B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  The tenth Doctor took Donna home so she could spend time with her mother and grandfather on the anniversary of her father’s death. Morgan Tech, owned by a thrall of the Mandragora Helix, was about to release the newest personal computing gadget: the M-TEK. The Helix planned to control and speed up man’s expansion into space - it was projected that humans would build farms on Mars in twenty years and colonise Alpha Centauri in a hundred, all part of a Mandragoran Empire. The Helix took control of people whose lineage extended back to San Martino, Italy, but the Doctor ended its schemes. UNIT helped to recall the M-TEKs.

  The Prime Minister at this time was Aubrey Fairchild.

  c 2009 - “The Time of My Life” [1275]

  The tenth Doctor and Donna confronted gun-totting dog aliens from space, whose spaceship arrived over London to incite the dogs of Earth into revolution against their human masters.

  (=) 2009 (early April) - Turn Left [1276]

  In the “Donna turned right” universe, the Emergency Government adopted an “England for the English” policy, sending foreign-born residents to labour camps. Soon afterwards, the stars started going out. Donna met with Rose and a UNIT group led by Captain Erisa Magambo. They had recovered the dying TARDIS from under the Thames, and used its technology to build a time machine that could reflect chronon energy from mirrors. Donna agreed to travel back to the point of temporal deviation, and convince her past self to turn left...

  2009 (a Saturday in early April) - The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End [1277]

  Davros, rescued from the Last Great Time War by Dalek Caan, created a new generation of Daleks genetically derived from his own cells. A new Dalek Empire was born, and set about creating a reality bomb - an alignment of twenty-seven planets that would flatten Z-Neutrino energy into a single string, and thereby undo the electrical field binding all reality. The Daleks intended to shield themselves as all matter became dust, then mere atoms. They would become the only living creatures in existence. Three worlds were plucked from different time zones for the reality bomb: Adipose III, Pyrovillia and the lost moon of Poosh.

  The Daleks moved into the second phase of their plan, and teleported twenty-four planets - including Callufrax Minor, Jahoo, Shallacatop, Woman Wept and Clom - into the Medusa Cascade along with the three worlds already taken. Earth was also one of the stolen planets, and humanity was horrified to look into the sky and find itself surrounded by other worlds. When the translocation occurred, Martha Jones was at UNIT’s New York HQ, working as medical director on Project Indigo: an attempt to salvage Sontaran technology into a teleport system. Captain Jack was at the Torchwood Hub, and Sarah Jane was at Bannerman Road. Rose Tyler materialised on Earth from Pete’s World. Mickey Smith and Jackie would later journey from Pete’s World to help her.

  The Daleks were operating from the Crucible: a massive space station in the middle of the planetary arrangement. A fleet of two hundred Dalek ships set out to subjugate Earth, transmitting in advance a single word, repeated: “Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate”. The Daleks gleefully dismantled every form of resistance, from UNIT forces aboard the Valiant to Wilf Noble with his paintball gun. Daleks landed in Japan and Germany, and forced the air force to retreat over North Africa. Contact was lost with the airplane bearing the UK Prime Minister. The Commander General of the United Nations signalled Earth’s surrender.

  The tenth Doctor and Donna learned about the missing planets from the Shadow Proclamation. Harriet Jones connected the Doctor’s allies using the Subwave Network she’d developed, and together they sent out a pulse that enabled the Doctor and Donna to return to Earth. The Daleks traced the signal back to Harriet’s home and exterminated her.

  The TARDIS materialised in London, and the Doctor was reunited with Rose... and was then shot by a Dalek. He began to regenerate, but used the process to heal himself and diverted the excess energy into a biomatching receptacle - the hand severed in combat with the Sycorax - to save his life.

