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“What is it, Doctor, an asteroid?” Phryne asked, looking up at the viewscreen and out across the barren, icy vista outside the TARDIS. The inky sky was peppered with stars and the readout on the screen indicated no atmosphere separating them from the void above.
The Doctor grinned, it had that slightly manic edge her smile took on when she was about to show them something very, very impressive and couldn’t quite wait to let them in on one of the secrets of the universe. Phryne was watching her expectantly, but Jack considered this to be something of an odd response, the landscape outside the TARDIS did not look especially interesting, then again, if there was one thing he had learned whilst traveling with the Doctor, it was that appearances could be deceptive.
“It’s an office.” The Time Lady explained, adding rather than detracting from the Inspector’s confusion. He was pretty sure she was doing it on purpose.
“Looks a bit colder than mine,” he observed, “we need to keep warm.”
“At the South Pole they recommend skin to skin contact.” Phryne smirked at him fluttering her eyelashes coquettishly, causing Jack to pull down the corners of his mouth as he tried not to laugh at her antics, knowing he didn’t have a hope of fooling her.
“Only if you want to become one giant human ice-cube,” said the Doctor, apparently oblivious to the single-entendre.
The detectives hadn’t quite worked out if the Doctor understood their flirting or not. Most of the time she acted as if she was oblivious, but once in a while the Time Lady would reveal herself to be an excellent flirt in her own right. Usually in the context of giant swarms of multicoloured insects, ancient sea monsters from the dawn or time or once, an entire solar system, rendered temporarily sentient by a minor cosmic accident.
“You mean we have to go out there?” Phryne asked, “couldn’t you have landed inside?”
The Doctor gave her an incredulous look, “not without being terribly rude. This is however, a mission of mercy.”
Tapping out a few chords on the piano keyboard which formed part of the TARDIS console, the Doctor extracted a handful of silver powder from a large bowl which had appeared in mid-air in front of her. She scattered the glittering flakes over each of them in turn, causing a slightly opaque bubble to appear around them. A second set of chords caused what appeared to be a picnic basket to slide up from under the purple mosaic tiles of the TARDIS floor.
“Come along Alice, Inspector Grumpypants,” she beckoned her friends imperiously towards the door, each of them rolling their eyes at the use of their respective nick-names. They had long since given up arguing about them.
Phryne followed eagerly, ready and willing to fall even further down the rabbit hole after the Doctor and Jack joined them, a little more cautiously perhaps, but nevertheless intrigued.
There was no air outside the TARDIS and the temperature must have been close to absolute zero. Particles of frozen gas had coalesced around the ‘office’ or whatever it was, so they should have been trudging through ice, but whatever the powder the Doctor had thrown over them had been, it seemed to have sealed them inside their protective bubbles, along with the air and heat. Phryne thought the experience felt a little like walking along the inside of a rubber ball, with an almost invisible barrier between herself and her companions, each of them slightly distorted behind the silvery sheen of their air shield.
It did not take long to find their goal. The Doctor led them past a towering wall of ice, round a sharp corner and up to, what was unmistakably, a door. It was round and made of something that looked like brass, inlaid with copper nails and rivets, more like the door to an especially sumptuous submarine than anything you might expect on either an office or an asteroid, but it was clearly their way inside.
The Doctor moved closer, took out the sonic screwdriver and waved it in a circular motion, the purple light at its tip bright against the dim starlight, the sound muted by the airless void between their respective bubbles. Within the Doctor’s sphere, the hiss of the airlock releasing gave way to the slick metallic noise of the round door rolling aside and allowing them entry.
Once inside, Jack turned questioning eyebrows on the Doctor.
“And that wasn’t rude Doctor? It looked a lot like breaking and entering to me.”
“Sonicing and entering.” The Doctor corrected indignantly, causing Phryne to twitch a satisfied smile at her partner who was feeling, not for the first time, that, as a man of the law, he was grossly outnumbered.
“Ah, of course.” He nodded as if in agreement, there was really no point arguing with either of them.
“Besides, my friend won’t be able to get up to answer the door. He doesn’t get a lot of time off.”
The detectives were used to the Doctor’s enigmatic explanations by this point and this time it was Phryne who pressed for more detail.
“Your friend, Doctor. I thought this was a rescue mission, who are we here to see?"
“Not a rescue, well not exactly, a mission of mercy. My friend is one of the Administrators, and unless I’m very much mistaken, he could use a break.”
The detectives exchanged glances, silently confirming that neither of them had any idea what the Doctor was on about. Resigned to a no score draw, they contented themselves with following her up the brass and wood panelled corridor, towards another round metallic hatchway, which the Doctor opened with her sonic.
