A Continuum Of Doctors

He closed his eyes halfway, like a cat, and inclined his head politely.

"I'm pleased to meet such ... esteemed individuals," he said lazily, gaze drifting between the Doctor and Jack, "and I go by Balthazar."

They couldn't have gone more than two floors before the doors slid open again, but the floor-to-ceiling windows boasted a much higher vantage point than what should have been the third level.

"Please ..." Balthazar gestured for them to enter before him. "... enter as guests, with bread and salt between us."

The ritual promise of sanctuary is said mockingly. Sure, it's an ancient agreement, but, well, he is what he is.

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A flicker passed through the Doctor's mind that this was foreign territory. This kind of dimensional crossover and psionic presence obeyed physical laws that he wasn't familiar with... but that maybe Jack was.

Still, he was what he was as much as Balthazar was what he was. The Doctor adapted.

He stepped out of the lift onto the carpeted floor and looked out the windows for only a beat before turning his eyes back to their host.

"Your hospitality is appreciated, Mister Balthazar, but I can't quite dispel the notion that we were expected."

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No, Doc, unfortunately Jack was just the trigger man. He hadn't done much dimensional crossing over, even since discovering the Nexus, and if he had...well, let's just say he wasn't as tuned into his surroundings as the Doctor, so even if he had been in a similar universe (or even the same one), he couldn't have given much information on psionic presence or physical laws.

Jack stepped out of the lift, as well, not exactly marveled by the speed at which it had traveled -- he was from the fifty-first century, lifts were kind of retro -- but nevertheless keenly aware of technology that was advanced beyond the scope of that within the natural setting of their surroundings.

"Not that we don't appreciate expected," the Captain chimed in with a sly smile, "but we're the fly-by-night sort of guys, the sort most people least expect; it's part of our charm." Jack paused for a moment, the underlying message of suspicion made obvious by his tone, then added as an afterthought: "Nice tie, by the way."

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"Just Balthazar," he said with a calm, knowing smile, crossing the room to the liquor cabinet. The room was pretty sparse by way of decoration, probably because he didn't actually do anything here. "And thank you. I do try."

Pouring scotch without asking (he didn't really care, after all), he took his time in answering the Doctor.

"I spend much of my time in the Nexus. It's inevitable that ... visitors occasionally show up, for one reason or another. For instance, several individuals I met there still owe me payment for services rendered.

"Not any of you, of course." But it could be, his smile says, if you want me to do or undo anything.

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Nice try, Balthy, but the Doctor's turned down better offers in his junk mail. Join the Krillitane Brotherhood, get 20% off the reality transformation fee!

He looks out the window again, spotting another one of these beings--not human but not exactly nonterrestrial--and a few thoughts occur to him. This earth is rife with dimensional crossings at the point of bodily death. The sentiences in the robot dolls that leaked from the pocket dimension crossed here. The TARDIS landed right outside this building.

There is no such thing as co-incidence, especially when the Nexus is involved.

He looks at Jack. After all, it was Jack who led the both of them into this particular building.

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Jack exchanged a quick look with the Doctor; he was well-versed in taking his cue, so to speak. "So, these services you render -- " the Captain began with the tact of a ton of bricks and a tone that suggested he was well aware of it, " -- they wouldn't happen to deal with the transference of sentient consciousness from that nice little pocket dimension you've got out there to, say, otherwise inanimate objects in the Nexus at large, would they?"

Well, someone had to come right out and ask...

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He raises an eyebrow. "That's not a service anyone has requested from me -- recently, or ever, in fact."

Balthazar delights in telling the truth, see.

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Oh, perfect. A literalist. He hates literalists, for the record. Either they really are literalists and thereby unspeakably frustrating or they're simply being literalist at that moment and are rather insulting.

"You can't tell me you only ever do what people request. Bored, perhaps? Experimenting?"

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"You know, I'm going to start getting insulted in a few minutes." Jack commented to the Doctor, his grin sarcastic and just a little spiteful. "Now, let's think about this carefully before you answer the good Doctor's question, huh? We're both more than just pretty faces, trust me. We traced the origin of the misplaced sentience to this dimension, this Earth, this city. And if the suspicious behavior of that lovely receptionist downstairs means anything, it's that we're definitely in the right building."

Jack paused, just for dramatic effect, and regarded Balthazar again. "So, if you'd kindly drop the bullshit and tell us what we need to know, it'll save us a lot of trouble."

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He smiles modestly. At the carpet.

"Sometimes, a businessman needs to move ... certain cargo. But lacks the proper storage space to which such cargo may be moved. It may be that one of our numerous operations was ill-informed about the appropriateness of a location. Also, Balam has syphilis."

