"So you’re saying... this is connected to the End of the Void."
The Doctor took his time with that one.
He had spent most of the last few minutes standing with one hand tucked beneath the opposite arm, occasionally shifting his weight as though the featureless white floor could become uncomfortable if one remained in the same place long enough. At the mention of the End of the Void, his eyes wandered somewhere past my shoulder.
"Something to do with it," he said eventually.
That was less decisive than what he had implied earlier.
I let it pass.
We had already covered the broadest strokes. Another world. Twenty-seven years. Some higher existence apparently responsible for placing him here, along with a duty vague enough to involve the survival of the world waiting beyond this white space. He had also claimed that only he could open the capsules indiscriminately bringing people across—people who, according to him, would be necessary for whatever came next.
Because our world, Cyverse, was allegedly on the brink of collapse.
This was admittedly rather fresh for a story, however far-fetched it was. Points for originality, at least. Under any normal circumstances, I would have dismissed the whole thing as the ramblings of some crack addict tucked away in a dingy Downside alleyway.
The problem was the white space.
What exactly was it? Even the Doctor didn’t know. According to him, the same thing had happened when he retrieved his previous companion, and whatever this place was, he at least knew how to get us out of it.
The crack addict had somehow managed to put me inside his story.
I crouched and pressed two fingers against the white beneath my shoes.
Solid.
Or, more accurately, it resisted my fingers in a manner sufficiently similar to a solid surface that calling it one was useful for the moment. There was no texture, no visible seam, no temperature difference against my skin. When I dragged a fingernail across it, it produced neither a mark nor a sound.
Interesting.
I slipped the Lumen Stylus from my hip and rolled it once between my fingers. A thin yellow line illuminated along its body before opening into a narrow scanning lattice.
Nothing.
I tried again.
Still nothing.
No meaningful material return. No surface composition. No particulate reading. No detectable heat gradient beyond the Doctor and myself. Even the light was troublesome. There were no shadows beneath us, yet I could see him perfectly from every angle, as though illumination simply existed wherever sight required it.
"...What are you doing?"
"Shush. Be quiet for a minute." I snapped at the person who called himself the Doctor.
I squatted, unclipped the small metal cap from the Stylus and tossed it upwards.
It rose.
It fell.
Gravity, then. Approximately.
I caught it and threw it sideways harder.
The cap travelled exactly as I expected until distance should have made judging it difficult. There was no wall to strike, no shift in perspective, no change in the white behind it. I eventually lost sight of it.
A second later, something clicked against the floor behind me.
I turned.
The cap lay three metres away.
I stared at it.
Then at the direction I had thrown it.
"Well. This is... most interesting."
Then back at the cap.
I picked the cap up again and held it near my ear before snapping my fingers.
The sound was crisp.
No echo.
None whatsoever.
That was worse than silence. Echoes were not decorative. They were information. Even an apparently empty volume returned something eventually, assuming there was something for the pressure wave to meet.
Here, the sound simply ended. I glanced upwards. There was no ceiling.
I looked down again. No discernible floor beyond the fact that it supported us.
My glasses could establish the distance between myself and the Doctor. They could track his movement. They could even give me a reliable estimate of the angle of his shoulders. But they could not tell me how far the white continued.
No horizon. No depth cue. No boundary. A room without dimensions was not a room. A place with gravity but no measurable architecture was not particularly cooperative with the word place, either.
I straightened slowly.
"That’s unpleasant," I murmured.
If this isn't a Void phenomenon, it's certainly doing an excellent impression of one.
My eyes rested on the Doctor, who had been silently watching from a short distance away.
Hmm.
That was enough for the room. The more cooperative anomaly was standing a few metres away.
I turned my attention back to him.
His shoulders shifted almost imperceptibly, and one hand slipped from beneath the opposite arm before settling loosely by his side. Not defensive. Not quite relaxed either.
Well now.
There had already been several things in his explanation that bothered me.
Twenty-seven years was one.
His remarkably selective understanding of Cyverse was another. He could speak of the End of the Void as though he knew where the road eventually led, yet became vague whenever I nudged him towards the stones along that road. He knew enough to expect people from our world to appear inside capsules, but some of the context surrounding that knowledge seemed strangely... thin. Like somebody had taken a very large book, retained the chapter summaries and misplaced several hundred pages in between.
