FIC: On Being God 2/2 (Torchwood)
Title: On Being God (2/2)
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: BBC's. !mine.
Summary: You're either insane, or you're a God. When it comes to Torchwood, who can tell?
Notes: Written prior to Reset, but contains no spoilers. I started this in April 2007. That's a rate of a little over 1000 words per month. I totally fail.
Toshiko had been quickly installed on the sofa of the Hub, a cup of the hottest, most disgustingly sweet tea Ianto could conjure quickly warming her hands, blanket still slung over her, and Jack sat beside her, arm around her shoulders, looking at her pale face carefully. “How long's this been happening?” He asked, gently.
Tosh took a sip from her coffee, the motion betraying the fact that her hands were shaking. “I don't know,” she said, “A few days. Nothing major, I mean. I'd just be doodling and finding myself with a page full of equations. It's not weird,” she added, defensively, “I do it all the time. I just figured there was some idea the back of my head was trying to work out.” She raised her head and jerked it in the direction of her briefcase. “I had all the papers with me, but some of it I'd already stuck on the computers.”
Ianto, who had been hovering nearby with his hands in his pockets, moved off at Jack's nod, opening up the briefcase and removing what seemed to be half a rainforest's worth of scrap paper. He settled himself into Tosh's chair, and started sorting through the pages. After a moment, he turned to the screens and started typing up what he'd found, adding them to what Tosh had already put in. His fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard as he typed without looking at the screen, his eyes instead flickering back and forth across the pages.
“Do you know what they mean?”
Tosh shook her head. “Like I said, I figured it was some new idea I'd had that I hadn't really worked out yet.” She laughed, a little hollowly.
Jack stroked her shoulder gently, comfortingly. “How are you feeling?”
“Actually,” Tosh frowned, looking up from her tea, already gone but for the very dregs. “I'm really hungry. Isn't that weird?”
It was weird, but Jack had this horrible feeling that it might actually be connected to whatever was going on with her head. Fortunately he knew where Gwen kept the stash of chocolate biscuits she thought no one else knew about, and, after putting the tin into Tosh's hands, she started eating them as if she'd been starving for a week.
He fetched her another sweet tea, and she drank that down quickly as well. Though some sort of colour had started to return to her cheeks, she was clearly exhausted. She was struggling to keep her eyes open, and her head kept dipping with an absolute exhaustion that she couldn't fight.
Gently, he pulled her against his chest, leaning back against the arm rest of the sofa, bringing her with him. She stiffened briefly, then sagged, apparently too tired to resist. After only a few moments, her breathing deepened and evened out as she fell into sleep, lulled by his body warmth and the soft, unintrusive sounds of the Hub idling and Ianto typing.
He was worried. How could he not be? She didn't seem to be ill, but then this was hardly normal. She was always working hard, but this was inhuman. He stroked her hair gently, and tried not to sigh.
The halting of the clacking of a keyboard caused him to glance up at Ianto, who had stopped typing and was frowning at the screen. He gave it a brief tap, and a new screen opened up with scrolling data. He made a small thoughtful noise, and leaned back from the computer.
Trying not to disturb Tosh, he carefully extricated himself from underneath her, resettling her gently on the sofa. She didn't even seem to notice that much, burrowing into the warm cushions that his body had left behind. He tugged the blanket a little higher over her shoulders, and reluctantly left her alone.
Ianto was stretching his arms and causing his shoulders to crack audibly as Jack settled against the desk next to him. “It's a lot of data,” he said, after a moment, shaking out his hands. “My fingers ache.”
Jack smirked, reaching out to take Ianto's hands, gently massaging the joints. Ianto's mouth twitched. “Captain,” he said, chidingly, “What will the staff say?”
Jack glanced over to the sleeping Toshiko and grinned. “You're right. They'll all be after my attentions, and then you'll languish in obscurity.”
“Ah,” Ianto said, affecting dramatic woe. “Such is my lot in life.”
Jack smirked, and let go of Ianto's hands, now that they seemed to be moving without the stiffness they'd had before. “What've you found?”
“The equations aren't complete, even with all the papers I found and typed up, and the stuff upstairs added in.” Ianto had already cleaned off the chalk scribblings, but not before capturing their image on CCTV. “And I can only follow them so far. Near as I can tell, it's actually several different equations for things, but it's all in one single equation.”
Jack stared. “One single equation? But that's a lot of stuff.”
“I know.” Ianto tapped the screen, causing one line to highlight. “This bit seems to refer to gravity, and this,” another tap, “To light. I don't know how they're all connected, and I don't even know what they are, but there's something very very odd.”
Jack raised an eyebrow at him. “You mean more than already?”
“About the maths, Jack,” Ianto said, patiently. “All the variables. They're self-propagating. You just need to give a value to a single variable and all the others fall into place off this equation.” He shrugged embarrassed. “Although the computer had to point that one out. I'm afraid it all rather made my eyes cross after a while.”
“Which variable?”
“This one.”
Ianto scrolled back through the numbers and symbols and highlighted the relevant section.
Ei
Jack looked at it. He tilted his head. It made no difference. “Ei” he said. “What's that?”
“Initial energy,” a croaky, whispery voice came from the direction of the sofa. “The spark from the jump leads to set it all going.”
Jack frowned and turned towards the woman in confusion. “Tosh?”
But Tosh appeared to still be mostly asleep, and, after a moment, she rolled over and her breathing deepened. He was loathe to wake her. “I'll go call Owen and Gwen,” he said, and, feeling better for having decided upon something to do, anything to do, that might help her, he headed towards his office purposefully, leaving Ianto to stare blankly at pages upon pages of an equation that made no sense whatsoever.
**
Owen was predictable angry that they had waited so long to call him. It apparently bothered him more than the fact that Jack had woken him out of a sound sleep on his day off. When Jack called Gwen, he heard her sleepily shushing Rhys back to sleep and felt a brief brush of guilt for having disturbed her, but concern for Tosh quickly quashed that and he told her the situation and asked her to come in. She was quick to agree.
Owen was there by the time Gwen arrived. He had gone straight over to Tosh's side when he'd entered the Hub, after casting a dirty look at Jack and Ianto, doing simple things like checking her pulse and temperature. She remained firmly slumbering throughout. Jack would have thought she'd slipped into a coma but for Owen's grouchy confirmation that “no she hasn't, now will you get me my medical kit, you useless git, Harkness”. Now he was in the autopsy bay, running her blood through the scanners.
Gwen looked at Tosh, sleeping, and stepped over to Jack and Ianto, who were still by Tosh's computers. “What's going on?” she asked, brow furrowed in concern. “You weren't very clear on the phone.”
Jack nodded his head in Tosh's direction, and then touched Gwen's arm to bring her attention the computer screen with the reams and reams of equations on it. Gwen leaned forward and muttered, “What the hell?” as her eyes tracked over the reams of data.
Jack’s hand remained on her arm as she pulled her away from the console, Ianto trailing behind, and as they passed by the autopsy bay, beckoned towards Owen, the four of them gathering in the doorway to Jack’s office so as not to disturb their slumbering technician. Quickly, Jack explained to the pair of them what Tosh had been doing up on the Plass, the strange equations she seemed not to be able to stop herself from writing, and her odd overeating and sudden exhaustion.
Gwen and Owen listened silently for a moment.
“Well, it has to be related to that light that knocked Tosh clear across the Hub the other day,” Gwen pointed out, and when Owen frowned and opened his mouth to argue that he’d examined her at the time and found nothing wrong, she gave him a quelling stare. “If you have a better suggestion for what might have caused this, I’d like to hear it.”
Owen subsided, apparently conceding the point.
“So,” Gwen continued, “What are we going to do about it?”
“We don’t even know that ’it’ is,” Ianto said, quietly.
“I’d like to get a proper scan conducted,” Owen said, “Find out what’s going on in her head. If the worst comes to the worst I can put her under heavy sedation, or even freeze her with the alien cryogenics until we figure out what’s wrong with her.”
