B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (140 page)

The eighth Doctor was lured to Earth by the Time Lord Marnal, who had recently learned of the Doctor’s role in the destruction of Gallifrey. Fitz and Trix left the Doctor to set up home together, but the police approached Trix and attempted to arrest her on suspicion of murder. As they fled the country, Marnal confronted the Doctor and the Eye of Harmony was briefly opened. Like moths to a flame, the insect race the Vore was drawn to Earth. Their moon materialised in Earth orbit and a full scale invasion took place. The Doctor and his companions destroyed the moon, and engaged the surviving Vore.

Captain Jack Harkness renewed his acquaintance with Estelle, claiming that she had met his father during World War II.
 [1019]

Sarah Jane Smith Series 2
 [1020]

Rechauffer, Inc., rebranded itself as Mandrake, Inc.
 [1021]

2005 (20th-22nd of the month) - SJS: Buried Secrets
 [1022]

Sarah Jane Smith now resided in a cottage on the coast. She hadn’t seen Harry Sullivan since he left for an overseas posting, but went anyway to their annual rendezvous at a restaurant not far from Blackfriars in London. Harry failed to show up, but Sarah instead met Will Sullivan, Harry’s younger step brother. Hilda Winters died while under house arrest; she’d been killed by the Crimson Chapter for going too far in her mission against Sarah Jane. Sarah and Josh went to Italy to help Natalie Redfern, who was working with archaeologists excavating 500-year-old Medici tombs beneath the Church of San Lorenzo. Natalie’s boyfriend Luca, a Crimson Chapter member, tried to obtain some pages from
The Book of Tomorrows
from a hidden room beneath the basilica of San Lorenzo, but Josh killed Luca when he tried to kill Sarah.

2005 - SJS: Snow Blind
 [1023]

Sarah Jane and Josh visited Nikita Base in Antarctica, as Sarah had used some of Lavinia’s inheritance to fund an operation there. The project was drilling for ice-core samples, hoping to calculate when global warming would reach a tipping point. One of the research team - Morgane Kaditch, a member of the Crimson Chapter - attempted to steal a supply of uranium-235 found beneath the ice, and thereby help fund the Chapter’s operations. She was killed when an accomplice double-crossed her. Sarah secured the uranium.

2005 (August) - SJS: Fatal Consequences
 [1024]

Sir Donald Wakefield warned Sarah that the Crimson Chapter viewed her “emergence” as the human herald mentioned in
The Book of Tomorrows
as a call to action - and would seek to bring about an apocalypse if none was forthcoming. The Crimson Chapter had used Mandrake, Inc.’s operations, as funnelled through the Pangbourne Research Centre in Reading, to create a powerful variant of the Marburg virus - one that incubated within people in a matter of hours. Sarah and her allies stopped the Chapter from opening vials of the virus in twelve major world cities, an act that would have killed millions. The international media covered the failed plot, and identified the Crimson Chapter as a doomsday group obsessed with aliens.

Sarah learned that Josh was both Wakefield’s son and a White Chapter agent. Will Sullivan - a Crimson Chapter operative - died in a scuffle with Josh, who also killed the Keeper of the Crimson Chapter.

2005 (August to 27th September) - SJS: Dreamland

Sir Wakefield believed that Sarah still had a destiny to fulfill as a human herald, and invited her to join him aboard the maiden voyage of the
Dauntless
, set for 27th of September at the Dreamland facility (Area 51) in Nevada. Sir Wakefield succumbed to cancer beforehand, and so Josh accompanied Sarah as the
Dauntless
lifted off. The
Dauntless
pilot, a Crimson Chapter agent, mutually died with Josh in an exchange of gunfire that ruined the ship’s instrument banks. Sarah was alone as the
Dauntless
, its life support failing, ventured further into space. She saw a bright light, commented that she’d seen something like it before a lifetime ago, and said goodbye to Earth...

c 2005 - Red Dawn
 [1025]

Backed by the Webster Corporation, the first manned American mission to Mars -
Ares One
- successfully reached the Red Planet. The crew made planet-fall in the
Argosy
shuttle just as the fifth Doctor and Peri arrived. The astronauts and the time travellers found the tomb of Izdal, a heroic Martian who sacrificed himself to the Red Dawn - the ultraviolet Martian sunrise.

