his cells at that moment.

He thought he heard voices. Or singing. Lyrics and melodies out of the air, breaching the sound barrier and dawning on his consciousness. The world around him sang. But the words it sang were terror. The metal horror above him sang to him. And pitched its rhythm to despair.

As the boy became more active the machine became more invasive. “Click, click, click-BLEEP!” it said, waving its tentacles about more forcibly. It buzzed in satisfaction as if from a good meal. The boy’s mouth tasted like metal and static flickered on his skin.

He involuntarily twisted away to avoid it and found he was restrained by straps. He was held down to a table of some kind. Or maybe a gurney. It felt like a slab. He didn’t like it.

“What lair?” he finally ventured.

“The angel’s lair.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said defensively. It was an attempt to stop what he was talking about by stopping him talking about it.

“Tecteun. That’s her. The Angel of Weeping.”

The sound of the name, Tecteun, made the boy’s memory jump harder. It burst against his skull and demanded to be let out. “No,” he said and wondered why.

“She keeps us here and experiments on us. I’ve been here for ages already.”

“No, no, no, NO!” The memory burned his forehead.

“But you’ve got it the worse.” Now it flushed his cheeks. He could only mouth the word, ‘No.’ “When she’s done with you, you come back.”

“NO, YOU’RE LYING. SHE CAN’T! SHE’S MY MOTH-“ The memories exploded in his head. A glimmer of gold light flashed in his eyes and was then snuffed out. He pushed against his restraints.

The machine buzzed and bleeped and burped in time with his struggles. Then it paused. Then it thought. Then it spoke again. It seemed to speak in sentences, blurting out metallic sounds that seemed to say, ‘Under a dark sky sets the moon,’ and ‘The BUZZzzz blurred gold and went sallow!” Then the machine went silent, but inside its metal mind was seething.

He pushed against his restraints again and cried, then collapsed, succumbing to the bed restraints, the probing horror, and the flood of memories. One hundred years of them. He slumped into the bed and stared with glazed eyes at the ceiling. The machine went back to its pops and whizzes and demonic cracks. Then fell back into its normal mumbling routine. The crashing ordeal over.

“Kasi,” he said, in a whisper, almost inaudible.

“What?”

Then louder, “Kasi. That was my name.”

The instrument above him registered a discharge of temporal energy, which it duly recorded, adding a slight modification to the molecules it was synthesizing. It detected the rise and fall of heartsbeats and the straining of muscles. Then nothing but an empty bed. It hummed on, uncomprehending.

Kasi was off the table. His exertion had been more powerful than his body would allow for and he had wrenched the restraints enough to let him free one of his arms and find and loosen the buckles. The floor felt cold to his bare feet and his hospital gown fluttered behind him as he ran to the air grate. Climbing on a chair he saw another room with instruments and tables like his organized around what must have been a bed below the grate and out of site.

“What’s your name?” he demanded.

“Adrik.”

“OK, Adrik. I’m going to come get you.”

“Kasi?”

“What?”

“Be careful. She has assistants who come by and check on us.”

“Thanks,” he said. He almost added, ‘Wait for me,’ but stopped.

He cracked open the door and listened. There was no sound so he quickly got out of the room and closed the door quietly. He couldn’t help but shudder at the thought of leaving what had been his prison for-he didn’t venture to consider how many years. The next door over opened into a room identical to his but with the bed against the wall directly below the air grate. The bed contained a boy, Adrik he assumed, strapped down and hovered over by a similar machine. The sight of him awakened another memory. “Sylvester,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. You remind me of a boy I once knew. Here, let me get you out,” and loosened his restraints.

Kasi went to a window to inspect his surroundings. Where were they? What floor were they on? He expected to see security fences surrounding them with barriers and armed guards. What he saw was a courtyard surrounded by ugly brick buildings. There were sidewalks between them and people walking from building to building. He appeared to be looking out a second story window in a building indistinguishable from the others.

“We’re in a hospital,” said Adrik.

“What?”

“A hospital. A place for sick people.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I remember.” He was starting to understand the depth of his ignorance.

“That may give us an advantage.”

“How?”

“I recognize this hospital. And the city around it. If we can get out, I can bring you to where my people live.”

“Your people?”

“I can’t explain. Later.”