Jack didn’t look at all happy, but he nodded, “Ok, Owen, Ianto, I want you to-”
Tosh sat up, with a faint cry as if awakening from a bad dream, and threw off her blanket. She sat there for a moment, eyes darting backwards and forwards. The movement startled the group and they turned in unison to look at her worriedly.
“Tosh?” Jack asked, tentatively.
She ignored him, standing and moving with purpose towards her computers. She swept aside the papers that Ianto had been sitting atop her keyboard, ignoring the way they fluttered to the floor, and her fingers were moving, typing, before she’d even sat down in her seat.
Jack made a move towards her, but was stopped when Gwen gently laid a hand on his arm and shook her head. He didn’t look happy, but deferred to her, stepping backwards and folding his arms as if to physically keep himself in check. Gwen stepped forward slowly, cautiously, as she would approach a wild animal she was unsure was about to purr at her or claw her.
“How are you feeling, Tosh?” she asked, as she approached.
Toshiko ignored her.
“Tosh, sweetheart,” Gwen said, a calming and patient smile on her face, her body language open and unthreatening, “Could you look at me for a second?”
Tosh didn’t move, didn’t even blink. Gwen’s outward expression didn’t flicker at the lack of responsiveness, every inch of her the professional police officer she had once been.
“Tosh, can you hear me?” Gwen reached out as she spoke, her hand reaching for Tosh’s arm.
Possibly she was only going to rest a hand on her colleague’s arm reassuringly, but the moment that she touched Tosh, the apparent unawareness of Gwen’s existence vanished and she moved so suddenly and violently that no one had a chance to move close quickly enough.
She stood, and Gwen abruptly backed up, trying to give her some room. “Tosh…” she started, but whatever she might have said she never got a chance to voice, as Toshiko planted her hands on Gwen’s shoulders and shoved, hard.
Gwen gave an incoherent yelp of startlement as she toppled backwards over the railing she had been backed onto. Ianto lunged to catch her, though not quickly enough. She crashed to the ground and lay moaning quietly, stunned.
“Toshiko!” Jack and Owen had reflexively gone for the nearest weapons to hand. “Stand down!” Jack's voice was a curious combination of anguished and angry.
“Wait!” It was Gwen that halted them, yelling as Ianto awkwardly helped pick her up off the floor.
“Gwen?” Owen didn't take his eyes off Gwen to glance down at her.
Gwen winced, as she rubbed the back of her head. “Just... look at her.”
They did, and, sure enough, now that Gwen was no longer making any moves towards hauling her off the keys, Tosh seemed perfectly content to ignore them again. Jack and Owen both slowly lowered their weapons, as if afraid that at any moment, Toshiko would leap up and attack them, but their computer expert just kept tapping away at the keyboard, eyes fixed unblinkingly at the screen, and she appeared to be muttering mathematical concepts under her breath.
Jack stared at her for a long moment, then said, tightly, "Owen, monitor her vitals. Gwen, keep track of what she's doing on the computers, and Ianto," He stabbed a finger in his direction, "Get me the archival record for that thing that hit Tosh the other day. I want to know exactly what's been screwing with her head."
They all hurried about their business, not even waiting to acknowledge his orders. On other occasions, Jack might have appreciated that they were, for once, acting like a team who respected him as a leader, but right now, all he could do was stare at the barely blinking Toshiko, at the sweat on her forehead that she ignored, and the way she whispered to herself in English and Japanese and the language of mathematics that only she understood.
He gripped the nearest railing in frustration. He hated it when there was nothing he could do.
**
Life contained in the seed of all's hope
all's wishes destroyed and cast into shadow
destroyed and lost save for the seed
**
Thanks to the many and varied pieces of alien technology that had either fallen through the Rift, been scavenged by Torchwood and secreted away for future use, and stuff they’d cooked up themselves from a combination of reverse engineering and occasionally insane ingenuity, Owen had one or two remote scanners that he could call upon to scan Toshiko without disturbing her.
Unfortunately, they all showed the same thing. While Toshiko seemed to be going through her body’s energy stores at a frightening rate, there didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with her. She had no viruses or abnormal bacteria in her system, no signs of tumours or any sort of trauma.
He suspected that if he hooked her up to a detailed neurological scan, the results would be somewhat different, but the small handheld scanners were incapable of such fine detail.
He wanted to hit something, to give some sort of release to the frustration he felt. Of all of them, Tosh shouldn’t be the one to fall victim to some alien light that they didn’t properly understand. She should be the one to figure out what was going on, not sit there, helpless in whatever grip the alien thing had on her.
The mortality rate for Torchwood employees had never been good, even before the Battle of Canary Wharf. Owen tried not to think too hard about that, and was so preoccupied that he almost missed the moment when Tosh’s concentration flickered, and she shifted in her seat.
Her eyes sluggishly left the screen and she looked at him, licking dry lips. “Owen,” she said, in a voice like withered leaves.
He lowered the scanner, staring at her pale and sweat-dampened face. She was blinking rapidly, probably a reaction to the fact that she’d hardly been blinking all the time he’d been monitoring her. Her pupils were completely dilated so that only a small ring of iris could be seen. “Tosh…” he said softly, cautiously, not making any sudden moves, not wanting to startle her or send her back into that oddly unreactive state. The others hadn’t even noticed that she had looked away, but then her fingers were still clattering away without her even looking at the screen, depositing line upon line of code without her apparent conscious knowledge.
Owen tried not to let how creeped out he felt show on his face. “Why don’t you come and sit down, Tosh? Get Ianto to make us a coffee and you can have a rest, yeah?”
Tosh bit her lip. “I don’t think I can,” she said, after a moment, turning back to the screen.
Owen had a tight feeling somewhere in the middle of his chest, a small crushing feeling of hopelessness. He thought she’d returned to a state of unawareness, but then she spoke again, her voice even softer than before.
“Owen,” she whispered.
“Yes, Tosh?” His fingers tightened on the scanner to curb the impulse to reach out and touch her hand.
“I’m scared,” she admitted.
Owen watched her, her pale skin, her sweetening, the way her hands moved as of possessed by a life of their own, the way the screen flickered and changed, screens filling up and switching faster than the Human eye could properly follow, and swallowed. “Me too, Tosh,” he told her, though, this time, she didn’t say anything in response.
**
Across the Hub and unaware that Tosh had emerged from her reverie long enough to communicate with Owen, Gwen sat at her desk, the remote monitoring program open, watching it with Jack hanging over her shoulder, the way he was clutching at the back of her chair a better indicator of how anxious he was for Tosh than anything else he could have said.
“I have no way to follow this,” Gwen said, shaking her head, hopelessly confused by the rapidly shifting screens, “I have the computer set up to monitor it, but I’m sure that if anyone wanted to hide what they’re doing from the computer, Tosh’d know how.”
Soft footsteps approached, and they turned to look at Ianto as he came up beside them. There were smudges of dust on his jacket where he had been rummaging around in the archives, and had neglected to brush them off before he returned. “I found the record,” he said, his eyes on the object in his hands even as he spoke.
Ianto was flipping through a thick notebook, whose pages were yellowed with age. What little could be seen of the text was neatly handwritten and arranged in columns. "Unknown artefact number 1936/00142. Found during an estate sale of a recently deceased wealthy woman. Extra-terrestrial quality confirmed, unknown purpose. Suggested it may be a light source. Classified as harmless and archived the nineteenth of June, 1936." He shut the book with a snap, and a small puff of dust escaped with the motion.
"So why'd she bring it up out of the archives?" Jack asked, glancing down at the much newer file that Ianto also carried, which he knew was filled with neatly printed pages.
Ianto didn't even glance at the records as he answered. "She was working on an adaptive translation matrix. She wanted an example of alien language that hadn't previously been processed, to see whether it would translate from a limited example of any given syntax. I suggested this particular item, since it appeared to contained an example of conceptual branching arcs."
Jack eyed Ianto, whose face was studiously blank. After a moment, the younger man glanced away, giving away the guilt he felt.