That last is apparently directed to Jack, re: the receptionist.

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The Doctor fights down the highly affronted lecture that sprang to mind at the thought of regrding living souls as "cargo" that can end up so callously "misdirected". Fights ... and loses.

"You shift uncounted numbers of sentiences about like they were so many ... apples for the market?" he demands in a tone only an indignant Liverpudlian can achieve. "And expect us to believe it's nothing more than a misfiled business transaction? Those are minds, Balthazar, not boxes of freight, and now they're in vessels, they're not so easily shifted about!"

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He might have actually had something to say to that syphilis comment, if he hadn't been so distracted by the use of the word cargo. The Captain opened his mouth to retort -- but Eight beat him to it and Jack stood there gaping for a few seconds while the Doctor lectured on indignantly.

There was just one angle the Doc forgot to rant about and Jack picked it up easily, not missing a beat between the end of the Doctor's justified tirade, "And what the fuck sort of business are you doing that requires moving sentience like that?"

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"Actually, most of them don't really have minds; they were never alive long enough to cultivate any," Balthazar answers both men, unperturbed. "They're just souls. And probably enjoying a taste of life, however fleeting."

He leans against that wide desk that's probably never seen so much as a scrap of paperwork, and smiles at them genially. "Moving souls is my business, gentlemen. It's what I was born to do."

The faint glow of red to his eyes is meant as punctuation to that last.

"Now, as I was saying, moving them elsewhere is possible, if costly. But I understand this is a matter of principle, so any fee incurred would merely be to cover the expense -- no profit made."

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This is why the Doctor is a gallivanting do-gooder--business is a cold, foreign, and ultimately incomprehensible concept to him. But all that aside, the practical ramifications still come through to him loud and clear.

"Where would they be moved to?"

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Unlike the Doctor, Jack was very experienced in this sort of thing, because the universe as a whole in the fifty-first century still revolved around money. While Eight took the most important of questions, because they were both concerned with where this sentience would end up, Jack took to the negotiations the Doctor probably wouldn't: "How costly is costly, Balthazar?"

But he wouldn't be happy about it. A conman getting conned is never happy about it.

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Balthazar takes his time answering, examining the view out his windows with a vague air of calculation.

"The most cost-efficient way would be to simply unload them into someone who's got some extra room. A serial killer, a rapist, someone newly in a coma -- longterm catatonic bodies generally can't take the stress, or overcome the body's natural defenses for a fullblown case of possession," he says, all very laconic. "It would be temporary. Of course. The difficulty arises in the fact they almost certainly won't want to leave. We'll need to forcibly extract and bind them to another body or container -- we'll need a psychopomp."

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At this, the Doctor is floored. This being is talking about the wanton shuffling about of minds as though he were simply slotting data into computers. And that is something he simply cannot stand. It hits him where few other concepts do.

"Only you seem to have already forgotten one fundamental thing!" the Time Lord splutters. "These are conscious minds, however immature that consciousness is! You can't simply tear them out of something they've come round in and become accustomed to, only to jam them into something else, and for how long, until you do the same thing all over again?"

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While Jack could and did appreciate the Doctor's fervor in the matter, he was also beginning to worry that the moral ambiguity of the situation was going to strain the Byronesque one a little much. The lecturing, the sputtering -- Jack circled around to the Doctor while he was distracted with laying another morality lesson on Balthazar, his hand finding Eight's shoulder and squeezing in an attempt to reassure and pull him back from the edge.

"All right, I was going to negotiate, but clearly I underestimated the level of evil we're working with here," Jack addressed Balthazar from his newfound position behind the Doctor, steeling his gaze and holding back all the horror and disgust and outrage as much as Eight was throwing it out. "If I say to you that money isn't an issue, can you accept reasonable terms from us on the humane removal and relocation of the sentience?"

Because if that wasn't an option, his itchy trigger finger said, he had six other good ones for the job.

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"What, then, do you propose to do?" Balthazar inquires of the Doctor, silkily. "I assure you, a professional psychopomp -- Hermes, or perhaps one of the more upstanding shinigami, will ensure smooth transition. As smooth as death gets, anyway. I care not where the souls will be stored, but they will be collected ... sooner or later."

He yawns and adjusts the cuff of his jacket. "I suppose I could be persuaded to much later; long enough for the souls to have passed on in a natural fashion before 'collection'. But to a more pressing matter: money is worthless to me, gentlemen. I require something more ... unique. A something more ... personal."

