Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‘Fine,’ says Kate, on one of those long days where she has reached the end of her tether because it’s not just Geneva, now the Home Office is breathing down her back too, and half her team will barely look her in the eyes anymore, and more and more she’s beginning wonder if she maybe shouldn’t have set the Shreek on that arsehole, arsehole though he was, because, well, really, Gordy was that age once, and heaven knows her son has made his mistakes even if she did of course raise him to be a feminist, and there’s something scratching at the back of her mind saying  you’ve been here before, and—‘Fine! I’ll call him.’

‘It’s just that we’ve run out of options here. We can’t run any more tests without—’

‘I said I’d call, Shirley.’

‘Well. Good. Thank you. Do you want me to ask Donna, or Ruby, or Mel, or…?’

Kate sighs, and tries to ignore the – doubt? concern? general wariness that everyone seems to be adopting around her these days? – flashing across Shirley’s face. ‘I can handle a phone call, thank you.’

She scrolls through her phone to Doctor (#10 v2, Donna) and dials. Her call goes straight to voicemail.

Kate considers leaving it there. He's probably on some space Ibiza anyway, enjoying the kind of retirement Kate cannot imagine for herself. And she doesn’t want anyone to think she needs him. Self-made woman, she tells herself. Self-made woman with daddy issues so bad she would have let an alien kill a man because he—stop it stop it stop it stop!

Besides, this isn’t about her. It’s about UNIT. Kate tells the Doctor that they love him here mainly for professional purposes, although she is unsure if he realises this is networking. (When she still worked here, Osgood was an outlier and should not have been counted.) But she has spent enough time in the labs and the field to know that privately, many of her employees resent an outsider with an intergalactic title parachuting in to tell them how to do their jobs, then disappearing before the cleanup is finished.

Pavlov’s dogs meets endogenous cause, Kate thinks. Do we worry about the Doctor because of what happens when the Doctor visits, or does the Doctor visit only when what happens makes us worry? Either way, the sound of the metaphorical bell leaves peoples’ stomachs churning.

But by the time she has reached the end of his long, rambling voicemail (…Ciao, you’ve reached the Doctor. A Doctor. Well, a The Doctor. Specialties in time and space, probably not your best bet if you’re looking for a GP, but you know, always willing to try. Look, there’s a million reasons I might’ve missed your call, it gets a bit spacey-wacey out here, but I’ll try to get back to you in time. In a time, I promise. Sooner. Maybe later. Anyway…) Kate has changed her mind. If there is anyone who will relish this whole damn situation – better yet, if there is anyone who will take it out of her hands never to be seen again – it is the Doctor.

‘Doctor, call me back. We…’ She forces the words out of her mouth that she has been putting off for the last week, ‘We might need your help.’

Kate looks back at Shirley, eyebrows raised, as she slides the phone back into her pocket. ‘Done. We might hear back in two to three business days, knowing him.’

‘Shouldn’t that be business weeks?’ Shirley suggests.

‘Business weeks,’ Kate agrees.

In any case, she has her doubts about whether he will come at all. The Doctor has never been punctual, and that is when he wants to help. And these days, he seems to double down on his standard aura of disapproval every time he encounters a piece of alien weaponry which UNIT is studying for reasons verging on practical rather than scientific. Last time he visited, he walked into their capability forward planning division, sniffed and said, ‘Science leads, eh?’ and walked out of the building again. He has not visited since.

So it is a surprise to hear the familiar vworp vworp of the TARDIS materialise in Kate’s office just a few minutes later. The TARDIS snaps open and the Doctor barrels out with the frantic energy of a puppy just released from a very small cage.

‘Shirley! Shirley. How are you! Gooiemorgen! I’ve just learnt Dutch, great to give the mind something to do for a few hours. You can make some wonderfully long compound words. Kin-der-car-na-vals-op-tocht-voor-be-reid-ings-werk-zaam-he-den,’ he demonstrates, pronouncing each of the fifteen syllables as a precious gift. ‘And Kate. Hello,’ he adds, a little more coolly.

‘Hello,’ says Kate.

‘You mean you learnt all of Dutch, don’t you?’ says Shirley. ‘This morning.’

‘Yep,’ the Doctor beams. ‘What’s next?’

Shirley and Kate share a glance; Kate nods.

‘Well, it’s about Jeremy Bentham…’ Shirley begins.

