Fiction

Scheduling Masters

Cpt 8

“The Land of Fiction?” Arissa repeated after a moment. Her tone was disbelieving, little more than a whisper, and she hated herself for it as it implied weakness, and weakness was something you couldn’t express if you wanted to survive the Master.

Showing weakness in a room full of them? Well, that was just inviting trouble.

To be fair as her eyes scanned the room, Arissa actually felt fairly confident that she could take them on. Not all at once of course, but one on one. Well, all but Missy, as that version was like a bag full of cats. You could smell the crazy on her. She was unpredictable enough to be the real threat and also seemed to be REALLY excited about the idea of doing great harm to our intrepid heroine.

“The Land of Fiction,” Missy repeated, her eyes boring into her as she smiled a toothless smile that somehow still implied fangs were involved.

Arissa stared back, determined not to break eye contact first. “I’ve been there once. It wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences.” She said, discreetly tightening the grip on the sword hilt.

“Well if you’re familiar with it there’s no point in explaining is there?” The purple-clad Master quipped.

“Indulge me.” Said Arissa, still staring down Missy.

The original Master (but again, who was to really know) stepped forward and gently laid a hand on Missy’s sword, lowering the blade. She glared at him, but allowed it to happen, giving Arissa a golden moment to blink when she whirled away and sheathed the sword inside her umbrella. “It seems, my dear, that several cosmic coincidences have taken place at once. It started with this ridiculous crusade of the Doctor’s and his journey into THE DARK TIMES.”

The Master in the black crushed velvet began to laugh ruefully. “Who would have ever thought the destruction of the universe could be laid at his feet and not our own?”

“Sickening, isn’t it?” Asked blondie.

The original Master continued, unabated, “The first event was not the paradoxes, but the very act of traveling back. It ripped the fabric of space-time asunder and weakened the dimensional barriers that keep reality together. The paradoxes created in THE DARK TIMES echoed forward throughout the continuum, creating tears of their own.”

“By the time of your own excursion into THE DARK TIMES, the universe was in pretty rough shape.” Came the low voice of the leather jacket, sunglass-wearing Master, who somehow had snuck up behind her. He moved to her other ear. “You didn’t help.”

The crispy, sunburnt Master picked up the thread. “By the time we became aware of the Doctor’s meddling, all of time had begun to unravel. Catastrophic, cataclysmic damage done to the time vortex.”

“Bleedthrough was inevitable.” The original Master said.

“And one of those points of bleed-through was from The Land of Fiction,” Arissa confirmed.

The original Master nodded. “Precisely. Threads of that pocket universe snaked out and infected our own, manipulating reality and blending it with fiction.”

Missy sipped at a cup of tea and continued. “At the same time, a small podcast from Kansas gets the bright idea to suddenly change their schedule listings into a fictional story, featuring a fictional character who is self-aware. Coincidence?”

“The author is being influenced by the Land of Fiction,” Arissa said, realization dawning.

“Got it in one.” Missy purred.

“Here’s where it gets interesting.” The purple-clad Master intoned. “Because of that influence, their schedule quickly became the template for the real world. History was re-written into a new… UNBOUND universe.”

“Didn’t care for that.” Blondie injected.

“As their schedule became more and more prominent in the real world, more and more of reality became tethered to it. This podcast was suddenly the most important thing in the cosmos.”

“Speaking of, Transmitting now.” The crispy Master interrupted.

497 – The First Doctor Adventures 1.1 “The Destination Wars” (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who: Missy comic issues #2, #3.

498 – The Ninth Doctor Adventures Ravagers Box Set – 1. “Sphere of Freedom”, 2. “Cataclysm”, 3. “Food Fight” (Big Finish Audio)

499 – Lost in Time: The Space Pirates (Retcon & Novelization)

500 – Whosical the Musical – (Rocking revue of the Music inspired by Who)

501 – Lethbridge-Stewart The Laughing Gnome: Rise of the Dominator by Robert Mammone (Novel)

502 – The Eighth Doctor Adventures 4.3 “Nevermore”, 4.4 “The Book of Kells” (Big Finish Audio)

“And that’s when we began seeking you out, my dear. You continued to transmit the schedule for them, even as the walls of reality were breaking down. Your dedication simultaneously kept the cosmos from imploding and allowed the Land of Fiction to further infiltrate reality.”

“Things have inverted,” Arissa said. “The author is no longer in control; he only thinks he is.”

“Indeed. But as a construct of the author, you are the essential bridge to solving this problem.”

She looked around the room at the various faces of the Master looking expectantly (or in Missy’s case, predatorily) at her. “Whey do I get the feeling this is going to end badly?”

“Because it will, Poppet.” Missy’s toothless grin widened.

Victorious Mastering of the Schedule

Cpt 7

Lucky number seven. Double-O seven, Seven-eleven…

“Will you knock it off?” She asked, though she wasn’t entirely sure who she was talking to anymore. It might be a plea to the author, (if she ever pleaded for anything, which she didn’t), or perhaps she was talking to herself, ordering her brain to cease its whimsical connective association game. Or hell, it may even be that she was talking to him.

The rest had done her some good, and now she gingerly sat up in the bed, finding the restraining field had dissipated. There was a red light on the console next to her, silently blinking on and off. Surely an indicator to the console room that she was awake and mobile.

Which meant the next move was hers.

Well, technically the next move involved getting to the wardrobe, which indeed, opened only on a sparse closet containing her clothes and sword and not into the fabulous fantasy world of Narnia.

“Well, he did warn me.” She mumbled, getting dressed. Which lead to the next thought. If he was honest about the clothes and sword, was he being honest about everything else? She barked out a laugh, which same so quickly and forcefully it startled her. What was she even thinking?

The only thing the Master was honest about was his dishonesty. The Doctor’s oldest foe, (and hers too, if she were quite honest), he put the MY in enemy. Fiendish, clever, ruthless, and evil, but still charming in his own way. What with the whole Time Lord Victorious nonsense, this was no time for him to show up and wreak his usual brand of havoc.

And yet, he had returned the sword to her. He was either being extra dubious, or he didn’t see her as an immediate threat.

She’d have to cure him of that notion, toot sweet.

Dressed and armed, she made her way through his TARDIS. Whether through simple necessity or some trick of the trans-dimensional engineering, the sickbay bedroom was just down the corridor to the console room, so she didn’t wander far. She drew the sword, and with her left hand grasped the doorknob to the nerve center of the ship. She didn’t have a plan so much as an inkling of a course of action, but sometimes those were best. With a mighty bestial roar (what Whitman described as a barbaric yawp and Robin Williams tried to explain to a group of adolescents in that movie), she charged through the door, sword leading the way.

He stood at the controls on the far side of the center console, the lighted column in the middle rising and lowering with each great breath of the time machine indicating they were in flight.

And because that was the scene she expected in her mind’s eye, the sheer number of him in the room stopped her in her tracks and the yawp died in her throat. There was a Master in a fetching purple three-piece checking the time on a fob watch. Another Master wearing a leather coat and sunglasses leaned against the wall looking for all the world like he’d rather be somewhere else. A Master who looked like he’d been left too long in the sun—scratch that, ON the sun—hunched over the other side of the console consulting with still another Master in black crushed velvet.

There was some Mucho Master going on.

Another sword tip parried hers, and SHE stepped forward in her blue and orange Mary Poppins ensemble. Suddenly that nightmare about a classroom full of clowns was starting to look pretty good.

“Oh, you’re awake my pet” Missy said, managing to be all kinds of condescending. “Pity.” She turned to yet another Master, this one with short blonde hair. “I owe you a five spot.”

“Double or nothing she disarms you in under two minutes.” The Master leaning against the wall said.

Missy turned back to face her. “What do you say gosling? Shall we dance?”

The Master, (the original in her mind, though honestly who could know at this point where his timeline diverged and folded back on itself) stepped forward. “Now now, is that anyway to treat a guest? Arissa is here at my invitation. I do not want her to feel unwelcome.” He raised a gloved hand and lowered the points of their still crossed swords.

Arissa took a chance a lowered her guard. Either this would look cool and carefree, or Missy would try and run her through. “Alright, I’m here. I’m not fighting–” She stopped herself. “—yet. So what’s going on? You having a soirée? A little get-together? A meeting of the Master-minds?” She was proud of that one. She knew by pushing she was increasing the odds of Missy lunging point first, but she was on a roll. “Are there refreshments? Some chips and dip? OOOOhhh, a convention! Where’s the ‘I tried conquering the universe and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ vendor?”

Missy smiled that quirky, half smirk of hers, and Arrisa steeled herself for the steel that would surely be plunging into her any minute. But instead, she turned her maniacal glare back to the Master—damn the descriptors when multiple versions of the same person are present—and said menacingly, “We don’t really need her, do we?”

The Master surprised her then. “In point of fact, we do. My dear Arissa, as impossible as it may be to believe, I rescued you from THE DARK TIMES—”

“Oy!” Shouted the blond Master.

“Forgive me. WE. We rescued you from THE DARK TIMES… because we need your help. Not only has the Doctor’s foolish Time Lord Victorious crusade endangered the cosmos on scale we could only hope to dream of, but your podcaster friends are in trouble as well.”

“The author? But he’s controlling all this.”

“If only that were the case. You keep sending out their schedule because it was what you were contracted to do, and you never renege on a contract. An admirable trait. But its so much more than that. Despite its insignificance to the world at large, the very act of sharing it is also a tether. A very tenuous tether keeping the real world from disintegrating entirely.”

“We know a thing or two about disintegrations.” Said the purple clad Master a little too eagerly.

“Speaking of” the crispy Master spoke from his perch at the controls, and his voice was as dry and raspy as his skin. “It’s time to transmit the new schedule.”

“Then by all means.” The Master said, moving back to the console and pressing a series of buttons, then flipping a toggle.

They all turned to the viewer, which irised open to display the following:

491 – Lethbridge-Stewart The Laughing Gnome: Havoc Files (5) by Various Artists

492 – 25th Anniversary of Doctor Who: The Movie, Big Finish Master!: #1 Faustian, #2 Prey #3 Vengeance

493 – Fury From the Deep (Animated) DVD review

494 – Sarah Jane Smith: Roving Reporter by Various Artists

495 – TLV: Echoes of Extinction (Big Finish Audio)

496 – TLV: The Edge of Time (Video Game), Time Fracture (Event), The Time Lord Victorious & Brian the Ood (Action Figure/Short Story?), Overall impressions (w/special guest Timothy Harvey of SciFi4MeTV’s TARDIS Sauce)

“What do you mean tether? Why is this podcast so important to the fate of everything? And what does the author have to do with this?”

Missy whirled on her, her eyes flashing. “Tell us poppet, what do you know about The Land of Fiction?”

Masterpiece Scheduling

Cpt 6

Swimming in darkness, her mind cast about for something, ANYTHING to latch itself to. It settled on an old memory of happier days and simpler times when she wasn’t floating helplessly on a Dalek Saucer trapped in THE DARK TIMES without power, or heat, or air, or wifi… any of those conveniences the kids go all-in for nowadays. She wanted to stay in the memory, wrap herself up in it like a comfortable blanket and just sleep. A rest. A long, quiet, well-deserved rest.

Her eyes sprang open at the thought.

She was no longer floating helplessly on a Dalek Saucer without power, heat, or air. She was floating helplessly on an incredibly comfortable hover-mattress in a softly lit, warm room. Wifi was still in question, but she tabled the idea, for now, trying to determine exactly what had happened.

“Ah, you’re awake my dear.” Came a velvety smooth voice from a darkened corner. “Feeling better?”

She was actually, as the cobwebs began to clear and she realized she had blacked out from oxygen deprivation back on the saucer. “Where am I?” Her voice sounded small and far away.

“My TARDIS. I’ve rewired the Zero Room components into the sickbay here. I find the creature comforts of a bedroom particularly regenerative, and you, my dear, certainly seemed in need of a rest and recharge.”

“You rescued me?”

“From both the debris of the Dalek ship and THE DARK TIMES, yes. Though my methods were unconventional, they were ultimately successful.”

She closed her eyes, dreading the next question but knowing it had to be asked. “And what do you want?”

The voice chuckled in the darkness, sweet and sinister. “I should think a word of gratitude to start.”

Arissa made to bolt off the bed, thinking a surprise attack might just buy her time to escape. Hell, she might even get lucky enough to wrap her long fingers around the collarless jacket he wore closed about his neck. But all she succeeded in doing was rattling the bed frame. She had forgotten the part at the beginning about floating HELPLESSLY on an incredibly comfortable hover-mattress.

She was held in place, though whether by straps or stasis field she didn’t know.

He laughed again. “You will find you’re quite immobilized, my dear. Didn’t want you to hurt yourself. Or me, for that matter. Consider yourself my guest. When you’ve had a bit more rest, you’ll find your clothes and sword in the wardrobe, which I’m afraid does not lead to Narnia. We’ll chat some more, and then you can decide if you still want to attempt to kill me.”