The red gleam in his eyes is no less greedy for the utter predictability. "A memory, say. Just one from each of you."

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Eight remains silent for the moment. He doesn't negotiate. He pulls threads out of plans like these, stands back, watches them unravel into glorious messes, and then off into the vortex he goes.

But which would serve the greater good, here?

The greater good. It's a phrase so easily abused, and so easily misunderstood. But it's something he'd lived by for centuries--for the most people to benefit, a few had to suffer. Usually himself. Sometimes those with him. Always the antagonist, or so he wanted to beleive, so he tried to insure. But sometimes it just didn't work out that way, especially in this Nexus of conflicting realities.

So sometimes he couldn't do it his way. Sometimes he couldn't charge in, destroy the plan, and move on. Like now.

He watches Balthazar's red gaze, then, and waits to hear what someone more skilled at negotiating will say.

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There were two whole years of his life missing, two years during which he couldn't account for his whereabouts or actions, and he'd not yet succeeded in getting them back. At times it seemed insignificant compared to the moment, but at others he wondered and dreaded what he had done, questioning his morality and always fearing the worst. The way his stomach bottomed out was only a natural, instinctive response to the notion of sacrificing another memory -- but now for completely selfless reasons.

"No," Jack asserted fiercely, stepping up and positioning himself in front of the Doctor in a smooth, solid motion. "You can't have any of his memories. Ever. Take two of mine. Any you want, I don't care. Just not his." That was it, no second thoughts and he didn't so much as flinch. It was pure instinct and he didn't question it.

I wish I'd never met you, Doctor, I was much better off as a coward...

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"Done." Balthazar says instantly, but he's looking at the Doctor, not Jack. "We'll discuss the details of that later. What's important is, after all, the matter at hand."

With that smile, he could hardly fill his words with less sincerity if he tried. Still, he has a suddenly brisk way of moving that implies at least some sort of action taking place. He picks up the phone on his desk and utters four or five guttural, gratingly alien syllables into it -- hellspeak, people like Constantine called it. Mothertongue, Balthazar would say in his mockingly cultured 'normal' voice.

"Once we've hired the appropriate psychopomp and located suitable vessels, I'm sure you'll wish to oversee the procedure; shall I contact you, Captain? Doctor?"

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For his part, the Doctor isn't even listening to Balthazar, and is staring at Jack, instead.

"Wh..." It takes a beat for the Time Lord to put the enormity of the concept into words, as he suspects the human stnding in front of him hasn't considered this enormity.

"What did you just do? What if he removes the memory of who you are? Or your ability to remember things at all? The system redundancy of the human brain can overwrite a lot of things, but there are still things it can't recover from! Mine can!"

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"It's worth it!" Jack replied with an easy sort of passion he hadn't felt in years. "How do you know? Really? This whole universe is upside-down, with different rules and different physics and different everything -- how can you be sure?" He turned and grasped the Time Lord by the shoulders, fixing him with a hard stare full of an emotion that could only best be described as love. Maybe he hadn't considered the enormity of the decision, but obviously he didn't need to. It was a simple choice that he had made long ago: between himself and the Doctor, Jack knew who he would willingly sacrifice. "I'm not sure and I can't take that risk! You're the Doctor. What if he took something vital, something important, something...beautiful -- and you couldn't recover? I can't let that happen. I won't."

Jack inhaled deeply and let the Doctor go, having said all he could think to say without overstepping some boundaries. He turned back to face Balthazar, all emotion gone from his face and voice. "Yes. I want to know who this psychopomp is and what exactly the arrangements are as you're making them." Caveat emptor, after all. The Captain reached inside his jacket pocket and removed a business card with his contact information on it, offering it to Balthazar blankly.

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Balthazar reaches out for the card, shakily. Shakily because he's trying very hard not to giggle. It would completely ruin his image (what there is of it to ruin ... further ...?). When he has himself mostly under control, card safely tucked away, he offers Jack one of his own in return.

"I usually ask for a certain amount of choice from the ... donater," he remarks, laughter lurking in his voice. "Not complete freedom of choice, of course, as I hardly want to end up with the memory of the largest rubber band ball you ever constructed. But that would just be cruel now, wouldn't it? Don't trouble yourself, Jack, we'll work out those details in private, hmm?"

They make a funny little triangle, Balthazar looking at the Doctor, the Doctor looking at Jack, and Jack at Balthazar.

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There is no dissuading this man, is there? No, not in front of the ... half-daemon there is, anyway. The Doctor steps back, watching Balthazar with a gaze that's left alien geniuses shaking in their half-Dalek transport modules and waits.

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