12 - Seeing I

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DOCTOR WHO
Seeing I
An Eighth Doctor Ebook
By Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman
For the ones who make a difference – starting with Frank Brannigan, Dick Kelly, and Alpha Phi Omega.
“Well, that was the whole point of growing up, wasn’t it? To stop wishing and start doing.”
Paul Cornell, Timewyrm: Revelation
Chapter One
An Ordinary World
First step: find somewhere to sleep.
Sam Jones hurried down the city street, the evening heat sticking to her as she ran.
No – as she walked. She was going to walk this, no matter how fast she did it, she had to make sure she
made each damn foot touch the damn ground before picking up the next one, because no way was she going
to run, no way was she going to lose her grip on the one thing in the world she still had any control over.
She didn’t break stride as she squeezed through the pedestrians. The orange sun was almost down, but the
day’s heat hung in the air, heavy after the air-conditioned spaceport. The streets were filling with people, too
many people, and lots of flat cars with big black solar-cell things on their tops, and concrete walls and
pavement stalls and street signs she couldn’t make any sense of.
There were too many details to really take them in. Even now, her mind was full of burning wires and thin,
freezing air and the taste of the Doctor’s skin.
First step: find somewhere to sleep. You’ve got to stop moving. There’s no one chasing you, there’s no one
on the whole planet who even knows or cares who you are, and you’ve got to find somewhere to sleep now
and for ever, because you’ve run out on the Doctor.
She knew this planet was called Ha’olam, and this city was El Nath or El Neth or something like that. That
much she’d been able to pick up from the succession of wallpaper-faced bureaucrats in whose offices she’d
been detained. The other evacuees had visas and identity numbers, or could get them by applying to central
records. She was about two hundred years too late for any of that.
No, they told her, without an I-card number she wasn’t eligible for refugee support. No, without her computer
record, she couldn’t apply for an I-card. No, the Earth embassy had closed years ago, during the war. No,
she couldn’t use the employment services. Even the dole was right out.
She’d snapped at them and tried to plough through their denials (it always worked for the Doctor ), but their
responses just grew blander and vaguer. Finally they gave her some directions and escorted her through the
door at closing time. She’d wandered out of the spaceport, blinking in the unfamiliar sunlight. They hadn’t
even locked her up – just tossed her out on to the street. Welcome to Ha’olam.
An alley up ahead, with rubbish piled by the skip at the corner. Without even thinking she headed for the
opposite edge of the pavement, to give her that extra second in case someone was hiding back there. Stay
relaxed, act as if you belong here. Look up, look fearless, and maybe the fear will go away.
What would the Doctor do?
She didn’t know.
There was too much crowding her attention out here, all the rattles and buzzes and smells – people,
machinery, garbage, smoke, cooking food – of a new city on a new planet. She didn’t want to take it all in,
not now. She turned right, away from the traffic, into a side street full of sandblasted stone buildings.
There was no one in sight, which was either a good thing or a bad thing. Now at least she could handle a look
around – read the signs on the buildings, lettered in what looked like Hebrew and Arabic and, thank God,
English. At least the bureaucrats had got their directions right.
The second building on the other side of the road had a small hanging sign. A stylised sketch of a blue dove
holding an olive branch, and the words SOUP KITCHEN in six different languages.
She didn’t let herself think about it, because she was ravenous.
She hurried across the street and clambered up the steps to the front door. like all the buildings around here,
the place looked worn, as though a passing sandstorm had scraped away the top layer of paint. Maybe it had
– for all she knew this place was in the middle of a desert. For all she knew, it was in the middle of a black
hole.
The screen door gave her a glimpse of what lay ahead: a crowd of scraggly bearded men and thick-legged
women, shuffling about, bowls in their hands.
Beggars can’t be choosers, she thought, and went inside.
The volunteer’s name was Sara. Her dark hair curled, her voice was breathy, her smile sweet, and she set
every single one of Sam’s nerves on edge.
