B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (137 page)

2003

With time destabilised, the eighth Doctor, Anji, Fitz and the stowaway Trix were drawn into a series of adventures in alternate histories...
 [950]

(=) 2003 - The Domino Effect
 [951]

The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji discovered a version of history where the British Empire ruled the world. There was widespread racial and sex discrimination. This timeline had developed because an alternate version of Sabbath had murdered key figures in the history of computing, including Babbage and Zuse, thus preventing the development of computers. The alternate Sabbath had learned that the Time Vortex was disintegrating following Gallifrey’s destruction, and hoped to preserve his Earth in a temporal focal point. He was betrayed by a Vortex creature devoted to chaos, and the focal point collapsed. The entire past, present and future of this timeline were consumed.

(=) 2003 - Reckless Engineering
 [952]

The Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrived in an alternate Bristol after “the Cleansing” effect had ravaged Earth, and found the Utopian Engine still generating a slow-time effect around Jared Malahyde’s estate. After linking the Utopian Engine to the TARDIS’ systems, the Doctor rolled back time a hundred and sixty years and averted “the Cleansing” timeline altogether.

(=) 2003 - The Last Resort
 [953]

Fourteen-year-old Jack Kowaczski had built a time machine, and thus created many thousands of variant histories. This included his own, in which President Robert Heinlein presided over the USA and Mars - along with the Martians - had been conquered.

The Doctor, Fitz and Anji landed in one such history, where the time-travel holidays of Good Times Inc, founded by Jack’s father Aaron, had turned the whole of human history into an homogenous tourist resort. The constant time travel, though, had destabilised reality and generated hundreds if not thousands of versions of events - including duplicate Doctors and companions. Sabbath was the only being unaffected by this process. The Doctor carefully sacrificed all but one version of himself and his companions, thus restoring the timeline.

c 2003 - Timeless
 [954]

The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrived back in the London of their reality. They found that Erasmus and Chloe, two survivors of a destroyed homeworld, had set up Timeless Inc. as a means of “helping people”. Chloe and her time-active dog Jamais would visit parallel realities to find persons in pain, then bring them to the proper reality. Jamais would transfer each person’s soul into their parallel counterpart, creating a merged soul with an improved timeline. Clients of Timeless Inc. paid £75,000 in diamonds for the privilege of murdering the parallel reality version, preventing the merged souls from defaulting back to their original state. Erasmus eventually realised that his goal of helping people had failed and killed himself, ending Timeless.

The genetic manipulations performed by Kalicum in the eighteenth century culminated in the British government worker Guy Adams. He possessed the DNA needed to house an intelligence that Kalicum and Sabbath had gestated, in a pile of diamonds, on behalf of the Council of Eight. The Doctor and his allies followed Sabbath back to the beginning of time, where he and Kalicum tried to seed the intelligence into the universe’s beginnings.

Afterwards, Anji left the TARDIS crew to return to her old life in 2003. Aided by forged documents produced by Trix, she adopted Chloe and Jamais. Chloe introduced Anji to a man named Greg, whom she predicted Anji was going to get to know a lot better.

c 2003 - The Forge: Project: Valhalla
 [955]

A maximum-security spaceship holding the Nyathoggoth - a sentient liquid that had killed billions to slacken its hunger for blood - was dispatched to fly into a black hole, but instead crashed in Lapland. Nimrod and Cassie Schofield of the Forge investigated the incident, and Nimrod - thinking the Nyathoggoth was uncontrollable - caused the ship to self-destruct, killing the creature. Afterwards, Nimrod became the Forge’s deputy director.

