Doctor Who: Panic Moon Ch. 35

A building jutted up into the horizon, a splinter of heavy metal stabbing at a grey sky, and it was there that she was being herded.

'They didn't want anyone else, Oswin,' He stood, and in that moment his eyes were cold stars, floating above the frozen wasteland she travelled across. 'Just you. Just that brilliant little mind of yours, that you wasted working on that ship.'

If there was any significance to that last statement- and it was too out of place a statement to just be something throwaway- it was lost on Clara, but she didn't have too much time to consider it. Turning the ring on the edge of the projector once again, Sander switched the footage one more time, and what was displayed sucked all other sound out of the bar almost instantly, and replaced it with a desolate, horrified silence that seemed to go on into eternity.

It was the sight of Dalek machinery, carving through human flesh.

Blades sliced, refined laser scalpels left trails of smoking skin, and blood pooled where it didn't evaporate instantly. Netting of wires and circuitry grasped and held, chemical injectors filled what was left of her body with substances that pulped her at a genetic level, stripping away her very humanity as the cybernetics dragged her mind into a cage of metal and glass. The entire procedure was carried out with a horrible efficiency, the inexorable march of machinery committed to gruesome purposes, pressing and pressing and pressing even as she screamed and struggled and...

... Stopped.

What was left was the same sort of ruinous metal cylinder that populated this world. Just another microbe in the plague of twisted flesh and metal that had swept across the land.

Tears had sprung to Clara's eyes, but through the haze she saw the turned heads, the silent, deathly grim fascination on the faces of every man and woman in the room, the pale faced hunted looks of people who had felt the impact of the Daleks themselves. The footage had mercifully been paused, but the latest freeze frame hung above the table still, painting the nearby surfaces in the colours of blood and rust. The picture wasn't even particularly distinct; the point of view was too close, the image frozen in the midst of a flurry of motion that left it blurred, more a splotch of colour than something recognizable.

But it said enough.

'So, when I said that you would die, that turned out to be more symbolic than literal,' For the first time, Sander seemed to inject a little understanding in his voice, even some discomfort at the subject matter; whatever else he was, he was a human being existing in a time and place when the Daleks had become a form of cultural nightmare, a very real bogeyman that could drop out of the sky at any moment and burn your entire world to the ground. It was impossible to maintain a true distance from something like that, 'It will be literal later, once you've served your purpose, but by that point I presume it's more of a blessing than anything...'

Words didn't come to Clara for a very long time; they had been swallowed up by the stark, awful reality placed before her. She watched, as Sander shut down the hologram, the other patrons of the bar getting up to leave one by one, the laid back atmosphere of the bar punctured by what they had seen. By the time a rather angry looking man had emerged from behind the bar and begun making his way toward them, both she and Sander had stood- rather numbly on Clara's part- to leave before they could be forcibly ejected. Nobody liked having their nightly business ruined, after all.

'My name is Sander Hackett,' He said to her finally, as thoughts once again began percolating in Clara's head. 'And I'm here to offer you a chance to save your life.'

They walked out together onto a cold, cold street, leaving the android bodyguard idling by the table without a second thought. The two women Sander had brought with him to the deal dawdled as they walked, adjusting their pace in a casual manner so they weren't right with Clara and Sander the whole way. Sander himself easily kept up with his target, watching sidelong as she stared off into the middle distance, clearly walking nowhere in particular.

'All I have to do is not board the Alaska again,' She said, her words short and clipped. 'If that's in the future, then now I can change it.'

No! No, no, no!

She stopped at this, swaying from side to side, one hand flying out to catch herself on a nearby wall. The voice in her head had never shouted before, never sounded quite so... defiantly angry. Worse still, it had never sounded quite so much like her own voice, like it had screamed up from the depths of her own mind, rather than outside of it. The sheer strangeness and vividness of it almost drove her to her knees.

'Yeah, that's going to be a problem,' Sander said, reaching out to steady her. 'In that it prevents some things that need to happen, from happening. You felt that, didn't you? What was it?'

