Sergeant Cameron offered Rose and the Doctor guns, an offer that the Doctor swiftly declined on both of their behalves, much to Rose’s chagrin.

“I think I’d feel safer with a gun,” she grumbled.

The Doctor gave her a look. “Do you even know how to use one?”

She shrugged. “No, but-”

“Then I’d feel safer if you didn’t.”

“Oh, how hard can it be? Point; shoot; reload; repeat.”

The Doctor sighed. “It’s the folly of your entire species; putting your faith in a little mechanism that expatriates metal nuggets faster than the speed of sound.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Doctor.”

They set off with a young soldier in the lead; Rose had heard the captain call him Private Doherty. He was carrying a handheld computer that seemed to be telling him where to go. After him came the rest of the soldiers. Captain Hamilton and Sergeant Cameron brought up the rear, behind the Doctor and Rose.

Traversing the jagged landscape didn’t get any easier. Soon the group was spread out over several hundred yards, and Rose noticed there was no one in earshot.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you, Doctor?” she asked.

He frowned. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, it sounded like you knew the place when Sergeant Cameron mentioned its name; what was it he called it again? Urabus? Arabis?”

“Erebus; but that’s not what it was called when I was last here.”

She smiled. “And how long ago was that?”

“Oh, about ten thousand years.”

She froze for a second. “Okay; tell me everything.”

“Erebus is just your name for this world; it’s a very unaffectionate moniker, taken from one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology. Since the dawn of time humans have taken it upon themselves to name other stars and planets; never with any regard for those who might already live there. When mankind became a space-faring race, it arrogantly assumed it could travel to these worlds and keep calling them by the names given to them by human astronomers. I could tell you about wars your five-thousand-year-old species will fight trying to make civilisations a hundred times older adopt names you gave them in the mid-twentieth century. But then I’d just be getting side tracked; Erebus, you see, is one of the exceptions.

“This planet was first spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008; it made headlines on Earth for being the furthest-most planet from Earth that the telescope had spotted. At the time, it was tagged D8-III by NASA; and that’s what it remained for over one-hundred-and-fifty years, until the first manned exploration mission to this sector landed on the planet and decided to give it a better name. It was the privilege of those early deep-space crews to name unnamed planets, and with a typical survey mission lasting eighteen months, in which time they’d visit perhaps ninety different worlds, well, you can understand why they had their little jokes.”

“Naming this place after a river in Hell?” Rose snorted derisively. “I don’t think that was a joke, Doctor; I can see why they did it.”

The Doctor shook his head. “Erebus wasn’t like this when they landed; there was none of this effluence here then. But what they found was a dead world, a completely lifeless world. They couldn’t find a single plant or animal; they couldn’t even detect any native microbes. If you catch a cold on Erebus, chances are you brought it with you. Erebus itself is completely sterile; it’s just a rock.”

“Was it like that when you came before?”

“No,” the Doctor murmured, frowning. “Did you manage to catch a glimpse of the soil in that crater after their shuttlecraft exploded, Rose?”

“Yeah; it was black, like...”

He glanced over at her. “Yes? Like?”

“Well, like burnt toast.”

“You’ve got it.” The Doctor inhaled noisily. “The dirt’s completely irradiated; all the carbon in it has been incinerated; and it’s been that way for millennia.”

Rose sucked her lips in. “What happened?”

“Remember I said Erebus was one of those exceptions; one of those planets that human beings could name because nobody living on it had? Well, that isn’t entirely accurate; because whilst there was nobody alive by the time the first humans landed, that doesn’t mean there never had been. But I suppose we can forgive them for not knowing; any trace of the alien civilisation that once thrived on this planet had been gone five thousand years by the time homo sapiens first stood upright.”

“So there used to be people here?” She looked around.

He nodded. “Billions of ‘em.”

“What were they called?” Rose asked wistfully.

The Doctor gestured with his hand. “Their alphabet had seventy-two letters, including nineteen unpronounceable vowel sounds I could spend ten thousand years of my own time trying to translate into English; so I can’t tell you what they called themselves, but I called them the Thrukstones. Thruk is what they called their sun, or what I thought they called it; that’s what it sounded like, anyway. When I saw it written down the word was about forty letters long; I didn’t count.”