“One more question?” She asked.

“Of course.”

“Did he send you?”

“He…?”

“The author.”

The third laugh seemed to lower the temperature in the room, for Arissa shivered. “My dear, the author is exactly the reason why I’m here. The very heart of the matter, you might say. And yet, he is completely unaware.”

She sank back, unable to process exactly why that riddle left her more exhausted than when she initially awoke.

He pressed a button a small remote nearly hidden in his palm.

486 – I Am The Master – Legends of the Renegade Time Lord

487 – Big Finish The War Doctor Series 1: #1 The Innocent, #2 The Thousand Worlds #3 The Heart of the Battle

488 – Titan Comics The Thirteenth Doctor Vol 2 (Issues #5-#8), Big Finish 8th Doctor Adventures #4.2 Situation Vacant

489 – Base Under Siege Discussion

490 – Doctor Who Annual 1974: The Short Stories Listen – The Stars & Out of the Green Mist, and the Comic The Time Thief

“You can relax, I’ve just transmitted the next bit of their ridiculous schedule. Now, get some rest. The trials to come are likely to be more strenuous than those prior.”

He padded softly out of the room, leaving Arissa to reflect that she may have been better off suffocating in the debris.

Scheduling Victorious: Chapter V – Scheduling Unbound

Chapter Five

Compared to the universe, she burns bright and hot like a young star, yet she is ageless and infinite. Her wisdom goes hand in hand with her neurotic mischievousness, the sly smirk on her lips never belaying the surprise she feels at learning something new. Her temperament as unpredictable as her hair, and her fury…

Her fury burns hotter than all those bright stars.

It’s the fury the Daleks feel—smoldering white hot rage—as they die in droves all around her, screaming their ineffective threats of extermination. Some are panicked, yelling about impaired vision. If your eyestalk was sliced off, your vision would be impaired too. She moves like poetry, like water droplets playfully cascading down a brook, as she darts across the control room of the scout ship from one drone to the next. Her weapon cuts just as deep as words, an ancient sword rumored to have come from these very DARK TIMES, forged by the great weapon smiths of Andromeda, its alloy folded more times than could be counted, fused in the vortex itself and imbued with any number of incantations and spells, covered with magic charms and runes from dozens of galaxies.

It’s also on fire, because, reasons.

The sword’s name is lost to time (and likely unpronounceable, given the Andromedan alphabet) but legends passed down through the eons roughly translate it to “sharp burning stick”. A gift to her from Absalom Daak—

“You can stop there.” She warns, driving the blade solidly through the dalekanium hull of another drone. “Bad enough you gotta go all “smoldering eyes” on me, but to mention HIM…” She withdraws the sword and whirls on the Dalek commander, “is hitting below the belt.”

The Dalek Commander’s gunstick quivers, just enough to signify the retargeting computer has locked on her, and without a second thought she thrusts out and upward, decapitating the dome off the engine of war. The gun falls limp.

“Ha.” She says.

She looks around and takes a deep breath, and for the first time since this whole Time Lord Victorious started, feels reassured. As if history was back on track

And that’s when the temporal distortion wave hits and knocks her on her ass.

The Dalek scout ship instantly tumbles end over end, sending drones careening into bulkheads and ceilings, sounding like a washing machine full of cast iron skillets. Sparks fly from Dalek casings and computer bays, their interfaces fried by the temporal wave. Arissa dodges artfully and avoids most of the debris thrown around the control deck, finally coming to stand on the communications board. She nearly swoons, her mind awash on the shores of history, as the tide runs out and takes half the sand making up the beach with it.

“I never swoon.” She says through grit teeth, looking up at the forward view screen, now orientated on the ceiling, trying to get a feel if the Pyramid ship survived the impact. More sparks fly from shorts and blown connections. One certainty is that the scout ship won’t much longer. She was a little overzealous with the Osiran weapon pods when overtaking the Daleks, and of course there was the whole sword play thing.

“What was that—“ She starts to ask, but is cut off by the blaring speaker below her left heel as it starts to recite an incoming transmission. “But there’s no one to transmit—”

 

“Attention. Attention. The following schedule” (the voice pronounced it “shed-u-all” and sounded oh-so familiar) “reflects the next month of transmissions from Traveling The Vortex, delving into the Unbound rage from Big Finish:

482 – Doctor Who Unbound #1 Auld Mortality, #2 Sympathy for the Devil 

483 – Doctor Who Unbound #3 Full Fathom Five, #4 He Jests at Scars

484 – Doctor Who Unbound #5 Deadline, #6 Exiles

485 – Doctor Who Unbound #7, A Storm of Angels, #8 Masters of War 

“Follow along, or don’t. It makes no difference to me.

And my dear Arissa, if YOU are receiving this message, you’ll know what to do.”

 

The voice transmission trails off into a series of chuckles that chill her to the bone despite the heat coming off Sharp Burning Stick. It couldn’t be HIM…

She runs along the wall to the science console and kneeling down does a quick sensor sweep…

…only to have her worst fears confirmed. (Well, second worst fear. The recurring dream about showing up to the first day of class naked and surrounded by evil clowns is her worst fear, obviously.) But this is just as bad.

History HAD been rewritten. Whatever the Doctor has been doing in THE DARK TIMES was now over with, and time has reset. Which means with one or two exceptions, the Osirans die out here in the next couple of centuries.

Which mean they do not exist in the 35th century. Which means they will never construct a golden Osiran Pyramid Ship. Which means it isn’t floating nearby, ready to get her home.

She is trapped in THE DARK TIMES, and the author is in terrible danger…

She tries to utter a dramatic “dun dun DUN!”, but finds her throat is too dry.

Scheduling Victorious: Chapter IV

Cpt 4

Sprong.

With a rippling of its mighty engines, the golden Osirian Pyramid ship rends the fabric of reality asunder and pops into existence in THE DARK TIMES.

Arissa stares at the viewscreen with a mixture of amusement and disbelief, both that the ship actually arrived in THE DARK TIMES, and that the author allowed it to happen without killing her.

And that he continues to type THE DARK TIMES in all capital letters.

And that the Osirian Pyramid ship, technological marvel of the 35th Century, actually makes a “Sprong” noise.

What can she say? She is easily amused.

She fiddles with the view screen to get a look at her surroundings, and despite the desperate circumstances, feels a weight of relief at no longer being in the year 2020. The jokes and internet memes had started early, but if humanity only knew the depths to which time travelers actively avoided the year, they might feel better about having survived it.

Assuming, of course, this was THAT timeline. There was after all, still a couple of weeks to go.

The sensor readings bounce back to her display, confirming the worst: Major temporal disruptions. Arissa always thought of time (incorrectly) as the surface of a lake. A temporal disruption was like dropping a rock in the middle of it, sending ripples and waves out in concentric rings that changed the surface reflection. These readings indicated someone had dropped a dump truck full of gravel over the water, seeding it with minor blips and ripples that were cascading back and forth into each other before being wiped out by the impact wave when the truck itself fell in.

Time was tearing itself apart as forward moving paradoxes begat backward traveling paradoxes.

She hadn’t seen anything like this since The Time War (which, she notes, only warrants capitalization of the first letters, not the whole title). The sensors also show her a myriad of wreckage outside. The Pyramid ship had materialized in the middle of a debris field. And quite the interesting on at that. She detects pieces of Dalek saucers, hull fragments of Arkanian star liners, the burned-out hulks of Draconian battlecruisers, and what appeared to be stonework from the monolithic Cathedral-Class Coffin ships of the Great Vampires. Very few of these races occupy the same plot of history as each other, and yet here they all are, mingling in yet another paradox mixer as the flotsam and jetsam tumble endlessly in space.

These wrecks did not belong here, not in this when. Had they been pulled to their destruction by the paradoxes? Or had they arrived intact and fought amongst themselves until only scrap remains? She backs away from the monitors and sensors intending to step out onto the terrace and see the devastation firsthand, to see if the distortions are visible to the naked eye. Pyramid ships are quite capable of holding an atmosphere over their ray-shielded observation decks—when her heel strikes something, sending her suddenly tumbling over backward.

At this point, there was any number of things Arissa was prepared to accept, but a gigantic stone tablet was not among them. Her fingers snaked out to caress the tablet, which is covered with a combination of hieroglyphics, runes, symbols, and pictograms, all deeply etched upon its surface.

“Is this High Galifreyan?” She asks, knowing the author will not reply, but unable to stop herself. She’s rusty but manages to decipher a few pieces of the tablet while the Rosetta circuits embedded behind her eyes and ears translate the rest.

TTV #477 – A Christmas Carol Revisited, Eleventh Doctor Chronicles “The Top of the Tree” (Big Finish Audio)

TTV #478 – TLV: The Last Message, Mission to the Known, (Eagle Moss / Hero Collector short stories), Mutually Assured Destruction (Big Finish Audio)

TTV #479 – Revolution of the Daleks

TTV #480 – TLV: Exit Strategy, Genetics of the Daleks (Big Finish Audio)

TTV #481 – TLV: Tales of the Dark Times Episodes 4 & 5 (Comic Maker), All Flesh is Grass (Novel)

“Really? There’s no one here who could possibly listen to your podcast. Why would you send me your schedule to post…” She trails off, suddenly understanding. “You really have no control over this, do you? I suspected as much, but this bloody well confirms it, doesn’t it?”

She rises, moving back to the controls. If things are this bad, she has less time than she thought. Scouring the debris for salvage would have to wait. Arissa transmits the schedule—because despite it being a worthless gesture that would not gain them listeners, she had been contracted to do the job, and therefore it was going to get done—and fiddling with the sensors, slaved them to the navigation controls and set a new course. As the Pyramid ship moves off, she heads to the wardrobe.

You can’t save the universe wearing a silk robe, no matter what the movies say.

Scheduling Victorious – Interlude

Interlude

It was the best of THE DARK TIMES; it was the worst of THE DARK TIMES.

Arissa slams the book shut and throws it across the room in disgust with no regard for the ancient binding or crumbling pages within. It thuds against the far wall before hitting the floor, leaving her instantly ashamed. One simply doesn’t throw books, no matter how inane the book may be.

“I know, I know.” She acknowledges, rising off the couch to retrieve the tome. “But come on, ‘the best of THE DARK TIMES’?” She quotes. “Times that were so dark, they are spoken about in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? How could there possibly be any ‘best of’ times?”

She inspects the book, and satisfied that there was no permanent damage done, returns it to its place on the bookshelf.

“The problem with THE DARK TIMES is that not too many people made it out of them alive. It’s difficult to learn the history when so little history exists. So, we’re left with all these half-truths and myths and legends, and most of them involve the Doctor in some way, shape, or form, which automatically makes the truth of the stories suspect in my mind.”

She whirls suddenly, glaring skyward. “You used my name. I thought we agreed, no names?” The author starts to type something about “literary license”, but is cut off—“No, no, no! I’m doing you a favor. Don’t forget that. Stick to the terms of the deal.” She warns. Then sighs, rubbing a hand through her short hair. “Well, it’s out. Can’t take it back now, can we?”

She begins to pace the confines of the pyramid’s control room, walking around the black silk couch, between the pool table sized control panel and the gold felt covered pool table, in front of the giant viewscreen that dominated one wall of the room, and past bookshelves stuffed full of leatherbound first editions, signed copies of the dead sea scrolls and other documents from all over the universe. She bypasses the open doors that lead out onto the terrace that overlooks the ruined city. 2020 is out there and she inherently knew it would contribute nothing of value.

There’s only so much paradox a mind can take, after all.

Arissa thought she was almost at capacity herself. She found her memories changing from moment to moment, adding to her frustration. It was one thing to know something and be confused by contradictory evidence, and quite another to suddenly realize the thing you knew wasn’t what you knew at all, and the evidence wasn’t contradictory, because IT was correct all along, and you knew that. She shakes her head vigorously trying to dislodge the chaos. She even considers reconsulting Andrew Kearley’s “The Complete Adventures” for reference, but that website, (and all other subsequent Doctor Who websites for that matter), while normally rock-solid kept displaying File 404 error messages as if the internet itself was giving up.

Without consciously knowing that she’s doing it, Arissa moves back to the control panel and begins laying in a course. The Pyramid ship responds to her touch, sealing off exterior bulkheads and lifting gently off the towers it was resting on. The buildings crumble into their own pyramid-shaped piles of debris, but the sound dampers are already on, so inside she hears nothing but the distant throb of the engines from somewhere deep inside the ship.

“There’s really only one way out of this.” She reasons. “I don’t appreciate being forced into it, mind you, but if you’re being affected by these temporal shifts more than just having to change the upcoming podcast schedule every week—well then drastic measures it is.”

The Pyramid ship hangs over the ruins, tears a hole in the fabric of reality with the sound of a door stopper being sprung by a precocious kitten, and vanishes.

