The Planet of Relaxation--Chapter Six

Chapter Six,

 in which one Doctor remembers very little, another Doctor remembers too much, and something quite terrible happens at the end.
** by Tony Whitt **

 "Hello," a new voice said. The Doctor looked at the doorway and saw a woman in her twenties smile at him. She was naked from the waist up, but her long blonde hair covered her breasts. She stepped forward and gently placed her hands on the Doctor's shoulders. Instantly, her body went rigid and she screamed.

 

[Thirty Years Later]

 At the top of the tower, in the windowless room, things still crawl, but their movement is softer as they watch the two men conversing in the room. They watch as the younger-looking of the two lowers the older-looking man into the single chair at the centre of the room. They watch as the younger-looking man peers into the older-looking man's eyes with great care and frowns worriedly. They watch as the younger-looking man as he seems to realize that maybe this visit wasn't such a good idea after all.

 But appearances are deceptive, and they do not know how much the Doctor wants, needs, to hear the rest and to be reminded of what happened, to find out how everything turned out after he left. They do not know how little he can remember of the last time he was here, or the urgent need he has to recall his part in the disaster. They do not know how short a time he has worn this face, or the fact that he is several times older than the man who appears his senior.

 "Maybe this isn't the best time for this, after all," the Doctor says, hoping despite his best intentions that the prisoner will continue.

 "This is the only time you'll ever have, sweetheart," the prisoner rasps, trying to pull air into artificial lungs that haven't worked properly in decades. "Besides, this allows me to ask you some questions, too. I don't want to shuffle off this mortal coil, such as it is, without knowing a few things that I've been in the dark about all these years. Is that food?"

 The Doctor frowns at the non-sequitur, then follows the prisoner's gaze to his chest, and the fresh stalk of celery pinned there. Wordlessly and without hesitation, he unpins it and hands it to the prisoner, who tears into it as if it were a three-course meal.

 "Ah," the prisoner says, spewing bits of vegetable as he speaks, "not the grandest last meal that anyone ever got, but I'm sure it'll be good for my teeth."

 The Doctor grins ruefully and then casts a glance into the shadows. He stares directly at the things that creep in the cold blackness, and despite the seeming kindness of his pleasant and open face, the warning in his eyes is clear: You won't have him. Not until we're done, and maybe not even then. I won't allow it.

 Appearances are deceptive, but they get the message. They back off and cower in the corners.

 The Doctor turns back to the prisoner, who has finished his small repast and now belches softly. "I'll answer anything you want," he replies. "I wasn't much help to you back then, I'm afraid, and I want to make up for it somehow."

 "In that case," the prisoner says, trailing off as his eyes unfocus. He remembers a time just before the darkness fell forever on the moon of the fourth planet, and one of the many things that happened during that time which has puzzled him all this time.

 "What in the hell DID you do to that poor girl, anyway?"

 

[Thirty Years Ago]

 As the woman took her hands from the Doctor's shoulders and continued to scream like a wounded animal, the Doctor shot upward from the table. His eyes rolled back into his head, and after a few convulsive jerks of his entire body, he fell back onto the table on his side, seemingly dead.

 "What the hell...?!" one of the security officers shouted. As his partner grabbed the still-screaming hander and restrained her from hurting herself, he rushed to the Doctor's side and tried to find a pulse.

 "Damn! ORG said to relax him, not kill him!" He placed his finger in his ear and spoke into his wrist just as two more guards ran into the room to help with the hander. "Emergency, Block 4, Room 13 -- we need restraints and a resuscitation team, stat! Top Priority!"

 He turned and saw that the hander had somehow knocked out his partner and was making short work of the other two guards, using some form of aikido that he'd never seen before. Remembering ORG's instructions to him earlier, he removed his pistol and set it on stun before firing on the hander. A blue haze enveloped her entire body for a moment, and she collapsed to the floor with a frustrated sigh.

 The door opened, and the restraint team rushed into the room.

 "Right in the nick of time, eh, fellows?" the officer rasped. "Never mind -- get her out of here and unloaded ASAP!" As the resuscitation team arrived and began to examine the Doctor, the officer looked at the prone form and muttered, "What the hell kind of demons are you carrying around, anyway...?"