Cassie received a promotion after the Nyathoggoth affair and became “Artemis”, Nimrod’s top field agent in northern Europe.
 [956]

Professor Edgar Nelson-Stanley died - he was an accomplished adventurer who had learned much about extra-terrestrials, and deemed Sontarans the “silliest-looking aliens in the galaxy”. His wife Bea would become a resident of the Lavender Lawns rest home.
 [957]
The mother of Esther Drummond, a future Torchwood operative, died in 2003.
 [958]
A young woman named Kelly started helping out behind the counter at the Great Big Book Exchange in Darlington. Over the next seven years, she absorbed the reverberations from a magical text there, the
Aja’ib
- an unfinished, and endless, sequence of tales and puzzles from the planet Hyspero.
 [959]

2003 (10th and 16th April) - Touched by an Angel
 [960]

Rebecca Whitaker died in a lorry accident after visiting her parents in Chilbury. The older version of Mark Whitaker attempted to prevent this - had he succeeded, the Weeping Angels would have fed off the resulting paradox, and become strong enough to endanger Earth.

The eleventh Doctor, Amy and two versions of Rory arrived from 2001 to stop the Angels. One of the Rorys was touched by an angel, and sent back in time two years. The lights, cameras and monitors that Rory pre-ordered while he was there enabled the Doctor to spring a trap - the Angels, already malnourished, were caught in a closed circuit and erased. One Angel survived, and would encounter the contemporary Mark in 2011.

The older Mark realised the havoc his saving Rebecca would have caused, and allowed her car accident to proceed as scheduled. She died in his arms.

On 16th April, the Doctor, Amy, Rory and the older Mark attended Rebecca’s funeral in secret. The travellers then took Mark, who was now 46, for one last meeting with his wife in 1993.

2003 (April) - Eternity Weeps
 [961]

Liz Shaw was Chief of Operations at Tranquillity Base on the moon, where co-operation with the Silurians had led to the construction of an experimental weather control gravitron. Shaw and the Silurian Imorkal were in a close relationship.

Mount Ararat and Mahser Dagi were now in territory disputed by Turkey and Iraq, but an expedition to find Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat set off anyway. Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane joined the team, although Benny found the Tendurek Formation, six billion years old and utterly alien. The Cthalctose terraforming virus - dubbed Agent Yellow - was set off and triggered catastrophic geological changes on Earth.

The US launched a nuclear strike in the area, but only succeeded in speeding up the process. This wiped out many cities including Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Almawsil, Tbilisi and Krasnodar. President Springsteen ordered the targeting of the moonbase, believing the crew there to be responsible. Jason fled billions of years back into the past and returned. The Agent was spreading as far as the Alps, the Sahara and Asia. The seventh Doctor engineered an x-ray burst using singularities to sterilise the Agent. This wiped out one tenth of all life on Earth, including six hundred million people.

Imorkal perished during these events, and Liz Shaw appeared to die also. Benny and Jason agreed to separate. Suborbital flights could be used to travel quickly around the world.

c 2003 (late May to June) - Rip Tide
 [962]

A peaceful alien race used spatial gateways to become tourists on other worlds. Two young members of the species, genetically altered to resemble human beings, violated their people’s strict rule against risk of discovery by visiting a small Cornish fishing village. One of them died in a sightseeing accident, losing the “key” to their spatial gateway in the process. His stranded mate adopted the name “Ruth”, but began dying from prolonged exposure to Earth’s environment. Nina Kellow, age 17, aided the eighth Doctor in rescuing Ruth, and he transported her back home.

A Fortean Flicker transported a group of train-riders on the 8:12 out of Chorleywood to the planet Hogsumm in the twenty-seventh century. They were later returned to Rickmansworth Station in their native time.
 [963]
In 2003, Detective Inspector Tom Cutler discovered that an alien entity in Hammersmith had possessed Mark Palmer, and compelled him to rape and murder three boys. Torchwood London drew the entity out of Palmer, but left Palmer to be arrested. Cutler testified to falsifying evidence, sparing Palmer from a life sentence. Palmer wound up in a mental hospital, and Torchwood permitted Cutler to keep his memories of the incident.
 [964]

2003 - The Quantum Archangel
 [965]

Stuart Hyde was now the Emeritus Professor of Physics at West London University. He had used the discarded technology from TOMTIT to build TITAN, a dimensional array intended to penetrate the higher dimensions called Calabi-Yau Space. Thanks to TITAN, businesswoman Anjeliqua Whitefriar became infused with the core of the Calabi-Yau and gained reality-warping powers. She became “the Quantum Archangel”, and channelled her newfound reality-warping powers through the Mad Mind of Bophemeral, the super-computer that triggered the Millennium War, in a benevolent attempt to create separate utopias for each person on Earth. This threatened to plunge the universe into chaos.

