Trace Memory

NINE

'That,' said Jack, 'is a Vondraxian Orb.'

Owen laughed and shook his head. 'Of course it is,' he said. 'How could I forget? There's a picture of one in my Bumper Book of Orbs.' He paused. 'I'm sorry, Jack… What did you just say?'

'It's a Vondraxian Orb.'

'And what's one of those when it's at home?'

'Oh,' said Jack, crossing the Hub to the table on which the sphere lay. 'This is not at home. It's a very, very long way from home and it most certainly does not belong to us.'

Owen shrugged. 'Haven't the owners heard of finders keepers?'

'The Orb,' said Jack, 'was buried under arctic ice for almost 3,000 years before it was discovered in 1953. An expedition was launched to dig it out and return it to Britain before the Russians could get their hands on it. It was that metal ball that was inside Michael's crate. It was that metal ball which exploded the moment it was taken off the ship, killing three dockhands and leaving Michael with his, shall we say, untimely affliction.'

'But what is it?' asked Owen, losing patience.

'The Vondrax,' said Jack, 'are said to be one of the oldest sentient life forms in the universe.'

'So how come we've never heard of them?'

'Because even amongst enlightened folk such as ourselves they're like a myth, a fairy tale. The legend goes that they were born within the first few nanoseconds of the Big Bang. Tosh, you said you were picking up an electromagnetic wave, like radiation, but that it was harmless to humans?'

Toshiko nodded.

'And you said that the wave came and went, increasing in volume and then decreasing?'

'Yes, Jack.'

'That electromagnetic wave was tachyon radiation.'

'OK, Jack,' said Owen, deadpan. 'Now I know you're making this up. I did A-Level physics, and we most certainly did not discuss tachyon radiation.'

'You wouldn't have,' said Jack. 'Nobody here discusses tachyon radiation because nobody here knows about it. Why should you? The amount of tachyon radiation in the universe has been steadily depleting since the Big Bang. But this stuff is potent. Oh boy, is it potent…'

In the Boardroom, Michael was dreaming. He wasn't sure whether the dream was a memory or not. There were faces that he recognised, and yet he could name none of them.

Through the windows of an ambulance he saw trees. It was funny seeing them from this angle, lying flat on his back, strapped to a gurney. Only an hour ago, he would have been screaming his way through this experience, but now he was calm. He found it hard to focus, at any one moment, on any of the things that had been troubling him. He had only vague memories of the little girl in Japan and the monster that was terrorising her, or of the cities full of cars that he had seen.

He thought about the Japanese city and he could somehow recall looking out through a window in the night, and being able to see nothing but hundreds and thousands of lights. He could make little or no sense of it. What had happened to the world?

None of that mattered now, of course. In this dream, he had been given a shot at the police station, a police station that had been full of noise, bleeping sounds and people talking. There had been a group of teenagers arguing with a policeman standing behind a thick pane of glass, and they looked so strange to him; T-shirts that revealed their bellies, multiple earrings, tattoos. Was this really Cardiff? If he hadn't seen the Castle and the museum through the windows of the police car he would never have believed it.

But none of those things mattered to him now. Now it was as if the hard edges of the world had been sanded down and softened. The voices of those around him were barely audible, even the hum of the ambulance's engine sounded almost like a lullaby.

'Tachyon radiation,' said Jack, 'is generated when the universe is split off, when different possibilities are generated. Whenever you make a choice, that choice generates tachyon radiation. Should I have coffee? Should I have tea? Each choice generates tachyon radiation because there is now a universe in which you have coffee and a universe in which you have tea, but the impact those choices have on the different universes are so miniscule the amount of radiation generated is next to zilch.'

'"Zilch"? Is that a scientific term?' said Owen.

Gwen sheepishly put her hand in the air. 'Um, I know I'm kind of out of my depth here, but what has all this got to do with the Von… What were they called?'

'The Vondrax,' said Jack. 'The Vondrax, so the story goes, feed on tachyon radiation. In the first few split seconds of the universe it was in rich supply. There were so many possibilities; universes in which gravity collapses, universes in which light travels at a slower speed; and all those possibilities generated more radiation. As the universe cooled down and began to settle, those possibilities became more and more limited and localised. Tachyon radiation began to die out. The Vondrax, in their wisdom, began depositing the radiation in orbs, like this one.' Jack tapped his fingers twice on the top of the metal ball. 'They could tap into the orbs whenever they liked, and they could surf the tachyon radiation's electromagnetic wave to travel backwards and forwards in time. Travelling back in time meant they could alter events in the past to cause further splits, thus creating more tachyon radiation. In AD 219, the Emperor Elagabalus entered Rome with a black sphere the Syrians worshipped as a god, the Sol Invictus. The sphere was said to have fallen from the sky. Elagabalus should never have become Emperor; he was a twisted and sadistic fourteen-year-old boy. His reign changed the course of Roman history, which generated tachyon radiation. It was all part of their plan.'

'So it's kind of like time-travel juice?' asked Gwen.

'Right,' said Jack. 'Time-travel juice, but highly concentrated time-travel juice.'

'And when it exploded…' Gwen looked at the image on a nearby monitor of Michael sleeping.

'Yes,' said Jack. 'I'm thinking maybe it was the effect the Rift had on the Orb. Rift energy and tachyon radiation are like opposing magnets; push them together and one gets forced out. That's why the Rift's been so quiet today. When the Orb exploded, Michael received a massive dose of tachyon radiation. The Vondrax can control the effects it has, but Michael… He has no say in it.'

