Torchwood: Exodus Code

Gwen’s name at the top. ‘Gwen has the chromosome for synaesthesia.’ Jack noted this under Gwen’s name. ‘But what if because she had a baby recently she also has a particular combination of chemicals in her body that have been triggered along with her synaesthesia.’
    ‘If that’s true,’ said Vlad, ‘then it would also explain why not every woman who is a synaesthete is experiencing this heightening, because it’s not just the synaesthesia – it’s their hormones, too.’
    ‘I think so,’ said Jack. ‘But there’s still a piece missing.’
    Jack drew a circle round Gwen’s name and the word synaesthesia, then an overlapping circling with the word hormones in the centre. Then he drew a third and put a question mark in it. ‘If we’re going to help these women, we need to find what’s in this third… circle.’
    Jack stared at the image he’d drawn on the board, a Venn diagram. He didn’t know if it was coincidence or not but it looked weirdly like the symbol Gwen had carved on her forearm.
    Eva, who had been silent throughout the conversation, spoke up. ‘I think Vlad and I may have discovered the third trigger.’

48
    EVA UNROLLED A thick sheaf of printouts in front of Jack.
    Cash rolled his eyes. ‘Nothing fancy, lass, keep it simple tonight. He can see the numbers and all the data tomorrow.’
    Eva gulped her water and stood up. She put on her glasses. ‘For the past week, Vlad and I have been monitoring a series of submerged tremors, eruptions in the deepest parts of the ocean floor. None of which have resulted in major tsunamis as you might expect, and none of them have impacted major land masses. They’ve hit mostly on the edges of shorelines. But they’ve resulted in underwater geysers like the one that broke through the surface in Wales.’
    ‘Which ones?’ asked Jack.
    ‘Coast of Vietnam. Off the far northern coast of Scotland—’
    ‘And,’ interrupted Vlad, ‘the islands south of New Zealand, and the southern coast of Peru.’
    ‘Peru?’ asked Jack.
    Vlad nodded. ‘Shelley’s running a program that’ll look for tick points, see what comes up.’
    ‘Shelley?’ asked Jack.
    ‘Tick points?’ asked Hollis.
    ‘When you’re comparing things in a paper chart the traditional way,’ said Jack to Hollis, ‘you’d give tick marks or check marks to elements of similar qualities, to situations or variables that overlap. Sort of like the centre of my Venn diagram.’
    Vlad nodded. ‘If those geographic areas have anything in common, Shelley will find them much faster than any of our brains.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Shelley’s the ship’s artificial intelligence. She also keeps the systems on the ship running, but I think you knew that since you gave her the virus that shut us down.’
    ‘I needed your attention.’ Jack sipped his beer, and looked across at Eva, who Jack decided was as adept with technology and probably as smart as Vlad, yet she kept deferring to him in the conversation. ‘So you named your AI after a Romantic poet?’
    Eva shook her head. ‘We named it after a Romantic poet’s
wife
.’
    ‘Go on, Eva,’ said Cash, smiling. ‘Finish your report.’
    ‘The final thing I’d add is… well… I haven’t really discussed it yet with anyone else,’ she paused, taking a sip of her wine and not her water before continuing, ‘but, well, I think there may be a way to connect the underwater eruptions with the cases of heightened synaesthesia.’
    Jack looked over the map that Eva had created. ‘Let me see this on your screen.’
    Eva gathered up her files and led Jack and Vlad across the passageway to the communication centre. Cash headed up to the wheelhouse with Sam, leaving Hollis to clean up in the mess.
    ‘I’ll check on Gwen,’ said Cash, on his way down the corridor.
    In the comms centre, things had been settled back in their place since the storm. The computer screens glowed in the dim light and an occasional beep from a monitor punctuated the silence. Vlad perched on the end of his desk, his hands in his pockets, while Eva picked up her iPad. The massive screen on the wall powered up, displaying a map of the world with the epicentre of each of the deep-water events flashing in red. Jack stepped in front of the map, folded his arms and stared at it in silence.
    On the flat screen on Eva’s desk, a young woman dressed in an off-shoulder black velvet gown, her hair pulled back from an intelligent pretty face appeared. She was sitting