Rose laughed. “They should have learnt English.”

He gave her a look; she seemed to realise what she’d just suggested.

“Sorry,” she said. “Go on; why Thrukstones?”

“Ah.” He rubbed the back of his scalp and chuckled awkwardly. “Now you’ll have to promise you won’t laugh; I suppose like those first space-explorers from your planet, I got bored just naming people after their planet and bunging an -ian at the end. Denebian, Venutian, Martian; you get the idea. Anyway, for some reason I’d been to Earth in the 1970s, and for the life of me I can’t remember why, but I had ended up watching television, and seeing this show called ‘The Flintstones’.”

Rose burst out laughing, which the soldiers heard; they turned round to look.

“I swear, Rose; my Thrukstone host looked just like Barney Rubble!”

This made Rose laugh even harder.

He sighed. “Yes; it was a pity when they vaporised themselves.”

Suddenly Rose stopped laughing and stared at him.

“They were such an advanced civilisation,” he went on. “Their culture was based around their dreams; they believed in the metaphysical; transcendence; all those things that were popular for about ten years on your planet before people remembered their love of money again. They had pioneered this technique that allowed you to record your dreams, or go into other people’s; you could hold entire parties in your head, and it beat the hell out of any psychotropic there is on your world.”

“Was it deliberate, them vaporising themselves?”

The Doctor snorted. “It always is.”

“What happened?”

The Doctor shook his head. “It’s complicated. Great spiritual communities had developed around different interpretations of dreams. People migrated according to their beliefs, so there was some religious nationalism. Some were fundamentalist, and took any refutation of their interpretation as an assault on their faith. One such group accused another such group of acquiring powerful weapons to attack them, so they attacked first on the principle of pre-emptive self-defence. It turned out the other group did have the weapons; and they used them; and everyone died.”

Rose didn’t say anything for a bit.

“Doesn’t sound complicated to me,” she said finally.

The Doctor sighed. “Well, the first group would never have attacked the second group if they had truly thought the second group had those weapons; they knew it would be the end of the world. They only attacked because they thought they didn’t have the weapons; they were just using weapons as an excuse.”

“An excuse for what?” Rose asked slowly.

“Wiping out all those who disagreed with their beliefs.”

“Oh,” was all Rose said.

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes.

Private Doherty was leading them on a path that took them around the side of one of the mountains of scrap metal, which was a steep, hard trek. Rose and the Doctor almost managed to catch up with the soldiers who’d been ahead of them. Rose noticed that Captain Hamilton and Sergeant Cameron were also catching up with her and the Doctor. Once they were heading downhill, the gaps increased again.

“How’s your ankle now?” the Doctor asked.

“Oh, it’s okay if I keep my weight off it,” Rose replied.

“I can’t imagine it’s much further.”

“Doctor, what was that other thing you mentioned?”

He grinned. “The Io Accord?”

“Yeah; what’s that?”

“It’s the informal name for the Second Amendment to the Universal Definition and Protection of Sentience Act of 2182, Rose.”

She screwed up her nose. “You what?”

“Human rights; for robots.”

“Okay; explain,” she said slowly.

The Doctor took a deep breath. “In the mid-twenty-second century, scientists from Earth built the first robot that was capable of creative thinking. All the robots that preceded it were merely capable of doing what they were told to do; they could learn to do things they weren’t programmed to do, but they couldn’t discover it on their own. Creative thinking allowed the Adam-series droids to think outside the box, as it were: they could learn without any instruction, internal or external.

“This was a major landmark in the development of artificial intelligence. Now you had machines that were capable of appreciating a painting, or a piece of music, without being pre-programmed with a database of art criticism.”

“I bet they were a real help round the house,” Rose said.

“Very funny; but I don’t think you truly appreciate what I mean by creative thinking. You see, what always set humans apart from robots was that your brain wasn’t a logical, mathematical processing unit. Sure, machines could do everything your average human could do; and do it better, without mucking it up. But at the same time, they couldn’t do anything your average human couldn’t: they couldn’t think up anything new, because even though they were learning things they hadn’t been programmed with, they weren’t really thinking; they were just recording.

“Are you following me so far, Rose?”

