Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
The Age of Greel
“By the end of the fifth millennium AD, the homunculi created by the human species - clones, cross-breeds, fighting-machines and artificial intelligences of all descriptions - outnumbered humanity by more than thirteen to one.”
[1380]
Twelve clockwork automata, each of them representing a different animal on the Chinese zodiac, were fashioned to serve as army commanders. Two of these were lost - the Dragon became a “crippled and idiotic thing” while the Pig “forgot his lowly station and was taken from us”.
w - Lolita sent the rest of the automata to the eighteenth century, to the court of King George III.
[1381]
Earth in the fifty-first century had pan-dimensional sonic weaponry.
[1382]
In the Ice Age around the year 5000, Findecker’s discovery of the double-nexus particle had sent human technology into a cul-de-sac. Humans nonetheless developed limited psychic techniques such as the ability to read and to influence the weak-minded. Various Alliances governed the world.
The Peking Homunculus, an automaton with the cerebral cortex of a pig, was presented as a toy for the children of the commissioner of the Icelandic Alliance - but the pig component became dominant, and the Homunculus almost precipitated World War Six. The Supreme Alliance came to power, and horrific war crimes were committed. The Doctor was with the Filipino Army when it finally defeated the Alliance at the Battle of Reykjavik.
Magnus Greel - the Alliance’s Minister of Justice, and the infamous Butcher of Brisbane - had performed terrible scientific experiments on one hundred thousand prisoners in an attempt to discover time travel and immortality. He escaped to the nineteenth century using a beam of zygma energy, and feared Time Agents would pursue him.
[1383]
The Doctor witnessed the sonic massacres in Brisbane.
[1384]
Greel’s path through time was deflected when his zygma beam hit the TARDIS.
[1385]
5000 - Emotional Chemistry
[1386]
Magnus Greel had been a Chinese national, part of the PacBloc regime. The PacBloc used anti-matter shells against opposing armies, but not on population centres, and deployed Stepperiders and Locust aircraft. The Alliance forces used Thor battle tanks and Fenrir reconnaissance tanks. An Alliance division commanded by Razum Kinzhal stormed Greel’s fortress and secured his Zygma technology. Using this, Kinzhal developed transit belts that let his agents roam time and secure possessions formerly owned by Kinzhal’s beloved, Dusha.
Hostilities had increased between the PacBloc - led by one of Greel’s lieutenants, Karsen Mogushestvo - and the Icelandic Alliance. The strategies of the Alliance’s Lord General Razum Kinzhal devastated the PacBloc’s air force. Kinzhal’s forces further eliminated Mogushestvo’s troops in Sverdlovsk, and overran Omsk.
Formerly a being known as a Magellan, Kinzhal sought to reunite with his other half, the nineteenth century Russian noblewoman Dusha. The eighth Doctor realised that such an act would obliterate Earth as the Magellan recorporalised. Kinzhal’s assistant, Angel Malenkaya, was mortally wounded and offered herself as a host. The Doctor used the Misl Vremya device in 2024 to link this era with 1812, and thereby transferred Dusha’s soul into Angel’s body. Reunited with his love, Kinzhal considered reorganising his temporal paratroopers into “a unit for policing the past and preserving the future”.
As part of these events, Trix stole a psionic weapon that Kinzhal had developed using enemy technology. However, she was forced to abandon it.
c 5010 - “The Keep”
[1387]
The Sun began to fail. The great Metropolises fell and the rich deserted the Earth - they left for the stars in a fleet of space arks. Those who remained behind became desperate. Matter transmission was commonplace, and this development broke up the nation states and ushered in the Transmat Wars. The whole world became a battlefield.
Ten years into the Transmat Wars, the eighth Doctor and Izzy followed an SOS in the Vortex. They were captured by Uber-Marshal Hsui Leng of Greel’s army, who believed they hailed from a structure named the Keep, and that they could help him secure the “treasure” within.
The Doctor and Izzy were transmatted inside the Keep by an android called Marquez. He served the greatest scientist of the age, the shrivelled Crivello, who had built an artificial sun - the Cauldron - to become the centrepiece of a new solar system for humanity in the Crab Nebula. The Cauldron was alive, and required a living conduit to achieve fusion and launch itself - only the Doctor, as a time traveller, was able to communicate with the Cauldron and survive. He did so, and the Cauldron headed out to the Crab Nebula, promising a new life for those that followed. After the Doctor departed, Marquez killed Crivello.
Marquez was actually a Dalek construct, and was trying to help his masters secure the Cauldron. The Daleks needed the artificial sun to fight spider-Daleks from a parallel universe. Work on the Cauldron had been secretly funded by the Threshold, as part of a plan to eliminate the Daleks’ war fleet.
[1388]
Paper magazines still existed in the year 5013. For a time, it was fashionable to print them on edible, vitamin-rich paper that was flavoured with the saliva of the author.
Professor Henrietta Nwokolo and her team at Aberdeen University were honoured for their innovations, including the Super Infinite Cosmic Battery.
(=) Jane Blythe’s time commodity scheme in 2007 diminished Earth’s future and Nwokolo’s accomplishment, meaning that a professor at Tokyo University was given the Buffet Prize for inventing a less-effective cosmic-power battery.
[1389]
5019 - Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Predating the Predators”
[1390]
A salvage crew found the starship with the last of the vampiric Utlunta, Lilu, in orbit near Bathory’s Star. Lilu escaped into history by booking passage with Yesterways, Ltd., a time travel company embarking on a “The V is for Vampire” tour of different Earth eras.