  The Doctor and his many allies confronted the Daleks aboard the Crucible. The Supreme Dalek had the TARDIS dumped in the Z-neutrino core of the Crucible to destroy it. Donna was still aboard the Ship, and the regenerative energies in the Doctor’s hand (severed during his battle with the Sycorax leader at Christmas 2006) interacted with her. The hand grew into a duplicate of the tenth Doctor who was part human, and Donna absorbed all the Doctor’s knowledge, becoming a human-Time Lord metacrisis. This was enough to turn the tables - Donna deactivated the reality bomb, and twenty six of the planets were returned to their rightful places, but the Supreme Dalek destroyed the machinery before Earth could be returned. Jack destroyed the Supreme Dalek, and the duplicate Doctor used a backfeed to wipe out the Daleks. Davros refused the Doctor’s offer of a rescue, and the TARDIS left the exploding Crucible. In conjunction with the Torchwood Hub and Sarah Jane’s Mr. Smith computer, the tenth Doctors and their companions used the TARDIS to tow the Earth back home.

  Humanity celebrated Earth’s return to its proper location, although there was widespread rainfall due to atmospheric disturbances. Mickey opted to remain in his native reality as his grandmother on Pete’s World had died. The duplicate Doctor, Rose and Jackie returned to Pete’s World. Jack returned to Torchwood, and Sarah Jane went home.

  UNIT had developed the Osterhagen Key: 25 nuclear warheads placed at strategic points beneath the Earth’s crust as a means of destroying the planet - a final option should humanity’s suffering be deemed too great to be allowed to continue. Martha promised the Doctor that she would dismantle the system.

  Donna’s mind couldn’t cope with the Time Lord abilities it had absorbed. The Doctor saved her life by removing all of her memories of him, the TARDIS and their travels together, then left her with her family.

  Adelaide Brooke lost her parents in the Dalek invasion. A Dalek confronted her, but - perhaps recognising her importance to history - did not exterminate her. [1278] The Daleks’ gambit with the reality bomb weakened the dimensional walls, enabling some Cybermen within the Void to fall back through time to London, 1851, using the dimension vault they stole from the Daleks. Everything else inside the Void perished. [1279] One Dalek ship survived and was hurled back through time, damaged, to the 1940s. [1280]

  2009 (April) - Planet of the Dead [1281]

  The aristocratic art thief Lady Christina de Souza stole the Cup of Athelstan, which was worth £18 million, from the International Gallery in London and fled aboard a No. 200 bus. The tenth Doctor joined de Souza and her fellow passengers on the bus, which promptly fell through a wormhole to San Helios - a desert planet in the Scorpion Nebula, on the other side of the universe. A UNIT team led by Captain Magambo sealed off the tunnel in London.

  The Doctor made contact with the Tritovores, fly-like aliens who thought San Helios had a population of one hundred billion. In the last year, all life on the planet has been devoured by monsters that resembled ravenous flying stingrays. The Doctor realised that the wormhole between San Helios and Earth was growing, and that the Stingrays would soon cross over, wiping out all life on Earth. With the help of UNIT, and after breaking up the Cup of Athelstan to use as components in a machine, the Doctor got the bus back to London and closed the wormhole. He also helped de Souza elude the police.

  The TARDIS had landed in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, and the Doctor was confident the Queen “didn’t mind”.

  In May, a test conducted on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN created a dimensional bridge that provided a neutron-eating creature with access to our universe. [1282] Sylvia Noble received a letter that Donna had written prior to her memory loss. It detailed her excitement about travelling with the Doctor. [1283]

  2009 - SJA: The Last Sontaran [1284]

  Six weeks after defeating Kaagh, Maria Jackson moved to Washington with her father.

  (=) 2009 (a Saturday in June) - Last of the Time Lords [1285]

  The Master had controlled Earth for a year, and turned it into a factory world. The enslaved human population was
put to work building two hundred thousand war rockets “set to burn across the universe” and create a Time Lord Empire. A space lane traffic advisor warned all travellers to stay away from Sol 3.

  Japan had been devastated, and New York was reportedly in ruin. China had fusion mills, Europe had radiation pits, and a shipyard in Russia ran from the Black Sea to the Bering Strait.

  Martha Jones spent a year travelling the world and spreading word of the Doctor, telling the public to think of him when the rockets were launched. The hyper-aged tenth Doctor had spent the last year linking himself into the telepathic field of the Archangel network, and used the humans’ psychic energy to restore himself. Captain Jack destroyed the Paradox Machine, reversing time one year and one day to the exact moment before the Toclafane materialised.

