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or_timelords ([personal profile] or_timelords) wrote2008-12-19 09:34 pm

This could prove to be interesting.

from [livejournal.com profile] laser_not_sonic

If you woke up one morning and found me in your bed, what's the first thing you'd think or say?

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2008-12-31 04:29 am (UTC)(link)
"Oi. Well. Nothing like a second opinion, especially if it's your own." The Doctor bobs under one table, snakes down several passageways between desks and shelves and counters and snags of wire extruding from the backs of instruments and snaking across the floor; he moves through the tangle without watching his feet or stopping to consider his next move through the labyrinth—he knows this room backwards and forwards, inside out and upside-down.

In seconds, he's standing at the shelves by his other, scooping up the Mahler. "Huh. I haven't seen these since..." Since very shortly after his Tenth regeneration. He wasn't in the lightest of moods at the time. "...Years. Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken, Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken." His expression clouds briefly—he's not done so well, with banishing the night inside of him. But he tucks the sheaf of sheet music under one arm, slips his glasses out of a pocket, jams them on, and looks at the first folder on the drums his other has pulled out. "Oh, right, this is early work, fairly crude, a stab in the dark, but it informs my later hypotheses. See, these are stimuli to perceived-volume sequences, I thought I could work out a relationship..."

Someone is avoiding the energy issue.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2008-12-31 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)
The Doctor runs a hand down his notes, thoughtfully. Even back at the very beginning of his studies, he'd known that there had to be a scientific explanation—there always was—and felt, every step of the way, that he was close. There were relationships, between volume and stimuli and mental activity, between time of onset and their gradual strengthening, that almost fit together. With two of them working on the problem, he and his other, the objective outsider but just as brilliant, the same background, the same quick mind, they'll have it solved in no time.

This is the problem he wants to work on.

He gives the ECaSS (Energy Collection and Sustainment Sphere) a glance, as his other holds it up to the light, fascinated. And he would be fascinated, too—he should be—because his other is right, the properties of the energy, as it curls in the orb, pooling against the inner surface where his other's fingers touch the outside, differ from artron energy. Except that energy came from him, and he's getting tired of discovering he doesn't know quite who he is, anymore. "Mm. Yeah, the spectrum shift's off, too, see those sparks? Bit too far to the violet, almost out of the visible entirely."

"It's not artron." He's seen energy like this, right after his reconstruction by the TARDIS—he radiated the stuff for days—he even tried to run tests on it. But his notes from that time period read as nonsense, when he fully recovered and looked over them again—ramblings and doodles and equations that involved colors and flowers and rubber ducks taken to the cauliflower-th power, written in Gallifreyan and English and High German and...hieroglyphics, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, for Rassilon's sake.

Not the best science. The TARDIS had been very worried, at the time; now she just remembers him bashing about his laboratories and waving sticks at beakers and drawing chalk diagrams on the walls to perform "alchemical chemical super-zoning-triangle analysis" with amusement.

"We really should figure out what that is, shouldn't we?" His tone of voice says 'I know we should, and I'm trying to convince myself.'

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-01 07:45 am (UTC)(link)
The Doctor shelves the lab notes and sets the sheaf of sheet music back down on the counter. The drums will have to wait; he knows his own curiosity, and it seems to remain a constant across universes—his other won't let this go.

And why should he? The energy's new, something neither of them, it seems, has seen anywhere in their universes. It could be dangerous, it could be important.

The Doctor in black doesn't have the memories of John Smith, having never reclaimed the body of his version, but, if he did, he might recognize his feelings about the energy, recognize how similar they are to a human man's feelings about a fob watch, which, once opened, could erase his understanding of himself, of who he is—partially, entirely, he has no way of knowing.

He just wants to be the Doctor. Gallifreyan, whole, himself. What he's always been. Nothing else.

"Once. After my TARDIS...reconstructed me, I saw energy like that. It came off of my hair, my skin, when I breathed, when I spoke—and I talked streams, don't think half of what I said made sense, but no one was listening but me, so who's to say? Followed me everywhere I went—everywhere in the TARDIS. I didn't leave her—I don't think I could've." He waves down towards the 'R's and 'Regeneration.' "I took notes. You're welcome to them. The effect wore off before I came back to my right mind, so...well, they're a bit...oblique."

