by Dave Rudden
There was a blue box sitting on the end of the street.
‘Let’s just take it,’ Sibling Different hissed. ‘The Doctor isn’t even here.’
Paradox energy sizzled around her fingertips. They were still learning about this strange power that infected them – the power that let them glide through dead timelines like spectres through a wall. Maybe it was a by-product of that line that had bisected them. Maybe it was a remnant of the War itself – some contaminant or scar. Everything had been weaponised eventually, Sibling Same remembered. Everything from the stars in the sky to the beats of your heart.
Even that memory felt fragile in his head.
‘If we take it, the Doctor will hunt us,’ he said finally. It was an old argument. ‘The last TARDIS? Their TARDIS? They will never stop, and we will never have peace.’ Threads of paradox light dribbled from his own fingers. ‘I don’t want their attention, Sibling. Look what it did to us last time.’
That stung her, and not least because it was a lie. The Doctor had erased the Time War, split the Siblings down the middle and cursed them to this flickering half-existence without even knowing they existed. Sibling Same didn’t want to know what might happen if the attention of a Time Lord fell on them for real.
‘Besides,’ he said, watching a figure step out of one of the houses. ‘You’re right. The Doctor isn’t here. And I am not unsympathetic to who is.’
They had done their research when it came to the TARDIS and the known associates of the Time Lord who called it home. Henrik Chyll had been useful for that, at least, even if it had been clear he hadn’t believed the words coming out of his mouth.
‘A child touched by the Vortex,’ Sibling Same said. ‘Made singular and unique, and cast adrift to wander through the universe, never belonging anywhere. Another one of Gallifrey’s callous accidents.’
Sibling Different’s voice was sombre. ‘The closest thing to family we will ever have.’
They watched River Song run to the TARDIS. In minutes, the timeship would explode, taking this entire timeline with it.
‘We want to leave the War behind, Different,’ he said. That made him think of ghosts too. Ghosts all wanted second chances, didn’t they? Or revenge. ‘Why steal someone else’s TARDIS when we can build our own?’
4
Now
Possibly December, definitely the Shadow Proclamation HQ
‘I really don’t need guards,’ the Doctor said, stepping up on to the platform. ‘And I’d much prefer to bring my ship.’
‘I’m sure you don’t, and I’m sure you would,’ said the Architect from the teleporter control station. She was wearing a look of uncharacteristic amusement. ‘I remember how useful you find that machine when you need to leave us behind. If it remains in our custody, your fate is bound to ours.’
‘Doesn’t that count as stealing?’ the Doctor asked wryly.
A ghost of a ghost of a smile might have crossed the Architect’s face. ‘Confiscating.’
‘Flirt,’ the Doctor said, and looked round at the two guards she had been assigned. ‘Right. Introductions, then. I’m the Doctor.’
The first guard was a robot the shape of an archaeologist’s trowel – wide at the bottom, narrowing to a point at the top, where a single gleaming lens peered out through plates of black armour. It clicked forward on a hundred spindly legs.
‘Praetorian X-B1,’ the robot buzzed. ‘A pleasure to serve.’
‘Good,’ the Doctor said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Sincerity Value ten per cent,’ it added.
‘Oh,’ the Doctor said.
‘Transparency is important with our officers,’ the Architect said. There was that amusement again. ‘And this –’ she indicated the second guard ‘– is Praetorian Mae. A human. I know how you like those.’
‘Happy to help,’ the other guard said, face hidden behind a mirrored helmet. She didn’t add a Sincerity Value, which the Doctor supposed was something.
‘Prepare for teleportation,’ the Architect said, activating the console. ‘I expect to be kept abreast of what is happening.’
‘Of course!’ the Doctor said, popping the commlink Mae offered her in a pocket and immediately forgetting it existed. ‘And, just checking, obviously just checking, you’ll give me a good heads-up before you open fire on the moon, won’t you?’
The Architect was suddenly very engrossed in her screen.
