Fffc Bingo Card - All at once familiar

[m_findlow]

Title: All at once familiar 
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Tosh, Ianto, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none 
Author notes: Written for Bingo Card Prompt 40 - Song at fffc
Summary: Tosh is having all kinds of trouble with her latest piece of alien tech. 

Tosh stared mindlessly at her computer screen. It felt like it was kicking her, but then again it's fairly difficult for a computer to be possessed of such things as emotions and thoughts. It was just a pile of one's and zeros, powered by electricity through a complex series of computer chips, which were themselves nothing more than metal and plastic. There were definitely no cognitive capabilities embedded in the microprocessors. Even Torchwood's mainframe computer, though much more highly advanced than the basic dumb terminal she was currently using, augmented by alien technology, still didn't have the ability to think in a non-linear, fuzzy logic way that a human mind could. That sort of thing was millenia away even in Jack's own timeline. Computers were still just machines, though more technically advanced with their own human voice patterns programmed into them to make them seem less mechanical. 

Would that she could have a computer that really understood what she was thinking and that could think like her, only better, with more processing power than the human mind. The kinds of problems she could mull over with it, debating logic and solving mysteries. But that was just a fantasy. 

She wished she had that computer now instead of the one feeding her nothing but dead ends. She'd spent every spare hour of the last week chewing over the data from a small travel chip that had come through the rift. It was so small it might have gone completely unnoticed and ended up in a bin, or washed down a drain if it had landed anywhere other than in the kitchen of a very popular burger bar in Cardiff Bay, which just so happened to end up in the double beef and bacon deluxe cheeseburger ordered by one Jack Harkness when he was meant to be on a pre-wedding diet imposed by his future husband to be. Fortunately he didn't bite down hard enough to break it, just hard enough to spit it out and see it for what it was. 

Jack had given it to her as a side project, but not an urgent one. These things, he explained, frowning over the cup of decaffeinated purgatory that had been served as punishment for breaking his promise to Ianto, were about as common as a USB flash drive was in 2010. In other words, there were millions of the damn things and most contained nothing of any real interest whatsoever. It was highly unlikely to reveal the secrets of life, the universe and everything, but that didn't stop Tosh from wanting to find out what kinds of things aliens -or even humans, perhaps- stored away some time in the far flung future. 

Actually finding a way to connect the chip to a converter that would allow her to download the contents was easy. She had a specifically partitioned part of their computer system for it, since like any removable data device, God alone knew what was on it and whether it wasn't full of nasty viruses and trojans just waiting to seize on a big juicy database like the hub's mainframe. Then again, it might find their twenty first century database totally boring. Still, she didn't risk it. 

She'd ended up with a garbled mess of alien symbols that didn't mean anything. It was just the same handful repeated in different combinations, and not matter how many translator programs she tried running it through, nothing was coming up. She surmised that maybe it was numbers rather than letters, some kind of mathematical formula for something, but even that left her scratching her head. 

‘Looks like you could use one of these,’ came the gentle Welsh voice from behind her, slipping a mug onto the desk by her keyboard. 

‘Thanks, Ianto,’ she replied, picking it up and sipping from it. 

‘Still no luck?’ 

She shook her head. ‘I'm running out of ideas. It's just the same eight symbols jumbled around. Base eight math, maybe, but there's no math symbols in between.’ 

‘Maybe it's the answer to Pi in base eight math.’ 

‘Nope, thought of that already.’ 

‘Oh. Damn. Um... What about music? There's eight notes in an octave.’ 

‘I could try.’ Tosh clicked some keys and loaded the data into a simple midi file generator. The notes bounced around but it didn't seem to make anymore sense as a tune than it did as anything else. 

‘Hey kids, what's up, and where's my coffee, Ianto?’ 

‘You had it. Decaf, if you recall.’ 

Jack pulled a face. ‘C'mon, that was a week ago! I've been on nothing but lettuce and carrots since!’ 

Ianto teasingly patted him on the head. ‘Just like a good little rabbit fiancé.’ 

Jack swatted Ianto's hand away and heard the sad little tune piping out of Tosh's computer speakers. ‘What's that?’ 

Tosh looked despondently at the screen. ‘Just another dead end in trying to translate that data chip.’ 

Jack paused and listened. ‘No, wait... Doo doo da dada, daaaah, ding ding ding, da dada dum dum... Spin it back like a time lord, everybody knows that space is moving fast now, gotta drive it round, round, zip it, slip it, Quadrant Five gonna dip it, Be-be-be-tel-geuse!’ 

Ianto pulled a face. ‘What on Earth?’ 

‘Not Earth,’ Jack said, rocking his hips around and doing some kind of silent disco moves, ‘only one of the best songs ever to come out of Arganza Alpha Six! Man, I haven't heard this in, well, centuries!’ 

‘Never heard of it.’ 

‘It was a one hit wonder. Probably the biggest ever.’ 

‘Bigger than My Sharona?’ 

‘Yep.’ 

‘Bigger than Tainted Love?’ 

‘Way bigger.’ 

‘Bigger than the Macarena?’ 

‘Complete with the dance moves! Doo doo da dada, daaaah, ding ding ding, da dada dum dum,’ he carried on, humming the rest of the tune and trying to drag Ianto into dancing with him. ‘Dance with me, Ianto!’ 

Tosh sighed and started back at her computer. ‘Great,’ she muttered. ‘I just spent a week decoding someone's I-pod playlist.’