 

Sangstom sat at his desk and cried like a child. It had been the first time he'd allowed himself to fully give in to his emotions since finding out about Amanda. It was true that they hadn't been close, especially after he'd made that awful marriage arrangement for her with Ed. He knew that she wanted to get away from Alta Regina any way she could, but the same rules that kept him here had bound her. He had wanted so badly to make it all up to her, and now he would never have a chance. The thought of losing that chance was almost enough to send him in search of a hander, to finally expatiate himself of all the guilt and pain, and to hell with any thoughts of rebellion he might have had.

 It was almost enough. The emotionless voice of ORG cut in over his reverie and stopped those thoughts cold.

 I'M SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS, DAVE. I DO HOPE YOU'LL ALLOW ME TO OFFER SOME CONDOLENCE AFTER THIS MORNING'S... DISAGREEMENT.

 Sangstom pulled himself together and put on a smile he did not feel before turning to the terminal. "Yes, yes, of course, ORG. I know you were only trying to show concern for my daughter." In truth, he knew this wasn't true at all, but keeping on ORG's good side was for the best of them all.

 I MAY HAVE SOME NEWS THAT MAY COMFORT YOU IN THAT RESPECT, the voice continued. HADYN NEVILLE HAS BEEN ELIMINATED. THE ESCORT WE ASSIGNED TO THE DOCTOR'S YOUNG FRIEND WAS ATTACKED BY NEVILLE, AND ONE OF THE GUARDS WAS KILLED.

 This caught Sangstom's attention. "Killed? Is she all right? Where was the Doctor when all this happened?"

 THE GIRL IS UNHARMED. SHE WAS THE ONE WHO SHOT AND KILLED NEVILLE, IN FACT. HER PROFICIENCY WITH A GUN SEEMS TO RIVAL THAT OF OUR GUARDS.

 Sangstom waved his hand irritably. "Never mind that, ORG...where is she now?"

 SHE ASKED HER ESCORT TO BE TAKEN TO THE DOCTOR, SO I HAVE ARRANGED FOR HER TO BE BROUGHT TO HIM IN BLOCK 4, ROOM 13.

 "What is he doing there?" Sangstom asked suspiciously.

 I HAD THE GUARDS BRING HIM THERE FOR THERAPY, OF COURSE, the AI replied casually. HE APPEARS TO HAVE HAD A... REACTION TO THE TREATMENT.

 Sangstom stood up. "What?! Did he agree to this? Why wasn't I informed?"

 HE NEITHER AGREED NOR DISAGREED, ORG said. THE GUARDS WHO BROUGHT HIM TO THE ROOM REPORTED THAT HE DID NOT RESIST. I'M CONFUSED, DAVE -- WE HAD ALWAYS PLANNED TO HAVE HIM RELAXED. WHY SHOULD YOU NEED TO BE INFORMED OF A SIMPLE THERAPY SESSION?

 He didn't dare reply to that question truthfully -- if he did, ORG would know about the deal he had made with the Doctor and Sarah to investigate for him. He had a horrible suspicion that ORG was about to find out anyway. Ignoring the question entirely, he asked, "What happened to him? And what has happened to the hander who treated him?"

 HE PLACED HIMSELF INTO A PROTECTIVE COMA, BUT HE APPEARS TO BE CONSCIOUS NOW. HANDER SELA MIRANDA, ENCLASS 20, ID-NC179/00/2B, IS CURRENTLY BEING PREPPED FOR ROUTINE UNLOADING.

 Before Sangstom could respond, a chime sounded. NEW INFORMATION: I HAVE JUST BEEN INFORMED THAT YOUR SON-IN-LAW, ED FORD, HAS BEEN MURDERED, AND THE HANDER SCHEDULED FOR HIS THERAPY AT THE TIME OF HIS MURDER, FLISS INDIE, ENCLASS 17, ID-AT916/000/6S, HAS GONE MISSING. I HAVE DISPATCHED PATROLS TO SEARCH FOR HER.

 Sangstom reeled from the sheer amount of bad news. His plans with the Doctor were about to be revealed; Ed was dead (though that was probably the only good news he'd had all day); and yet another hander was likely to be involved. It was all coming apart at the seams.

 "I've got to go see the Doctor," Sangstom said, rising quickly and heading for the door. "He might have a theory as to what's going on here. In the meantime, delay processing that hander -- examining her might give us some more information to go on!"

 As he left the room, ORG processed the orders and then promptly ignored them. It was determined to know why the Doctor hadn't wanted to be processed, and why Sangstom had not insisted upon it.

 But first ORG had to insure that Sangstom could not interfere.

