Repercussions (15/55)

[amberfocus]

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Chapter Fifteen:  Can I?

I am startled that someone as obviously powerful as Brigadier General John Benton would look at an ordinary human girl for help. But then I realize it is the Doctor’s faith in me that makes him look at me that way. I close my eyes, reaching inside myself for some answer that won’t disappoint him. It is rare for me to ever meet a friend of the Doctor. I don’t want to be the one who makes him lose his hope.

What I find there astonishes me. I can. I can wave my hand and wipe out the Cybermen. But if I do, if I let that remnant of power flare to life in me again, it would kill the Doctor. It had killed him. I hadn’t known it before this moment. It is why he’d regenerated. He’d died to save me. But…but, no. That isn’t how it happened. Not quite. What is this place in my mind that I’ve just found?

Don’t walk through that door, I tell myself. Or at least I think it's me. The voice is mine, but now I'm no longer sure. It echoes in my head. You’re not ready for what you’ll find. But then I see another door, and it might as well have a flashing neon sign on it. Without thinking I step through it and words tumble from my mouth. My hand rises up and waves in the air in a sweep towards the Doctor. “Binary 9,” I say. “Six, eight, seven, nine, seven, six, zero.”

“What?” But the Doctor is already moving, already accessing a computer that he has confiscated from the nearby work station, pushing it’s user out of the way. I know with certainty this moment has happened before for him even though it has not for me. In the same way I know what it will do when he finishes what he has to do.

“What are you doing, Doctor?” Benton asks though he makes no move to stop the Doctor.

“I’m reprogramming satellites to transmit that number worldwide, bouncing it through a TARDIS relay. It’ll disable the emotional inhibitors of the Cybermen.”

“What good will that do?” Benton wants to know.

“Cybermen survive because they remove all their emotions. It is the only way a human being can deal with being trapped within a steel body. Disable that chip and--.” He presses a few last keys and hits the transmit button.

“They’ll suicide.”

“Yes.”

“The only way?” Benton raises his eyes to meet the Doctor's.

“They’re not human anymore, John.”

Benton nods abruptly. He turns his eyes on me. “Guess you really can wipe out the enemy with the wave of your hand.” He looks awed.

My stomach churns. It isn’t really a power I want to have. No matter how evil those races are or were, I am now responsible for the genocide of two species.

Comments

[slvrcrystalc.livejournal.com]

If he thinks Rose has never been in an alternate world(lacks void stuff), then it follows that he never went to 'pete's world' too. Then, how would he know that the number that she says is...

It’ll disable the emotional inhibitors of the Cybermen.

How does he know that?

[amberfocus.livejournal.com]

He did go to an alternate world. His original Rose, she of the blue eyes, he went to her Pete's world. Remember in A Place in Time, the non-AU Rose plucked him out of his universe after he destroyed it and the other one, and stuck him into this one with this Rose. He did have that whole set of adventures with his first Rose, from The Age of Steel and The Rise of the Cybermen, and that's when the binary 9 code was used. He's remembering some of his hidden memories.