Speculations 1

Once more I have proven I may not be trusted to keep this journal current, or even to finish thoughts I have begun. Days have passed since my conversation with Capt. Susenko, yet I have lost myself in work and not paused to write down more of what was said and what transpired. I have busied myself with the Museum and such small tasks as I could find in need of my attention. Hanging the portraits of Owen and Hawkins and Mary Anning (though I have yet to procure suitable frames), uncrating an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur and a number of ammonites, and planning exhibits I do not currently have the presence of mind to construct. But it makes for a perfectly serviceable distraction. I have hardly seen Miss Paine since Friday, and here it is Tuesday. I know she's keeping company with Bellatrix, but I do not know where they are spending so much time. Likely, it is no business of mine.

This morning, I awoke to find these words scrawled upon a sheet on paper on my desk, in my own hand, though I have to recollection of having written them:

"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"

Hours later, I carried the typewriter from the flat at 24 Babbage Canal uptown to the Museum's attic, where I am now composing this entry. There are far too many bad memories in the flat, and I can think more clearly here in my attic. Father would laugh to see me so, my hands stained with ink, pecking away at this infernal device, and no doubt make some jest about madwomen and attics.

Rather than attempt to recount a conversation that is now four days passed, and that already I have begun to forget, at least in its many particulars, I have decided to try to record some of my speculations. I am uncertain if I possess as much courage as that. Can I put these thoughts on paper? Is it worse than recording the dreams? Is it half so terrible? No, I think not. I think I can not do worse than I have done. And perhaps it will help to organize my thoughts if I can write these things down, these hesitant bits of conjecture, these doubtful observations. If I may make of it something resembling a problem to be solved, instead of a maze in which I find myself imprisoned.

1. I was not born human. My "father" may have known this, or he may not. He may have been lying to me all along. I am, in a sense, what Mr. Yeats might call a "changeling." This brings me to the matter of the handkerchief, of which I have spoken with Oolon Sputnik, but I do not believe I have yet mentioned here. When Mr. Sputnik examined me, he found Nebari and Kalish DNA, though he said I had been born human. However, shortly thereafter, while sorting through some effects I had salvaged from the time cabinet, I came across a handkerchief. It is an unremarkable thing, really. White linen with pale pink at the borders. It bears a large bloodstain, a brownish splotch marking a winter's afternoon shortly before the accident when I was seventeen. I was helping Father replace a glass insulating cap in one of the aft turbines, and it broke apart. I sliced my hand, and this is the handkerchief onto which I bled. The matter is as clear in my memory as anything else that happened six years ago. The handkerchief was laid aside when he bandaged my injury, and apparently was forgotten and so became lost in the cabinet until I found it a couple of weeks ago. I have extracted a sample of the blood and compared it with samples of my own blood at the present time, as well as with the genetic material from a strand of Mr. Sputnik's own hair (which I, by stealth, lifted after he performed his tests). Though this branch of micro-anatomy is novel to me, I believe I grasp the principles and practice and that I have not mistaken the results of my own tests. The blood on the handkerchief matches almost identically with Mr. Sputnik's "genetic" material. It does not match human blood, nor the hybrid blood pumping now through my veins. It is, by all accounts, and unless I am sorely mistaken in my analysis, the blood of a Gallifreyan.

2. My father's stories of my mother having been a San Francisco whore are to be discounted. At the time I bled upon the white handkerchief, I was not human. Indeed, I was never human. I was placed with a human man — who may or may not have ever known the truth of my identity.

3. At some far distant time, or some far off future (I can not guess which), a Gallifreyan scientist created an inconceivably powerful weapon which then could not be destroyed. It could, however, be broken down, divided into its constituent parts, many of which were essentially organic, for the mechanism was both living and inorganic, as well as conscious. Those parts, which may have numbered in the thousands, were then scattered across the Cosmos by the Gallifreyans. By this route, it was hoped the device would be lost forever and its threat effectively neutralised. However, those who disassembled the weapon did not ever fully apprehend its will, or they hoped that will would prove insufficient to ever reunite the fragments. In either case, they were mistaken, and for ages the machine has sought to reassemble itself, slowly, ruthlessly, gathering itself together again. And the suspicion I have been led too, by the course of my "visions" and these empirical investigations, and by the things I now know my body to be capable of, is that I was never born. Rather, I was manufactured from a Gallifreyan being or beings, and hidden on Earth. It may be I was hidden there long centuries before I passed into my father's care and assumed the guise of Nareth Elenore Nishi. I can only guess. Sputnik has gone as far as to suggest my father might even have been of that alien race, and certainly it might explain his deadly obsession with time travel.

4. In the first accident, at age seventeen, when my body and mind was commingled with those of a Nebari and a Kalish, the essential matter of my original construction was diluted or broken apart. That one small part of the vast weapon was, at that time, most likely rendered inoperable and unfit to be reassembled with the whole. However, the entity which stalks me through my dreams — and which I now believe to be the weapon in the act of self-reassembly — is either unaware of this or knows or believes the case to be otherwise. The situation's complexity was exponentially increased by my second accident, at the end of May, when I sought to use my father's cabinet to travel backwards and change the events leading to his death. When the vessel encountered a competing signal and was pulled off course, to this world, this time continuum, I was split again, and this time into many more parts than I may even guess. This must surely have further diluted the thing I was at the beginning. Yet it is at this point that I became aware of the entity's attempt to reclaim me, and, indeed, I do believe it was at this point that it managed to locate me. Or, I should say, the many splinters of me created in the instant of the schism. It was as the sound of shattering crystal acting upon the tympanum of an ear, perhaps.

This is hopeless. There is so much more, but here I have typed pages, and my hands are shaking too badly to continue. I would speak of Capt. Susenko's belief that something fundamental to this universe is keeping the entity at bay, and I would speak also of my certainty that this cannot be so, that already it has collected many of the splinters scattered across this world.

The most terrible question is not what I might have been before my accident at age seventeen, but, at least to my mind, what I have now become? Some fraction of a component of some device so vast I cannot begin to comprehend it. Have I any that can rightly be called a mind? Have I a soul? How does the illusion of a mind differ from an actual consciousness? No more. Not now. I will not say more now.