B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

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B00DPX9ST8 EBOK Page 141

by Parkin, Lance


  The wrecked spaceships were rebuilt inside the hyperspace tunnel as the G-Lock station.

  A mysterious planetoid was detected entering the solar system, and it eventually became the thirteenth moon of Jupiter. It was named Neo-Phobus by humans, and the Nerva Beacon was set up to warn shipping of this new navigational hazard. Nerva was one of a chain of navigational beacons, which also included Ganymede Beacon at vector 1906702. [1016]

  c 2820 - The Whispering Forest [1017]

  The fifth Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough arrived at the Purity colony so Nyssa could test a potential cure for Richter’s Syndrome. They destroyed the Takers and the ghostly beings who had been afflicting the colony for generations.

  ID implants were mandatory in citizens of the Empire, except for those exempted by the Corporate Faiths Amendment Act 2820. [1018] The Privacy of Sentient Beings Act was passed in 2830. [1019] Earth President Helen Kristiansen declared herself Empress. Helen I would be kept alive by life support systems, and her brain would be controlled by the computer Centcomp, which gave her access to the memories of all previous Earth Presidents. She became aware of the Doctor. [1020]

  2847 - Dark Progeny [1021]

  The telepathic inhabitants of Ceres Alpha died out long ago, but survived as a psychic gestalt. Much later, the planet - the closest ever found to Earth’s natural conditions - was colonised by humans. Earth was overcrowded and polluted at this time, and terraforming corporations like Worldcorp and Planetscape make planets suitable for human colonisation.

  Influenced by the gestalt, the colonists’ children began developing psychic powers. Worldcorp encouraged this, hoping that the children’s telekinesis could be used to transform planets. The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji exposed the plan. The children rebelled against Worldcorp’s corrupt leader, Gaskill Tyran, who died when the children made him mentally relive his acts of murder. The parents of one of the children, Veta and Josef Manni, took custody of the entire group.

  The accelerator, a device than could heal wounds and change people’s appearances, had been invented.

  2850 - “Time Bomb” [1022]

  The scientists of the City of Light on Hedron reached complete control of their environment, and the genetic cleansing of their race. They banished impurities with their time cannon. The sixth Doctor and Frobisher were caught in the weapon’s effect - which sent them two hundred million years into Earth’s past.

  The pilgrims of the Arrow of Righteousness arrived at their destination, but although their bodies were sound, their minds had gone. The ship crashed into the City of Light and devastated it, killing the population when its microbes and poisons were released.

  The Doctor and Frobisher learned that the Hedrons had located the origin of the Arrow of Righteousness - Earth - and deliberately targeted their time cannon. In doing so, the Hedrons allowed mankind to evolve, and didn’t destroy it.

  ? 2850 - The Mind’s Eye [1023]

  The Earth Empire Space Marines established a base on a planet designated YT45, which had a diurnal cycle lasting one hundred fourteen hours. YT45 was home to a type of flower - “kyropites” - that emitted a sleep-inducing gas; their victims experienced very detailed dream-realities while the kyropites fed upon their alpha waves, then their bodies. The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem were present when jekylls - monkey-like creatures who were immune to the kyropites - destroyed the marines’ base. An agent of the Federation Drugs Administration thwarted a plan to derive mind-controlling drugs and telepathic enhancers from the kyropites.

  The Dreamwavers of the Goyanna system had devices that could monitor dreams.

  c 2850 - Three’s a Crowd [1024]

  A group of militaristic, reptilian Khellians happened across the Phoenix colony, and the Khellian Queen laid a clutch of eggs aboard the colony ship. The colony leader, Auntie, bargained with the Khellians and allowed them to feed off humans in stasis; in return, they were to spare her family. The number of humans who were awake dwindled down to sixteen. They became agoraphobic and lived intensely isolated lives, unaware of the Khellian presence and what had befallen their fellows.

  The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem exposed the Khellian threat. The Khellians were wiped out and the colony ship destroyed, but the terraforming process improved the planet’s sustainability. Humans sleeping in a dozen habitat domes were slated for revival.