There were reasonable explanations for that. There were also unreasonable ones.
I preferred not to become attached to either until one began surviving contact with evidence. Yet I had already become attached to one conclusion without noticing.
Doctor.
My eyes narrowed slightly.
There it was again. I had been calling him that since I opened my eyes. Not because he introduced himself that way. He had, eventually, but that came after.
I had looked through the glass, seen his face, and known.
The Doctor.
No deliberation in the slightest. My mind had simply recognised him and moved on, as though the matter had never required proving in the first place. Which was precisely why it bothered me now.
Why had the Doctor changed so much from the man I remembered? His mannerisms, his speech, even his body.
I had already run a discreet scan with the Stylus while he was talking.
The result was unsettlingly clean.
Just flesh. Human flesh.
I stopped.
It was a question built upon an assumption.
Is he actually the Doctor?
There were circumstances in which recognition itself could be compromised. Cyverse—or, if I accepted his story, my former world—had developed no shortage of methods for deceiving the human mind.
Doctor.
I tested the title again in my own head.
It still felt right. That was the problem.
I tapped the Stylus lightly against my thigh.
"You still dislike the bells in Vesper, I assume?"
His attention returned to me.
For a moment, he simply looked.
Then his eyes narrowed. I had not expected that quite so quickly.
"What bells?"
"The ones above the eastern intake."
His gaze remained on my face rather than searching whatever fragments of memory he claimed to possess. A faint crease formed between his brows. Then, annoyingly, his attention dipped to my mouth.
"No."
I tilted my head. "No?"
"That’s fake."
Well now.
"What makes you say that?"
He shifted his weight, regarding me with the wary expression of a man who had just noticed the floor ahead might contain a trap.
"You’re smiling."
"And?"
"You do that when you think you’ve got someone."
I let the smile widen deliberately.
He pointed once.
"That."
"How terribly scientific."
He lowered his hand, but did not relax.
"You always looked way too happy whenever someone was about to say something stupid."
Interesting.
There had never been bells above Vesper’s eastern intake. I had chosen Vesper because he had already demonstrated familiarity with Lunallu before me, and because the facility was real enough that a partially informed impostor might accept an invented detail buried inside it.
Instead, he had ignored the detail and watched me.
A good countermeasure, for a fake.
"You remember my expressions," I said.
I smoothed the smile from my face.
"All right," I said. "No more games."
We stood in silence for a few seconds. I let the absence of a question become the question.
People disliked unstructured silence. But he, the Doctor stayed surprisingly calm. His gaze wandered briefly across the white, then down towards his hands. His right thumb rubbed once over the side of his index finger, catching on something dark beneath the nail. Blood.
"Do you remember the first time we met?"
He was quiet for longer than I expected.
"Not properly."
"Where was it?"
Another pause.
He shook his head.
"What did I say to you?"
His expression changed slightly.
"You accused me of interfering."
"I accuse everyone of interfering."
"You threatened to catalogue me as evidence."
I stopped.
That, unfortunately, sounded familiar.
"What colour was the room?"
"No idea."
"What case were we working?"
"Don't know."
"What did I drink?"
"Is there a point to this thought exercise, Charlotte?"
"What did I drink?" I repeated.
The Doctor sighed, and closed his eyes as if he was seriously recalling.
"...Not jasmine at least."
Oh.
"Why?"
"Because you hated it."
"Did I?"
"You said it tasted like perfume rinsed through curtains."
I said nothing. That was true. Worse, it was useless. Not the sort of information anyone would preserve deliberately if they were attempting to reconstruct a convincing identity. And it was the kind of unflattering information about me, with a particularly unkind description.
The Doctor opened his eyes again. He seemed to notice that I had stopped asking questions and waited, one hand still loosely folded beneath the other arm.
I paced once around him, fitting the answers together.
"Does my current contradictory existence bother you that much, great detective?"
Those words stopped my feet.
The Doctor had not moved. His gaze was lowered towards his hands again, thumb worrying at the dried blood beneath one fingernail as though the question had been tossed out with no particular importance attached to it.
I'll bite.
"Contradictory existence?"
A faint shrug.
"You've been walking around me for the last few minutes like I'm a crime scene."
I looked down. I was, in fact, standing slightly behind him.