'And these Vondrax…' said Toshiko. 'When I was a child, there was… there was this man… in a bowler hat…'

Jack nodded gravely.

He was sitting on a wooden chair, in a white room with black curtains, talking — or rather listening — to another doctor. To Michael, it seemed he had spent his whole life being flung from hospital to hospital, each one stranger than the last, talking to doctors.

This latest one, an Indian woman with greying hair and a broach the shape of a lizard on the lapel of her jacket, was called Dr Hawoldar. She asked him where he lived and, when he gave her his address, one of the men from the ambulance said something about his street being demolished in the 1970s to 'make way for flats'. Michael started to laugh.

Dr Hawoldar asked him what was so funny, and Michael told her that he didn't know, that he didn't know anything any more.

'Everything is like dreaming,' he said.

'But why is he being dragged into our pasts?' asked Ianto. 'Why us?'

'We've been working in the same building as this thing for how long now?' Jack asked, tapping the ball again. 'It's broken, and most of its radiation got soaked up by Michael in the explosion, but there was still some residual radiation left in it. Close proximity to the ball, not to mention Michael, has left us all dosed with tachyon radiation. Once you've been dosed, you're always dosed — not just in the future, but in your past.'

Toshiko was on her feet now, and walking toward the table and the Orb. 'This just doesn't make any sense to me,' she said, looking down at the engraved surface of the Orb and the gaping, molten rupture in its side. 'This thing, can do all that? With a kind of radiation I've never heard of…'

'It's Clark's Third Law,' said Jack, raising one eyebrow and grinning.

'OK,' said Gwen, 'so assuming that this is what you say it is, and Michael really is bouncing around in time, what can we do? For Michael, I mean.'

Jack sat on the edge of the table and shook his head. 'Nothing,' he said pensively. 'There's nothing we can do.'

'You don't know that,' said Gwen.

'No, Gwen,' said Jack, walking towards the Boardroom. 'I do.'

From the white room, he was taken to a ward in the hospital where there were many beds, and in each bed a patient. Each man's face was a mask of bewilderment or suffering, as if they were a Greek chorus of agony. Some of them were moaning, or laughing to themselves. One man was screaming. One man was singing.

The orderlies lifted Michael out of the wheelchair and lowered him onto the hard mattress of a narrow bed. He lay there for what seemed an age before Dr Hawoldar came back to him.

'Great news, Michael,' she said. 'We've just received a call from your doctor at the Torchwood Institute.'

He knew the name, but where did he know it from?

Torchwood.

He saw it as the image of a word stencilled on a wooden panel.

'Torchwood?' Michael asked. He could hear himself slurring.

'That's right,' said Dr Hawoldar. 'They said they've been very worried about you. You won't be staying here too long. One of your doctors will be here shortly.'

'When?' Michael asked.

'Soon,' said Dr Hawoldar. 'You should be back at Torchwood by three. That'll be better, won't it? Back at Torchwood with all your friends?'

Dr Hawoldar left him alone on the ward again, alone that is apart from his fellow patients, and Michael began to panic. His breathing grew heavier, and he felt his pulse begin to quicken. Torchwood. He knew the name Torchwood. He heard the growl of the car's engine as it chased him along West Bute Street; he saw an underground room filled with what looked like televisions, and the chrome base of an enormous water tower. He saw a great glass tower, like an obelisk, and a shattered mirror.

Around him, the other patients were laughing, all of them pointing at him and laughing, as if they all understood something that he didn't. Then they stopped, quite abruptly, and, as if choreographed in some way, they turned to face the far end of the ward. There, in the aisle between the hospital beds, stood three identical men, each wearing sunglasses, bowler hats and black suits and carrying umbrellas. The three men looked at Michael and smiled, each revealing teeth like hundreds of needles.

'The Traveller…' they said in unison.

That was when Michael woke up.

'It's OK,' said Jack. 'It's OK. You were having a nightmare.'

They were alone in the Boardroom.

'You,' said Michael. 'You were in that room. When I came here. You knew my name. Who are you?'

'I'm Jack Harkness,' Jack said, looking away into the far corner of the room.

'It wasn't a nightmare,' said Michael. 'It was something else. I saw things… It was like I was seeing things that haven't happened yet.'

'It's OK,' said Jack again. 'You're here now. You're safe.'

Michael looked down and realised that Jack was holding his hand. He quickly pulled away, and looked Jack in the eye.

'I'm sorry,' said Jack. 'I didn't mean to…'

'Why do you look at me like that?' said Michael.

'Like what?'

'Like you know me. Like…' Michael trailed off and looked away from Jack, as if embarrassed. 'Like you've always known me.'

Jack stood and walked over to the far corner of the Boardroom. He could hardly bear to look at him any more. How much time did they have left? How much longer before Michael would be taken away?

'I'm sorry,' said Jack, 'I didn't mean to… I mean'

'No, it's OK,' said Michael. 'I feel like I know you, but I don't. I remember things that haven't happened yet, and I'm forgetting the things that have. I don't know what's real any more.'

Jack returned to him, and held Michael's hand once more. This time Michael didn't pull away.

'This is real,' said Jack, squeezing his hand and smiling.

'Here, now. And while you're here, you're safe, with me.'

'What happens to me, Jack?' asked Michael, his eyes filling with tears. 'What happens?'