  Six months after a grieving Lucie returned home, the Headhunter arrived on her doorstep, shot her unconscious and whisked her away to the planet Orbis in the future. [1286]

  2009 - “Ghosts of the Northern Line” / “The Crimson Hand” [1287]

  Intersol, a time-travelling intergalactic justice organisation, estimated that Earth’s oil reserves were “almost depleted”.

  The Mnemosyne unit hidden in London’s Northern Line had matured, and wanted revenge for the murder of its guardian. The tenth Doctor and Majenta Pryce intervened as the Mnemosyne manifested everyone who had died on the Northern Line in previous decades as “ghosts”, and announced its intention to incinerate everyone within the Underground. Majenta convinced the ghostly engrams to turn on the Mnemosyne, destroying it and themselves.

  A squadron of Intersol ships arrived in Earth orbit and arrested Majenta. They time-locked the TARDIS, and returned with it, the Doctor and Majenta to the future...

  Torchwood Series 2 / Series 3 Interim [1288]

  2009 - TW: Lost Souls [1289]

  Martha Jones asked Torchwood to help her investigate mysterious events at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. CERN was about to switch on its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in an effort to identify the theoretical Higgs particle (the most fundamental unit of existence), but the LHC had enabled a deadly alien entity that consumed neutrons to cross into our reality. The LHC was reconfigured to smash protons into anti-protons - creating the Higgs particle, but also killing the creature and preventing others of its kind from crossing over.

  Gwen Cooper met a trader from the planet Murgatroyd, and acquired from him a device that could purportedly speak to the dead. She used it - or so she hoped - to send a message to Owen and Tosh in the hereafter. [1290]

  2009 (Friday to the following Saturday) - TW: Almost Perfect [1291]

  The Perfection had built a sentient device that extended their natural reality-warping abilities, but the device became bored of creating perfection and escaped with the Perfection’s interior decorators. The device began “helping” various people, causing such brouhaha as a group of speed-daters being reduced to skeletons. Torchwood confronted the Perfection - who had broken their word to Jack, and decided to install themselves as Earth’s gods after all. Ianto used the device to drain the life-energy from the Perfection, leaving them as aged husks that he Retconned. In accordance with its wishes, Jack pitched the device into Cardiff Bay.

  2009 - TW: “Ma and Par”

  Torchwood electrocuted a Bull-Craktor - a monstrous arachnid - and its offspring at the Pontyvale Golf Course.

  2009 - TW: “The Selkie”

  Jack found that the shapeshifting Selkie he’d previously aided was behind a series of murders on Seal Island in Scotland, and killed it.

  2009 - TW: “Broken”

  Bilis Manger had designed the Clockhouse Hotel - located on the old site of the Amber Hotel - to contain a creature thought to have been either born of the Rift, or was an expression of the Rift’s own self-awareness. Torchwood looked into reports of missing persons at the Clockhouse exactly one hundred forty years to the day after the Rift struck the Amber. The entity hoped to tap enough of Jack’s life energy to properly manifest, but Jack temporarily died in such a fashion that severed the Rift entity’s link to reality, and also destroyed the hotel.

  2009 - TW: The Sin Eaters

  A swarm of alien insects - creatures that normally lived in a shadow dimension - fed upon the guilt of people in the Cardiff city centre, endowing them with euphoria in return. Torchwood destroyed the swarm and their queen, a giant creature in Cardiff Bay. Jack also burnt down the church of St. Francis, which had been infected by the creatures.

  2009 - TW: Into the Silence

  The Rift enabled an entity from the Silent Planet - a shadowy world in the furthest corner of the universe, where the formless inhabitants lived in total isolation and only corporealised to mate - to travel to Earth. The entity thought sound so beautiful, it murdered several singers to absorb their vocal cords and larynxes - but even these barely functioned as intended. The killings disrupted preparations for the fifth annual Welsh Amateur Operatic Contest. Torchwood ended the killing spree by allowing the entity to merge with Ryan Scott, an autistic child who craved isolation, and then return home. Detective Inspector Tom Cutler helped Captain Jack with the case; afterwards, Jack removed Cutler’s memories of Torchwood with Retcon.

