B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  The eighth Doctor, Charley and C’rizz arrived as Arken further used lambda radiation on Eunis Flood, a convicted serial killer from Caludaar. This unexpectedly forged a link between the planet’s morphogenetic field and Flood, turning him into a formidable psionic. The planet’s collective life force appeared in guise of the dead girl Galayana, and although Flood disintegrated her physical form, she peeled away his defences and left him with the mind of a child. Flood had similarly lobotomised Arken, but Endaara was now left to develop naturally.

  c 4,500,000 - The Criminal Code [1681]

  Humanity developed a new method of terraforming: a quasi-organic, asexually reproducing machine that would generate massive amounts of nanobots. Such nanobots could transform entire worlds, and interface with a user’s synapses to respond to verbal commands. They could erect force fields, direct lightning strikes and create earthquakes.

  An nine-member terraforming team got lost in a wormhole, and emerged a long way from human space. They terraformed a local world, but a disease killed all but one of them. The survivor was alone for forty years, and the machine created smoke creatures based upon the darker recesses of his mind. After the survivor’s death, the creatures spurred evolution of the Shanquis - a race of pale blue humanoids, whose bodies they could inhabit. The Shanquis developed an advanced society, but the smoke-creatures possessed their political leaders and were deeply xenophobic. English became a forbidden language, as the smoke-creatures feared someone uttering commands that would terminate their existence.

  Tensions increased between the Shanquis and the neighbouring planet of Esoria, and so the Doge of Micene - a cosmopolitan planet - asked the seventh Doctor to serve as an arbiter. The Doctor and Benny extracted the smoke-creatures from the Shanquis rulers, who petitioned for peace.

  5,000,000 - “4-Dimensional Vistas” [1682]

  In the twentieth century, the Monk and the Ice Warriors seeded a giant crystal in the Arctic. Now they arrived to harvest it. They would be able to destroy continents with the sonic cannon powered by the crystal.

  Two Time Lords visited the far future, and found that the Cybermen had evolved to become pure thought - the most peace-loving and advanced race in the universe. [1683]

  (=) Iris visited an alternate universe “three dimensions to the left” from our reality, where flying, vampiric versions of her companion Panda decimated entire worlds. [1684]

  The Doctor took the Cold to Pluto in the far future. [1685] Many millions of years in the future, the people of Phryxus established a technocracy in NGC4258 and developed galactic travel using warp capsules in the Grey Interchange. The renegade scientist Zodaal was jailed for experimenting on lesser life forms, and tried to escape using a warp capsule. This failed and he had to reduce himself to a gaseous state to survive. He escaped to the year 1929. [1686]

  Humanity attempted time-travel experiments during the Twenty-Seventh Segment of Time, but these proved to be a total failure. [1687] Parasitic eggs laid by the Artifact were expected to hatch in the Elysium system. [1688]

  The Destruction of Earth

  “Fleeing from the imminence of a catastrophic collision with the sun, a group of refugees from the doomed planet Earth...” [1689]

  c 10,000,000 - The Ark [1690]

  In the Fifty-Seventh Segment of Time, ten million years hence, scientists realised that the Earth was falling towards the Sun. With the help of the Monoids, a mysterious race whose own planet had been destroyed in a supernova many years before, humanity constructed a great space vessel. It contained the entire human, Monoid, animal and plant population of the Earth in miniaturised form on microcells. Audio space research revealled that Refusis II was suitable for colonisation. It would take seven hundred years to reach the new world. To symbolise the survival of man, a vast statue of a human carved from gregarian rock was begun.

  The ship set out, and the few humans and Monoid servants that remained active - the Guardians - watched the Earth’s destruction. Very soon afterwards, the common cold swept through the vessel, brought by the first Doctor’s companion Dodo. The Doctor cured the disease using animal membranes.

  Enormous generation ships were “quite common” as mankind left Earth for the final time, during humanity’s late expansion period: the great Diaspora Era. Human engineering was now at its peak - entire worlds could be terraformed to Earth conditions over several generations. The Ice Warriors had resettled on Mars prior to the Earth’s death, but the Red Planet was rendered uninhabitable with the sun’s expansion, and the Martians similarly migrated into space. [1691]

  c 10,000,000 - Frontios [1692]

  A vast colony ship containing thousands of people, plus the technology and material capable of rebuilding the whole of human civilisation, was sent to the Veruna system on the distant edge of the universe. Despite being touted as failure-proof, every system on the colony ship failed. The ship crashed on Frontios. Most of the crew died in the crash, and many more perished from diseases that spread through the colony immediately afterwards.

