Treachery - What Tosh Saw - Part 11/?
Feb. 26th, 2011 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aviv_b_artworkRATING: PG-13
WARNING: Reference to medical experiements on humans, selective (eugenic) murder of humans.
CHARACTERS: Tosh, Owen, Jack
DISCLAIMER: Not mine; Aunty B's and RTD's
WORDS: ~ 2040
SUMMARY: Tosh's search through UNITs database yields some startling results.
Treachery (Part 1) here: http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/49816.html
All chapters are linked.
A/N: I'll be taking a small break from this story in order to finish my Torchwood Gen_Fest Prompt and to beat the next chapter into submission. But I should be back in a week or so.
For several nights following her theft of the software, Tosh was unable to find time to work with it. The first day had seen a pack of weevils invading a park near Newport. The whole team went out on retrieval and while they were eventually successful, Tosh got swiped by one and had a long gash on her arm. Owen carefully stitched up her wound and then insisted on her coming home with him. She tried to avoid agreeing, but after stating that she was fine and that she didn’t want to be any bother, Jack had ordered her to either go home with Owen or to go to her own home where Jack would look after her.
Tosh shuddered involuntarily at the thought of Jack being in her house with Ianto’s pictures and the software disc sitting on her dining room table.
“What is it, what’s wrong,” Jack asked with concern.
“You’re right Jack; I’m really not feeling too well. Can Owen take me home now?”
Jack nodded, relieved that she had finally given in.
On the drive back to Owen’s she really didn’t feel well. That had been way too close; she had to make sure that her ‘research’ was well hidden, even in her own flat.
“Do we need to stop by your place and get you some clothes?”
Tosh startled. “No! I mean I already have half my wardrobe at your flat, there’s no reason to stop by. And I really don’t want to get into a conversation with my nosy neighbor down the hall.”
Owen snorted. “Yeah, Mrs. Tripp, she really is one, isn’t she?”
Tosh smiled. “I swear she stands by her door and listens to everyone’s comings and goings. Do you know that after you left my flat last Saturday afternoon, she came by not ten minutes later? Asking me if I had out-of-town company, of all things.”
“What did you tell her?” Owen wondered how Tosh maneuvered out of a confrontation.
“No.” Seeing the look of puzzlement on Owen’s face, Tosh smiled. “I told her ‘no’ and shut the door on her. Between her and Liz, I’m surrounded by snoops.”
Shit, could it be that her neighbor was some type of spy? She felt sweat break out on her forehead. “Tosh stop being an idiot,” she told herself, “there are nosy people everywhere. That’s all it is.”
Owen noticed her sweating and drove as quickly as he dared to his flat. He got her upstairs and into a track suit she kept there. He took her temperature and sighed.
“You’re running a bit of a fever, let’s give you something for that and get you into bed.”
Tosh fell asleep almost immediately after her head hit the pillow and slept long but restlessly. When she woke some time later, Owen wasn’t in bed with her, but from the impression on the mattress next to her, he had slept by her side. She smiled at how nice he had become to her since Ianto left, as if he sensed how much his loss had affected her. Ianto had been her best friend after all.
She really didn’t have much in common with Gwen, now married and talking about her and Rhys starting a family. Liz, well Liz was just a bit peculiar, bookish on the one hand, reading mostly history and biographies by the boatload, but almost unnaturally interested in living life fast and hard. Tosh often thought of her as a female version of “old” Owen, shagging anything that moved, including Jack and Owen.
She opened her eyes to see Owen carrying a tray with some tea and toast on it. “Oi Sleeping Beauty, its nine o’clock.”
“At night?”
He helped her sit up and put down the tray over her lap. “No, Thursday morning, you’ve been asleep since 4 PM yesterday. How are you feeling?”
“Better, but oddly, I still feel tired.”
“Not surprised, you had some rather strange dreams.”
“Crap,” she thought, taking a sip of tea. “I did?”
“Yeah, weevils chasing you and I think you had one that Ianto was in. I could swear I heard you mutter ‘killer.’
Tosh inhaled and began to choke on her tea. Owen quickly helped her with the cup and wiped her face.