‘You’re an olah, I can tell,’ said Sara, stirring stuff round in a huge pot. There was an incredibly sincere look in
her unblinking brown eyes. ‘You haven’t even got a tan yet.’
‘Yeah,’ said Sam, ‘I guess I’m an olah.’
Sam had volunteered a couple of times for a soup kitchen in London. It hadn’t been much different. Though
these cookers were a bit more high-tech, and she wasn’t sure what some of the vegetables piled on the
counter actually were.
‘Well, welcome to Ha’olam. I’m glad to see you here at the shelter. We can always use another pair of
hands,’ said Sara brightly. ‘You’ll like it here – it’s hard work, but it always leaves you feeling good.’
Sam could just see Sara driving off to her church meeting, an I’m saved and you’re not bumper sticker on her
car, having done her good work among the unwashed for another week.
God, she thought, I hope I never sounded like that.
Whatever those vegetables were, she wanted one right now, and she didn’t care who was running the place.
Bite the bullet. ‘Uh, I’m afraid I’m not a volunteer,’ stammered Sam. ‘I, uh... need a place to stay.’
Sara hesitated. Sam didn’t dare let her get out a ‘no’. ‘Of course I’ll work or whatever. I just need to get back
on my feet. I didn’t mean to come here, to this planet I mean. I was evacuated. I was travelling with
someone.’
She scrambled along the metal wall, pulling at the grab-handles, shouting Stop! Go back! We have to go
back!
‘We were out seeing the universe together, but we got separated.’
We have to go back we’ve got to go back I’m not leaving him again...
‘That’s bad luck,’ said Sara. ‘Look, I’ll have to find out if we have any space left. In the meantime, get yourself
washed up, and you can chop that lot for me.’ She nodded at the heaps of vegetables.
The best part of getting the dinner ready had been washing up. She’d washed as much of herself as she
could without actually taking clothes off, scrubbing her fingernails, even ducking her head under the tap. Sara
had laughed and handed her a towel.
Dinner was vast kettles of soup. Sam used a nearly blunt knife to reduce the great mounds of vegetable
matter into manageable chunks – marrows, tomatoes, potatoes, aubergines, something blue and tough,
something with a yellow skin and stringy clear stuff inside it. Sara added lentils, pepper and bay leaves.
‘Normally there are three of us,’ Sara said, as she bustled, piling flat circles of bread on to a tray. ‘But Ari’s
downstairs trying to fix one of the toilets, and ChrisBen’s got the flu. So I’m glad you showed up.’
‘So am I,’ said Sam. The smell of the soup was causing odd noises to emanate from her stomach. She
wished Sara would wander off for a few minutes so she could cram a chunk of carrot into her mouth.
Sam was surprised when Sara sat down to eat with the rest of them. There were maybe three dozen
‘customers’ – sick-looking old men and women, skinny young men and women, a cowed-looking woman with
two children hanging on to her in terror. Quite a few teenage boys and girls trying to look as though they
didn’t care where they were. A seventeen-year-old space refugee didn’t look out of place.
The ‘dining room’ was just a big, echoing hall, the walls made out of plasticrete or something. There were a
couple of long tables and lots of plastic chairs, most of them broken, a sink at one end. Someone had stuck
up some magazine printouts. The pictures clung tenuously to the wall on yellowing bits of tape.
The stew was good – but then, anything would have tasted good by now, thought Sam. She made herself eat
at a reasonable pace, one spoonful at a time, tearing off chunks of the flat bread like everyone else and
dipping it in.
Sam was used to everyone staring at her. Her jeans and horribly filthy T-shirt were probably about as out of
time as a hoop petticoat. The homeless people wore kaftans and loose shirts and skirts, in various states of
repair. Sam stared down at the table, hoping they would think she was saying grace.
They. Us.
‘Where are you from?’ chirped Sara, making Sam jump.
‘Um,’ she said. ‘Earth, originally.’ London in the twentieth century, to be precise. ‘My friend and I travelled
around a lot.’ Through time, since you ask. ‘How about you?’