---

Philosopher, atheist, and failed prison reformer Jeremy Bentham always intended to enjoy himself in death, but never quite so much as this.

His plan was clear, simple, and bound to catch on: first, have his body dissected for science, never mind the prudish “morality” of the powers that be. How else should medicine advance but through careful study of human anatomy? No wonder the illegal trade in corpses could thrive in a country where the government did not recognise their utility.

Second, he wished to be preserved. Others might opt for the painting or sculpted bust, but Bentham has never had time for representations when there is reality to be chased. The realest, truest souvenir of himself could be none other than himself. So he left instructions that after he had been drawn and quartered in the name of public good, he should be rebuilt. His skeleton would again form the frame of his body. His clothing should be as it were for the everyday. His head would be embalmed with practices from New Zealand, far advanced beyond the morticians of Europe. And in this way, he could still attend meetings and parties with his old friends.

When he first wrote about this – yes, the auto-icon, that is what he called it – he imagined the future: stately estates where the ancestral owners line the path between gate and door, watching all those who enter. Watching being a figure of speech, of course. No point getting sentimental about the eyes of the dead. From there, it is a slippery slope to pretty lies about eternity and undercutting the pure calculations of ethics with hoaxes of ineffable fatherly love.

Bentham wasn’t counting on an afterlife. Could he have been wrong? A lifetime of unshakeable conviction rears its head and he decides no, of course not. There must be a more logical explanation to all of this.

Jeremy Bentham, or at least what is left of him, has been returning to something approaching life.

This has been happening for, he estimates, five days now. Time eludes him, but the pattern of light then gloom is unmistakeable.  

It came in flickers at first. Visions of light like a half-formed dream, flashing so quickly he could not register what he saw. Gradually, the visions have lengthened from seconds to minutes, although the dark spaces between them remain incomprehensible and arrive suddenly.

When he is awake, his eyes do not seem to close, but nor does he feel the urge to blink. He has no choice but to observe.

He is inside a glass box. Traffic in this space ebbs and flows around him, although he has not yet been awake for long enough to tell by what schedule. At times the space around him is lit, at others it sits empty and dark beyond small lights flickering like embers and the occasional creak of a settling building at night. Its stairs and balconies are white and blank, shining as if recently built. The people that stop and sit around him pull out large metal instruments which they sit on tables like a book opened sideways. The fashion of the day is far from nineteenth century modesty. Bentham wonders not just where, but when he is.

By the fifth cycle of daylight, it occurs to the growing consciousness that might just be Jeremy Bentham to look down at himself.

He notes with some pleasure that his instructions seem to have been followed. He is wearing his habitual daily dress. Although there is something strange about being in this facsimile of a body, the curvature of his lower spine as he sits is so obvious to him that he suspects if he moved, he would hear his back click as it did in life. Across one knee rests his walking stick – Dapple! A busy atrium is no meeting hall, but resurrection has rendered him generous. A meeting of lives and minds is close enough.

He tries to run his tongue over his teeth, only to find that he has neither. I say, he thinks, The preservation of my head seems to have gone astray. Yet as clearly as he feels no movement in his mouth – as clearly as he has no mouth – he is certain that if he continued with this unmotion he could open his lips to speak. I say, he thinks again. I say, I say, I say. Carefully, holding the mouth and tongue and teeth in his mind (does he have a brain? better not to think too hard about this) Jeremy Bentham declares through closed and waxy lips: ‘I say!’

Too far away to hear, in a rarely visited storeroom, a muffled noise echoes his voice.

---

‘He’s started speaking now. The university won’t be able to play it off as an art installation much longer,’ Shirley concludes.

‘Frankly, we’re stumped as to why it’s happening,’ Kate tells the Doctor. ‘We just need you to provide advice as a subject matter expert. Take a look at Bentham’s replica, tell us what it is, and then we’ll deal with the rest and you have all the plausible deniability you like.’

The Doctor frowns, so Kate adds, ‘We’ll pay. Contractor’s rates.’ She suspects that this offer might hold more sway than it once did with him, although she would not be surprised to hear that he has been funding his time on Earth with some kind of TARDIS gold deposit.

‘Plausible deniability?’ asks the Doctor, as his mind churns over the choice.

He’s been trying not to interfere. In case he runs into his other self, mainly. That sort of thing is bad for the soul.