Clara glanced across at him, saw not a trace of concern or scepticism on his face, merely an inquisitive desire to hear her vocalize something he already suspected to be there. It was the expression of a scientist, examining an experimental subject.

'It's a... I don't know. Like a thought in my head, but not from my mind,' Clara said unsteadily. 'I've had it my entire life. Even when my parents tried to medicate me when I was little, nothing worked. I just learned to hide it, in time. It was just easier that way.'

'Oh, now that is interesting,' An absent smile tugged at the corners of Sander's mouth. 'Finally, a little data to look at! Some form of metaconscious direction, maybe little more than a protection mechanism for an underlying subconscious drive, to prevent guys like me from screwing things up...'

'What are you talking about?' Clara found herself snapping, as the strange throbbing head rush continued unabated.

'Lemme try something real quick,' Sander placed himself directly in front of her, levelled his gaze to hers. 'The Doctor.'

Doctor! Yes!

Just two words, but they clanged through her head like a church bell rolling down a long set of stairs. This time she was slightly better prepared for it though, and the sensation didn't destabilize her in the same way the initial shock had. She ended up staring at Sander, wondering how, exactly, he had figured out how to trigger the voice at all.

'Oh, god, the scientist in me is really loving this,' Sander grinned, as Clara's head spun. 'It's actually some kind of context-sensitive trigger? I've wondered about this for so long, but without a proper specimen all I was doing is guessing, and it's hard to get a specimen when all of them will come into contact with the Doctor at one point or another, and it's so hard to predict... Oh, I could learn so much from you, Clara Oswald.'

'What... What are you doing to me?' Clara felt herself shaking, but tried to remain as stable as possible, entirely unappreciative of Sander's efforts to trigger such a discomforting phenomenon.

'Confirming something to myself,' Sander replied, waving a hand vaguely. 'But I don't need to do that anymore. You aren't who I was hoping you were, Oswin. That makes this more difficult, and I'll need my machines to explain it to you further. I hope by now I've demonstrated at least that I have some important things to say to you, so that when I ask you to come with me back to my hotel, you don't take it as some overt attempt to get into your pants. Now please, can we take this somewhere more private, so that a productive discussion can be had regarding your life, and how to get it to continue beyond the next few days?'

'Y-yes,' Clara stammered, resisting her immediate urge to walk away. The image of her own flesh being torn apart by ruthless machines stuck in her mind, making it impossible for her to do anything but desperately fight against that possibility with everything she had.

'I'm happy about that,' Sander said. 'Because I'm about to blow your mind, and I would so like to do that in a place where you won't make a scene.'

*************

He led her to a fairly upscale hotel, and yet further up to an apparently reserved whole floor, walking through deserted corridors and past rooms ringing with silence, finally ending up on the balcony, looking out over the city. Itself a small room with sturdy railings separating the building from the open sky beyond, the floor and walls were shod in wood panelling, a large table and chairs seemingly growing from the floor itself, in one continuous piece, like living plant matter set right there in the skyscraper. It was here that Sander sat, offering Clara a seat opposite him.

The very same holographic projector that had so terrified her before sat between them, now linked wirelessly to Sander's own systems, apparently.

'You're a smart girl, I know that without having to be told,' He said. 'In fact, I know more than you on that front, owing to your complex temporal nature. So I understand that a lot of this stuff doesn't require much explanation, beyond some very basic assertions, but it's still a lot to take in. You're going to want to sit down, while I explain to you why Clara Oswald needs to board the Alaska tomorrow, whether she knows she's going to die aboard it or not.'

Obediently, Clara sat down, propping up her head on her hands as Sander began fiddling with the controls of the hologram projector.

'You are not the only Clara Oswald to exist. That's the short version of this conversation. Iterations of you exist all throughout history, all funnelling back to a central point, many years before now. Here, let me show you, since I can see your scepticism already,' Twisting the ring around the base of the projector with one hand, Sander tapped a few commands into a keypad he had brought with him, and suddenly the lens bloomed to life once again. This time it was multiple images, collections of still and videos, focused on a central figure that was at once familiar and strange; it was Clara, clad in clothes from a different time period in each image, acting within a different setting from image to image.

