[BTR]

[eelseason]

[Locked against {TimeAgent:462O1}] [Locked to Torchwood, in the event of...]
Is it fair to say that I have no idea what to put in this lock? "Locked to any existing Torchwood force in the event that I go irreparably feral" seems cumbersome. Not to mention the fact that this won't actually work unless these journals function as a permanent re-evaluative memory storage device, but so far it seems to, as it adapts backdates to new political alignments... and that's beside the point.

With any luck, I'll go see Elashte tonight and somewhere from his centuries of experience dealing with the mentally ill, he'll figure out some way to put a cap on this. If you're reading this entry, that probably didn't hold. Gwen, you expressed concern that you wouldn't be able to tell when I was too far gone to leave any option but my containment or death. If you're seeing this post, it's come to that point, and I'm sorry, and this is to help if I can.



Here's what I know.

The biggest advantage I'm going to have is that I can't die, obviously, but there are ways to get around that. I can't not-die my way out of a prison cell or a quality set of cuffs, for example. Because I know I can't die, I'm more likely to be reckless, take bigger risks. I can "afford" to fall into a trap, here and there.

I became this way when a lot of energy was dumped into me from the heart of a TARDIS, resulting in my being imprinted on the universe's Morphogenic Field (MGF). Ever wonder why so many aliens we run into are roughly human-shaped? That's an imprint being passed down from the morphogenic field into physical reality. Usually it's vague and prone to transcription errors, and usually it affects species and not so much individuals, but I'm a special case. That's beside the point. The point is that it's the universe acting to reconstitute me physically if something happens to me – reset me to what it thinks I should be – and a TARDIS might understand how it works. Good thing, because as of the time of this writing, we have one here.

There are certain things that will delay that transfer. Comprehensive damage is one of them. A bullet to the head, I'll heal in under a minute. (The average is 38 seconds, if you're curious.) Removal of the heart, last time, was something between four and nine minutes, decapitation was up around thirteen, and total incineration (we're talking ashes, folks) was up between sixteen and twenty-nine.

Certain types of energy and radiation will also make it more difficult for me to come back, though there are a few reasons to be wary of that – your own personal safety is the big one, and then there's the fact that I can adapt to some. Radiation damages and denatures the cells until you eventually die from complications, but if I'm not dead by the time the MGF transfer kicks in, my rate of healing will speed up to match the damage and it won't shut off. Ask the Doctor; I can work in a room flooded with stet radiation and not worry about a thing. But if you kill me fast enough and keep that intensity or a rising intensity on me, you can temporarily exceed the rate of MGF transfer and prevent me from reviving.

Finding some way to suck (Owen, if you're there, I can see you rolling your eyes – this is serious) mass quantities of that energy out of me is also effective. The reserve I draw from will be put into deficit, and while it'll balance itself out, until that happens I won't be able to revive. I'm not sure how you'd do this – last time it happened the Doctor was siphoning energy off to heal for what felt like every injury the human race had ever suffered – but after that, a single bulletwound kept me down for what must have been six minutes.

Last but not least, if there's anything physically disallowing me to come back, I won't. A stake through the heart, to go with the old cliche, will keep me down – though, fair warning, my body will try to heal in such a way that it pushes the offending object out - or at least to a nonlethal position.

Low-severity stuff: if it doesn't kill, disfigure, deform, infect, or mutate me, it's fair game. MGF won't autoreset it. I have a high tolerance to most drugs, but it's not an immunity. I wouldn't recommend biological warfare on any count; while the chemical stuff can affect me, for whatever reason as soon as it crosses over into the realm of bacteria and virii, I can't contract it any more. (Ask the Rani if you want explication on that and are willing to spend a good hour or two convincing her to talk.)

The bad news is, if something triggers the MGF reset, everything is wiped clean. If I'm drugged and something breaks my arm, the same process that heals the arm will burn out the drugs.

...certain homoriginal chemicals are excepted for this, damn if I've ever discovered why. Mostly epinephrine. Reviving always seems to leave me with an epinephrine rush.



Right. Now. Wrist device.

A Time Agency Wrist Device with integrated Vortex Manipulator is designed to cover 80% of all equipment needs for a Time Agent in the field. It functions as a scanner, a transmitter, a recorder, a library, an adaptable computer interface, a long-range time-space teleport, basically, it does everything but unlock doors and walk the dog. Its programming is semantic and holistic, which means that it can be programmed to do anything it's physically capable of doing. You want to hack its holotransmitters into its teleportation energy shunt and make a light show across the whole of Chicago, you can do it from the command line, it just takes a while. No disassembly or reassembly required.

Oh, and it's bulletproof. No disabling it that way.

The teleport should probably concern you the most. There are ways to weaponize a wrist device, but no one does – it's inefficient, sets off every scanner from here to wherever, and it's just easier to use and control a traditional sidearm. But with a teleport I can cross just about any defensive line. I can infiltrate and extract in seconds. And if I have a health-monitor recall working, it'll get me out of a situation before you can contain me, even if I'm dead.