The Super Lucky Romance Camera was invented on Earth in 5044, and was used on more than thirty planets. People could use such devices to extend their holidays by placing themselves in time bubbles.
[1391]
In the mid-fifty-first century, “Jonathan Smith”, a member of the Supreme Alliance, repaired the Zygma Beam and travelled to 1889 to try to prevent the death of Magnus Greel.
[1392]
A young girl, Charlotte Abigail Lux, was dying - and so her family turned an entire planet into a library to keep her occupied. The planet’s core was the largest index computer and hard drive ever built, and Charlotte’s mind was deposited inside it. The world became known as simply The Library - it contained every book ever written, and had “whole continents of Jeffrey Archer, Bridget Jones, Monty Python’s
Big Red Book
” and more.
The books in the library were made from forests inhabited by the Vashta Nerada: microspores that lived in darkness, and fed off meat. They were on most inhabited worlds, and had endowed nearly every species with a fear of the dark. The Vashta Nerada in the Library books swarmed, and so the central computer teleported out the four thousand and twenty-two patrons in the Library. With nowhere to send the patrons, the computer digitally saved them on the planet’s hard drive. The last outgoing message from the Library read, “The lights are going out”, and then the planet was sealed. It took the Lux family three generations to find a way back in.
[1393]
5087 - Borrowed Time
[1394]
Amy and Rory enjoyed a brief holiday on Earth until the eleventh Doctor collected them. Earth’s cities had all been documented. New York had an Ascendancy Tower. Tourists could visit the beaches of Old Tokyo.
A dormant Weeping Angel was found in the ruins of Razbahan, and was kept in private hands.
[1395]
Captain Jack Harkness
The man who would later become known as Captain Jack Harkness
[1396]
was a Time Agent in the fifty-first century. He lived on the Boshane Peninsula.
[1397]
The people of the fifty-first century, including Captain Jack, had pheromones far more potent than people from the twenty-first.
[1398]
c 5084 - TW: Adam
[1399]
An unnamed race of howling aliens routinely passed by Jack’s hometown - but one day, when he was an adolescent, they besieged it. Jack’s father, Franklin, was killed while searching for Jack’s mother. Jack lost his grip on his younger brother Gray in the chaos, and, unable to face his mother afterwards, ran away. He fruitlessly spent years searching for his missing brother.
As an adult, Jack still didn’t know his mother’s fate.
[1400]
When Jack was young, he convinced a friend to go off with him to fight “the worst creatures imaginable”, but they were captured and tortured. His friend was killed for being the weaker of the two.
[1401]
Jack was the first person from the Boshane Peninsula to join the Time Agency. He became a poster boy for the organisation, and was known as “the Face of Boe”.
[1402]
The Agency partnered Jack with Captain John Hart, as it was thought that Jack could “control” him. They were once trapped in a time bubble together for five years. Jack was dubbed “Rear of the Year, 5094”.
[1403]
This era was the native time of Time Agents Kala, Jode and Fatboy; the eighth Doctor met them in Marpling in 1932. They could time travel using a temporal transduction beam.
[1404]
Jack awoke one morning while still in the Time Agents’ employ and found two years of his memories were missing. He eventually acquired a Chula warship and took up trying to con his former colleagues. Jack came to own a sonic blaster/cannon/disruptor fitted with digital removal and rewind, and which was made at the weapons factories at Villengard. The Doctor visited the weapons factories, leading to an incident where the main reactor went critical. The summer groves of Villengard, which produced bananas, took to growing in the factories’ place.
By this point, humanity had spread out across half the galaxy, and had commenced “dancing” with many species.
[1405]
The Time Agency was eventually shut down; John Hart later told Jack Harkness that there were “only seven of us left now”.
[1406]
John Hart found Jack’s now-adult brother Gray surrounded by corpses, and chained to the ruins of a city in the Bedla Mountains. Gray was the only survivor, and had gone mad owing to the torture he’d received. He forced Hart to help him exact vengeance on Jack in the twenty-first century.
[1407]
When Lorna Bucket was a child, she met the Doctor in the Heaven-neutral, normally uneventful Gamma Forests. He said “run” a lot, and they ran together. The event inspired her to join the military arm of the Church in the hope of meeting him again. To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word “doctor” came to mean “mighty warrior”.
[1408]
River Song
[1409]
5123 - Let’s Kill Hitler
[1410]
The eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory took the newly regenerated River Song to the Sisters of the Infinite Schism, the “greatest hospital in the universe”, to recover from the events of 1938. The Doctor left River a TARDIS-patterned, blank diary in which she would record her adventures. River recovered after the TARDIS had departed, and enrolled in Luna University to study archaeology under Professor Candy. The profession enabled her to uncover clues about the Doctor.
The movement known as the Silence and Academy of the Question, allied with the military forces of the Church (the Clerics) and the Headless Monks, believed that on the fields of Trenzalor at the fall of the Eleventh, when any living creature present must answer truly, a question that should never, ever be answered would be asked... and that silence would fall. The Silence sought to prevent the Doctor from ever reaching Trenzalor and answering the question, and worked to craft a weapon against him...
[1411]
Closing Time / The Wedding of River Song
[1412]
The day River was awarded her doctorate, she read the account of children who saw the Doctor prior to his meeting his death at Lake Silencio in 2011. Madame Kovarian, the Silence and the Clerics overpowered River and placed her in an augmented NASA astronaut suit. They then took her back to Lake Silencio, to kill the Doctor as history dictated. River returned to this era after she had married the Doctor.