  In the mid-twenty-ninth century, zigma photography proved reconstructions of the Temple of Zeus to be inaccurate. [1025] The Forrester palace was built on Io. [1026] The Earth Empire annexed the Schirr homeworld and renamed it Idaho. Some Schirr - the Ten-Strong - formed a resistance movement. They stole knowledge of black arts from the non-corporeal Morphieans, who failed to distinguish between the Ten-Strong and the other corporeal beings. The Morphieans initiated retaliatory strikes against human worlds such as New Beijing, and the Ten-Strong launched terrorist strikes on planets such as New Jersey and Toronto, often killing millions. [1027]

  ? 2875 (Day 3, Week 47) - Revenge of the Cybermen [1028]

  Fifty years after Neo-Phobos was discovered, the civilian exographer Kellman began his survey of the planetoid, setting up a transmat point between it and the Nerva Beacon. He renamed the planetoid Voga.

  Fifteen weeks later, an extra-terrestrial disease swept through Nerva. Once the infection began, the victims died within minutes. The medical team on board the station were among the first to perish, and Earth Centre immediately rerouted all flights through Ganymede Beacon. As loyal members of the Space Service, the Nerva crew remained on board. Ten weeks after the plague first struck, all but four people on the station were dead. The Cybermen were responsible as part of their plan to destroy Voga. The fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry defeated them.

  The Ice Warriors slumbering in the asteroid belt awakened and departed the solar system, hoping to found a new homeworld. [1029]

  ? 2878 - The Power of Kroll [1030]

  The Sons of Earth Movement claimed that colonising planets was a mistake. They demanded a return to Earth, but most of its members had never been to the homeworld, which was now suffering major famines.

  A classified project, a methane-catalysing refinery, was set up on the third moon of Delta Magna. Two hundred tons of compressed protein were produced every day by extracting material from the marshlands, and sent to Magna by unmanned rockets. It was claimed that the Sons of Earth were supplying gas-operated projectile weapons to the native Swampies on this moon, and that the group was employing the services of the notorious gun-runner Rohm-Dutt. The truth was that Thawn, an official at the refinery, was supplying the Swampies with faulty weapons as an excuse to wipe them out.

  A squid creature on this moon had consumed the fifth segment of the Key to Time, and grown to a monstrous size. The Swampies regarded it as their god, Kroll. Thawn’s plan was uncovered and he was killed. The fourth Doctor and Romana recovered the Fifth Segment, which ended Kroll’s power. Kroll had been the source of the refinery’s compressed protein, and the facility was useless upon the creature’s reversion.

  ? 2878 - “Victims” [1031]

  Kolpasha was the fashion capital of the human empire. The fourth Doctor and Romana arrived and were accused of copyright theft - a crime more serious there than murder. Elsewhere, the political activist Gevaunt was planning to release Vitality, an age-reversing cosmetic. Romana discovered that repeat use of Vitality would make human flesh break down... and make it easier to digest.

  The Doctor discovered that a carnivorous Quoll from the Reft Sector was behind the scheme. The Quoll had stripped their home bare and wanted new feeding grounds, but the Doctor made the Quoll explode by dousing it with Vitality. However, this ruined the Doctor’s clothes...

  Earth colonised Dramos, located between the secondary and tertiary spiral arms of the galaxy. Dramos Port became an important trading post. [1032] The third Doctor and Jo visited the home planet of the Pakha and discovered that an ancient Diadem contained a being that made them aggressive. The diadem was lost when the Do
ctor cast it into a ravine. [1033] Artificial people, such as those created by the Villiers Artificial Life laboratory in Battersea, were given their independence. [1034]

  Kaldor City

  Kaldor City and its surrounding society became extremely reliant upon robots: fourteen million robots served a population of eight million people within Kaldor City itself, and a total of fifteen million people worldwide. The robots were created by the Company, which directly or indirectly ran the planet. The Company Board consisted of many Firstmasters, as led by a Firstmaster Chairholder. [1035]

  Robots in Kaldor City became so advanced that some people found themselves greatly unhinged by the robots’ inhuman body language. Psychologists christened this Grimwade’s Syndrome, or “robophobia”.

