theladytre:
Tre smiled gently “I’m afraid you are, darling. Alien just means someone native to another world, and you are that. But don’t take it too hard. I’m not even alive, you know.”
“Clever of you, to get the system on your side so immediately,” Tre agreed. “We were always rather good at that, even if, as you say, making friends as such isn’t foremost among our qualities. Still–there’s Leela, and Narvin, and the Doctor. We do rather well for ourselves, all things considered, in the long run.”
Tre sighed. “It’s difficult to say,” she said. “The trouble is, you see, I’m more than just an early warning system–I’m the whole safety protocol that goes with it. I’ve been studying Pandora’s partition, you know, and it’s degraded something awful since she left it. Of course, hers isn’t as well-made as mine, but it does suggest that a conscious intelligence is necessary to maintain such things, and even if a sort of shift system were set up, others taking turns with me to monitor the Daleks, they wouldn’t have the control I do, over the Matrix I mean–and I won’t have more Matrix constructs created just to swap in and out with me, that would be ghastly, to be so weak they had to create someone else just to suffer, and…”
Tre realized she was babbling. “I don’t know, Mana,” she admitted. “That’s the plain truth. I don’t know.”
“I suppose.” Mana said, doubtfully. She’d been thinking of the new Gallifrey as exactly like her native one in all the ways that mattered, but Tre was right, she didn’t wholly belong. If she did, there’d be no need to hide, or to cloak her identity with Tre’s illusions, or to change her name. This world already had a Romana, one who’d long since finished the business of growing up. She looked away, homesick for a world that no longer existed.
After a few moments of thinking over Tre’s rambling, she looked up. “No one would call Omega weak for only maintaining a universe for a mere few millennia.” She pointed out. “Couldn’t the shades do it? They’re already meant to be here.”












