FIC: Potentiality 4/8 (Torchwood)
Title: Potentiality (Or: How I Learned To Loathe The Quantum Bomb)
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Torchwood is the legal property of the BBC. In case you didn’t know.
Summary: Somewhere between “Countrycide” and “Captain Jack Harkness”, Ianto Jones went from hardly knowing how to hold a gun to be willing and able to use it. How did he get there, and what did he have to sacrifice in the process?
Word Count: ~45,000
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/dwho/potentiality00.html
Read From The Beginning
**
Part Four
**
Monroe didn't say anything other than a brusque “follow me” when she came to fetch Ianto from his little prefab home away from home, and a warning glance was sufficient to keep his questions to himself. He, of all people, knew the wisdom in not blurting out questions somewhere out in the open, where anyone might be listening. Instead he followed silently, following Captain Monroe to a building set a fair way apart from the cluster of administrative buildings that Ianto had already pegged as important by the sheer overt innocuousness of it. It looked little more than a squat storage bunker with a chipped wooden door as the only entrance. But there were CCTV cameras all around high up on the exterior walls, three of them pointed straight at the entrance. If that hadn't been enough to convince him of the buildings importance, all doubt vanished as he stepped in through the doors after Monroe, to be confronted by three armed guards, one sitting by a computer attached to a scanner arch and two more guarding the room watchfully.
He was scanned quietly and efficiently, and they removed his security badge and replaced it with one almost identical except for the fact that it had a different barcode along the bottom edge. No words were exchanged, apart from the guard saying, after he had completed all his security checks and scans, “You're cleared, sir,” to which Monroe responded to with a terse nod and gestured for Ianto to follow her through the double doors at the other end of the room.
She lead him down nondescript white-walled corridors that flowed with UNIT staff rushing around, all clutching files or official looking bits of paper. They didn't so much as glance at Ianto and his escort as they walked at a brisk, urgent pace down the corridor. They moved through two more security checkpoints, before arriving at a final set of doors that were guarded by UNIT soldiers that scanned their badges before opening the doors to let them through.
“So,” Ianto said, as he got a good look at what he'd already guessed was the base's command centre, “This is where you've been hiding. And here was me starting to think you didn't love me any more.”
It was a large room, one wall completed dominated by an expensive looking panel screen that was currently showing a map of the British Isles and a dizzying array of readouts and graphs besides it. There were video windows of UNIT personnel at other stations, clearly on a constantly monitored feed that allowed the base to keep up with the status of other sites. There were banks of monitoring equipment and computers, all facing the large screen, and a glass panelled conference room at the back of the room, by the door where Ianto and Monroe entered. The noise was almost deafening. Between equipment chittering and beeping, and staff talking to each other and over comms in low tones, it wasn't helped by an air conditioning system that was blowing noisily, trying and failing to keep the temperature of the room down to bearable levels. Ianto could feel the prickle of sweat between his shoulder blades. General Carver was standing by large monitoring screen, on the phone to someone who was apparently infuriating enough to make the General occasionally raise his voice and acquire a particularly impressive shade of red skin.
He started to understand why Monroe was looking so tired.
Monroe shot him a wan smile at the joke. “It's gone crazy over the last twenty four hours,” she said, “We weren't certain of the level of threat, but since I got ordered to bring you in, I'm guessing it's very serious indeed.”
“About that,” Ianto leaned down towards her, dropping his voice, “What is going on anyway?”
“Jones!”
Ianto raised his head at the yell, looking towards the source. General Carver was glaring at him, holding out the phone in his hands. “For you.”
Ianto exchanged a glance with Monroe, but didn't argue, approaching and taking the phone. “Ianto Jones,” he said, trying to ignore the way Carver watched him carefully.
“Ianto.” It was Jack's voice, and Ianto found himself unconsciously straightening at Jack's all-business tone. “Good to hear your voice again.”
“Likewise, sir,” Ianto said.
“Long story short,” Jack said, “There's something strange going on, and frankly we don't know what the hell's causing it. UNIT'll fill you in, but for now consider yourself to be Torchwood's official liaison to UNIT.”
Ianto managed to hide his surprise, both on his face and his voice. “Liaison.”
“Right, keep an eye on them. And don't let them forget who's boss.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now pass me back to Carver. I'm not done with the old goat yet.”
Ianto managed not to grin, and held the phone out to the General. “Captain Harkness for you, sir,” he said, politely, and pretended not to notice the visible irritation on the man's features. For a moment, he contemplated making the situation worse by offering some words of condolence regarding unreasonable American Captains, but decided that goading a UNIT General into having him shot would be one of the poorer decisions of his life (although far from the worst, really) and instead smiled politely, turning away.
Monroe had hurried away when he'd been called over by Carver, and was now approaching with a small earpiece in her hands. “Here,” she said, as she handed it to Ianto. “Comms unit. One channel's tuned to general chatter. The other's a personal one. Don't lose it. You're logged into the system now if you need to use a computer. Your name and 'Torchwood' as the password.”
“Original,” Ianto said dryly, fitting the comms unit into place over his ear. He tabbed through the channels. The general channel seemed to be a running feed on all non-classified communications. He could hear various sectors reporting in, voices running into each other. The other channel was silent, empty. He dialled down the volume on the general channel and left it to burble quietly in the background.
Monroe shrugged. “We were in a hurry.”
“So,” he shoved his hands in his pockets. He'd donned the suit he'd arrived on the first day in, warned by Jack's text message and determined that if something bad was going to happen then he would be at least well dressed for the occasion. “What's all the fuss about?”
Monroe opened her mouth to answer but General Carver interrupted her, having apparently finished his phone call. “The fuss,” he said, “Is that.” He pointed to the giant screen or, more accurately, at one particular set of graphs that danced in the bottom corner of the monitor. “Yesterday, Torchwood Cardiff started picking up unusual readings they couldn't identify. It seemed to be coming from our vicinity, so, naturally, I got woken up in the wee hours of Thursday morning by an American demanding to know what we were up to. By lunchtime, the readings were strong enough for us to pick them up as well. The only problem is that we don't know what the readings are, and neither do Torchwood Cardiff. All either of us can agree on is that they aren't Earthly in origin.”
Carver nodded to a nearby technician. “Put up the area of effect grid, would you?”
The technician nodded, fingers dancing across the keyboard, and the map of the British Isles changed, pulling out so that it showed most of Europe. Another keystroke, and a roughly circular shape was overlaid on the image. Its centre point was somewhere in Britain, not too far away from the UNIT base, if Ianto wasn't very much mistaken, and it spread out from there. The circle managed to cover the whole of Britain, and a good deal of France, reaching out to the point where it wasn't far off the coast of Denmark. “We're getting gradually escalating readings within this area,” Carver said, “Centring on this area of Britain where the readings are strongest.”
Ianto nodded slowly. “So I assume the working theory at the moment it that it's some sort of alien incursion?”
“Good a theory as any at this point.” Carver said, “Now why don't you pick a nice spot and stay out of the way while the proper soldiers do their job. Monroe, with me.”
Carver strode off towards the conference room without looking back, and Monroe shot Ianto an apologetic look before following.
Ianto had no doubt that the clearance assigned to him gave him a much more restricted access than UNIT's own login, but short of forcibly evicting someone from their own workstation it was doubtful that he would manage to see any data at all. A quiet query to one of the staff, however, earned him a laptop and a space of clear desk that he could sit down at. It gave him an excellent view both of the room and of the conference room, in which he could see Carver pacing while speaking in short terse sentences to his staff. Ianto briefly wished he'd learnt how to lip-read at some point and instead turned his attention to the laptop.