“Next stop, THE DARK TIMES,” Arissa says grimly.

Scheduling Victorious III

Cpt 3

She crumples the paper into a compact wad and throws for the wastebasket, (both as anachronistic as can be: an Osirian Pyramid ship from the 35th century—one of the most technologically advanced pieces of starcraft ever created—and sitting in its gleaming white, high-tech, fully automated control room, an honest to goodness piece of paper and cylindrical metal can) sending it in a near-perfect arc across the room. The makeshift ball bounced once on the rim and out, skittering across the floor making that noise that was both satisfying and strangely unnerving.

She rolls her eyes. “Really? You couldn’t let me have that one?”

She melts upright off the couch and into a stretch, her lithe body arching beneath her white silk robes. Paradoxes aside, it was getting annoying to have to reschedule things every other week, even if she was just the mouthpiece. Sauntering over to the wastebasket, she nimbly plucks the wad of paper up and unsmooths it, re-reading the characters on the page. She shakes her head, inputs a few sequences on the panel before her, and hits the transmit button.

TTV #473 –Tales of the Dark Times #3 (Comic Maker), The Enemy of My Enemy (Big Finish Audio), Monstrous Beauty #3 (Comic)

Thanksgiving – OFF

TTV #474 – TLV: Daleks! #1 “The Archive of Islos”, #2 (Animated Series)

TTV #475 – TLV: Daleks! #3, #4 (Animated Series)

TTV #476 – TLV: Daleks! #5 (Animated Series), The Minds of Magnox (Audio Book)

That finished, (again), she crumples the paper and drops it without fanfare into the trash.

“You realize this is wrong, right?” She shakes her head. “I mean, you are aware of the inaccuracies here.” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder toward the platform she spoke from not all that long ago. “I mean, aside from the fact that there is a ruined city outside that looks like it barely survived a nuclear blast—and granted, that may just be 2020 doing its thing—there’s a golden Pyramid ship sitting on top of it. Weird, right?”

She begins to pace, waving her hand around the room. “A 35th century Pyramid ship, you described it as. But the Osirians, are from the DARK TIMES. With one or two notable exceptions, they do not still exist today, and they certainly won’t exist in the 35th century to create this technological marvel that I’m currently shooting hoops in.” She moves back to the wastebasket and digs out the printout. “And look at this!” She cries out, holding the page aloft. “It’s ye ol’ green and white striped, tractor fed, DOT MATRIX paper!?! Could you get any more analog? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!?”

She collapses back on the couch, a sense of genuine worry about her.

“Are you off your game? I mean, I thought something was afoot last week when you named the post ‘Scheduling Victorious II’ and didn’t tag it with ‘Electric Boogaloo’ at the end. I know how you love that joke.” She pauses, the wheels in her sharp mind turning. “Unless… the Time Lord Victorious paradoxes… are they affecting you too? Is that even possible? I mean, you’re the author. The Narrator. You should be outside of these fictional events, but…” Her eyes travel skyward as if looking for god. “Hell, I’m self-aware, so who knows what your game plan is.”

Somewhere, the loud and abrasive grinding of the dot matrix printer started its insecticide chewing noise. It was only one line, and so mercifully short. She rose to pull the just printed page.

AS ALWAYS, THE SCHEDULE IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE.

She re-reads the words several times as if imposing her own will on the text would cause it to change. But of course, it doesn’t. Instead, she wads the paper up and tosses it into the trash, where it makes a perfect basket, (nothing but net) thudding on the bottom of the can with a small echo.

“That isn’t reassuring.” She tells the author.

Doctor Who Fiction: Strangers In The City Of The Sun

Doctor Who: Strangers In The City Of The SunColin-Baker

Featuring the Sixth Doctor

By Shaun Collins

 

Cahokia, 1201

Ezhno awoke with the sun as its first rays crested the horizon. The sky was already brightening with the coming day, but he slept until the sun rose properly, in honor of the city he lived in and the gods they served.  He washed briefly, dressed and started about his day, packing a small meal and tools in a pack. He was in need of supplies to continue to make the arrowheads and spear points that were so in demand these days, and his own stores of obsidian, coastal shells and leather thongs were almost gone. He hoped to return in time to actually begin work on a few. There was a new design was rattling around in his head itching to be put to use, but suspected today would be all about foraging or trading for parts

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

As he left his solitary hut and moved about the city, the sights and sounds of Cahokia filled him. The bakers were already hard at work firing their ovens, bushels of just harvested corn were stacked up next to the granaries, and people moved too and fro preparing for the day. Cahokia was a major trade center, located on the Mississippi river, and goods from the city were in high demand all across the Midwest… including his arrowheads.

Ezhno darted down an alley between huts intending to cross the corner of the Grand Plaza on his way out of town. Looming over the plaza—indeed the entire city—was the terraced Great Mound. It stood nearly 10 stories tall and was crowned with the temple and residence of the Paramount Chief. Construction on the last terrace apron had finished just last year, and while the work had been hard and backbreaking, looking at the sheer size of the structure, Ezhno knew it was worth it. This city would stand for thousands of years.  He had just reached flat, wide and open Great Plaza—already filling with people for the day’s ceremonies and gatherings—and barely dodged a spear thrown at a still-rolling disc-shaped rock as children played Chunkey. They shouted an apology, and he waved back, adjusting his pack slung over one shoulder and continued.

As one of the cities better known and respected artisans, Ezhno lived just inside the fortified bastions that surrounded the Great Mound and Plaza, and he had to cross through the barricade to the outlaying city on his journey to the river. He passed more huts, more people and more children playing in the morning sun. He weaved between the ceremonial burial mound that held the remains of the last Great King, and a small lake until he finally reached the outskirts of town. He knelt by the lake edge, cupped his hands and drank deeply. Though not an old man by any stretch of the imagination, his walk across town had already winded him, and Ezhno knew his work on the new arrowheads would have to wait. Cahokia had simply gotten too large to traverse easily. By the time he found what he needed for supplies and walked back it would be too late in the day to accomplish anything of real value. Best to make this trip worthwhile, and get a fresh start on the design tomorrow.

He was debating weather or not to take a short nap by the lake when he heard a noise he couldn’t place. It was as foreign a sound as he had ever heard, like a beast wheezing and groaning. A tall blue box suddenly appeared next to him, fading into existence before his very eyes. Despite being terrified, Ezhno couldn’t help it. He reached out and caressed the totem with his fingertips. It was smooth like wood, but warm and alive to the touch, and he snatched his hand back before he lost it.  An artisan without hands wasn’t much good to the community.

Voices came from within the box, and Ezhno fled to the relative safety of the tree line, abandoning his pack on the lakeshore.

“Peri, welcome to Cahokia, the city of the sun!”

“I remember reading about this place in college. The largest mound settlement in America, right?”

“The largest city in North America. Well, north of Mexico anyway. At this time in history, it’s larger than most European cities, including London.”

Two voices, a male and a female; his deep and gruff, the woman’s more lyrical. Ezhno peeked out from behind his hiding place and nearly dropped to his knees. The woman had short dark hair and wore a strange form-fitting peach tunic that covered her breasts but left her belly bare. The man’s outfit was bright as a rainbow and incorporated just as many colors. His head was topped with a fiery mane of sun blond curls. Surely these were gods. Who else could appear out of thin air?

“Weren’t they cannibals or something?”

“Cannibals?” The man sounded offended. “No. But they did practice human sacrifice, so we better be careful. We’ll just nip into town and get some measurements of Woodhenge for the archeologists to settle their bet and be off.”

“I didn’t know you liked archeologists so much.”

“The truth is Peri, I don’t. When you can travel in time, you tend to point and laugh at archeologists. But I admire and respect them, Professor Wood in particular. So I’m doing her a favor. Come on,” he said, gesturing at the city rising up before them. “Let’s take a quick tour. The city won’t be abandoned for another hundred years or so, but best not to dawdle.”

“Why was it abandoned?”

“Archeologists aren’t sure. But I have a theory or two I’ll put to Professor Wood when we get back.”

As the pair walked off toward the city, Ezhno snuck from his hiding place and looked at the strange cabinet again, then at the two people who came out of it. Who were these strangers that knew so much about his home and yet spoke about it as if it had passed into memory? Spies? Cahokia wasn’t at war with any other tribes, trade with the great city was too important, and it was heavily defended. He thought gods much more likely, but Ezhno resolved to find out for sure. He snatched his pack up off the ground and began following the strangers.

To be continued…

* Author’s Note – So this was my final project for Archeology class this semester. We had to write a fictional account of one of the places we learned about in class.  Cahokia (pronounced Ka-Ho-Kia) was the most recent, and therefore most fresh in my mind.  As I wrote about Ezhno going about his day, I was suddenly struck with the idea of adding the Doctor to the narrative.  Once that idea took hold, it wouldn’t let go.  And so Doctor Who made it into a serious paper.  So… do you guys want more?  Cause I have NO idea where it goes from here. lol.  Let me know!

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Doctor Who Fiction: The Panopticon Patsy

2 DoctorDoctor Who: The Panopticon Patsy

Featuring the Second Doctor

By Shaun Collins

The pain was the surprising thing.  He knew the change was happening, he’d experienced it once before. Of course, that had been incoming, not outgoing.  Who knew regeneration could hurt quite so much?  It was a bit like dying.

The truly unfair and agonizing part though, was that it wasn’t his choice.  Not that any Time Lord got to choose the time of their regenerations (there were a few capable of the feat, but not many) but this was a punishment forced on him by the stagnant, bureaucratic Gallifreyan Time Lord regime.  The one he’d run from to begin with.

It wasn’t fair.

Just as he’d resigned himself to it, the pain stopped.  The Doctor took stock and opened his eyes.

He was still in the tribunal chamber of the Time Lords.  He was still standing against the wall being frowned at by the buffoons, and—most surprisingly—if the mirrored surface behind their scowling faces was accurate, he was still him.

His features hadn’t changed.

He supposed he should have been grateful, he supposed maybe even a little humble.

Instead he started shouting.

“What’s the meaning of this?  Can’t you even perform a simple forced regeneration without mucking it up?  No wonder I left.  Of all the idiotic, imbecilic…” The Doctor trailed off, realizing no one had moved.  No one had even blinked.  The man standing before him—what was his name? The Junior Councilor? Goth? And there was another insult to injury, how dare they demean him by having a Junior Councilor in charge of the trail?

“Calm yourself, Doctor.”  Came a new voice, cutting through his thoughts.

The Doctor whirled, quite surprised to see a man standing behind him with his arms folded before him, dressed in ornate Time Lord robes.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Coordinator Vansell.”

“Coordinator of what?”

“The Celestial Intervention Agency.”

“CIA?  Never heard of you.”  The Doctor huffed.  “And what does the CIA do?”

“Much like yourself, we intervene.”

“Intervene?  In what?”

“Places, situations, lives.”

“I’m being put on trial and sentenced to exile for intervening and there’s a whole agency dedicated to the practice?”

“Well, not yet, but there will be.”  Vansell said.

The comment seemed to deflate the Doctor’s anger a bit.  He turned away from Vansell and looked at the tribunal, still frozen inexplicably where they stood.  “You’re projecting from the future, aren’t you?  Must be an enormous power drain.”

“It is.  Which is why I’d like to get the point of my contacting you.  I’ve come with an offer…”

“What’s that?”

“We’re calling it ‘Project 6B’”

“Nonsense.  6B?  What gibberish is that?”  The Doctor complained.  But Vansell could see he was intrigued.

“We need you, Doctor.  As even my illustrious predecessors surmised,”  He said, indicating the tribunal, “there is evil in the universe that must be fought, wrongs to be righted, dangers to be faced.  The Time Lords of this time are far to ridged with their idealistic dogma to allow for such thinking.  But I come from a more… enlightened time.  We think you are the man for the job.”

“Oh, I see.”  The Doctor said, mulling it over.  “And does this mean commuting my sentence?”

“More of a postponement.  I’m afraid we cannot offer clemency.”

“But… well that’s outrageous! Why should I agree to such ridiculous terms?  Why I have half a mind to-“

“Please Doctor, you’re hardly in a position to argue or threaten, and as I’ve said, my time is short.  We can do nothing about your sentence, because from our perspective, you’ve already served it.  Altering the time stream in that way would be catastrophic and unforgivable.  BUT, if we were to lift you out of your current time stream and allow you to work for us for a while, in our present, then return you to your time…”

“You’d be breaking the laws of time!”  Said the Doctor.

“Nonsense.  At most we’d be bending them a little.”

The Doctor had his finger raised, mouth open as if to launch into another argument, but paused mid-thought, obviously considering.  “Yes, I suppose that might be allowed.”

“What do you say, Doctor?”

The Doctor clasped his hands behind his back and began to bounce on the balls of his feet.  “I’ll need access to the Tardis.  My Tarids.”

“With a few modifications, of course.”  Agreed Vansell.  “We’d have to be able to keep in contact with you.”