(And the therapist he visited one time who suggested otherwise didn’t know shit, as Donna would put it, about the intricacies of Gallifreyan intrapersonal relations. Speak kindly to yourself is excellent advice for someone who doesn’t regularly have to stop world-ending crises with the ghosts of who they have been and will be. Self-compassion is for people who haven’t watched those idiots spend four hundred years trying to sonic wood, and who haven’t been them either.)

Strictly speaking, he should not be able to remember trying to sonic wood. Bigeneration seems to have filled in gaps in his memory he never knew existed.

The Doctor has always felt like a ball of string, line so tangled you can’t tell where or if it begins and ends. Now, he feels like an arrow, with the universe’s most erratic flight path. Sooner or later, he’s going to smash into the target. His body has changed, even in the short time he has been living on Earth. He felt a knee creak as he stood up after dinner last night. Added it to the growing list of symptoms which he grimly catalogues as reminding him of Trenzalore.

(It feels a little like a chameleon arch – no, not quite. It feels a little more like being half-human on his mother’s side.)

Time Lords don’t sleep much but the rest of his household does, so the Doctor practices insomnia when he runs out of other overnight hobbies. He’s read the amateur advice and fan forums: he knows that often when humans do this, there is something  keeping them up. The Doctor has enough worries and regrets to pick and choose but recently he has laid there thinking, am I still what I was anymore? Because there is something in the clicking bones of his fingers that makes him wonder if he will ever shoot golden light from them again.

It makes him cautious, which he hates. Last week he turned down Rose’s fervent request to visit the Cretaceous period with no preparation, saying, ‘If we don’t pack wisely first, we might become carcharodontosaurus food.’ It’s the “we” that worries him – not “you, human with one life and crunchable bones and coincidentally your mother will give me hell if you get eaten”.

So the Doctor has been laying low.

And there’s… the other thing. He might have known from the tower. Hell, he might have known from a dozen lifetimes of experience and a two-thousand-year study of human nature. If you ask anyone at UNIT, they’ll tell you they work for the good of humankind. The Doctor dismissed this as short-sighted speciesism, something to talk through every few years in a crisis, until he watched Kate Stewart use an alien as a weapon on livestream. Every war he has ever fought in came running back to him, then. What good is the good of the species when nobody can agree on what that means?

And now this talk of plausible deniability. As if they could get the job done if they let him step away right afterwards so they can get their hands dirty. As if his own hands are clean.

Perhaps UNIT could do with some hands-on guidance after all.

Besides, playing it safe has been deeply unsatisfying. Playing it anti-interventionist has left him climbing up the walls. The Doctor is bored. Staring down the barrel of another week learning Germanic languages until he runs out of compound words, the Doctor makes a decision.

‘I don’t want deniability,’ he says, ‘But I’ll help.’

---

In a glass box inside the University College London student centre, Jeremy Bentham remembers the tongue. A powerful muscle, red and moist, exploring the walls of a hinged-cavity-to-be. Something feels liquid in his head and it’s not saliva, not exactly – he is melting himself a hollow for a mouth and it tastes like candlewax. He flicks his renewed tongue around and imagines the ridges of his teeth. They form underneath it. The sensation is not at all like how ice melts on a hot day, but he can think of no other way to describe it.

He continues to rebuild his head. A throat – the wax dribbles down, it must do, because it is flowing out of his mouth and he does not yet have lips. The lips themselves, fleshy and soft. He tenses them as a test. Ah, yes, his face forms sinew and muscle in response, form following function. But whatever to next?

Jeremy Bentham remembers the jaw.

----

Chapter Text

So maybe it’s not really Kate’s job to babysit the Doctor. So maybe the bureaucracy of management is what should actually be wedging itself into her overburdened schedule instead of this glorified school trip. So maybe being here was a captain’s call.

Kate’s pretty damn diligent, but everyone needs a break from risk and assurance taskforce working groups every once in a while. And never mind the siloes of hierarchy, leadership looks like lending a helping hand in a crisis. Which this is. Well, which this could become.

Not that her new friend in Bentham’s final place of rest seems particularly convinced.

Associate Professor Minerva Arliss, head of UCL Collections and Conservation, is wearing business casual culottes, fun red floral earrings, and a look of intense disapproval.

She crosses her arms. ‘I don’t think you understand. Bentham’s auto-icon is a delicate artefact. We can’t just pick it up and move it.’