"It wasn't your fault," he said, sternly.
"Yes, sir," Ianto said, with a remarkably neutral tone to his voice. "If you like I can try running the cage through the matrix. See if it comes up with anything that might give us a clue."
Jack nodded. "Good idea. Owen!" He raised his voice to yell across the Hub as Ianto moved off to see to the remnants of their alien artefact. "How's she doing?"
Owen was standing next to Tosh, holding a blood scanner onto which he had put a drop of Tosh's blood. She hadn't even flinched when he'd used the tiny lancet on her arm, she didn't seem to even notice he was there. He glanced up at Jack's call, and it was clear to see the concern there. "Her blood sugar and electrolyte levels are plummetting through the floor. She really needs something to-"
"Eat. Right." Jack snapped his fingers. "I can do that. I'll be right back." Feeling better for having something to do, Jack patted Gwen on the shoulder, a wordless ‘keep at it’, and headed for his office and the number of a local takeaway.
**
The food, fortunately, didn’t take very long to arrive, but the delivery boy was doubtlessly a little surprised when Jack simply shoved a handful of notes in his face without even bothering to hear how much the food cost, and slammed the door in his face. Jack set the food, still in its containers, down next to Tosh, and she ate one-handed, her concentration never breaking. It seemed vaguely obscene to be standing by doing nothing while Toshiko obviously suffered, to some degree, under an unknown influence.
When Jack hung over Tosh, almost fidgeting, Owen tactfully suggested that maybe they could all do with a nice cup of tea.
The coffee machine was Ianto’s sole dominion, but it was through mutual agreement that tea was a fairly safe beverage that they were allowed to make, since little could go wrong with dropping a teabag into a mug and filling it with water. As one could not be a citizen of the British Isles and be unable to make tea (however much Ianto insisted that Jack’s American genetics should make him physically incapable of making a decent tea), on Ianto’s days off it was all they drank, unless they snuck out for coffee from the shop down the road. So, Jack busily made the tea, tentatively dropping a cup loaded with sugar on Tosh’s desk, wincing as she snatched at the mug with one hand, and downing half of the milky liquid in several mouthfuls. He was glad he’d had the foresight to let it cool down first. Gwen and Tosh’s mugs went ignored as he put them on the desks next to them, and only Ianto glanced up, blinking as he refocused his eyes away from the screen, as Jack held out a godawful pink and yellow affair that might have been picked up at a car boot sale somewhere.
“Thanks,” he muttered, as he took the mug, sipping gingerly at it. “Linguistical analysis isn’t really my thing. Definitely Tosh’s area of expertise.”
They both glanced towards Tosh, and then back away from her. Ianto sighed, and swirled the tea in his mug. “But I think I’m making some progress,” he said. “You put too much sugar in this.”
“Sorry,” Jack said, unapologetically. He had other things to think about than how much sugar Ianto prefered in his tea.
“The thing about it is…” While Ianto held his mug in one hand, he sketched lines across the screen with the other. “It’s completely non-linear. There’s no start point, though this glyph in the centre seems to signify the central concept of the whole text.” He gestured to a single symbol, from which three curved arms of text all emerged, before they branched off into three further arms. It looked more like a work of art than a piece of useful information. He shrugged helplessly, encompassing the whole thing with a single wave of the hand. “It’s a cross between descriptive and imaginative. I can’t say for absolute certain what it is.”
Ianto trailed off, staring thoughtfully at the white on blue text that cast a ghostly glow upon his face.
“So…?” Jack prompted, frowning, “What do you think it is?”
Ianto raised his eyes hesitantly from his screen. "I think," he began, uncertainly, "I think it's a poem."
He froze, as did the others. It wasn't a sudden noise, but a lack thereof that stopped them. They turned towards Toshiko, who had stopped typing, the clattering of keys having fallen silent. She was no longer muttering to herself, and instead her lips were pressed together thinly.
She nodded, decisively. "It's done," she said, with a firmness in her voice that had been so absent these long hours. She reached out, and tapped a key, and then her hands fell into her lap.
Gwen abruptly made a startled sound of surprise, and pulled her hands away from her own keyboard as if she'd burnt them. "She just locked out the system!" she said.
Ianto set his mug down and stood, though he looked uncertainly towards Jack, not sure what to do.
Unfortunately, Jack didn’t have much more of an idea than the rest of them. “Owen,” he started to say, “Get her away from the-”
And that was as far as he got before the shockwave hit them all.
It wasn’t an explosion, but the air was so abruptly and forcefully displaced that the wave slammed into them all with a solid thud that rattled Jack’s bones and made his ears ring. It took him a moment or two to realise that the rushing sound he could hear wasn’t in his head, but was the air itself swirling violently around the Hub. He awkwardly struggled to his feet against the wind, clinging to the desk even as Gwen used it to help herself upright. Ianto was already back on his feet, head turned towards the water tower.
An elongated distortion, a globe pulled at the poles, encircled the tower. It gave off no light itself, but light bent and warped around it, giving it a faintly reflective appearance. Its outer edges rippled and swirled, expanding and contracting at random intervals, as if something were struggling to get out. The familiar screech of mechanics could be heard dimly through the rush of air, and Jack knew that the Rift Manipulator was somehow causing this. In all her frenetic programming, she'd somehow managed to override the lockouts.
Jack could see Owen struggling to his feet. When he couldn’t fight the wind to reach Tosh’s side, and couldn’t make himself heard over the rush of air, he took the path of least resistance, and allowed the wind to push him along as he haltingly made his way over to the others.
“I don’t see her!” he yelled, and Jack peered harder into the distortion, which was definitely growing more than it was shrinking. Every time it fluctuated, it crept out another foot or more.
However violent the distortion was, it was localised. If they looked towards the water tower, space was visibly rippling and changing around it. It didn’t extend more than a few meters outwards, but it whipped the air around into a hurricane, scattering equipment and papers everywhere.
And inside the distortion stood Toshiko, impassive and calm. He could just about make out the outline of her body, facing the water tower, arms held away from her body.
“We need to shut down the manipulator,” Ianto said.
“I thought we couldn't once it started,” Gwen said, clinging to the desk as the wind whipped at her hair.
“That was before,” Ianto said, yelling to make himself heard over the wind.
Of course. Before. Before they nearly destroyed the world. Somehow Jack wasn't surprised that Ianto had taken the opportunity to do some modifications to the manipulator while everyone's back was turned. It was exactly like him to try and atone for his own feelings of guilt by trying to prevent the same thing from ever happening again.
“I'll do it.” Ianto started to move, as if to head towards the manipulator, but was stopped when Owen abruptly grabbed his arm, fingers digging painfully into the muscles.
“Sticking your arm into an active rift manipulator would kill you," Owen snapped. "Make Captain Scarlet do it."
Jack scowled, and rolled up his sleeves as he ran across the Hub. "I love you too, Owen."
“Pull out the core regulator!” Ianto yelled after him, “The failsafe'll kick in and it should shutdown.”
Should, of course, being the operative term.
Jack nodded shortly to indicate that he'd heard, and stepped forward, straight into the heart of that twisting that felt so very wrong on a fundamental level, and lost sight of his team, who clung to each other and the railings to keep themselves from getting swept off their feet.
It was all so very wrong, every cell in his body screaming that same message at him. It almost felt like the time vortex against his skin, that one time when he'd been stupid enough to expose himself to it with no protection, unadulterated power warping and shifting around him, refusing to bend to any 'conventional' notion of how things should be.
But the world wasn't fracturing, or breaking. Reality was twisting and distorting, as if trying to make room for something that wouldn't quite fit, stretched and compressed, but not turned to glass and shattered. The air felt alternatively too thin or too thick, and Jack had the fleeting thought of what it might be like to suffocate to death in the middle of the Hub. It was worst around the water tower, and the manipulator contained within. The access panel was open, put trying to reach it and put his arm inside was like trying to force his arm alternately through treacle and concrete.
