What if?
At first it’s jokes about knicking his old suit and cheeky compliments about just how clever they are to be able to get a message through. But his double isn’t playing along, and that’s his first hint something is wrong. When he finally gets to the question that, if he’s honest, has been on his mind from the moment his screwdriver picked up the signal, the tone shifts rapidly.
“And where’s the missus?”
“That’s why…” his older face stops short, his eyes lose focus for moment, before his adam’s apple bobs and he looks forward again.
“What’s happened to Rose?” he asks, suddenly urgent.
“Nothing yet,” the hologram shakes his head. “Something, maybe? I don’t know. I think it’s something to do with the Bad Wolf. Astronomical signs have been off the charts lately and at first I thought it was just coincidence. A flu, maybe, or maybe mor…Well, doesn’t matter now.”
“What’s happened?” Anger pushes up from his gut, punching its way up to his throat. He’s a bit more familiar with the feeling in this incarnation than he’d like to admit.
“I don’t…I don’t know. Nothing and everything. But something’s wrong, it’s like she’s…shorting out…like a faulty wire…and I’ve never seen anything like it before and I nothing I do is working and if…”
“If this message is getting through it’s something big.”
“Right,” his older face nods, kicking at the ground of an alternate universe with his toes. The sand in this universe is not upset. A strange visual.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he nods. “Stay by this frequency. I should be able to reverse engineer the signal.”
“Yes. Good. Please, hurry. You’re the only one who understands.”
“Please, we’ve got the same brain, mate. Still, two heads and…” He doesn’t like seeing himself so desperate. It’s unnerving.
“No, well, ordinarily we’re equals and all,” his other interrupts. “But right now I’m so knackered…and, if I’m honest, bloody terrified…”
“Yes, well, you have to let me go or I can’t get to work, can I?”
“Right. But you know. Like no one else.”
“What’s that?” he answers as he begins fiddling with the screwdriver, beginning calculations in his head.
“We can’t lose her. Not again.”
He looks up, catching a glimpse of the strange but familiar face of his double as it faded from view. He has had low points in his long life, but he’s not sure he’s ever felt as desperate as he looked. He switches off the screwdriver, steadying his hand lest he drop it in the sand from the sudden tremors taking over his extremities.
If he reverses the polarity of the neutron flow, he should be able to isolate the right variables to start reversing the multiversal signal. Time to find a dying star.