By Torchwood standards, it was sluggish. Earth technology couldn't yet hope to match the smooth slickness of the alien-enhanced one that Tosh nurtured at the Hub. He drummed his fingers impatiently while he waited for the operating system to finish loading (Windows - rarely a good sign, he sincerely hoped it was only on laptops and that the main systems had something more robust), and watched the room while he waited. He was unused to spending a crisis, any crisis, surrounded by people. He was used to the small team at Cardiff, presided over by Jack who barked orders and ran roughshod over everyone with a clever word and an insouciant grin. But here, the UNIT staff functioned like a well oiled machine. He could hear the reports easily dovetailing into one another as stations reported in sequentially, and he watched as personnel moved around the room, dancing around each other where there wasn't enough space, and the hum of voices littered the air. He hadn't been around this many people since... since London... and that felt like a lifetime ago these days.
The computer beeped at him. It had finished loading, and was waiting for his access code. He ignored the prompt that asked for the information that Monroe had given him, instead typing in an apparently random string of numbers and letters and tried not to smile as the network chewed it over, before the screen cleared and box popped up, informing him that administrative-level access had been accepted. He wondered what Carver would say if he learnt that Tosh had long ago hacked UNIT's systems, and took it as a challenge whenever they tried to upgrade their security. Their backdoor clearance to UNIT files had come in useful on more than one occasion, and Ianto knew he'd have to be careful to wipe the laptop's memory after he was done with it. It wasn't that he had no trust in UNIT or the login that Monroe had so helpfully provided him, it was just that he was reasonably sure that whatever information he might have been able to access would have been more than useless.
With high level access granted, he could see all the computers on the network, and the linkages to other UNIT sites as well. He ignored them for the moment, instead digging into the logs of sensor readings and pulling up information for the last twenty four hours. He didn't go further beyond that. From what Carver had said, it was doubtful that UNIT scanners were sensitive enough to detect changes in ambient energy levels at the point where it would trip the Hub's sensor arrays. The information appeared as pages and pages of data, accompanied by images that showed the same information in graph form. He lined them up carefully on the screen, and flicked through them, watching the progression of energy spikes and dips over time. Back and forth he clicked, forward through time and then back.
There was something odd about these readings, something familiar.
The problem was that he was certain he'd never seen anything like it working at Torchwood Cardiff. He'd stayed away from the Rift monitors mostly, not wanting to draw attention to himself. It was Tosh's dominion, and he had no desire to attract her attention, or Jack's, by appearing more knowledgeable than he perhaps should. But he was certain he recalled seeing... something... like this before. It was maddening, like a word caught on the tip of the tongue. He turned to the Lieutenant sitting next to him, working at his own laptop. He seemed to be coordinating communications and looked up impatiently when Ianto attracted his attention.
“Have you got a pen and paper?” he asked, and had the back of an old phone list and a biro shoved towards him.
“Thanks,” he said, politely, even though the man had already gone back to ignoring him.
Shrugging to himself, he set to draw a set of axis on the paper, and began plotting a new graph, using the data on the screen as a reference. Slowly, though clumsily, given that he was plotting the waveform with a rather loose definition of accuracy, a new shape began to form on the paper. And this one he definitely recalled. His breath caught in his throat as he remembered exactly where and when he'd seen this pattern before. The familiarity was painful, and instant.
No. He could be wrong. He had to be wrong. He must be wrong. There was no other explanation.
Ianto rolled the biro between thumb and index finger before decisively dropping it on the table next to him, nodding to himself. He opened a new window on his screen and started typing slowly. Character by character, stopping frequently and frowning, he entered into the system an equation, a piece of script, that would chew through the sensor logs for the last several hours and produce a new data set. He had to go back and erase odd lines, here and there, amending or replacing them. He was working entirely from memory, and he was no longer sure he remembered the details clearly. When he'd finally finished, and there was nothing glaring that jumped out to his eye, he set the computer to running the script, and sat back to wait while the computer laboriously processed the directive.
Carver was saying something that he punctuated by pointing at Ianto. Ianto smiled at the faces that reflexively turned towards him, and laughed quietly to himself as they all quickly looked away again. They were probably discussion what they were supposed to be doing about their new “liaison”. UNIT and Torchwood had never particularly gotten along. The attitude in the halls of Torchwood London had been that UNIT was an up-itself johnny-come-lately organisation that would break apart as soon as the disparate nations contributing to the force realised that they had about as much in common as a collection of furniture in a student bedsit. So high and mighty, the staff had giggled. They'd get their comeuppance, for sure. Torchwood survived in the shadows, and would be around long after UNIT had bitten the dust.
It was a rather pointed example of hubris proving to be one's downfall.
The remnants of Torchwood, namely Cardiff, had a somewhat more relaxed attitude towards UNIT. Ianto had occasionally wondered if the fact that Jack had clearly once been a military man himself tended to bias him in favour of sympathising with UNIT. Certainly, he didn't seem to mind giving them the run around when it suited him, but Jack never seemed to indicate that he held UNIT in less esteem than any other organisation. Maybe that was why they'd agreed to take Ianto on for the duration. Probably, Ianto mused, he would never know.
The laptop played a musical tune to indicate it had completed its analysis, tearing Ianto's attention away and redirecting it back to the screen in front of him. He pressed the key to call up the new result graph. What he saw made his stomach do backflips, and his breathing hitched.
“No,” he whispered, aghast, “It can't be. It's impossible.”
He scrabbled in his pocket for his phone, dialling the Hub and getting the number wrong twice through sheer nerves. “Come on, come on,” he hissed, as the phone rang.
“Ianto?” It was Tosh's voice.
“Tosh!” Ianto gripped the edge of the desk he was sitting at, pushing himself away from the monitors, over to a quieter corner, where hopefully no one would hear him. “Where's Jack?”
“Jack?” Tosh sounded briefly confused. “He's just in-”
Ianto didn't have time to wait for her to finish. He glanced up at the transparent-walled conference room. Carver was talking to an assemblage of UNIT officers, and hadn't noticed Ianto's movements. “Tell him. There's been a breach of the secure archives. There must have been. It's the only explanation.”
“The secure archives?” Tosh's voice rose in alarm. “What are you talking about, Ianto?”
Ianto took a deep breath. “The readings that you and UNIT have been picking up. I've seen them before, but only in simulation data. It's fallout from a pre-shock wave. It's-” The phone beeped, and died. Ianto pulled the handset away from his ear and looked at it in dread.
NO SIGNAL, it said.
On screens all around the room, line graphs jumped around into a frenzy of motion and light, and Ianto realised that, as much as he would have liked to have been, he wasn't mistaken.
And then the world turned inside out.
**
By anyone's definition, Ianto Jones had been through an awful lot in just a few short years. Between the Battle of Canary Wharf, cannibals, aliens and nearly getting himself and everything he cared for killed after hiding Lisa away and telling himself that it would be alright in the end, it was a miracle he'd managed to come out unscathed (as long as one took unscathed to mean still breathing and possessing of a pulse). What happened next, though, was something so utterly beyond his experience that he had no way of describing it properly.
It felt like he'd hit a wall at speed while standing completely still, like he had been turned inside out from the navel, before being hung up by his ankles and shaken. And, through it all, he was vaguely aware that he was still standing upright, in the corner of a UNIT command centre.
Hmm, he mused to himself, I wonder if I'm dead.
He thought about that for a long moment.
I don't think I'm dead, he finally decided, Though I do feel decidedly odd.