So your first priority should probably be getting that away from me, which will be difficult, because a Time Agent's wrist device is his life. If I've gone rogue I won't take it off, and I won't lend it out, and the easiest thing for it might just be to take the arm. One of you knows how to make a circular sawblade launcher, right?



Toshiko. Memorize these numbers:

102.2012 Hz

There's no way I can go into the physics of a temporal shunt power supply, because I don't understand most of it. It's Chula technology, and they deal in paradoxes and things that just shouldn't work. But there's a very low-amplitude electromagnetic wave on this frequency – we're talking strength measured in handfuls of electrons – which is an unavoidable byproduct of tapping into the local temporal field to shunt power off. It's a bit like developing an understanding of global meteorology by studying the movements of leaves in one tree, but you might be able to learn something about the way the wrist device is powered.

It has no battery. All the charge it uses, it harvests at point of necessity. Find a way to jam or disrupt it, and it'll be rendered useless.

.003 - .06 sec

Depending on circumstance, this is how long it will take the wrist device to scan for and register simple information (the state of my health, the temperature or rad count outside, presence or absence of breathable atmosphere, a nuclear detonation). Simple information scan is an ongoing passive process of any Agency Wrist Device, so those numbers should be measured from incidence of environmental change.

.07 - .53 sec

Depending on circumstance and programming, that's how long it will take for the wrist device to take registered information, compare it against preprogrammed triggers, and issue a teleport order if necessary.

.12 - .24 sec

Depending on circumstance, this is the time it'll take from a teleport order to dematerialization. At demat, you've lost me. You can't interrupt the process it at that point.

1.7 – 7.0 sec

Nice to see something above the 1.0 mark, isn't it? If you get a chance, the second you see me teleport out of somewhere, get an energy residue spectrometer (Toshiko, I know you had some experience with one in my universe – here's hoping you did in yours, because you'll probably have to build one yourself or see if the Doctor's got one squirreled away somewhere) to take readings off my last location. Set up something that'll read for those same signatures.

Want to know what the numbers are?

That's how soon you'll be able to pick up the energy signature before I materialize.

The wrist device won't drop me in a place incapable of supporting human life. This is why I can activate it with random destinations and trust that I won't find myself floating in empty space. It will begin to open the Vortex for remat, then scan while it has access to the destination. That's the beginning of your 1.7-7.0 seconds. Because the wrist device doesn't technically exist while it's doing these scans – and don't ask for details on how that works, because I really don't know – it takes much longer than other scanning procedures. That gives you some very short advance warning.

Also, if you're able to make the destination inhospitable – flood it with nerve gas, or something – in that time period, the teleport will not remat me there. Where it'll put me depends on programmed settings, so I can't predict them, but you might be able to push me away.

...please note that I really don't recommend you trying to find nerve gas and rigging up a trap system. It was just the first thing that came to mind.

All of this is something a Time Agent would know, and you'd normally have little reason to look for. So be careful how you use it. You'll have an advantage so long as you don't tip your hand, but if you do, that's asking for suspicion, and if I suspect that you know more than you should...

One thing I can give you, though: I'm going to retcon myself once I finish these notes, so I shouldn't have any memory of making this entry. I won't know that you know what I've told you. I'm giving you at least a temporary measure of surprise – use that element.



Okay, and, tactics.

Time Agents skirmish. We don't stand and fight. Relatively weak attacks with surgical precision are the order of the day. Gwen, I talked to you about systems of advantage; of all of them, maneuverability is the one on which 70% of Time Agent tactics are based on.

Generally, this is maneuverability in both time and space, but the wrist device I'm using now is incapable of time travel since coming through the Rift. On the offchance that I get it fixed by the time this needs to display, I'll give you two (simplified) points on how that'll influence things:

1) The primary use of a wrist device within a mission is to allow for materials and reinforcements to be retrieved to the field in what, for the target, registers as instantaneous recall. Teleport out at second A.01, get whatever seems necessary taking as long as you need, teleport in at second A.02 with something custom-designed to deal with the problem. This is why we don't carry much kit. You should worry about this.

2a) The Grandfather Paradox applies to cognition and memory as well as physical reality. If I want to change the past, that desire is a result of my knowledge about the past, and the closer I come to changing it deliberately, the closer to a paradox we get. A paradox will pretty neatly kill everyone around, depending on its severity.
2b) Twin paradoxes – crossing your own timeline – are the most common, and moderately severe. (You can go back and exchange quick pleasantries with yourself without killing everyone. You cannot go back in time and kill yourself without a paradox that'll cleanse all sentient life from a 500km radius. Or more.) If I try to use time travel to directly change anything I did, for better or for worse, it's autosuicide for Chicago and a good chunk of the USA, and Time Agents try to avoid that. You won't need to worry about this.

If the Vortex Manipulator isn't fixed and I can't time jump, so much the better for you.