He braced one hand on the edge of the panel, and used his other hand to reach inside. He could feel bones crunching, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he was fairly sure that different parts of his brain were existing in different time zones. Things kept going blank or strangely grey, and he wondered if it was different parts of him dying at different times. He hadn't had the regulator that Ianto mentioned ever pointed out to him, but it was obvious, given its placement within the architecture of the machine, where and what it was. It was a simple disc-like object, held in place with three clamps.
He forced his hand forward, even further, and about an inch or two (or a yard or two away, the distance varying from instant to instant) away from the core mechanism, he could feel the distortions lessen; the eye of the storm. Painfully, he tried to force his fingers to undo the clamps, nerves misfiring down his arm and requiring him to make more than one attempt. Finally, he managed to get the device freed, but removing it was another matter.
The contortions of reality resisted his attempts to pull it free. Everytime he thought he'd managed to pull it far enough away, some sort of force tried to push it back into position. He grit his teeth and strained, putting every ounce of effort into the action. Slowly, the regulator moved out of position, and the motions of the manipulator slowed, the failsafe kicking in.
If he could just pull it all the way free, then this would all be over.
A soft touch on his hand, the one he was using to brace himself, stopped him. Squinting against the ripples of time and space that twisted and turned the very fabric of reality and made his head hurt, he looked down, and at Tosh, who was staring at him with startling lucidity in her eyes. She seemed unaffected by the contortions of reality, the architect of this chaos.
"Please," she said, her voice too quiet to be audible over the shrieking of the manipulator, and yet somehow it reached his ears more clearly than anything else, "I think this is the right thing to do. It should happen."
Jack started to shake his head. "Tosh..."
"Please, Jack." She smiled, tentatively. "Please."
He stared down at her, so difficult to see amidst the twisted currents of the Universe, and saw the way she was staring at him, with deep trust in her eyes. He knew Toshiko, and he knew it was her, and not some alien masquerading as her.
The question was... did he trust her?
Jack smiled at her, and let go of the manipulator.
**
In that moment, they saw everything. All that could be, stretching out from this moment to the infinite end of time and space, when this great work came crashing down upon itself. They saw the potential. They saw life, they saw worlds, they saw death and song and light and greatness and infinite multitudes.
At some point the world had possessed edges, and each of them had been separate, but this was not their reality, not their worldview. This was something new, something alien, something unknown and unfamiliar to any experience that any Human could ever possess. That anyone of this Universe could possess.
The world was white, and it was black, and it was so many colours it was painful. It was all and nothing.
And it was waiting.
All was still and silent and then Toshiko spoke.
“Um...” Her voice reverberated through the harmonics of the newness as ripples upon a still pond, touching every moment that is, was and will be. “Am I supposed to say something?”
They were inauspicious words to proclaim a birth, but enough. Solidity crept in. Things became defined, and began to recede, shadows formed and lengthened, and reality began to cluster into lines and curves, and solid balls that would burn and give life to billions...
... but not here.
**
The return to normalcy was almost an anti-climax. There was no great bang, no flash of light. One minute they were consumed by that vast Everything and the next they were all standing in the Hub, where they had been standing before whatever it was had happened. None of them felt ill or sick, there was no disorientation, and the experience seemed to be fading from their minds fairly quickly. The wind had died down, and the only damage apparently done was having papers and bits of loose equipment scattered all over the place. The pterodactyl was making a racket somewhere in the ceiling, but she didn't sound in pain, only confused.
The only difference was Toshiko, lying on the floor, clearly unconscious.
**
Life begets the living
living breath touches life's seed and thus blossoms hope
touches the heart of life's seed and changes endure
**
Owen had examined Tosh again, a little more thoroughly than usual, and eventually concluded that whatever had been happening to her had stopped, or run its course. Her fainting had been due to a combination of low blood pressure, abominably low blood sugar, and severe overheating.
“Very much like her brain'd been working on overdrive,” Owen had added, with a raised eyebrow.
It hadn't taken long to get her back on her feet, and for her to join the rest of the team in trying to work out what had been happening. It took a while, but once Tosh had managed to have a look at the readings, she'd been quick to realise what had happened. Perhaps some remnant of her experience still lingered, she would later think.
“A Universe,” Gwen said in wonder, as she looked at the screen, with incomprehensible equations and all manner of peculiar sensor readings scrolling across it. “Wow.” She had her head propped on her hands and tilted it in Toshiko's direction. “I think you've outdone yourself, Tosh.”
“What happened to it?” Jack asked, eyeing Toshiko closely. One hand absently tugged at the splint wrapped around his arm, supporting the bones that had been crushed by the warping of reality, being repaired faster than normal by a handy little alien gadget. He had a slightly hazy look in his eyes from the industrial strength painkillers that Owen had forced upon him, but otherwise, he seemed the only one to have emerged with any harm lingering from this latest crisis.
“It's gone,” Toshiko shrugged, setting down the stylus of her PDA. “Shrank to Planck scale and vanished, presumably to occupy it's own little dimensional niche.”
“Ok, but I still don't get this.” Owen hitched his chair closer to the table, jabbing a finger in the direction of the computer screen. “I don't get how that maths student's nightmare and that,” he then jerked his hand in the direction of the fountain and the Rift Manipulator contained within, “Equals a new Universe.”
Tosh looked down at her hands, biting her lip, trying to figure out how to answer. She was saved by an outside source, who bore drinks into the room on an old Cardiff Tourist Board tin tray.
“In programming,” Ianto said, as he deposited coffee cups in front of everyone, filling the room with a delightfully aromatic combination of tea and coffee, “You describe an object to create it. You give it properties and values for those properties.” He stared at Tosh as he dropped her mug in front of her.
She was silent a moment, thinking about it. “You're right,” she finally said, “That's sounds exactly like what I was doing.”
“That explains why the equation was so long.” Jack mused, “You were describing a whole universe. A unified theory of everything. Just not for our Universe.”
Gwen gave Tosh an inscrutable look. “Just as well you didn't have to show your working,” she said.
Owen nodded. “I was always crap at that in school.” Then he sat bolt upright, as if he'd been jabbed in the side with a pencil. “That reminds me of those computers Torchwood seized off that school... um...” Owen snapped his fingers impatiently, trying to remember. “Deffy Vale or something... that equation they said it contained. The key to the Universe or something.”
“The Skasis paradigm,” Jack said, quietly, closing his eyes to avoid focusing on anything.
“Yeah, that's it. A Godmaker or something.” Owen turned a grin on Tosh. “So what we have here is the Toshiko Paradigm.”
“How does it feel being a God?” Gwen asked, cheekily.
Tosh frowned. “If I'd known I'd be required to say something profound,” she said, “I would have made the effort to write something down in advance.”
Jack's mouth twitched. “Not quite 'let there be light' but I suppose it had a certain poeticism to it.”
Tosh looked embarrassed. “When life evolves,” she said, clearly attempting to sound like she created Universes every day, “I hope they leave that bit out of their sacred texts.”
Jack's twitch grew into a full blown grin. “When life evolves,” he told her, “They might develop Universe-hopping technology and come to have a chat with God.”
Toshiko's face grew pale as she considered the possibility. She grabbed her mug, holding it between her hands tightly and clearly disturbed at the thought. “I don’t think it was me, though,” she said, biting her lip, “It felt more like… I was a conduit. It felt so beautiful, all those numbers, but it was just outside of my comprehension. I could almost get it…” She raised her hand, fingers moving in a faint grasping motion, before she let her hand drop, and shook her head. “But not quite.”
"Oh," Jack said, opening his eyes slightly and turning to look at Ianto, "You never did get around to telling us what was written on the artefact. You said it was a poem?"
Ianto looked surprised at the subject coming up, but he nodded. "Yes. I thought it was odd at the time, but in retrospect, I suppose it makes sense." He took a sip of his coffee.
Gwen raised her eyebrow. "Well, are you going to tell us, or are you going to leave us in suspense?"
Ianto smiled, set down his mug, and quoted from memory. “Life turned to darkness and sorrow...”