‘Chalutz, third generation,’ said Sara.‘My whole family is Jseda Tech. I’ll be an e-kaatib myself when I
graduate.’
Sam nodded, as though she had some of idea what Sara was talking about.
She looked down in surprise. A very small and mangy cat was circling round her ankle. When it saw it had
her attention, it let out a pitiful, monotone miaow.
‘Maybe we can help you find your friend,’ said Sara.
‘I doubt it,’ said Sam. ‘Thanks though. I don’t really want to find him.’
Sara wisely decided not to pry any further. Sam wanted to explain that the Doctor hadn’t hurt her or anything,
that it was the other way round really: she’d dumped him and run off. But she was too tired to explain about
the Kusks and the dreamstone and the TARDIS. and she didn’t want Sara to think she was on drugs or out of
her head.
The cat miaowed again. She pulled off a bit of the bread and held it under the table. The stray sniffed at it and
then grabbed it with its tiny teeth.
Half the people here, thought Sam, are doped to the eyeballs or off their heads. So don’t mention travelling
with him through time. Don’t mention fighting the monsters beside him. Don’t mention what
happened (what You did) with him, don’t mention his body lying there as you stumbled away and the taste in
your mouth, don’t even mention it to yourself...
Sam jerked awake. She had fallen asleep at the table. Bad move. She looked around, giddily, making sure no
one was about to attack her.
But there was no one else in the hall. It had been locked up for the night, after they’d spent over an hour
gathering up the plates, washing, wiping, sweeping.
She staggered into the kitchen, where Sara and the guy – urn – Ari were talking in quiet voices. ‘Heavens,
you’re about to fall over,’ said Ari.‘Time to put you to bed.’
‘Is there anywhere for me?’ asked Sam faintly.
The two volunteers exchanged glances.‘We’ll put you in the corner,’ said Ari.‘We can get out that old folding
bed.’
Sam tried to help as they dragged a bed out from a dusty cupboard and unfolded it in a corner of the
basement. They waved her away, and she sagged against the cinderblock. Just watching them was
exhausting her. At least half of the people she’d seen at dinner were there, snoring on cots, covered by rough
blankets.
Ari found a blanket for her. There were no sheets or pillow, just a thin mattress.‘I’m full-time staff,’ he said
quietly. ‘I’ll be upstairs, just in case, but you shouldn’t have any trouble from this lot.’
They left her there in the basement. She pulled off her shoes and socks, considered taking off her jeans, then
decided to leave them on, at least tonight.
She wouldn’t go to sleep just yet. Just one more thing to do. In the dim light from the open bathroom door,
she emptied her pockets out on to the bed. A piece of string. A few odd coins from different worlds; maybe
there was a rare-coins dealer who’d pay something for the two-hundred-year-old pennies.
One TARDIS key.
She just stared at that for a while.
A pen. An interesting pebble. One cartoon Mo badge; unless she could find a highly wealthy collector of
Alison Bechdel artwork, that probably wasn’t going to help her much.
She slipped the TARDIS key on its chain over her head and tucked it under her shirt where no one could see.
The metal felt chilly against her skin.
She crawled under the blanket, praying there were no life forms inhabiting the mattress.
Her whole body went like jelly. She could stop moving now. Finally.
She woke up with a start in the middle of the night, flailing around, ready to belt anyone who was hassling
her.
But the others were just snoring. She was just a scrawny kid with no money and no drugs, and no one
wanted to get themselves thrown out anyway.
She rolled on to her side and stared out at the basement.
First step: find somewhere to sleep.
Second step...
Second step: come up with any kind of idea what the second step was.
What would the Doc –
Sod that. What would Sam Jones do?
She had a horrible suspicion that the answer to that was curl up in a ball until it all goes away. But that
wasn’t the Sam she wanted to hear answer the question. She wanted space-heroine Sam Jones, who stared
down the monsters, who was sharp and resourceful and always, always cool. Who had her own series and a
range of posable action figures.
