Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
? - The Face of Evil
[1591]
A Mordee colony ship landed on an unnamed world and developed a computer failure. The fourth Doctor helped their descendants by linking the computer to his own mind, but he neglected to remove his personality print from the data core. As a result, the computer became schizophrenic.
Centuries later, the colonists worshipped the computer as Xoanon. It had split them into two groups: the Sevateem (the savage descendants of Survey Team Six); and the Tesh (formerly the technicians, to whom Xoanon granted psychic powers). Xoanon was thus attempting to breed superhumans, but the fourth Doctor returned and made a reverse transfer, curing the computer’s multiple personality disorder. Leela, a warrior of the Sevateem, left with the Doctor.
? - Last Man Running
[1592]
Class warfare was brewing between the First Planet’s “firsters” and the Second Planet’s lowly “toodys”. An Out System Investigation Group (OIG) was sent to a forest plane to look for a toody weapons manufacturer. The OIG team, the fourth Doctor and Leela got caught in a Last Man Running complex, a simulated environment built by the Lentic race to find and clone the ultimate warrior. Leela destroyed the force field surrounding the complex, and the OIG bombed it.
& 33,935 - Iris: Enter Wildthyme
[1593]
The Glass Men of Valcea had been ousted from their city, and killed in great numbers, by their “new gods”: Servo-furniture in the form of flying wardrobes, who had no memory of their origins. Iris Wildthyme, Panda, Simon, Jenny and Barbra the vending machine tried to stop Anthony Marville from using Valcea’s space-time corridors to reach the planet Hyspero. What remained of the Glass Men’s city was melted by a bomb, and its impending explosion prompted Marville, Jenny, the Scarlet Empress Euphemia, Barbra and all of the wardrobes to flee through the
Dii h’anno Doors
: a portal in the head wardrobe that led to Hyspero, millions of years in the future. Iris, Simon and Panda, thinking their friends dead, returned to the twenty-first century.
Around the year 34,600, humans committed atrocities during the Platonic War and became despised by other races. The Lord Predator, Haralto Wong Bopz Wim-Waldon Arlene, had died twenty-two years previous, and a new Lord Predator ruled. Some members of the Slitheen family, still exiled from their homeworld, came into possession of time technology that included a Navarino time-jump and a Sundayan stabiliser. Navarino technicians assisted in the construction of a time machine until the Slitheen ate them. The Slitheen used their plundered technology to open a time-travel tourist service to ancient Greece, but their operations in this era were bankrupted when they were held accountable for the wrongful death of Cecrops of the Collective of Mulch.
[1594]
37,166 - Planet of Evil
[1595]
A Morestran survey team arrived on Zeta Minor, searching for an energy source as their home planet was facing disaster. Zeta Minor was a planet on the edge of the universe, beyond Cygnus A, as distant from the Artoro galaxy as that is from the Anterides.
The Morestran team discovered that a black pool on Zeta Minor was connected to an incomprehensible universe of anti-matter. As a result, it was impossible to remove anything from the planet without incurring the wrath of powerful creatures native to the anti-matter universe. The fourth Doctor and Sarah helped the Morestrans to survive the experience and return home.
The Doctor offhandedly suggested to Professor Sorenson that he explore the energy potential of the kinetic forces involved in planetary movement.
c 39,164 - Zeta Major
[1596]
Morestra was abandoned, and the fleet set off on a search for a new home planet. A suitable home was located in the Beta system forty months later, and the city of Archetryx was founded there. The New Church Calendar began and the Sorenson Academy was established.
A hundred years later, work commenced on the Torre del Oro, a structure that would extract energy from planetary motion, but which would take fifteen hundred years to build. The dematerialisation beam was invented after several more centuries. Great Technology Wars were fought as the Cult of Science schismed.
A few years before the Torre del Oro was due to be completed, the Grand Council of Cardinals discovered errors in the equations - the Torre del Oro wouldn’t work. To cover up this failure, they dispatched an expedition to extract anti-matter from Zeta Minor, and the Zeta Project was established on the nearby Zeta Major. By that point, Morestran territory spanned eighty million light years and contained one thousand four hundred and twenty-seven inhabited star systems, but the energy crisis meant that eight hundred and ninety-two of them, the Outer Systems, were beyond the Empire’s reach.
Students of the Sorenson Academy started vanishing, part of the cover up of the Torre del Oro debacle. The fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa discovered that the tower was full of anti-matter. Soon after, anti-matter creatures started a rampage. A State of Crisis was declared and old political and religious rivalries re-emerged. The Zeta Project was destroyed. The Doctor once again negotiated with the creatures of anti-matter and returned all the plundered material to its original universe.
At this time, a new breed of Zamps should be ready to conquer the universe.
[1597]
The Terraphile Era
[1598]
Human Guide Sensors possessed the ability to plot courses through the cosmos and map the multiverse. They discovered the Second Aether, which was between
everything
: Matter and Anti-matter, Law and Chaos, Life and Death, Reason and Romance. It was where Famous Chaos Engineers performed morphing miracles that even Morphail’s wizard-scientists couldn’t explain. It was the home of the immeasurable entities Spammer Gain and the Original Insect. A legend held that the Doctor had named this region, although he denied this.
An early Guide Sensor, Lord Renark of the Rim, led a huge percentage of the human race out of the original universe and into another. Renark disappeared, possibly into a greater structure than the known multiverse, which was not understood but was known as Renark’s Multiverse or Renark’s Dilemma.