Adrik went back to the door and listened. Although they were in a hospital, they must be in a place used for research, so it was not full of regular patients. This floor, or maybe the whole building, was reserved for Tecteun and her ‘subjects.’ At least he hoped so. He knew that she was away from the city and that all experiments would be suspended until her return. He had heard two of the interns talking about it. He didn’t know when she would be back, though, so this was their only chance. They crept down the hallway, checking any closets they found for spare clothing. They found one with some lab assistants’ uniforms in it. “Excellent,” he said. “Here, take his,” giving Kasi a set of scrubs. “We’re too young to be meds, but we might pass for interns.”

It is a funny thing.  Most of the staff who worked with Tecteun knew her subjects only lying down, in a bed, with complex medical equipment over them, which was just as intimidating to the staff as to the patients. They were, first and foremost, medical personnel after all, not guards or soldiers. And since her primary specimen kept ‘changing,’ sometimes three or four times a week, they never knew who she was or what to expect the next time they entered her room. Now, two teenage boys in hospital drabs going about their business didn’t elicit any qualms. The boys got as much attention as two candy-stripers going out for lunch.

They descended the steps of the building, past a bronze statue of someone with a shiny nose, across the courtyard, and into the streets without a quibble. Instead of going down the main avenue into the city, Adrik turned left and skirted around the edge. The monuments and tall globe enclosed shrines to greatness that adorned the center of town faded away and were replaced by more humble streets, windowless utility buildings, machinery, and all of the wretched mechanisms that every civilization needs to flourish but none wants next door. Beyond was an enclosure with a fence around it and a high gate, currently open. They had come to the ghetto of the Doctors.

Adrik stopped when he saw the gate. There was nothing there to suggest a threat. Still. He had the suspicion of a slave.

“What’s wrong?” said Kasi, sensing his new friend’s hesitation.

“I’m-I’m not sure,” he said.

“Is that where you live?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Shouldn’t we get inside? Someone might see us out here.”

“Someone might see us in there, too.”

“But if these are your own people. Wait. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Look. I haven’t been here in a year. I don’t know what to expect. Just come with me. I’ll explain later.”

“That’s what you said before. Why should I trust you?”

“Do you want to go back?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But I don’t want to go from the frying pan to the fire. Not if I can help it. Come on!”

With that he led them around the main gate and along the side of the compound walls. They got shabbier and dirtier and more in disrepair as they went, until they were no more than a jumble of detritus resembling an earthen mound, in places people had carved through it like rivers creating great canyons. Still, Adrik wouldn’t go in or pay them any heed except to avoid them when possible. Eventually they came to a plane of wind-swept gravel with mountains in the distance. Eddies of dust curled about their feet. On they went until they came to a lonely hut of rough planks and a metal roof. Inside was some minimal furniture, a table, and a loft with a ladder ascending to it.

“OK. Now we can rest,” he said. “I’ll go get us something to eat later.”

“Where are we?” said Kasi. Although the boards were loosely attached with gaps letting in the noonday sun, he found it difficult at first to make out his surroundings.

“This? This is just an old barn. There used to be a farm here. This is all that’s left.”

“Nobody uses it for anything?”

“We’re using it for something!” he said. “We’re using it to hide.”

“Hide from who?”

“Right. I forget,” he said, contemplating his new friend. Adrik knew that Kasi was old, some said hundreds of years old, and that he kept coming back. But that didn’t mean he knew what was going on. “Right,” he said again. “Maybe we should start at the beginning. How much do you know?”

“Know? Nothing, really. I thought I was just a few days old today. I remembered waking up in that room strapped to that table with that woman standing over me.”

“How did you feel?”
“Feel? Exhausted, actually. Like I had gone through a great exertion. Or like I had been drowning and then someone pulled me out of the water.”

“Nothing before that?”

“No. Well, not until you spoke to me. And then some memories started coming back…”

“What is it?”

“Oh. Nothing. I feel…strange,” more memories churned around his head, each one vying for his attention. Each one blotting the others out in turn.

Adrik filled him in on the rest. Who Tecteun was. Who Kasi was. What they were trying to do with him. Between the rumors and the reality Kasi got a stunning picture. Adrik had to explain a lot of concepts to him before he could fully understand. The last one was the concept of a lab rat.

Chapter 12

Tecteun came back that afternoon to find her hospital in chaos.

“What is going on here?” she roared.

