Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

circuits, all those late-night undergraduate thoughts came back to haunt him.
    That lonesome whistle was really beginning to grate on his nerves. He wanted to say something to Toshiko, to suggest that she shut up, but Owen worried about the way Toshiko reacted to things sometimes. She internalised a lot. Not like Owen, who let everything out as often as possible. She pondered. Brooded. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her withdraw even more. It wasn’t that he cared, particularly, but she was a key part of the team. Owen didn’t want to be blamed if she went over the edge.
    The face that looked back at him and Toshiko from inside the alien device was differently proportioned to humanity: shorter and wider, something like a hammerhead shark. There were two eyes – at least, there were things that might have been eyes – placed at extremes of the head. A vertical slit right in the middle of the face could have been a mouth, or perhaps a nose. Or something completely different. The image finished at the neck, but Owen would have bet a lot of money on the probability of there being arms and legs somewhere beneath the head, all joined up with a central torso.
    Scale was impossible to ascertain – that head could have been the size of a house, or the size of a microbe – but Owen was pretty sure that if you put the alien being and him side by side they could have looked each other in the eye.
    ‘So is that all this is?’ he asked Toshiko. ‘Just a portrait? A snapshot of the wife?’
    ‘No,’ she said quietly, still studying the image on the screen, moving her finger across it as she talked. ‘This is a functioning device. There is a power source just there: some kind of battery, I think. And I believe this area over here to be an amplifier, although I’m not sure what is being amplified. Judging by the way the circuits are routed, some kind of energy is being detected here , and the amplified version is transmitted here . The picture of the creature is a side effect. Something incidental to the primary function.’
    ‘Incidental?’
    She shrugged. ‘Have you ever seen cheap radios shaped like…’ She paused, casting around for an appropriate analogy. ‘Elvis Presley! Or David Beckham!’
    ‘No,’ Owen said quickly. ‘Never. I’ve never seen a radio shaped like David Beckham, and I’ve certainly never owned one.’
    Toshiko glanced back over her shoulder at him, and her expression was disbelieving. ‘I understand they were unaccountably popular, once,’ she said. ‘The circuitry works no matter what shaped case it’s in. The shape of the case is a decoration. And that’s all this is – a decoration. An incidental addition.’
    ‘But with Elvis Presley radios, the decoration is on the outside. This image is on the inside. In the circuitry itself. It is the circuitry. Who was it designed for?’
    ‘Perhaps it was a joke,’ Toshiko said. ‘Something the designer put in that they knew nobody else was ever going to see.’
    ‘Or perhaps the race that the designer belonged to had some kind of X-ray vision. Perhaps everything they designed had a picture inside, rather than outside.’
    ‘I suppose anything is possible,’ Toshiko said. ‘Look, Owen, may I ask you something?’
    ‘Yeah, what is it?’
    ‘Could you please stop whistling?’
    That took him by surprise. ‘I’m not whistling. I thought you were whistling.’
    ‘I am not the one who is whistling. I assumed it was you. It is the kind of thing you would do. That, and singing. And breaking wind.’
    ‘Tosh, I promise, I am not whistling.’
    ‘You might be doing it without realising.’
    ‘So might you.’ He took hold of her shoulder. She tensed under his grip. ‘Turn around. Come on – turn around.’
    She turned on her stool, but for some reason would not look him in the eye.
    ‘Tosh – look at me. Am I whistling?’
    Her gaze rose to his mouth. ‘No, Owen,’ she said. ‘You are not whistling.’ Her face tensed