Fffc March Special Bingo - Secrets revealed

[m_findlow]

Title: Secrets revealed
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,962 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for fffc March Special Bingo Card - Prompt 8 - The Secret History
Summary: A power outage brings something unexpected.

Jack was hovering so close over him he could feel Jack's breath prickling the back of his neck. He wanted to swat him away and give him a bit of space.

'Please just tell me it hasn't completely corrupted our systems,' Jack pleaded, watching impatiently as Ianto ran diagnostics.

Stupid virus, Ianto thought. Where it had come from was still a mystery. One second they'd been minding their own business, and the next the whole hub had been plunged into pitch darkness. That of course lead to its own problems, more than just stumbling around in the dark. There was no way of knowing what power was working. Immediately Jack had grabbed Johnson and the pair of them headed straight downstairs to check on the cells, whilst Gwen and Ianto remained behind to try and figure out what had happened. The last thing they needed was weevils and other undesirables on the loose inside the hub whilst chaos was erupting.

Just as Jack had given them the all clear that the cells were holding, at least for the moment, the power mysteriously came back online.

'What did you do?' Jack asked them as he and Johnson made their way back upstairs, looking around as the lights gradually flickered back on all around them, computers booting back up.

'We didn't do anything,' Gwen replied, looking confused at her computer monitor. 'It came back all by itself.'

Jack didn't believe in random acts of seemingly unharmful behaviour, thus why Ianto was now having to trawl through their systems, looking for anything and everything. He'd found some lines of code that he didn't recognise, ingratiating themselves into their basic operating systems, which when parsed through one of Tosh's programs revealed it was a virus, but it hadn't been able to tell them anything beyond that about its purpose or origins.

'I wanna know what this virus is, how it got there and what its purpose is,' Jack demanded. Ianto huffed. Sometimes it was hard not to fall into old habits whereby Jack was still in charge, bellowing orders, and Ianto was nothing more than his girl Friday. They'd come a long way since then, Ianto now being the global director for the Torchwood Institute. Still, there were moments like these when all of that went out of the window, and Jack did what he did best, taking charge of the situation.

'It's going to take awhile, Jack,' Ianto said, falling into familiar habits, letting Jack lead.

'That's not good enough.'

'Well, it will have to be,' he replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He was hardly happy about the situation himself. They had enough on their plates without a cyber incursion which may or may not be alien in origin.

He tapped a few keys, trying to figure out which systems the virus had worked its way into, when a new window popped up on his screen. It looked like Jack's email account, though what it was doing on his computer was anyone's guess. He frowned as his eyes scrolled down the screen. 'Five thousand unread emails. Jack, what the hell?' He knew Jack wasn't a fan of administration, but this was beyond ridiculous.

Jack leaned over and took a closer look for himself. 'That's not my email account.'

'Then whose is it?'

'I don't know. But email accounts don't just appear out of nowhere.'

As Ianto began to dig deeper in to the mystery account, more windows began to pop up.

'What is that stuff?' Jack asked.

'I don't know,' Ianto replied, not able to have enough time to read the contents of any one window before three more popped up in its place. 'It's like a whole other system.'

'Yeah, but where did it come from?'

A few keystrokes later Ianto had the answer, though it only created more questions. 'It's ours.'

'What do you mean it's ours?'

'It's Torchwood,' he said with absolute certainty. 'Some sort of system on our servers that was partitioned and locked off.' He turned to look up at Jack. 'You didn't know about it?'

Jack shook his head. 'No.'

'But how? I mean, you have access to everything.'

'So do you, now,' Jack reminded him. Yes, he supposed that was true, now that Jack had handed over the helm to him. He clicked back over the the odd email account, now that new windows had ceased appearing all over the screen, and began to read off some of the subject lines and senders. 'Oh, my.'

'What?'

'These emails go back to 2000, and about a year later, they just stop.' He thought about this for a moment. 'What if this email account belonged to Alex Hopkins?'

'How far back do the emails go?'

Ianto scrolled and scrolled. The nineties, the eighties, even the seventies, he saw as the dates flicked by. He knew Torchwood had the internet long before the rest of the world, but Alex hadn't been here in the seventies. 'Jack, I don't think this was just Alex's account. I think it belonged to whoever was in charge at the time, handed over with each change in leadership. If Alex died on New Year's Eve, then emails would have kept coming in.'

'And then if no one was getting a reply, they stopped sending them,' Jack surmised. 'Makes sense.'  

'Yes, but look at the senders. Portugal, Canada, Australia, Japan, Zimbabwe, Russia...' The list of countries and locations went on and on.  

'Spam?' Jack joked.

'Hardly. These, I hate to say it, but these look like emails from Torchwood outposts.'

Jack shook his head. 'Impossible. They were all disbanded, shut down.' He ran a hand through his hair. 'There weren't even Torchwood bases in those countries!'