There was no challenge in his voice. If anything, he sounded tired. He finally looked over his shoulder, met my eyes for perhaps a second, then glanced towards the Stylus tapping against my thigh.
"And every time I tell you something you don't like, that thing starts moving."
My hand stopped.
Well.
Perhaps I had been enjoying myself too much. For just a moment, I almost succumbed to my heart.
I resumed walking, slower this time.
"You're remarkably calm for someone who believes he is being wronged."
"Would getting nervous make you stop?"
"No."
"Then what's the point?"
I almost smiled.
"Most people object when their identity is questioned."
His expression shifted slightly at that. The Doctor turned properly to face me again.
"If I'm not the Doctor, then who else would I be? I don't have a motive to lie to you."
I stopped in front of him.
"You're assuming the alternative knows he's lying."
His expression changed. Only a little at first. The tiredness remained, but his attention sharpened behind it. I tapped the Stylus once against my leg.
"A counterfeit does not require malicious intent to be counterfeit. Give someone your face, your memories, your habits and enough internal continuity to believe he woke up as himself this morning, and he would become a continued existence."
The Doctor didn't give me a rebuttal to that.
"You could answer every question with complete sincerity and still be wrong about the most fundamental premise."
"That I'm me?"
"Precisely."
He looked away from me then, somewhere into the featureless distance. His arms had loosened at some point during the conversation. One hand hung by his side while the other rubbed slowly across his knuckles.
I watched rather than filling the silence.
Eventually, he spoke.
"Wouldn't that make testing memories pointless?"
I blinked.
Not a bad question.
"Not pointless."
"If whoever you're talking about has them."
"Possibly has them."
He nodded faintly, accepting the correction without comment.
Then he went quiet again. I could almost see him picking at the problem. Not quickly. Certainly not with the sort of manic branching I knew my own thoughts were capable of. He seemed to need time to turn an idea over before deciding which part of it bothered him.
"But if the copy doesn't know it's a copy..." His brow drew together. "And it remembers being the original..."
...
"How would the original prove he's not one?"
My smile returned before I could prevent it.
I moved.
The Lumen Stylus sharpened into a narrow Photon edge as I stepped around his shoulder and drove it towards the junction beneath his skull, directly over the upper cervical spine.
He did not move.
What?
I stopped the edge a hair's breadth from his skin.
His expression had barely changed at all until after the Stylus was already there.
For one moment I simply stared.
Confidence?
No.
That would have required him to process what I was doing first.
Then stupidity?
A depressingly viable alternative.
"...Charlotte?"
I withdrew the Stylus by a few centimetres, though I kept the edge active.
"You've just discovered why high-fidelity Doppels became such a nuisance."
His eyes shifted towards the light hovering beside his neck.
"And apparently," I added, "you're probably not one."
"Probably...?"
"Unfortunately, my other explanation is that you simply have terrible reflexes."
"..."
"Doppels possess unusually strong preservation responses. ...Well. You pass that test, for now."
He remained very still while I stepped back.
After all, Doppels were artificial organisms. Their synthetic genetic frameworks could imitate ordinary biology, but imitation came with structural compromises. Preservation systems compensated for vulnerabilities that natural organisms handled through redundant biological processes.
"Even one that sincerely believes it's the original?" he asked.
"Especially one like that."
I deactivated the edge.
He stared at me for a moment, then lifted one hand and rubbed the back of his neck where I had nearly put the Stylus through it.
"You're just as crazy as I remember. Haah... it takes a lot of bravado to recruit an old friend."
I smiled.
"Old friend?"
He looked at me, then away again.
"That's what you were, wasn't it?"
Were.
His shoulders sagged slightly, as if he was exhausted.
"Charlotte... I already told you. Some things stick."
I watched him rub the back of his neck again, still irritated by the spot where the Stylus had nearly touched him. He did not seem particularly interested in defending the wording. If anything, he looked as though he regretted giving me another thread to pull.
Naturally, I pulled it.
"Do you remember becoming my friend?"
His hand stopped. A few seconds passed.
Then, instead of answering, he looked at me.
"Existence precedes essence."
I blinked. ...What did that matter to the subject at hand?
The man coughed awkwardly, as if realising that it had not stuck with me.
"The point is... maybe you're asking it backwards."