'Many Claras, from many places and times, all rooted in this Clara Oswald,' Sander flicked his finger through the light, and a single image grew to fill the screen, the same face as all the others, standing inside some kind of spacecraft, wrought in glass and curving metal. 'The progenitor. The original. Clara Prime.'

'I'm starting to feel this whole conversation going off the rails of realism, here,' Clara- whether she was the original or not- narrowed her eyes.

'You live on a space ship, Clara,' Sander raised an eyebrow. 'In a world full of time travellers and psychics and aliens. Just let me present all my evidence, and then feel free to comment. You're aware of the Time Lords, I assume?'

'I am.'

'But probably not what a Time Lord becomes when he finally dies, for good,' Sander continued. 'Which is fine. Few people do, since the Time Lords are notoriously secretive about anything that might make them look weak. The truth is, their deaths provide unprecedented access to their timelines, from birth to death, with an attendant opportunity to alter that timeline. It's a vulnerability that they, quite understandably, keep quiet. But the original Clara Oswald travelled with a Time Lord for a while. She knows.'

More footage began to play, in the same sort of setting as Sander's first image of "original" Clara had been in, only darker, more roughshod. A spiralling coil of light rose from the floor, and it was into this pillar of luminescence that the original Clara stepped, disappearing completely.

'And this is the moment that led to your creation,' Sander said. 'To prevent a malicious alien from destroying her Time Lord friend at every point along his timeline, Clara Prime followed him into the Doctor's timeline, splitting her identity across every point of divergence from how it had originally been, to live and die multiple lives to keep the Doctor's life in check. Self sacrifice becomes the central theme of her lives, and can you guess who you're going to meet on that planet the Alaska crashes on?'

'So, you're saying that I need to be present on the Alaska when it crashes so I can meet some alien I've never met before... presumably as a Dalek, to take part in some conflict I've never committed to?' The voice in Clara's head was a constant internal pressure now, building, demanding that she agree, commanding submission to what was happening.

'Yes. Basically. To do otherwise would be... disastrous. I hold no love for the Time Lords, and this one specifically has raised my ire something fierce, but I can't deny his importance in numerous critical points in history,' Sander said, bitterness etching his voice. 'He goes, we all go, Clara. Not just us, countless other worlds and people and cultures, dispersed all throughout time and space.'

'And I just die? Me, here, this Oswin Oswald, who has a life and a family of her own, I die for that?' Clara couldn't help the crack in her voice as she spoke, even as the pressure in her mind had filled almost all of the available space, making it almost impossible to focus on what Sander was saying.

'That is what the force in your head is telling you to do, isn't it?' Sander said. 'It knows. That's the original you, the template upon which you were based, trying to order you around. You're not her, of course. Not anymore; you've lived a whole life that she was never party to, met people and done things she never has... You are Oswin Oswald, not her. You don't think there's a reason you should die for her battle.'

'That's right.'

'And I quite agree,' Sander said. 'That's why I came to you. There's no reason that every iteration of Clara Oswald needs to be in their respective places, you're one of the ones I can save, being that you exist contiguously with myself. Like I said before, I'm here to offer you a deal to get out of this whole mess unscathed.'

'A deal? So you want something in return, this isn't something you're doing out of the goodness of your heart?' Clara asked, tilting her head as suspicion mounted in her.

'Coming to you like this is out of the goodness of my heart,' Sander responded without a second thought. 'I didn't have to do that. I have ways of just making you do what I want, with minimal effort on my part. Instead, I've come to you to offer you a choice, a way out you can take of your own accord. So you're no longer a plaything of powers beyond your control. I would have thought such a thing would appeal to you.'

Clara spent a moment searching the man's face, and what she found was surprisingly... honest. There was little attempt to sugar coat what was happening, no sense that what he was doing was charitable present in his features. He was, from head to toe, merely offering a business deal that just happened to include a human life as the stakes. It wasn't particularly uncommon for Selestene, trades like that, but the fact that he saw no need to hide away the grim reality of what was on offer was comforting, in some strange sense; there seemed less chance of being trapped in some game he was playing away from her sight. Everything she needed to know was right there in front of her.

