Dr. Lugnar, Miss Watkins, Lexi, and I followed the Doctor down the hallway.
"Wait!" Lugnar shouted just before the Doctor took a left right turn. "We have to go left."
"Why?" the Doctor questioned. "The way out is this way."
But Dr. Lugnar had already started off down in the opposite direction, and we had no choice but to come along with him.
I took Lexi's hand as we ran. She gazed in awe at everything we passed like she had never seen it before. Then I realized that she had probably never been out of her psychic-glass room. It surprised me that even to a genius, a water fountain could be found fascinating.
“Have you ever been outside of your room...?” I asked her.
We kept following Dr. Lugnar as he turned another corner.
“No,” Lexi replied. “And even though I know all about everything here, it still amazes me to experience them in person.”
A few minutes later, Lugnar had led us all to a large metal door at the end of a dimmed hallway.
“Now,” said the Doctor, watching the older scientist try in vain to open the door. “There’s something off about this.”
“What do you mean?” asked Andrea worriedly.
“Lisa! Have you noticed anything unusual?”
I thought a moment, my eyes fixed on Dr. Lugnar, who was now pushing with all his might on the locked door. “We haven’t seen any Judoon,” I realized, looking up at the Doctor, now grinning proudly at me.
“Exactly! Now, why might that be, hm?” This time the Doctor aimed his question at Miss Watkins.
She looked up. “Oh, that’s because the guards wouldn’t have let them through.”
“No, no,” said the Doctor, raising his head in exasperation. “The Judoon have guns that can fry a human in a second.”
Lexi looked quite dismayed at this, squeezing her eyes shut and biting her lip.
“Any ideas?” the Doctor persisted. “Anyone?”
The little girl gasped, opening her eyes and taking a step back, catching her balance. “They’re coming.”
“What?” the Doctor asked.
“She must have hacked into the CCTV waves and seen where they are!” exclaimed Lugnar.
“Yeah I gathered that much.” The Doctor hopped over to the door and drew out his sonic screwdriver. He started sonicing the door with a series of short, then long buzzes of blue energy.
“They’re nearly here!” Lexi squeezed my hand.
“Come on...” urged the Doctor, hitting the door squarely with his palm. “Open sesame!”
The door burst open with a hiss, and we all ran through just as two rhinoceroses rounded the corner, shouting for us to halt.
“Oh my God,” I said, looking around at the cavernous room we had stepped into.
The ceiling was as tall as a cathedral, and extended as long as a warehouse would. Rows and rows of tall glass tanks filled with water towered over our small group of five. I gasped when I realized what was in the swirling cylinders.
“Oh...” said the Doctor, eyes growing wide. “There are lots and lots of Lexies...”
In every one of the huge tanks was a single gilded body, floating in the fluid, hooked up with wires to a computer stuck to a small receptacle covered with buttons and the readings of the other Lexies’ heart rate.
Dr. Lugnar strode quickly over to a large screen and began typing hastily on the keypad.
“What are you doing...?” asked the Doctor, his voice getting lower.
“You said that those aliens were coming to shut us down,” Lugnar stated.
“Never said that.”
“I’m not stupid,” said the scientist. “If they’re coming to shut us down, they might shut down wrong, thus destroying all the data Miss Watkins and I have collected. Even if they destroy what specimens we have now, I am determined to start again.”
The Doctor’s face grew graver as Dr. Lugnar proceeded to power off. “Lugnar...” he warned.
Unnoticed by the rest of us, Lexi had wandered over to the nearest tank. It had a young woman, maybe around twenty years old, suspended in the liquid, her blonde hair floating about her serenely.
“Andrea, be ready to shut down,” commanded Dr. Lugnar.
She walked over obediently and started pressing buttons and looking up at the screen’s readings.
“Dr. Lugnar, stop now.” The Doctor glared at the two as they proceeded to ignore him.
“Lisa...” Lexi whispered. “She’s moving...”
I glanced over at Lexi. She was standing under the tall cylindric tank, gazing at the other golden woman. At first I didn’t notice what Lexi meant. But the fingers of the specimen twitched. Her wrist jerked. And soon her whole arm was shaking, a look of deep distress on her perfect face.
“Lugnar, what the hell are you doing?” I demanded.
“I have to shut every tank down individually,” he explained. “That makes it safer, and harder for... other people to destroy our work.”
Suddenly the woman in the tank’s face contorted into shear pain. Her mouth opened pouring bubbles out in a silent scream. Then she went still, and the light eluminating the water turned off.
“What have you done!?” screached Lexi, loosing her cool for the first time I had seen her. She ran over to Dr. Lugnar and began hitting him with her fists and kicking at his shins. “You killed her! You hurt her! Did you not feel her pain? She was screaming and you killed her!”
“Oh...” the Doctor said, realizing something. “You’re overloading their brain with computer waves, overwhelming their consciousness. You’re frying their brain’s nervous system.”
“You make it sound so terrible, Dr. Smith,” growled Lugnar.
What happened next happened so quickly, like a blur.
Lexi heaved herself at Dr. Lugnar and pushed him over onto the large computer. His back hit the keyboard, pressing buttons and flipping switches and the computer’s screen turned red- a warning. Lexi fell backwards onto the floor and screamed. The scream got higher and higher pitched and soon, I had to clamp my hands over my ears. Then the tanks shattered, and I realized the the screeching had broken them because of its high frequency.
"What just happened?" I shouted, aiming my question at the Doctor.
He started quickly typing away on the buzzing computer, ignoring the screams coming from the little girl. "Oh no..."
"What? What's wrong?"
The Doctor turned toward me, his deep brown eyes full of grim worry. "Lisa. The barriers around her brain have been lifted. Lexi has the whole internet flooding her brain."
