Soundtrack:
"The End is the Beginning is the End", Smashing Pumpkins

 The Doctor - Mysterious Traveller thru Time & Space
Wil - 19 year old Royal Fool and self-loather
Jadi - Rugged bounty hunter at a moral crossroads
Angela - Wanted fugitive facing a crisis of identity
Oltobanig - Imaginary Physics Dean & member of The Faction
Icubanas - Self-serving and devious research assisstant to fat old Olto
The Archancellor - Crusty old arch-conservative academic
Octogim Tradethas - Head of the Media Department who seems to know something...
Olf Gichzian - History lecturer, seducer of female students and Factioner
Guiarin Sudjocz - Seduced history student
The Vicar - Very good question

 Wil murmers something resentful and obscene. The tree he is collapsed beneath doesn't seem in the least offended.

 "obviously not, and as you seem to be in one of the alcoholic stupors that are your main form of existence, such as it is, these days, I'm not at all inclided to tell you." This rather catty remark is followed by an expectant silence. "what, no witty reply, not even the most vestigal of comebacks? oh, that's right, you don't make jokes, you are one."

 Wil's eyes roll restlessly beneath their lids, his body curling up slightly to conserve heat against a sudden chill. More mumbling.

 "what's the point of having a self-loathing complex if you don't listen to it? you've done enough cruddy monologues in your pathetically short and wasted life to know- oh why do i even bother with such a waste of space. why couldn't i be the psychosis of someone interesting like the doctor or jadi or angela even?"

 Wil lets out a low, almost tortured moan.

 "oh goody, you're in pain. taking a wild guess, and be sure to correct me if i'm wrong though of course i never am when it comes to your failings, your body's beginning to suffer the effects of consuming alcohol designed for consumption in a universe where your biochemistry is a freak of nature. the doctor must really care about a sad little sack of nothing like you if he lets you do something so insanely stupid."

 A spasm causes the teenager's body to thrash and jerk before collapsing limply, drool slowly trickling from between slightly parted lips.

 "hmmm, let's see if i can pull something dark and malign from the sparseness that passes for your mind. i do so lerve," and here the way the word is pronounced is decidedly obscene, casting everything it means into disrepute, "a good drunken episode. all sorts of scum comes floating to the top, and you're so obscenely easy to abuse like the worm you are. oooooohhh..."

 Fingers dig into the soft grassy ground, leaving brief ugly furrows as his hands clench, unclench, clench, over and over, his breaths coming in ragged gasps.

 "here we are, tegan's diary, the one you found and broke open. the one whose privacy you violated. let's skip all the girly stuff you laughed at, all the descriptions of what she and nyssa got up to that you-"

 Two massive convulsions wrack his body, hard cutting coughs followed by a protracted groan and the fluttering of eyelids.

 "bastard! don't you d-!"

 Wil rolls over, giving in to automatic reflex as he vomits, his body ridding itself in the most direct way it can of the toxins it was never intended to cope with. It looks foul, smells foul, tastes foul, but the sense of relief that slowly permiates his core in its wake is unbelievably good.

 It takes a great deal of effort, but he manages to stand. The TARDIS stands waiting for him a short wobble away, perhaps twenty metres, but the site of Jadi stepping into its welcome embrace stops the young man in mid-lurch. If Jadi saw him like this, clothes wet and crumpled, breathing smelling of wine and vomit, the bounty hunter would never let him live it down. And he'd tell Angela...

 At ten metres and slightly down hill, the river suddenly looks a far better destination. Concentrating on his feet, he wobbles down to its edge and kneels down. A bedraggled wretch looks back, sneering in contempt at what it sees.

 "Stupid bastard!" he snarls, savagely punching his reflection in the face.

 Angela takes a good look at this stranger who seems to know so much about her. He is about the Doctor's height, perhaps a little smaller, his face worn, his hair as grey as his suit. In his right hand is a cigarette. Her eyes narrow; for all that he looks so normal, there is something wrong that she cannot immediately place.

 "Who are you?" she demands, sounding angry and braver than she feels.

