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eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
**
It was important to keep talking.
Certainly, in this instance, no one could accuse him of being in love with the sound of his own voice, and anyway he wouldn't hear them even if they did. Since the second week after they'd forced their neurological vise on him, the Doctor's world had consisted of nothing but hands and likelihoods. Hands--pushing, prodding, grabbing, hitting, strapping him down. Hands forcing feeding tubes down his throat. Hands turning his head this way and that, hands examining his eyes and ears. Hands injecting him with chemicals--though that hadn't lasted. The tendrils seizing his brain refused to let his body metabolize their "adaptive" drugs any longer, a fact they'd learned when they tried to give him something for the pain after the isolation procedure. He spent a day so dizzy and sick in the aftermath, it was all he could do to find the loo in the corner of his cell and keep himself right side up and heaving into it.
After that, they left him be and didn't bother with anything beyond the essentials. Hands--male hands, soldiers' hands--gave him a change of clothes every other day. He couldn't smell the difference but he didn't fight them on it. They had tried using restraint and force at first to dress him, but one accidental knock to the back of his neck had been enough to instill some caution, on both sides. Now they merely handed him the thin fabric and let him work it out on his own. It wasn't much of a concession, but it was the only routine they put him through that didn't leave him feeling utterly violated afterward. It reminded him that those hands were connected to human beings. So he kept talking to them.
He desperately missed the TARDIS. Their psychic link, already tenuous from fatigue and uncertainty, had been the first thing to go when the vise took hold. She didn’t feel the initial spasms wracking his body in the interrogation room, but she recognized a manufactured intruder and its intent. At first, she was merely amused. This puny, stupid little drone in your brain wants to separate us—he translated the the oblique images and sensations into more structured concepts as clearly as ever, but then the machine bit into him, needles branching and converging. Thoughts turned quickly to alarm and anger, redoubled and reverberating as though from both their minds at once. This blind, deaf, dumb thing that understands nothing but the bit streams and crude estimations fed to it! How dare it! How-- and that was that. TARDIS, gone. Telepathy, gone. Then it set its sights on his internal perceptions. He tried to re-route the neural pathways it was targeting, but when the machine was through fighting back, he was blind to anything going on under his skin beyond simple pain responses.
A week of dreary experiments went by before the agency men finally realized that they had never really wanted to get to know him, and sent him the rest of the way into the black. But he kept talking anyway.
To a mind starved for input, spoken language was now an exercise in memory and precision. Consonants--ejective, fricative, dental. Alveolar versus palatal voiced implosives. Glottal stops. Cardinal vowels--front, centre or back of the throat; rounded tone or flat. Modulated volume and cadence. Speaking was one thing he could still easily control, but more than that, it reminded his captors that their test subject was an independent, sentient being, and not simply another piece of laboratory equipment. It acclimated them to the sound of his voice. It kept them guessing.
He didn't talk to himself, but when he knew they were listening, he spoke to them. He paid close attention to any reactions. Speech was a wide net cast into a murky ocean, but like a net it had weight to it, and he didn't always come away empty-handed. He reserved the singing for when he knew they could hear him, but chose not to listen. When he was immobilized, a thousand questing needle points flexing their grip on his brain and waiting for the smallest bit of information to direct them deeper, he did his best to concentrate, remember most of the words, and stay roughly in tune. They could take and take and take, or at least they could try; all he would ever give them were words and a few simple tunes.
He was so tired. It took effort to sort through the confusion of disassociated time sensitivity. In those first few terrifying hours post isolation, he could hardly distinguish inanimate from animate timelines. But by necessity, he was learning. Now he could sense the humans around him as bundles of linear history and change-point potential. He could pick them out from the static newness of concrete walls, and he could tell which ones were older and which ones were younger than the surrounding prison. He couldn't hear their words but he could feel their speech as the pa-pa-pop of realized decisions that emerged from the structure of the past, and subtly re-weighted future possibilities.
His temporal grasp of these histories was weak at best, as it always was for events so ensconced in normal, linear timelines. Paradox and schism were the footholds for any directed control of the fabric of time, and neither were present in great enough quantity to give him a good grip on anything. In fact, this place was so dull in regards to jump-tracked timelines and the like that when they finally did show up, he had absolutely no idea what he was sensing. Consequently, it took him a full fifteen seconds to identify the timey-wimey, nonlinear ball of faint paradox and ridiculous potential assaulting his time sense as River Song, standing at the door of his cell.
He couldn't help but smile. Oh, sweetie! What a sight for sore eyes! Figuratively speaking, of course.