  Vehicles called storm miners ventured out on two-year missions into a hundred million mile expanse of desert. Sand blown up in storms was sucked into the storm miners’ scoops, which sifted out lucrative substances such as zelanite, keefan and lucanol. The water supplies for the storm miners’ eight-man crew was totally recycled once a month, but the crew lived in relative luxury. Most of the work was done for them by robots: around a hundred Dums, capable of only the simplest task; a couple dozen Vocs, more sophisticated; and one Super-Voc co-ordinating them. [1036]

  The first time that Uvanov commanded a storm mine, one of his crew - the brother of Zilda - developed robophobia, ran outside the storm mine and died. Uvanov was such a good pilot, the Company didn’t want to lose him and overlooked the incident. [1037]

  Taren Capel was an extremely innovative robotics engineer who had been raised by robots, and sought to elevate his robotic brethren above their lowly status. He introduced changes to the Company’s designs so that newly made Dums, Vocs and Super-Vocs were embedded with a trigger phrase - “Awake, my brothers! Let the slaves become masters!” - to be given in Capel’s own voice. When transmitted, this would turn the robots into killers. Capel went into hiding for six weeks, then assumed the identity of a robotics expert named Dask and joined the crew of a storm mine under the command of Uvanov. He waited for eight months while the Company created new robots with his murder sub-routine. [1038]

  ? 2881 - The Robots of Death [1039]

  The robots aboard Uvanov’s storm mine predated the augmentation Capel had made to the Company’s robots, and so Capel personally turned Uvanov’s robots into killers and instigated the murder of his crewmates. Thanks to the fourth Doctor and Leela’s intervention, a robot killed Capel. Three of the crew - Uvanov, Pool and Toos - survived the slaughter.

  The Company publicly blamed the murders as the work of ore raiders, and Capel’s trigger phrase went unused. [1040]

  ? 2882 - “Crisis on Kaldor” [1041]

  Storm miners were found with their Voc and Dum-class robots destroyed, and their Super-Vocs missing. An advanced Kaldor City robot, the Ultra-Voc (UV-1), had achieved a greater degree of independence and was recruiting Super-Vocs to help it liberate robotkind. Sylvos Orikon, an investigator for the Kaldor Robotics Corps, went undercover as a Super-Voc on a storm miner, found UV-1 and destroyed it - but was mistaken for a malfunctioning robot and “disassembled” by the storm miner’s Vocs.

  & 2887 - Corpse Marker [1042]

  In Kaldor City, the lowly-born Uvanov was promoted to being a topmaster of the Company, but this failed to sit well with members of the elite classes on the Company Board. They asked the psycho-strategist Carnell to devise a means by which they could secure their power. Carnell’s scheme entailed use of new generation of cyborg-robots, which had been secretly created. The cyborgs proved uncontrollable and went on the rampage, killing many prominent citizens. The fourth Doctor destroyed the cyborgs, and Carnell supplied Uvanov with blackmail information against members of the Board. Uvanov quickly attained the position of Firstmaster Chairholder.

  & 2889 - Kaldor City: Occam’s Razor / Death’s Head [1043]

  Kaston Iago, an assassin, arrived in Kaldor City and was suspected in the murder of several Company Firstmasters. As Firstmaster Chairholder, Uvanov judged that Iago was innocent and hired him as his bodyguard and security consultant. The psycho-strategist Carnell told Uvanov that the murders owed to a conspiracy concerning Uvanov’s motion that the Company send signals to other worlds and commence interplanetary trade with them. Iago killed the last of the alleged conspirators, seemingly ending the matter. In truth, Iago and Carnell had formed an uneasy alliance - Carnell knew that Iago had murdered the Firstmasters purely to gain a lucrative position with Uvanov, whereas Carnell had invented the “conspiracy” to prevent the Company opening up trade with the Federation, from which he had fled.

  Some time after this, the Church of Taren Capel - a robot fundamentalist group led by the former storm mine worker Poul, a.k.a. Paulus - caused civil unrest and terrorist incidents. Uvanov, having hired Carnell as a consultant, arranged for security agent Elsca Blayes to go undercover and join the terrorists’ ranks, then steered the Tarenists to eliminate his political opponents.

  & 2890 - Kaldor City: Hidden Persuaders / Taren Capel / Checkmate

  Carnell fled, having determined that the key players in Kaldor City were being manipulated by a force older than humanity. In a bid to stop the unseen entity’s plans, whatever they might be, he activated Taren Capel’s trigger phrase. Robots across Kaldor City turned murderous until Iago edited recordings of Capel’s voice, and transmitted an order that the robots stand down.