“I have been thinking about him lately,” she confessed. Seeing the look of concern on Owen’s face, she continued, “I remember when he first joined I thought to myself, that when I finished my parole, I was going to drag that shy boy out and party with him for about a week.”
She hesitated for just a moment. “I sometimes wonder how he’s doing, don’t you?”
Owen was caught a bit off guard. “Well…uh sure, but I’m certain he’s fine.” Tosh smiled and picked up her tea. If there was one thing she could tell about Owen it was when he was lying. And if he’d been hooked up to a lie detector she reckoned its needle would be off the scale.
“You know, we should have a little celebration when my parole is up.”
“That’s a good idea, I’m sure the Captain would be…”
“I didn’t mean the team, I meant you and me,” Tosh said cutting Owen off. “And really a party with the team? I’m hoping that Liz and Gwen don’t know anything about my imprisonment with UNIT.”
“Sorry, you’re right, don’t know what I was thinking. Can you just imagine what Gwen’s reaction would be if she knew she was working with a renowned industrial spy?”
Tosh rolled her eyes. “And Liz, she’d probably bake a cake for the occasion. With a metal file in it.”
For the first time in several weeks they both laughed out loud.
***
Tosh stayed at Owen’s flat until Saturday. She fretted about how she was going to keep him out of her flat, but luck was on her side. Just as he was pulling into a parking space near her flat, Owen’s cell rang. It was Jack and there was an emergency at the airport. Some type of giant crawling reptile had shown up in the terminal and the whole place was in an uproar. Reports of a twenty-five foot komodo dragon were being tweeted everywhere.
“I’m just pulling up to Tosh’s place...yeah, got you; I’ll be there as quick as I can.”
Tosh quickly unbuckled her seat belt, gave Owen a small kiss, opened the car door and got out. “Owen, that sounds serious, you go ahead, I can open my door on my own.” Seeing his hesitation, she added, “Look, I’ll call you in ten minutes so you know I’m Ok.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just closed the car door, waved him goodbye and headed to her front door. She entered her building, collected her mail and went up to her apartment. By the time she opened her door, her hands were shaking. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw her laptop and all her research documents still safely on her table. She needed to find a suitable place for them, but first, she had to call Owen. Owen was just arriving at the airport so Tosh wished him luck adding that he shouldn’t stop by because she was going to sleep the weekend away.
He understood but made her promise that she would call him if she started to feel poorly or she needed anything. As she ended the call, Tosh smiled and booted up her laptop.
The software quickly confirmed her fears. She put an old picture of Ianto side by side with the image of the assassin in Oman. The computer morphed one into the other and predicted that they were the same person with a 70% certainty. Not as good as she hoped, but the connection couldn’t be discounted.
She took another look through the UNIT computer system especially the research files. Something had seemed a little bit strange the last time she browsed through them, but she wasn’t certain what was off. She located some files that dealt with a project to alter the appearance of UNIT’s agents. It was mostly small stuff, wigs, facial hair implants, colored contacts, nothing she wouldn’t have expected to find. Two hours later, she still hadn’t located anything remotely of interest and she thought if she looked at one more report on the progress of a wig that could change colors via an implant in its lining she thought she’d scream.
As she carefully retraced her steps back out of the files she knocked a can of Coke over. She grabbed her keyboard to prevent it getting wet. As she sponged up the spill she hoped she hadn’t accidentally hit any keys that would leave a trail. When she sat back down at her laptop she was stunned to see a new screen had opened.
SECURITY LEVEL RED – EYES ONLY
Somehow she must have inadvertently typed the sequence of keys needed to open this concealed menu. Running a diagnostic, she determined that access had been achieved by holding the Alt and Ctrl keys and typing the word ‘UNIT.’
If Tosh was less than impressed at the security for this section, the files it contained shook her to the core.
She opened the folder labeled “Cloning Experiments.” It wasn’t cloning of embryos or stem cell research, as she had expected. UNIT was attempting to clone a human adult. There was no way that UNIT could accomplish that with the current technology available on planet Earth. Sure enough, as she read further, they were using a 26th Century replicator that had come through the rift to produce copies of living adults.