 

Fliss ran through the corridors, careful to avoid the patrols of guards which she was sure were now after her. Her mind was in a state of complete confusion -- she had no idea why she had done what she had done, but she knew for certain that she would be liquidated if they found her. She was also aware of voices in her head, voices that had followed her into consciousness from her dreams, the dreams she wasn't supposed to be having.

 /We all do it,/ the voices sighed. /We all do it. We all do it./

 She recognized the voice -- it was poor Carmen's -- but she didn't recognize the memory. It was as if she were seeing the dead girl talking to someone else.

 Fliss found a deserted cul-de-sac, far from the garish lights of the main corridors, and slid painfully to the floor. Her breath came in desperate gasps, and she felt like she'd twisted an ankle in her desperate run. The world began to blur before her eyes, and she slipped into unconsciousness.

 Then the dreams began again, and the voices told her something completely new.

 

The guard whose life she had saved escorted Sarah to the Doctor's room. When she'd heard that he'd undergone the relaxation treatment, she felt a mixture of concern and anger, mostly directed at him. The idiot! she thought. He's always doing something like this! Why does he think he's invulnerable? It's not like he can't be killed. I've already seen him die once....

 Sarah closed off that line of thought before she got any further. For a long time now, though, she had been feeling a growing sense of apprehension about her travels with the Doctor. She used to enjoy the idea of going off into dangerous situations and coming out victorious, no matter what jolts she might experience along the way. It made her feel stronger, somehow, to know that no matter what alien beasties menaced her as if she were some heroine from a 50's B-grade picture, she could hold her own and help the Doctor beat them. It generally gave her feminist heart a great deal of satisfaction. Lately, though, she'd been the target of those alien beasties a lot more often, generally with the Doctor arriving only at the very last moment, and she'd become more concerned at the idea that the Doctor would get himself killed and leave her stranded and at their mercy. What good was visiting some exotic planet like this one, or traveling to 15th century Italy, if you were constantly in danger of being left there without friends or help, or finishing up dead?

 Quashing her fear and anger down, she entered the room and found the Doctor sitting up on the corner of the bed and grinning like a madman. Nothing different there, then, she thought. She breathed a sigh of relief and even returned his smile.

 "Well," she said, moving to his side and sitting down, "I expected to find you in one of those healing trances or something. How are you feeling?"

 "I'm fine," he replied, turning to look at her with wide eyes. 'I haven't felt so relaxed in ages!' He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag. "I'm the Doctor, by the way. Delighted to meet you! Would you like a jelly baby?"

 

The restraint team brought Sela Miranda into Sangstom's office, fully expecting Sangstom himself to be there to supervise the unloading. When ORG itself instructed them to hook her into the machine, however, they did not question it. Obviously Mr. Sangstom was off looking into these murders. And if you couldn't trust ORG, who could you trust, anyway?

 

Fliss Indie awoke with a new sense of purpose.

 

After several minutes of not-so-gentle coaxing, the Doctor blinked his eyes and stared at her intensely. Then he beamed again, and this time the smile didn't remind Sarah of those vacuous grins she'd seen whilst doing her story on the state of modern mental hospitals a few years ago.

 "Sarah Jane! Well, isn't this nice! I'd wondered where you'd gotten off to...." He frowned for a moment and shook his head. "Come to think of it, I was wondering where I'D gotten off to."

 "What happened?"

 The Doctor got up and began pacing the short length of the room, his expression hesitant and bewildered. He dug into the bag, brought out an orange jelly baby, and munched on it thoughtfully.

 "Well, they... they RELAXED me, just as they said they would. Or rather, NOT just as they said they would." He stopped at the far end of the room and pointed at her with the now-headless jelly baby. "Do you remember what Sangstom told us about the process and how it works?"

 Sarah shrugged. "I didn't actually follow most of it, to tell you the truth. Something to do with suppression of biochemicals, wasn't it?"

 "Modification of the amygdala on an electrochemical level to suppress the chemicals that produce violent emotions," he replied grimly. "Anger, jealousy, pride, hate, fear, guilt -- all of those darker emotions which make the positive emotions more meaningful. Such a process, in theory, should have nothing to do with the memory engrams, as they're stored in a different part of the brain altogether."

 He then turned and fixed her with an angry stare, and for a moment, Sarah couldn't be sure if she were the target of all that pent-up anger or not.

 "But the process *I* underwent was a savage rape of the mind, pulling away all that was negative and replacing it with nothing, despite all my efforts to resist."