As expected, they roughed him up after he let her know he recognized her. He felt her come to his aid but her immediate potential was focused and peaked and very, very cautious. Whatever she was playing at, she had few options and little room for error.
So it was back to waiting, he figured, letting himself be led meekly out the door. God, he was so terrible at waiting.
He drummed relentless fingers against the pads of his thumbs as River's time echo faded in the distance. The vise itched and stung like a metal biting fly at the back of his neck and he wanted to swat it away, right now. Half-way down the corridor his concentration failed; he stumbled, lightheaded and reeling, and was caught at the elbows by the strong hands of the military guard. When they stopped to badge through the double doors of the corridor leading out to the laboratory, he steeled his nerves, and went back to a familiar routine in the rumbling vibrations of speech.
"Haydn? I think I've gone through all of his already. Mozart? Too flighty. Gluck? Gluck is cool . . . "
The sigh from the soldier holding his left arm was so faint he almost missed it. It was just a breath at his ear, coupled with a bit of eased tension in the grasp on his elbow. No words, but there was a re-posturing of resigned disappointment that the Doctor reconstructed in his mind and recognized instantly from the many times he'd seen similar reactions. Old man, it said, that will never be cool.
The Doctor cocked his head, reading his escort for a moment. His brief past was a pendulum swinging wildly between regimentation and pure chemical abandon. His uncertain future was converging all too swiftly around the expectation of violence and war: a dim, cloying likelihood like the pulsing thrum of military helicopters in dense, hot air. He was so, so young.
"Fine, have it your way," he decided. "Anyway I suppose it's time for a change of pace."
They took up the gallows walk again, and the Doctor belted out a new tune at what he was quite sure was the top of his lungs.
"In the t-o-o-own, where I was born!
Lived a m-a-a-an, who sailed to sea!
And he t-o-o-old us of his life!
In the l-a-a-and of submarines . . ."
**
Part 2 | Part 3
**
It was important to keep talking.
Certainly, in this instance, no one could accuse him of being in love with the sound of his own voice, and anyway he wouldn't hear them even if they did. Since the second week after they'd forced their neurological vise on him, the Doctor's world had consisted of nothing but hands and likelihoods. Hands--pushing, prodding, grabbing, hitting, strapping him down. Hands forcing feeding tubes down his throat. Hands turning his head this way and that, hands examining his eyes and ears. Hands injecting him with chemicals--though that hadn't lasted. The tendrils seizing his brain refused to let his body metabolize their "adaptive" drugs any longer, a fact they'd learned when they tried to give him something for the pain after the isolation procedure. He spent a day so dizzy and sick in the aftermath, it was all he could do to find the loo in the corner of his cell and keep himself right side up and heaving into it.
After that, they left him be and didn't bother with anything beyond the essentials. Hands--male hands, soldiers' hands--gave him a change of clothes every other day. He couldn't smell the difference but he didn't fight them on it. They had tried using restraint and force at first to dress him, but one accidental knock to the back of his neck had been enough to instill some caution, on both sides. Now they merely handed him the thin fabric and let him work it out on his own. It wasn't much of a concession, but it was the only routine they put him through that didn't leave him feeling utterly violated afterward. It reminded him that those hands were connected to human beings. So he kept talking to them.
He desperately missed the TARDIS. Their psychic link, already tenuous from fatigue and uncertainty, had been the first thing to go when the vise took hold. She didn’t feel the initial spasms wracking his body in the interrogation room, but she recognized a manufactured intruder and its intent. At first, she was merely amused. This puny, stupid little drone in your brain wants to separate us—he translated the the oblique images and sensations into more structured concepts as clearly as ever, but then the machine bit into him, needles branching and converging. Thoughts turned quickly to alarm and anger, redoubled and reverberating as though from both their minds at once. This blind, deaf, dumb thing that understands nothing but the bit streams and crude estimations fed to it! How dare it! How-- and that was that. TARDIS, gone. Telepathy, gone. Then it set its sights on his internal perceptions. He tried to re-route the neural pathways it was targeting, but when the machine was through fighting back, he was blind to anything going on under his skin beyond simple pain responses.
A week of dreary experiments went by before the agency men finally realized that they had never really wanted to get to know him, and sent him the rest of the way into the black. But he kept talking anyway.
To a mind starved for input, spoken language was now an exercise in memory and precision. Consonants--ejective, fricative, dental. Alveolar versus palatal voiced implosives. Glottal stops. Cardinal vowels--front, centre or back of the throat; rounded tone or flat. Modulated volume and cadence. Speaking was one thing he could still easily control, but more than that, it reminded his captors that their test subject was an independent, sentient being, and not simply another piece of laboratory equipment. It acclimated them to the sound of his voice. It kept them guessing.