The tomb’s guardian, Lord Zzaal, was revived with his Ice Warriors. Zzaal believed the humans had good intentions, but a misunderstanding quickly escalated into conflict. Zzaal sacrificed himself to the Red Dawn to save the Doctor’s life, ending Webster Corp’s plans, but it was hoped his dream of a peaceful existence with Earth could survive.
Ares One
returned to Earth. Tanya Webster, a human who possessed Martian DNA, remained behind as Earth’s first ambassador to the Martians.

A Russian general ordered a nuclear strike against Chechnya, killing half a million people in an instant. After leaving the army, the General erased his identity and became the notorious arms dealer known as Baskerville. He lacked an electronic presence of any kind, making him impossible to track. After British Airways went bust, Baskerville bought one of their Concordes and converted it for stealth.

Nicopills, designed to wean people off tobacco, were marketed as a consumer item in their own right. The pills were less harmful but even more addictive than cigarettes, and thus were more profitable.
 [1026]

Jack Harkness recruited Suzie Costello to join Torchwood after she encountered him and Torchwood operative Ben Brown. She helped to contain an alien virus that had been downloaded via some computers into her boss. Brown later died in an unrelated incident.
 [1027]

Suzie Costello had been on the run when she joined Torchwood, and used her technical skill to wipe clean all records pertaining to her. She secretly joined Pilgrim - a religious support group and debating society started by Sara Briscoe - and conditioned Max Trazillion to brutally kill the other Pilgrim members if he didn’t see her for three months.
 [1028]

On Earth, a reptilian extra-terrestrial set up a business supplying combat divisions to clients on other worlds. Creating armies posed significant problems: Combat computers were only so reliable; artificial intelligences could only be created under certain conditions; remote-control signals could be scrambled; and fully crewed combat vehicles were costly, plus had a high turnover rate.

As a solution, the alien created heavily armed giant robots, which resembled twentieth-century Earth office complexes on the inside. Humans were kidnapped and brainwashed into thinking that they were simple office workers; in reality, their “paperwork” and office meetings coordinated the robots’ attack patterns.

One worker, Todd Hulbert, overcame his conditioning and instigated a hostile takeover. The company was renamed Hulbert Logistics, and moved its home office from Ipswich to London.

A group of Cybermen had settled on the planet Lonsis, the next system over from Shinus. Its people - the Shinx - were traders who disliked aggression because it destabilised their markets. The Gallifreyan CIA sought to eliminate the Lonsis Cybermen, and seeded paranoia into the Shinx’s minds. The Shinx hired Hulbert, whose combat divisions started routing the Lonsis Cybermen in 2005.

The CIA secretly aided Hulbert by equipping his Telford branch with a quantum crystalliser - a device that splintered the timelines over a small area, then picked the most desirable one as dictated by its programming.

Elsewhere on Earth, the CIA manipulated history to prevent Karen Coltraine becoming a dictator. Certain negative experiences were eliminated from Coltraine’s history, and she matured into a more agreeable person.
 [1029]

The First Environmental Crisis

By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was clear that unchecked industrial growth had wreaked havoc on the environment. Increasing instability in weather patterns subjected Britain to acid rain and created turbulence that made air travel less reliable. Shifts in the ozone layer laid waste to Oregon. Traffic had reached gridlock in most of the major cities around the world. Motorcycles superseded the familiar black cabs in London, and many car owners sat in traffic jams working at their computers as they commuted. Predictably, air pollution reached new levels.

A catalogue of environmental disasters threatened the entire planet. The Earth’s population was spiralling towards eight billion. Low-lying ozone and nitrogen dioxide levels had risen to such an extent that the London air was unbreathable without a face mask on many days, even in winter. Global warming was steadily increasing: by the turn of the century, there were vineyards in Kent. Antarctic waters became hazardous as the icecap broke up in rising temperatures. The rate of ice-flow had trebled since the nineteen-eighties.