- Fin -
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.b-jewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: BBC's. !mine.
Summary: You're either insane, or you're a God. When it comes to Torchwood, who can tell?
Notes: Written prior to Reset, but contains no spoilers. I started this in April 2007. That's a rate of a little over 1000 words per month. I totally fail.
Toshiko had been quickly installed on the sofa of the Hub, a cup of the hottest, most disgustingly sweet tea Ianto could conjure quickly warming her hands, blanket still slung over her, and Jack sat beside her, arm around her shoulders, looking at her pale face carefully. “How long's this been happening?” He asked, gently.
Tosh took a sip from her coffee, the motion betraying the fact that her hands were shaking. “I don't know,” she said, “A few days. Nothing major, I mean. I'd just be doodling and finding myself with a page full of equations. It's not weird,” she added, defensively, “I do it all the time. I just figured there was some idea the back of my head was trying to work out.” She raised her head and jerked it in the direction of her briefcase. “I had all the papers with me, but some of it I'd already stuck on the computers.”
Ianto, who had been hovering nearby with his hands in his pockets, moved off at Jack's nod, opening up the briefcase and removing what seemed to be half a rainforest's worth of scrap paper. He settled himself into Tosh's chair, and started sorting through the pages. After a moment, he turned to the screens and started typing up what he'd found, adding them to what Tosh had already put in. His fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard as he typed without looking at the screen, his eyes instead flickering back and forth across the pages.
“Do you know what they mean?”
Tosh shook her head. “Like I said, I figured it was some new idea I'd had that I hadn't really worked out yet.” She laughed, a little hollowly.
Jack stroked her shoulder gently, comfortingly. “How are you feeling?”
“Actually,” Tosh frowned, looking up from her tea, already gone but for the very dregs. “I'm really hungry. Isn't that weird?”
It was weird, but Jack had this horrible feeling that it might actually be connected to whatever was going on with her head. Fortunately he knew where Gwen kept the stash of chocolate biscuits she thought no one else knew about, and, after putting the tin into Tosh's hands, she started eating them as if she'd been starving for a week.
He fetched her another sweet tea, and she drank that down quickly as well. Though some sort of colour had started to return to her cheeks, she was clearly exhausted. She was struggling to keep her eyes open, and her head kept dipping with an absolute exhaustion that she couldn't fight.
Gently, he pulled her against his chest, leaning back against the arm rest of the sofa, bringing her with him. She stiffened briefly, then sagged, apparently too tired to resist. After only a few moments, her breathing deepened and evened out as she fell into sleep, lulled by his body warmth and the soft, unintrusive sounds of the Hub idling and Ianto typing.
He was worried. How could he not be? She didn't seem to be ill, but then this was hardly normal. She was always working hard, but this was inhuman. He stroked her hair gently, and tried not to sigh.
The halting of the clacking of a keyboard caused him to glance up at Ianto, who had stopped typing and was frowning at the screen. He gave it a brief tap, and a new screen opened up with scrolling data. He made a small thoughtful noise, and leaned back from the computer.
Trying not to disturb Tosh, he carefully extricated himself from underneath her, resettling her gently on the sofa. She didn't even seem to notice that much, burrowing into the warm cushions that his body had left behind. He tugged the blanket a little higher over her shoulders, and reluctantly left her alone.
Ianto was stretching his arms and causing his shoulders to crack audibly as Jack settled against the desk next to him. “It's a lot of data,” he said, after a moment, shaking out his hands. “My fingers ache.”
Jack smirked, reaching out to take Ianto's hands, gently massaging the joints. Ianto's mouth twitched. “Captain,” he said, chidingly, “What will the staff say?”
Jack glanced over to the sleeping Toshiko and grinned. “You're right. They'll all be after my attentions, and then you'll languish in obscurity.”
“Ah,” Ianto said, affecting dramatic woe. “Such is my lot in life.”
Jack smirked, and let go of Ianto's hands, now that they seemed to be moving without the stiffness they'd had before. “What've you found?”
“The equations aren't complete, even with all the papers I found and typed up, and the stuff upstairs added in.” Ianto had already cleaned off the chalk scribblings, but not before capturing their image on CCTV. “And I can only follow them so far. Near as I can tell, it's actually several different equations for things, but it's all in one single equation.”
Jack stared. “One single equation? But that's a lot of stuff.”
“I know.” Ianto tapped the screen, causing one line to highlight. “This bit seems to refer to gravity, and this,” another tap, “To light. I don't know how they're all connected, and I don't even know what they are, but there's something very very odd.”
Jack raised an eyebrow at him. “You mean more than already?”
“About the maths, Jack,” Ianto said, patiently. “All the variables. They're self-propagating. You just need to give a value to a single variable and all the others fall into place off this equation.” He shrugged embarrassed. “Although the computer had to point that one out. I'm afraid it all rather made my eyes cross after a while.”
“Which variable?”
“This one.”
Ianto scrolled back through the numbers and symbols and highlighted the relevant section.
Ei
Jack looked at it. He tilted his head. It made no difference. “Ei” he said. “What's that?”
“Initial energy,” a croaky, whispery voice came from the direction of the sofa. “The spark from the jump leads to set it all going.”
Jack frowned and turned towards the woman in confusion. “Tosh?”
But Tosh appeared to still be mostly asleep, and, after a moment, she rolled over and her breathing deepened. He was loathe to wake her. “I'll go call Owen and Gwen,” he said, and, feeling better for having decided upon something to do, anything to do, that might help her, he headed towards his office purposefully, leaving Ianto to stare blankly at pages upon pages of an equation that made no sense whatsoever.
**
Owen was predictable angry that they had waited so long to call him. It apparently bothered him more than the fact that Jack had woken him out of a sound sleep on his day off. When Jack called Gwen, he heard her sleepily shushing Rhys back to sleep and felt a brief brush of guilt for having disturbed her, but concern for Tosh quickly quashed that and he told her the situation and asked her to come in. She was quick to agree.
Owen was there by the time Gwen arrived. He had gone straight over to Tosh's side when he'd entered the Hub, after casting a dirty look at Jack and Ianto, doing simple things like checking her pulse and temperature. She remained firmly slumbering throughout. Jack would have thought she'd slipped into a coma but for Owen's grouchy confirmation that “no she hasn't, now will you get me my medical kit, you useless git, Harkness”. Now he was in the autopsy bay, running her blood through the scanners.
Gwen looked at Tosh, sleeping, and stepped over to Jack and Ianto, who were still by Tosh's computers. “What's going on?” she asked, brow furrowed in concern. “You weren't very clear on the phone.”
Jack nodded his head in Tosh's direction, and then touched Gwen's arm to bring her attention the computer screen with the reams and reams of equations on it. Gwen leaned forward and muttered, “What the hell?” as her eyes tracked over the reams of data.
Jack’s hand remained on her arm as she pulled her away from the console, Ianto trailing behind, and as they passed by the autopsy bay, beckoned towards Owen, the four of them gathering in the doorway to Jack’s office so as not to disturb their slumbering technician. Quickly, Jack explained to the pair of them what Tosh had been doing up on the Plass, the strange equations she seemed not to be able to stop herself from writing, and her odd overeating and sudden exhaustion.
Gwen and Owen listened silently for a moment.
“Well, it has to be related to that light that knocked Tosh clear across the Hub the other day,” Gwen pointed out, and when Owen frowned and opened his mouth to argue that he’d examined her at the time and found nothing wrong, she gave him a quelling stare. “If you have a better suggestion for what might have caused this, I’d like to hear it.”
Owen subsided, apparently conceding the point.
“So,” Gwen continued, “What are we going to do about it?”
“We don’t even know that ’it’ is,” Ianto said, quietly.
“I’d like to get a proper scan conducted,” Owen said, “Find out what’s going on in her head. If the worst comes to the worst I can put her under heavy sedation, or even freeze her with the alien cryogenics until we figure out what’s wrong with her.”