The Doctor frowned.  “Hrmm. Well yes, yes of course.  Oh, and Jamie and Zoe.  I couldn’t possibly go anywhere without them.”

“I’m afraid at the moment, that’s not possible—“ The Doctor made to cut him off, but Vansell rushed to finish, “but perhaps we can make that allowance in the future.”

The Doctor dropped back onto his heels and brought his hands back in front of him, fiddling his fingers.  He looked a bit like a petulant child.  “Oh crumbs.  And when my service is done?”

“You’ll be returned to this very second to continue on your normal journey through time.”

“Will I remember?  Or will you wipe my mind too?”

“I know the answer my cohorts would give.  I’d prefer to tell you we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“I see.  What if I refuse?”

“I sever the link, time resumes moving forward and you go into exile with your new face and persona.”

The Doctor shuddered, remembering the swirling faces before him and the hideous one the Time Lords had chosen for him.  “Best to postpone that disaster as long as possible.  I accept.”  He gave a little bow.  “Now what?”

“You go to your Tardis, and we’ll bring you to us.”  Vansell said, smiling.  For some reason, the Doctor was reminded of a shark.  “Oh, and Doctor?  Welcome aboard.”

Doctor Who Fiction: Departure Time

dr1Doctor Who: Departure Time

Featuring The First Doctor

By Shaun Collins

The fog was thick, a proper London fog that made the city feel so rife with possibilities.  The stranger stood in the doorway of an abandoned building, watching a police constable walking through the thick soup with his torch waving to and fro.  The constable stopped to check a gate on a junkyard, a tall, imposing doorway painted with I.M. Foreman in white letters on its dark surface.  The gate didn’t budge, and the policeman moved off into the night.

The stranger turned his attention away from the policeman and toward Foreman’s junkyard.  It was a rather unassuming place, run down, the paint on its dark privacy fence cracked and peeling.  Piles of junk occasionally towered over the fence, with only the top most bits and bobs recognizable.  Here a bicycle wheel, there a clock face.

But in the stranger’s experience, it was the unassuming places that were the most interesting, and held the most secrets.

He hesitated a moment longer in the shadows, scanning up and down Totter’s Lane.  He swore he’d heard something a moment ago.  Maybe he was just paranoid.  But no, you didn’t get to his station (or his advanced age) without learning a thing or two about your senses, and his were telling him to hold back.

The lane was shrouded in fog, swirling along the sidewalk and gutters.  He heard her before he saw her—or rather, he heard her radio.  The girl was young, maybe sixteen, walking along Totter’s Lane with a transistor radio for company.  It was quietly playing some awful racket—The Common Men, if his memory served correctly, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember the lead singer’s name—they’d be about right for this time period.  Probably just been ousted of their spot on the chart by The Beatles.  But the girl didn’t seem to mind their company, humming along with them absentmindedly as she walked.

She didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere, which in and of itself was strange, as Totter’s Lane was not exactly the best or safest of neighborhoods.  There weren’t any residences nearby either, so just what was she doing out here?  She stopped suddenly, her vacant, dreamy expression dropped and she became acutely aware. She turned, looking all around her, and then her eyes fell on the stranger.  Her gaze actually seemed to bore straight through him, and he fought the impulse to move further back into the shadows.  The sudden movement might throw off the perception filter he wore, and he was suddenly convinced that something was very much afoot on Totter’s Lane, and this young girl was a part of it.  He’d thought her a normal teenager, out for a walk, but now, starring at him—or at least, starring at the spot he happened to be standing in—she seemed… unearthly.

The dark haired girl stood a moment longer, then blinked and seemed to fade back to a normal teenager.  She looked down at the transistor radio—now hawking equipment from Magpie Electric—as if she’d forgotten she had it.  She switched it off, and stepped lightly up on the curb in front of the junkyard.

The stranger admired her movements.  Not at all an awkward teenager, but light and lithe on her feet like a cat.  He started admiring her form when she ducked inside the gate and was gone.

He blinked his eyes, purposefully, and hard.  The gate was locked.  He’d checked it earlier tonight before setting up his surveillance, and the constable had checked it just a moment ago.  But the girl had managed to nip in and do it quickly.

He started to move from his position in the shadow, when a couple walked into view just down the street.  The man was tall, dark haired and wore a dark trench coat over his suit.  The woman was slightly shorter, with her hair teased up into the big style popular nowadays.  They seemed intently interested in the junkyard, and appeared to be keeping the girl under surveillance, nervously looking behind them to see if they had been noticed.

The stranger frowned.  They could be spies, he supposed.  The Russians had been making noises lately if the intercepted communication chatter from MI6 was to be believed, but if they were spies, they were two of the worst he’d ever seen.  They looked like school teachers of all things.  Quickly and nearly noiselessly, they ducked into the lot.

The girl must have left the gate unlocked.

The stranger was about to seize the moment of opportunity and move after them, when a small pressure pushed into the small of his back.  It felt very much like the barrel of a gun.  “Are you always in the habit of spying on young girls?” A voice asked from behind him.

The stranger froze.  There was absolutely no way he could be seen by a normal person.  The alcove alone should have disguised him well enough, add in the shadows and the fog not to mention the perception filter and he was practically invisible.

He raised his hands and turned slowly, to find a old man dressed in a black suit and traveling cloak complete with hat doffed on his head full of white hair.  This was the man who not only saw him, but snuck up behind him?  The stranger admonished himself.  He must have been deeper in contemplation than he thought.  He was relieved to see the old man carried a cane, which he didn’t seem to need, because at the moment this was what had been pressed into the stranger’s back, and not a gun.

“I’m not spying on anyone.”  The stranger replied, offering up his best smile.  Rule one: always lie.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, but that’s certainly what it looked like to me.  What are you doing here, hmm?”

“Just locking up.”

“Locking up? This shop has been abandoned. No one’s been here for months.”

“I’m the owner.  Been thinking about doing some renovations and trying to rent the space out to a business.”  The stranger said quickly.  The old man was sharp, maybe a little too sharp.  The stranger eyed him closely.  There was something familiar about the old man, despite his certainly that he’d never met the man before.

They starred off for a moment longer, and suddenly the old man broke into an embarrassed smile.  He lowered the cane. “Dear oh dear, my my my” he said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief he produced from some pocket or another.  “How embarrassing.  Do accept my apology young man, I had no idea. Simply no idea.”

The stranger put his hands down.  “No problem.”

“I’m afraid I may be a bit over protective of my granddaughter.”  The old man said, still apologizing.

The stranger had a perplexed look for a second. “Oh, the young girl in question.”

“Yes, she’s quite precious to me.”

“Well no harm done.  Good to know that there are concerned citizens in the neighborhood keeping an eye on things.  Makes me feel that much better about getting a business in here.”

“You’re sure there’s no hard feelings then, my boy?”

The stranger gave him his best and brightest smile.  “None at all.”

“Well, goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

The old man loitered for a moment longer, then strode off across the street.  The stranger went the other way, slowly strolling through the fog until he got to his designated second viewpoint.  He ducked around the corner and watched the old man, who stopped suddenly in the middle of the street and looked back, trying to spot where the stranger went.  Satisfied he was gone, the old man turned and began walking to the junkyard at a much quicker pace.  He shuffled slightly when he walked but moved.  He was muttering to himself, “hmm” and “now, now, now” seeming to be two of his favorites.

The stranger watched closely. Once again, he questioned the directive that had brought him here to investigate.  There was something strange going on on Totter’s Lane, but he’d seen no evidence of extraterrestrial activity.  Certainly no technology they could use.  And yet, his own intuition insisted something was up.

The old man ducked into the junkyard, the same junkyard the girl and the couple had gone.  Were they squatting there?  Or was there maybe a small flat just inside the fence.  It would be impossible to tell without a closer look.

He moved back onto the street, and walked back down the block.  As he neared the junkyard, he heard raised voices coming from the other side of the towering gate with I.M. Foreman written on it.

“Grandfather?”

“Susan!”

Who had spoken he couldn’t determine, but they seemed agitated.  He paused again.  Was this just a quarrel that he had no business in?  Would he be jeopardizing his mission by intervening?

The momentary hesitation would haunt him for years to come.  From the other side of the fence game a strange, groaning and wheezing, as if a great beast had come to life in the junkyard and was struggling to breath.  To anyone but a select few, the noise would have been foreign and completely unknown.  The stranger was one of the select few who recognized it for what it was, the sound of the TARDIS dematerializing.

He ran forward, all concerns forgotten.  “Doctor?!?” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

He burst through the door just in time to see the Police Box fade from view, disappearing into the vortex.

Captain Jack Harkness walked over to the spot where the TARDIS had stood.  He knelt and ran his fingers over the cobblestones.  Eventually, he moved to the rickety wooden staircase that was attached to the outside of the neighboring building and sat, rubbing his face in his hands.  Torchwood had it right, there was an alien presence here.  And he’d scoffed, with his knowledge of the future, but come like the obedient lap dog just to be on the safe side.  And he’d missed him.  The Doctor.

The old man was the Doctor.  Not his Doctor, but certainly one of him.  He wondered which.

Ah well.  Captain Jack rose and dusted his hands off, heading back for the entrance.  He’d been stranded on Earth for a long time, but he’d catch up with the Doctor again someday. <>

Doctor Who Fiction (Magnetic Poetry Style) Contest!

So recently while dusting the top of my refrigerator, I found an old Magnetic Poetry kit.

(One: don’t judge me for owning magnetic poetry, I’ll bet lots of you do to!  Two: yes, I do clean.)

Well I realized that I hadn’t seen this set in like three years!

(Three: I do clean, but I guess that doesn’t speak well of how often I do the top of my refrigerator.)

ANYWAY, I thought it would be fun to toss the magnets up on the fridge and see if anyone still played with them.  And as is frequently the case when I’m left alone around words, the creative side of my brain took over and started writing.  So I snapped a picture of the finished product to post for all of you here.  (It’s a bit rough obviously, as these kits don’t always contain the words you want or need to pull the imagery off, but at the same time, that’s part of the fun!)

And now, a challenge!  I’m betting that those of you who DO have magnetic poetry kits lying around could probably come up with your own Doctor Who themed poem, so I want you all to do the same!  Line those magnets up and snap a picture and email it to shaun@travelingthevortex!  I’ll get them posted here, and then we’ll vote on them.  The writer of the winning poem will win a Traveling The Vortex *Prize Package of GAME SHOW proportions!  The contest will run through December 31, 2011!  Winner to be announced next year…

* NOTE – Our lawyers (if we had any) would probably disallow me to use the term “Prize Package of GAME SHOW proportions” in a post, since there is in actuality NO prize package and if there was one, it would certainly NOT be of game show proportions.  They’d bring up a lot of terms like “illegal” and “fraudulent” and “false advertising” and probably force us to run the contest just for silly fun.  Lucky for you I don’t own the “law speak” Magnetic Poetry kit, so those words are pretty meaningless to me anyways.

 

Doctor Who Fiction: The Sudden Awakening, Lonely Life, And Tragic End Of Cyberman Bob

11thdoctor01Doctor Who:

The Sudden Awakening, Lonely Life and Tragic End Of Cyberman Bob

Featuring The Eleventh Doctor

By Shaun Collins

* Authors Note – This story deals with the events of several Doctor Who episodes and eras, including the second Doctor story “The Invasion”, and the ninth Doctor episode “Dalek” but features the eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory.  I would place this story during the sixth series of Doctor Who, after the episode “Let’s Kill Hitler” but sometime before the events chronicled in “The Girl Who Waited”.

* Authors Note part 2 – Sorry for the length, but the story (and Bob) refused to die. Upon reflection, I believe there is still more work to be done, specifically with the ending segment (including some rather embarrassing formatting errors. Apparently four am is NOT the time for me to upload things to the site). I spent a bit too much time “telling” you all what was happening, and not nearly enough “showing”. Since the number one rule of writing is “show, don’t tell” I feel I failed pretty miserably on this one. If you still want to plow forward and read it, please do, and feel free to send me some feedback with your thoughts. I would love to know if the shortcomings I feel are in the story are echoed by others. If you would rather wait to read it until the “final product” as it were is uploaded, check the main page for updates.

SUDDEN AWAKENING

Earth, 1968

Blackness.  Empty, meaningless blackness. Then sudden light.  It pulsed, flaring up bright and then fading away again in tandem with a low, deep throbbing sound.  The tone increased its tempo, the light increased its flashing.  Awareness blossomed along the neural pathways and cybernetic junctions.  It pooled in shimmering pockets and cool logic followed, bringing with it sense of purpose, mission parameters and goals:

The Invasion.

Reflexively, instinctively the Cyberman reached out and tore through its shipping membrane, a metallic beast born onto the Earth.  It emerged into a flood of light that temporarily overloaded its optic sensors.  Consequently, it never saw the attack.