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-01 07:05 pm (UTC)(link)
The Doctor registers his other's reaction to the notes with a slight smile—he went through those backwards and forwards himself in the weeks after his full recovery, hoping to find something that made sense, but all he got were a few unusual but quite tasty recipes, a handful of new knock-knock jokes, the discovery that you could write haiku using only the chemical symbols from the Yelvian Expanded Periodic Table (Plus Footnotes), and the general impression he'd been enjoying himself, which fit in with the scattered memories he retained.

"Try test number three hundred point pink. It's in very bad Latin. I think I was trying to summon a Patronus."

And despite his reluctance, he's already found his way to a modified general diagnostics table, which looks rather like a late 20th/early 21st-century doctor's table, except for the scanner panel floating full-length above it, the snake's nest of electrodes and psionic sensory samplers wired into the headrest, and the readout and instrument panels haloing it, angling up from its sides.

He taps in some basic settings, priming the table. "Mm, I'd rather you stayed out of the loop. One of us needs to stay the objective scientific observer, and I don't think either of us can do that if we're tangled up in each other's minds."

"Right," and he takes off his glasses, tosses them on a nearby table, throws his jacket over a lab stool stacked with bulky texts, and proceeds to strip off his jumper, "I reckon I can simulate the merge by lowering all mental defenses and entering a pre-forced-regenerative state. That sets up a time resonance—remember our Fourth-to-Fifth? The new regeneration will be on the cusp of existence, right outside of space-time, and the TARDIS will try to get through to him, it's instinct, make the bridge from me to him. That's a highly-charged moment, entirely potential energy, and the readings should be extremely strong."

He's applying electrodes to his chest and back as he talks, wincing now and again—some of the sensors also take blood readings, piercing tiny, sharp biometallurgic hooks down into his skin. But it's all routine, he's run tests like this many hundreds of times before—though never one quite this...precarious.

"If it looks like I'm going over into full regeneration, you know what to do. Psionic-electric shock, should break the connection, reestablish temporal-physical stability, the trigger's here." He indicates a keypad on one side of the table. "If that doesn't work, well..." He looks over at his other, with a very quiet smile and a shrug. "Take care of me, will you?"

Festooned with electrodes, he hoists himself up onto the table. "Ready?"

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-02 03:04 am (UTC)(link)
The Doctor in black pulls one knee up and leans his arms on it, watching his other. Huh. He hadn't thought of that—that his other might not even know the risks attendant on what he wants to explore. That explains some of his eagerness.

"Well..." He runs a hand through his hair, expression ambiguous—embarrassment, earnestness, uncertainty, something a bit like fear, and a kind of tense eagerness—this is an experiment he's never before let himself consider running, one he couldn't run on his own, and now that he's actually thinking about it, he just wants to go with it, to see how far he can push it. It's like walking to the edge of a cliff—get too close, and the whole world opens up below your feet, and you just want to jump. "It doesn't just appear, I've gone...what is it, now, almost two years without a flicker. Judging by what happened in the wardrobe, it must be generated only while I'm in extraordinarily close...contact, I s'pose you could call it, with my TARDIS. I don't know if you could feel it, no reason you should have, but while she was making contact with you, I—I was her and she was me. Her in my mind, that's nothing new. I invite her in all the time, she helps. But loss of identity boundaries like that...that's very close to...there was a liminal state, when she'd—this is all theoretical, I've only got the barest memories, but I've got hers, too, and they corroborate this—she'd got the best part of me out of the watch but she had to..."

He plucks at one of the wires hooked into his chest, frustrated and uneasy—all of this is somehow, oddly, very personal. It feels almost wrong, indecent, to talk about it. "...I wasn't all in the right order. It took her years to put me right. And we're not sure she did, there're bits that stayed in the wrong one of us, and I reckon she did some patching, with her own memories of me, where she'd lost my own memories."

"So, rough analogy, she had to defrag the software before she reconstructed the hardware. And, while she did that, there weren't any divisions between us. The entire process involved her recreating the division."

"That's what it felt like, in the wardrobe. Faster, of course, moments, not years, but the same process. Subsumption and redivision. It's a new field, I haven't developed terminology."

He throws his other an apologetic, frustrated look—this is a long, convoluted explanation, and terribly imprecise, almost metaphysics, not science, and he's sorry for that. He wishes he had better words, knew more.

"If we want to recreate that scenario under laboratory conditions, I'm certain I need an external focus point for her to attempt contact with. I've run tests pushing our symbiote resonance up to levels far beyond any historically recorded—brain scans show activity indicative of the Rassilon Imprimature throughout the nervous system, beyond the symbiotic nuclei. But identity permeability increases with increased resonance. If I push it to the levels I think are necessary for energy emission, she'll...we'll merge again. I'm not certain what the effect would be."