‘I’m not certain you understand,’ says Kate. ‘We’re dealing with an extraterrestrial event of unknown origin and intent. You can remove the auto-icon or close down the Student Centre. Either way, it’s not safe for the public to get close.’

‘I get the need to keep up the front, but frankly, everyone knows aliens aren’t real,’ the other woman sighs.

‘Funny. I used to say that to people just before I used the memory wipe on them.’

Minerva purses her lips to show that if that was a joke, she is not amused. ‘If you have any research needs for whatever it is that you really do, I’m sure the university can put you in touch with a Bentham expert.’

‘No need,’ Kate smiles, wolflike. ‘Brought my own. Dr Smith?’

Behind her, the Doctor fumbles with the pockets of his jacket to produce his psychic paper. He steps forward and holds it out to Minerva.

If she looked unimpressed before, she looks even less so now. ‘Cosmic Sam’s Catwalking Services (canines and mustelids by special request only)?’ she reads out.

‘Sorry,’ says the Doctor, snatching the psychic paper back and shaking it. ‘Should be fixed now. Dr John Smith, reader in physics and, uh—’ he squints down ‘—posthuman philosophies at St Luke’s University.’

‘I would call Bentham’s philosophies very human, actually,’ sniffs Minerva.

‘Ah, well, you know how it is. Gotta find some giants to stand on the shoulders of before you can get into the fun stuff.’

Somehow, this almost seems to placate her. ‘All the same, I suspect you would get more out of his papers than the auto-icon. I can give you the spiel, but Bentham himself wrote about the concept much more extensively.’

‘Professor, I would love to hear your spiel,’ says the Doctor, oozing charm as he walks her away from Kate. ‘Did you say the auto-icon was this way?’

Surreptitiously, he pulls his sonic screwdriver out of a trouser pocket and waggles it triumphantly in Kate’s general direction. Minerva doesn’t notice, busy pointing the way to a glass cabinet at the centre of the Student Centre.

Kate follows a few steps behind. Better to let the Doctor deal with Minerva, if that’s who she’ll trust enough to talk to right now. (This feels like the funhouse mirror of all those years ago, when he was the President of Earth and she was the one the other humans actually knew.) When she catches up to the two of them, Minerva is saying, ‘And of course, the wax bust was never in the original—’

A spluttering noise interrupts her. Like bacon fat in a hot pan.

Minerva curses under her breath, then says, ‘Those damn art students. Sorry. This should be over in a moment.’

The spluttering noise continues, hissing sibilant between plosives. As it grows louder, a muffled sound cuts in and out. Vowels, as if said with a full mouth. Eye… ay… eye…. Then, as suddenly as it started, the noise stops.

Catching Kate’s eye, the Doctor raises his eyebrows questioningly. She shrugs in response. I don’t know, either.

‘Does this happen often?’ she asks Minerva.

‘Only since the beginning of the week, although I suppose you already know, if that’s what you’re here for. Innovative use of readymades, I’ll give them that, but I do wish they’d chosen something else to make a statement with. Not that it’s clear wh—’ The sonic’s warbling interrupts her abruptly. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘Just a voltage test,’ answers Kate quickly, before the words sonic and screwdriver can slip out of the Doctor’s lips. ‘Like I said, we’re worried about the safety of the building.’

‘And is it? Safe, I mean.’

The Doctor pops back up from where he was scanning the base of the auto-icon display case and sucks in the air between his teeth. ‘Ooh, I don’t know about that. Electricity all over the place. Volting like anything.’

Minerva’s eyes narrow. ‘And you’re an electrician too, are you?’

‘I took a very practical course of study in physics.’

‘Look,’ Kate intercedes. ‘Clearly it’s not safe and you should let us move the object. Or at least cordon off the area to have a closer look.’

‘It just seems unusual for the government to get involved in an art project.’

So perhaps Shirley was wrong, then – the art project angle could be guesswork rather than public relations. Kate shrugs noncommittally and hopes for more details. ‘You never know that’s all it is.’

A single sharp grunt emanates suddenly from the auto-icon. Minerva flinches, but disguises it well.

She looks anxiously at Kate. ‘I won’t pretend it’s not an inconvenience, but they’re kids, really. As much as I’d prefer them to stick to protesting in the streets, this isn’t the sort of thing that should go on a permanent record.’

Oh. Oh. ‘I’ll, uh, bear that in mind.’