Then he remembered why he could be confused about such a thing, and why it was very very important that he decide to be alive. I'm alive! He mentally screamed, as loud as he could bring himself to do. He might have even been screaming out loud, but he had no way of knowing. I'm alivealivealive!
The Universe shifted into a blurred sort of focus, like a photo taken while the photographer was moving.
He was staring at unbroken grey, and it wasn't until Ianto blinked that he realised he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Most of the lights were flickering on and off, and the monitors were dark. He turned his head slowly to look around. There didn't appear to be any damage to the room, and he didn't feel injured, but whatever had happened had clearly affected everyone else. Around the room, people were groaning and awkwardly picking themselves up off the floor. General Carver stumbled out of the conference room, followed by his staff, and looked as if someone had struck him in the forehead.
“What the hell was that?” He sounded more confused than anything.
Ianto heard a choking sound, and turned his head in time to see a woman in a green UNIT officer's uniform being copiously sick on the floor next to him. The acidic stench wafted over to him, and turned his stomach. He looked down at the phone he'd somehow managed to keep a hold of through everything. Its screen was still dead. No chance of contacting the Hub just yet then. He shoved it into his jacket pocket and pushed himself into a sitting position. A hand landed on his shoulder, and he looked up to see Louise Monroe staring down at him, blinking rapidly as if to try and focus.
“You okay?” she asked.
He nodded, and accepted the hand she offered to help him to his feet. She was surprisingly strong for a woman her size. He smiled at her, and let go, and immediately had to grab a hold of the edge of the nearest table. Apparently his balance hadn't been as stable as he'd thought. He swallowed against and upsurge of nausea, and tried not to think about the woman still crouched on the floor, retching.
“Systems!” Carver was snapping at the technicians. “I want external monitors up, asap. What's going on, people?”
Ianto awkwardly reached for the desk phone a few feet away. For all that the staff had wound up on the floor, shaken up, all the equipment was still in place, and apparently undisturbed. He lifted the receiver, but didn't hear a dial tone. It was as dead as his mobile. That was bad. If UNIT dedicated landlines weren't functional, that meant that there was probably no way to communicate with the outside world, and certainly no way to get word to Torchwood. Ianto was very much on his own, and, he realised, there was every chance that the situation was going to get far worse.
There was the buzzing sound of power starting to surge through wires again. It was intermittent, though. Like the lights, monitors flickered on and off, as if they couldn't decide whether to be fully functional or shut down. After a second, there was a triumphant cry from a technician, and the main monitoring wall lit up.
Carver stared at it. “What the hell?” he said, in a low voiced growl.
The monitor was, at least for the moment, staying on, but the image on it kept flickering and shifting. One moment, it showed an 'all status nominal' message across the British Isles and Europe, and the next it painted a picture of utter devastation, with a scrolling list of damage and casualty reports, and an illustrative area of effect overlay, which kindly informed anyone looking that most of northern Europe had been destroyed by unknown means. Then it flickered back to normal.
Monroe bent down next to the technician, grabbing the diagnostic screen off him and scowling at it. “What did you do?” she demanded. “We're not dead. This thing's wrong.”
“No,” Ianto said, his voice feeling somehow disassociated from his body. “No, it isn't.” He didn't even realise he'd spoken aloud until Carver, his expression not angry but deadly serious, turned to look at him.
“What precisely are you talking about, Mr. Jones?”
Ianto passed a hand over his mouth, and tried to force his thoughts into some sort of order. “Those energy readings that you've been picking up. They're a pre-shock event. A trans-temporal signifier of-” Ianto stopped himself, and took a deep breath. “It's a Quantum Bomb. Someone set off a Quantum Bomb. The destruction resonates out through twenty-odd dimensions, including time. The bomb hasn't exploded yet, which is why we don't have a reading on the damage caused by the explosion. It's not happened yet. We're in a suspended quantum state.”
“How exactly do you know so much about this thing?” Monroe's voice was soft, but in the sudden quiet that had overtaken the room as Ianto spoke, she was clearly audible.
Ianto laughed, though humour was the furthest thought from his mind. He rather thought that if he didn't laugh he might do something unseemly, like sob. “Because, Captain,” he said, looking General Carver straight in the eye, “Torchwood designed it.”
**
It had hardly been what Carver wanted to hear. The General had ordered Ianto escorted into the conference room under guard, unwilling to let Ianto out of his sight by locking him up in a brig somewhere else on the base, and so Ianto got a very good view on how General Carver handled a crisis. He watched silently, hands folded neatly on the table top, as Carver spoke to technicians and soldiers, and some white coated people who were clearly scientists. He looked confused though, and the scientists pale, so Ianto guessed that whatever was being said was not what the General wanted to hear. He watched Carver pace, becoming increasingly more agitated, until the man finally caved and entered the conference room with a couple of scientists and senior officers.
“Start talking,” he said, brusquely. “And give me one good reason why I shouldn't have you dragged off to interrogation being thrown in the deepest darkest little hole I can find.”
Ianto spread his hands, palms upwards, unimpressed by Carver's bluster. He'd faced Jack Harkness in a murderous rage, and, after that, a General held little threat for him. “Where would you like me to start?” he asked, trying for 'cool and collected' in his response.
“What the hell is a Quantum Bomb?” Carver snapped, “And why can't we get a fixed reading on it?”
One of the scientists had pulled out a notepad and pen and was listening intently.
Ianto thought for a moment about how to phrase it. Finally, he said, “You know Schroedinger's Cat, right? The classic thought experiment? Simplified, you put a cat in a box with a vial of poison and close the box. You have no way of knowing until you open the box whether the cat is alive or dead. Once you open the box, and observe the result, you know whether the cat is dead, or just very pissed off.”
“We're a cat in a box?” Monroe was standing at the back of the assembled UNIT officers, and there was a faint smile on her face at the notion.
Well, at least he had at least one ally, or something approaching that, in the room. “More or less. At the heart of a Quantum Bomb is a point singularity source. When it's detonated, it tears through reality in all directions, space, time, and a lot of dimensions in between. But, as far as we're concerned, it's not detonated yet. It's a possible future. Until we pass the point in time where the bomb has either been detonated or diffused, we're stuck in an indecisive quantum state. We're both alive and well, and we're also dead and blown to pieces.”
One of the scientists snorted. “Ridiculous,” he said.
Ianto smiled placidly. “I've not eaten in fifteen hours, and I've only had about an hour's sleep. Right before the shockwave hit, I was working up a killer hangover. Now I'm not hungry, thirsty, or tired. How about you?”
The scientist didn't have a response for that.
General Carver was frowning. “Why precisely would Torchwood build a weapon capable of destroying most of Europe? Or should I be unsurprised at the continuing evidence of Torchwood's late Empire-building ambitions?”
Ianto frowned. “I didn't say Torchwood built it. Torchwood designed it.”
“The difference being?”
“It was a last line of defence, in theory.” Ianto folded his hands together and examined his fingers thoughtfully, lost in recollection. “Though I always thought that it represented a rather childish attitude of 'well, if we can't have Britain, no one else will'. It was to be used if Britain ever fell to the slavering alien hordes. Turns out, however, that the upper echelons actually had half a brain cell working the day they reviewed that project. They decided that it smacked of cowardice, and that if Britain ever did fall, then Torchwood would still be waiting in the shadows to retake our 'blessed land' through guerilla tactics and obscenely powerful weaponry.” Ianto rolled his eyes expressively. “There was also the rather minor question of whether or not the act of using a controlled point singularity in a destructive fashion wouldn't in fact destroy the Universe altogether. It was shelved before it reached the prototype stage. Though, I must say, score one for Torchwood R&D, since it apparently worked exactly as it was designed to do.”