Jack didn’t look at all happy, but he nodded, “Ok, Owen, Ianto, I want you to-”
Tosh sat up, with a faint cry as if awakening from a bad dream, and threw off her blanket. She sat there for a moment, eyes darting backwards and forwards. The movement startled the group and they turned in unison to look at her worriedly.
“Tosh?” Jack asked, tentatively.
She ignored him, standing and moving with purpose towards her computers. She swept aside the papers that Ianto had been sitting atop her keyboard, ignoring the way they fluttered to the floor, and her fingers were moving, typing, before she’d even sat down in her seat.
Jack made a move towards her, but was stopped when Gwen gently laid a hand on his arm and shook her head. He didn’t look happy, but deferred to her, stepping backwards and folding his arms as if to physically keep himself in check. Gwen stepped forward slowly, cautiously, as she would approach a wild animal she was unsure was about to purr at her or claw her.
“How are you feeling, Tosh?” she asked, as she approached.
Toshiko ignored her.
“Tosh, sweetheart,” Gwen said, a calming and patient smile on her face, her body language open and unthreatening, “Could you look at me for a second?”
Tosh didn’t move, didn’t even blink. Gwen’s outward expression didn’t flicker at the lack of responsiveness, every inch of her the professional police officer she had once been.
“Tosh, can you hear me?” Gwen reached out as she spoke, her hand reaching for Tosh’s arm.
Possibly she was only going to rest a hand on her colleague’s arm reassuringly, but the moment that she touched Tosh, the apparent unawareness of Gwen’s existence vanished and she moved so suddenly and violently that no one had a chance to move close quickly enough.
She stood, and Gwen abruptly backed up, trying to give her some room. “Tosh…” she started, but whatever she might have said she never got a chance to voice, as Toshiko planted her hands on Gwen’s shoulders and shoved, hard.
Gwen gave an incoherent yelp of startlement as she toppled backwards over the railing she had been backed onto. Ianto lunged to catch her, though not quickly enough. She crashed to the ground and lay moaning quietly, stunned.
“Toshiko!” Jack and Owen had reflexively gone for the nearest weapons to hand. “Stand down!” Jack's voice was a curious combination of anguished and angry.
“Wait!” It was Gwen that halted them, yelling as Ianto awkwardly helped pick her up off the floor.
“Gwen?” Owen didn't take his eyes off Gwen to glance down at her.
Gwen winced, as she rubbed the back of her head. “Just... look at her.”
They did, and, sure enough, now that Gwen was no longer making any moves towards hauling her off the keys, Tosh seemed perfectly content to ignore them again. Jack and Owen both slowly lowered their weapons, as if afraid that at any moment, Toshiko would leap up and attack them, but their computer expert just kept tapping away at the keyboard, eyes fixed unblinkingly at the screen, and she appeared to be muttering mathematical concepts under her breath.
Jack stared at her for a long moment, then said, tightly, "Owen, monitor her vitals. Gwen, keep track of what she's doing on the computers, and Ianto," He stabbed a finger in his direction, "Get me the archival record for that thing that hit Tosh the other day. I want to know exactly what's been screwing with her head."
They all hurried about their business, not even waiting to acknowledge his orders. On other occasions, Jack might have appreciated that they were, for once, acting like a team who respected him as a leader, but right now, all he could do was stare at the barely blinking Toshiko, at the sweat on her forehead that she ignored, and the way she whispered to herself in English and Japanese and the language of mathematics that only she understood.
He gripped the nearest railing in frustration. He hated it when there was nothing he could do.
**
Life contained in the seed of all's hope
all's wishes destroyed and cast into shadow
destroyed and lost save for the seed
**
Thanks to the many and varied pieces of alien technology that had either fallen through the Rift, been scavenged by Torchwood and secreted away for future use, and stuff they’d cooked up themselves from a combination of reverse engineering and occasionally insane ingenuity, Owen had one or two remote scanners that he could call upon to scan Toshiko without disturbing her.
Unfortunately, they all showed the same thing. While Toshiko seemed to be going through her body’s energy stores at a frightening rate, there didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with her. She had no viruses or abnormal bacteria in her system, no signs of tumours or any sort of trauma.
He suspected that if he hooked her up to a detailed neurological scan, the results would be somewhat different, but the small handheld scanners were incapable of such fine detail.
He wanted to hit something, to give some sort of release to the frustration he felt. Of all of them, Tosh shouldn’t be the one to fall victim to some alien light that they didn’t properly understand. She should be the one to figure out what was going on, not sit there, helpless in whatever grip the alien thing had on her.
The mortality rate for Torchwood employees had never been good, even before the Battle of Canary Wharf. Owen tried not to think too hard about that, and was so preoccupied that he almost missed the moment when Tosh’s concentration flickered, and she shifted in her seat.
Her eyes sluggishly left the screen and she looked at him, licking dry lips. “Owen,” she said, in a voice like withered leaves.
He lowered the scanner, staring at her pale and sweat-dampened face. She was blinking rapidly, probably a reaction to the fact that she’d hardly been blinking all the time he’d been monitoring her. Her pupils were completely dilated so that only a small ring of iris could be seen. “Tosh…” he said softly, cautiously, not making any sudden moves, not wanting to startle her or send her back into that oddly unreactive state. The others hadn’t even noticed that she had looked away, but then her fingers were still clattering away without her even looking at the screen, depositing line upon line of code without her apparent conscious knowledge.
Owen tried not to let how creeped out he felt show on his face. “Why don’t you come and sit down, Tosh? Get Ianto to make us a coffee and you can have a rest, yeah?”
Tosh bit her lip. “I don’t think I can,” she said, after a moment, turning back to the screen.
Owen had a tight feeling somewhere in the middle of his chest, a small crushing feeling of hopelessness. He thought she’d returned to a state of unawareness, but then she spoke again, her voice even softer than before.
“Owen,” she whispered.
“Yes, Tosh?” His fingers tightened on the scanner to curb the impulse to reach out and touch her hand.
“I’m scared,” she admitted.
Owen watched her, her pale skin, her sweetening, the way her hands moved as of possessed by a life of their own, the way the screen flickered and changed, screens filling up and switching faster than the Human eye could properly follow, and swallowed. “Me too, Tosh,” he told her, though, this time, she didn’t say anything in response.
**
Across the Hub and unaware that Tosh had emerged from her reverie long enough to communicate with Owen, Gwen sat at her desk, the remote monitoring program open, watching it with Jack hanging over her shoulder, the way he was clutching at the back of her chair a better indicator of how anxious he was for Tosh than anything else he could have said.
“I have no way to follow this,” Gwen said, shaking her head, hopelessly confused by the rapidly shifting screens, “I have the computer set up to monitor it, but I’m sure that if anyone wanted to hide what they’re doing from the computer, Tosh’d know how.”
Soft footsteps approached, and they turned to look at Ianto as he came up beside them. There were smudges of dust on his jacket where he had been rummaging around in the archives, and had neglected to brush them off before he returned. “I found the record,” he said, his eyes on the object in his hands even as he spoke.
Ianto was flipping through a thick notebook, whose pages were yellowed with age. What little could be seen of the text was neatly handwritten and arranged in columns. "Unknown artefact number 1936/00142. Found during an estate sale of a recently deceased wealthy woman. Extra-terrestrial quality confirmed, unknown purpose. Suggested it may be a light source. Classified as harmless and archived the nineteenth of June, 1936." He shut the book with a snap, and a small puff of dust escaped with the motion.
"So why'd she bring it up out of the archives?" Jack asked, glancing down at the much newer file that Ianto also carried, which he knew was filled with neatly printed pages.
Ianto didn't even glance at the records as he answered. "She was working on an adaptive translation matrix. She wanted an example of alien language that hadn't previously been processed, to see whether it would translate from a limited example of any given syntax. I suggested this particular item, since it appeared to contained an example of conceptual branching arcs."
Jack eyed Ianto, whose face was studiously blank. After a moment, the younger man glanced away, giving away the guilt he felt.
