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You may be looking for the titular natural feature or the novel.

Iceberg was the thirty-eighth story in the Torchwood - Monthly Range by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Grace Knight and featured Burn Gorman as Owen Harper.

Publisher's summary[]

Dr Owen Harper's called to the hospital. There's a ward full of remarkable coma patients and more are coming in. Each patient came in with a dead relative as their imaginary friend.

Has Owen really discovered a bridge between the living and the dead?

Plot[]

At 1 o'clock in the morning, Owen is called by his old friend Amira Hussein to help save the life of Lucy Sheppard at Queen Victoria Hospital. Upon arriving, he diagnoses Lucy with acute hyperkalemia and is concerned at how Amira seems to have forgotten her medical knowledge. She also forgets to tell him that Lucy hallucinates and has conversations with her dead sister, Ella.

Owen notices that nobody else in the ward has reacted to them or the noise that Lucy has been making and criticises Amira for acting like. After seeing the ghost of Ella, he checks on the other patients, finding that they are all in comas, and confronts Amira, realising that it is not really her. She confesses that the real Amira died in a cycling accident and that she is a Spore, having taken on the form of Amira as her mother remembered her.

To save Lucy, Owen gives her more dextroamphetamine and tells her that it is a Spore using the form of her sister, then realising that the Spores also used the memories of Lucy's and Amira's mothers and that Amira was now taking his. He forgets how to walk and collapses, waking up in a hospital bed and getting into a wheelchair to inspect the patients. Whilst everyone in Lucy's ward is in a coma, the other patients and staff members are dead, having been used by the Spores.

After working out that the Spores use delta waves, Owen offers to provide them with Torchwood technology that could artificially produce delta waves and tells Amira to dig out his mind-reading device. He uses it on Lucy, ostensibly to give Ella form but actually to cut off her supply of delta waves, stopping Ella and killing Lucy, before doing the same to kill Amira. He calls Tosh to arrange for a clean-up.

Cast[]

Worldbuilding[]

Individuals[]

Entertainment[]

Food and beverages[]

Medicine[]

Organisations[]

Species[]

  • Amira Hussein is an alien spore, which uses the memories of two hosts to form its own body. Amira uses Fatima Hussein, the mother of real Amira, and Owen Harper.
  • Alien Amira has been using the hospital to harvest the memories of human hosts and breed more spore creatures. Amira refers to these 'ghosts' as her 'sisters'.
  • Ella's two hosts were Lucy and Lucy's mother.
  • Amira compares the formation of a body to the formation of an iceberg. Just as an iceberg forms around a speck of dust, the spore uses the harvested memories to build a body.
  • Harvesting the memories and delta waves of a host drains the host of their natural bodily functions, such as talking, reading and walking. The "ghosts" guilt-trip the hosts into producing delta waves, a side effect of grief, which they then use to solidify their bodies, killing the hosts.

Technology[]

  • Owen uses a mind-reading device, normally used to assess unconscious patients, to erase Ella's delta waves, thus killing both Ella and Lucy. He then uses it to kill the alien Amira.

Torchwood[]

  • Owen phones Tosh to arrange a clean up at the hospital, stating there are 21 corpses and 19 coma patients caused by the alien.

Notes[]

to be added

Continuity[]

External links[]

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