'I'm listening,' Clara said finally, the words coming out something like a sigh, the image of her own destroyed body still sticking in her mind. 'Tell me what you're thinking.'

'I have a way to get you out of this,' Sander began, leaning in closer to her over the table. 'A way to keep you safe while still completing the mission you were created to complete. We can mull over the implications of who and what you are later on, I personally don't think there's much to feel bad over there but you might, the point is that for right now you have a time sensitive issue that needs to be dealt with. You don't have very long to decide, and whatever you do decide is going to be permanent. If you walk away from this meeting don't try coming back tomorrow morning before your flight, asking me for another chance. I won't give it, and if there's one thing that what I've shown you should make very clear, it's that I have plenty of Clara Oswalds to choose from, if I'm desperate for one of you.'

'Okay, okay, I understand,' Clara said, waving her hands. 'What is it that you want from me?'

Sander's eyes flicked up to meet hers for a moment, cool and contemplative, before he stood up and walked back inside, gesturing to Clara to remain in place for a moment. It only took him a minute to return, and when he did he strode over to the table and placed an object in front of her, staring at her as though challenging her to react to it.

It was a highly familiar thing.

'In the next few days, I'm going to be doing something big in this city, something I've been planning for a while now. Let's call it an enterprise, and leave it at that for now,' Sander said, fingering the cool metallic curve of the collar he had put down in front of her. None of the usual mind-altering devices seemed to be present within it, but these days it was hard to tell, what with nanotechnology becoming smaller and more prevalent every day. Hiding malicious tech inside any object one cared to think of was simple work, lately, 'I'll need someone with your specific set of skills to help me with that. Entertainment manager on a slave cruise, that's an interesting job for one of you to have. Of course, the Alaska was the ship that crashed on the asylum planet, you aren't to blame for what it was made for. You didn't have a choice, but as it happens it's just the kind of job I need to be hiring from. I'd call it fortuitous, but luck doesn't really matter. One of you had to have a job like this, just by sheer probability.'

'Is that for me?' Clara prodded the collar as it lay on the table cautiously, seemingly worried that it might explode. 'My job involves organizing slaves, not being one.'

'Which is exactly what I need,' Sander said smoothly. 'But not a manager that can move around freely. You'll live among my slaves, performing many of the same duties they do, and report back to me on their activities, quelling rebellion and so on. They've escaped recently, you see, and I'm not eager for a repeat of that to begin with, especially not with what I'm planning in mind.'

'And what are you planning, exactly?' Clara asked, eyeing the collar with a curiously pounding heart.

'You won't know that until after you're in the collar, Clara,' Sander shot her a sharp-edged grin. 'I don't intend to take any chances on that. Call it good business sense. But you'll like it, you can trust me on that. You won't be mistreated.'

'I'm... not that kind of girl, Sander...'

'Oh, don't try that on me. You Oswalds, you always try this chaste stuff, but the truth is...' As he trailed off, Sander reached out to manipulate the projector again. Clara found herself blushing almost instantly, as the image changed once again, and Sander spoke, 'The truth is this.'

He hadn't just been taking footage of her... other lives, on other planets, people that were at once her and not her. It was easy for Clara not to take ownership over acts she had never committed, regardless of how identical to her the other selves had been. But what she was seeing now, in the interior of the Alaska, was her own actions, her own life aboard that ship, as debauched as it had turned out, laid bare for her eyes, and the gaze of this stranger who seemed to know more about her than she did herself.

Employees on the Alaska were given free reign over the less valuable onboard stock during their time off. Clara had been uncomfortable with that concept initially; she had never been in contact with a real slave before, let alone a pleasure slave, and their constant presence within the walls of the ship had begun as something unnerving, especially during the long haul flights that had left them all bottled up together for weeks or months at a time. She had had to force herself to treat them the way the company had officially treated them; as stock, rather than people. In time, it had all become easier.