The Doctor settled into life with the Ponds well enough. He and Elise took walks every day and just talked about things that were on her mind. It felt nice to spend time with him.

Right now he was sitting with Amy and Rory eating fish fingers and custard as they watched some reality television. "If I had a restaurant, this'd be all I'd serve," the Doctor told them.

Amy scoffed. "Yeah, right. You running a restaurant."

"I've run restaurants. Who do you think invented the Yorkshire pudding?"

Rory laughed, but stopped when he saw the serious look on the Doctor's face. "You didn't."

"Pudding, yet savory. Sound familiar?"

The next morning, the Doctor was playing on the Wii again. His favorite game involved hitting a ball with a racquet.

Elise didn't see the appeal.

"Oh, yes! Second set, Doctor! Ha ha! Oh, if Fred Perry could see me now, eh? He'd probably ask for his shorts back. Third set decider, come on, then."

Suddenly, the cube that was sitting on the side table started floating.

It flew in front of the Doctor. "Out of the way, dear, I'm trying to..."

The cube didn't do anything. It just hovered there.

"Whatever you are, this planet, these people, are precious to me. And I will defend them to my last breath."

The cube only hovered.

"Is that all you can do, hover? I had a metal dog could do that."

A little metal tube came out of the cube.

"Oh, that's clever. What's that?"

It fired an energy bolt.

The Doctor dodged and it hit a vase. The Doctor and Elise scrambled out of the living room.

Well so much for domesticity.

The cube started flipping through images on the TV.

"You really have woken up."

Rory came running in from the kitchen. "Doctor! Hi. Uh, the cube in there, it just opened."

Amy came running down the stairs. "The cube upstairs just spiked me and took my pulse!"

"Ha! Really? Mine fired laser bolts and now it's surfing the net," the Doctor told them. He grabbed his jacket and put it on as Brian came inside the house.

"You're never going to believe this. My cube just moved. It rattled."

Rory's phone started ringing and he answered.

The Doctor laughed and ran back into the living room.

"Hello? Okay, I'm on my way." He hung up. "I have to get to work. They need all the help they can get."

"Let me come, help out," Brian said.

"Take your dad to work night, brilliant!" He turned to Amy. "Okay, are you going to be all right here?"

Amy kissed him on the cheek. "Keep away from the cubes."

"Right." Rory and Brian left.

The Doctor was looking down at his psychic paper with a smile.

"What are you grinning about?" Amy asked.

"We're wanted at the Tower of London."

Amy, Elise, and the Doctor got out of the car and were greeted by Kate.

"Every cube across the whole world activated at the same moment."

"Now we're in business. You sent me a message to my psychic paper. You know what? I'm almost impressed."

"Secret base beneath the Tower. Hope we're not here because we know too much," Amy joked. The last time they'd been in the Tower of London, they were freeing a Star Whale.

"Yes, I've got officers trained in beheading. Also ravens of death," Kate said, sarcastically.

"I like her," Amy told the Doctor.

The Doctor knew another redhead would like Kate.

They entered an area with small rooms containing cubes.

"There are fifty being monitored, and more coming in all the time. I don't know how useful it is. Every cube is behaving individually. There's no meaningful pattern. Some respond to proximity. Some create mood swings," Kate said.

There was a women crying in one of the rooms.

Amy pointed to one of the cubes. "Er, what's this one?"

"Try the door," Kate told her.

Amy opened the door and an extremely annoying song (that once again Elise didn't recognize) started playing.

The Doctor put his fingers in his ears.

"On a loop!" Kate yelled over the music.

Amy quickly shut the door.

They walked over to a bay of computer screens.

"This is the latest," Kate said.

"Oh dear. Systems breach at the Pentagon, China, every African nation, the Middle East," the Doctor listed off.

"I've got governments screaming for explanations and no idea what to tell them. I'm lost, Doctor. We all are."

"Don't despair, Kate. Your dad never did."

Kate looked over at him and the Doctor smiled.

"Kate Stewart, heading up UNIT, changing the way they work. How could you not be? Why did you drop Lethbridge?"

"I didn't want any favors. Though he guided me, even to the end. Science leads, he always told me. Said he'd learned that from an old friend."

