B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (133 page)

All computers were joined up to the Hubway, a formalised version of the Internet. As Hubway went online, though, chaos broke out: aeroplanes crashed at Heathrow as air traffic control systems failed, the Astra satellite was sent into a new orbit, the Library of Congress catalogue and all its backups were wiped, the computer facilities of the First National Bank of China were obliterated. Instruments at Nunton told technicians that the reactor had gone to meltdown. The head of MI5, Veronica Halliwell, was assassinated. Jonah Cosgrove, former sixties superspy, succeeded her as the head of MI5.
 [832]

This was all part of the plan of the Voracians, cybernetic reptilians from Vorella. They planned to use the sentient software Voractyll to take control of the Earth. The fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry helped to defeat them.

c 1998 - Option Lock
 [833]

President Dering was now in the White House, with Jack Michaels serving as vice-president.

The Khameirian-sponsored brotherhood, founded in the thirteenth century, had many members in positions of power. They sought to trigger a nuclear conflict that would produce the energy needed for the Khameirians to recorporealise. A brotherhood member launched an unauthorised nuclear strike from Krejikistan, which compelled the Americans to reveal the nuke-killing Station Nine as they nullified the threat. The US subsequently turned Station Nine over to the United Nations.

The brotherhood’s leader, Norton Silver, forced the eighth Doctor to relocate the TARDIS to Station Nine to launch a nuclear strike from there. Britain’s Captain Pickering died while destroying Station Nine to prevent this, an act that also killed Silver and the Khameirian core within him. A month later, Sam Jones learned that Silver’s widow was pregnant, and worried the Khameirian taint might have passed to the child.

1998 (11th-12th August) - Touched by an Angel
 [834]

The older Mark Whitaker had started a consultancy company, and used his foreknowledge of the future to make millions. He was a partial investor in
Mama Mia!
The eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory helped the older Mark to lock his younger self and Rebecca out on a balcony for the evening - and the two of them took the opportunity to cement their budding relationship.

Thomas “Hex” Schofield, a companion of the seventh Doctor, was born to Cassandra Schofield on 12th October, 1998.
 [835]
When Rose Tyler was 12, she received a red bicycle for Christmas.
 [836]

1999

Adelaide Brooke, the woman destined to become the commander of the first Martian colony, was born on 12th May, 1999.
 [837]
A rain of frogs was reported in San Francisco.
 [838]

w - The Great Houses dispatched Chris Cwej to curtail the activities of Faction Hollywood. Cwej bested Faction Hollywood’s leader, Michael Brookhaven, in combat during the Hollywood Bowl Shooting incident of 1999; Faction Hollywood was not expected to prosper after Brookhaven’s downfall.
 [839]

In 1999, a division of Phicorp purchased the land in Shanghai containing the Blessing - part of the Three Families’ preparation to destroy the world’s economy and rebuild it under their control.
 [840]
In June 1999, James Lawson of Torchwood Cardiff improved upon a formula supplied by Jack Harkness, and did the early field tests on the amnesia drug Retcon.
 [841]

c 1999 - FP: Warlords of Utopia
 [842]

Marcus Americanius Scriptor arrived in the True Earth to track down August Hitler, who had been spirited away from his own parallel universe. The Little Hitler was in South America. Scriptor killed him, then wrote an account of his long life.

1999 - Auton 2: Sentinel / Auton 3: Awakening
 [843]

The Nestene essence that escaped from The Warehouse two years previous established an Auton contingent on the remote Sentinel Island, home to the best preserved of the ancient Nestene chambers. Lockwood used a psychic seed the Nestene had planted in his mind to absorb the long-dormant Nestene beneath the island, and prevented it from summoning the entire Nestene consciousness to Earth.

Soon afterwards, all of the New York Exchange’s systems were wiped, the Nasdac went into freefall and Flight 4906 came down over Berlin owing to computer error. Some surviving Autons tried to channel through Lockwood’s mind a pulse that would awaken all the dormant Nestene on Earth, but he stopped their scheme by killing himself.

1999 (July) - The King of Terror
 [844]

The alien Jex sought to conquer Earth, and had fronted the communications conglomerate InterCom to this end. They were secretly stockpiling plutonium to detonate and raise Earth’s temperature to better accommodate their race. The Canavitchi, formerly enslaved to the Jex, worked to exterminate their former masters. The Brigadier received reports of extra-terrestrial involvement in California, and summoned the fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough to UNIT’s Los Angeles office.

The Doctor and his allies brought InterCom to ruin as rival Jex and Canavitchi warfleets showed up in Earth orbit. The Doctor used Earth’s satellite network to create a planetary defence shield as the warfleets slaughtered one another and departed. The Doctor advised the Brigadier to co-ordinate with the American CIA and help capture the Jex and Canavitchi agents still at-large.

1999 (July) - Dominion
 [845]

Department C19 had resumed active service by this time.

Professor Jennifer Nagle, a UNIT scientist, experimented with captured alien equipment at a C19 base in Sweden. She accidentally created a dimensional wormhole into a pocket universe named the Dominion. The larger universe expanded into the Dominion, threatening many races there. Some of the carnivorous Ruin fled through the wormhole to Earth, but Earth’s higher gravity killed them.

The Dominion was completely eradicated, but the eighth Doctor evacuated fourteen of the frog-like T’hilli and their Queen to a habitable planet, saving the race from extinction. The wormhole terminated, but an energy backlash destroyed the C19 base and killed Nagle.