“Tecteun!” her chief research assistant gulped. “I’m glad you’re here,” she added with conviction exactly to the opposite.

“Nonsense! Just tell me what is happening.”

“Your specimen escaped.”

“What!?”

“It happened this morning. At eleven o’clock he was there for the hourly checkup but when lunch was brought to him at noon he was gone. He and another patient.”

“Who else?”

“That doctor boy in the room next door.”

“Damn,” Tecteun thought. “I never should have left while a disposable subject was still around.” “How did he escape? Describe what happened!” she demanded out load.

“As far as we can tell he somehow managed to pull the restraints enough to bend the brackets holding them to the bed. Then he got his arms loose and opened the buckles.”

“Astounding,” said Tecteun. “Are the authorities aware of this?”

“We have notified them.”

“Be sure to give them the name of the doctor boy. If they can’t find him have them bring in the boy’s family for questioning.” The assistant left her.

Tecteun went to the room Kasi had been kept in to see if they had missed anything. The machinery whined emptily as she entered the room, it had not been touched, along with everything else in this and the other boy’s room. It all looked as she had been told; the straps were tampered with but those in the boy’s room had just been loosened. The windows were untouched, so they had left through the building. “They just walked out like they owned the place,” she thought.

She was about to leave when the hulking machine over the bed coughed. It must have detected her living presence as she passed. Then she stopped. She went back to the machine and looked at the squiggly lines, then the glowing globes of the replicators. Then brought up the logs on the machine’s console. “Between 11:00 and 12:00,” she said. “What happened between 11:00 and 12:00…?”

Tecteun ran to her laboratory office, beside herself and in a huff and a hurry. She spent the next four hours pouring over the readings of the instrument and the resulting molecular structures it had synthesized. “How could I have missed this?” She had gone over the genome of the child a thousand times. It was like a hollow shell, one that had once contained a great treasure; indeed, the imprint of that treasure was all over the place, but the treasure itself was not there. “I’ve been looking at the package all my life,” she said. “Looking at the container to guess the nature of the contents, but not the contents itself. I was looking at an eggshell and guessing what an omelet must be,” her consternation growing. “What a fool I’ve been.”

Chapter 13

“And how long have I been here?” Kasi asked.

“A long time,” Adrik answered. “They say you were found on an asteroid thousands of years ago. And that you are a shapeshifter who can turn yourself into someone else whenever you want.”

Kasi shuddered. “And that’s why they keep me in that horrible place?”

“The hospital?  Yes. They say the physicians and technicians, and the Angel of Weeping herself, are all trying to find out how you do it. They keep killing you over and over again and watching you come back as another person.”

“That’s horrible.”

“I never entirely believed it myself. I thought it was just a story they tell. You know, adults like to tell fables to keep kids in line. ‘Be good or the Angel of Weeping will take you away!’ that sort of thing.”

“But then it happened to you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Then it happened to me.”

“And how long have you been in the hospital in the room next to me?”

“Oh, a year at least.”

“And you could hear what was going on in my room?”

“Sometimes.”

“How many times have I-you know. How many times have I changed?”

“Too many to count. A hundred, maybe.”

A hundred times! And that was just in one year! And if he was as old as Adrik had said... Kasi felt sick.

"Adrik,” he said. His fear coming out in his voice. “What am I going to do? I can’t go back. I can’t leave.” His fear turning into panic.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You can stay with me.”

“But they will find you. They have to know where you came from. They must know that we escaped together. And when they go looking for you, they will find me and when they do we will both be in trouble.”

“We will run away.”

“Where? And how? Where can we go?”

“There’s another city on Gallifrey.”

“So? Someone will see us and report us.”

“We can go there and stay with my people who live there. Don’t worry. They will hide us and nobody knows what you look like so you’ll fit right in.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Trust me. I won’t let them find you.”

“But you don’t even know me!”

“I know enough. You are being mistreated like the rest of my people. Like the rest of the doctors on this planet.”

“That makes me one of you?”

“Of course it does. What else?”

“OK. I’ll trust you. Thank you!”

“Don’t thank me yet. We have to get there first.”

“And where are we going? What is this city’s name?”

“Arcadia.”

They waited until sunset. Adrik had intended to get some food for them before they left but decided that going back to the doctor’s ghetto was too risky during daylight. But when it was dark they decided to go in through one of the breeches in the walls at the back of the compound.