Or at least Sam the somewhat experienced galactic traveller, able to muddle through new or nasty situations
with a minimal number of bounds. Done it before, should be able to do it now.
Maybe he would rescue her. The Doctor could turn up tomorrow, or six months from now.
They had cut his face his skin was as cold as ice be was not moving there was silence...
She screwed her eyes shut and tightened her whole body up, trying
to squeeze the memory to powder in her brain.
No. He wasn’t coming for her. Thank God. He was never going to know what had happened.
Blowing into his mouth pushing on his chest blowing warm air into his cold mouth pinching his nose watching
for his chest to rise blowing desperate blowing wake up lips pressed hard against his sandalwood blood frost
ozone sweet pressing and pressing wake up goodbye kiss...
He hadn’t died, despite her. He would go on.
She would just have to accept the new situation. Adapt to it, deal with it. She couldn’t be the first one who’d
had to build a new life after being with the Doctor – hell, she’d already met a bunch of his ex-friends who had
gone on fighting for what they’d believed in. No reason she couldn’t do it too. She could make herself cope. If
she had to damn well change every last thing about herself, she’d do it, and by the end of it she’d have a nice
real job and a real place to live and a real her.
Sam woke up with a taste like fungus in her mouth and padded across the empty basement to the bathroom
to brush her teeth. It took a moment for it to sink in that she didn’t have a toothbrush.
She felt the implications of that wash over her, until she finally realised that she’d just been staring blankly at
her eyes in the bathroom mirror for far too long. She rinsed her mouth out with water and went upstairs to find
Sara.
It was afternoon. The dining room was empty, but she could hear someone talking – to themselves, by the
sound of it. The stray cat came up to her and rubbed its head on her leg. She scratched it between the ears.
A talking head was floating against the wall, a computer-generated newsreader spouting stories with an
anchorman’s sense of gravitas. When she stared for a few moments at the red light behind the three-D, a
bunch of holographic menu choices popped up around his head.
This was kind of cool – she tried staring at them, and found that a
blink was enough to make a choice. She spent a while fiddling with the anchor’s appearance, voice, sense of
urgency and story selection, until by the time she finished he was a fifty-year-old black woman reading the
news in a perfectly inflected lazy drawl.
One of the stories was about the disaster at Mu Camelopides. There was no mention of a teenage girl being
found on the scene, trying not to cry as she was bustled on to the last ship out with all the other evacuees.
There was no mention of the Doctor either.
But she knew he’d been there, that was the only time she’d even glimpsed him since the don’t think about it,
since she’d run off from him the first time... At least she knew he was alive, out there somewhere.
The newsreader rambled on as she headed for the kitchen. How many of the other stories was he involved in,
behind the scenes?
Maybe that was how her own parents listened to the news. Ears pricking up every time they heard something
about UFOs or Bigfoot, wondering if their lost daughter was a part of the story.
They knew she was out there – if the postcards she mailed off any time she was around Earth ever made it to
them, and if they believed the one that said ‘Greetings from Kapteyn’s Star’ when it was postmarked from
Amsterdam...
Too late now.
She bumped the newsreader back to his default settings and switched him off. It was too bloody easy for him
to change – the last thing she needed right now was a piece of software making her feel inferior.
There was no one in the kitchen, but there was a big pile of unwashed dishes. Left over from lunch,
presumably. Right, she thought, make yourself useful. Very useful.
Sara found Sam elbow-deep in suds.‘Oh, good on you!’ she exclaimed. Her curly hair was sticking out
everywhere. ‘We’ve been on the phone all morning and half the afternoon. More funding problems.’ Sam
nodded, scrubbing hard at a pan with gunk burnt on to it.‘Who funds you?’
‘INC, mostly, as part of their Community Responsibility Programme. Coffee? Wait, have you had lunch?’
Sam shook her head.‘Anything left?’
