Two Smiths

Art by m_alodel (LJ | comment) and unithien_rerith (LJ | e-mail | comment)

Chapter One

When an agent of the Time Lords approached the Aubertides and proposed an alliance, August smelt a rat as large as the one Greeneye was feasting on at the time. It was not that they didn't believe the offer really came from the oldest race. The agent was the young man they had known as Alton, a fellow with a laconic drawl and aristocratic features, who had been undercover during the whole Incident, as they had taken to referring to it. Someone who, therefore, knew of both their skills and methods. The question was more the extent to which they could trust him. The Gallifreyans had, after all, time looped them once before when their activities had got a little too close to Gallifrey's sphere of interest. True, they'd escaped from that time loop, but that only meant that if the Intervention Agency didn't like any of their subsequent behaviour, it would come up with something even more elaborately fiendish to trap them in. Because of course, the High Council couldn't be seen to police the galaxy directly. A time loop was as much a legal loophole as a temporal one, imprisoning the undesirable elements in spirit if not in technical definition. The oldest civilisation hadn't lasted this long without knowing a thing or three about public relations.

But Alton's proposal seemed direct enough. Time Lords had singular biodata – consisting of a unique genetic makeup and a few other things that Alton wasn't about to tell them about – that gave them certain advantages and disadvantages. The Agency had peered into the shadows of Gallifrey's own future and foreseen a time when it would be prudent not only to tackle the disadvantages, but also curtail the advantages. Alton was a little circumspect on this point, but August guessed that the two times their species had crossed each other offered a reason: the Aubertides were masters of manipulating biodata, splicing genes from different species and modifying the results as necessary for environmental and other variations; the Time Lords couldn't risk their own species' unique selling points getting into the genome of certain of their enemies. A great war was coming, Alton said, and what he offered the last family of Aubis was not just a deal, it was a treaty. Collaborate on the biodata technology we need, he said, and you get to keep anything you learn in the process.

This sounded to August like a big gamble for Gallifrey, given that "anything you learn" might include the very power of regeneration that the family had long lusted after. But maybe that was just the carrot the Time Lords were dangling for them to get them to agree. And risk was always minimal to Time Lords anyway – in the worst-case scenario they could always pop back to the first dawn of civilisation on Aubis and quietly genocide the species with no one any the wiser. Rumours persisted that such things had been done before.

Gallifrey had set up an experimental facility on some deserted moon somewhere, well away from any territorial concerns, and while the treaty was being drawn up, the family were invited there, to learn about the Chameleon Arch Project. The first thing they were told was that the Time Lords were working on a storage device for Gallifreyan biodata. It had to extract everything needed to recreate an individual: DNA, memories, bodily configuration; and it needed to store it in a portable device.

Hoff had laughed when Alton had shown them the prototype. It was a time-telling device, of human design, a fob watch. A fully working one, too. Seeing their confusion, Alton had sketched in the idea of dimensional transcendentalism, plasmic shells and chameleon circuits. Not enough for them to reverse engineer anything from the watch, but enough to understand the basics. The size, Alton said, was not important, because insides and outsides were not in the same dimension. The biodata could take up as much physical space as the nanites – or whatever tech ended up being used – needed. The heart of the device appeared as a glowing channel of light and sound that could zero in on a life form in proximity, do a basic friend or foe analysis, and transmit and receive as much data as needed to achieve its pre-programmed objectives.

All this time August was waiting for the punch line. Surely Gallifreyan technology could handle all this. What did they need the family for? Alton then explained that what they needed was somewhere to hide. The watch itself – or whatever disguise the chameleon circuit chose according to its surroundings – could safely store the Time Lord biodata, and a perception filter would stop undesirables from giving it too close attention, another clever idea that they apparently used on their own travel craft. But an individual who had removed his Time Lord abilities would need a life to live, an alternative bodily configuration to exist in, and guard the device with, until such time as the perceived threat, whatever it was, had passed. And that was when the penny dropped for August, to borrow a human expression that he rather liked. The Time Lords wanted to squirt into the hollowed-out body a new personality, a different species, a fresh set of memories. They were asking the family to give them the means to do to their entire race what it had once done to the Doctor. "Any species will do," Alton said, "within reason. It doesn't have to be Tellurian. Alzarian, Sontaran, Raxacoricofallapatorian... as long as they've got the wheel and fire and can avoid drawing attention to themselves for a decade or two."

The Aubertides were satisfied with the scope of the project, signed up to the treaty, and immediately set to work. Laylock was their technical expert and drew up the design. Hoff was good with his hands and did a lot of the manual work. August set about defining an extensive test regime. Leaving Greeneye free to reverse engineer as much Gallifreyan technology as he possibly could without making their allies suspicious. Which turned out to be quite a bit more than any of them hoped. The Time Lords pretty much left them to get on with it, their resources presumably divided among many such projects for the coming conflict. In hardly any time at all Greeneye had discovered ways to hide their own spacecraft in plain sight, upload thoughts for long term storage using telepathy, and invisibly translate speech in unfamiliar languages. The Holy Grail, of course, would be to experiment directly on Time Lord biodata, find ways to incorporate it into their own to take on some of the advantages the Gallifreyans were so keen to protect. But even with their allies distracted, there was no chance they'd be able to do that. Not without being very sneaky.

Naturally, when Greeneye suggested the idea of a double cross, it took days of persuasion to get all four of them on the same page. August was afraid of the Time Lords and their ancient, shadowy powers; Laylock was just afraid in general as this was his natural disposition; and Hoff struggled to understand Greeneye's rather elaborate plan, though the process of explaining it to him over and over again did at least iron out some of August's main concerns. Were Serif and Aphasia still alive, the family might have come to an agreement earlier. As he had tended to view himself as superior to just about everybody, Serif had always been prepared to endorse any battle plan whose chief component was offensive; and Aphasia had been reckless and immature. But then, that was probably why those two hadn't survived the Incident.