River and sea pollution had reached such levels that the marine environment was on the verge of collapse. Water shortages were commonplace, and even the inhabitants of First World cities like London and Toronto were forced to use standpipes for drinking water and to practise water rationing. The mega-cities of South America saw drought of unprecedented proportions. The holes in the ozone layer were getting larger, causing famine in many countries. Sunbathing, of course, was now out of the question. “The plague”, in reality a host of virulent, pollution-related diseases such as HIV 7, appeared and killed millions.

The collapse of the environment triggered political instability. New terrorist groups sprang up: the Earth For Earth groups, freedom fighters, environmentalists, anarchists, nationalists and separatists, the IFA, PPO and TCWC. In England, a whole new youth subculture evolved. Gangs with names like the Gameboys, the Witchkids and the Crows smashed machinery (except for their own gaming software) and committed atrocities. In the most notorious incident, the Witchkids petrol-bombed a McDonald’s restaurant on the M2 before ritually sacrificing the customers: men, women and children.

Every country on Earth saw warfare or widespread rioting. In the face of social disorder in America, President Norris’ right-wing government ended immigration and his infamous “Local Development” reforms restricted the unemployed’s rights to movement. The Connors Amendment to the Constitution also made it easier for the authorities to declare martial law and administer the death penalty. The underclass was confined to its slums, and heavily armed private police forces guarded the barriers between the inner cities and the suburbs.

Once-fashionable areas fell into deprivation. The popular culture reflected this discord: In Britain, this was a time when SlapRap blared from every teenager’s noisebox. There was a Kinky Gerlinki revival, its followers dressing in costumes described as “outrageous” or “obscene” depending on personal taste. The most popular television series was
Naked Decay
, a sitcom inspired by 45-year-old Mike Brack’s “Masks of Decay” exhibition which had featured lumps of wax hacked into caricatures of celebrities. The teledildonic suits at the “SaferSex emporiums” along London’s Pentonville Road became notorious. All faced the opprobrium of groups such as the Freedom Foundation and the Citadel of Morality. American children thrilled to the adventures of Jack Blood, a pumpkin-faced killer, and they collected the latest Cthulhu Gate horror VR modules and comics. Their elder brothers became Oi Boys: skinheads influenced by the fashions of Eastern Europe.

The early twenty-first century saw many scientific advances, usually in the field of computer science and communications. Elysium Technology introduced the Nanocom, a handheld dictation machine capable of translating speech into written text. Elysium also developed the first holographic camera. The 3D telephone was beyond the technology of the time, although most rich people now had videophones. In June 2005, “Der Speigel” gave away a personal organiser with every issue. The first robot cleaners were marketed at this time - they were small, simple devices and really little more than automated vacuum cleaners or floor polishers. Communications software and computer viruses were traded on the black market; indeed, they became almost substitute currency in countries like Turkey.

Surgeons could now perform eye transplants, and the super-rich were even able to cheat “death” (or rather the legal and medical definition of it) by an intensive programme of medication, transplants and implants. If even this failed, suspended animation was now possible - the rich could afford full cryogenic storage, the poor settled for a chemical substitute. Military technology was becoming smarter and more dangerous. The Indonesian conflict and the Mexican War in the first decade of the century were the test-bed for much new weaponry. Arms manufacturers were happy to supply the Australian and American forces with military hardware. The British company Vickers built a vision enhancement system capable of tremendous magnification and low-intensity light applications. The helmet could interface with most weapons, allowing dramatically improved targeting. If anything, the helmet was too efficient - one option, which allowed a soldier to target and fire his weapon merely by moving and blinking his eyes - proved too dangerous and was banned. A new generation of UN aircraft were introduced, including a remote controlled helicopter (the Odin), a jet fighter with batteries of Valkyrie air-to-air missiles (the Loki), Niffelheim bombs and Ragnarok tactical nuclear devices. The US military introduced a turbo-pulse laser gun developed for use against tanks.
 [1030]