  Carnell arranged for Uvanov to receive evidence that his rival, Firstmaster Landerchild, was guilty of aiding the Tarenists; he also provided Landerchild with evidence that Uvanov was similarly culpable. The Company Board had to decide if they were both guilty, or if Carnell was lying.

  Paulus acquired what he thought was Taren Capel’s skull, but it was actually the Fendahl, which had become stronger after being thrown into a supernova. The Fendahl fed upon Paulus’ followers, and its core hosted itself in Justina - Uvanov’s personal assistant, and Iago’s lover.

  Iago tried to eliminate Blayes as competition for his services as a hired killer, and was gravely wounded in a shootout with her. The Fendahl, in Justina’s body, appeared before Iago and suggested he would live if they went into the past and altered history. The two of them went back to an earlier point in Justina’s quarters, where Iago destroyed Justina’s painting of a red pentagram and killed her younger self. Carnell then appeared, and told Iago that they were both in Hell...

  Kaldor City survived the Fendahl incident, and would prosper by exporting its robots to other worlds. [1044]

  c 2890 - Grimm Reality [1045]

  Titan had whale ranches and was being terraformed. Space mining was big business, with prospectors looking for rare particles such as strange matter, squarks and Hydrogen 3. Zero Rad Day was celebrated on Earth.

  The eighth Doctor, Anji and Fitz landed on the planet Albert as the salvage ship Bonadventure entered orbit. The Doctor realised that the planet was alive and had absorbed the memory banks of a crashed Earth ship, then modelled itself as a world of fairytales. The Doctor collected up various “wishing boxes”, which contained the spawn of a nearby white hole. One of the insectoid Vuim used the great powers of the white hole to cure his race of a wasting disease, which seeded the white hole’s spawn into a gap between realities to gestate. The parent white hole left and life on Albert returned to normal.

  c 2890 (May) - Ten Little Aliens [1046]

  Earth was exporting its poor and levying repressive taxes. Those born on Earth had legal and social advantages over offworlders. Alien planets were renamed after places on Earth. Pentagon Central ran Earth’s military, which included the Pauper Fleet, the Royal Escort and the Peacekeepers. The Japanese Belt was trying to develop teleportation.

  An Anti-Terror Elite squad from Earth landed on a planetoid for an exercise and discovered a Schirr building there, with a murdered group of Schirr terrorists inside. The first Doctor, Ben and Polly realised that Nadina Haunt, the human squad’s leader, was a Schirr sympathiser who
thought she was leading her men into an ambush.

  The complex launched itself towards the Morphiean Quadrant. The Schirr terrorists, the Ten Strong, revived. They wanted to ally with a renegade faction of the Morphiean race, then topple the Earth Empire. The Doctor resisted the Ten-Strong’s spells and annihilated them. The Morphiean authorities dealt with their renegades, ending the Morphiean Quadrant’s conflict with humanity.

  In 2891, the Daleks destroyed the planet of the reptilian Anthaurk, so the Anthaurk occupied Kaillor in the Minerva system and renamed it New Anthaur. The native Izrekt were massacred. The other planets declared war.

  On the 16 Lannasirn, following the Anthaurk defeat, the Treaty of Yquatine was signed. The Minerva Space Alliance was formed when the system declared independence from Earth. The Anthaurks began the Century of Waiting, secretly rebuilding their arsenal. For a century, other races flocked to the Minerva system, including the Ixtricite (a crystal race combining “the Krotons, the Rhotons and the something-else-ons”). The Adamanteans and the Ogri colonised Adamantine. [1047]

  A space battle led to two of the four Krotons serving aboard a dynatrope being “exhausted”, i.e. killed. The dynatrope was largely composed of tellurium, and required the mental power of four “high brains” to function. Per standard procedure, the dynatrope put down on a nearby planet. The two surviving Krotons entered stasis while the dynatrope operated on automatic. It regularly culled the most gifted students that the humanoids living on the planet - the Gonds - could offer, hoping to find a pair smart enough to function as high brains. No such Gonds were found, and the mental energy harvested from the students was only enough to keep the dynatrope functioning. [1048]

 

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