Maybe that’s the question she should have been asking from the beginning: If aliens aren’t real, what do you think UNIT does? Nobody has believed Kate when she says that she runs a pharmaceutical research lab for years now. And ‘intelligence’ is in the organisation’s name…

But at least it’s a cover story she can work with.

‘We’re just trying to understand what’s happening,’ she tells Minerva, quite honestly. ‘Much more interested in cause and effect than names and numbers.’

The other woman smiles tightly, a show a being of reassured that is clearly not intended to convince. ‘Of course.’

Again, a burst of sound from the auto-icon case: a strained creak like an elastic band stretched too far, growing louder like a siren. The three of them turn back to Bentham as one, only to see his draw drooping downwards. The gap in between his lips and his nose is extending, stringy like melted mozzarella. A clear liquid dribbles out through the gaps.

The Doctor and Kate lean in for a closer look as Minerva recoils, murmuring, ‘That’s disgusting.’

Not one of them can tear their eyes away. What emerges from the inside of the lower half of Bentham’s head is the pink of pale flesh, which somehow makes it worse.

Kate sneaks a glance at the Doctor, who widens his eyes and shakes his head slightly in an admission that he is just as confused as she is. Worrying. So much for subject matter expert. Not that explaining this would do anything other than spook Minerva further in exactly the wrong way.

‘It’s very… contemporary,’ says Kate, going for a different tactic. ‘I think I saw something similar at the Tate Modern last year. Don’t you agree, Dr Smith?’

‘Oh yes, it’s like Dali meets Duchamp. Spent a, well, some might say scandalous weekend with them both in Catalonia once, actually—’ A sharp glare from Kate cuts him off.

‘They had to remove it, of course,’ she continues. ‘There was some kind of issue with the local power grid.’

The Doctor nods sagely. ‘The whole physics faculty was talking about it.’

Reluctantly, Minerva says, ‘If you really are sure…’ On the floor of the exhibit case, a pool of liquid that has dripped down from Bentham’s top half is congealing into solid wax again.

‘Enormous risk to critical infrastructure, I’m afraid,’ Kate affirms.

There is a belch from the stretching mouth and liquid splatters against the glass pane between them and Bentham. Minerva looks like she might retch. The Doctor looks like life has just become worth living again.

And look, a few hours ago Kate was ready to hand off this problem and never think about it again. Even now, she couldn’t say she’s enjoying watching a waxwork face split and spill open. But her team have seemed keen for her to step away from operations for the time being, which means instead she has spent the last few weeks thinking about governance artefacts and procurement and traditional versus agile project management strategies. If Kate’s honest, she’s ready to throw the whole damn finance division off the UNIT helipad just so she never has to read another report from them. If Kate’s honest, she has been wondering if this is all she gets from a life’s devotion to the cause: a big, lonely office and a bureaucrat’s vocabulary.

Staring into Madame Tussaud’s worst nightmare, the spirit of inquiry grips Kate by the jugular and she remembers how she got here. Science leads; she follows. It’s what drew her to research and what drew her to UNIT, way back when: the thrill of the chase.

‘We’d be more than happy to take this off your hands,’ she says slyly to Minerva.

Reluctantly, Minerva agrees at last. ‘At least it’s getting quiet in here now that exams are finished. You still can’t move the case, but I can speak to the building manager about closing a floor.’

Kate and the Doctor share a small grin. And they’re off…

...

Once Minerva has been sent off on a quest to find documents about electrical wiring (the Doctor mutters something about a floor plan, Kate uses the phrase “National Interest”, and the combination sends Minerva running to the building manager), the real work can begin. Of prime interest: Bentham’s condition, which is far from stable. In one moment, he splutters and bursts with wax. In the next, he oozes with nothing but the slow kineticism of gravity. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see through the glass of his cabinet as a layer of translucent pink collects inside.

‘We could try to open it,’ the Doctor says, but he is frowning. A viscous globule lands inside the glass at his eye level, and he places the palm of his hand against it. ‘That’s hot!’

The space around them is very minimalist, very marble, very white, and very clean.

‘Not yet,’ Kate says.

‘Not yet,’ he agrees.

Jeremy Bentham is seated staring straight ahead with his hands in his lap. He is visible from three sides of the cabinet, but the fourth is a piece of white display board which bears his name. A walking stick rests across his legs. His body, at least, still appears to be at rest.