He took another few seconds before continuing.
"If I don't remember the exact day we became friends, then I can't give you the scene you want. I can't tell you what room we were in, what you were wearing, or whatever clever thing you said that made me decide I liked you."
"..."
"But I know what kind of person you are. You don't leave things alone when they don't make sense. So maybe I can't remember becoming your friend. But if I still know that much about you, and I still want to keep talking to you after you nearly put a hole through my neck..."
The corner of his mouth lifted.
"Isn't that enough sincerity, friend?"
My smile returned, carefully this time.
"That quote, you probably heard it from someone else."
He scratched the side of his cheek.
...
I still had not decided.
The Doctor glanced away for a moment, then towards the endless white around us.
"Anyway... if you're done trying to figure out whether I'm secretly a fake version of myself, there's something outside that's probably more important."
There was no impatience in the words.
Just weight.
His posture had changed. His shoulders had lowered, but there was tension sitting beneath them now.
"People are dying out there," he continued. "A lot of them."
The humour had gone.
The Doctor swept his hair back, and looked into the distance, wistfully.
"Something's spreading. They call it the Z-Virus. People get bitten, turn violent, stop acting human. Fast. Sometimes within minutes."
He looked back at me, with a look of conviction.
"Charlotte. You always talked about chasing the truth because it was exciting. But I remember there was more to it than that. Your father... you wanted justice for him."
...This man...
"I know you can help me. I know you want to help me."
I watched him in silence.
The Doctor seemed to take that as permission to continue. He looked away again, one hand lifting to rub absently at the back of his neck.
"And if you ever get bored of helping me with all the small stuff..."
He paused.
A faint smile appeared.
"...finding supplies, figuring out where things landed, telling me which piece of weird technology is going to explode in my face..."
My own smile threatened to widen.
"Then maybe you can work on the fun part."
"The fun part?"
He glanced back at me, clearly expecting me to take his bait.
"Why this happened."
His expression had gone thoughtful again.
"Whether the virus is natural. Whether somebody made it. Whether someone knew before everyone else did. Whether there's some company, government lab, cult, billionaire, whatever, sitting behind all of this."
A small shrug.
"Or maybe there isn't. I don't know. In this world, I'm just a simple civilian."
He... isn't lying.
Then...
"And if that's still too easy for you..."
The corner of his mouth lifted again.
"You could always find a cure."
If it was only the provocations, I could admit one thing.
Whatever he was, calling him Doctor no longer felt like a mistake.
A challenge.
That was what he was offering me.
"You assume I would find that entertaining?"
The Doctor looked at me for a moment.
Then his eyes dipped towards the Stylus at my hip.
"I wonder. The world outside, it may be challenging even for you."
...Doctor, you really are something.
For once, there was nothing in his answer I could immediately pull apart.
And... If there was a pattern behind the outbreak, I wanted to see it. If there was a lie buried beneath this world of the infected. If there was a cure no one had managed to reach yet... My fingers tightened once around the Stylus.
That would be interesting.
"One condition."
My last act of defiance, to the strange Doctor of this new world.
"I reserve the right to investigate you."
He stared at me for a second. Then the corner of his mouth moved.
"Anytime."
"Without complaints."
That gave him pause.
"... If I'm not subject to some weird experiment again, sure."
Again, huh.
I smiled brightly at that retort.
"Deal!"
[Recruitment Result]
★★★★ Charlotte Holmes
[Confirm Recruitment Results?]
[Yes]
The white around us had already begun to change.
Only then did I look at the hand he had been holding out towards me.
Perhaps I could afford to stop arguing with my heart for a moment.
Doctor.
For now, that was enough.
I placed my hand in his. Warm.
That simple sensation loosened something I had been keeping carefully suppressed since I woke.
I had missed this.
A fragment surfaced with it.
Ten years. The Doctor missing. And a vague, unpleasant memory of a version of me who'd known this, staring down lifelessly on the floor.
Then it was gone again.
A troublesome memory.
His fingers closed around mine.
"Are you ready to step out into the new world?"
A theatrical question.
I looked up at him and smiled, this time without quite as much calculation behind it.
"Naturally. Lead the way, Doctor~"
[Affinity has increased by 20.]
Happiness is surely contagious.
The Doctor had a wide smile too.