In the end, Greeneye's argument was that they simply had nothing to lose. None of them could bud off any further times, and having slaughtered their own race, the species ended with their generation. They had, what, half a year before their telomeres expired and their being started to deteriorate. Gallifreyan biodata held all the information they could need to regenerate their cells fully. The potential was a greatly increased lifespan, perhaps even immortality. It had to be worth any risk.

The idea of merging Gallifreyan biodata into their own was not a new one. It was, after all, why they'd set the trap the Doctor had fallen into before. They had hoped that such a union would give each of them thirteen lives and the ability to bud off each time. But further research had suggested that that wasn't possible. Gallifreyans were as near to infertile as made no odds, and it was an infertility intrinsically linked to their regenerative capabilities. At some distant point in their history, it was said, they had made the conscious decision to exchange one for the other. A race of people who viewed a greatly increased personal life-span as worth losing all the joys of being fecund for, was a race to be wary of indeed. But just because the biodata wouldn't allow them to continue to bud off didn't mean it was of no use. An Aubertide's natural life-span, if measured in Earth years, would amount to no more than five, and they had but months left. A single regeneration each, just one, could extend that to well over a hundred, and, optimistically, the same duration for each successive one. The species would still end when the four of them died, but at least they could have some fun in the meantime.

But trying to steal Gallifreyan biodata during the development of the Chameleon Arch Project would be folly. The Time Lords may be distracted but they would have their eyes peeled – another Earth expression that rather appealed to the Aubertides – for any hint of such activity. Greeneye's idea was more complicated, but less dangerous. Once the project was finished, they would make contact again with the Doctor, but in one of his later incarnations, one that would have been drafted into the war that was supposedly on the horizon. His craft would have been fitted with a completed chameleon arch mechanism. They would trick him into placing his biodata into one of the portable devices. And they would steal it. The only way to do so was to make the Doctor believe that he had no choice but to go into hiding, and that he had no time to investigate other alternatives. And that was why it had to be the Doctor. Because way back when the seventh incarnation of that Time Lord had first approached Laylock to create a human life for him, Laylock had been canny enough to keep a copy on file of that very life. The memories, the skills, the history, the name, the biology, even the time/space coordinates for his hiding place; it was all there. If they could somehow fool the Doctor into using that biodata without checking it first, then they wouldn't have to hunt him down when and where he hid. They would know. They would simply travel there themselves, infiltrate the boy's school, take the watch at the first opportunity and leave.

Greeneye had struggled to get agreement for all aspects of the plan. The first question raised was how, exactly, two versions of them, not to mention the good John Smith himself, could be present at the same time. He'd patiently gone over it several times. They would make subtle adjustments to the human biodata record they had. For instance, their second attempt at Time Lord biodata theft would actually occur several Earth months before the first. In effect, they'd arrive, carry out their business, leave, and then a season or so later, younger, less experienced, less worldly-wise versions of themselves would arrive and attempt the same thing. That group would fail, but in doing so would learn everything that the older group would need to succeed.

"Won't that create a massive paradox?" August wanted to know.

"No. Why should it? The two sets of events are distinct. They will proceed along similar lines, but the second – temporally speaking – will not rely on being a consequence of the first."

Hoff didn't like – or possibly grasp – this. "Surely the later set of events will have to happen differently? We fused Hulton Academy in an instant into a glass monument to humanity's stubbornness. How can we do this in 1913, and yet it still be standing in 1914 for the same thing to happen again?"

Greeneye explained, with some weariness, that there was no need to take such a heavy-handed approach on their own second journey. Quite the reverse, in fact. They would know that the Doctor was to become a human known as John Smith. They would know that he was to do so in the little English town of Farringham. They would know he was to take up a teaching post at the school. The first time they had arrived, the chaos that had ensued was caused by the biodata pod going missing from its hiding place, and time needlessly wasted by assuming the Doctor's companion either had it or knew of its whereabouts. In addition, the family was barely in infancy then, three of their members having only budded off that season. They had been, they all had to admit, ham-fisted. But this time it wouldn't be a brute force approach. It would be a surgical strike. This time they knew that John Smith would keep the biodata close to him.

And this time, the family would not leave anything to chance. Before, they'd travelled unshielded through the vortex, a practice so dangerous they now shuddered to think at the consequences if their calculations had been a fraction out. They'd brought no spacecraft, just whatever sundry bits of tech they could carry with them. Their only protection once on Earth had been two domes, an initial forcefield around their headquarters in a real field, and later, a time barrier that turned out to be too sophisticated by half. They'd called each other by their given names, even giving away their planet's name far too freely. Should any of their Time Lord allies be keeping an eye on them, that would be far too big a giveaway.

This time, it would have to be planned out much more cleanly and meticulously. They wouldn't even bring their corporeal forms with them, meaning to pick up a few once they got there. They would have codenames – Mother of Mine, Daughter of Mine, Father of Mine and Son of Mine – to refer to each other. They would take an impenetrable spacecraft brimming with all the gadgetry they could ever need. And Greeneye had even come up with a suitably macabre cover name for the little group of bandits. The Family of Blood. It tripped off the tongue so beautifully.

They would land, they would take bodies, preferably trusted ones in the community, and they would close in, the entire operation needing to take no more than a day.

Then they could get to work on their immortality.

Go to chapter two