(=) In July 1999, an encounter with Lord Roche’s dead TARDIS inflicted young Ezekiel Child with Jeapes’ Syndrome, a condition in which a person matures backwards in time rather than forward. Child was 21 in 1999, but age 46 in 1972, and failed to notice anything odd about this. The Doctor’s involvement retroactively averted the Child anomaly.

In 1999, a lingering side-effect of temporal interference turned the
Independent on Sunday
newspaper into the
Sunday Telegraph
.
 [846]
Shortly after Joseph Heller’s death, documents were found among his effects with the recollections of Alan Turing, Graeme Greene and Heller himself of their encounter with aliens in Dresden, 1945.
 [847]

w - 1999 - The Taking of Planet 5
 [848]

UNIT was called in to investigate an anomaly in the Antarctic that had been detected by satellite, and discovered a protoplasmic creature inside an alien structure. The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion eventually arrived from twelve million years in the past, where they’d been thwarting the machinations of a group of future Time Lords.

c 1999 - “Darkness Falling” / “Distractions” / “The Mark of Mandragora”
 [849]

The party drug M - Mandrake - was a problem. Captain Muriel Frost and Sergeant Jasper Bean of UNIT discovered a Mandrake factory at the popular Falling Star nightclub in London, but an energy creature killed Bean.

The Mandragora Helix was warping the TARDIS’ structure and drawing it towards Earth. The seventh Doctor and Ace found themselves at the Falling Star with Frost, and Lethbridge-Stewart vouched for their identities via video link from Geneva. Returning to the Falling Star, they arrived to see the Helix energy manifesting in a bid to take over the Earth, then the universe. The Helix started to kill the clubbers, whose will had been sapped by the Mandrake drug, and Frost ordered in the UNIT troops. The Doctor was convinced the Helix had won, but the circuit broke. It appeared that the TARDIS had disintegrated, but it rematerialised at UNIT HQ a few days later.

The very public threat convinced the United Nations to increase UNIT’s powers and put it on a more public footing. A new United Nations team - Foreign Hazard Duty - was set up to deal with problems that had to be kept more secret. Muriel Frost was promoted to Major.

1999 - Zygons: Homeland
 [850]

UN military adviser Guy Dean and his allies stopped a group of Zygons from unleashing a shoal of Skarasen upon the world, but perished while self-destructing the Zygons’ spacecraft.

1999 - Krynoids: The Root of All Evil
 [851]

The Chase Foundation had a website that provided some information on Krynoids. Eve Black, a biologist working for the Ministry of Agriculture, destroyed two Krynoids that hatched on an isolated Yorkshire farm.

Steven Carter - the son of Joe and Alice Carter (née Sangster), and the grandson of Jack Harkness - was born on 4th October, 1999.
 [852]

1999 (29th and 31st October) - Touched by an Angel
 [853]

The older Mark Whitaker used his clout to secretly get his younger self a job with the law firm of Pollard & Bryce. The younger Mark Whitaker proposed to his beloved, Rebecca Coles.

The Millennium

The turn of the twenty-first century was one of the Doctor’s favourite parts of Earth’s history, and he suspected that he had visited it more times than he’d been on the
Titanic
.
 [854]

Ben Jackson’s wife was “gone”. Polly Wright was estranged from her son, Mikey. On the last day of 1999, Ben and Polly acknowledged their love for one another at a house that belonged to the Doctor, where they had gathered with the second Doctor and Jamie.
 [855]

Dana Morgan, a thrall of the Mandragora Helix, heightened the prominence of his company, MorganTech, on a news special broadcast that was live on 31st December, 1999.
 [856]

1999 (31st December) - “Plastic Millennium”
 [857]

The seventh Doctor and Mel gatecrashed a New Year’s Eve hosted by Alisha Hammerson, director of the world’s largest plastics factory, for the world’s business leaders. Hammerson gassed the CEOs and planned to replace them with Autons. The Doctor brewed up a phial that he used to destroy the meteor that represented the link to the Nestene, and Hammerson melted.

1999 / 2000 (30th December to 1st January) -
Millennial Rites
 [858]

Ashley Chapel had worked for International Electromatics before forming his own company, ACL. Following the collapse of I2, ACL quickly bought up all their hardware and software patents, and Chapel became a multi-millionaire. He funded the construction of the new Millennium Hall on the banks of the Thames, and began work on a powerful computer program - “the Millennium Codex” - that would use quantum mnemonics and block transfer computation. This would change the laws of physics to those of the universe of Saraquazel, which was created from the ashes of our own.

Elsewhere, Dame Anne Travers became worried about the return of the Great Intelligence. She attempted to banish the sentience, but inadvertently summoned it.

On the stroke of midnight, 31st December, 1999, magic returned to the world as the Intelligence and Saraquazel fused over London, transforming the city into an aeons-old battleground between the forces of three factions: the Abraxas, Magick and Technomancy. After only ten minutes of real time, the new laws unravelled and the world was returned to normal. Fifteen people had died. Saraquazel took Chapel back with him to his own universe.

1999 (31st December) - TW: Fragments
 [859]

Alex Hopkins of Torchwood used an alien device to foresee the future... and was so horrified by events to come, he mercy-killed his teammates and then himself on the stroke of midnight, the year 2000. The unkillable Jack Harkness, having given Torchwood Cardiff a century of service, assumed command of it.

Jack subsequently severed all links between Torchwood Cardiff and Torchwood London.
 [860]

1999 (31st December) - Iris: The Panda Invasion
 [861]