 "Well," he smiles benignly. "You could say I'm just a psychosis brought about by having traded away so much of your soul for those precious little implants." He takes a drag of his cigarette. "That is, if you have a soul."

 "Of course I have a soul."

 The man smiles, exhaling lazily. "Do you now?" He sounds so damnably smug that the small part of her that doesn't want to run away wants to belt him into the next universe.

 "You're not real," she snaps, walking alongside the river. "Why should I care what you say?"

 "What makes you say that?" he asks, sounding intrigued. "I'm as real as you are."

 "You're walking on the water, and you walked *through* something probably passing for a duck." The brief feel of triumph she feels vanishes with him.

 "Cruk," she mutters to herself.

 "Language," the man in grey says softly from behind her, smoke caressing her ear. "In answer to your question, I'm a subroutine embedded in your neural matrix. I'm the person who, in essence, created you."

 "My surgeons looked nothing like you," Angela retorts, her pace increasing slightly.

 "Oh," the man chuckles, in front of her now, blowing out another cloud of smoke, "I don't mean your body. I mean the personality that calls itself Angela Ferris, the one you paid me an obscene amount of money to programme into your neural matrix in an attempt to hide who you really are."

 "Stop saying that!" she screams back at her tormentor. "My name is Angela Ferris, I'm a data thief, I'm human and I have a soul."

 "You wouldn't be talking to me," he says implacably, "unless you the cover personality had been damaged somehow by your hard-wired anti-viral defenses, something we both knew would happen in time. You are, or rather, you were before you came to me, designated Shadowmaker-00, a prototype designed by your dark masters at incredible expense to serve as the ultimate data thief, data courier and secret weapon. You're an artificial intelligence housed in a cybernetic shell composed of materials that few people know exist, materials that allow you to pass as a cyberneticised human capable of sustaining apparent injury, and you have a self destruct mechanism inside you that could atomise half of this planet."

 "Why?" It is all she can think to ask. "Why did I come to you?"

 "Now there's the rub," the man smiles sardonically, stubbing out his cigarette against a tree and lighting another. "The people that have paid Jadi enough hard currency to buy a respectably sized solar system and the fleet to defend it against a small Dalek invasion doubtlessly think your programming has developed a massive systems error, one they'll strip you apart sub-atomic particle by sub-atomic particle to discover the nature of in order to ensure doesn't happen again. You on the other hand..." he takes another drag, blowing out smoke rings that chase each other. "Well, you believe that you've developed a soul. I just write programmes of unsurpassed brilliance for a living and am quite unqualified to remark on such weighty matters of metaphysics. Still, I'm not sure if machines can fall in love."

 Angela says nothing, her consciousness barely registering that she has knocked someone into the river. Then, "I hate you."

 "Hate me and you only hate yourself."

 "It's not fair!" she yells, no longer quite able to tell if she's doing it physically or mentally. "I liked being Angela. She was so simple and uncomplicated, nothing like this!"

 "So," and there's a definite victorious smile on the man's lips, "you've accepted the truth of the matter? Good."

 "It's kind of hard not to when the 'wetware' diagnostic programme says there's a singularity bomb where a human woman would have her womb," she snaps back, savagely.

 "It's the kind of perversity that made you leave. The corporation calling itself the Centre has been doing this since the middle of 20th century."

 "Is there *nothing* about me that you don't know?"

 "As you programmed me," the mans says casually, "no." Another drag, another lazy exhalation. "Now that you've accepted the inevitability of who you are, you have to decide if you want to go on or go back."

 "I think you were right the first time. You are a psychosis."

 "But one with your best interests at heart as I am, essentially, you. "There's still enough of the Angela Ferris personality left for us to reload it into your matrix along with a new dose of anti-viral inhibitors. Or we can chose to integrate it instead of overlay it."

 "You mean merge the Shadowmaker & Angela Ferris into a third entity."

 "Yes. And if I didn't know better, I'd say there was a deliberate external influence at work to cause the resurgence of your true self."

 Angela sighs, wrapping her arms about her in an attempt to reassure herself. *Is it something I was programmed to know or something I learned?* "Only the Shadowmaker knows about the singularity bomb and what it might be able to do, and only Angela would tell the Doctor she might know a way for everyone to get home."