  2009 - TW: Bay of the Dead

  The symbiont Leet heard the siren call of his life pod, and used Oscar Phillip’s memories of The All-Night Zombie Horror Show to create “search units” to retrieve it. Dozens if not hundreds of people were transformed into the undead but proved hard to control, so Leet sealed Cardiff within a time-energy barrier. Oscar disintegrated the cadavers by killing himself, whereupon Leet brought down the barrier and was believed to have returned home.

  2009 - TW: The House That Jack Built

  Jack discovered that interdimensional beings had polluted the timeline of a house he owned, Jackson Leaves, causing the deaths of thirteen of its residents over the past century. He destroyed the beings, and - as insurance against more fatalities - enabled to the current owners of Jackson Leaves to win a lottery, preventing them from renting the house out.

  2009 - TW: Asylum

  Some inhabitants of an unknown planet escaped in “lifeboats” when solar flares ravaged their world. One lifeboat landed on Earth, and the thirteen benevolent aliens aboard integrated with Earth society and sired offspring with humanity. One of the aliens lived in Cardiff under the name “Moira Evans”.

  The Rift disgorged Moira’s granddaughter - Freda, a Cardiff resident in 2069, whose personal debit gun could disrupt modern-day communications, security and transport systems. Captain Jack’s team suspected that the Torchwood of the future had deliberately sent Freda back so they would adopt an asylum policy, hopefully blunting some of the xenophobia that Torchwood would otherwise cause. Jack, Gwen and Ianto helped Freda adjust to life in the present. [1292]

  2009 - TW: Golden Age

  The “time store” at Torchwood India required an ever-growing amount of energy, which it collected via an energy net that consumed the potential, unfulfilled history of people’s lives. Over the last few months, the net had made thousands of beggars and transients in India vanish without a trace. Captain Jack’s Torchwood team investigated the resultant temporal emissions in Delhi. The Duchess tried to widen the time store’s effect and roll the whole of Earth back to 1924, but Jack sabotaged the device. The Duchess and her colleagues were unwilling to venture into the modern world; the device exploded, destroying them and Torchwood India.

  2009 - TW: The Dead Line

  Professor Stella Courtney, an old flame of Jack Harkness, was now a grandmother and one of the country’s top neuroscientists. The electrical virus trapped in the disused Madoc House escaped and quickly infected twenty people - including Captain Jack - by ringing their phones. Through these victims, the virus sought to achieve the critical mass required to ring every phone across the world. Ianto and Gwen destroyed the virus with an electro-magnetic pulse, causing its victims to awaken.

  2009 (Wednesday to
Sunday) - TW: Risk Assessment [1293]

  Torchwood destroyed the planet-eating Vam when it manifested on Earth, but not before it further ravaged the SkyPoint apartment complex. Agnes Havisham, the Torchwood Assessor, awoke once more from stasis and colluded with George Herbert Sanderson - her fiancé - to help the supposedly peaceful xXltttxtolxtol settle on Earth. Torchwood helped to destroy a xXltttxtolxtol bridgehead once the aliens’ conquering intentions became known, and Havisham left to start a new life with Sanderson.

  (=) 2009 - TW: The Undertaker’s Gift

  Hokrala Corp’s use of warp-shunt technology to send people and messages into the past had widened the Rift, and the Already Dead - beings who sought to keep the Rift from their enemies’ hands - exploited this by triggering a temporal fusion device known as the Undertaker’s Gift. The resultant explosion destroyed Cardiff. An enormous Vortex Dweller came through the widened Rift and reclaimed its child, Zero. In gratitude to Captain Jack, the Dweller rewrote history to stop the Already Dead from building their temporal device.

  (=) 2009 (4th August) - The Eternal Summer [1294]

  A hyperspatial warp-core explosion originating in 1899 caused a time-stasis field to encompass all of Stockbridge. The bubble trapped six decades of the town’s history, and the residents were made to experience their lives over and over again.

  In one version of events, the entity Veridios awoke and endowed the fifth Doctor and Nyssa - who had been thrown forward in time by the explosion - with some of its life force. As “the Lord and Lady of the Manor”, they ruled Stockbridge for at least a million years. They became ancient, desiccated husks that leeched off the histories of their subjects.