Elise could hear the fondness in her voice when she spoke about her father. Elise shifted closer to Doctor and put her head on his shoulder.

"We don't let him down. We don't let this planet down."

A monitor started beeping.

"They've stopped. The cubes, across the world, they just shut down," the guy who was monitoring the screens said.

"Active for forty seven minutes, and then they just die?" Kate asked.

"Not dead. Dormant, maybe," the Doctor said.

"Then why shut down?" Amy asked.

"I don't know. I don't know," the Doctor said, "I need to think. I need some air. Who has an underground base? Terrible ventilation."

Amy, Elise, and the Doctor sat out by the river Thames.

"The moment they arrived, I should have made sure they were collected and burned. That is what I should have done," the Doctor said.

"How? Nobody would have listened," Amy told him.

"You're thinking of stopping, aren't you? You and Rory."

"No. I mean, we haven't made a decision."

"But you're considering it."

"Maybe. I don't know. We don't know. Well, our lives have changed so much. But there was a time, there were years, when I couldn't live without you. When just the whole everyday thing would drive me crazy. But since you dropped us back here, since you gave us this house, you know, we've built a life. I don't know if I can have both."

"Why?"

"Because they pull at each other. Because they pull at me, and because the traveling is starting to feel like running away."

"That's not what it is."

"Oh, come on. Look at you, four days in a lounge and you go crazy."

"I'm not running away. But this is one corner of one country in one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond. And there is so much, so much to see, Amy. Because it goes so fast. I'm not running away from things, I am running to them before they flare and fade forever. And it's all right. Our lives won't run the same. They can't. One day, soon maybe, you'll stop. I've known for a while."

Just like Elise would eventually stop once she met him. The one she was always meant to be with.

"Then why do you keep coming back for us?"

"Because you were the first. The first face this face saw." He turned to look at Elise. "Besides you of course." He kissed her forehead and turned back to Amy. "And you're seared onto my hearts, Amelia Pond. You always will be. I'm running to you, and Rory, before you fade from me."

Both Amy and Elise put their heads on his shoulders. His girls.

"Don't be nice to me. I don't want you to be nice to me," Amy told him.

"Yeah, you do, Pond, and you always get what you want." An idea hit the Doctor. "They got what they wanted."

"What? Who did?"

The Doctor smacked himself in the face. "The cubes. That's why they stopped. Come on."

They ran back inside and found Kate.

"Kate? Before they shut down, they scanned everything, from your medical limits to your military response patterns," the Doctor told her.

The power suddenly went out.

"They made a complete assessment of Planet Earth and its inhabitants. That's what the surge of activity was. Problem with the power?"

"Not possible. We've got back-ups."

"Hmm."

They ventured into the room containing the cubes.

"Doctor? Look!" Amy said.

All the cubes were showing the number seven.

"Why do they all say seven?" Kate asked.

"Seven. Seven, what's important about seven? Seven Wonders of the World, seven streams of the River Ota, seven sides of a cube," the Doctor said.

"A cube has six sides," Amy corrected.

"Not if you count the inside."

The number changed to six.

"It has to be a countdown," the Doctor said.

"Not in minutes," Kate told him.

"Why would it be minutes? Kate, we have to get humanity away from those cubes. God knows what they'll do if they hit zero. Get the information out any way you can. News channels, websites, radio, text messages. People have to know that the cubes are dangerous."

"Okay, but why is this starting now? I mean, the cubes arrived months ago. Why wait this long?" Amy asked.

"Because they're clever. Allow people enough time to collect them, take them into their homes, their lives. Humans, the great early adopters. And then, wham! Profile every inch of Earth's existence."

"Discover how best to attack us," Kate said, realizing what was going on.

"Get that information out any way you can. Go!"

"Right."

The Doctor ran over to the bay of computers. "Every cube was activated. There must be signals, energy fluctuations on a colossal scale, there must be some trace. There can't not be."

He turned to Elise, Amy, and Kate. "We need to think of all the variables, all the possibilities, okay? Go, go, go, go, go!"

They were running out of time. The numbers on the cubes changed to four.