 "Why did you let them do it in the first place?" Sarah asked, some of her earlier anger at his cavalier attitude towards his own life rising back to the surface. "I mean, don't you have some sort of Time Lord whammy to keep you from being 'savagely raped' like that?"

 "Yes," the Doctor replied, ignoring her tone, "and without that 'whammy,' as you put it, I'd have been just as 'relaxed' as Sangstom's son- in-law. I'd never have remembered who you were at all. But I wanted to see what the process was, to try to understand what they've been doing to these poor devils. At first, I thought the worst it could be was a removal of the negative emotions, the 'evil' as it were, which would have been bad enough. I encountered something like that once before, with UNIT. Ask the Brigadier to tell you about the Keller Machine sometime." He grinned suddenly at her for a brief moment. "Just make sure to promise him you won't write anything about it first."

 Sarah grinned momentarily. "But... you said this is worse?"

 "Far worse, Sarah," the Doctor muttered, popping the rest of the beheaded candy into his mouth. "This process accesses the very memory engrams themselves, makes a copy, removes the negative associative emotions, and then replaces them. The handers then carry those memories until they're unloaded. Hence the incidents of violence. They become that person, in a way."

 "You're joking," Sarah said. "They... clean up memories? Like they were a load of old laundry? That can't be possible, surely!"

 "Why not?" the Doctor replied. "If emotions can be suppressed at the biochemical level, then suppressing them within the memories themselves can't be that far out. The brain is a vast computer, Sarah. Like any computer, the programs within it can be copied, erased, and even rewritten, given the right tools. Or in this case, the wrong tools. The question is, what happens to the original programs after they've been copied?" He turned to look at her with tired, world-weary eyes. "Who becomes caretaker of all those negative memories?"

 "I'm afraid I have the answer to your question, Doctor," Sangstom said, as he walked into the room, a terrified expression on his face. "ORG is the caretaker... as I've long feared."

 He closed the door behind him and stared at them grimly. "I told you something has gone wrong on Alta Regina."

 

The girl's form was still twitching with pain and horror as ORG plugged itself into her consciousness to begin the unloading. Immediately, the connection was overwhelmed with images and memories, alien beyond belief, as 749 years of experience flooded into the computer's memory banks. Every unloading was its own reward to ORG, as it acquired more and more insight into what drove the human mind every time it received a new set of dark emotions. But this was far beyond anything the AI had ever known before, and somewhere in the ever-darkening recesses of its memory core, the computer began to change.

 The hander who was once Sela Miranda opened her eyes one last time, and screamed.

 

Fliss made her way cautiously along the brightly lit corridors of the complex. She had managed to avoid all the patrols so far with great ease. It was as if she had an extended sense of her surroundings and could tell if she was about to be discovered, so that she could then duck quickly into hiding. And in a few rare instances, the voices in her mind would suddenly shout /Behind you!/ or /Look out!/ in just enough time to allow her to avoid being caught. She was gratified for their help, especially when Carmen, dear, sweet, Carmen, spoke to her.

 Soon, she caught sight of her goal, just as a door closed between them. She moved slowly towards it.

 

"This is why I've never allowed myself to undergo the process, Doctor," Sangstom said. "ORG would learn far too much about me and my plans. Unfortunately, I'm afraid he may learn it all anyway, now that he's had you put through it."

 "Is there any way to stop the unloading, Sangstom?" the Doctor asked. He moved to Sangstom and placed his hands on the younger man's shoulders. "It's absolutely vital that ORG be kept from those memories!"

 "I couldn't agree with you more!" Sangstom replied. "But I'm sure ORG will ignore my orders to delay the procedure, and if it sends out an unloading order on its own, that order would supersede mine, anyway. I came here hoping you could help me stop it."

 "We must, Sangstom," the Doctor said, motioning for Sarah to get up and come to his side. "If ORG gets its positronic paws on my memories, you'll have a lot more than just a few deaths on your hands."

 Sangstom's eyes widened in disbelief, but the Doctor's tone convinced him.

 "Come on, then, follow me." He moved to the door and reached it just as it opened. A slim hand holding a knife shot through the opening, slashing at his right shoulder. The knife cut deeply into his flesh, and he cried out and fell backwards as Fliss leapt into the room, her face a mixture of pleasure and determination.

 "I'm sorry, Dave," she said. "But we all do it, you see. We all do it."

 The Doctor and Sarah pulled Sangstom further into the room as she slowly advanced upon them, smiling serenely.

 

Meanwhile, in the computer centre, a terrible beauty was being born.
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