Carver's lip curled slightly. “Forgive me if I hold off on the celebrations.”
Ianto smiled.
Carver sat down opposite Ianto and leaned forward, mimicking his hands-together position. “So you're telling me that this bomb hasn't gone off yet.”
“Yes,” Ianto said.
“So we've still got a chance to stop it.”
Ianto shrugged. “Theoretically,” he said, “If you can find it.”
“We.” Carver stabbed a finger in Ianto's direction. “Since you know so much about the device in question, and since Captain Harkness's last act before we lost communications was to insist that you function as a liaison officer, then you're going to be helping us, because, frankly, you're only other option is to spend the rest of your life in a very small and dark cell.”
“Well, when you put it like that, General, how can I refuse?” He remembered reading Toshiko's file before insinuating himself into Torchwood Three, and the stark descriptions of her accommodations in a high security UNIT prison. Jack had left a lot out of those scanty reports, not intending anyone other than himself to read them, but Ianto came to learn how to read between the lines of what Jack didn't say.
General Carver shook his head. “You Torchwood lot are unbelievable,” he said, “Designing bombs like that. What were you thinking?”
Ianto raised his eyebrows. “Are you telling me you would never even consider doing exactly the same thing?”
The corner of Monroe's eye might have twitched, but it could have been Ianto's imagination.
“Let's hope you never find out,” Carver said, quite seriously, and Ianto was taken aback for a moment. “One more thing. We’ve lost several of our staff. What’s happened to them?”
Ianto looked at Carver, who returned his glance with a steely look. Ianto found that he couldn’t bring himself to lie, even though Carver clearly desperately wanted him to. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “My best guess is that they’re caught on the wrong side of the decision to be alive or dead. All of us here are more alive than dead, and they might be more dead than alive. We might have made the conscious decision that we could be alive, the observer effect and all that. There’s some stuff about decoherence that might help to explain it, but that’s really not… ah… relevant.”
Carver nodded. “So, if we stop the bomb from going off…?”
“Then everyone’s alive,” Ianto said, “Because it never went off.”
“Good enough for me,” Carver said, slapping his palms on the tabletop and standing. Ianto reflexively followed suit. “Get to work. All of you. We’re going to find out what the hell is going on and stop it from happening, because there is no other option.”
**
Ianto stared at his mobile, which still displayed the maddening ‘no service’ message, and cracked its casing, hard, on the edge of the conference room table. It did nothing except to scratch the edge of the phone, and perhaps assuage some of his frustration.
“Still nothing?”
He looked up. Monroe had looked up from her laptop, peering across the table at him. The conference room had been turned into a working area, with what pieces of equipment they could get to work set up, and several white-coated scientists were standing by the white board and squabbling. Ianto had been attempting to call the Hub for nearly an hour now, and there had been no look. Every so often, it seemed that the problems with the equipment would resolve, and he could dial out, but it died again before anyone at the Hub picked up.
Presuming, of course, that there was anyone at the Hub to answer. Ianto couldn’t help but wonder if the realisation that something was going on was what had prompted most of the people in the Command Centre to still be alive. They were observing what was going on. Would that have affected it?
It made his brain hurt to think about it.
He would feel much better if someone at the Hub, anyone, even Owen, would just answer the phone.
“No,” he said, and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He returned his attention to the file folders in front of him. UNIT had pulled all their paper records (given that the electronic ones were hard to access) on current threats, plus speculative ones, or anyone related to Torchwood who might bear enough of a grudge to wipe out a good part of Western Europe. The number of files was frighteningly large.
He fingered the edge of the file he had open in front of him. It detailed the activities of a subversive quasi-terrorist organisation which had made several attempts, usually through blackmail or other forms of extortion, at getting their hands on alien technology. There was a notation at the bottom of the file that the group had been “deactivated” several years earlier, and Ianto tossed the file aside without further thought, picking up the next.
“How do you know about it?”
Monroe’s question caused him only to glance up briefly before returning his attention to the files. She was staring at him in a decidedly odd fashion, biting her lip.
“Know about what?” he asked, in return.
Morecome, Alec. Card carrying anarchist who sold dangerous alien components on eBay. Killed when he mistook a Venzeni subductor for a sandwich toaster. Ianto tossed the file into what he’d started to call the ‘waste of my bloody time’ pile. Who the hell had organised these files, anyway?
“The Quantum Bomb.”
Ianto glanced up. Monroe's mouth was set into a thin line. After a moment, she got to her feet, picking up the laptop in front of her, and moved her chair around to the other side of the table so that she was sitting next to Ianto and could lower her voice to speak.
“You know an awful lot for just a 'librarian',” she said, softly, leaning in towards him. He could detect the faintly floral scent of her perfume. “How do you know about a weapon like this?”
Ianto picked up another file and gave her a pleasant smile. “Like you said, I'm a librarian. Maybe I read the files while I was archiving them. Maybe I hacked into the old Torchwood systems out of curiosity and read up on the subject. Or maybe,” he leaned in towards her, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial murmur, “Maybe I helped design it.”
Monroe straightened sharply.
“Wouldn't that be a bit of a mind screw?” He asked, and grinned. Apparently the expression worked as well as it did for Jack to throw people off. Monroe's expression moved from shock to uncertainty, not knowing whether or not he was playing with her. He restrained the urge to laugh, glanced at the file in his hands and discarded it.
“You're a strange man, Ianto,” Monroe said, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. “Are all you Torchwood people like that? I... I hear things. People talk about what Torchwood's like.”
“And what do they say?”
Monroe shrugged, a tiny minuscule motion that belied the tension in her shoulders. “Arrogant jerks who like to hide behind the veil of monarchy and Rule Britannia while plotting to take over the world.”
“You forgot to say how unfairly attractive we all are,” Ianto teased.
“That too.” Monroe smiled slightly. “I don't believe it, though. At least not about everyone at Torchwood being bastards who deserved what they got. I was on a salvage team that went into what was left at Canary Wharf-”
It was only through long practice that Ianto managed to conceal any sort of reaction to a mention of the battle.
“- and I saw the bodies, Ianto. There were a lot. I don't know if you guys at Cardiff ever turned up there, but it was pretty devastating. I refuse to believe that anyone is bad enough to deserve that.”
Ianto stared blindly at the file in his hands, unable to read a single word on the page.
“What's it like?” she asked.
“What's what like?”
“Torchwood.” He looked up at Monroe. Her eyes were wide, and staring at him. “What's it like to work there?”
Ianto opened his mouth to give a glib answer, but found that the words stuck in his throat. He thought about it a long moment, and tried again. “It's the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. It's horrible, and it's probably going to kill me before my thirtieth birthday, but it's the only thing that gives me life meaning. The only thing. And the promise of something beautiful coming from Torchwood is one of the few things that stops me from killing myself some days.”
Monroe's expression softened, and she reached out to rest a hand on his arm. “Ianto...”
“Louise,” he interrupted, “You can't understand, you really can't.”
She shook her head. “I don't pretend to. But you're in pain. Is it worth it?”
“Oh yes,” he said, quickly, before he could even think about it. “It really is.”
She smiled. “Then that's alright, isn't it?”
He looked at the hand she had resting on his arm, and the way her thumb gently stroked over the sleeve of his jacket. “I suppose so,” he said, and then the photograph in the file he was holding finally caught his eye.
He raised the file, staring at the picture, trying to imagine what the flat and unflattering image would look like on a person.
“What is it?” Louise asked, realising his sudden interest. Her hand dropped away.
“I know this man,” he said, hurriedly shuffling through the pages looking for a name. “Shit, I know this man.” He stood. “Where's General Carver?”