His face is now less molten than it is elastic. Rather than drooping down, Bentham’s lips now stretch to a tube extending forwards as his cheeks ripple. A whistling noise emanates. The Doctor leans in to take a closer look from the side, pressing his nose against a clearer patch of glass.

Jeremy Bentham’s eyes swivel to meet his.

The Doctor recoils. There is a thud as Bentham’s hand thunks against the glass where his face was a moment before.

‘Kate, you might want to stand back. Just in case.’ He keeps his eyes on the cabinet.

The hand hits the inside of the glass again, then flops to Bentham’s side. Slowly, Bentham’s head swivels to the side, his eyes constantly tracking the Doctor’s. The motion is owl-like, the turn of the neck a few degrees further than natural for a human neck. He moans an oooooh which turns to a waaa as he widens his mouth.

‘Wheeeerreeeee,’ asks Bentham like a man rediscovering the consonant, ‘Isssss my heeeaaaaad?’

‘Reckon you’re using it,’ the Doctor tells him.

Bentham frowns, a cartoonishly perfect upside-down shape that does not quite look real. He runs his tongue across his teeth, then spits on the ground. ‘Waaxxx,’ he hisses. He spits again, and mutters something quietly. 

‘Didn’t quite catch that, sorry.’

‘Arroundd the raagged roockss the ragged rasscal rann. Around the ragged rockss the ragged rascal ran. Better.’ Bentham looks between the Doctor and Kate accusingly. ‘I had to build these teeth myself.’

‘That’s how it often goes,’ says Kate.

‘From waxxx.’ He still catches on some letters, hissing each sibilant sound. ‘Where is my head? Was it not preserved?’

The Doctor starts, ‘According to the professor who I was just—’

‘We don’t know what he is yet,’ Kate interrupts under her breath. ‘Don’t tell him too much.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘He may be a little slimy, but I don’t think he’s a threat.’ The Doctor turns to Bentham. ‘Not made of plastic, are you?’

‘Plastic?’

Waving the sonic screwdriver around the cabinet, the Doctor replies, ‘Polymerised hydrocarbons compounded into a mould. Hard oil, essentially. Don’t worry about it.’ He tells Kate, ‘Sonic says he’s no Nestene duplicate.’

‘You’ve crossed one off a very long list, Doctor.’

‘As you wish, then. No idea what’s happened to your head, Jeremy. Sorry.’

Bentham looks no happier. ‘I am no imbecile, doctor… your name, doctor?’

‘Just The. As in The Doctor. Doctor to my friends, without the The. And you’re Jeremy Bentham, eh? Inventor of the utility principle, not to mention half the academic terms in common use today – you really are no imbecile! And no duplicate, apparently,’ he muses, spinning slowly. ‘But you seem to—ah! Minerva!’

Appearing on the other side of the room, she is clutching a stack of papers, some more yellowed and crinkled than others. ‘I have the plans you asked for.’

The Doctor nods to Kate and raises his eyebrows: the universal symbol for this one’s yours to deal with. With surprisingly diplomatic grace, she smiles at Minerva and walks to meet her, steering her away from the now-mobile Bentham. ‘Is there somewhere more quiet we could have a look at these?’

As she walks away, Kate turns back to the Doctor and mouths, five minutes.

He holds up ten fingers, then a hopeful thumbs up.

Okay, comes Kate’s silent reply.

He turns back to the cabinet. The – well, whatever it is – is a puzzle. Sonic returning no signs of plastic, barely a hint of any given metallic compound. As far as he can tell, Bentham really is made of bones and wax. Earth materials, circa mid-nineteenth century, with nothing newer that cannot be explained away as two centuries of dust and the glass of the cabinet. There is a pulsing to the signal that the sonic returns which mimics near-perfectly a human heartbeat. In short, everything is telling him that Bentham, who has neither, is flesh and blood.

The Doctor paces as he speaks. ‘So… Jeremy, my old friend. Jezza! No? No to Jezza,’ he backtracks as Bentham frowns. ‘Jeremy. We knew each other, once.’

‘This cannot be my time. We cannot know each other. I have never seen your face.’

‘Eh, not quite. But I’ve got a lot of faces, me, and a lot of time. Well. Had a lot of time. Travelled in it, back and forth and a little sideways. It’s complicated.’

‘Impossible!’