The room beyond was cramped, full of flashing lights and gleaming metal dials. Wires threaded and tangled through the place in a complex mass of translucent insulation and glimmering gold. In the centre sat a man - probably a man - his skin appeared to be made of the same brass and copper configuration as the doorways and there were metal rivets at his joints and placed in artistic and aesthetically pleasing patterns over his face and neck. His eyes, which were lit up with the same winking blue and green lights as the surrounding machinery did not appear to be viewing the room at all, although the flickering flashes within them seemed to radiate a kind of awareness. It made Phryne think of the twitch of a man’s eyelids as he dreamed. He was surprisingly attractive for a mechanical man, she wondered what he might be dreaming about.
She looked across at the Doctor, who was busy rummaging in the picnic basket.
“Is he a…a robot?” she asked hesitantly. He looked so lifelike.
“Artificial life form.” Phryne and Jack both jumped as the man spoke, his head moving smoothly to watch them, the flickering lights in his eyes becoming a steady, warm gold which matched nicely with the brass of his skin.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Phryne was not entirely sure if she was apologising for calling the man a robot or for not realising that he could hear her.
“Technology can be confusing, Phryne Fisher, Lady Detective. You are a long when from home.” The man smiled, and Phryne was forced to wonder if his skin was metal after all, it moved smoothly, almost human, but polished, the angles at which it caught the still flashing lights in the room altering subtly with each tiny stretch of a mechanical muscle.
Jack was deeply intrigued by the Doctor’s friend, who looked as far as he was concerned, like a character who had just walked directly out of the pages of H.G Wells or Jules Verne. Glancing at Phryne, the Inspector barely repressed a sigh as he began to mentally count down the seconds until his partner and love of his life started flirting with a self-declared artificial life form. He did not make it to five before Phryne decided to turn on the charm. Beaming and extending her hand she advanced on the unsuspecting man in the chair.
“Always a delight to meet any friend of the Doctor’s, but you appear to have me at an advantage Mr..?”
“My designation is DRU-14/10/17-KS-1 I am the Administrator for this galactic sector.”
“Sounds intriguing, what do you administer?” she had already forgotten the string of digits he had reeled off but was hoping it didn’t show.
“Everything.”
“He means it,” the Doctor had finally managed to extract a bottle of what looked suspiciously like whisky from the picnic basket and was balancing glasses on top of a nearby computer terminal, which beeped angrily at the intrusion.
Jack made a small sceptical noise at the back of his throat, this felt like one of the Doctor’s games and he did his best not to get taken in by them.
The Time Lady looked up at him “what, you didn’t think all of this,” she gestured vaguely around at the universe in general, “kept on working all by itself did you? You know how it is Inspector, there’s always paperwork.”
DRU-14/10/17-KS-1 turned his glowing golden eyes towards Jack.
“The Doctor is correct Johnathon Robinson, Senior Detective Inspector, Victoria Police Force. We are the Administrators, we observe the universe and thus it continues to be.”
“The act of observation determines that which is observed." The Doctor recited a little smugly, "even by your time humans had worked that one out.”
Phryne had reverted to her second favourite investigation tactic (after flirtation of course) of surreptitiously cataloguing every detail of her surroundings. Unless there were other doors into the Administrator’s ‘office’ they appeared to be very much alone.
“You said we,” she asked curiously, “but you appear to be all alone out here.”
The mechanical man turned to look at her and tapped the side of his head, his expression a little too intimate for Jack’s liking, “never alone, billions upon billions of people all connected. I observe, and thus they are.”
“Sounds exhausting,” she responded with sympathy.
“And very rarely rewarded,” the Doctor interjected, handing her a whisky glass, “that’s why I make a point of dropping by from time to time.”
“I always look forward to your visits Doctor, Time Lady. You have a new face since I last saw you.”
“More than one I’m afraid to say. How long has it been?” She passed a glass each to Jack and DRU-14/10/17-KS-1.
“10.788980988 data units have passed since your last visit. I was beginning to worry.”
“Really? I’ll try not to be so long next time – you know me, I do tend to get distracted. Daleks, cybermen, giant mechanical tree people. Things tend to get in the way.”
Sensing that the Doctor was a little embarrassed by her long absence, Phryne stepped in, raising a glass in toast and doing her best to appear as if she had understood any of the conversation that had passed. Only Jack suspected she was faking it, and he had the good grace not to let it show.
“To the Administrators. Without whom none of us would exist at all.”
And the four of them raised their glasses in celebration of a difficult job done spectacularly well.