Elytra 5

Wednesday 21 June 85AGF 9pm

'Ten years. Ten years.' The Doctor took a long draught from the flask that sat amongst the casually strewn pieces of paper that surfed one another beside the pile of books to his right. 'Ten years.' Having assuaged his thirst, he resumed his position hunched over his desk, staring through a microscope as he made minute adjustments to the circuitry that lay beneath the lens. 'Ten years. What might I have achieved in ten …oh, now what have we here? This is most interesting.'

A timer began to beep its message of completion into the thick, turbid air. 'Ah, almost perfect timing. One of your cousins calls for my attention, it seems.You stay right there, I'll be back soon.'

The Doctor slid his chair to the side, transferring his attention to another workstation.'Interesting.' He spoke in a semi-mumble. 'I wonder.' Punctuating the morass of books and instruments and paper leaf-litter were glass towers with drawers from top to bottom.Each drawer contained a black beetle which struggled ineffectually against the smooth translucence of its known universe. He slid a drawer open, releasing its captive into his open palm, which he then gently closed.

His hand opened involuntarily as the pain bit into his hand, and the beetle fell onto the desk, immediately scuttling away in search of some kind of freedom. An upturned tumbler was all it took to arrest the scuttle.

'Were you a human child such behaviour would lead to your being very carefully watched. Iwould eventually have you denuded or simply euthanised. But you are new and you are useful and you must be looked at carefully.'

The Doctor moved back to his original place and took a small square of a shiny black substance from a tray full of identical black squares and carefully milled a hole in its side. Using a long pipette, he extracted a tiny spot of fluid from the reservoir of a small electronic unit attached to the workstation and introduced it into the newly created hole, sealing it in with a piece of the milled material.

He lifted the tumbler and slid the square towards the beetle, which grabbed it and began to eat. Soon the beetle was occupied enough for the tumbler to be removed. The Doctor looked closely at the insect with a large, illuminated glass. 'Interesting ...' He poked at the beetle's wing cases with a large needle before driving the metal through its body, exactly at the point of conjunction of the brittle protective sheets.

He transferred the insect, its legs flailing in the air, desperate to find purchase that would have been useless were it actually there, to the nearby microscope, clamping it onto the slide plate by the needle which had passed directly through it. 'Oh, you feel nothing.' Besideit lay another beetle, though this one was upside down.

He blew the fine sand from where it had eaten and returned to his previous task. 'While we're waiting ...