‘There should be... cheese. One very dead-looking Eridanian potatoid. Umm... cheese and hummus
sandwich?’
‘Sounds wonderful,’ said Sam, and meant it.
‘You keep washing, I’ll make it. INC don’t think we’re high-profile enough. We’re supposed to be a PR
exercise, but it’s hard to make a homeless shelter look glamorous, if you know what I mean.’ She stooped
over the counter, spooning hummus on to the bread.
They sat down together in the dining area when the work was done. The cat was batting at a passing bug;
Sam ignored both as best she could.
Sara said, ‘Look, I had a talk with Ari and with the director – he never comes in – and... anyway, you can
stay for a while.’
Sam felt the tension drain out of her shoulders. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve saved my life.’
‘We’ve caught you before you started with drugs or prostitution,’ said Sara. ‘I want to keep it that way.’ Sam
was shaking her head, but Sara said, ‘Don’t fool yourself. It takes most kids about two weeks of being hungry
all the time before... Anyway,’ she said, trying to push her hair into shape, ‘let’s face it, we need someone
extra to help with the work.’
‘I’ll have to get a paying job.’ said Sam, in between mouthfuls of sandwich.‘Eventually. How do I look for
work?’
‘Use the newsreader,’ said Sara, surprised.‘Just follow the menus.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Sam nodded.
Sam started by looking for the kinds of jobs she would have wanted back home. She’d always planned to
work for Greenpeace or be the director of a shelter for battered women, or the Prime Minister, something
along those lines. It didn’t take long to realise she wasn’t going to have much luck there. Most of the jobs in
the newsreader’s database – scrolling past jerkily as she got the hang of using the eye menus – wanted
formal qualifications of some kind or other. And she hadn’t even finished –
God, realised Sam suddenly, making the menu jump, I’m a sixth-form dropout.
She was going to have to take whatever work she could get. Well, almost. She drew the line somewhere
around ‘You want fries with that?’
The causes would have to wait. The Doctor’s other companions might have gone on to save planets or
whatever – right now, she just had to eat. At least in the meantime she could help with the shelter.
Helping the less fortunate.
Right.
The dream with dark hair ambushed her again that night.
It was the same freeze-frame as always. She saw herself leaning back against the foot of a cheap
metal-frame bed, staring back at herself with an expression halfway between a smile and a sneer. Her hair
was dark brown to black – the colour she kept having the urge to dye it. Something had kept her from ever
trying it.
It wasn’t a dream really, because dreams move and this one was just a still image. A single moment that had
kept turning up over and over in the jumble of everyday dreams she’d had in the TARDIS.
And, in a weird cubist perception, she was inside this other Sam at the same time as she could see her from
the outside. She could feel the bed frame against her back, her fast tingling heartbeat, the dryness of her
mouth. This her was impossibly distant, and at the same time close enough to make out the frayed hole in
her T-shirt, the nicotine stains on her fingers, the odd needle mark.
The room was a bedsit in King’s Cross. She never knew how she knew that. It had milk-crate furniture and
scuff marks on the wallpaper. It was home, and a home she was happy with, though not one she really cared
about that much.
And that was wrong, because home was a nice house in Shoreditch with Mum and Dad. And then home was
the TARDIS.
She knew she was still a veggie, still on the Amnesty mailing list, but if she thought about taking time to go
on all those marches, then the aah-who cares-really surged up like a foul taste in her mouth. She tried to
think of all the extraordinary things she’d done with the Doctor, and just felt those mocking eyes on her. Her
own voice echoing: You can’t be for real, can you?
And the words cut, because this other Sam felt more real than she did.
Somehow she knew it. That this was who she should have been, left to her own devices. That getting stuck in
a cheap bedsit and a crap job and the tail end of a buzz going sour was where she should be, a million miles
away from the TARDIS.