He didn't talk to himself, but when he knew they were listening, he spoke to them. He paid close attention to any reactions. Speech was a wide net cast into a murky ocean, but like a net it had weight to it, and he didn't always come away empty-handed. He reserved the singing for when he knew they could hear him, but chose not to listen. When he was immobilized, a thousand questing needle points flexing their grip on his brain and waiting for the smallest bit of information to direct them deeper, he did his best to concentrate, remember most of the words, and stay roughly in tune. They could take and take and take, or at least they could try; all he would ever give them were words and a few simple tunes.
He was so tired. It took effort to sort through the confusion of disassociated time sensitivity. In those first few terrifying hours post isolation, he could hardly distinguish inanimate from animate timelines. But by necessity, he was learning. Now he could sense the humans around him as bundles of linear history and change-point potential. He could pick them out from the static newness of concrete walls, and he could tell which ones were older and which ones were younger than the surrounding prison. He couldn't hear their words but he could feel their speech as the pa-pa-pop of realized decisions that emerged from the structure of the past, and subtly re-weighted future possibilities.
His temporal grasp of these histories was weak at best, as it always was for events so ensconced in normal, linear timelines. Paradox and schism were the footholds for any directed control of the fabric of time, and neither were present in great enough quantity to give him a good grip on anything. In fact, this place was so dull in regards to jump-tracked timelines and the like that when they finally did show up, he had absolutely no idea what he was sensing. Consequently, it took him a full fifteen seconds to identify the timey-wimey, nonlinear ball of faint paradox and ridiculous potential assaulting his time sense as River Song, standing at the door of his cell.
He couldn't help but smile. Oh, sweetie! What a sight for sore eyes! Figuratively speaking, of course.
As expected, they roughed him up after he let her know he recognized her. He felt her come to his aid but her immediate potential was focused and peaked and very, very cautious. Whatever she was playing at, she had few options and little room for error.
So it was back to waiting, he figured, letting himself be led meekly out the door. God, he was so terrible at waiting.
He drummed relentless fingers against the pads of his thumbs as River's time echo faded in the distance. The vise itched and stung like a metal biting fly at the back of his neck and he wanted to swat it away, right now. Half-way down the corridor his concentration failed; he stumbled, lightheaded and reeling, and was caught at the elbows by the strong hands of the military guard. When they stopped to badge through the double doors of the corridor leading out to the laboratory, he steeled his nerves, and went back to a familiar routine in the rumbling vibrations of speech.
"Haydn? I think I've gone through all of his already. Mozart? Too flighty. Gluck? Gluck is cool . . . "
The sigh from the soldier holding his left arm was so faint he almost missed it. It was just a breath at his ear, coupled with a bit of eased tension in the grasp on his elbow. No words, but there was a re-posturing of resigned disappointment that the Doctor reconstructed in his mind and recognized instantly from the many times he'd seen similar reactions. Old man, it said, that will never be cool.
The Doctor cocked his head, reading his escort for a moment. His brief past was a pendulum swinging wildly between regimentation and pure chemical abandon. His uncertain future was converging all too swiftly around the expectation of violence and war: a dim, cloying likelihood like the pulsing thrum of military helicopters in dense, hot air. He was so, so young.
"Fine, have it your way," he decided. "Anyway I suppose it's time for a change of pace."
They took up the gallows walk again, and the Doctor belted out a new tune at what he was quite sure was the top of his lungs.
"In the t-o-o-own, where I was born!
Lived a m-a-a-an, who sailed to sea!
And he t-o-o-old us of his life!
In the l-a-a-and of submarines . . ."
**
Part 2 | Part 3
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Date: 2015-09-26 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-10-11 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-12 02:39 am (UTC)I see what you mean, but I think your comment about how relying on it alone is difficult may be connected to my point; he realizes that his time sense alone is not nearly as helpful to him without context ... and if he connects the dots and realizes how much River can do, using context and her vestigial time-sense, he might be more impressed with what she can do than he previously was.
Sort of like telling a guy with a Volkswagen that it doesn't compare to your Lamborghini - and then having most systems on the Lamborghini break down, making it capable of going only 50 miles an hour (on the way to the garage), and you discover the Volkswagen owner has supercharged the Bug, and compensated for its rather unaerodynamic build with some jury-rigged architectural innovations, and it can go 160 without overturning or flying. Your Lamborghini will always go faster when all systems are in order, but the Lamborghini owner now and forever knows that he or she had better give some dap to the Bug owner.
Does that make sense?
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Date: 2015-10-12 06:21 pm (UTC)