A speculation in story-form…
Adam Mitchell loved working for Van Statten, cataloguing his alien artefacts. For an uber-geek who loved to tinker with unusual technology, it was the perfect job. Adam wasn’t evil. He would never think of himself as a bad man. Just the same as most people - willing to bend the rules a little to suit himself. Nothing that would hurt anybody.
Like keeping a few trinkets for himself to play with. Nothing big, and nothing spectacular. Nothing that anyone would be likely to notice. Van Statten wouldn’t miss the odd rock, the odd claw. Van Statten had the metal head. He wouldn’t miss a little metal finger.
And then The Doctor came. And Rose. And the Dalek came to life, and everything turned upside down.
Was it just a few weeks later that Adam found himself back home, with no job, and a strange device buried in his forehead?
But Adam was a genius, and he still had references from Geocomtex. Soon he was back in business, and going from strength to strength. A PhD from Cambridge, and then working in government labs. And finally, Doctor Adam Mitchell, a Senior Fellow at the world famous Torchwood Institute.
Torchwood studied everything that was exciting and important.
It was when Adam saw a demonstration of the nanofusion cell that he had his brainwave. Somehow, it seemed like just the right power source for that little metal finger, so long forgotten.
He sneaked one of the nanofusion prototypes into his pocket, and took it home.
He dug the finger out of a dusty box where it had lain for years, and hooked up the cell. It jerked almost imperceptibly, or so Adam thought, and started to grow very slightly warm.
“Recharging perhaps?” he thought. “I’ll leave it overnight, and take a look in the morning.”
Adam was awoken by the scream of his daughter.
“Mummy!”
He flung himself down the stairs towards the shrieking, into the kitchen.
His wife, but not his wife, turned. Her body seemed half-eaten by metal.
Her head something like a head he’d seen in a glass case, long ago.
For the second time in his life, Adam fainted.
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