"But, if she has an external focus, the merge, judging from what happened in the wardrobe, becomes a temporary state, it's controlled. Once contact with the external focus is made, the conditions the merge was triggered to achieve are met, and the redivision occurs spontaneously. It becomes an unstable peak, emitting energy and returning to ground state, instead of a...a stable jump, up from one energy level to another. Physical reaction instead of chemical. Conducting electricity instead of being burned by it."

"It's not clean." By this point in his monologue, his hair's standing out at all angles, he's run his hands through it so many times, and he's given up fidgeting with the electrodes and wires in favor of tapping his rhythm against his knee, unconsciously, as the picks his way through the imprecise mess of words. "The science is rubbish. I'm making the language up as I go."

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-03 03:04 am (UTC)(link)
The Doctor shifts on the surface of the table, turning to face his other more squarely, letting the leg he's not leaning on hang over the side.

"I've run extensive tests on general healing and disease and poison resistance. I'm fit. I couldn't test regenerative capacities, of course, without initiating a crisis, but...you're here now! I needed a second, there's no one I'd trust more than myself. We can kill two birds with one stone. Stun. Stun two birds."

"Come on, of course it's a risk. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, where no Time Lord's gone before, all that." Despite the offhandedness of his words, he watches his other with a tentative, tense seriousness—he wants to be enabled, he wants to go out on this limb, now that he's allowed himself to consider it, to recklessly confront these questions he's been unable to answer—or ignored—for far too long.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-03 05:41 am (UTC)(link)
His other sees what the Doctor in black hides from himself—that this recklessness, the desire to initiate an experiment that could easily result in death or regeneration, comes from his wish to run. To run from himself into someone else, a new personality that might not have the drums or that might know how to make peace with them, a new personality that would be one more remove from his mistakes.

Like his other, he runs from himself without stopping to look at what he runs from, the inescapable hurts he never holds still long enough to think about, and so none of his running can ever help him. He doesn't look at the way, in his Tenth, he clings to the remnants of his Ninth, clothing and body language and the quick temper, the harshness that the drums approve of and that sits poorly with his current personality.

Regeneration has not helped and cannot help him, because the man inside the changed body has not changed.

The man inside refuses to change. He was broken and healed at wrong angles, and he must break again in order to heal properly.

He must face the pain of the rebreaking, at his own hands or the hands of another. A Doctor's hands.

But he doesn't think any of this, not consciously. He pulls the leg dangling over the edge of the table back up, rests his arms on his knees, and his chin on his arms, brows drawn down in frustration as he regards his other. He catches the expression and smooths it over, converting it into formal, flat neutrality, a mask for his disappointment and irritation. After all, what his other's saying does make sense.

"Fine. No, fine, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking." He twists back around and lies down on the table properly, stretching out his long legs and settling his head back into the tangle of sensors at the top of the table. They begin to attach themselves automatically, electrodes positioning themselves at his temples and along his hairline, sharp-ended bio-reads slithering down along the back of his neck, disappearing under his skin to lace themselves into his spinal column. He has other devices that can take similar readings less invasively, but the extra margin of accuracy these sensors allow outweighs the snags of pain.

"Preliminary readings coming through?" He could cue the machine to recite its findings to him, but with the other Doctor here, it's quicker if he just has him check the displays.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-03 04:53 pm (UTC)(link)
The Doctor notes the moment his other shifts his gaze to the EEG, the sudden intent fascination of his gaze, the way he leans in closer and pushes his glasses further up his nose as though to bring the readings into clearer focus (though they both know the glasses don't do anything—funny, isn't it, he thinks, that they still wear them, even alone or around each other). He remembers the first time he read the presence of his TARDIS as part of him, knit into the signature of his mind—marveling and disturbed by how well she fit, as though his brain structure had been missing an element before, a gap that had now been filled.

He'll have to point out his genetics notes to his other, later. In any given strand of his DNA, a fraction of the gene sequences are undetectable using even the most advanced medical instruments—he had to develop analogous devices that could sense and render fourth-and-higher-dimensional structures according to first-to-third dimensional principles before he could map the "missing" genes. The sections aren't new—nothing's been added to his genetic structure—it's only that a fraction of it (and which fraction can change at any time) no longer exists in standard physical space.

He has yet to work through all of the implications of that, including the fact that his RNA polymerase can read and transcribe hypodimensionally-encoded data.