‘Speak for yourself, Lazarus. Tell you what, let’s swap. I’ll tell you about how I got here if you tell me about how you did.’

‘You are a liar, doctor. No man can travel through time. And I have never seen your face before.’

‘Oh, come on! You spend a lifetime trying to divorce morality from the afterlife, you die, and now here you are again in a world made anew. Surely you’re wondering if there aren’t more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…’

‘I have not the slightest idea what is going on! But if you are to tell me that the teachings of the saints and Jesus Christ—’

‘Jesus? Met him, lovely lad. Put on a great picnic spread, but a bit Freudian before his time once you got him talking about his dad. He’s got nothing to do with this. But what I’m wondering is, what do you?’ He leans in close and peers at Bentham through the glass. ‘Who are you, Jeremy Bentham?’

Bentham stands in indignity. It is a precarious process; there is an audible crack and visible wobble as he tests limbs that have been locked into a seated position for almost two hundred years. He does not seem to notice. ‘Good sir, I should hope that if you know my name so well, you would know my work and reputation too!’

‘Yeah, yeah, founder of modern utilitarianism.’ The Doctor grins at him. ‘Prove it.’

With a crunching of joints, he sits back down and recites in the singsong voice of one explaining an old axiom, ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. The utility principle.’

‘Anyone who took Moral Philosophy 101 could tell me that. Tell me something you would know. Tell me about the name.’

‘I had a wonderful dream. I was the founder of a sect, someone of great importance, and we called ourselves the utilitarians. I had already known, naturally,’ —it is hard not to nod along as Bentham expounds— ‘that my principle was of great use. Common sense, were such a thing not so uncommon!’

It is still uncanny to watch Bentham speak: the sound emanates faster than his lips can move. At points, he opens his mouth overwide to compensate. Even from the outside, it is evident that his tongue is dripping.

And yet, he seems a little too comfortable – too in his element for a man catapulted into the future. ‘And your panopticon, Jerry B, Jeremy. Huge round prison, open cells, one guy watching. That could never work.’

Something unknowable flickers across Bentham’s face as he says, ‘The more we are watched, the better we behave.’

‘Foucault’ll have a field day with that one.’

‘Who?’

It’s the right answer to a reference he never could have got. They continue like this until the Doctor’s general knowledge runs out. Then, there is no choice but to ask the question he has really been leading up to – the answer that cannot merely be pulled from a book. He may be a sworn liar, under every face he has ever owned, but the Doctor did mean it when he said that he and Bentham knew each other once.

‘In the last decade of your life, a man visited you to tell you of a war in his homelands, very far away. He didn’t look anything like me. He asked you if the time for scholars was done. What did you tell him?’

Bentham locks the Doctor in a piercing gaze. ‘That there is no profit from war. But that in some cases, where the chance of success is tolerable, it may be the only remedy prescribed for the injury.’

And oh, it was a long time ago, but that bitter pill still leaves a familiar taste in his mouth. Physician, heal thyself…

‘Does this charade satisfy you, Doctor? Is now the time for my questions? I find myself in a box in a strange land, interrogated by a strange man who insists I must open my mind, but will not tell me the location of my own head.’

This snaps the Doctor back to the present day. Bentham’s answers have been word-perfect. As good as confirmation. There seems little to lose by admitting the truth. ‘Oh yeah, that. I think it’s in storage somewhere.’ He senses this may not be enough, so he adds, ‘Been stolen a few times, I’ve heard, but they’ve got it back from King’s College now. All those stories about using it as a football were rumours, don’t worry.’

A thunder cloud settles on Bentham’s face. ‘Pardon?’

...

Meanwhile, the electrical plans are simpler than Kate had been banking on. Three questions about light fittings in, she realises she cannot keep this up for as long as the Doctor needs to interrogate the auto-icon formerly known as Jeremy Bentham.

‘While I have you here,’ she says, changing tack, ‘I wanted to ask. Bentham’s head. What happened to it?’

‘It’s quite grotesque, really. It was preserved, but the physician was trying to use Māori techniques that nobody in England understood. We don’t tend to display it.’ Minerva’s tone is still hesitant, but she must have decided that it is better to help than hinder, because the next thing she says is, ‘Do you need to see it?’

Oh, sweet relief. Ten minutes and more, for certain. ‘Yes, actually,’ says Kate.