The Cyberman took a half step forward and was hit with an intense wave of… of what?  The memory banks scrambled, there was nothing like this in the pools of logic and straightforward mission goals.  It had to search back—far back—back before the endless landings and attacks, the wars and the conquests, all the way back to when the Cyberman was still a small humanoid stranded on a outcropping of rock in the middle of an all-but dead mining operation.

Back to when it was still human.

The planetoid was small, rocky and uninhabited.  It resembled nothing so much as a rock quarry thrown into a shaky orbit around a nearly dead white dwarf star.  There was just enough gravity to hold a meager atmosphere clinging to the rock, but not much else.

He remembered watching the approaching ship come in for its first pass, low on the horizon and low over the camp.  He’d been initially elated.  Earlier that month, a freak ground quake caused a landslide that buried the mine shaft entrance along with the other five members of his team deep in the planetoid.  The same quake had damaged the signaling equipment beyond repair.  And without the signaling equipment, he couldn’t contact the LANDMARK, their automated ship sitting serenely in orbit for retrieval. 

There were many nights early on, after he’d exhausted himself trying to dig his companions out, and he lay on a pile of rocks in a feverish delirium with only the slowly softening sounds of their screams for help to keep him company.  He’d look up at the stars in this foreign sky, and just be able to make out LANDMARK as she passed over head, unaware.  He’d dig by day listening for signs they were still alive, and be tortured every night, watching salvation sail overhead, unreachable.

It nearly drove him mad.

So when the other ship swooped in low over the camp and the backwash from its engines flattened nearly everything still standing after the quake, he didn’t care.  He was elated.  He jumped up and down, shouting with what was left of his horse, raspy voice waving his arms in what was left of his tattered jumpsuit desperate to be seen.

And when the tingle of the transmit beam embraced him, the exhaustion left and the only sensation was one of relief.  And when the tingle faded, and he found himself surrounded by Cybermen on a ship full of them, the relief evaporated like the last of his water in the dry heat on that planetoid. 

Captured; enslaved; processed; stripped of his identity—his humanity; raped.  The Cybermen called it upgrading.

Watching as cutting tools bit and chewed into his flesh, screams trying to bubble to his lips from vocal chords that had been torn out.  Watching parts of his body pass before him—parts that were never meant to see the light of day—all while the strange chemical anesthesia they pumped into him kept him awake and feeling.  Then seeing the metal apertures and appendages attach and form his new body…

That nearly drove him mad.

It was all the way back to this point the memory banks searched, as the host was dissected and lobotomized alive, that the Cyberman found a word to match the wave that was hitting it now.

Fear.

It was intense, powerful and overwhelming.  An emotion that the Cyberman had never felt nor was equipped to handle flooded through the neural pathways and crashed like a wave over the logic banks, eroding the mission parameters and drowning the sense of purpose.  Unprepared for such a raw, basic attack, the effect was instantaneous.

The Cyberman went completely and totally insane.

It cried out, a metallic moan that was as much a cry for help as it was an expression of pain.  Then it began lumbering forward, toward the source of the Fear, thinking to crush it, to destroy it, to return to the blissful ignorance the silent blackness held.  But the waves were too strong, relentless in their pounding, and the last vestiges of defense fell.  Reason and logic gave way to terror and irrationality.  The Cyberman staggered back, battering someone out of its way, and climbed the short ladder in the rear of the room.  There was a way out here, a hatch that led into a vast network of tunnels if its limited scans were correct, and ANY way out meant getting away from the Fear.

The humans in the room spoke of stopping it, but the Cyberman paid them no heed, seeking only the solace the tunnels promised.

Hours, or days later, the thing was still wandering the sewers, it was hard to tell with its internal chronometer off line, one of a multitude of systems that had seized up or shut down.  The Cyberman couldn’t tell, but thought its equilibrium may be affected as well.  What else would be causing this stumbling lurch through the tunnels?

There suddenly appeared multiple signatures on its imagers.  Three appeared to be human, but the other two were Cybermen like itself.  The last vestige of reason it possessed bubbled to the surface.  If they were Cybermen like it, they could report the malfunction, repair it.  At the very least it’d be deactivated and even that would mean a return to silence.  It continued on, lumbering toward them.

 

Isobel, Jamie and Zoe pressed themselves against the wall of the sewer, with two Cybermen on one side and what appeared to be a malfunctioning one on the other and them trapped in the middle.

“Ach, this is a fine mess.”  Jamie muttered.

Two UNIT men dropped down the nearly hidden ladder behind them and opened up on the advancing Cybermen.

“Quick, get out!”

The companions didn’t need to be told twice.  One by one they scrambled up the ladder.  From below came the loud THWOMP noise of a grenade going off.

 

The Cyberman tried to signal to the others but all that came out was a garbled noise it didn’t recognize as its own voice.  The humans were clambering out of the way when flashes of small arms fire blossomed in the darkness.  The caliber was small enough to not worry the Cyberman even if it had been sane when suddenly a small spherical object was lobbed toward it.

What was the point of—

The explosion was deafening in the enclosed sewer tunnel, and devastating at such close range.  The blast slammed the Cyberman against the tunnel wall while shrapnel permeated its outer casing and scrambled what was left of its sensory inputs.

The other two Cybermen attacked, but the grenades were turned on them next.  Both soldiers scurried up the ladder and nearly made it out of the manhole cover above but one was dragged back down by the remaining Cyberman and killed.  It dragged itself toward the carnage.  That one still standing Cyberman may be its last hope for repair.

Topside, the UNIT soldiers tossed grenade after grenade down the open manhole.

The multiple explosions obliterated the standing Cyberman at the foot of the ladder, and severed the head off the insane one.  Its last conscious thought was of deactivation.

But that would have been too kind.

The Cyberman—headless, riddled with shrapnel and with scrambled and intermittent sensor ability—was still very much alive.  After the explosion thundered and the smoke cleared, the body lay in a powered down, nearly deactivated state… until it began to move.

Limbs twitched and flailed until finally coordinated with the motor processors and began the tedious clamber over rubble and Cyberbodies strewn about the sewer.  No thought process, just movement.  And like a headless chicken will continue to run about the yard, so did the Cyberman crawl through the wreckage of the UNIT attack.

One of the mission parameters made a brief squawk about trying to find and reattach the head—there should have been a locator beacon active somewhere in the skull—but the motor skills won out, continuing to move away from the murky pool where the head did lie.  What cognitive functionality the Cyberman had left was wirelessly transferred to the back up control brain, little more than a CPU buried in the chest cavity just above the breathing unit.  It was into this box that the Cyberman’s consciousness found itself confined, lost, confused, and still completely insane.

It railed against the confines of its new prison, raved at the motor controls acting to try and save the whole, and in general made a nuisance of itself around the other automated programs that were still functioning.

         

          Years passed.  The automated systems repaired what damage they could, regenerating the cybernetic tissue and rewiring or rerouting essential control systems.  Every six hours, the motor controls took command and laboriously crawled the body to a new location.  The raging insanity calmed, and a few tattered shreds of rationality and logic took root.  It wasn’t going sane, necessarily, more like having free run of the house while the parent was off napping.  What was left of the Cyberman’s higher brain functions remembered the whole ordeal, and still couldn’t quite come to grips with what had happened.  One thing was certain.

It could not continue this meager existence within the sewers.  It would either have to adapt to survive, call for help, or die.  Finally having a cold hard concept to grasp, the Cyberman did, a lifeline to a drowning man.  It could survive, and it could call for help.

Eventually.

All it would have to do is wait.

LONELY LIFE

Earth, 1985

Blind Danny rummaged through the trash bin behind Sugar Mama’s Bakery looking for a spot of dinner before retiring.  This had been a good week for him, having found an only slightly-bruised apple on Monday, and nearly half a turkey sandwich on Tuesday.  He reckoned today being Wednesday his luck would hold one more day, (he had always liked Wednesdays, though if pressed for a reason couldn’t say why) and if you were gonna roll the dice, you did it behind the sweet shop.  Sugar Mama’s was the best smelling thing on the lower east side of London, and even the garbage was a slice of heaven.

His luck was indeed holding, as Tuesday was the day the old stock went clearance, and Wednesday was the day anything left over was tossed.  Apparently yesterday’s sale hadn’t gone well, for great chunks of inventory rested in the bin behind the store, including—an entire tray of sticky buns.  He ran the tray under his nose and inhaled the sickly sweet smells of cinnamon and frosting. He turned instinctively for his friend, “Great ‘aul today, Bob!” before reality reminded him that Bob wasn’t there.

They’d been quite the pair, the two of them.  Danny, who had lost his eyesight in a factory accident not far from here and not all that long ago (though sometimes it felt like years), and shortly after that had lost his flat and his possessions and his world.  He’d just about given up when Bob arrived.  Bob was mute from birth and grew up on the streets and when he found Danny trying to end it all on his rail tube line, well that just didn’t sit well.  The two had been inseparable after that, and despite their infirmities, managed to eek out an existence of sorts below the bridges and streets of London.  Just two more down on their luck lost souls.

Bob—the other homeless had called him Silent Bob, and wasn’t that just a great joke they thought—took Danny under his wing, taught him about life on the streets, about how to survive.  Blind Danny—as the imaginative and inventive homeless dubbed him, but the name had stuck—didn’t feel like he returned much from the relationship, but finally decided Bob was just happy to have someone talk to him, even if he couldn’t reply.

Blind Danny and Silent Bob, you had to laugh.

All the laughter ended when Silent Bob was laid to rest last year, after a hit and run driver mowed him down one night.

Blind Danny didn’t see it happen—couldn’t see it of course, but the noise the car made coming round the corner…

In his mind’s eye, he knows the driver was drunk.  In his mind’s eye, it’s a shiny red car, new off the factory floor. (He can’t know this for sure of course, Blind Danny knows this is his imagination filling in the details with very broad, vivid strokes.)  But the too-late squeal of brakes, the hard crunch of Bob’s body ricocheting off the hood of the car, the softer thud as he lands on the pavement, the gunning of the car’s engine as the driver roars off into the night without so much as a pause, and the horrid gurgling moan that escaped Bob’s throat as he died instantly…  No, Blind Danny needs no help from his imagination to fill those sounds in.  Those sounds will haunt him the rest of his days.

He felt his breath catch behind the lump in his throat.  Wouldn’t do to break down now, always best to rummage and run.  That was the rule. He could meet up with the others and divvy the up the stash…  He paused.  Why?  Normally the unwritten rule was if you had something you shared.  Bob had believed in it strongly, and therefore so did he.  But some days, some things were meant just for you.

Today was Wednesday after all.

Blind Danny turned and ambled back down the Alley, heading away from the camp the homeless community congregated at and instead moving deeper into the industrial part of the City.  He knew just the spot to enjoy his treat and reflect on his friend.

A short walk later (made longer by his attempts to stay upright with the tray.  He missed his eye sight!) Danny came to his spot, a small outcropping on the Thames, under a bridge.  The water from the river lapped noisily against its banks, and the occasional seagull cry carried across the water.  He and Silent Bob used to come here a lot, and he relished the memories the familiar smells brought back.  He missed the comforting presence Bob exuded, he missed prattling on to him at length about philosophy, or science or politics (subjects about which Blind Danny knew very little, but Silent Bob never corrected him), but mostly, he missed his friend.

Danny got the first bite of only slightly stale bun into his mouth when he heard a mournful, strangulated cry echoing from a nearby sewer main.  His ears were good at compensating for the loss of his sight, but this sounded nearly mechanical as opposed to organic.  He reckoned that was just the distortion from the tunnel mouth which lay somewhere behind him.

Danny got shakily to his feet and went to investigate.

“‘Ello?”  He called out when he got to the edge of the sewer.  His voice echoed and rebounded along the curved walls.  For a moment, nothing but silence greeted him, and then another moan floated out of the darkness.  It was illegible, but whoever it was, was clearly in pain.  “’old on, I’m coming!” Danny shouted into the sewer, and placing a grubby hand on the wall for guidance began shuffling his way in.  “Keep making noise if you can!”

The out pipe was fractured and broken round the rim, and he had a devil of a time making his way over the uneven footing.  After ten feet, the stupidity of what he was attempting dawned on him.  How was he, as a blind man, supposed to find his way back out of the sewer once he found whoever needed help?  Suppose he got himself lost down here in the endless mazes that made up the London underground?  Just as he was psyched up enough to talk himself out of continuing forward, Blind Danny found the source of the noise and fell arse over tea-kettle when he tripped over a body.

Danny fell to his knees, but thankfully his outstretched arms broke the worst of the fall for his upper body.  He did land in something faintly recognizable from the stench, and he was glad for once of his inability to see.  He rose up, shaking from the fall, and began to feel around for whatever he had tripped over.  His hand fell on a leg.  It was solid, nearly more like a pipe than a limb, but no, that was unmistakably a knee joint.