  Captain Revere eventually restored order. For ten years, the survivors planted and harvested crops, stocking up with food. But then meteorite bombardments began, striking the colony with such accuracy to make plain that it was being deliberately targeted. The bombardment continued for thirty years, but that wasn’t the worst of it: the earth began swallowing up the dead. Over the years, the number of Retrogrades - people who deserted the colony - swelled.

  And then, the earth swallowed Captain Revere while he was investigating the planet’s potential mineral wealth. This left his son, Plantagenet, in command. The colony was soon in danger of falling apart.

  The Tractators, insect creatures who could harness gravity, had arrived on Frontios five hundred years before and were responsible for the colony’s setbacks. Under the command of their leader, the Gravis, they had pulled down the colony ship. They had given the colonists ten years to establish themselves, then began the meteorite bombardment. The Tractators had been kidnapping humans to serve as “drivers” for their tunnelling machines. The Gravis hoped to create a tunnel system that would amplify the Tractators’ gravity fields and let them pilot Frontios throughout the cosmos.

  The fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough arrived on Frontios, isolated the Gravis and transported it to the planet Kolkokron. Without their leader, the Tractators were mindless drones, and the survival of the human colony was better assured.

  After delivering the Gravis to Kolkokron, the fifth Doctor made a side trip to the planet Artaris circa 1001 before returning to Frontios. [1693] Professor Stream retrieved the Gravis from Kolkokron using the Doctor’s TARDIS, and returned to the twentieth century. [1694]

  (=) c 10,000,000 - “The Child of Time” (DWM) [1695]

  The time-child Chiyoko had built the Museum of Lost Opportunities in the remains of Earth - nothing more than an asteroid belt circling a dying sun - as a tribute to the human race. The synthetic Galateans had now lived so long that they had gone insane, and exterminated all other races.

  Some Galateans working at the Museum - made to resemble famous persons such as the Bronte sisters, Alan Turing, Buddy Holly, John Keats and Jayne Mansfield - had gained self-awareness. The Brontes saved the eleventh Doctor and Amy with a Timescoop when Chiyoko destroyed the Earth, then sent them and the faux Turing back to avert the Galateans’ creation.

  The trio failed and returned. The Doctor time-scooped the young women Cosette and Margaret, plus Sister Konami, from points prior to their being physically combined to create Chiyoko. This greatly weakened Chiyoko’s abilities. The Doctor persuaded Chiyoko that her actions had caused universal suffering and death, and she undid her existence. The Doctor and Amy took Turing and the now-anomalous Chiyoko back to the genesis of the Galateans...

  c 10,000,675 (winter) - The Silent Stars Go By [1696]

  A colony ship arrived on the Earth-esque planet Hereafter. Three mountain-sized Terra Firmers were established, each containing engines that, over the course of hundreds
of years, would make Hereafter’s environment entirely comparable to that of Earth. A thousand of Earth’s most powerful and elite members hibernated within the Firmers in secret, intending to emerge once the settlers had performed the hard labour required to shape Hereafter to human norm.

  Twenty-seven generations later, Hereafter’s three settlements - Aside, Beside and Seeside - had a total population of around nineteen thousand. An Ice Warrior migration fleet with members of the Tanssor clan of the Ixon Mons family from Old Mars entered the quadrant, and judged Hereafter as the most viable colony world. Seven years passed as the Martians attempted to alter the Terra Firmers with their seed technology, hoping to change Hereafter’s environment to Martian norm. When the Firmers’ defence mechanisms prevailed, the Martians directly altered the machinery. Three years passed, with the winters becoming increasingly harsher.

  The Terra Firmers converted some of the sleeping elite into powerful transhumans to attack the Warriors. The eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory defused hostilities, and sent the transhumans back to sleep. The Doctor convinced the Martian warlord Ixyldir that it would be honourable to leave Hereafter to the human settlers, and left the settlers to decide when, if ever, they should awaken the sleepers.

