Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane Read Free Book Online

it, and I was trying to work out how to get my hand back when you walked back in. I’m really sorry it happened. So – are we OK?’
    Gwen reached out to take his hand. ‘No, we’re not OK, and it’s my fault. I’m never home. I don’t spend enough time with you. And when we are together, it seems like all we do is argue. Rhys, I don’t want it to be like this. I love you, and I don’t know how things got like this.’
    He squeezed her hand as they left the restaurant, walking into the humid, petrol-scented air of Cardiff’s city centre. Behind them, the waiters set to work like worker ants, clearing the restaurant in record time. ‘I love you and you love me. That’s what’s important. Anything else is a trivial problem that we can sort out with enough chocolate and massage oil.’
    ‘Rhys, I really love you.’
    ‘I know. Oh, by the way – is it OK if Lucy comes to live with us for a while?’
    Owen gazed, fascinated, over Toshiko’s shoulder. ‘That can’t be a face,’ he breathed. ‘I mean, it just can’t . Can it? Tell me it can’t.’
    But it was. At least, it was something approximating a face. Not even as close as the Weevils got, but the same basic shape, the same proportions, the same general relationship of features.
    Toshiko was whistling to herself: a tuneless lament that grated on his nerves. He tried to ignore it, and process what his eyes were telling him.
    As a biologist – or, rather, as a trainee doctor with a solid knowledge of human anatomy – Owen had assumed that life on other planets would follow a completely different course from life on Earth. Not that he’d thought about alien life on a regular basis before he joined Torchwood, of course, but it was the kind of thing that occasionally bothered him in those stretches of time, late at night, somewhere between the fifth bottle of San Miguel and the tenth, when his mind could raise itself from thinking about sex and consider some of the deeper mysteries of the world. Evolution meant that everything from bilateral symmetry to five fingers and five toes was the result of random mutation that, by sheer fluke, conferred a slight advantage over other random mutations, which meant that their possessors would have a slightly greater chance of not dying, and therefore a slightly greater chance of passing their mutated genes on to their offspring. And that advantage was entirely down to local conditions: the chemistry of Earth, the geology, the weather, the predators, everything. Take any alien planet – assuming there were such things – and any or all of those conditions could be different. And that meant other, different, random mutations would confer a slight advantage, and get passed on. Radial symmetry might be the preferred design option: an entire ecosystem of creatures that looked like starfish, perhaps, with eight, or ten, or fifteen arms. Or no symmetry at all: protean creatures with eyes located at random locations all over their bodies. The chances of two arms, two legs, two eyes and all the rest occurring as a random evolutionary outcome on an alien planet were infinitesimally small.
    At which point, Owen usually stopped thinking about evolution, and random mutations, and alien life, and started worrying about whether he was going to get the chance to pass his own genes on that night.
    Since qualifying as a doctor, and then later joining Torchwood, Owen had discovered that the basic human form was more like the norm across the universe than the exception. Not exclusively – there were creatures out there that were about as far from human as it was possible to get – but there were more beings that could pass for human in a dark alley than not. Which, for a biologist like him, raised the question: why? What was it about the universe that favoured a human-like design?
    And now, as he looked at a picture of a form of life probably never even seen before by humanity, encoded somehow into a series of alien electronic