Doctor Who History 101 Mags L. Halliday

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.He was spread too wide in time and too narrow in space.Like all of his kind, he knew he had only limited superposition.That he could only observe from all possible positions within a limited range.He withdrew the elements of himself that were looking that far forward, reset the parameters of his research.He would start with Barcelona in 1936.‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair.Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’– Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939The response from the Hub had taken some time, the search fields he had entered had been wide, after all, and the Hub was always thorough.Always produced the correct and accurate answer.Information-gathering was their business and had been since the System had been created.Questioning why, or who could now access the data with their creators now long gone, was not part of their programming.Barcelona.Looking about he immediately identified the wildly different architectural styles that divided the city into distinct visual districts.He noted with interest the port that opened into the Mediterranean sea and that mainly industrial shipping and small fishing boats flowed through it.The humans were mainly speaking Catalan, although he noted the relatively high level of French and other European languages also in use.Glancing at one human, he noted that although the man was speaking French, he was thinking in English and the man he spoke to was slowly mistranslating the French into Catalan.How clumsy this world was! To have not yet developed a method of accurately transmitting data from one unit to another but to rely on the vagaries of speech.He made a careful record of their conversation and the misunderstandings by both sides.He filed that neatly in his own local memory, time, date and location stamped ready for retrieval.Flickering around the country, he found the key communications method: the telephone.Millions of packets of data broken down into analogue signal and sent down primitive cables, through junctions and exchanges, racing along until they are converted back to sound, back to information the humans could understand.Like all the Absolute, he approved of the telephone.It was primitive, prone to error and omission but its structure reminded them of the System.Of, for lack of a better term, home.It had been designed to convey information: it was as close to a natural environment as an Absolute in this era could find.He flicked a new connection into place, anchoring several of his positions within the network of hard copper wires and Bakelite handsets.He accessed his feed line from the System, pulled down a little extra power to hold the new link in place.The synapse was thick, pulsing with energy as the signals were pumped into him.White noise buzzed along it, forcing him to devote another little part of his conscious to damping it down.But the information.So much information.He would be filing such a huge report from this era, so many events.A woman in Madrid was screaming down the phone for help.A Russian in Alcalá de Henares spoke secrets down a secure line, which could easily be decrypted back at the Hub, should anyone ever request both the message and the key that one of the other Absolute had doubtless recorded.There were no secrets to the Absolute, no lies that they did not hold the truths to.That was their role in the universe – that was his role – to see, to observe, to record the truth.‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’He could see everything – within his purview – with clarity and focus.Each person was a moving cluster of perspectives: he saw them from every conceivable angle, at every age, all overlapping yet fitting together to create a full representation of the person’s life.And from each person gossamer-thin shimmering lines spread, showing their relationships to their surroundings, to others, to the future.He had no such connections, he had no need for different perspectives.To the humans, or to whatever creatures they observed, the Absolute were less than ghosts, less than even the faintest tingle of a presence.They did not conform to the rules of the modern universe and so they were invisible to it.In Barcelona, two unshaven men were dragged up from a cellar and bundled away by guards.He saw them arrive, later, at the barracks where they were tortured [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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