Bollocks to that. This was just another bit of classic teenage insecurity, like that dream she’d had about all
her friends just wandering away when she tried to tell them about her life with the Doctor. Just that same
feeling like you’re not living a real life unless you do the stuff the wild kids do.
She tightened her muscles up and tried to make herself move. She wasn’t going to swallow this nightmare.
All she needed to do was focus, and push away that Sam’s flat and her ciggies and her AM radio, and she
could feel the dream disintegrating as she clawed her way out and awake –
- into a bed that wasn’t even hers, in the basement of a homeless shelter.
Left to her own devices.
A month later.
Sam was serving breakfast – porridge, as always. She hauled huge steaming kettles of the stuff around,
hands protected by grubby oven gloves, and glopped ladles of it into bowls held by a ragged line of the
hungry.
She scraped up her own bowl and sat down with the others. Back home she had liked porridge with lots of
milk and lots of brown sugar. Here there was sometimes sugar, sometimes milk. This morning there were
both, and some reconstituted orange juice besides. Ari had been on the phone again.
She was getting to know the regulars – runaways, alien refugees, corporation drones who’d fallen behind on
their rent when the gaps between jobs grew too large.
Pincher, the mad old woman who was nice enough so long as you stayed out of reach, and Cathy, who
alternated between the game and the shelter.
Ramadan, her age, with inky eyes and his hair dyed white to look fashionably alien. He was a shifter, he told
her, a data thief. He couldn’t get work because of his criminal record, so he kept on shifting information here
and there, doing a little courier work, looking for a way off the planet.
Yusuf, a grizzled old survivor at sixty-eight going on a hundred, who kept offering her swigs from his
ever-present bottle of gin. She kept declining, but still sat with him so he could regale her with tales of his
glorious misspent youth, all his adventures. He’d always been a promising child, his mother had told him, and
the pride with which he kept revealing this nugget of information over and over made it sound as though he
honestly believed he’d start fulfilling that promise any day now.
Two centuries and Christ knew how many light years from home, but this city had something in common with
her time, her town. There were still people who the haves really didn’t give a damn about.
Tidy up, wash up, dry up, seven mornings a week, two hundred and eighty-seven days a year. Scraping a
cold film of porridge from the bottom of the kettles and putting it into a bowl for the mangy cat. A bit of a wash
and then off to seek gainful employment.
The locals were mostly olive or dark-skinned, rarely as pale as she was. Or blue-skinned and white-haired;
Lacaillans moving gracefully through the crowds. A Caxtarid buzzed by on a bicycle as Sam headed for the
bus stop, the man’s electric red hair a bunding flash in the morning glare.
The worst part was always trying to get the money for the bus. She went to a different stop every morning.
And she told the precise truth.
‘Hi, I have to get to a job interview – do you have a transport token you could spare? Thanks anyway. Hi, I
have to get to a job interview – do you have a transport token you could spare? Never mind, have a good day!
Hi –’
It took her fifteen minutes this morning. Sometimes it had been almost the end of rush hour before some kind
or possibly intimidated soul plucked out a token and handed it to her. She always smiled her gratitude. She
always felt like complete and total dirt.
The bus landed. Sam climbed aboard, deciding that she’d be walking home this afternoon.
The ornithopter rose slowly from the ground with its load of passengers, giving her a bird’s-eye view of the
crowd and the bikes, a bunch of market stalls crammed on to one street corner, then the rooftops of El Nath.
A week ago she had got her RAIN. It had taken three weeks for the application to be processed – mostly,
explained the polite woman on the phone, because there was no computer record of her, anywhere. But she
had it now. Her Resident Alien Identification Number.
That meant she could start applying for real jobs. Now she existed. Without the shelter, she couldn’t have
done it – she had to have a permanent address to apply.
The first day of the rest of your life, she thought.
The bus let her out a few blocks from the agency. It was an intimidating chunk of stone on one corner, narrow
steps leading up to glass doors.