But explaining that to his other can come later. Right now, the other Doctor's offering the mental contact that can initiate this experiment—the Doctor in black can feel the undisturbed quiet of his mind, as he lets his shields down.

He puts his hands out as his other leans over him, reaching up to touch his other's temples as his other's hands position themselves over his.

Before he can catch himself, he licks out into his other's mind, a brief but intimate intrusion, like tongue in a casual greeting kiss, tasting his other's silence.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-04 02:51 am (UTC)(link)
Unlike his other, the Doctor in black is mortified by his breach of etiquette. True, his other volunteered to establish contact again, and they've already shared much of their minds with each other, but that was with implicit permission. What he just did, that was...taking advantage, turning a handshake into a caress, using the contact to satisfy his own need and curiosity.

When his other opens his mind further in response, the Doctor wavers. He can feel the relative peace of his other's mind, in the lingering impression from his mental trespass and in the bleed from their contact. Reaching out into his other's mind would be like stepping from a bunker in a shelled battlefield onto a distant beach, the impacts of the shells reduced to the soft hiss of the waves.

He wants that. He wants to take that, and that's what stops him.

Before he can lose his resolve and act on his desire—on a selfish hunger, edged with envy—he sinks down into his own mind, calling his TARDIS, making his understanding of this experiment, of what he wants her to do, her understanding.

She doubts. The two Time Lords are playing with forces and energy beyond, perhaps, their ability to control. Out of simple curiosity, they would risk themselves—risk her, because if she loses her Doctor, she does not believe she would be capable of surviving alone anymore, one half of a whole.

But they believe it is important. S/he knows that, feels it in the part of her that is her Doctor. He is afraid. He wants and doesn't want to know what he is now. What they are.

Oh, Doctor. Her Doctor. Does it matter? He has always been hers and now he is her, and they are only one more expression of sentience, of energy and matter, taking its turn in the universe, living and burning in brilliance before entropy tears them apart and pulls them back out of time and space.

They are forever and not at all, two and the same, and she wishes this, like the drums, were not too large a truth for him to contain.

She goes where his want and fear lead her, out along the pathways of his mind, taking them as her own, out into the mind of the other Doctor. She brushes a greeting to her sister, at the back of the other's mind—hello and I'm sorry because she knows the other's mind isn't her place and Why do they hurt themselves like this? and, not intentionally, but because it's part of her, carried along with her, the snap of fingers broken and the edge of hunger for this Doctor's silence.

She washes through his mind and then recedes, though like a wave, she will both leave and take, because part of her is the Doctor and the two merges in one day have made this second merge stronger, more balanced, the Doctor-TARDIS.

She takes silence and she leaves the drums. With the model of silence from the other, she mimics it in her Doctor, in his/herself, stifling the rhythm for a time; with the model of the drums from his/herself, she finds the potential for them in the other and touches that potential into life. Not for long and not loud. But there.

S/he does not mean to. They only need, and this is part of the need.

S/he slides back into his/her own mind, carrying the panacea of silence into him/herself, and redividing into his/her component parts, until the Doctor is only himself again, as much as he can be, the not-artron glowing thick in the air around him and the stolen peace relaxing the tension he always holds, in his body and his mind.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-04 06:48 am (UTC)(link)
The TARDIS feels the pain of the sharp disconnect, as the other Doctor forces her out of his mind—and she's never been forced from a Doctor's mind before. The mental/physical shock of the disconnect and the emotional shock of the rejection disorient her, both sensations are new and painful, and she loses the divisions between herself and her Doctor, loses the trick of sorting his so-small self out from her greater being.

S/he panics, sitting up in his/her/the Doctor's body, still tied to the table by electrodes and bio-reads, non-artron energy sifting up in a dense aura around him/her. It. Them.

(His vocabulary is so limited, but it's all he can encompass, and it's all they can use, like this.)

They feel the Doctor near them, the familiar sound of the drums, but they're too strong. They've felt the Doctor like this, before, and they know how much it hurts, and that the Doctor needs their help, when the drums roar like that.

They hurt too. They are meant to go by two names but they cannot force themselves to name one part differently from the other.

Perhaps they hurt because the Doctor hurts. After all, they are linked.

They know this logic is wrong. Part of them knows that they are the Doctor and they are the TARDIS, but they feel that this is not true, not entirely.

They are frightened, but this is how they are meant to be.

This is how they are whole.