“Bloody ‘ell, you alright?” he asked.  There was no response, and for a moment, Danny feared that he had found a body in the sewer.  A dead one.  And that would lead to police, and police would lead to questions, and police questions were never very fair to the unemployed homeless.  And that would lead to more questions, and inevitably incarceration of some type.  And while he regretted the loss of life, he had a tray of sticky buns waiting for him just ten feet away.  This poor soul wasn’t going to be eating them, but Danny resolved that if he could find some change, he’d make an anonymous call from a payphone.  He could do that much for the dead.

He got shakily to his feet and had just about re-orientated himself toward the opening of the sewage pipe when the Cyberman reached out and grabbed his leg.

The Cyberman’s initial thought, was to kill, pure and simple.  This was an inferior species, and it was in no condition to perform a conversion and upgrade him.  Besides, now that it had been found, this one might alert others (like the ones with the explosives).  The inferior specimen would have to be killed.

It was, all-in-all, an impeccable piece of logic from the Cyberman.  There was a small sense of satisfaction at having made the deductive leaps.  It was beginning to think again.  To be again.

And that’s when it all went wonky.

The Cyberman did not kill.

It did not activate the electrical charge in it’s palm and fingers, (though the capacitors were weakly charged, they had more than enough juice to end Danny’s life.)It did not crush Danny’s leg with his hand, (though the servo motors in the gauntlet were more than up to the challenge, and it wouldn’t have taken much.)It did not swing out with it’s other arm, it did not fire a wrist harpoon, it did not use it’s sonic disruptor pulse, or any of the other dozens of weapons at it’s disposal—despite their lumbering march, an individual Cyberman had literally 112 different means of eradication in it’s arsenal—but all of them remained quiet.

What it did do—andthis was as much of a surprise to Danny as it was the Cyberman—was to call out for help.

With no head, the vocal cords stripped away at the neck, it wasn’t an articulate cry.  It was more of the mournful moan, the same kind that lured Danny into the sewer in the first place.  But this one was intentional.  The original cry happened without conscious thought, without intent.  This was obviously a plea.  And while a part of the Cyberman deep within the backup CPU rejoiced at being able to force the sound into existence, the rest of it was left confused, wondering if it was mending as well as it had initially assessed.

But the cry did stop Danny from trying to leave.  That noise—hell, any noise—emanatingfrom a body he was prepared to leave in a sewer scared him half to death.  Never mind the fact the body had just latched on to him.

Blind Danny helped the Cyberman out of the sewer, the tray of sticky buns forgotten.  The Cyberman went willingly, not knowing why.  He helped it down the embankment and through town on the way back to the homeless camp.  The industrial center though which they walked was either derelict and abandoned, or simplyempty by this point in the day.  Dusk had fallen, the sky becoming the deep purple of twilight before the meager stars would try and shine through the blanket of pollution over the East side of London, and the streets were deserted, saving them from the strange stares that would have come their way, for they made quite the odd couple, a bum and a cybernetic warrior from another planet.

Of course, with one being blind and the other headless, they were saved from stares anyway.

Danny dressed the Cyberman in Bob’s old trench coat, and perched a baseball hat on the stub protruding from the top of his shoulders.  It didn’t hide the fact that it was missing a head, (except maybe from a distance) and truthfully, Danny didn’t understand how that worked, how could you still be alive without a head?  But in truth, Danny didn’t care either.  His new friend was just as quiet as his old friend, the clothes made him more approachable, and when Danny suggested the name Silent Bob, the Cyberman didn’t complain.

The rest of the homeless community didn’t complain either.  They were glad for Danny to have someone knew to hang out with, even if it was akin to him bringing home a wayward puppy.  They thought the new Bob was a bit of an odd duck, being headless and all—but they appreciated that he didn’t eat their food, and kept to himself when Danny wasn’t around, but it was when he produced green blasts from his hand and ignited the trash barrels around the camp that he earned his place among the citizens.  Warmth was a precious commodity on the streets.

The Cyberman couldn’t fathom why it had done that.  A group of inferiors standing around, complaining about the cold, teams sent out to locate matches or lighters, anything to get a fire going.  It had reached out it’s hand and used the built in wrist blaster, set for it’s lowest incendiary setting and set the barrel of newspapers ablaze.  And they had starred.  And then applauded.  Actually applauded.

The part of the Cyberman who was struggling for control told itself it was trying to blend in, to infiltrate this society by subterfuge.  The logic circuits countered that that was a job for a Cybermat, not a warrior.  The tiny shred of humanity that was becoming more and more vocal in it’s outings from the CPUs subconscious just cheered and cried.

It was all very confusing.

After the barrels were lit, and the backslapping (gingerly done unless you wanted a bruised or broken hand) had tapered off, and the homeless were clustered around the fires, happy and warm and not looking, the Cyberman stole a small penlight from one of the other crude tents.

This could be incorporated.  This could be used.  So much inferiority around it, (and in truth, the penlight was very inferior) but unlike the unsuitable flesh, that surrounded the Cyberman, THIS could be upgraded.

But it would need more.

TRAGIC END

Earth, 2010

The Doctor energetically leaped from the back of the black UNIT Hummer and took a deep breath.  “Oh just smell that air!”  He exclaimed.

Rory clambered out of the Hummer next, and Amy poked her head out.  “Doctor, that’s pollution.” She said, wrinkling her nose.

“Industrious little Humans, you.” He agreed, beaming.  “Now, where were we?”

Rory grabbed Amy by the waist and helped her down.  “You were about to explain why we are enjoying the aroma of industrial London’s east side instead of taking a holiday in much more fragrant Naples.”  Several UNIT soldiers jumped down out of the vehicle and ran to secure a perimeter.

“Rory, you’re sulking.”  The Doctor said.  He pulled out the Sonic Screwdriver and began scanning, waiving it in all directions before consulting the device.  Rory suspected most of this was for show, as his own limited experience with the Sonic had never indicated there was a display for any information, but he wasn’t ruling out a psychic link, either.

“I’m not sulking.  And why are we here?”

The Doctor pointed the Sonic at the ground and began walking briskly toward a man-hole cover. “You know that nagging feeling you get when you’ve mislaid your car keys or wallet and you’re not quite sure where you may have left them?”

“Yeah.”

“Well this is nothing like that.  Besides,” he shouted over his shoulder, “Naples is NOT lovely this time of year.”

“Oh yes it is, I was there!”  Rory called back.

Amy laughed softly rolling her eyes.  “Why do you bother?”

“I dunno. I should have learned my lesson by now.”

The Doctor trotted back over to the couple as a UNIT soldier ran up and saluted.  “Perimeter established, Doctor.  Let us know when you want us to commence the sweep.”

“Thank you, Sgt. Gage.”

Amy looked The Doctor over.  “You’ve got that look.”  She accused.

“No I don’t.”  Replied the Doctor, fiddling with his bowtie.

“Ooh!  Yes he does!” Rory said, looking The Doctor over.  “I know that look!  I don’t know what it means yet, but I know it.”

Amy nodded her agreement. “So, spill it.”

“In nineteen-sixty-eight there was a Cyberman invasion of Earth.”

“Wait, you mean attempted invasion, right?”

“Well, I stopped them, yes.”

“Years later I was exiled to Earth and became UNIT’s scientific advisor.  Apparently the Cybermen had opened the floodgates.  The Autons, the Sontarans, the Daleks, they all made a run at Earth at some point during that time frame.”

“Sounds exciting.”  Amy commented.

“Boring was more like it.  Between the alien incursion form, the unexplained phenomenon log and the registered entity file, they tried to drown me in paperwork.  UNIT does love their forms and reports.”  He drifted off, the look in his eyes relaying stories from long ago.  Amy and Rory waited patiently, knowing better than to interrupt one of the Doctor’s pensive moments, and just like that, he was back and smiling wanly.  “Different times.”  He said, as if that explained it all.

“Anyway one of those reports dealt with the clean up of the Cyberman invasion.  It was decided to keep the details quiet as the pubic was not ready to accept the idea of aliens let alone being invaded by them.  UNIT cleaned it all up, the bodies, the damage, everything.  Even came up with a fairly convincing cover story.  There was an itemized accounting for every Cyber-body they picked up off the streets.  Every part.  Cyber-body parts can still operate and in some instances self repair so it was essential to get them all.”

“Don’t I know it.” Amy said ruefully, rubbing her neck and thinking of the chamber below Stonehenge that held the Pandorica.

“In twenty-twelve, I saw a Cyberman’s head in a museum as part of a private collection, supposedly found in the London sewers.”  The Doctor finished.  His companions looked at him expectantly, then at each other.

Rory finally spoke the question.“And?”

“Sorry?”

“And, what?”

“You don’t see the connection?”

“Um, no.”

“The head wasn’t on the UNIT manifest.”

Amy broke in.  “Well, it wouldn’t be would it?  I mean, it was recovered and spirited out of London before they could clean it up.”

“Exactly. Top marks.” The Doctor encouraged.

“At the risk of sounding like a broken phonograph, And?  I mean, so what?  So what if someone found a head…” Rory trailed off, obviously beginning to catch the Doctor’s drift.

“So where’s the body?”  The Doctor concluded for him.  “Can’t have one without the other.”

“It wasn’t on the manifest.”

“No.  At least I didn’t think it was, so I had Captain Magambo pull the records for me to be sure.”  He pulled a notebook full of yellowing frayed dot matrix style papers out of a box from the back of the Hummer and flipped through it, green and yellow stripes flying by.  “Every part from the invasion.  No severed heads.”

“Are you saying there’s a headless Cyberman wandering the sewers of London’s lower East Side?”  Amy asked.

“Are you saying you remembered NOT seeing one body part on THIS report?” Rory asked incredulously, taking the notebook from him.

The Doctor turned to Rory, “Speed reading courses at the community college.”  He turned to Amy.  “No, I’m only suggesting the possibility there is.”

“Why now?”  Rory asked suddenly, tossing the notebook back in the hummer.

“Pardon?’

“Nineteen-sixty-eight, Two-thousand and twelve.” He waived his hands like balancing a scale.  “And a report from sometime in between.  If UNIT cleaned all this up, the body was missing its head shortly after the invasion.  Yet here we are, nearly fifty years later.  Why come to this time to find out?”

“And why did it take you this long to make the connection?”  Amy chastised.

The Doctor shrugged.  “Like Rory says, it’s been fifty years spread between these instances.  I challenge you to remember what we had for supper two nights ago!”  Amy opened her mouth to counter, and found she couldn’t.  “And that’s fifty years Earth time.  For me those events are spread over the last…” he trailed off, doing some mental calculations, “eight hundred years give or take.  Of course, it’s only started nagging at me the last hundred and fifty or so.  To answer your question of why now Rory, the TARDIS just picked up an extremely brief, but extremely powerful burst of subspace static on the Cyberman communication channel.  I’ve been monitoring it ever since we challenged the Twelfth Cyber Legion.”

“When did you have time to crack their comm codes?” Rory asked, impressed.

“While you were parlaying with them.”  The Doctor tweaked his bow tie.  “Hacked into the system using an old code I had from one of my other incarnations, back when I was older.  I doubted it would still work, but it did.”

“Nice.”

“I hate to break up the mutual appreciation society boys,” Amy interrupted, “but what are we thinking, ET phone home?”

The Doctor nodded.  “An attempt, anyway.  The message contained nothing but static, and was too weak to reach the nearest Cyber relay, but that doesn’t mean it wont try again.”  He started rooting around in the back of the Hummer and pulled out rope and flashlights.“The signal was far too brief for me to triangulate an exact location, so we’re going to have to search for the transmitter.”  He handed the torches over, and then pulled out three pairs of green rubber boots.

“What’s with the boots?” Rory asked, perplexed.

“We’re going into a sewer, Rory.”  The Doctor said, as if that was the simplest explanation in the world.  They changed shoes while the Doctor radioed UNIT and told them to commence their search, thentrotted over to an open manhole cover.

Amy grabbed his shoulder. “Doctor, how many of your other companions have you dragged into the sewers searching for monsters?” She teased.

“Loads.”

“Find any?”

“Other than the usual suspects like Cybermen and Daleks?”  The Doctor thought for a moment.  “Alligators.”

Amy’s face fell.  “Are you putting me on?”

“Oh, and a giant rat.”

“How giant?”

“Giant.  Ready?”

“No.”

“Good, lets go!” He said brightly, and with a call of “Geronimo!” slid down the ladder into the darkness below.

 

The sewer was dark, dank and full of a misty fog that clung to the curved walls and circled around their feet as they splashed down lightly inside the shaft of light streaming in through the open manhole.

The Doctor moved confidently forward, waving his torch with one hand and the sonic screwdriver with the other.  Amy and Rory stepped into the darkness and ignited their torches, sending two more beams of light stabbing into the dark.  Nearly simultaneously, they whiled on each other and wielded the flashlights like swords and began a mock duel, complete with shouts of “Vrum, vrum” and clashing noises when the beams crossed.

