In the Library

"Almost as if someone went around erasing himself from every database in the universe."

-{+}-

Cal watched the people roam her new Library. Well, most of them didn't "roam" so much as "sit and read", but she thought that that might be sort of the same thing, in a library. She guessed that made her the ultimate traveller, because, while they read the books on paper, one at a time, she had them all at her fingertips, all the time, all at once.

It totally made up for being sort of dead.

Then something new appeared in her Library, usurping her status as Ultimate Traveller. To the cameras, it was just a blue box, with a lightbulb on the top, but inside the computers, Cal could trace every mention of the T.A.R.D.I.S. and man stepping out of it. This was his eleventh face, she recognized. Roughly 1,375 miles from where he'd landed was a shelf of related biographies, including of course Professor R. Song's preeminent The Lonely Angel. Several thousand more historical documents referenced him.

The Doctor went straight to the nearest interface, and Cal greeted him personally before he could even turn it on. There weren't many other beings donated yet, anyway, and this was interesting.

"Hello, and welcome to the Library. How may I help you?"

"Hello," he responded easily. "I'm the Doctor. I need to take some information out of your data core."

"I would be happy to help with any research you need to do."

"It's not exactly that," he said, and there was something grim in his voice. He took out his sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the interface. "This might sting a bit, but you won't remember a thing."

"What?" she asked, slipping off the script. "Doctor, what do you mean?"

"I'm sorry, Cal. It's just a small program. I just need to disappear a bit. You won't even notice the difference."

"What––" she asked again, but then the screwdriver's green was filling her screen and circuits, and all she could hear over the buzzing was the Doctor saying, "Trust me."

...

Cal blinked. Did she just fall asleep? No, she couldn't fall asleep. She was a computer now. A Library.

Most of her drive was focussed on a single interface, in the early 32nd-century section of the Science Fiction continent.

"Hello," she said pleasantly to the man standing there. He was dressed like an elderly gentleman from 20th century Earth, though he looked reasonably young. She looked, but there were no visual matches in any book she had. That was fine. Not everyone got books written about them. "Welcome to the Library. How may I help you?"

The young man slipped something in his pocket, cylindrical and silvery, that she also didn't recognize. Maybe she'd look it up later in Tools. He adjusted his bowtie, looking sort of sad. "No need." Then he walked away, towards an odd blue box that she was sure wasn't part of any exhibit. But something in her circuitry shied away from curiosity.

Cal shrugged and turned her attention away from that interface. Back to more important things. Like what to read next...