Elytra 3

March 76AGF 5pm

'Do you understand?' The voice was strangely weak for one with so much power.

'Oh, yes. I understand all too well.' The Doctor sat impassively, the ties that bound him seemingly ineffectual as the man they sought to contain exuded a calm stillness that began before them.

'When you have served your sentence, atoned for your crimes, you will be cast into the Underground, your data intact but your status amended to anathema. There is no way back into the System. Your exile will be permanent and relentless.'

'Thank you,' replied the Doctor.

The Doctor was sitting at his desk, the top of which bore parade-stiff ranks of books, a resource which, while banned from wider society, were still available in a prison service which existed less to punish or rehabilitate than to remove undesirables from circulation, and therefore occupied a transitional space in the System. Clara had long since cut the service off from all IntelSupport. The desk's surface, in direct contrast with the orderliness of the books, was covered with pieces of paper on which arrow-like pens skewered obscure formulae which were interrogated with the help of an old halogen desk lamp, accompanied by several complex helical shapes which served no discernible purpose. The desk, and the walls festooned with charts, pictures and the Doctor's own scrawlings, were the direct result of his exemplary behaviour, behaviour which had led to his being accorded privileges on an almost monthly basis during these, the first three years of incarceration of the ten he was to endure. Today, however, his cell was lit not by halogen, but by a new acquisition, an old tablet, supposedly secure, but locked with code so simple that he was viewing footage of his trial almost as the cell door was shut and locked again. The three years had seen him go prematurely grey, but his eyes now sparkled with another life force: revenge.

'What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man, indeed, Steven.' He gently dismantled another fire wall, another series of digital doors, sliding ever deeper until he swam freely in the System's core. 'And so finally we see what three years have given me, Steven. What glorious sights of your torment await, hmm?'

The Doctor tapped out code, gently at first, but soon his interventions were asserted with increasing urgency. Screen after screen, day after day, week after week the Doctor called up the past.

'Black?' His question was both rhetorical and literal. 'How is this possible?' Weeks turned into months turned into years. The Doctor muttered to himself. 'Perhaps the storage? Maybe the System finally decided to work out how this works?' The tablet fixed on a feed, and slowly images took shape in the pixellated mist. 'Ah, live feed only … it's easy enough to ...' The Doctor adjusted the focus and within minutes he saw the inside of a dreary room.

'Hello Steven.' He mouthed, as he saw Steven's hands move towards a scrap of paper. They began to write. Then stopped.

'Hello Doctor, what kept you?' read the note.

The Doctor'sjaw clamped tight and his eyes narrowed as the rage began to form a knot in his core, tight and dense.

Steven's face now appeared in a mirror, and he smiled. 'Watch carefully', he mouthed, as he held up a hypodermic syringe. 'This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,' he added and the Doctor did as instructed as the hands slowly drew a black fluid from a small pot into the syringe's reservoir, then held it up to the light.

'Goodbye, Doctor', Steven said, aloud this time, though the Doctor still lipread.

The Doctor watched as the needle approached the eye, and penetrated the lens. Then, slowly, a black mist began to swirl in his visual feed, almost imperceptible at first, but soon the black spread like contagion until there was no light.

Steven sat back, exhausted and shaking.

'Fuck you, Doctor', he said, before responding to the message that had come in just as the needle had first touched his eyeball.

That night the light that kept the Doctor from the darkness was a single, bare bulb.