A the moment, it's a rough teleport and it takes its toll to use it too much. Four or five teleports in the space of a few hours will ruin me for the rest of the day. (Unless, again, something kills or severely injures me, in which case the MGF reset will fix everything. You should get used to thinking of death as an all-out fix to whatever physically ails me.)



Tactics lesson 2, with included strategy: Time Agents love closed systems. If you map out all the forces and vectors, you understand every potential and can predict for them. "determine and contain" is the Time Agency equivalent of "divide and conquer," and if this turns into a long campaign, which you shouldn't let it, that's what I'll be looking to do. There are three general processes I'll likely attempt to keep the system closed:

1) Weakening your (ties with) allies. Finding the people who are definitively on your side and either influencing them away from you or weakening them enough so that they're unable or unwilling to help you.

2) Preventing the formation of new alliances. Focusing on those people who are neutral to you, and spreading anti-Torchwood sentiment so that they would be more reluctant to help you and more likely to become your enemies.

3) Strengthening your enemies and levering them against you. Giving them reason, encouragement, and even aid in attacking you makes my job easier and safer for me.

Subverting these is a matter of speed and knowing why who does what. Negotiations are a question of whys and for whats, and once you have a grasp on those, you can push almost anything to your advantage. If you go to Romana and tell her that you're trying to take me down, she might turn on you the moment it's accomplished, but she might just switch from your enemy to your ally for however long that takes.



Speaking of Romana and odd bedfellows... let's move on to allies.

One on one, I hate to say it, but you're going to be outclassed*. The good thing is, I'm only one man. There's such a thing as overwhelming force, and while I don't think you want to try Napoleonic warfare, outflanking also works. The Rift is great at throwing specialized people your way, and on my own, there's a certain level of specialization I can't counter.

Though, keep this in mind: Every advantage you have that I know of, I will try to neutralize. In the case of people, more than likely, this means death.

*(Unless you find a sympathetic Time Agent, and knowing the Time Agency, let's just say I don't find that probable. If you really want to try your best angle on that, aim a laser/radio transmission in the direction of the Crateris constellation – English is fine – asking for Chula assistance with a rogue Time Agent. The Chula have never done anything they were uninterested in, and their attention spans might or might not outlast a conversation. The most likely response you'll get is a colossal interstellar "Whatever." But the Time Agents were basically the Chulas' dogs. One Chula trumps one Time Agent, hands-down.)



As for me...

Don't trust anything I promise or say. Go by your instincts and what you observe, not what you want to believe. There's an old saying that a Time Agent will always come to a negotiation table, the the real question is whether or not he'll poison the drinks while he's there. Any trust or quarter you extend to me will register as an advantage you're surrendering. If I'm far enough gone for this entry to display, I won't honor any agreements or hold to rules of engagement. I'll lie through my teeth, and Sam, if you're reading this, knowing what you can do...

Let's just say you're an advantage I won't let the enemy hold onto.

I wish there was more I could tell you. But not knowing what's going to set me off, I can't give you much more insight than this.



And, as a last note. I never saw the point in making a living will – you know, it didn't seem that important, when dying (at least the permanent kind) was something that happened to other people. But there's more than one kind of death, and this qualifies.

I'm sorry that I don't have anything to leave you but my final standing orders:

STOP ME.

I know what I'm capable of, and believe me, you don't want to let this run its course. If you're seeing this post I am, for all intents and purposes, already dead. Don't let any resemblance to me in the person running around town stop you from doing what you need to.



Torchwood.

Wherever I am, and wherever you are, I'm proud of you. Always have been. Whatever your doubts or personal weaknesses, you have my confidence. It's been an honor serving with each and every one of you, and I'm sorry it had to end like this.

It's been fun. :)

–Jack
–22.08.08

[Locked against {TimeAgent:462O1}] [Locked to the Doctor, in the event of...]
Doctor,

Earlier today, as I write this, you promised me you'd stop me if I'd gone too far and there was no pulling me back. If you're reading this entry, that's occurred. I don't know how, and I don't particularly want to, but there is something I have to say:

I'm sorry.

Whatever that means, where and when you are, I am so, so sorry.

I want you to know that however it's fallen apart, for the time it lasted, you made me a better person. I know I could never rise to your requirement, but I rose further than I ever had before. That's all I could ask, and it meant the cosmos to me.

Thank you.

Do what you have to.

–Capt. Jack Harkness
–22 August, 2008

Comments

[Locked] O Captain! my Captain!

[superiorspectre]

Jack --

You can't read this. Which probably makes this the safest possible place to write this.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Yes, I'm back with Torchwood. I'm sorry you couldn't be there to see me home. But I'll see you home, Captain. I know you're in there. And I'll do what I have to in order to stop Thane. That goes with the job, doesn't it? Guard humanity against the ones that would threaten it.

But I'm going to get you back. Whatever it takes, whatever happens, I'll have gone into this gladly. You mean more to a great many people than you'll ever believe. And amazingly enough, it seems I'm one of them.

I don't come to care for people easily. And I never really grow to trust them. You're the most unexpected exception to that I could ever imagine.

...I'll see you soon. I promise.