“Yep, I get it; robots were just glorified VCRs.”

He frowned. “What’s a VCR?”

“Doesn’t matter; where does this Io Accord come into it?”

“Not so fast. The Adam-series droids weren’t just capable of appreciating art, they were also capable of making their own; and I don’t mean just producing a photo-identical copy of a landscape. One Adam-series droid became a notable pioneer of the twenty-second century resurgent Surrealist movement; by the time of the Io Accord, he had a painting entitled ‘End of Wasp Summer’ in one of the Saatchi galleries.”

“Oh, I think I’ve been there,” Rose said.

“No; this Saatchi gallery was on the Moon,” the Doctor went on. “Anyway, the point is: there’s nothing mathematical, or scientific, or logical, or rational about art, which is why it was beyond most robots. What made the Adam-series droids different was their polylinear parallel processing capability. Most robots could only ‘think’ in a straight line: do this, then this, then that. The Adam-series droids were capable of thinking about more than one thing at the same time. The human brain is chaotic compared to a machine’s, but it is out of that chaos that you make new connections between unconnected things, that pre-existing ideas collide and form new ones. That’s why humans are artistic, spiritual, philosophical. The Adam-series’ brains mimicked that chaos, and out of the chaos came creative thinking.

“Are you still with me, Rose?”

Rose bit her lip. “I think so; you’re saying that the old robots were more like microwaves; they could cook your dinner, but they couldn’t make up their own recipe; whilst the new robots could do both?”

The Doctor gave her a funny look. “Well, I don’t think that’s an entirely appropriate analogy, but I suppose there’s some understanding there.”

“What do you expect, Doctor? I’m hungry!”

He chuckled. “Fair enough. Anyway, the real breakthrough came when one of the Adam-series droids turned his hand to robotic engineering. Here you have a machine that was not only capable of thinking in terms of step-by-step computer code, but was also able to think beyond the limits of his own design; creative thinking in its truest form. And, before long, he had built his first prototype, which was basically a redesign of his self. This new type of droid, a robot designed by another robot, was far beyond what human scientists were working on. It set a new benchmark in artificial intelligence: this droid had multi-level as well as polylinear parallel processing; it had no programming beyond basic input sensors; it learnt everything.”

“Like a baby,” Rose said under her breath.

The Doctor’s eyes sparkled. “Just like a child, yes. If the Adam-series droid had been capable of feeling it, no doubt he would have been surprised by what happened next. It was a completely unexpected development: the new model reacted better to him that it did any of the other Adam-series droids, or the human scientists who were also working on the project. It had developed an attachment to him; and as it developed, it began to have other feelings, too. It was the first machine ever to experience emotions. Nobody taught it. It just happened naturally.”

“That’s... wow.” Rose stared in disbelief.

“The Adam-series droid, her father, called his creation the Eve-series.”

Rose snorted. “Oh my god; was it trying to be funny?”

“Well, the Adam-series droids could paint like Caravaggio or Dali, compose like Beethoven or Hendrix, and design machines like no human ever could; I think we can forgive them for never getting the hang of being humorous. Indeed, it wasn’t until the Eve-series designed the Abraham-series that you got robots being funny. There was a famous Abraham-series stand-up comic in the 2170s; I’m trying to remember one of his jokes. Oh, yes: why did the Adam-series droid cross the road?”

Rose didn’t say anything; she didn’t think she was meant to.

“Go on,” the Doctor said. “Why did the Adam-series droid cross the road?”

She frowned. “Um, I don’t know; why?”

“To learn the meaning of the chicken joke!” The Doctor roared with laughter.

Everyone looked round; Rose felt a bit embarrassed.

“Is that when they got human rights?”

“Pretty much,” the Doctor said, still smirking. “In 2181, an incongruous alliance of left-wing politicians and theological activists forced a law through the world parliament granting certain rights to any droid that could claim it was a sentient being: namely, the right to exist. You could no longer dismantle robots.”

“What? Even if they were worn out?”

“Nope; had to be repaired.”

“What if a better model came along?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Nope; you could get a new model droid in addition to the one you already had, but woe betide if you tried to replace it.”

Rose frowned. “Sounds a bit crazy to me, Doctor.”