(=) The alternate realities created by the Quantum Archangel included ones where Mel was British Prime Minister, and faced a Cyberman invasion; the Doctor was President of Gallifrey, leading his people against the Master and the Daleks; and the Master, the Monk, the Rani and Drax altered Earth’s DNA.
 [966]

The sixth Doctor persuaded Anjeliqua to restore order and relinquish her power, while the Chronovore named Kronos sacrificed himself to destroy Bophemeral.

2003 - Minuet in Hell
 [967]

Hellfire Club leader Brigham Elisha Dashwood III believed he’d allied himself with a group of demons, and set about using their support to booster his organisation. In truth, he’d contacted alien Psionivores, members of a species of cosmic parasites that feasted on negative emotions. With the Psionivores’ help and technical expertise, Dashwood seceded a small portion of America, renamed it “Malebolgia” and dedicated it to a social program of devil worship. The Psionivores helped Dashwood perfect the PSI-895, which was capable of rewriting or transferring human memories, and Dashwood hoped this would let him install Psionivores in his political opponents’ bodies.

The eighth Doctor and Charley, aided by the Brigadier, publicly exposed Dashwood as a political charlatan. Dashwood turned against Marcosius, his main contact among the Psionivores, and accidentally disrupted the PSI machine. This created an unstable portal that consumed Dashwood, Marcosius and the device. The remaining Hellfire Club leaders crumbled in a political scandal.

Lethbridge-Stewart had now retired from UNIT, but still undertook occasional work for them.

Vulcan, nearest planet to the Sun, was discovered in 2003.
 [968]
Vulcan was a large, hot world with a bleak landscape of mercury swamps and geysers that spat toxic fumes. It had a breathable atmosphere and soil capable of supporting plant life. Plans were made to set up a mining colony on Vulcan for a trial period.
 [969]

c 2003 (Saturday, 14th June) - The Hollow Men
 [970]

The Hakolian battle vehicle Jerak revived in Hexen Bridge and animated scarecrows, who attacked the villagers and fed them to Jerak’s organic component. Jerak mentally influenced a former resident, Defence Minister Matthew Hatch, in a bid to taint Liverpool’s water supply with genetic material that would increase Jerak’s mental hold over any humans it infected. The seventh Doctor thwarted the scheme, entered Jerak’s psychic realm via a mirror gateway and convinced the villagers absorbed over the centuries by Jerak to turn their willpower against the battle vehicle. The Doctor escaped and Ace destroyed the gateway, trapping Jerak on the astral plane. Hatch died, still mentally connected to Jerak upon its defeat.

c 2003 (June) - “Evening’s Empire”
 [971]

The seventh Doctor and Ace were in Middlesbrough, where Colonel Muriel Frost of UNIT was recovering a German fighter from the Tees. They learned that the plane was downed after contact with an alien ship.

Ace met a local named Alex Evening, and upon following him home discovered a tiny Q’Dhite mindtreader spaceship among the Airfix models in his bedroom. The Q’Dhite explored the universe by weaving reality from fantasy, and Alex had been using that power to kidnap women, send them to his imaginary “empire” and then humiliate them. Ace was woven into his empire, and the Doctor, Frost and her troops followed in the TARDIS. The Doctor defeated Alex by bringing his domineering mother into the empire, shattering the illusion. They returned to the real world to find Alex in a coma.