****
Part Five
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Torchwood is the legal property of the BBC. In case you didn’t know.
Summary: Somewhere between “Countrycide” and “Captain Jack Harkness”, Ianto Jones went from hardly knowing how to hold a gun to be willing and able to use it. How did he get there, and what did he have to sacrifice in the process?
Word Count: ~45,000
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/dwho/potentiality00.html
Read From The Beginning
**
Part Four
**
Monroe didn't say anything other than a brusque “follow me” when she came to fetch Ianto from his little prefab home away from home, and a warning glance was sufficient to keep his questions to himself. He, of all people, knew the wisdom in not blurting out questions somewhere out in the open, where anyone might be listening. Instead he followed silently, following Captain Monroe to a building set a fair way apart from the cluster of administrative buildings that Ianto had already pegged as important by the sheer overt innocuousness of it. It looked little more than a squat storage bunker with a chipped wooden door as the only entrance. But there were CCTV cameras all around high up on the exterior walls, three of them pointed straight at the entrance. If that hadn't been enough to convince him of the buildings importance, all doubt vanished as he stepped in through the doors after Monroe, to be confronted by three armed guards, one sitting by a computer attached to a scanner arch and two more guarding the room watchfully.
He was scanned quietly and efficiently, and they removed his security badge and replaced it with one almost identical except for the fact that it had a different barcode along the bottom edge. No words were exchanged, apart from the guard saying, after he had completed all his security checks and scans, “You're cleared, sir,” to which Monroe responded to with a terse nod and gestured for Ianto to follow her through the double doors at the other end of the room.
She lead him down nondescript white-walled corridors that flowed with UNIT staff rushing around, all clutching files or official looking bits of paper. They didn't so much as glance at Ianto and his escort as they walked at a brisk, urgent pace down the corridor. They moved through two more security checkpoints, before arriving at a final set of doors that were guarded by UNIT soldiers that scanned their badges before opening the doors to let them through.
“So,” Ianto said, as he got a good look at what he'd already guessed was the base's command centre, “This is where you've been hiding. And here was me starting to think you didn't love me any more.”
It was a large room, one wall completed dominated by an expensive looking panel screen that was currently showing a map of the British Isles and a dizzying array of readouts and graphs besides it. There were video windows of UNIT personnel at other stations, clearly on a constantly monitored feed that allowed the base to keep up with the status of other sites. There were banks of monitoring equipment and computers, all facing the large screen, and a glass panelled conference room at the back of the room, by the door where Ianto and Monroe entered. The noise was almost deafening. Between equipment chittering and beeping, and staff talking to each other and over comms in low tones, it wasn't helped by an air conditioning system that was blowing noisily, trying and failing to keep the temperature of the room down to bearable levels. Ianto could feel the prickle of sweat between his shoulder blades. General Carver was standing by large monitoring screen, on the phone to someone who was apparently infuriating enough to make the General occasionally raise his voice and acquire a particularly impressive shade of red skin.
He started to understand why Monroe was looking so tired.
Monroe shot him a wan smile at the joke. “It's gone crazy over the last twenty four hours,” she said, “We weren't certain of the level of threat, but since I got ordered to bring you in, I'm guessing it's very serious indeed.”
“About that,” Ianto leaned down towards her, dropping his voice, “What is going on anyway?”
“Jones!”
Ianto raised his head at the yell, looking towards the source. General Carver was glaring at him, holding out the phone in his hands. “For you.”
Ianto exchanged a glance with Monroe, but didn't argue, approaching and taking the phone. “Ianto Jones,” he said, trying to ignore the way Carver watched him carefully.
“Ianto.” It was Jack's voice, and Ianto found himself unconsciously straightening at Jack's all-business tone. “Good to hear your voice again.”
“Likewise, sir,” Ianto said.
“Long story short,” Jack said, “There's something strange going on, and frankly we don't know what the hell's causing it. UNIT'll fill you in, but for now consider yourself to be Torchwood's official liaison to UNIT.”
Ianto managed to hide his surprise, both on his face and his voice. “Liaison.”
“Right, keep an eye on them. And don't let them forget who's boss.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now pass me back to Carver. I'm not done with the old goat yet.”
Ianto managed not to grin, and held the phone out to the General. “Captain Harkness for you, sir,” he said, politely, and pretended not to notice the visible irritation on the man's features. For a moment, he contemplated making the situation worse by offering some words of condolence regarding unreasonable American Captains, but decided that goading a UNIT General into having him shot would be one of the poorer decisions of his life (although far from the worst, really) and instead smiled politely, turning away.
Monroe had hurried away when he'd been called over by Carver, and was now approaching with a small earpiece in her hands. “Here,” she said, as she handed it to Ianto. “Comms unit. One channel's tuned to general chatter. The other's a personal one. Don't lose it. You're logged into the system now if you need to use a computer. Your name and 'Torchwood' as the password.”
“Original,” Ianto said dryly, fitting the comms unit into place over his ear. He tabbed through the channels. The general channel seemed to be a running feed on all non-classified communications. He could hear various sectors reporting in, voices running into each other. The other channel was silent, empty. He dialled down the volume on the general channel and left it to burble quietly in the background.
Monroe shrugged. “We were in a hurry.”
“So,” he shoved his hands in his pockets. He'd donned the suit he'd arrived on the first day in, warned by Jack's text message and determined that if something bad was going to happen then he would be at least well dressed for the occasion. “What's all the fuss about?”
Monroe opened her mouth to answer but General Carver interrupted her, having apparently finished his phone call. “The fuss,” he said, “Is that.” He pointed to the giant screen or, more accurately, at one particular set of graphs that danced in the bottom corner of the monitor. “Yesterday, Torchwood Cardiff started picking up unusual readings they couldn't identify. It seemed to be coming from our vicinity, so, naturally, I got woken up in the wee hours of Thursday morning by an American demanding to know what we were up to. By lunchtime, the readings were strong enough for us to pick them up as well. The only problem is that we don't know what the readings are, and neither do Torchwood Cardiff. All either of us can agree on is that they aren't Earthly in origin.”
Carver nodded to a nearby technician. “Put up the area of effect grid, would you?”
The technician nodded, fingers dancing across the keyboard, and the map of the British Isles changed, pulling out so that it showed most of Europe. Another keystroke, and a roughly circular shape was overlaid on the image. Its centre point was somewhere in Britain, not too far away from the UNIT base, if Ianto wasn't very much mistaken, and it spread out from there. The circle managed to cover the whole of Britain, and a good deal of France, reaching out to the point where it wasn't far off the coast of Denmark. “We're getting gradually escalating readings within this area,” Carver said, “Centring on this area of Britain where the readings are strongest.”
Ianto nodded slowly. “So I assume the working theory at the moment it that it's some sort of alien incursion?”
“Good a theory as any at this point.” Carver said, “Now why don't you pick a nice spot and stay out of the way while the proper soldiers do their job. Monroe, with me.”
Carver strode off towards the conference room without looking back, and Monroe shot Ianto an apologetic look before following.
Ianto had no doubt that the clearance assigned to him gave him a much more restricted access than UNIT's own login, but short of forcibly evicting someone from their own workstation it was doubtful that he would manage to see any data at all. A quiet query to one of the staff, however, earned him a laptop and a space of clear desk that he could sit down at. It gave him an excellent view both of the room and of the conference room, in which he could see Carver pacing while speaking in short terse sentences to his staff. Ianto briefly wished he'd learnt how to lip-read at some point and instead turned his attention to the laptop.