“Yes, well, you weren’t the only one to think so; hence why the act had to be revised a year later. Certain governments felt threatened by robots getting their independence, and found the robotics corporations all too willing to do anything to side-step the law; they thought it would finish them. They exploited the wording of the new act and programmers hard-coded into new droids the complete inability to claim sentience. This trick worked particularly well on the Eve-series, who had no other programming; now they could never learn a sense of individuality.”

“Okay; now that sounds cruel,” Rose said.

The Doctor nodded. “The world parliament reconvened for a convention to debate the issue on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter; hence the Io Accord: it granted rights to any droid who met the agreed criteria for sentience, whether the robots claimed sentience or not. All of the Adam-series and Eve-series droids were covered, as were many different types of robot that had preceded them.

“So, there you go: a short history of artificial intelligence; the end.”

“Well, not quite.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah; how does Erebus come into it?”

“Ah.” His voice fell in pitch. “Well; I won’t bore you with the bureaucratic details, but in short, the law only passed by one vote the first time, in 2181; on Io a year later, the amended act failed its first reading, losing by seven votes. Rather than have the law vetoed in its entirety, stripping droids of existing rights, those pushing for it submitted to a concession: namely, that a get-out-clause be written into the act regarding the ownership contract between human and robot. Two of the rights set out for robots included the right to exist, plus freedom of movement. That meant you couldn’t destroy your droid, neither could you shut it up somewhere when you’d finished with it. However, if you managed to find a way to dispose of a robot without infringing any of its rights, then the Io Accord couldn’t stop you.

“One of the other things discussed at the convention was a motion put forward by an Adam-series droid, who’d gone as an activist rather than in any representative capacity. He proposed that an uncolonised, unpopulated planet be set aside as a sort of haven for robots. They would have the run of the place and would have a certain degree of autonomy from Earth. Funnily enough, when it went before the vote, half the delegates who voted against the Accord voted for it.

“Now, why do you think that was?”

“Um?” Rose shrugged.

“Think about it: the concession to the amendment to the Io Accord established that you could dispose of your robot as long as you didn’t infringe its rights; and now someone had had the bright idea of creating a world just for robots.”

Rose gasped. “They can dump them there!”

“Not just a pretty face.” The Doctor pinched her cheek.

“Yeah; but how does Erebus come into it?”

The Doctor’s smile fell. “Okay; perhaps I should take that back.”

“Huh?” she went.

“Rose, that world was Erebus!”

Rose slowed down. She looked round and could barely believe it, but at the same time, she couldn’t forget her close encounter with that giant robot.

“From the looks of things, I’d wager we’re about twenty years after the Io Accord,” the Doctor was saying. “Which would put us around the turn of the twenty-third century.” He smiled. “Happy New Year, Rose.”

“But where are all the others?”

He frowned. “Others?”

“The other robots; you said this was a haven, and a dump.”

“Yes; a vastly overpopulated one, too.”

“So where are they?”

He gave her a funny look and tossed his hand up. “We’re surrounded by them, Rose; what have you been looking at all this time?”

“I...I...” She didn’t understand.

But then, gradually, she began to realise.

It was the finger that gave it away. She looked down to check her laces and saw a robotic finger between her feet. She picked it up and stared at it.

“Looks like an Adam-series,” the Doctor said.

Rose quickly threw it away. It landed with a clang, bounced off another metal surface and then disappeared between a couple of severed robot legs. Suddenly, everything she could see looked like it was a bit of broken robot: this bit of junk was a metal spinal column; those bits of junk were pneumatic tendons.

“It’s all robots,” she breathed.

“Yes,” the Doctor said.

“But there’s so many of them; we’re twenty feet off the ground!”

He nodded. “Yes; like I was saying, I reckon this lot’s been accumulating for several decades; metal doesn’t decompose and there’s nobody to remove it.”

“Why did they destroy each other?” she cried.

“What makes you think they did?”

“I...I...” she stammered.

“Not even the Abraham-series, second-generation robots designed and built by robots, were able to sort out the power issue; just like humans, droids can’t run on empty. When your batteries run down, you better be near a recharge socket. That said, I’m sure there was some fighting; I bet new arrivals became prey for robots who had been here a long time and were getting a bit desperate for a new power core.”