The research read like something out of a horror movie. Their first experiments resulted in half formed humans with defects so severe that they didn’t survive once they were removed from the cloning tanks. As time went on they perfected their techniques to where they could produce a limited number of physical clones. She estimated that for every stable clone, they had about a thirty that they judged unsuitable. They came out of the cloning vats with serious though survivable defects or their new memories wouldn’t implant properly; occasionally the clone became sick and the implanted memories rapidly degraded. All of these clones were destroyed.
“They are creating humans, and executing them if they don’t meet their specifications,” Tosh thought in horror. She felt a little nauseous. It was close to midnight and she realized that she hadn’t eaten, her injured arm was throbbing and she really needed to get some rest. She‘d have to come back and look at the files again, and somehow download them without being detected.
There were two more sub-folders she wanted to take a quick look at before she shut down her computer. They weren’t labeled so she had no idea what she was going to find.
She gasped as the first page loaded.
Cyberman Conversion Experiments Using Stateless Prisoners
She moved rapidly through the files, just skimming them to see how far UNIT had gotten. To her relief, it looked like they had tried to implant devices that controlled memories and dreams directly, while behavior was controlled through stimulus and reward. She could see where this was heading. If they could implant the same technology into the clones they would have a powerful, unshakably loyal fighting force willing to do anything they were instructed to do. The implications were horrifying.
She’d have to come back and copy these files as well if she could. As she opened last sub-folder a screen labeled “Assassin Project” popped up.
“Shit,” Tosh thought. On the page were pictures of six men and two women. All had two names under their pictures and all except the last two were marked as ‘terminated’. The second to last picture was of an older Caucasian man with silver hair. The legend underneath read,”Harry Peterson aka Stuart Baylor.” The last picture was of a man that looked familiar and yet not so. The legend read “Ianto Jones aka John Thomas.”
Tosh felt her gorge rise and ran for the bathroom. Afterwards she leaned on the sink as tears rolled down her face. This was impossible. Dangerous beyond belief, this was the work of people who had lost all sense of morality and humanity and worse yet, Ianto had fallen into their clutches.
Chapter 12 here: http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/91665.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 05:31 pm (UTC)Is the one we have been following a Clone? or the real Ianto.
If the one we are following is a clone, where is the real Ianto?
Wonderful stuff!!!!!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 08:38 pm (UTC)Which means all the Carols we have seen are clones which is why they kllied him.
That said this a story with many twists in it so what actaully is , may be are very different to what is going on.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 05:46 pm (UTC)Although a thought came to me: what if John's next target is Tosh, since her parole is coming up?
I'm going to be eagerly awaiting the next chapter.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 07:47 pm (UTC)As for John's next target, first we have to see if he recovers, then if he does what his next assignment will be. And if he doesn't recover, then what will be his fate.
OMG - now I'm nervous!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-26 09:11 pm (UTC)*dashs after tosh*
*comes back*
Finally! Awesome!Tosh is getting somwhere!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 01:30 pm (UTC)Acccck!
Date: 2011-02-27 07:12 am (UTC)We can trust Myfanwy, right?
Re: Acccck!
Date: 2011-02-27 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 09:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 09:46 am (UTC)I wonder if she shouldnt cofide in Owen about this.
Brilliant cant wait for more.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-27 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-28 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 07:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 07:03 pm (UTC)So, I haven't heard about Jack sleeping with everyone in sight as if Ianto never existed, altho after watching that unbearably uncomfortable scene in Tennant's final Dr Who when he appears in the bar and pimps Alonso to Jack (I'm not sure why that seems so appropos to Jackarse's behaviour and mindset) and Jack just accepts Alonso as if to say "yeah, that's what I ordered when I called your advert to rent a sex partner for the night".
So, break my heart some more and tell me about Jack the man-whore of S4, and please for God's sake, tell me that f*cking Gwen bloody Cooper isn't one of them????? Please?
no subject
Date: 2011-03-28 01:31 pm (UTC)great update
no subject
Date: 2011-03-28 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-02 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-22 03:51 pm (UTC)UNIT is so disturbing.
Good chapter.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-22 05:28 pm (UTC)