By Torchwood standards, it was sluggish. Earth technology couldn't yet hope to match the smooth slickness of the alien-enhanced one that Tosh nurtured at the Hub. He drummed his fingers impatiently while he waited for the operating system to finish loading (Windows - rarely a good sign, he sincerely hoped it was only on laptops and that the main systems had something more robust), and watched the room while he waited. He was unused to spending a crisis, any crisis, surrounded by people. He was used to the small team at Cardiff, presided over by Jack who barked orders and ran roughshod over everyone with a clever word and an insouciant grin. But here, the UNIT staff functioned like a well oiled machine. He could hear the reports easily dovetailing into one another as stations reported in sequentially, and he watched as personnel moved around the room, dancing around each other where there wasn't enough space, and the hum of voices littered the air. He hadn't been around this many people since... since London... and that felt like a lifetime ago these days.
The computer beeped at him. It had finished loading, and was waiting for his access code. He ignored the prompt that asked for the information that Monroe had given him, instead typing in an apparently random string of numbers and letters and tried not to smile as the network chewed it over, before the screen cleared and box popped up, informing him that administrative-level access had been accepted. He wondered what Carver would say if he learnt that Tosh had long ago hacked UNIT's systems, and took it as a challenge whenever they tried to upgrade their security. Their backdoor clearance to UNIT files had come in useful on more than one occasion, and Ianto knew he'd have to be careful to wipe the laptop's memory after he was done with it. It wasn't that he had no trust in UNIT or the login that Monroe had so helpfully provided him, it was just that he was reasonably sure that whatever information he might have been able to access would have been more than useless.
With high level access granted, he could see all the computers on the network, and the linkages to other UNIT sites as well. He ignored them for the moment, instead digging into the logs of sensor readings and pulling up information for the last twenty four hours. He didn't go further beyond that. From what Carver had said, it was doubtful that UNIT scanners were sensitive enough to detect changes in ambient energy levels at the point where it would trip the Hub's sensor arrays. The information appeared as pages and pages of data, accompanied by images that showed the same information in graph form. He lined them up carefully on the screen, and flicked through them, watching the progression of energy spikes and dips over time. Back and forth he clicked, forward through time and then back.
There was something odd about these readings, something familiar.
The problem was that he was certain he'd never seen anything like it working at Torchwood Cardiff. He'd stayed away from the Rift monitors mostly, not wanting to draw attention to himself. It was Tosh's dominion, and he had no desire to attract her attention, or Jack's, by appearing more knowledgeable than he perhaps should. But he was certain he recalled seeing... something... like this before. It was maddening, like a word caught on the tip of the tongue. He turned to the Lieutenant sitting next to him, working at his own laptop. He seemed to be coordinating communications and looked up impatiently when Ianto attracted his attention.
“Have you got a pen and paper?” he asked, and had the back of an old phone list and a biro shoved towards him.
“Thanks,” he said, politely, even though the man had already gone back to ignoring him.
Shrugging to himself, he set to draw a set of axis on the paper, and began plotting a new graph, using the data on the screen as a reference. Slowly, though clumsily, given that he was plotting the waveform with a rather loose definition of accuracy, a new shape began to form on the paper. And this one he definitely recalled. His breath caught in his throat as he remembered exactly where and when he'd seen this pattern before. The familiarity was painful, and instant.
No. He could be wrong. He had to be wrong. He must be wrong. There was no other explanation.
Ianto rolled the biro between thumb and index finger before decisively dropping it on the table next to him, nodding to himself. He opened a new window on his screen and started typing slowly. Character by character, stopping frequently and frowning, he entered into the system an equation, a piece of script, that would chew through the sensor logs for the last several hours and produce a new data set. He had to go back and erase odd lines, here and there, amending or replacing them. He was working entirely from memory, and he was no longer sure he remembered the details clearly. When he'd finally finished, and there was nothing glaring that jumped out to his eye, he set the computer to running the script, and sat back to wait while the computer laboriously processed the directive.
Carver was saying something that he punctuated by pointing at Ianto. Ianto smiled at the faces that reflexively turned towards him, and laughed quietly to himself as they all quickly looked away again. They were probably discussion what they were supposed to be doing about their new “liaison”. UNIT and Torchwood had never particularly gotten along. The attitude in the halls of Torchwood London had been that UNIT was an up-itself johnny-come-lately organisation that would break apart as soon as the disparate nations contributing to the force realised that they had about as much in common as a collection of furniture in a student bedsit. So high and mighty, the staff had giggled. They'd get their comeuppance, for sure. Torchwood survived in the shadows, and would be around long after UNIT had bitten the dust.
It was a rather pointed example of hubris proving to be one's downfall.
The remnants of Torchwood, namely Cardiff, had a somewhat more relaxed attitude towards UNIT. Ianto had occasionally wondered if the fact that Jack had clearly once been a military man himself tended to bias him in favour of sympathising with UNIT. Certainly, he didn't seem to mind giving them the run around when it suited him, but Jack never seemed to indicate that he held UNIT in less esteem than any other organisation. Maybe that was why they'd agreed to take Ianto on for the duration. Probably, Ianto mused, he would never know.
The laptop played a musical tune to indicate it had completed its analysis, tearing Ianto's attention away and redirecting it back to the screen in front of him. He pressed the key to call up the new result graph. What he saw made his stomach do backflips, and his breathing hitched.
“No,” he whispered, aghast, “It can't be. It's impossible.”
He scrabbled in his pocket for his phone, dialling the Hub and getting the number wrong twice through sheer nerves. “Come on, come on,” he hissed, as the phone rang.
“Ianto?” It was Tosh's voice.
“Tosh!” Ianto gripped the edge of the desk he was sitting at, pushing himself away from the monitors, over to a quieter corner, where hopefully no one would hear him. “Where's Jack?”
“Jack?” Tosh sounded briefly confused. “He's just in-”
Ianto didn't have time to wait for her to finish. He glanced up at the transparent-walled conference room. Carver was talking to an assemblage of UNIT officers, and hadn't noticed Ianto's movements. “Tell him. There's been a breach of the secure archives. There must have been. It's the only explanation.”
“The secure archives?” Tosh's voice rose in alarm. “What are you talking about, Ianto?”
Ianto took a deep breath. “The readings that you and UNIT have been picking up. I've seen them before, but only in simulation data. It's fallout from a pre-shock wave. It's-” The phone beeped, and died. Ianto pulled the handset away from his ear and looked at it in dread.
NO SIGNAL, it said.
On screens all around the room, line graphs jumped around into a frenzy of motion and light, and Ianto realised that, as much as he would have liked to have been, he wasn't mistaken.
And then the world turned inside out.
**
By anyone's definition, Ianto Jones had been through an awful lot in just a few short years. Between the Battle of Canary Wharf, cannibals, aliens and nearly getting himself and everything he cared for killed after hiding Lisa away and telling himself that it would be alright in the end, it was a miracle he'd managed to come out unscathed (as long as one took unscathed to mean still breathing and possessing of a pulse). What happened next, though, was something so utterly beyond his experience that he had no way of describing it properly.
It felt like he'd hit a wall at speed while standing completely still, like he had been turned inside out from the navel, before being hung up by his ankles and shaken. And, through it all, he was vaguely aware that he was still standing upright, in the corner of a UNIT command centre.
Hmm, he mused to himself, I wonder if I'm dead.
He thought about that for a long moment.
I don't think I'm dead, he finally decided, Though I do feel decidedly odd.
Then he remembered why he could be confused about such a thing, and why it was very very important that he decide to be alive. I'm alive! He mentally screamed, as loud as he could bring himself to do. He might have even been screaming out loud, but he had no way of knowing. I'm alivealivealive!