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possible imagine.” Amy intoned dramatically.

Rory dropped the torch down.  “Why do I always have to be Vader?”

She smiled and kissed him on the cheek.  “Because I’m the plucky hero.”

“Are you two quite finished?” The Doctor called over his shoulder.

“Doctor, why haven’t we encountered any lightsabers?”  Amy asked.

“What, you mean besides the idea that a beam of light can be fashioned into a blade is complete rubbish?  Inter-galactic copyright law.”

“Okay, now I know you’re joking.”

The Doctor shook his head.  “George is very protective of his intellectual properties.”

“Hang on, what about the Headless Monks?  They had lightning swords!” Rory protested.

“The lawsuit is still pending…” The Doctor stooped and scooped up a bit of frayed wiring from the floor of the tunnel.  He shined the light from his torch on it, then scanned it with the sonic.

“Looks like a cell phone circuit board.”  Amy said.

“We might be getting close.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You know that sense of foreboding you get when something nasty is about to jump out of the dark at you?”

Amy hesitated. “Yes.”

“I’ve got it now.”

They moved deeper into the sewers.

 

The Cyberman had been busy.  For the last twenty-five years it had been salvaging, stealing, scavenging and scraping spare parts.  Bits of circuit board, cell phones, flashlights.  The mother load came when a major corporation went bust and tossed all their equipment.  Actually tossed it.  The Cyberman had looked upon the bounty of that day with the same relish Blind Danny did over day old sweet rolls.Some of the equipment had gone into it’s special project–a transmitter powerful enough to beam a distress signal into the heart of the Cyber Relay itself–and some of it had been appropriated into itself.  (An old computer monitor and web cam were now integrated on top of it’s head, giving it limited “vision” and it was planning to upgrade to flat screen model.)

It had been busy within the homeless community too, making small improvements to the camp, structurally fortifying their tents and shelters, providing heat, even going so far as to defend the community from the invading Cybermen army a few years back. (Admittedly, it originally wanted to join the other Cybermen, but they had refused, some nonsense about “missing Cybus Industries Branding” and attacked.  The Cyberman had no choice but to open fire and defend its position.

The project had become too important.

And of course, there was all the time spent with Blind Danny.  Danny talked to they Cyberman like a confidant, a conspirator, an equal and a friend.  The Cyberman was almost surprised to find it liked spending time with Danny.  Almost, because it knew the annoyance it thought of as humanoid remnant was asserting itself more and more frequently these days, even succeeding in overriding motor control functions at times.  Despite repeated diagnostics, the CPU had not managed to purge that part of itself.  So when the Cyberman thought about Blind Danny, and felt somewhat less inclined to improve or upgrade him, it just chalked it up to that rogue bit of leftover programing.

For all intents and purposes, the Cyberman had become Silent Bob.

Or Cyberman Bob.  It kinda liked that.

An alarm sounded, dragging the Cyberman’s full attention to the set up in front of it.  There were intruders in the tunnels.  And they were getting closer.  They must not be allowed to jeopardize the project.  The Cyberman made ready.

 

Blind Danny couldn’t find Bob.  Normally at this time of day they were preparing for supper, and while Bob didn’t eat, it was a community rule, everyone came home for supper.  It also afforded the opportunity for a daily head count, just to be safe.

Danny suspected he knew where Bob was.  Ever since his first day with them, he’d sneak off to the sewer mouth just beyond the camp, (not all that different from the one where they first met), what Danny had come to think of as the lab.  Bob was always on the hunt for bits of technology, and while it didn’t make much sense to Danny (if you couldn’t eat it, sleep in it, or wear it, why bother?) but whenever he found something and brought it back, Bob seemed happy to see it.  Lately, he’d been spending more and more time there.

Danny had never been in the lab, it was Bob’s, and Danny respected his privacy, but it was time to eat whether he did or not, and community rule was community rule.  Danny wandered slowly over to the entrance of the sewer.  He’d call after him and get him to the dinner table.

 

“Rory, something just floated past my leg.  Do I want to know what it was?”  Amy asked.

Rory shined his torch down.  “Ewwww.  No, no you don’t.”

“The tunnel dries out a bit up here!”  Said the Doctor a little ways ahead of them.  “But I think we should be qui—“ a loud, echoing clamor cut him off mid sentence.  It sounded like steam powered train whistle, but the tunnels distorted it; the enclosed stonework made it echo and reverb even louder than it was.  The explorers cupped their hands to their ears in defense.

“That’s a factory whistle!”  Rory tried yelling over the din.

“What?”  The Doctor yelled back.

“My dad, he worked for a factory, that’s a…” as abruptly as it began, the noise cut off.  “…shift change whistle.”

“Yes.  Everyone okay?”  The companions nodded.  “Right.  No point in being quiet now, it knows we’re here.”  The Doctor consulted his screwdriver again.  “Not much further now.”  He strode off into the darkness.

 

Danny had just opened his mouth to call out for Bob when an ear splitting noise exploded from the mouth of the tunnel.  He slapped his hands over his ears and screamed in surprise.  The noise ended a moment later.  Danny wasn’t sure what he had just heard, but thanks to a trick of acoustics due to the shape of the mouth of the tunnel, the noise sounded to him a lot like the squeals and groans Bob made when trying to communicate.

“Bob?!?”  He called out, concerned.  “Hang on Bob, I’m coming!”

He plunged into the sewer opening.

 

The Doctor Soniced open a door recessed into the wall and darted inside. The interior hall stretched around a corner, on the other side teaming with sound and noise and electronic beeps and whistles.  The Doctor took off, and rounded the corner with Amy and Rory tight on his heels, but stopped so suddenly they collided into a three person pile up.

They were in an immense room, possibly some sort of overflow control center.  There were the standard things one would expect to find in a place like this, a bank of electrical boxes and a few boxy computer terminals that looked like they would have been at home on the set for Doctor Strangelove, or the bridge of a retired battleship, old sixties models.  Everything was painted a drab grey.  Then there were the things they would not have expected to find:

Computers, monitors, laptops, cell phones, Bluetooth headsets, telephones, televisions, clock radios, DVD players, iPods, wire, CB radios, lengths of co-axial cable, video game arcades, microwave ovens, power cables snaked across the floor plugged into extension cords, and power strips.  Anything and everything that could remotely be considered a piece of technology over the last 50 years was represented in that room, a Radio Shack garage sale.In the center of it all stood the Cyberman.  Or rather, an augmented Cyberman, as it appeared to have a television perched on its shoulders in place of a head, and was wearing a trench coat.

“Okay,” Amy said. “That is not something you see everyday.”

“Hello, I’m the Doctor, and you’ve been busy.”  Said the Doctor.  “I am impressed, genuinely impressed.”  He raised the sonic and gave the Cyberman and the room a quick once over.  “Although admittedly I’m not sure what it is I’m looking at or impressed by, but still… quite an accomplishment.”

The Cyberman stood immobile, but Rory could swear the thing was looking at them, even without the benefit of eyes or a head.  Somehow that blank monitor representing a face was worse than their true appearance.And then suddenly the monitor wasn’t blank anymore.  The word appeared and floated on the screen:

 

Trespassing

 

The Doctor straightened his coat by the lapels.  “And you’re dealing in stolen goods.  Besides, this isn’t even your planet.  Don’t get tetchy with me.”  He finished, waggling a finger.  The screen went blank, new words appeared.

 

Leave now or be deleted

 

“We can’t leave, we came here to find you.  I know you’re trying to contact the Cybernet.  I can’t allow them to come here to get you; they’d just invade the planet.  But perhaps we can help.”  The Doctor took a ginger step forward and the Cyberman went into full ballistic attack mode, whirling, grinding gear noises accompanied by new protrusions emerging from the Cyberbody, each one a newly fashioned or upgraded weapon.

“It looks like a transformer.” Amy said, backing up.

“Yeah,” Rory said, trying to insert himself between her and it. “Gives new meaning to the name Cybertron.”

The Cyberman raised his gauntleted hand, preparing to fire.  The Doctor raised the sonic screwdriver and fired first.  The Cyberman’s wrist gun sputtered and powered down.“I don’t want to have to this.  Don’t make me do this.” The Doctor pleaded.  He reached out his hand.

Instead of taking it, the Cyberman lashed out with his other hand, and a series of small discs shot out of a slot on his other wrist.  The Doctor ducked, and the discs flew overhead, narrowly missing Rory and Amy as they embedded themselves into the concrete wall.  They appeared to have once been CDs, or perhaps mini-discs, carved down and sharpened into throwing stars.

“There’s no call for this!”  The Doctor shouted, diving behind a pile of tape recorders as more discs flew over his head.  Amy and Rory tried moving to the relative safety of the doorway, but were cut off by a pencil thin beam of red light that burned and singed the wall, forcing them back.  Rory pulled out the walkie-talkie from the Hummer, “UNIT command, we’ve found it—“ the walkie exploded in a shower of sparks.  Rory pulled it away and starred incredulously at the cluster of nails that had been shot into the handset.  One of them protruded out farther than the others from the top of the earpiece, and he felt a trickle of blood running down his ear.

The Doctor lobbed a cassette recorder at the Cyberman—hit it square in the chest, but he might as well have thrown a helium balloon for all the impact he got—and was rewarded with a shower of broken glass that rained down on him.

 

Cyberman Bob hesitated.  The shower of broken glass should have launched with much greater force than that.  Perhaps a problem with the pneumatic tubing or the pressure regulator?  It filed the question away for later.  It was getting a thorough check of all its upgrades, some of them were bound to be more effective than others.

 

Danny hurried along as best he could, but was unfamiliar with this section of the sewers, and there seemed to be a lot more junk piled against the walls.  Overflow from what he’d been bringing Bob?  Had they actually accumulated that much junk?  He pressed on, his keen hearing picking up what sounded like a war zone just ahead.

 

The Doctor dodged to another piece of hooked in electronics just in time to dodge a hail of D batteries that hit the cinderblock wall behind him with enough force to pop and ooze acid.  This was getting deadly serious.  He changed a setting on the Sonic and hit the Cyberman with a harmonic resonance field, hopefully enough to scramble its projectile weapons.  There was a pause in the sound of carnage, and he raised his head enough to see what was happening.

The Cyberman was turned slightly away from him, trying to launch something toward where Amy and Rory hid behind a reel-to-reel.  The repeated click told the Doctor he’d been successful.

“Ha!”  He yelled triumphantly, rising from his cover.  “No more shootie explodiethings for you.”

Amy and Rory tentatively peeked over the top of the equipment.  “Sonic to the rescue?”

“Always and forever.”  Said the Doctor, advancing on the Cyberman.  It turned toward him, the blank monitor casting a pale reflection of the Time Lord on its surface.  “So, where were we?  Oh yes, I was offering to help when you attacked my friends and me.Very naughty.  Shouldn’t do that.”

The Cyberman pulled a flashlight cylinder from its leg and held it up and the top of the torch ignited and became, inexplicably, a blade of blue light, complete with a low thrumming noise.

The smile slid from The Doctor’s face.

“No, way.” Said Rory, taking a tentative step forward despite the danger.

“Doctor, that appears to be…” Amy trailed off.

The monitor flashed one word:

 

Delete

 

…and the Cyberman lunged, the saber changing pitch as it thrummed through the air.  The Doctor leaped back—landing on Rory’s toes—and the blade passed through the space where he was just a moment ago.  A fine singe mark scored across his blue bowtie.

“Run!”  The Doctor shouted.

The three scrambled to get out of the room.

“But, how can that…?  You said…  I thought those were impossible?”  Rory stammered.

“George is not going to be happy!” The Doctor shouted as they hustled out.

 

Sgt. Miles Gage listed to the squawked comm again as Corporal Hodges played it back in the UNIT command truck.  It was undeniably one of the Doctor’s lot, but the message was so short and so garbled they couldn’t make any of it out.  Nor had the UNIT communications officer managed to pinpoint the walkies location before the signal had been lost.

Which left Sgt. Gage in an unenviable position.  He knew there was a hostile in the area; he knew the Doctor had gone after it.  He knew the Doctor was probably in trouble somewhere within the locked down zone, but not where or how badly.  Which meant deciding on a course of action was next to impossible.

“Orders sir?” Hodges asked, reading the other man’s expression.

Gage wasn’t a cautious man by nature, and he knew what was riding on the Doctor.  Every fiber in his being screamed at him to charge in and do something.  But the words from a lecture, given by a legend during his time at Sandhurst kept him steady.  The Royal Academy had brought in one of their own for a commencement ceremony, winner of the Queen’s Medal and The Sword of Honor as a cadet, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Retired.  And the Brig, (as all the cadets called him) had opened Cadet Gage’s mind with one word:

Caution.

The Brig knew a thing or two about hostile aliens, as it turned out, and even more about the Doctor.  And if he could recommend caution in the face of the unknown, then certainly Sgt. Miles Gage could heed that advice.