‘Typical,’ the Doctor said. ‘Just typical. Shall we –’
A pillar of blue light lanced upward to connect the platform and the moon like the laser sight on a sniper rifle. Then, with a roar, they were airborne. The Doctor had ample time, in the sparkling transference beam, to observe the moon grow larger and larger, its surface pocked and pale and strangely fragile, like a shed snakeskin. She instinctively flinched as they went through that surface, and then the beam faded away, leaving them standing in …
‘Odd,’ Praetorian X-B1 said. ‘Sincerity Value ninety-five per cent. We appear to be in a –’
‘House,’ the Doctor said. ‘An Earth house, by the architecture. Maybe early twentieth century?’
The hallway was narrow, its ceiling low, the floor darkly varnished wood. The wallpaper was yellowing flowers, struggling to grow through a layer of dust. Not a home, the Doctor decided. If a person lived long enough in one place, they imprinted it with their personality. They made it theirs. But this place was giving the Doctor the same feeling she got in bus stations or airports or hotels. Nobody lived in those places; they just visited, and afterwards their presence was meticulously tidied away.
There were many doors leading off the hallway. The Doctor tried each handle as they passed. All of them were locked.
‘Where do you think it came from?’ Mae asked. The hallway eventually gave way to what might have been a ballroom. White sheets covered the furniture, and dust covered the sheets. Every door they found was locked. The windows were shuttered, their clasps glued shut by dust. The trio moved slowly, poised for any sign they were not alone in this echoing, abandoned place.
‘Could be a spaceship,’ the Doctor said. ‘A spaceship made to look like a moon. Or a moon converted into a spaceship. Or a moon converted into a creepy old house and then converted into a spaceship. I’ve seen spaceships that looked like forests. Spaceships that took the form of people. I mean, my TARDIS alone can …’
Something was itching at the Doctor’s senses, rasping against them like a file. ‘You two been with the Shadow Proclamation long?’ she asked. Maybe if she distracted herself, it would click into place.
‘Since activation,’ the android said. ‘It is a pleasure to serve. Sincerity Value eighty-five per cent.’
‘That’s nice,’ the Doctor said. ‘Good to like your job. What about you, Mae?’
‘I’m new,’ Mae said. ‘Why are you here?’ They made their way down another corridor, identical to the one that had gone before. ‘Just arrived out of nowhere, same day as the moon? What’s that about?’
Accusation, the Doctor noted. They must teach that tone in basic training. ‘I got a distress call,’ she said. ‘Or my TARDIS did. A single word, phrased as a cry for help.’
‘What word?’ Mae asked.
‘Paradox.’ The cheer had drained from the Doctor’s voice. ‘So I came, as fast as I could.’
‘Feels like it fits,’ Mae said. ‘Moon appears out of nowhere, all done up like a house –’
‘That isn’t a paradox,’ the Doctor said. ‘That’s just weird. And, don’t get me wrong, if the distress call had been “Help, there’s a weird abandoned house-moon,” I still would have come. Mostly because calls like that are brilliant, but also because that’s what I do. Travel around the universe. Try to keep things ticking over. Keep things tidy.’
‘Thought you didn’t like maintenance,’ Mae said. She sounded … annoyed.
‘You were listening to that, were you?’ the Doctor said. ‘Well. Some types of maintenance are more important than others. Maintenance was wha
t my people were all about, once upon a time.’
‘And what people are those?’ Mae asked.
The Doctor hesitated. Gallifrey had a weight to it. The Time Lords were an old race. That came with responsibilities. It also came with guilt. Being around a long time meant you had plenty of time to make mistakes.
The Doctor had once been proud to be a Time Lord. Now, it was something she wanted a break from. I’ll tell Team TARDIS about my past some day. Definitely.
‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘I’m a citizen of the universe.’
She peered at a painting on the wall beside her. It appeared to be a replica of ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ by Jacques-Louis David. Not a very accurate one, she thought. She’d crossed the Alps with Napoleon. She didn’t remember any stegosaurs. What am I missing?
‘Is paradox a dirty word where you’re from, then?’ said Mae.
