Nexus 100 Prompt #13 - Yellow

[continuum_of_drs]

There was something in his pocket that he hadn't actually put there.

Now, that might seem as though it'd be a common occurrence for an individual with as seemingly bottomless of pockets as the Doctor. Things must just end up there all the time, right? Wrong. Things don't end up there unless he puts them there. Oh, he may forget along the way that he did put said object there, but once he found it, he always remembered putting it there in some capacity or another.

But this--this he had not put there, and what made that realisation a little astounding was the fact that the object was unmistakably Gallifreyan.

So, a yellow datacrystal cube sat in his hand and he regarded it, wondering just how it had gotten there. He could stare at it long enough that he could see hints of its structure, within which would be stored huge amounts of data, read by taking advantage of an induced state of electric hysteresis. Given the structure of the crystal, it could loop and spiral almost indefinitely, spooling through immense amounts of data. Turning it in the light, he caught hints of cubes that would mathematically extend into depths of reality not easily regarded by the naked eye.

But enough musing on the datacrystal's function. He found the ferroelectric reader on the TARDIS' console and slotted the crystal into the input. The tiny currents and the light directed through it, bounced back upon themselves by countless tiny transistors and mirrors, ensnared a kind of bipole moment and reversed the crystal's polarity, its very structure. On such a tiny scale, physics was actually turned in on itself. Maybe that was why datacrystals glowed so brightly. He stood next to it, bathed in a citrine glow that diffused into the rest of the brightly-lit TARDIS quickly and lost itself in the manycoloured clothing he wore. The yellow colour meant what was stored on the crystal was of low security--publicly available.

He watched the screen for quite some time as text scrolled across it--reams of text he hadn't seen in centuries. And there was more. Much more. After an undefined while, he turned off the viewer and popped the crystal from its reader. A datacrystal of Gallifreyan literature, most of which he'd forgotten about, had somehow made its way into his posession where he usually did not keep such things. Why?

Well, now, that was a question best answered someplace other than the console room of his TARDIS. He stuffed the crystal back into his pocket and set about plotting a course that'd either answer that question or distract him completely from the thoughts seeing such a thing kicked up. Which would be better for everyone concerned, however, was hard to say.