Shutting the Door

That infernal bit of code is getting clever.

And, I think it's spreading. It's not hiding from me anymore and it seems to be infesting almost all of the non-Time Lord systems throughout the station. I still can't determine the origin or purpose of it, though.

At this point, I need help. Though I am aware of my capabilities and confident in their superiority, I am also aware of my limits.

This situation is going to need some extra eyes. I'm going to need to recruit a team to investigate this situation. I'll need experts on dimensional portal technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and likely some more telepathic individuals.

Until then, I am going to shut down the dimensional passages to Vanishing Point and lock down the station.

If my theory is correct, this... virus... is not just intelligent, but possibly alive.


Yesterday, I was given a hypercube by Morr, who had received it at a ceremony in the Panopticon. It contained a prophesy by Her Hi.... the Gold Usher and High Seeress. Rowan's contacting me with such a prophesy has me concerned. While relations between her and myself have become less adversarial of late, old wounds take time to heal. For her to contact me like this, even through an intermediary, is a sign that something BIG is on the horizon. The prophesy is... troubling.

"Tell him that the mark is still upon him.  This place has known fire- and it shall know it again.  Warn him that he draws nigh to a fork in the road, and its signpost shall be a bonfire of purification and renewal - yet it is but a milestone, not salvation itself.

Three high passes lead through the mountains, all high and perilous, and two of these lead to damnation.  One path alone may save him from the fire set out to await him, but take heed; let not ambition set the course, nor wrath, nor sloth, lust, gluttony, nor yet pride and avarice, for it is an empty road, which leads, if followed in full, to the fallen one with twicefold shadow, the fate he knows, and there are many forks on that mountain road; one alone, and heed it-  not the most likely, may guide him from fire and shadow alike, but it is yet hidden from us, which road he shall take.

This shall be his doom, to seek and choose - and he must accept the peril and walk into the mountain passes, or else he shall surely fail.  There shall be a sign for light, and a sign for dark- but the sign of light remains hidden.  The sign of dark he knows- should it come to pass, he shall see and cry out his name in emptiness and bitter wrath- and the wind shall take it, and return it to him changed, and altogether damned.  This is the road he must not take.”

It strikes me that this code may have its origins in my...hopefully... aborted future. I can't know for sure yet.

Either way, I can't afford for this riddle to go unsolved.

Other, help me. I am going to need to ask the Agency to help me on this.

A Rat in a Maze

My analysis of the errant code in Vanishing Point continues. In the words of a fictional character from a Terran children's story, "Curiouser and curiouser".

I still can't get a proper analysis of the code, itself, but I had a theory.

As I said previously, anytime I came close to pinning the code down, it almost seemed to hide from me.

That, obviously, indicates some form of intelligence.

Being a Time Lord, and a specialist in nanotechnologies, I'm well familiar with the concepts of intelligent programming and artificial intelligences. Even the idea of artificial sentience isn't foreign to me.

This bit of code has been displaying some level of the latter.

And it has been behaving like, well, a rat.

It almost seems to be looking for something, itself, while, at the same time, trying to escape capture.

To continue the analogy, if one is looking for a rat, and the rat is evading capture, one should look at the course the rat has been running.

In this case, Vanishing Point.

Vanishing Point, as I've said in the past, was not built by the Time Lords, but, rather, by the Chronarchs. The technology is... similar to ours, though inferior.

During the process of retrofitting it to serve New Gallifrey, I did patch SOME of our technologies into the station where I could, but it's still largely Chronarch.

So, having been unable to catch the rat, I took a look at the maze.

This code seems to be able to move freely through the Chronarch systems and areas of the station, but seems to be blocked by anything I added in, myself, as if, try as it might, it can't get into an New Gallifreyan technologies or materials.

At least, so far.

Fortunately, it also can't get into systems that aren't interfaced with Vanishing Point, so it hasn't gotten into Asteria or Helios.

It... may be time to call in some assistance.

Anomolous Program

Vanishing Point and I have a very strange history.

Having been incarcerated and tortured here should make me never want to set foot on this station. Logically, I should have been lobbying to have this station atomized as soon as the Time Lords defeated Tethseram so I could have some closure. Yes, I realize that would be putting personal feelings above New Gallifrey, but, honestly, I could think of a dozen reasons why that would still be the most logical course of action for this place.

Yet, even with some of the memories of what happened to me here starting to come back (though they feel more like a holo I watched as a child rather than actual memories), I still feel a strange... connection to this place.

Before embarking on my current excursion to the Six-Fold-Star... or at least its vicinity (I'll explain that in another entry), something felt... wrong... at Vanishing Point.

Almost like the station was ill.

So, I took some time (time being a relatively meaningless concept there) and ran a complete scan on all systems and the infrastructure on Vanishing Point with my wrist thingy. Needless to say, this was a tremendous amount of data for it to analyze.

I'm going to digress for a moment to explain a little about my wrist thingy.

Many Time Lords and Ladies carry various scanning devices. Some have even duplicated the technology created by the one called The Doctor to create their own sonic screwdrivers. I'll admit, I used one for a while. They're quite useful. I just thought they could be made more functional.

So, I got to creating my own device with the capabilities of a sonic screwdriver, combined with a Stattenheim remote control, a vortex manipulator and a few other helpful doodads.

And to boost its power, I grafted in to my own nervous system on a molecular level.

It became the "ridiculously useful wrist-mounted thingy", or wrist thingy, for short.

Back to my main point.

Even augmented in its calculations by my own mind, analysis of the data by the wrist thingy will take quite a bit of time. I'm not exactly sure how long.

I have noticed something odd, though.

There's a small anomaly in the station. It seems to be a bit of programming, but I can't pin it down.

Every time I think I have a proper read on it... it almost seems to run somewhere to hide.

And not just in the computer systems.

I don't know.

Maybe I should file an official report?

No.

No point in having anyone else chasing shadows.

This doesn't seem to be anything to worry about yet.