B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (205 page)

One of Marlowe’s agents, Hazel Bright, was forced to become a Krynoid and retained enough of her identity to kill him. With Bright’s help, the eighth Doctor and Lucie destroyed the Hothouse’s main biodome - killing Bright and all of Marlowe’s Krynoids.

2045 - Forty-Five: “The Word Lord”
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During the Second Cold War, the Ranulph Fiennes Bunker was constructed in Antarctica. It was located four hundred and fifty miles from civilisation, and housed top-secret peace talks. The seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex arrived at the bunker pursued by the Word Lord, a.k.a. Nobody No One. The engines of Nobody’s CORDIS had repeated instances of “45” in the Doctor’s recent adventures. Nobody failed to capture the Doctor’s party and claim several bounties on them. At this time, only thirty-four people had access to UN files on the Doctor.

Andrew Stone left his commune in Iowa in 2045, and had the desire to help the world survive the effects of global warming with new farming techniques. Despite Stone’s lack of formal training, Peter Bennett recruited him for the Mars colonisation programme. Steffi Ehrlich gained her degree in solid state physics in 2046. She joined the German astronaut team of the European Space Agency in 2048. Tarak Ital was working on space medicine, and developed a transdermal dimenhydrinate patch to solve the problem of space sickness. That year, the Olympics were held in Paris. Margaret Cain beat twenty-five thousand candidates to become one of four astronauts on the Russian mission Midas. She spent eighteen months training at the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training centre.
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In 2048, the police force dishonourably discharged Harry Pike after he protested the Department’s decision to replace human police officers with Cybernetic Civic Pacification troops: cyborgs built from cloned humans.
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The Krotons first evolved as a predatory, quasi-organic tellurium-based crystal (later called the “Kroton Absolute”) on the planet Krosi-Apsai-Core. The Absolute generated “slaved” sub-beings capable of mimicking their prey’s abilities, but didn’t develop a true consciousness until human capitalists arrived to expand their territory and find mineral wealth. The humans’ servo-robots proved easy to copy, and so the Absolute created millions, perhaps billions, of Krotons: semi-sentient, armoured crystalline entities that were linked through mental vibrations.
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K9 Series 1
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By 2050, London was a near-police state. Cybernetic Civic Pacification troops (CCPCs) patrolled the city and surveillance cameras and drones were ubiquitous. Giant floating screens advertised products and warned potential criminals. A totalitarian government agency, the Department, handled security and also ran Dauntless prison. The Tower of London had a facility that secretly held “Fallen Angels” - aliens - and experimented with alien technology. Most aliens were peaceful, but all were indefinitely detained. Juvenile human criminals were held in Virtual Reality detention.
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People carried verometers: advanced mobile phones.
 [134]
The currency in Britain was either the pound or the “cred”.
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Britain had a King.
 [136]
Omnivorous bacteria had been discovered on Pluto.
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Experiments on cyborgs were strictly regulated.
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The Mark II CCPC was introduced. It secretly used a variety of alien technology.
 [139]
The Department was protected by hovering stun mines.
The Jixen were winning their war with the Meron until the Korven began supplying the Meron with new energy weapons.
 [140]

2050 - K9: Regeneration

The activist Stark Reality, in reality a teenager named Starkey, stumbled across the house of the agoraphobic Professor Alistair Gryffen. He worked for the Department, mainly on the Time/Space Project, which reconstructed a device capable of creating portals in time and space. Darius Pike, age 15, was employed as Gryffen’s assistant.

K9 materialised in Gryffen’s house, quickly followed by four turtle-like Jixen warriors. K9 self destructed to save Gryffen and the children, but Starkey recovered K9’s regeneration disc. This activated and caused K9 to reform, but his memdrive was damaged, meaning he could not account for where and when he was from...

2050 - K9: Liberation

One Jixen survived, had Starkey’s scent and pursued him. K9 and his friends broke into Dauntless prison and freed the aliens held captive there. A Meron was revealled to be working at the Dauntless disguised as a human. The Jixen was killed and the existence of Dauntless made public, forcing the Department to close it.

2050 - K9: The Korven

K9 assisted Starkey, who was considered a dissident and on the run, to avoid the CCPCs and their invisible Camo vehicles. A dangerous alien Korven materialised in Gryffen’s house and kidnapped him, but K9 and the children tracked them down to an iceworks. The Korven had travelled back in time to absorb Gryffen’s knowledge and use it to cool the Earth in preparation for an invasion in the twenty-fifth century, but K9 defeated him.

2050 - K9: The Bounty Hunter

The technology of this era included the THX1138 self-aware oven and the experimental NX2000 spacecraft. A Mr Smith won a billion pounds playing the Lottery.

The bounty hunter Ahab arrived from the year 50,000, and attempted to apprehend K9 for the assassination of the diplomat Zanthus Pia. K9 had been framed - Ahab and the Jixen were the true culprits. Ahab escaped to exactly the same spot in his own time... but the Earth had moved by then, and Ahab was left adrift in space.

2050 (Sunday) - K9: Sirens of Ceres

After witnessing police brutality, the rebellious teenager Jorjie Turner threw a stone at a CCPC. She was sent as punishment to Magdalen Academy, where pupils wearing strange bracelets were unusually conformist. K9 learned that the bracelets contained Cerilium, a material that notoriously caused civilisation on Ceres to collapse after destroying its inhabitants’ free will. He also exposed the Department’s use of the material at the Academy.

2050 - K9: Fear Itself

Widespread riots spread across the world, putting everyone on edge. The source was an alien living in a wardrobe, but K9 isolated the alien before Drake - an agent of the Department - detonated a bomb, destroying it.