Lexi's shrieking stopped, and Dr. Lugnar and Andrea slowly pulled their hands away from their ears.
"What's happened?" Andrea asked.
But before anyone could explain, Lexi began to speak, babbling, saying random things.
"Theory of relativity- one-thousand eight-hundred fifty-five point two- bum bum bum bum-" Suddenly, her blue eyes shot to the Doctor, full of fear. "Doctor. You're the Doctor! Doctor Doctor Doctor-" She gasped and grabbed her head. "The light. The dark. Darkness. Weeping weeping weeping... Fear the angels- The walls will crumble and there will be no more--" Lexi screamed, louder than ever, and went still.
The Doctor's look darkened as Lugnar bent down.
"There's a pulse..." Lugnar sighed, and there was a moment of pure silence except from the dripping of water of the tanks that had broken.
I looked around the cavernous room. Golden bodies fallen from the glass containers, now lying on the floor sopping wet. The Doctor was right. There were lots and lots of Lexies. There could be hundreds in this room. Maybe thousands.
Suddenly my thinking was disturbed by a screeching, metallic noise from the door by which we had come in.
"The Judoon!" I cried.
More grating sounds from the door, and then it was vaporized. Yes, vaporized. And standing where the door should have been was a rhino pointing a gun at the four of us . Wearing leather, standing upright, and he began to speak in english.
"Who is the owner of this facility?" he demanded in a harsh voice.
"I am," stated Dr. Lugnar, bravely stepping toward the alien.
"Are you the creator of the Lystrovian-Human hybrid wished to use to defend your solar system?"
Lugnar's face grew red, not daring to look at the Doctor. "Y-yes..."
"Then you will be incinerated." The Judoon raised his gun again, and I saw that there were three more behind him.
"No no no no no!" said the Doctor, getting in front of Lugnar and holding his hands up. "Wait... just a moment." He turned to Lugnar. "Lystrovian. From the planet Lystrovia-Aurum."
"I... I didn't know," he stammered. "Really, I didn't."
"Then how did you find Lystrovian cells to make a hybrid?"
Lugnar paused, and took a deep breath. "The dead body of a golden-skinned woman was brought to me by a team of scientists. They said they'd found it lying in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and I became excited. I knew it was alien, nothing of this Earth, so I began to study it. Before long, I realized that I couldn't just let this wonderful thing decompose and be forgotten. So I started to work. I took cell samples and began making a hybrid, part... Lystrovian, as you call it, and part human. It was a success, and I was able to grow some more quickly. I then got the idea of putting a computer chip in their brain, strong enough to pick up waves from outer space. Lexi was the first one; smart, strong, and the perfect weapon to defend our galaxy."
The Doctor's face was stony as he looked at the little gold girl lying at his feet, between him and the Judoon. He looked up suddenly, and began talking to the Judoon. "Now, Judoon. Article twenty-seven of the Shadow Proclamation states that 'An individual will be put to trial for a crime known and understood by that individual. Ignorance is not to be punished.' This man here had no idea what he was dealing with, therefore... ignorant. Ignorant of what he had really created."
The Judoon stood still, impassive, but thinking. He hesitated, and put his vaporizing-gun back in its holster, but his hand (hand-type-thing...) was still hovering over it. The alien turned toward the others of his kind and shouted, "Back to the ship. Withdraw." And with that, the rhino-aliens retreated back down the hall and out of site.
The Lystrovian-Humans began to wake up, confused, wet, and not a little bit scared. Andrea and I helped them by giving them white hospital clothes and towels to dry off. We answered their questions, too.
What's going on?
Who are you?
What is going to happen to us?
Who am I?
Andrea explained to me that since they had been grown quickly in the bio-tanks without knowledge of the outside world (unlike Lexi, who had been cared for like a normal child her whole life), they would not know about anything until they could access the internet.
"But that's never going to happen," stated the Doctor, who was standing near by, leaning against the dead remains of the large computer.
"What do you mean?" asked Andrea, eyes narrowing.
"When Lexi pushed Dr. Lugnar back against the computer, she accidentally triggered the computer chips to lock down, turning themselves off. That's what was hurting her so bad; why she was screaming. The internet had poured into her brain before it shut off."
"Then what do we do?" Andrea cried. "They don't know who or what or where they are, and the can't learn about it unless the chip in their head enables them to--"
"A school," I said, hardly thinking. "You can't make more, you're computer's destroyed. Turn this place into a school for the Lystrovian-Humans, with you and Lugnar and Lexi as the teachers."
Andrea frowned, thinking about what I said.
"Lisa," said the Doctor. "You. Are brilliant."
I smiled at him and sighed.
"We should talk to Lugnar about it first," stated Andrea.
"Talk to me about what?" the scientist asked, walking up behind her. He was holding Lexi's hand, but she broke loose and staggered over to me.
"Hello Lisa," she said, hugging me.
"Hi, Lexi." I hugged her back. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. I can't get the internet, but I'm still a genius."
I laughed and hugged her tighter and looked up at the Doctor. From the look in his eyes, I knew it was time to leave. I let go of Lexi and crouched down so I was level with her piercing blue eyes. "Lexi... I..."
"I know, Lisa..." she said, smiley understandingly. "I know what you are." She turned to the Doctor. "You too, Doctor."
For some reason, this sent chills up my spine. It might have been that she said 'what' instead of 'who', but before I could place it, the Doctor took my hand.
"We really should be going," he said to Lugnar and Andrea. "Really." He scratched his head. "You'll figure it out, Lugnar. Just do the right thing."
"Will I see you again..." Lexi said slowly.
"Maybe," I answered, smiling and narrowing my eyes. "You know what I am. Kind of a crazy life, I could end up anywhere."