“Be cautious,” he told Kasi. “Don’t act out of the ordinary. We don’t want to bring attention to ourselves.”

“Why?” Kasi said. “No one should be looking for us in here,” then, “Are they?”

Adrik looked at him warily. “There’s a lot you don’t understand.”

“Yes, I know. You keep telling me. But if these are your people.”

“There are people and there are people.”

“Meaning?”

“I am afraid that the authorities might have begun a search.”

“Which is why we are hiding, right?”

“And not everybody in the ghetto can be trusted.” This was a shock to Kasi.

“Oh,”

“There are spies there,” he whispered as if one might be listening to them right now. “And some of them report on anything, words or actions, that might concern the rulers on the High Council of Gallifrey. Everyone knows it.”

Kasi stopped and looked at him in shock, “You can’t trust your own people?”

“Most of them, yes. But some of them? No. There are always those who think only of themselves. And who will do anything for the right price.” This was a new concept.

“So where are we going? Who can we trust?”

“I know someone. Someone I have known and trusted since youth. He was a mentor to me growing up. We’re going to see him now.” Kasi fell quiet and followed his new friend, mulling over all of the disturbing things he had learned today.

They scurried through the wall and down a side street being careful to avoid those with booths set up for barter or stalls selling food. These were getting dark but lights had not yet started blinking in the windows. Keeping the barrier to their left, they threaded their way deeper into the ghetto until Adrik turned abruptly right and went down a small alley, stopping before a small shack, barely a hovel. Adrik didn’t knock on the door. Instead, he took them around back. He willed them both to be invisible to hidden eyes. He was not successful.

“Ian,” he half called, half whispered, which made it come out as a breathy slur. “Ian!” he said louder. The door opened a crack and a voice said, “Adrik? Is that you?” The door opened further and let them both in.

A tall man with greying hair stood in the hall. “Adrik,” he said. “We all thought you were dead!” He lit a tall candle and led them down the hall.

“No. Worse. I’ve been imprisoned for a year now.”

“And who’s your friend?” he said, ushering them into a parlor.

“No time,” said Adrik avoiding the windows. “We both escaped from the Angel of Weeping.”

“Tecteun!” he hissed. Not too many people would say her name. He motioned to them to sit in chairs around a fireplace.

“The same.” Adrik quickly filled him in on as many details as he thought necessary. Ian sat listening with amazement. “And that’s how we escaped,” he said ending his story.

“But what are you going to do now?”

“Run away, of course.”

“Where are you going to run to?”

Adrik felt a sudden reluctance to reveal his intentions. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. It’s not that he didn’t trust Ian, but the less people knew about his plans the better. “Right now I just want to get away from the hospital.”

“Of course, of course,” the old man agreed. “But you can’t stay here for long.”

“I know. They will come here looking for us so we will have to be quick and careful.”

“How can I help?”

“We have to leave the Capital as soon as possible without being noticed.”

“There are work details that leave the ghetto in the morning. You could join one of those.”

“No, no. They’re sure to be watched. And besides, when we get to the fields or the mines what then?”

“True.”

“Can you get us a vehicle of some sort? Anything?”

Ian thought for a moment. Then, “There are land rovers in a lot outside of the City. They are mostly industrial vehicles; trucks, land movers, that sort of thing; with a few other service vehicles, as well. You should find something that would not bring attention to itself.”

Adrik thought a bit. “That should do. Right now can you give us some food and water?”

“Of course,” Ian said.

He got them some canned goods, bread, and jerricans of water. What he didn’t have in his own shelves he borrowed from neighbors. None asked what he wanted them for. A few gave him a suspicious look. He noted which ones did. Next, he packed them all together in bundles they could strap to their backs. He also gave them new sets of old clothing so they would blend in. These included cloaks with attached hoods. Standard peasant garb that would be invisible on the street. Ian never noticed the man listening at the window.

“You’d better eat and get some sleep now,” Ian said.

“No,” said Adrik. “I don’t want to risk being here overnight.” Ian nodded. During this whole time Kasi had not said a word.

They left the hovel being as careful as they could not to be seen. The streets were now dark and not at all friendly. Kasi would have been hopelessly lost and entirely vulnerable long before they reached the breech in the wall and wound their way back to the barn. Then they slept.