The Universe shifted into a blurred sort of focus, like a photo taken while the photographer was moving.
He was staring at unbroken grey, and it wasn't until Ianto blinked that he realised he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Most of the lights were flickering on and off, and the monitors were dark. He turned his head slowly to look around. There didn't appear to be any damage to the room, and he didn't feel injured, but whatever had happened had clearly affected everyone else. Around the room, people were groaning and awkwardly picking themselves up off the floor. General Carver stumbled out of the conference room, followed by his staff, and looked as if someone had struck him in the forehead.
“What the hell was that?” He sounded more confused than anything.
Ianto heard a choking sound, and turned his head in time to see a woman in a green UNIT officer's uniform being copiously sick on the floor next to him. The acidic stench wafted over to him, and turned his stomach. He looked down at the phone he'd somehow managed to keep a hold of through everything. Its screen was still dead. No chance of contacting the Hub just yet then. He shoved it into his jacket pocket and pushed himself into a sitting position. A hand landed on his shoulder, and he looked up to see Louise Monroe staring down at him, blinking rapidly as if to try and focus.
“You okay?” she asked.
He nodded, and accepted the hand she offered to help him to his feet. She was surprisingly strong for a woman her size. He smiled at her, and let go, and immediately had to grab a hold of the edge of the nearest table. Apparently his balance hadn't been as stable as he'd thought. He swallowed against and upsurge of nausea, and tried not to think about the woman still crouched on the floor, retching.
“Systems!” Carver was snapping at the technicians. “I want external monitors up, asap. What's going on, people?”
Ianto awkwardly reached for the desk phone a few feet away. For all that the staff had wound up on the floor, shaken up, all the equipment was still in place, and apparently undisturbed. He lifted the receiver, but didn't hear a dial tone. It was as dead as his mobile. That was bad. If UNIT dedicated landlines weren't functional, that meant that there was probably no way to communicate with the outside world, and certainly no way to get word to Torchwood. Ianto was very much on his own, and, he realised, there was every chance that the situation was going to get far worse.
There was the buzzing sound of power starting to surge through wires again. It was intermittent, though. Like the lights, monitors flickered on and off, as if they couldn't decide whether to be fully functional or shut down. After a second, there was a triumphant cry from a technician, and the main monitoring wall lit up.
Carver stared at it. “What the hell?” he said, in a low voiced growl.
The monitor was, at least for the moment, staying on, but the image on it kept flickering and shifting. One moment, it showed an 'all status nominal' message across the British Isles and Europe, and the next it painted a picture of utter devastation, with a scrolling list of damage and casualty reports, and an illustrative area of effect overlay, which kindly informed anyone looking that most of northern Europe had been destroyed by unknown means. Then it flickered back to normal.
Monroe bent down next to the technician, grabbing the diagnostic screen off him and scowling at it. “What did you do?” she demanded. “We're not dead. This thing's wrong.”
“No,” Ianto said, his voice feeling somehow disassociated from his body. “No, it isn't.” He didn't even realise he'd spoken aloud until Carver, his expression not angry but deadly serious, turned to look at him.
“What precisely are you talking about, Mr. Jones?”
Ianto passed a hand over his mouth, and tried to force his thoughts into some sort of order. “Those energy readings that you've been picking up. They're a pre-shock event. A trans-temporal signifier of-” Ianto stopped himself, and took a deep breath. “It's a Quantum Bomb. Someone set off a Quantum Bomb. The destruction resonates out through twenty-odd dimensions, including time. The bomb hasn't exploded yet, which is why we don't have a reading on the damage caused by the explosion. It's not happened yet. We're in a suspended quantum state.”
“How exactly do you know so much about this thing?” Monroe's voice was soft, but in the sudden quiet that had overtaken the room as Ianto spoke, she was clearly audible.
Ianto laughed, though humour was the furthest thought from his mind. He rather thought that if he didn't laugh he might do something unseemly, like sob. “Because, Captain,” he said, looking General Carver straight in the eye, “Torchwood designed it.”
**
It had hardly been what Carver wanted to hear. The General had ordered Ianto escorted into the conference room under guard, unwilling to let Ianto out of his sight by locking him up in a brig somewhere else on the base, and so Ianto got a very good view on how General Carver handled a crisis. He watched silently, hands folded neatly on the table top, as Carver spoke to technicians and soldiers, and some white coated people who were clearly scientists. He looked confused though, and the scientists pale, so Ianto guessed that whatever was being said was not what the General wanted to hear. He watched Carver pace, becoming increasingly more agitated, until the man finally caved and entered the conference room with a couple of scientists and senior officers.
“Start talking,” he said, brusquely. “And give me one good reason why I shouldn't have you dragged off to interrogation being thrown in the deepest darkest little hole I can find.”
Ianto spread his hands, palms upwards, unimpressed by Carver's bluster. He'd faced Jack Harkness in a murderous rage, and, after that, a General held little threat for him. “Where would you like me to start?” he asked, trying for 'cool and collected' in his response.
“What the hell is a Quantum Bomb?” Carver snapped, “And why can't we get a fixed reading on it?”
One of the scientists had pulled out a notepad and pen and was listening intently.
Ianto thought for a moment about how to phrase it. Finally, he said, “You know Schroedinger's Cat, right? The classic thought experiment? Simplified, you put a cat in a box with a vial of poison and close the box. You have no way of knowing until you open the box whether the cat is alive or dead. Once you open the box, and observe the result, you know whether the cat is dead, or just very pissed off.”
“We're a cat in a box?” Monroe was standing at the back of the assembled UNIT officers, and there was a faint smile on her face at the notion.
Well, at least he had at least one ally, or something approaching that, in the room. “More or less. At the heart of a Quantum Bomb is a point singularity source. When it's detonated, it tears through reality in all directions, space, time, and a lot of dimensions in between. But, as far as we're concerned, it's not detonated yet. It's a possible future. Until we pass the point in time where the bomb has either been detonated or diffused, we're stuck in an indecisive quantum state. We're both alive and well, and we're also dead and blown to pieces.”
One of the scientists snorted. “Ridiculous,” he said.
Ianto smiled placidly. “I've not eaten in fifteen hours, and I've only had about an hour's sleep. Right before the shockwave hit, I was working up a killer hangover. Now I'm not hungry, thirsty, or tired. How about you?”
The scientist didn't have a response for that.
General Carver was frowning. “Why precisely would Torchwood build a weapon capable of destroying most of Europe? Or should I be unsurprised at the continuing evidence of Torchwood's late Empire-building ambitions?”
Ianto frowned. “I didn't say Torchwood built it. Torchwood designed it.”
“The difference being?”
“It was a last line of defence, in theory.” Ianto folded his hands together and examined his fingers thoughtfully, lost in recollection. “Though I always thought that it represented a rather childish attitude of 'well, if we can't have Britain, no one else will'. It was to be used if Britain ever fell to the slavering alien hordes. Turns out, however, that the upper echelons actually had half a brain cell working the day they reviewed that project. They decided that it smacked of cowardice, and that if Britain ever did fall, then Torchwood would still be waiting in the shadows to retake our 'blessed land' through guerilla tactics and obscenely powerful weaponry.” Ianto rolled his eyes expressively. “There was also the rather minor question of whether or not the act of using a controlled point singularity in a destructive fashion wouldn't in fact destroy the Universe altogether. It was shelved before it reached the prototype stage. Though, I must say, score one for Torchwood R&D, since it apparently worked exactly as it was designed to do.”
Carver's lip curled slightly. “Forgive me if I hold off on the celebrations.”