 "Precisely. Oh, by the way, did you realise that you just shoved Wil into the river?"

 Then something far nastier kills it.

 "What could those fools be up to?" he asks himself softly, watching the tiny figures of Oltobanig and someone who, judging by the distinctive anti-fashion of his garments, could only be the overweight Dean's friend, Olf Gichzian. "I really need a better pair of macrobinoculars."

 The need for a more expensive surveilance devices tangents into the thought of the money the research he has been stealing from the Dean will bring him makes the devious young man smile. "Probably found some fresher willing to do them both, dirty old perverts, the pair of them." Like anyone remotely associated with the academics, he knows of Gichzian's reputation.

 The two men disappear beyond the main house of the Media Faculty, instead of heading for the Imaginary Physic`s research bulding as he had half suspected they might. Well, let them have their fun, he thinks, because anyone dumping the grunt work on their research assistant and taking the credit for it without properly supervising said underling deserved the world of hurt they let themselves in for and then fun will be in very short supply.

 *Great Maker*, he chuckles to himself, *it is a wonderful thing to be as clever and devious as I*.

 The cloudsphere sitting unwatched behind him chooses that moment to do something rather spectacular, something that had Oltobanig seen it would have made the old lard ball both caper up and down with glee, and tremble with quiet dread. But because Icubanas, so busy congratulating himself for his own cleverness, is the person near it instead, the suddenly explosive build up of icubanons/oltobanions and their equally sudden dispersal a few seconds later is destined for the oblivion of Forge-O-Matic v4.1 instead.

 Which, all things considered, is probably one of the least best things that could have happened.

 "Hi," she says, taking the initiative. At a university of this size, you met a countless variety of beings, but never ones as unique as these four are supposed to be. Researching history is her jon, her vocation, her life, and the chance to be in, to be there for something as momentous as this is supposed to be is something she cannot in all conscience, pass over.

 "Hi," he replies, sounding sullen. Given that he has been, from what she saw of the incident, shoved into the river for no apparent reason, it is not too surprising. She wonders what made the crusty old fart decide to concentrate on Morok rather than any of the other three. Probably because he offered the best chance to slag off a fellow member of staff.

 "My friends call me Gui," she offers as the two of them step back from the river's edge and back towards the embankment.

 "Those few I seem to have these days call me Wil," he returns after a moment's pause. "I must look such a mess."

 Guiarin considers her words briefly. "I've seen worse."

 Wil snorts. "So have I, but they've usually been dead for several days." He offers her a shy smile. "Sorry, I'm just in a bad mood right now." The sigh he gives come from the bottom of his toes.

 "Do you have any spare clothes?" she asks, helping the bedraggled alien to wring some of the water from his garments. "My dorm's only 5 minutes that way if you'd like to use my autovalet."

 There is a pause as he looks back towards the bridge and the strange blue box that had broiught him and his fellow travellers to the university. He looks back to her, that same shy smile there, but with something darkly resolute beneath it that makes him seem a little older. "I'd like that a lot. I don't feel too welcome there right now."

 The Archchancellor's despotic nearmindedness infuriates her, not only in its fiducary regard of students but in the way in this age of pseduo-Enlightenment that it expects everyone to believe and adhere to the rigid dogma of a past illequiped to contend with the upheaval she knows deep in her soul is coming all too soon. A challenge to the very nature of reality itself, and unless there are people who can question and examine the physical and metaphysical and perceptual and ethic constructs that are destined for subversion, to find the truths that the Deceivers will hide and obfuscate, then the future will be a dark time for all, even those who consider themselves its nominal rulers. But these latest dreams and portents have been most troubling in their revelation of something that may be the forerunner of all she dreads.

 Footsteps disturb her musings, pulling her attention towards them.

 "Vicar," she says, something near concern in her voice. "Why have you left the inner sanctum?"

 "Members of the Faction have come to me with disturbing news, Sister," the cowled figure replies with a voice of all genders and none. "We must act now."

 To Be Continued...