“We wait.  The Doctor will find away to contact us.”  He informed his subordinate, feeling justified in his decision.

 

“Don’t worry, UNIT forces should be showing up anytime.” The Doctor called out as they dodged around another corner.  Behind them in the sewer tunnel they could hear the Cyberman, it’s heavy footfalls crashing down in the claustrophobic surroundings.  And it wasn’t a lumbering pile of scrap now.  The thing was moving.  And fast.

“I still don’t see how—“

“Rory, sooner or later you’re just going to have to accept that a large number of the things we encounter defy analysis.”  The Doctor said, grabbing Rory’s head and looking over his still bleeding ear.  “You’re fine, it’s just a scratch.”

“So you don’t know how that trick with the saber was done?”

“Not a clue.”

“Where are we?” Amy asked.

The Doctor waived the sonic around the T-junction and consulted it.  “We’ve moved farther away from the manhole we entered, but there might be an opening this way.”  He headed off into the dark, the Cyberman still in pursuit.

 

Blind Danny was hopelessly lost.  He’d gotten turned and twisted in the maze of piled up junk and couldn’t seem to re-orientate himself.  He thought he knew which direction was Bob’s lab, but couldn’t find it.  The war zone that was emanating from that direction had quieted down, and now there was nothing but the occasional dull crash.  Nor could he find his way back to the sewer opening.  It was maddening.

Just as he was about to give up hope of ever getting out, he heard the sound of footsteps.  Big, heavy, clanging footsteps.  Bob.  Danny picked the direction most likely and started to move, only to have a young woman round the corner and careen into him.  He knew she was a young woman by both the weight (or rather, lightness) of the impact and the squeak of surprise she gave as they collided.  They ended up in a pile on the floor.  Then two men followed her around the corner and fell over the sprawled mass of limbs and body parts.  He could tell they were men by the dead weight way they fell on top of them, and the grunts of pain as the wind was knocked out of them.

And the footsteps were closer.

 

Amy found herself sandwiched between Rory and… well a bum if the odor was any indication.  The Doctor sat up, rubbing his backside.  “Spinal compression is the number 47 cause of considerable pain among Time Lords over 900.” He mumbled.  “Everyone all right?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to find to have run into you lot, but do you reckon you could get off me?”  Danny asked from under the pile.

The companions untangled and disengaged themselves while the Doctor helped Danny to his feet.  The clanging down the tunnel was louder still.  “From the sound of things, introductions will have to wait.”

“Oh, that’s just Bob.”  Danny said dismissively.

Amy and Rory shared a look.  “Bob?” The Doctor asked.

“Yeah.  Bob.”

At that moment, Bob clanked and clattered around the corner of the new T-Junction, monitor flashing, the blade slashing through part of the wall, sending bricks crashing down.

“Get back!” The Doctor yelled, stepping in front of the companions.

“Oh, toss off.”  Danny said, moving forward.  “Bob wouldn’t ‘urt anyone.”He walked toward the Cyberman’s imposing form.

“Perhaps you didn’t notice, but Bob just took out a wall with a lightsaber!” Amy yelled at his back.

“He didn’t notice.  He’s blind.”  The Doctor said in wonder, watching the spectacle.

Bob stood, sword raised in one hand, the other gauntleted hand open with arcs of electricity sparking between the spread fingers, the monitor cocked to one side as if considering the cluster of people before him.

“What’s all this about then, eh?”  Danny said.  “C’mon Bob, it’s dinner time.  They’re all back at the camp ‘eld up on us.”

The Cyberman seemed to hesitate, as if considering then brought the open glove down on Danny’s shoulder and sent thousands of volts of electricity into his body.

 

Deep within the processing centers of the CPU, the small, still-human part of the Cyberman cried out in anguish.  It flew to the central mind and exerted all it’s influence to gain control of the body.  The Cyber-programming would ordinarily have been too strong to even consider such a thing—and in truth, if the programing were still in effect there wouldn’t be anything to consider.  The human piece of feeling a memory only existed due to the Cyberman’s mind being shattered by the fear ray in the first place—but it had been working, constantly sowing seeds of confusion and discord within the mainframe that remained, weakening the Cyber-control.

Danny!It cried out, and wrenched the hand away.

 

As soon as the pain began, it ended.  Blind Danny crumpled to the ground, unprepared for the assault on his nerves, but he was alive.

The monitor flared to life once more, and the Doctor read the words burning on the screen for the benefit of all.

 

Leave now while I can still hold it at bay

I will destroy the transmitter and this body

 

Danny, thank you for being my friend…

 

“No, we can help—“ Cyberman Bob turned, and began stomping back the way they had come.

“Bob?  Bob?”  Danny called, half hysterical, still dazed.

“Amy, Rory, get him up and get out of here.”  The Doctor motioned to them and pulled out the Sonic Screwdriver.  Without waiting for a reply, he headed after the Cyberman.

 

Two different schools of being were at war in the heart of the Cyberman’s CPU.  One was the fractured and off-kilter logic of all Cybermen, one was the fractured and under siege emotions of a one-time human who had had enough.

For the moment, the human emotions were in charge, manning the drive mechanisms that controlled the (now lumbering) movement through the sewers, but the onslaught from the Cyber-control was powerful, and the bombardment was gaining intensity.

The Cyber-control found itself locked out of it’s own command functions, and became… well enraged isn’t too strong a word.  It battered against this insignificant nuisance that had suddenly become a major obstacle to the plan.

And it had to stop it.

Finally a crack in the defenses appeared in the guidance systems, and Cyber-control slipped through the just small enough gap to slam the body into the nearest wall.  The impact destroyed the tiny webcam mounted on the side of the monitor and blinded the Cyberman.

Bob stumbled, and now really was lumbering, arms out in a sick Frankenstein parody as it groped its way along in the near blackness of the tunnel.  It knew it was close.  It must reach the transmitter and set the overload before it was too late, before the Cyber-programming broke in and regained control of the body.

Somewhere within, quite unaware to either side that it was happening, the Cyberman began to scream.

 

Amy, and Rory reached the surface with Danny, nearly inconsolable with grief.  He kept muttering about drunk drivers, which meant nothing to the two companions.

Amy looked back at the open sewer tunnel.  “C’mon Doctor.”

 

The Doctor ricocheted off the door into the control room, and found the Cyberman, sprawled on a pile of circuit boards, it’s monitor cracked down the middle.  He approached cautiously, Sonic in one hand, the other open to appear non-threatening.

“It was Vaughn’s invention, wasn’t it?”  He asked softly.  “Cut though the rhetoric and tight clamps the Cyber-systems keep on your programing.  Allowed the original inhabitant of that mind a breath of air, but drove you insane.  How long has it been for you?  Fifty years, living in the sewers, outside the confines of a civilization that isn’t yours…. I’m sorry.  I thought maybe I could help, relocate you to a new home, or return you to your people….”

Inexplicably, the monitor flared with a final message on it’s cracked screen:

 

My name is Bob

I am home

I am with my people

 

Run

 

The gauntleted hand rose, and pointed to the computer terminal on the far side of the room.  The Doctor rose and crossed to it, scanning the device.  He consulted the Sonic’s readings.

He spun around, “You’ve reversed the polarity of…” and trailed off, the Cyberman—Bob—still pointing.  The Doctor looked behind the computer, and saw stacks of red petrol drums lining the walls, all with large “flammable” signs emblazoned across their hulls.  The computer read 10, 9, 8…

The Doctor ran.

 

The explosion was heard and felt for miles around, rumbling through the area just below the surface of the streets.  A wall of fire advanced through the sewer tunnels and blew fireballs that lifted several manhole covers up in the air, ten feet or more.  One of these was very near the UNIT mobile HQ, and when Sgt. Gage saw the manhole cover riding a pillar of flame and come crashing down on one of the detachment’s jeeps (thankfully un-occupied) he knew instantly the Brigadier must have followed his own advice… in all instances that DIDN’T involve the Doctor.

Several small fires were started in the area, and in the homeless camp, a great crack split the pavement, almost identical to the crack that ran down Bob’s monitor.Amy, Rory and Danny were present for the belch of fire and smoke that rolled out of the sewer opening.  Amy screamed and started to charge back in, Rory had to hold her back.

Of Cyberman Bob, and the transmitter, nothing survived.

 

Amy clung to Rory the way a drowning person would cling to a life preserver.  She couldn’t believe The Doctor was gone.

But of course, it was at that moment he came staggering out of the tunnel mouth, singed, dirty, sopping and dripping, carrying his rubber boots and leaving squashy wet footprints behind him.

Amy rushed to him, prepared to envelop him in a bear hug and admonish him for running off, when she caught a whiff of him and abruptly stopped.

“Ewww.  Doctor.”

“Tell me about it.”  He muttered, as disgusted as she was.

Rory tried to hid the smile and only marginally succeeded.  “So, we can guess how you survived?”

“Went for a swim.”

“Ah.”  A sudden thought dawned on him. “Doctor, you didn’t happen to grab the…” He trailed off as the Doctor spun slowly around and fixed him with a fierce stare.  “…Ah, no.  No I don’t expect you did, having to dive into sewer water to get away and all.”

The roar of an engine silenced them all, and a UNIT hummer drove up.  Sgt. Gage jumped out, Corporal Hodges on his heels.  “Well Doctor, I…” He trailed off, wrinkling his nose.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“We’ve shower facilities set up at the mobile HQ sir.”  Hodges stepped up, saving the Sgt. from the embarrassment.

The Doctor rubbed his hands together, trying to dislodge some of the film.  “Excellent.”

“Doctor,” Amy broke in. “Is it over?”

The Doctor looked back at the smoking ruin of the sewer opening, and down at Blind Danny, weeping on the sidewalk.  “It’s come to the end it was destined to come to.”  He said, thinking about a blinking monitor.  Not the one on the Cyberman’s body, but the one back in the TARDIS, announcing the fixed point in time of his death yet to come. <>

Doctor Who Fiction: Time And Again

200px-Fifth_Doctor

Film Title: Dr Who.Doctor Who: Time And Again

Featuring The Fourth and Fifth Doctors

By Shaun Collins

Dusk had fallen.

A long, multi-colored striped scarf dragged on the ground, rustling the dead leaves it passed.  The owner noticed, scooped it up with one arm, made yet another circle about his neck and dropped the remainder all in one motion.  The scarf’s fringe now dangled just above the ground as the man’s long legs carried him across the campus mall toward the bell tower.

Another, much younger man stood waiting beneath the monolithic structure.  He was curiously dressed in a cricketing outfit and white hat, and had a stick of celery pinned to his lapel.  The dress was curious because this campus was in the Mid-Western United States in late fall.

No one plays cricket in the Mid-West in late fall.

The scarf stopped swaying as the owner slowed his approach.  “Don’t I know you?” He inquired by way of greeting.

“In—a roundabout way.” The other man responded.  “Thank you for coming.”

“Well, your message said it was important.”

“So it did.  It’s important, because I wanted to warn you.”

“Warn me about what?” The man asked, tying a knot in his scarf.

“Well, the word is that you’re planning a trip to Aquida.”

This got the other man’s attention.  His eyes snapped up the curious figure in the cricket outfit, his knotted scarf forgotten.  “That’s very interesting. I haven’t told anyone yet.”

“News travels fast.”

“Yes, but that’s a little too fast.  How did you—“

“I can’t tell you who I am, and I can’t tell you how I know.  I just do.  Don’t go to Aquida.”  He removed his white hat with the red trim and glanced skyward, as the autumn breeze kicked up, billowing his blonde hair.  “There’s a storm brewing.”

The stars had just begun to shine overhead, and the other man followed his gaze up, looking toward where Aquida was located in this section of the Terran sky.  Not visible, but up there somewhere.  “Aha.”  He said, catching the meaning.  “Galactic Weather Service?”

“Something like that.  Let’s just say I’ve been there about now, and now is not the best time for a holiday.  You had a horrible time.  Dreadful trip.”  The hat returned to it’s accustomed place and his hands slid into his trouser pockets.

“Lost luggage?”

“Lost yes, luggage no.  Promise me you won’t go.”

The scarf received another knot as the thought it over.  “Well, Aquida isn’t really that interesting this time of year, is it?  A lot of ice a snow.  You can go anywhere in the universe to see ice and snow.”

“And do say hello to Sarah Jane for me.”  The other man looked up sharply at that, all levity forgotten.  There was a look of pure fire in his eyes.  But the cricketer just stood there, a haunted and bittersweet expression on his own face.  “Don’t go to Aquida.”

As quickly as the anger had formed, it dissipated, and a sparkle suddenly lit the other man’s eyes.  He rubbed a hand through his mop of curly brown hair. “You’re sure I don’t know you?”  He asked in a low voice.

The cricketer smiled.  “You haven’t met me yet.”

The sparkle quickly clouded over again, and with a shrug he turned back the way he came, leaving the cricketer standing beneath the monolith as it chimed the passing time. <>