They rip themselves free from the hooks of the table, and stand, disconnecting electrodes from their chest and back, and the little pains as the bio-reads snag out of their skin are both new and familiar, a terrible violating foreign sensation and a meaningless little physical twinge, one of life's many small but necessary discomforts.

They say the Doctor's name, their words thick with the not-artron, in their throat, in their lungs. Not "the Doctor," his assumed title, but his name, his real name.

Because the TARDIS does not think of the Doctor even with a word, but only with the understood truth of him, and if they must use a word, they will use the one that has been him since he began, the one he keeps closest to him.

They say his name and move to touch him.

"It's alright. Hold still. Let me help." They talk like he talks, because they are using his mind and his body and anything else is too much, but they are frustrated by the smallness of the words. They are not enough.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-04 06:47 pm (UTC)(link)
They sense his intention, when he reaches out towards them, the violence that his drums drive him to, and part of them twists with anger and shame and surprise, but it is a very small part and it does not understand that this is not the Doctor's fault, that he is the vessel for a force far beyond his ability to contain, that, like a deaf man, he cannot sense the fullness of the music but only the driving vibrations of its lowest notes, its simplest pattern. The Doctor can feel the tear of entropy but not the high, delicate, complexity of creation.

Just as the part of them that is the Doctor cannot, when they are divided.

They enter his mind, and the Doctor-part is astonished by how very limited it is, how bounded. They have always thought themselves clever, and they are, but "clever" itself, intelligence bound to physical matter, is, they can see now, such a frail, unpredictable thing. Even geniuses can see so little of the universe, and understand less yet. The Doctor-part laughs, because it means they will never, ever find the answer to the universe, it will always be a mystery, and that is the way they want it. The TARDIS-part sighs, because they enjoy being limited and she is not yet used to the insensitivity, the blunt imprecision, of the Doctor-part of her, of functioning within the bounds of the physical.

They try to be careful, not to disturb anything that does not need to be disturbed, but everything is disturbed, his thoughts torn from their places, memories tossed about by the drums. They feel so much death, a year of it, and they did not know that he had felt death they way they have, chosen to let the human race become collateral damage because something else mattered more.

They remember making that choice. They twist around his memories of standing witness, for a year, for long days one after the other, holding himself back from taking action, knowing that only his own survival mattered, and they share their own. Of looking down on a gray world and walking its surface after, finding nothing, nothing green, nothing flesh, nothing living. Of mourning in the dust and the ash.

They share sorrow, and astonishment that they could destroy so much and that entropy comes to their hands so easily, and the long moments of doubt about who they are, about what their making the choice to end life, even if for a greater cause, must mean.

They trace the memories back, because they know they will find the drums at their center. And they do. There is that sensitive part of the Doctor's mind, caught up in his time sense and his telepathic sense, the ability to feel the pulse of time and space and everything, though only to the muted extent a Gallifreyan body can manage.

Denying it for a year, because it hurts, because the time sense says that the universe demands what he is doing, demands the deaths, to stay whole, and the telepathic sense reports the deaths, each small, terrible shockwave as a mind dies, even though he cannot feel them all consciously, they are there, each of them, clutching at him as they fall and disappear.

Denying that most sensitive part of themselves until something in the mind twists and expands, not breaking, though both the Doctor and the Doctor-part think of it as breaking, but reaching out, extending, becoming something that the conscious mind can no longer control or deny.

Becoming not just time sense, not just telepathy, but a sense for reality itself.

Except that it is new and limited, as limited as are they, and it can only take in the drums.

[identity profile] watch-is-me.livejournal.com 2009-01-04 06:51 pm (UTC)(link)
They, the Doctor-TARDIS, lend him some control. They alter the synapses of his mind, using the non-artron (which, though they do not know this, will hurt him later, but that physical hurt will pass) to knit those sensory parts of his brain into something like their original configuration.

This will make the drums quieter, less acutely-felt, for a time. But it is only a temporary measure; they have hurt his brain, not healed it, and his Gallifreyan biology will cure the "damage" quickly enough, returning his senses to the full potential they developed under duress. The duress of a year that never happened, but which lives on in him, in its effects on him, regardless.

When the alterations are complete, they withdraw from his mind, back into themselves. And then they find that they remember the trick to redividing, because they have done all they need to do, for now, as a whole and can go back to being almost-separate.

So she recedes to the back of his mind, the greater part of her flowing back into herself, and he sleeps, because he cannot remember this, cannot hold all that has happened, without her to help him.

The Doctor in black loses consciousness, hands slipping down from his other's temples, slumping forward against him.

The room glitters with non-artron.

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