The Galactic Union now spanned millions of worlds, encompassing humanity as well as a vast diversity of other intelligent species made from “flesh, metal and petal”. The great rockets of the IGP and the interstellar mercantile vessels of the Terran Service crossed the whole Milky Way and the dwarf galaxies surrounding it, and spread into other space-time continua. Privateers preyed upon them. This was a time when galactic civilisation cycled between ages of prosperity and dark ages, and was peppered with intergalactic wars.
Humanity was planet hungry, and the commercial worldbuilding companies terraformed countless worlds. EarthMakers, run by the Tarbutton family, was the largest terraforming company and built planets with ancient Roman, Mogal Indian, Buffalo, ancient Greek and Eireish themes, as well as literary worlds based on the works of Disney, Balzac, Austen, Meredith, James, Lansdale, Mieville, Pynchon, Sinclair, Calderon, Gygax and Moore. The second largest company, TerraForma, was run by the Banning-Cannon family and specialised in Medieval English Edwardian versions of Earth: the Peers™. The firm was run from Earth Regenerated, which orbited Barnard’s Star. Intergalactic Air supplied atmosphere plants to terraforming companies. Aqua Suppliers supplied water to inhabited worlds. Water was a valuable commodity on many worlds, and a frequent target for pirates.
There was immense interest in Earth history, although mankind had a garbled understanding of it, as the only surviving texts - as recovered from a cave system in Arctic Skipton in Old Yorkshire - were some old cigarette cards,
Robin Hood
,
Boys’ Friend
,
Thriller Picture Library
,
The Captain
,
British Boys’ Book of the Empire
,
Captain Justice and His Submarine Gunboat
and
Sexton Blake and the Terror of the Tongs
. They avidly played what they believed to be games from Earth such as broadswording (with swords far wider than they were long), cracking a nut with a sledgehammer and Arrers - a combination of darts, archery and cricket. The ancient artists Rembrandt, Picasso, Emin and Coca Colon were revered.
Earth itself was now known as Terra, Original Terra, Old Old Earth, Original Earth and Home Planet. It was in a thoroughly frozen state following a comet strike, massive earthquakes and a series of nuclear winters. It was to be found in the Greater Oort in Orion.
Around 41,000, Algernon Pine was defrosted on Old Old Mars to help create the backstory for the Peers planets, although he wasn’t happy with the end result.
Other planets at this time included the beautiful worlds of Calypso V - Venice, Ur XVII and New Venus, as well as the howling terraces of Arcturus-and-Arcturus.
? 41,000 - “The Child of Time” (
DWM
)
[1599]
A falling star on Earth heralded the start of a plague that all but wiped out the human empire. Such was the widespread death, it was feared humanity was doomed. Keltor Jacobs oversaw an effort to engineer a new form for humankind, one that could resist all disease: the robotic Galateans. The original Galateans were kept in a station on the dark side of the moon. They resembled specific individuals, and contained duplicate copies of their memories. Jacobs activated the Galateans just three hours before Minerva Base reported finding a plague-cure.
(=) The Galateans thought themselves a superior lifeform, and vowed to wipe out their creators. The time-child Chiyoko helped to ignite a war between humans and the Galateans. The conflict would last at least a hundred thousand years, and help to facilitate Chiyoko’s creation.
The eleventh Doctor, Amy and a Galatean-made version of Alan Turing were sent to this era from the Museum of Lost Opportunities in the future, to avert the Galateans’ creation. They failed, and Chiyoko capriciously moved the trio ahead in time, to the day when the human-Galatean war destroyed Earth...
Chiyoko was eventually persuaded to undo her existence and the harm it had caused. The eleventh Doctor, Amy, a fading Chiyoko and the Galatean-made Alan Turing arrived once again from the Museum. Turing uploaded his memories of the human-Galatean war into the newborn Galateans’ network, which persuaded them to work alongside humanity and rebuild the Earth. Chiyoko’s mind was uploaded into a Galatean body; both she and the Galatean-Turing decided to stay in this era.
(=) & 42,000 - “Apotheosis”
[1600]
The human-Galatean war had now lasted a thousand years, and the planet Kepler IV was just one site of the conflict.
A church-based militia squad, the Sisters of Purity, investigated a space station that had wandered into human space, and met the eleventh Doctor and Amy there. The station had a defective time engine, which created pockets of fast-time. The TARDIS was hit with temporal acceleration, and the beings it had absorbed in its recent travels (the young girls Cosette and Margaret, part of the world-eater Axos and a Shasarak) were detached into a separate being that further incorporated Sister Konami into itself.
The Doctor tried to split the being into its separate components with a teleport, but they instead coalesced into a new individual: Chiyoko, a young girl with temporal abilities. She left to facilitate the events that led to her own creation, and the Doctor and Amy pursued her through time.
Chiyoko’s temporal dissolution meant that Novice Konami’s request to join the evangelical regiment was declined, and she stayed at an abbey for another year.
[1601]
(=) & 42,000 - “The Child of Time” (
DWM
)
[1602]
The time-child Chiyoko was worshipped as a goddess by both sides in the human-Galatean war, and stoked conflict between them. Now she decided that the Galateans were the superior lifeform, and encouraged the remaining humans on Earth to deploy a network of fusion bombs under the Earth’s crust. The eleventh Doctor and Amy tried to stop the countdown, but the Earth was destroyed. They were timescooped at the last instant, and taken to the Museum of Lost Opportunities in the far future.
The TerraForma company refused to sell Peers to the Lockesleys for seven thousand years.
[1603]
The Sussex and Surrey Bacon Street Regulators kept law in the two hundred billion star systems of the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy after the collapse of law during the last Dark Age, which followed the fifth or sixth intergalactic war.
[1604]
O’Bean the Younger drew the human race from the last Dark Age by discovering the colour pool, a method of propelling starships that made nukers obsolete.
[1605]