Minerva leads them through a maze of corridors and courtyards into the bowels of the campus, the whole time looking like something is on the tip of her tongue. Halfway through the journey, she finally turns to Kate and starts, ‘I saw you on the news…’

Ah, yes. The news.

The thing is, you can’t actually set an alien on a civilian as a government-funded organisation, or people start thinking Tiananmen Square meets X-Files. And you can’t pretend you never did, either, or people keep thinking Tiananmen Square meets X-Files. So there was a livestream – Conrad Clark’s paltry celebrity bought that a few hundred thousand views – and then it made the BBC, and then the international news, and then the whole world seemed to know Kate’s face. With no way of pulling a Derren Brown on this one, she’d had to front up to the cameras set to catch her on her way into work every morning for a week. She’d had to release a personal statement. Kate made the mistake of reading the news coverage once. Osgood found her in the study after midnight, unable to tear her eyes away from op-eds that couldn’t decide if she was a loose cannon or pinnacle of order, a feminist icon or neo-fascist. Since then, Kate has not been allowed to read a newspaper alone at home. Begrudgingly, she is forced to admit this may be for the best if she ever wants to sleep again.

It has been worse for Ruby. Kate has spent the past month fielding phone calls at odd hours, trying to convince the poor girl that it is not all her own fault. Kate doesn’t mind – it’s the least she can do. She remembers being like that, a long time ago: young, afraid, and alone, cradling a problem in her arms that she could barely speak about. She has half a mind to recommend that Ruby get herself a houseboat like she once did. But that wouldn’t work, of course, not for someone relearning to trust solid ground.

(Next time Kate sees Ruby’s Doctor, all light and life and teardrops, she will be too tactful to say, Where the hell were you? That does not mean she won’t gently ask, Did you know?)

And as for Conrad fucking Clark?

She wishes he were dead, actually. She knows it’s irrational. She knows it would only make him a martyr. She knows she may well have ended up on trial for either manslaughter or irresponsible pet ownership had the Shreek bit him a little harder. But it would be neater, and it would be deserved, and why the fuck is he the one who should get to survive the most dangerous parts of UNIT’s work? Bloody bloodsucking little piece of shit, not to be trusted with a microphone let alone a weapon, Jesus Christ what a fucking cu—

Kate takes a deep breath. Slowly in through the nose, then hold, one, two, three, four, and then exhale and release…

A sudden quiet falls and for a moment she thinks that all the mindfulness techniques have finally started paying their dividends, but then realises it is just that Minerva has stopped talking. Kate hasn’t caught a single word of her monologue but she can guess the contents. Irresponsible leadership, waste of government funding, UFOs are the ketamine of the masses, and so on.

‘Look, I can’t pretend that kind of work is for me…’ To her surprise, Minerva lays a hand on her shoulder. Kate does her best not to flinch. ‘But I am sure it must have been hard,’ Minerva says, ‘Parachuted into that role with so much to fix in the organisation.’

Parachuted! Kate wants to say. Into UNIT, her UNIT! But – deep breath – rebuilding was never an easy bloody job and sympathy has been a hot commodity for her recently. (Never employing yes-men for the sake of your personal and professional integrity is fine and good until nobody hesitates to tell you that you have fucked up. Even Christofer, with his puppy-dog crush and unturnable respect for hierarchy, had something to say to her after the whole incident.)

‘Thank you,’ she says grimly instead. Minerva is imagining a glass cliff and a parachute. Kate sees no reason to tell her she built the scaffolding to the top herself and jumped with no ripcord.

Mercifully, Minerva seems to sense that the conversation is over. They spend the rest of the walk in silence.

They arrive. It is cool and quiet inside the archives, and they are the only ones there. Minerva leads Kate to the shelf where Bentham’s head is usually kept, explaining conservation requirements in the hushed tones reserved for libraries everywhere.

She frowns as she pulls the box down and brings it to a bench. ‘Feels lighter than it should. You’re sure your gloves are on properly?’

Yes, Kate’s gloves are on properly. Yes, she knows how to follow proper lab procedure.

‘It should be just inside—’ Minerva almost drops the lid she has just carefully lifted away. ‘Where the fuck has it gone?’

There is no head in the box – not to resemble the artefact Minerva described. No strange red pallor, no scarred cheeks and thin lips, no piercing blue glass eyes.

Inside the box, there is nothing at all except a thin layer of a sticky pink substance coating every side.

....