She felt unbelievably grotty in the same shirt, the same pair of jeans. Cleaning them didn’t help: they were
fraying. Sara had at least loaned her a fairly nice jacket, but that was just a fresh coat of paint slapped on to
a house that had almost rotted through.
She managed to look confident right up until a little man in a little office started to hammer her with
questions.
‘Previous job history?’
‘I’ve, uh, never had a paying job before.’ Sam looked around his office. Here she was in space in the future,
and people still had offices, desks, computer terminals, clutter, and signs that insisted that you didn’t have to
be crazy to work here, but it helped. ‘I did spend three years organising the school Amnesty Chapter...
‘I’m afraid there’s not many managerial positions open to eighteen-year-olds,’ he said.
Sam smiled her polite smile. Either he was laughing with her, or laughing at her, and either way this couldn’t
be good.
‘I’ll take anything,’ she said. ‘Anything but food service, I mean. I’m a hard worker and I’m eager to do well.’
‘Any references?’
She sighed. ‘I think they’re all dead by now.’
The man nodded sympathetically. ‘You arrived with the refugees from Mu Camelopides, didn’t you?’
She stared at him.‘How do you know?’
‘Your RAIN,’ he said. ‘It indicates your date of arrival. Well, never mind about references. How many
languages do you speak?’
‘Just the one.’ She could see the wrong-answer shutters falling over his eyes, so she added, ‘Little bit of
French.’ That only made it sound more pathetic.
‘No Hebrew, Standard Arabic, Yiddish?’
‘No.’
‘Azerbaijani, Amharic, or Farsi?’
‘No.’ Her voice seemed to have shrunk.
‘I don’t suppose any Reshtke, Argolin, Martian, or any of the Kapteynian languages?’
‘Just English,’ said Sam. Once I could speak any language in the universe, she thought – and now I’m down
to one.‘And a little bit of French.’
The man shifted in his seat. He didn’t seem amused any more.‘Can you use an eye terminal?’
When she looked blank, he tapped his stylus on the device attached to his laptop. Sam looked at it. She’d
seen them around – a sort of arm with a lens on the end. The operator pulled it down in front of one eye while
they worked at the computer. She didn’t know what they were for. She shook her head.
‘Can you file?’
Sure! ‘Sure, I can handle it.’
‘Which systems? Parabase? SQFM? Agent indexing?’
‘What?’
‘Which filing systems?’
‘You got me there,’ she said, feeling her throat tighten.
‘Ever driven a three-two plexer?’
‘No.’
He was trying very hard not to sigh.‘Can you type?’
‘Yeah, pretty well,’ she said, but when the man took her to a machine for her typing test the keyboard wasn’t
the QWERTY layout she knew from home. She was left hunting and pecking, and shaking like she was going
to burst into tears all over the digitpad.
In the end he lowered his eyeset and typed a quick burst of data. Her resume. To put it mildly, it wasn’t very
long.
In the blink of an eye it vanished from his screen.
‘We’ll keep your name on file,’ he said.
‘They’re all the same.’
Sara and Sam were sitting about in the dining hall, the three-D burbling to itself in the background. Sara had
her head on the table, and Sam was leaning back in her chair, limbs sprawling.
‘The worst ones think it’s funny,’ Sam told the ceiling.‘Most of them just sort of switch off after the fifteenth
thing I can’t do. Some of them get impatient. One guy threw me out.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Sara muffledly. She clutched a mug of coffee in one hand. ‘I spent another
morning on the phone, trying to organise some extra food supplies. Everyone’s very polite.’
摘要：

DOCTORWHOSeeingIAnEighthDoctorEbookByJonathanBlumandKateOrmanFortheoneswhomakeadifference–startingwithFrankBrannigan,DickKelly,andAlphaPhiOmega.“Well,thatwasthewholepointofgrowingup,wasn’tit?Tostopwishingandstartdoing.”PaulCornell,Timewyrm:RevelationChapterOneAnOrdinaryWorldFirststep:findsomewhereto...

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分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：160 页 大小：468.87KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-24

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