‘No,’ the Doctor said distractedly. ‘It’s just one we use correctly. Does it bother you when people say “literally” when they actually mean “figuratively”? Or when people say “how ironic” when actually they just mean bad cutlery management?’
The two guards stared blankly at her. The Doctor shrugged.
‘Some words mean very specific things. Are you familiar with the grandfather paradox?’
Praetorian X-B1’s lens clicked. ‘Travel back in time. Kill your grandfather. But then you no longer exist. You did not travel back to kill your grandfather. Which means he is alive, which means you exist, which means you do travel back. So you didn’t. So you did.’
‘Exactly,’ the Doctor said. ‘When you travel through time, you have to keep things neat. Hands and other extremities inside the timestream, please. But a paradox is what happens when you don’t. A paradox is the unanswerable question. The repeating impossibility. The loose end that could unravel everything. Dangerous. Untidy. Also, very hard on grandfathers, which, as a former grandfather, I have to take issue with. Clocks!’
She spun suddenly, causing Mae to step back, torch beam jagging crazily.
‘Excuse me?’ Mae said.
‘That’s what this place is reminding me of,’ the Doctor said. ‘Don’t ask me how. It takes a little while for the rest of my thoughts to catch up.’ She started to jog, feet echoing on the worn floorboards. ‘Clocks. Why am I thinking about clocks?’
The hallways led to two more, stretching away into the gloom. She chose one at random – Is it random? Why do I feel like I know where I’m going? – and ran down it, each step prompting an exhale of dust. There were more paintings here – a replica of ‘American Gothic’ by Grant Wood, showing a morose Silurian couple posed with pitchfork and apron. There was a copy of poor Vincent’s ‘The Starry Night’, except the suns were Angels that wept and burned as they fell.
Not replicas, the Doctor thought. Alternates. Glimpses into paintings that never were.
‘Makers’ marks,’ she said suddenly. ‘That’s why I was thinking about clocks. Clockmakers often etch little messages inside the casing to aid future repairs. “Mind that ball joint” or “use a size-three screw”.’
‘Interesting,’ the android said. ‘Sincerity Value five per cent. Why is this relevant?’
‘Because everything made has makers’ marks,’ the Doctor said. They ran down another corridor, and yet another – all with that stained wooden floor, and fading wallpaper, and windows that looked out on nowhere. ‘Intended or otherwise. The passage of a chisel. A scar from a misplaced nail. A spot of paint where the painter was careless. It’s the artist’s signature. Even the most precisely machined component will show some sign of the tools that were used to create it.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Mae said.
‘Neither do I,’ the Doctor said. The hallway they were in ended in a set of doors far bigger than any they had passed before. She paused in front of them, running her fingers along the panelling as if searching for some hidden clasp or catch. ‘The floorboards, the windows … they don’t have makers’ marks at all. Nothing by chisel, or laser-cutter, or hammer, or nail. Look at the paintings! No brushstrokes. No sign of an artist’s hand at all.’
She took a step backwards, hands pressed to her temples.
‘I don’t think this place was made. I think it was grown.’
‘Try the handle,’ Mae said quietly.
The Doctor turned the handle and stepped through.
Falling through time was not a new sensation for the Doctor. She had tumbled through the Time Vortex in the TARDIS, of course, and knew that thrill as millennia ran like raindrops inches from her skin. She’d free-fallen with a vortex manipulator, which bore the same resemblance to travel in the TARDIS as bungee jumping did to a first-class flight. She’d stowed away in Gallifreyan paintings that were actual timelines frozen in place, and even jumped unprotected into her own timeline, which was one hundred per cent absolutely the stupidest thing she’d done that day, maybe even that week.
This wasn’t a literal plunge through time, but that made it more disturbing, not less. The space beyond the door was inky blackness. The Doctor held up her sonic screwdriver for light, but it was like the searchlights of a deep-sea explorer vessel trying to make sense of the ocean’s depths. All it did was illuminate just how much darkness there was.
The Doctor ran forward and the light of her sonic began to pick out looming shapes – five great hexagonal structures curving down from the ceiling like the fingers of a colossal hand. Every centimetre of the inverted towers was as busy as a coral reef – exposed machinery sparking and humming, bundles of wiring bulging out between arcane arrangements of circuitry and crystal.