"It wasn't your fault," he said, sternly.
"Yes, sir," Ianto said, with a remarkably neutral tone to his voice. "If you like I can try running the cage through the matrix. See if it comes up with anything that might give us a clue."
Jack nodded. "Good idea. Owen!" He raised his voice to yell across the Hub as Ianto moved off to see to the remnants of their alien artefact. "How's she doing?"
Owen was standing next to Tosh, holding a blood scanner onto which he had put a drop of Tosh's blood. She hadn't even flinched when he'd used the tiny lancet on her arm, she didn't seem to even notice he was there. He glanced up at Jack's call, and it was clear to see the concern there. "Her blood sugar and electrolyte levels are plummetting through the floor. She really needs something to-"
"Eat. Right." Jack snapped his fingers. "I can do that. I'll be right back." Feeling better for having something to do, Jack patted Gwen on the shoulder, a wordless ‘keep at it’, and headed for his office and the number of a local takeaway.
**
The food, fortunately, didn’t take very long to arrive, but the delivery boy was doubtlessly a little surprised when Jack simply shoved a handful of notes in his face without even bothering to hear how much the food cost, and slammed the door in his face. Jack set the food, still in its containers, down next to Tosh, and she ate one-handed, her concentration never breaking. It seemed vaguely obscene to be standing by doing nothing while Toshiko obviously suffered, to some degree, under an unknown influence.
When Jack hung over Tosh, almost fidgeting, Owen tactfully suggested that maybe they could all do with a nice cup of tea.
The coffee machine was Ianto’s sole dominion, but it was through mutual agreement that tea was a fairly safe beverage that they were allowed to make, since little could go wrong with dropping a teabag into a mug and filling it with water. As one could not be a citizen of the British Isles and be unable to make tea (however much Ianto insisted that Jack’s American genetics should make him physically incapable of making a decent tea), on Ianto’s days off it was all they drank, unless they snuck out for coffee from the shop down the road. So, Jack busily made the tea, tentatively dropping a cup loaded with sugar on Tosh’s desk, wincing as she snatched at the mug with one hand, and downing half of the milky liquid in several mouthfuls. He was glad he’d had the foresight to let it cool down first. Gwen and Tosh’s mugs went ignored as he put them on the desks next to them, and only Ianto glanced up, blinking as he refocused his eyes away from the screen, as Jack held out a godawful pink and yellow affair that might have been picked up at a car boot sale somewhere.
“Thanks,” he muttered, as he took the mug, sipping gingerly at it. “Linguistical analysis isn’t really my thing. Definitely Tosh’s area of expertise.”
They both glanced towards Tosh, and then back away from her. Ianto sighed, and swirled the tea in his mug. “But I think I’m making some progress,” he said. “You put too much sugar in this.”
“Sorry,” Jack said, unapologetically. He had other things to think about than how much sugar Ianto prefered in his tea.
“The thing about it is…” While Ianto held his mug in one hand, he sketched lines across the screen with the other. “It’s completely non-linear. There’s no start point, though this glyph in the centre seems to signify the central concept of the whole text.” He gestured to a single symbol, from which three curved arms of text all emerged, before they branched off into three further arms. It looked more like a work of art than a piece of useful information. He shrugged helplessly, encompassing the whole thing with a single wave of the hand. “It’s a cross between descriptive and imaginative. I can’t say for absolute certain what it is.”
Ianto trailed off, staring thoughtfully at the white on blue text that cast a ghostly glow upon his face.
“So…?” Jack prompted, frowning, “What do you think it is?”
Ianto raised his eyes hesitantly from his screen. "I think," he began, uncertainly, "I think it's a poem."
He froze, as did the others. It wasn't a sudden noise, but a lack thereof that stopped them. They turned towards Toshiko, who had stopped typing, the clattering of keys having fallen silent. She was no longer muttering to herself, and instead her lips were pressed together thinly.
She nodded, decisively. "It's done," she said, with a firmness in her voice that had been so absent these long hours. She reached out, and tapped a key, and then her hands fell into her lap.
Gwen abruptly made a startled sound of surprise, and pulled her hands away from her own keyboard as if she'd burnt them. "She just locked out the system!" she said.
Ianto set his mug down and stood, though he looked uncertainly towards Jack, not sure what to do.
Unfortunately, Jack didn’t have much more of an idea than the rest of them. “Owen,” he started to say, “Get her away from the-”
And that was as far as he got before the shockwave hit them all.
It wasn’t an explosion, but the air was so abruptly and forcefully displaced that the wave slammed into them all with a solid thud that rattled Jack’s bones and made his ears ring. It took him a moment or two to realise that the rushing sound he could hear wasn’t in his head, but was the air itself swirling violently around the Hub. He awkwardly struggled to his feet against the wind, clinging to the desk even as Gwen used it to help herself upright. Ianto was already back on his feet, head turned towards the water tower.
An elongated distortion, a globe pulled at the poles, encircled the tower. It gave off no light itself, but light bent and warped around it, giving it a faintly reflective appearance. Its outer edges rippled and swirled, expanding and contracting at random intervals, as if something were struggling to get out. The familiar screech of mechanics could be heard dimly through the rush of air, and Jack knew that the Rift Manipulator was somehow causing this. In all her frenetic programming, she'd somehow managed to override the lockouts.
Jack could see Owen struggling to his feet. When he couldn’t fight the wind to reach Tosh’s side, and couldn’t make himself heard over the rush of air, he took the path of least resistance, and allowed the wind to push him along as he haltingly made his way over to the others.
“I don’t see her!” he yelled, and Jack peered harder into the distortion, which was definitely growing more than it was shrinking. Every time it fluctuated, it crept out another foot or more.
However violent the distortion was, it was localised. If they looked towards the water tower, space was visibly rippling and changing around it. It didn’t extend more than a few meters outwards, but it whipped the air around into a hurricane, scattering equipment and papers everywhere.
And inside the distortion stood Toshiko, impassive and calm. He could just about make out the outline of her body, facing the water tower, arms held away from her body.
“We need to shut down the manipulator,” Ianto said.
“I thought we couldn't once it started,” Gwen said, clinging to the desk as the wind whipped at her hair.
“That was before,” Ianto said, yelling to make himself heard over the wind.
Of course. Before. Before they nearly destroyed the world. Somehow Jack wasn't surprised that Ianto had taken the opportunity to do some modifications to the manipulator while everyone's back was turned. It was exactly like him to try and atone for his own feelings of guilt by trying to prevent the same thing from ever happening again.
“I'll do it.” Ianto started to move, as if to head towards the manipulator, but was stopped when Owen abruptly grabbed his arm, fingers digging painfully into the muscles.
“Sticking your arm into an active rift manipulator would kill you," Owen snapped. "Make Captain Scarlet do it."
Jack scowled, and rolled up his sleeves as he ran across the Hub. "I love you too, Owen."
“Pull out the core regulator!” Ianto yelled after him, “The failsafe'll kick in and it should shutdown.”
Should, of course, being the operative term.
Jack nodded shortly to indicate that he'd heard, and stepped forward, straight into the heart of that twisting that felt so very wrong on a fundamental level, and lost sight of his team, who clung to each other and the railings to keep themselves from getting swept off their feet.
It was all so very wrong, every cell in his body screaming that same message at him. It almost felt like the time vortex against his skin, that one time when he'd been stupid enough to expose himself to it with no protection, unadulterated power warping and shifting around him, refusing to bend to any 'conventional' notion of how things should be.
But the world wasn't fracturing, or breaking. Reality was twisting and distorting, as if trying to make room for something that wouldn't quite fit, stretched and compressed, but not turned to glass and shattered. The air felt alternatively too thin or too thick, and Jack had the fleeting thought of what it might be like to suffocate to death in the middle of the Hub. It was worst around the water tower, and the manipulator contained within. The access panel was open, put trying to reach it and put his arm inside was like trying to force his arm alternately through treacle and concrete.
