Slow Decay

into a white slave trade convention tonight!” Or “Someone fired a machine gun at me and ruined my nice white blouse!” But she never says anything. Just “God, I’m tired.” Every night.’ He laughed bitterly.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is… ah. Shit. Shall we go? It’s getting late.’

Instead of replying, Lucy reached out across the table and put her hand over his. He felt a jolt run through him. ‘I’d like to help,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve been so good to me tonight, and I’d like to make things better for you. If I can.’

‘I’ll get the bill,’ he said. He could have sworn that he sent his hand a message that it should pull itself out from underneath hers, but somehow the message didn’t get through, and his hand just stayed where it was.

And, thanks to the immutable laws of cosmic irony, which Rhys believed in as much as he believed in anything spiritual, that was the perfect time for Gwen to walk back into the restaurant.

THREE

Owen was whistling again.

At least, Toshiko assumed it was Owen. Jack was in his office, doing whatever it was that he did up there, Ianto was out in the little Tourist Information Centre they kept as a back entrance and Gwen had left, Toshiko assumed, to return to her interrupted meal with her boyfriend. It was just Toshiko and Owen in the central atrium of the Hub, and she wasn’t the one who was whistling.

And if she had broken the peace and calm of the Hub at night with something as crass as whistling, it would have been soft and mystical, not an out-of-tune whine which wandered up and down several octaves apparently at random.

She tried to block it out by concentrating harder on the alien device on the table in front of her. There was something about the lavender colour and the smooth curves of the metal that made her think of Japanese art: the surface was incised in patterns reminiscent of formal calligraphy, and the colour was reminiscent of her father’s favourite Hokusai etchings. It wasn’t from Earth, of course. Her brain was just looking for comparisons, connections, similarities. But it was oddly comforting, compared with the harsh, hard-edged technology she usually ended up examining.

Toshiko had started off by using a microwave imager to get a picture of what was inside the shell. And that’s how she thought of it: a shell protecting something delicate, vulnerable. The image she got was fuzzy, in shades of green and blue, and so she had turned to an ultrasound scanner, using the vibrations from whatever was inside to map out the interior structure. The results had been ambiguous: there were definitely voids within the shell, separated from each other by denser areas, but it wasn’t as clear as she had hoped. The transmission X-ray system which she had wheeled in, based on the kind of thing used in dental surgeries but with some significant improvements of her own, had just revealed a series of what looked like grey-white whorls and spirals that didn’t really help.

And that whistling was driving her crazy. Tuneless, atonal, and yet strangely mournful.

She glared over at Owen, but he was sitting with his back to her, oblivious. He had his hands behind his head, and he appeared to be leaning back and listening to something on his headphones. Didn’t he have any work to do? Didn’t he have a home to go to?

Looking at the images from the three separate imaging systems that she had employed to no good effect, letting her eyes skip back and forth from one monitor to the next, Toshiko felt her mind teetering on the edge of revelation. It was as if there were something momentous sitting just beyond her reach: she knew it was there, but she couldn’t find a way of getting to it.

Her eyes slid from the turquoise contours of the microwave image to the grey spirals of the X-ray, and she suddenly noticed a correspondence: a curve that started off in the microwave and then apparently stopped dead, but in fact continued on in the X-ray, appearing there out of a dark void. And once her brain had made that connection, others suddenly sprang out. How could she have missed them? There was a picture, there was a coherent whole, but not revealed through any one sensor. Working feverishly, she whipped the cables out of the backs of the various monitors and fed them all into a central image- processing server. It took her ten minutes, during which she was so busy she couldn’t hear Owen’s sad whistling at all, but when she had finished she had all three images being projected at the same time onto the same screen.

And there, revealed in all its glory, was the inside of the alien device.

And it was beautiful.

‘What the hell is that?’ Owen’s voice said from behind her.

‘It’s a composite image,’ she said without turning, ‘formed by combining the images from three separate sensors. By themselves, the sensors didn’t have enough resolution to be able to map out the interior of the device — each one could see a bit of the picture, but it was only when I combined them all that I could see the whole thing.’

‘Yeah,’ Owen said, dubious, ‘but what the hell is that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Toshiko said simply. ‘But it’s beautiful.’

The image on the screen was a multicoloured structure in which there were no straight lines at all. What appeared to be a series of flat oval plates of different sizes were linked to each other and to a constellation of small spheres by cobwebbed connections, and behind it all were hints of a larger irregular mass.

‘I was expecting wires,’ Owen said. ‘A battery, perhaps. Would a battery have been too much to ask? Circuit boards, maybe? Or am I being old fashioned here?’

‘They’re there,’ Toshiko said, running her fingers gently across the screen, following the contours of the inside of the shell, ‘but they aren’t obvious. They follow a different design logic to the one we’re used to.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The devices we humans build tend to follow some simple rules,’ she continued, confident now that she was talking about the things she loved. ‘Wires carry current, but the current heats the wires up, which means that resistance increases and the current drops, so we make the wires as short as possible. That way we don’t lose too much power. The heat needs to dissipate, so we separate components as much as we can in order to allow some circulation of air. We use transistors to switch the current in different ways, and capacitors to store it up and discharge it in big chunks. But what if some alien devices were designed with a different set of rules? What if art was more important than power conservation? What if symmetry was more important than efficiency?’

‘That’s mad. Isn’t it?’

Toshiko shook her head. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘Look at it, Owen. Really look at it. What do you see?’

‘A mess.’ He moved closer, screwing his eyes up as he concentrated. ‘No, wait. OK, it’s still a mess.’

‘Relax. Don’t try to look at the screen: try to look beyond it.’

‘What, like those dot pictures? I could never get them.’

‘Try.’

‘OK.’ There was silence for a few moments. Toshiko could imagine Owen screwing his face up like a small child. Perhaps his tongue was even poking out between his lips. ‘Oh. Oh shit. Is that what I think it is?’

‘What do you see, Owen?’

He sighed deeply. ‘This can’t be right, but I think I can see a face. Inside that piece of tech. A fucking face!’

As soon as Gwen walked into the Indian Summer, she knew that something had changed.

It wasn’t just the fact that the place was almost empty and the waiters were standing around with tea towels, waiting for the last few diners to leave: it was more the fact that Rhys and Lucy appeared to be holding hands and staring deep into each other’s eyes.

A farrago of feelings bubbled up within her, rooting her in the doorway. Her legs seemed to be operating independently from the rest of her: they simultaneously wanted to run across to the table so she could slap their silly faces inside out, turn and stride out of the restaurant in a massive hissy fit, and collapse on the floor. Part of her felt like she wanted to be sick. Another part was telling her that it was all a massive misunderstanding, some trick of perspective that made it look like their hands were touching when they were actually miles apart on the