Ianto fixed him with a look. 'Are you sure?'

Jack squirmed. 'I thought I was.' Yes, he'd been around the traps for a long time and travelled a lot of places doing jobs for Torchwood, but he'd never really paid much attention to the administrative side of things. There was enough stuff being thrown out of the rift right here to keep his attention firmly fixed. He hadn't exactly had a proper hand over of the place, either. One minute Alex was here and then he was gone. Jack assumed he'd found everything he needed to carry on in his stead, but what if there'd been other secure files tucked away?

'You think this virus thing, whatever it was, unlocked all of these files?' Jack asked.

'Or maybe it wasn't a virus exactly. I mean, it looks like a virus, but from what I've been able to see so far, it hasn't done any damage. What kind of virus does no damage? Maybe it's more like a routine or a subprogram that was created, and after a set amount of time it was programmed to release the partition on its own.'

'What, so no one checks out their emails for ten years and it sets itself off?'

'Perhaps whoever designed it didn't want Torchwood to disappear in the event that whoever was in charge didn't survive to pass on the mantle to someone else. It could have been set up to ensure Torchwood always survived.'

'So, you think Alex knew all of this existed?' Jack asked.

'Could be. He was leader, after all. There must have been some secure passwords and protocols only he knew.' Ianto paused for a moment. 'Oh, boy.'

'What?'

'I don't really want to say it, but are we saying that there's a whole bunch of Torchwood operations going on out there without our knowledge?'

Jack sucked in a breath and let it out. 'It seems that's altogether possible. But who the hell is paying them to keep going? All of these outposts, assuming they're still operating after all this time. What's keeping the lights on, and more importantly, who?'

Ianto scoffed a laugh. 'Do you know how big London's bank account would have been? Just because they're gone doesn't mean the money just disappeared. It could have kept them running for decades. They could have been getting monthly payments for years and never questioned whether anyone was still on the other end, controlling the purse strings.'

'Bloody hell,' Jack swore. It really was possible. He'd never bothered to check it out. They had more than enough funding to keep them going without having to dip into any other resources. The same wasn't necessarily true if there really were other bases out there. Trust London not to have passed on the memo that there'd been a change in leadership. Maybe that had been intentional, making sure Jack didn't interfere any more than he already was. He'd never been popular with London, always choosing to do his own thing and to do it his own way.

'Nothing from Torchwood Four in there by any chance?' Jack asked. You never knew. Maybe they'd found themselves. He'd love to know where they'd gotten to in the first place.

'No idea,' Ianto replied. 'I'll have to go through all of this in detail. If anyone's still out there, I think they might get a shock to hear back from us after all this time. They probably think we went the same way as London when no one replied to their communications. Assuming they even know Torchwood One is gone.'

'Could've picked up a phone,' Jack said. Trite as it sounded, if you really wanted to get in touch, email was a poor option.

'What do you suppose they're all doing?' Ianto wondered. 'They don't have rifts like us, do they?'

'I guess we'll find out when we start going through some of these files. Might be they've all given up and gone home.'  

'Or they might be tinkering with alien technology.' He just hoped none of them had that same ruthless drive Torchwood One had possessed. They could have destroyed the world the times over, meddling with things they shouldn't. 'Alex never mentioned any of this to you?'

'He never had a reason to. He wasn't exactly thinking clearly the last time we spoke,' Jack said, remembering how broken he'd become. 'We talked about a lot of stuff over a scotch at night, but we kept politics and admin to a minimum.' Most nights it had just been nice to kick back and have a laugh over the day's events. Alex was probably the first leader he'd worked with whom he could honestly call a friend.

'Suppose not,' Ianto said, trying not to bring up painful memories.

'A whole other Torchwood,' Jack chuckled. 'Who'd have thunk?'

'More concerning is what the hell have they been doing whilst we've been here oblivious?'

'Guess we're about to find out.'

Ianto sighed. 'Well, looks like I've got five thousand emails to start responding to.'

'Have fun with that,' Jack said, clapping him playfully on the shoulder.

'I hate you sometimes. It's like you knew this was coming,' Ianto complained. 'Now I know why you handed over running this place. Just when you think you've finally gotten a handle on it, and know everything there is to know, you discover the fact there's a whole other secret Torchwood history you didn't even know about.'

'Well, you did say you wanted the place to have a wider reaching remit,' Jack teased.

'Not quite what I had in mind. I was thinking more of a slow expansion, fielded by people we knew.'

'Looks like you might be needing that airport lounge membership, after all. Could be a few new faces you'll need to meet.' Jack was quietly excited at the prospect.

'I think I'll want to be across everything in these new databases first,' Ianto said. 'They haven't dealt with us for over ten years. A few more weeks won't hurt.'