2050 - K9: The Fall of the House of Gryffen

The “biggest electrical event for decades”, a huge storm, affected London. This disrupted the Space-Time Manipulator installed at Gryffen’s house and released the Sporax, a creature that generated fear. It created ectomorphic replicas of Gryffen’s lost family, but K9 and his friends banished them.

2050 - K9: Jaws of Orthrus

K9 was caught on a coast-to-coast vidcast attempting to assassinate Drake - all part of Drake’s Project Orthus. The truth was revealled: the K9 that shot Drake was actually a duplicate, intended to frame the real K9 and have him taken into custody to be disassembled.

The Department was on the verge of introducing tracker chips for people.

2050 - K9: Dream-Eaters

London was bombarded with psychic energy that induced sleep and gave people nightmares. Terrifying creatures from Celtic myth, the Bodachs, had been disturbed by the Department’s unearthing of an obelisk containing the Eyes of Oblivion - crystals that the Bodachs planned to use to send the world to sleep. The Bodachs were using Jorjie’s mother June as an avatar, but Jorjie broke their control by convincing her mother she got a tattoo. K9 destroyed the obelisk.

2050 - K9: The Curse of Anubis

A pyramid-like spacecraft approached Earth. Drake ordered its destruction, but the ship vanished before the missiles hit, and reappeared over London close to K9 and his friends. Jackal-headed aliens, the Anubians, arrived and knelt before “the mighty K9, the great liberator”: the being that freed them from the domination of the Huducts. The Anubians took over Gryffen’s house, and used Torcs to control the minds of everyone present. K9 learned that the Anubians had used the Huduct mind-control technology to conquer other races that apparently included the Alpha Centaurians, Mandrels, Sea Devils, Aeolians and Jixen. K9 and Darius broke the conditioning, and the Anubians left.

2050 - K9: Oroborus

Gryffen’s Space-Time Manipulator activated, seemingly by itself. K9, Gryffen and the others began to encounter time loops and reversals. Starkey’s arm itched, and a scan revealled his body was producing alien antibodies. Gryffen revealled that Starkey’s parents had experimented on him, and endowed him with an alien immune system. Despite events happening out of sequence, or twice, or not at all, K9 and his allies tracked the source of the time shifts to a snake creature: the time-consuming Oroborus. They lured the Oroborus back into the Space-Time Manipulator, and banished it.

2050 - K9: Alien Avatar

The Department interrogated some aliens, the Medes, who could project avatars of themselves. Drake was keen to acquire their molecular refractor technology, but his researchers were dumping an alien toxin - chenium - that was a by-product of Qualon 37, as used by the Medes in interdimensional technology, into the Thames. K9 detected the pollutant while he and Starkey were fishing, and later helped to free the Medes, who departed.

2050 - K9: Aeolian

A huge hurricane swept across the UK and North Sea, disrupting communications. The event was centred on Holy Cross Cathedral. Tornadoes destroyed the Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park. Drake arrested Gryffen, as Gryffen had created conditions similar to this when one of his experiments went wrong and caused the Great Cataclysm. K9 identified the disruption as indicative of the Aeolians, masters of amplification long thought wiped out. The culprit was the last of the Aeolians, left without memories following the destruction of her race - the music was a desperate mating call. Gryffen detected a mating call from another Aeolian in the Orpheus Constellation, and the two Aeolians were brought together and then left Earth, which restored the weather to normal.

Earth’s population at this time was six billion.
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2050 - K9: The Last Oak Tree

K9, Jorjie and Starkey met Robin Hood in a virtual reality Sherwood Forest exhibition, the centrepiece of which was the last oak tree: the Major Oak of the Robin Hood legend. An alien jamming signal disrupted the exhibit, and the Major Oak was stolen. K9 found traces of an alien substance and tracked down a Centuripede, which was using the oak to build a pod to transport her eggs. The Centuripede became a butterfly and her babies hatched. She gave Starkey three acorns as a reward for saving them from the Department.

2050 - K9: Black Hunger

The Department created the Black Hunger: an all-consuming bacteria swarm made from a combination of yeast and microbes from Pluto. The Hunger was made to alleviate London’s rubbish problem, but it mutated into flesh-eaters and swarmed through the sewers. This would have destroyed all life on Earth in a week, but K9 contained the Hunger, and planned to take the swarm to Atrios. The leader of the Department, Lomax, decided that Drake had disobeyed orders too many times and replaced him with Thorne, the former governor of the Dauntless.

2050 - K9: The Cambridge Spy

Jorjie learned as part of a school assignment that Gryffen’s mansion was a police station in 1963, the centre of an investigation into a spy ring. The Space-Time Manipulator whisked her back to that year. Darius was briefly erased from history, but Starkey and K9 went to 1963 and recovered Jorjie, repairing the timelines.

2050 - K9: Lost Library of Ukko

The Department held an Open Day to look for new recruits, much to K9’s curiosity. Starkey attended and was sucked into a mysterious picture. K9 identified this as a library card from Ukko; Thorne had been planning to use it to exile criminals. Starkey was trapped on a barren world, Urlic, which had been compressed into a hologram by the Ukkans, an all-female race of archivists. An Ukkan, Yssaringintinka, arrived and retrieved Starkey.

The major world powers currently included the United Kingdom, the Americas and the Pacific Union.

2050 - K9: Mutant Copper

The CCPCs were given sweeping new powers, including the ability to enter homes without warrants. K9 and the others come across a “mutant” CCPC whose connection to the Department had been broken, and who had human DNA. They named him Birdie, because he was fascinated with birds. Birdie gradually became more human, and learned new skills such as how to make toast. K9 and his friends smuggled Birdie away from London to the countryside, where he enjoyed seeing the birds.