The floor too was cluttered with components; dissected and dismantled or piled in tottering heaps. There was an aprioritron – abandoned and dusty, its gauges and nozzles crusted with rust. There was an ambiguous resolver, and a great holding jar for symbiotic nuclei, and there was a dimensional adjudicator, sitting upright in an old chronon shell like a flower in a pot. The stark contrast between the advanced technology and the rundown architecture outside made her think of clocks again, of humming gears hidden behind antique wood.
Or, the Doctor realised suddenly, like stepping into a police box and finding that it wasn’t quite the same size as its dimensions might suggest.
‘Makers’ marks,’ the Time Lord whispered.
‘I thought you said the place didn’t have any,’ Mae said from behind her. The praetorians had advanced warily into the space, panning their torch beams through the junkyard heaps. X-B1 looked as worried as it was possible for a triangular robot to look.
‘The outside doesn’t,’ the Doctor said. ‘That’s the point. The outside is just what it looks like. The shell around the core. These components … This … machine is the heart of it. And there are makers’ marks everywhere.’
‘Can you read them?’ Mae asked.
‘Of course I can,’ the Doctor said. ‘They’re mine.’
‘Good.’ Mae raised her rifle and shot X-B1 through the visor. ‘Then we can begin.’
5
…
The Siblings ghosted through reality, through timelines alive and dead, and everywhere they went they collected.
They visited a timeline where the Doctor had fallen on Agrippina Primus, and a billion Cyber-Mites besieged a grieving TARDIS, desperate to convert the most powerful ship in the universe. The TARDIS had shut down its chameleon circuit in retaliation, swelling to the size of a planet, and starving Cyber-Converters and the TARDIS’s own self-repair systems duelled under a blue wooden sky.
Locating gravitic drift compensators took them to a timeline where the Doctor and the TARDIS themselves were at war. An ancient hunger had burrowed into the timeship’s heart, and now it hunted across the cosmos, consuming all it could find. A weeping Doctor raised an army in pursuit and, in the light of a dying sun, two old friends laid each other low.
Sibling Different had laughed at that. Sibling Same had not.
We don’t have a choice. That’s wh
at he told himself, as they plundered. The Doctor took that from us. The Time Lord got to rewrite the universe, to edit the course of events so that they were the winner, so that they were the heroes, time and time again.
All the Siblings had was the paradox energy that guttered in them like candles, and that was a double-edged sword. It gave them access to dead timelines, true, but every component they stole cost them, used them up just a little more than before.
That scared Sibling Same, on the days when he could remember to be scared. Every day brought a new gap where a memory should be. They were ghosts – figuratively and literally. They had been killed when the war had ended. It was just taking longer than usual for their bodies to lie down and accept it. They were, quite literally, running out of time.
Unless we get to undo what was done to us. Unless we rewrite ourselves.
And for that, they needed the machine.
Timelines where Donna Noble never existed. Timelines where Clara never died at all. Timelines where the Bad Wolf and the Daleks fused, and a garden of metal Roses grew across all of time and space. The Siblings ran up and down the Doctor’s histories like a bead of water on a string, and bound TARDIS component after component together with the energy that pulsed through them like blood. They sat in the Masque Magestrix and heard about the end of the war, and all Sibling Same could think was that it seemed like something that had happened to someone else.
They hunted, and they collected, and they excavated, and they stole, and, piece by piece, they fed themselves to the paradox moon.
6
Now
Possibly December, in orbit round the Shadow Proclamation HQ
‘You know,’ Mae said casually, ‘my plan was just to kill you.’ Smoke wafted from the charred crater of Praetorian X-B1’s sensor lens. She lifted a hand to waft it away. ‘Simple, effective …’
‘Yes, but historically quite a high failure rate.’ The Doctor didn’t even really hear herself say the words. People threatened to kill her a lot. She could usually deliver a comeback on autopilot, and there was always the chance it might break the tension and they could all have a nice laugh together instead.