“I don’t think I remember ever having fallen asleep before,” Kasi said to himself and immediately sank into a timeless slumber.

Kasi lay on the straw floor of the barn. Small green clovers pushed up between the dried bedding. He watched one emerge, grow, and open; its petals unfurling, a flower revealed. Then a golden glow surrounded the barn, rays and shafts of light pierced the gaps in the walls. The golden light fell on the flower, causing it to whither and die. Then a new flower appeared in its place. The flower turned its face to him and said, “Here lies you.”

“Wake up, sleepy head.” Kasi’s eyes flew open. The golden light had disappeared. It appeared to be dark outside. “Have something to eat then we’ll go. We’ve got to get to the Citadel gate before sunrise.

“Citadel gate?” said Kasi. “I thought we were going to steal a truck or something."

“That we are. But not the one they think we are.”

“They?”

“I saw Ian last night. He seemed…, too curious about our plans.”

“You don’t trust him? That’s awful!”

“I’m cautious.”

“I thought he was your teacher or something?”

“He was. And he is. Look, I do trust him, but I don’t trust anybody else. And I feel that he wasn’t saying all that he knew.”

With that they left the barn, two doctors on their way to the fields.

Chapter 14

It was cold when the two doctor boys left the barn. Kasterberous, the star and part of Kasterberous, the constellation, had not risen yet. The stars, some of which might have been the rest of the constellation of Kasterberous, provided their only light.

“I don’t like this,” said Kasi. He had a growing feeling of disquiet. They stayed as far away from the enclosure of the ghetto and circled it in a great arc. They approached the street that the hospital was on, but several blocks distant. Right now they had circumvented the ghetto where it drew closer to the city.

“We are almost past the worst part,” said Adrik.

“Really?”

“Well, I think so. If we can get past here we can find some more cover where we should be safe.”

“Should?”

“Wherever we go we will be two doctors and if we go someplace inside the city we will be completely out of place.”

“Why don’t we use the hospital gowns? No one bothered us in them yesterday?”

“What was fine on the hospital grounds. We fit right in. But once we left them we were out of place. The further from the hospital we got the more we stood out. Especially since they were looking for two boys who had recently escaped the hospital!”

“Oh,” Kasi said. Then, “Look! What’s going on there?”

Across the street and down a bit a group of people were gathered. There were guards with guns. Some doctors were there and it looked to be a confrontation. The guards were interrogating people, some were detained and held against a fence, which appeared to be a parking lot for heavy equipment. One broke away and ran for the ghetto. A guard shot him in the back.

Kasi cried out. This was all terrifyingly new to him. He stood, unheeding Adrik’s exhortations to look away. He couldn’t help but stare. A guard directly across the street saw him. He noticed that this doctor boy wasn’t scraping in fear. “Hey, you! What are you looking at?” he shouted. Kasi glared at him, by now he was in shock. The guard crossed the street, lifted up his rifle, and struck Kasi in the face with the gunstock. Kasi crumpled to the ground. Adrik put his arms over him as the guard lifted his gun to deliver another blow. “Don’t respond. Don’t say anything and for god’s sake, don’t look at them!” he said as he pulled Kasi’s hood across his face. Just then a captain across the street shouted, “Drog! Get over here. Now! Leave them.” The guard named Drog spat at the two cowering boys and turned back to the growing riot across the street.

Under the cloak and hood Kasi’s face glowed gold. An ugly gash across his face sparkled, zipped together into a scar, and then melted into his cheek.

“Quick. Before they get any ideas,” said Adrik.

“But that man. He-”

“Shut up! Do as I say!” Adrik hissed. He hustled Kasi along the sidewalk, away from the lot and the riot, and further into the city. When he could he found an alley where they could take a breather and a rest. “Let me see you face,” he said.

“I’m OK.”

“OK? That goon might have broken your skull. Let me see!” He lifted the hood off Kasi’s face and gasped. “There’s no sign!” he said.

“No, it got better.”

“That’s how it happens? You just… heal?”

“I. I guess so.”

“Amazing.” I still have scars from scraps I had as a kid.”

“Who was that man? The one with the loud stick?”

“The guard? That was one of the goons. Gallifrey’s thugs who call themselves police.”

“And that thing he had? The thing that made loud noises and hurt people?”