He braced one hand on the edge of the panel, and used his other hand to reach inside. He could feel bones crunching, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he was fairly sure that different parts of his brain were existing in different time zones. Things kept going blank or strangely grey, and he wondered if it was different parts of him dying at different times. He hadn't had the regulator that Ianto mentioned ever pointed out to him, but it was obvious, given its placement within the architecture of the machine, where and what it was. It was a simple disc-like object, held in place with three clamps.
He forced his hand forward, even further, and about an inch or two (or a yard or two away, the distance varying from instant to instant) away from the core mechanism, he could feel the distortions lessen; the eye of the storm. Painfully, he tried to force his fingers to undo the clamps, nerves misfiring down his arm and requiring him to make more than one attempt. Finally, he managed to get the device freed, but removing it was another matter.
The contortions of reality resisted his attempts to pull it free. Everytime he thought he'd managed to pull it far enough away, some sort of force tried to push it back into position. He grit his teeth and strained, putting every ounce of effort into the action. Slowly, the regulator moved out of position, and the motions of the manipulator slowed, the failsafe kicking in.
If he could just pull it all the way free, then this would all be over.
A soft touch on his hand, the one he was using to brace himself, stopped him. Squinting against the ripples of time and space that twisted and turned the very fabric of reality and made his head hurt, he looked down, and at Tosh, who was staring at him with startling lucidity in her eyes. She seemed unaffected by the contortions of reality, the architect of this chaos.
"Please," she said, her voice too quiet to be audible over the shrieking of the manipulator, and yet somehow it reached his ears more clearly than anything else, "I think this is the right thing to do. It should happen."
Jack started to shake his head. "Tosh..."
"Please, Jack." She smiled, tentatively. "Please."
He stared down at her, so difficult to see amidst the twisted currents of the Universe, and saw the way she was staring at him, with deep trust in her eyes. He knew Toshiko, and he knew it was her, and not some alien masquerading as her.
The question was... did he trust her?
Jack smiled at her, and let go of the manipulator.
**
In that moment, they saw everything. All that could be, stretching out from this moment to the infinite end of time and space, when this great work came crashing down upon itself. They saw the potential. They saw life, they saw worlds, they saw death and song and light and greatness and infinite multitudes.
At some point the world had possessed edges, and each of them had been separate, but this was not their reality, not their worldview. This was something new, something alien, something unknown and unfamiliar to any experience that any Human could ever possess. That anyone of this Universe could possess.
The world was white, and it was black, and it was so many colours it was painful. It was all and nothing.
And it was waiting.
All was still and silent and then Toshiko spoke.
“Um...” Her voice reverberated through the harmonics of the newness as ripples upon a still pond, touching every moment that is, was and will be. “Am I supposed to say something?”
They were inauspicious words to proclaim a birth, but enough. Solidity crept in. Things became defined, and began to recede, shadows formed and lengthened, and reality began to cluster into lines and curves, and solid balls that would burn and give life to billions...
... but not here.
**
The return to normalcy was almost an anti-climax. There was no great bang, no flash of light. One minute they were consumed by that vast Everything and the next they were all standing in the Hub, where they had been standing before whatever it was had happened. None of them felt ill or sick, there was no disorientation, and the experience seemed to be fading from their minds fairly quickly. The wind had died down, and the only damage apparently done was having papers and bits of loose equipment scattered all over the place. The pterodactyl was making a racket somewhere in the ceiling, but she didn't sound in pain, only confused.
The only difference was Toshiko, lying on the floor, clearly unconscious.
**
Life begets the living
living breath touches life's seed and thus blossoms hope
touches the heart of life's seed and changes endure
**
Owen had examined Tosh again, a little more thoroughly than usual, and eventually concluded that whatever had been happening to her had stopped, or run its course. Her fainting had been due to a combination of low blood pressure, abominably low blood sugar, and severe overheating.
“Very much like her brain'd been working on overdrive,” Owen had added, with a raised eyebrow.
It hadn't taken long to get her back on her feet, and for her to join the rest of the team in trying to work out what had been happening. It took a while, but once Tosh had managed to have a look at the readings, she'd been quick to realise what had happened. Perhaps some remnant of her experience still lingered, she would later think.
“A Universe,” Gwen said in wonder, as she looked at the screen, with incomprehensible equations and all manner of peculiar sensor readings scrolling across it. “Wow.” She had her head propped on her hands and tilted it in Toshiko's direction. “I think you've outdone yourself, Tosh.”
“What happened to it?” Jack asked, eyeing Toshiko closely. One hand absently tugged at the splint wrapped around his arm, supporting the bones that had been crushed by the warping of reality, being repaired faster than normal by a handy little alien gadget. He had a slightly hazy look in his eyes from the industrial strength painkillers that Owen had forced upon him, but otherwise, he seemed the only one to have emerged with any harm lingering from this latest crisis.
“It's gone,” Toshiko shrugged, setting down the stylus of her PDA. “Shrank to Planck scale and vanished, presumably to occupy it's own little dimensional niche.”
“Ok, but I still don't get this.” Owen hitched his chair closer to the table, jabbing a finger in the direction of the computer screen. “I don't get how that maths student's nightmare and that,” he then jerked his hand in the direction of the fountain and the Rift Manipulator contained within, “Equals a new Universe.”
Tosh looked down at her hands, biting her lip, trying to figure out how to answer. She was saved by an outside source, who bore drinks into the room on an old Cardiff Tourist Board tin tray.
“In programming,” Ianto said, as he deposited coffee cups in front of everyone, filling the room with a delightfully aromatic combination of tea and coffee, “You describe an object to create it. You give it properties and values for those properties.” He stared at Tosh as he dropped her mug in front of her.
She was silent a moment, thinking about it. “You're right,” she finally said, “That's sounds exactly like what I was doing.”
“That explains why the equation was so long.” Jack mused, “You were describing a whole universe. A unified theory of everything. Just not for our Universe.”
Gwen gave Tosh an inscrutable look. “Just as well you didn't have to show your working,” she said.
Owen nodded. “I was always crap at that in school.” Then he sat bolt upright, as if he'd been jabbed in the side with a pencil. “That reminds me of those computers Torchwood seized off that school... um...” Owen snapped his fingers impatiently, trying to remember. “Deffy Vale or something... that equation they said it contained. The key to the Universe or something.”
“The Skasis paradigm,” Jack said, quietly, closing his eyes to avoid focusing on anything.
“Yeah, that's it. A Godmaker or something.” Owen turned a grin on Tosh. “So what we have here is the Toshiko Paradigm.”
“How does it feel being a God?” Gwen asked, cheekily.
Tosh frowned. “If I'd known I'd be required to say something profound,” she said, “I would have made the effort to write something down in advance.”
Jack's mouth twitched. “Not quite 'let there be light' but I suppose it had a certain poeticism to it.”
Tosh looked embarrassed. “When life evolves,” she said, clearly attempting to sound like she created Universes every day, “I hope they leave that bit out of their sacred texts.”
Jack's twitch grew into a full blown grin. “When life evolves,” he told her, “They might develop Universe-hopping technology and come to have a chat with God.”
Toshiko's face grew pale as she considered the possibility. She grabbed her mug, holding it between her hands tightly and clearly disturbed at the thought. “I don’t think it was me, though,” she said, biting her lip, “It felt more like… I was a conduit. It felt so beautiful, all those numbers, but it was just outside of my comprehension. I could almost get it…” She raised her hand, fingers moving in a faint grasping motion, before she let her hand drop, and shook her head. “But not quite.”
"Oh," Jack said, opening his eyes slightly and turning to look at Ianto, "You never did get around to telling us what was written on the artefact. You said it was a poem?"
Ianto looked surprised at the subject coming up, but he nodded. "Yes. I thought it was odd at the time, but in retrospect, I suppose it makes sense." He took a sip of his coffee.
Gwen raised her eyebrow. "Well, are you going to tell us, or are you going to leave us in suspense?"
Ianto smiled, set down his mug, and quoted from memory. “Life turned to darkness and sorrow...”
- Fin -