Ianto smiled.
Carver sat down opposite Ianto and leaned forward, mimicking his hands-together position. “So you're telling me that this bomb hasn't gone off yet.”
“Yes,” Ianto said.
“So we've still got a chance to stop it.”
Ianto shrugged. “Theoretically,” he said, “If you can find it.”
“We.” Carver stabbed a finger in Ianto's direction. “Since you know so much about the device in question, and since Captain Harkness's last act before we lost communications was to insist that you function as a liaison officer, then you're going to be helping us, because, frankly, you're only other option is to spend the rest of your life in a very small and dark cell.”
“Well, when you put it like that, General, how can I refuse?” He remembered reading Toshiko's file before insinuating himself into Torchwood Three, and the stark descriptions of her accommodations in a high security UNIT prison. Jack had left a lot out of those scanty reports, not intending anyone other than himself to read them, but Ianto came to learn how to read between the lines of what Jack didn't say.
General Carver shook his head. “You Torchwood lot are unbelievable,” he said, “Designing bombs like that. What were you thinking?”
Ianto raised his eyebrows. “Are you telling me you would never even consider doing exactly the same thing?”
The corner of Monroe's eye might have twitched, but it could have been Ianto's imagination.
“Let's hope you never find out,” Carver said, quite seriously, and Ianto was taken aback for a moment. “One more thing. We’ve lost several of our staff. What’s happened to them?”
Ianto looked at Carver, who returned his glance with a steely look. Ianto found that he couldn’t bring himself to lie, even though Carver clearly desperately wanted him to. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “My best guess is that they’re caught on the wrong side of the decision to be alive or dead. All of us here are more alive than dead, and they might be more dead than alive. We might have made the conscious decision that we could be alive, the observer effect and all that. There’s some stuff about decoherence that might help to explain it, but that’s really not… ah… relevant.”
Carver nodded. “So, if we stop the bomb from going off…?”
“Then everyone’s alive,” Ianto said, “Because it never went off.”
“Good enough for me,” Carver said, slapping his palms on the tabletop and standing. Ianto reflexively followed suit. “Get to work. All of you. We’re going to find out what the hell is going on and stop it from happening, because there is no other option.”
**
Ianto stared at his mobile, which still displayed the maddening ‘no service’ message, and cracked its casing, hard, on the edge of the conference room table. It did nothing except to scratch the edge of the phone, and perhaps assuage some of his frustration.
“Still nothing?”
He looked up. Monroe had looked up from her laptop, peering across the table at him. The conference room had been turned into a working area, with what pieces of equipment they could get to work set up, and several white-coated scientists were standing by the white board and squabbling. Ianto had been attempting to call the Hub for nearly an hour now, and there had been no look. Every so often, it seemed that the problems with the equipment would resolve, and he could dial out, but it died again before anyone at the Hub picked up.
Presuming, of course, that there was anyone at the Hub to answer. Ianto couldn’t help but wonder if the realisation that something was going on was what had prompted most of the people in the Command Centre to still be alive. They were observing what was going on. Would that have affected it?
It made his brain hurt to think about it.
He would feel much better if someone at the Hub, anyone, even Owen, would just answer the phone.
“No,” he said, and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He returned his attention to the file folders in front of him. UNIT had pulled all their paper records (given that the electronic ones were hard to access) on current threats, plus speculative ones, or anyone related to Torchwood who might bear enough of a grudge to wipe out a good part of Western Europe. The number of files was frighteningly large.
He fingered the edge of the file he had open in front of him. It detailed the activities of a subversive quasi-terrorist organisation which had made several attempts, usually through blackmail or other forms of extortion, at getting their hands on alien technology. There was a notation at the bottom of the file that the group had been “deactivated” several years earlier, and Ianto tossed the file aside without further thought, picking up the next.
“How do you know about it?”
Monroe’s question caused him only to glance up briefly before returning his attention to the files. She was staring at him in a decidedly odd fashion, biting her lip.
“Know about what?” he asked, in return.
Morecome, Alec. Card carrying anarchist who sold dangerous alien components on eBay. Killed when he mistook a Venzeni subductor for a sandwich toaster. Ianto tossed the file into what he’d started to call the ‘waste of my bloody time’ pile. Who the hell had organised these files, anyway?
“The Quantum Bomb.”
Ianto glanced up. Monroe's mouth was set into a thin line. After a moment, she got to her feet, picking up the laptop in front of her, and moved her chair around to the other side of the table so that she was sitting next to Ianto and could lower her voice to speak.
“You know an awful lot for just a 'librarian',” she said, softly, leaning in towards him. He could detect the faintly floral scent of her perfume. “How do you know about a weapon like this?”
Ianto picked up another file and gave her a pleasant smile. “Like you said, I'm a librarian. Maybe I read the files while I was archiving them. Maybe I hacked into the old Torchwood systems out of curiosity and read up on the subject. Or maybe,” he leaned in towards her, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial murmur, “Maybe I helped design it.”
Monroe straightened sharply.
“Wouldn't that be a bit of a mind screw?” He asked, and grinned. Apparently the expression worked as well as it did for Jack to throw people off. Monroe's expression moved from shock to uncertainty, not knowing whether or not he was playing with her. He restrained the urge to laugh, glanced at the file in his hands and discarded it.
“You're a strange man, Ianto,” Monroe said, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms. “Are all you Torchwood people like that? I... I hear things. People talk about what Torchwood's like.”
“And what do they say?”
Monroe shrugged, a tiny minuscule motion that belied the tension in her shoulders. “Arrogant jerks who like to hide behind the veil of monarchy and Rule Britannia while plotting to take over the world.”
“You forgot to say how unfairly attractive we all are,” Ianto teased.
“That too.” Monroe smiled slightly. “I don't believe it, though. At least not about everyone at Torchwood being bastards who deserved what they got. I was on a salvage team that went into what was left at Canary Wharf-”
It was only through long practice that Ianto managed to conceal any sort of reaction to a mention of the battle.
“- and I saw the bodies, Ianto. There were a lot. I don't know if you guys at Cardiff ever turned up there, but it was pretty devastating. I refuse to believe that anyone is bad enough to deserve that.”
Ianto stared blindly at the file in his hands, unable to read a single word on the page.
“What's it like?” she asked.
“What's what like?”
“Torchwood.” He looked up at Monroe. Her eyes were wide, and staring at him. “What's it like to work there?”
Ianto opened his mouth to give a glib answer, but found that the words stuck in his throat. He thought about it a long moment, and tried again. “It's the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. It's horrible, and it's probably going to kill me before my thirtieth birthday, but it's the only thing that gives me life meaning. The only thing. And the promise of something beautiful coming from Torchwood is one of the few things that stops me from killing myself some days.”
Monroe's expression softened, and she reached out to rest a hand on his arm. “Ianto...”
“Louise,” he interrupted, “You can't understand, you really can't.”
She shook her head. “I don't pretend to. But you're in pain. Is it worth it?”
“Oh yes,” he said, quickly, before he could even think about it. “It really is.”
She smiled. “Then that's alright, isn't it?”
He looked at the hand she had resting on his arm, and the way her thumb gently stroked over the sleeve of his jacket. “I suppose so,” he said, and then the photograph in the file he was holding finally caught his eye.
He raised the file, staring at the picture, trying to imagine what the flat and unflattering image would look like on a person.
“What is it?” Louise asked, realising his sudden interest. Her hand dropped away.
“I know this man,” he said, hurriedly shuffling through the pages looking for a name. “Shit, I know this man.” He stood. “Where's General Carver?”
****
Part Five