Rose started walking again. “Were they all dumped?”

The Doctor sighed. “No; not to begin with. Some of those who came of their own accord probably imagined they could still make a haven out of it.”

“But they don’t come here anymore.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Not of their own accord; no.”

Rose turned on him. “But isn’t that against the Io Accord? Doesn’t it say they have a right to exist? Sending them here is killing them!”

“That’s the loophole in the Io Accord, though; the much-exploited technicality that ensured it got passed: they don’t die because they’re sent here; they die because when they do get here, they run out of power. As long as you don’t do anything that explicitly causes a droid to cease to exist, you’re not breaking the Io Accord.”

Rose kept shaking her head, but she didn’t say anything for almost a minute; she felt like she was walking over someone’s grave. She felt sick.

“I hate it here, Doctor; I want to leave.”

The Doctor and Rose walked in silence for a while. The Doctor noticed they were going uphill again. Captain Hamilton had said the observation team’s landing zone was four kilometres away; surely they must be nearly there, he thought.

“Who was it that they thought we were?” Rose asked.

“What? The Syndicate? I don’t know.”

“They’re terrorists,” said a voice behind them.

The Doctor and Rose looked round. Captain Hamilton and Sergeant Cameron had managed to catch up, and were only a dozen yards behind now.

“They’re a breakaway faction of the liberal tub-thumpers who created this godforsaken place in the first place,” he went on gruffly.

The Doctor and Rose exchanged glances.

“They don’t like what this place has become so have taken to targeting those that have to work round here; most of them are droids themselves.”

“What is it they want?” the Doctor asked.

“If you ask me, they want to take control of Earth; they think they’re so damn superior to us organic life-forms. Sergeant Cameron saved your hides by pointing out that if you were Syndicate, you wouldn’t have totalled that droid.”

The Doctor thought Cameron looked embarrassed by his captain.

“Look, don’t go feeling sorry for any poor robot you see here,” Captain Hamilton continued. “You’ve only met one and it wanted to kill you; that’s what they’re all like, given half the chance. So don’t even give them a quarter.”

“Actually, Captain, that droid wasn’t going to kill Rose,” said the Doctor.

Hamilton snorted. “Is that right?”

“Yes; when I opened it up, I didn’t find any indication that it had either the means or the intention of attacking us.”

“You can’t see what it’s thinking.” He tapped his skull.

“That droid was just a reconnaissance device,” the Doctor called, trying his best to put on that condescending voice Rose hated. “It was just a bundle of sensors; it didn’t even have a processor. So I know it wasn’t thinking anything, Captain.”

Rose tugged on his sleeve; she was frowning.

“What is it?” he said quietly.

“If it doesn’t have a processor, what was it doing on Erebus?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, wouldn’t it need a processor to be intelligent, Doctor? I thought you said only arty robots with feelings were protected by the Io Accord.”

The Doctor frowned. He was puzzled why he hadn’t thought of that first. He glanced over his shoulder; Captain Hamilton and Sergeant Cameron had probably been too far away to hear. He put an arm around Rose.

“Let’s keep that to ourselves for the time being,” he whispered.

Then he picked up the pace.

NOTES:
Despite being the longest chapter so far (over twice as long as the first chapter), I envisaged this one ending up the shortest. Perhaps subconsciously I then came up with a lot of padding, and I suppose it's a self-indulgence not to go back and cut away the chaff. I'm sure a thousand words could be cut detailing Erebus's long-lost civilisation of ten thousands years before, as it's not really that important, but I think it gives character to the planet, a feeling of it being truly dead - plus I get to rant with a little thinly veiled polemic about the war in Iraq. It's a wholly dialogue heavy chapter, and I promise the next few will be more action-based. Having the re-entry vehicle crash land so far from their landing zone was intentional, so that they would have to walk; I find exposition easier to swallow (and less of a death knell for the plot's momentum) if characters moving somewhere rather than just standing still.

Not much in the way of references, but I always figured the Doctor was a Jimi Hendrix fan after his third incarnation (Jon Pertwee) dressed in very much the same garb: velvet jackets with frilly lace cuffs. As for Caravaggio, I thought the darkness and the suggestiveness would appeal to the ninth Doctor's secret side.