“That was a gun.”

“Oh,”

“It’s something they use to keep order. Well, keep us in order, at least.”

“A gun,” Kasi said as if he were naming a new disease. “I hate it.”

When they had rested Adrik ventured out of the alley. It was noon by now. The heat of the day had washed most pedestrians off the streets. “Good,” he said. “Now we get out of here.” He brought Kasi down an avenue, past a growing tower, and through some mass transit tunnels. Any people they encountered ignored them. Kasi kept his head down and his shoulders slumped, as Adrik had commanded. Outside on the opposite side of the city, more construction was going on. In addition to the tower in the center of the city the architects and engineers of Gallifrey were building a dome to enclose it all. Except for the various enclaves of the tribes of doctors clinging onto the edges of the city like barnacles.

Construction had stopped for lunch. Adrik found a utility vehicle. It was small and rugged, made to move quickly around a construction site among the heavier, more cumbersome equipment, and it was parked beside a tank hiding it from a nearby shack. “Perfect,” he said. “Quick, jump in.”

Adrik was ahead. Kasi followed closely behind. Just as they reached the vehicle Kasi heard a loud noise behind him as a rip erupted from the back of Adrik’s cloak. His hands and head flew up, his knees buckled, and he traced an arc through the air before falling flat on his face. The tare in his cloak oozed red.

“Stop!” shouted a voice behind him. Kasi took a few more steps forward and stopped by the body of his friend. He reached his hand out to him. From behind a strong arm took it and wrenched him away. It turned him around. The man holding him was the guard, Drog, his free hand holding a rifle. Kasi glared at it and hated it more for having brought harm to his friend. A few paces behind were several people. Kasi recognized Tecteun. They ignored him and talked among themselves as if nothing had happened.

“You should have had better security, Tecteun,” a man said.

“It’s a hospital, not a prison. Omega, do you know how disruptive some of your storm troopers can be?”

“And this wasn’t disruptive?”

“Not at all the same.”

“You could have lost your only specimen.”

“Where was it going to go? He? I think it’s a ‘he’ this time.”

“I’m a person,” Kasi said to the pair.

“What?” Tecteun brought her attention to Kasi.

“Maybe I’m just a boy now. Or a lab rat to you.”

It was hard for Tecteun to think of him as a person. For years she had avoided thinking of her, or him, as anything other than a test subject. She no longer could remember his name, even.”

“And so was Adrik.”

“Adrik?”

“Adrik!” he screamed. “The boy. This person who you just killed!”

“I… You…” she stumbled.

“Do you even know my name?”

“What?”

“How long have you been experimenting on me? How many years?”

“I… don’t know. I can’t think. I can’t remember.”  Tecteun felt as if the frog under the knife had stood up and was condemning her.

“Lately, I have come to remember much. Not all. Some. Some I have learned just in the past few days. Some things I surmise and some things remain in ignorance. But you. You are different.”

“Different,” Tecteun said. She had never been spoken to so clearly by anybody, let alone this. Now her chemistry set stood up and reprimanded her. She wanted to smash it with a hammer.

“You’ve different. You’ve got no feelings.”

“Feelings. I do not understand that word.” She lied. Right now she was feeling fear. And shame.

“Emotions,” he said. “Love. Pride. Hate. Fear. Have you no emotions, madam?”

“Enough!” commanded Omega. “Take this child back to the lab where he belongs.”

“And you, Sir? What are you?” He walked up to Omega and Tecteun and directed himself to them both. “You look at life like it’s a snow globe. You take it as an object of observation, not admiration. ‘Oh, look,’ you say. ‘Here is a hill. And a little village is draped on its side. A frozen lake is at the bottom with tiny skaters on it. A dog warms himself by a campfire nestled next to the lake. Over here is a white church with a tall steeple. Carolers are gathered outside, singing. A tiny minister stands on the church steps with his arms up in blessing. And if I shake it snowflakes whirl around. How lovely. How exquisite. How sublime.’ Then you say, ‘I think I’ll hit it with a hammer.’”

Omega started to speak. Tecteun stopped him. “Who are you?” she said.

“I am…” Kasi looked down at his friend. At the torn fabric and the red glaze glistening around it. He turned back first to Omega, then to Tecteun. He tucked his thumbs into the folds of his jacket and said at last…

“I am The Doctor.”