  At the Doctor’s direction, the Ice Warrior fleet relocated Mars-like world Atrox 881, located eight light years from Hereafter.

  c 10,000,700 - The Ark [1697]

  The fever that had swept through the Ark had never fully abated, and it had weakened the humans. Seven hundred years after leaving the solar system, the Monoids had seized control of the ship, and the statue commemorating the voyage was now of a Monoid. The humans now called the ship “the Ark” after an old Earth legend, but the Monoids kept the Guardians’ descendants in check with heat prods.

  The TARDIS again brought the first Doctor, Steven and Dodo to the Ark as it arrived at Refusis II and Launcher 14 was sent to the surface. At first there was no sign of life, but it quickly transpired that the native Refusians were invisible giants. Nevertheless, the Monoid leader, named 1, planned to take his race’s microcells to the planet. He also intended to destroy the Ark with a bomb planted in the head of the statue, but the Refusians helped to throw the statue overboard, allowing it to explode harmlessly in space. The Refusians allowed the humans and Monoids to live on their world, but only if they promised to live in peace.

  Atrox 881 became a quadrant capital to the fiefworlds of the Ixon Mons dynasty. The Doctor arrived on Atrox 881 nine thousand years after the Martians settled there, but - in his personal timeline - before he had aided them in doing so. Azylax, the warlord of the Tanssor, bestowed upon the Doctor the honourary title of Belot’ssar, meaning “cold blue star”, in recognition of his friendship. [1698]

  Thus, humanity survived the destruction of its homeworld by travelling across the universe and rebuilding human civilisation on distant planets. What happened in the untold billions of years after that was a mystery - any TARDIS attempting to travel further into the future than this exceeded its time parameters, and the Time Lords themselves were unaware of anything beyond this time. “Knowledge has its limits; ours reaches this far and no further”. [1699]

  “The demise of Earth was followed by a period in which there was, effectively, no such thing as the human species; a period in which humanity suddenly found itself released from its heritage, with genetic manipulation and vast tracts of space separating the survivors from everything they’d once been. Many ‘posthuman’ societies inevitably became glorious, grotesque Princedoms, and none more so than those of the Blood Coteries, who - like the Medici and Borgia families of antiquity - commissioned the greatest art and culture of their age even as they conducted unimaginable vendettas and poisoned their potential rivals...” [1700]

  w - The family of Demetra Kein of the Blood Coteries was one of the greatest patrons of opera in the posthuman Renaissance. Shuncuker of Faction Paradox invaded the family’s home and crippled their 1000-year-old empire, motivating the Blood Cotieries to render their agents impervious to the Faction’s shadow weapons. [1701]

  Some inhabitants in the posthuman city of Civitas Solis sensed a temporal ripple related to Isaac Newton - an anomaly that could potentially undo their existence. They channelled themselves back to the seventeenth century, and manipulated the life of Nathaniel Silver to better guarantee their survival. [1702]

  w - The War in Heaven became such that the final generation living in the posthuman era foresaw the impending demise of humanity, and built the Universal Machine (UniMac) as a conceptual device that personified the whole of human technology. Mesh Cos, the last documented person of human descent, raided the Homeworld of the Great Houses to acquire the technology for the UniMac - and in so doing triggered an attack from House Mirraflex that eliminated the last of humanity. The UniMac continued operating and communicated through time with other forms of machine life. It made contact with the living timeship Compassion - together, they became the Secret Architects who created the City of the Saved, with Compassion’s body forming the City’s environs. [1703]

  ? 10,000,000 - Infinite Requiem [1704]

  Far in the future, representatives of over seven hundred cultures - including the Monoids, Morestrans, Rakkhins and Rills - used the Pridka Dream Centre. The Pridka were a race of blue-skinned, crested telepaths, and the Centre used their healing skills. At any one time, fifteen thousand individuals would be booked into the Centre, making it a tempting resource for the Sensopaths, a psychic communal mind intent on dominating the physical world.

  The malicious Sensopath Shanstra attempted to absorb the Sensopath Jirenal. The benevolent Sensopath Kelzen intervened, and all three of them died.

  (=) ? - TimeH: Peculiar Lives [1705]

  Evolved members of humanity tried to facilitate their creation through the rise and fall of homo peculiar - but failed, and were erased from history.

  The Doctor estimated that dogs would evolve thumbs in around twenty million years time. [1706]

  The Fifty-Eighth Segment of Time - The Well-Mannered War [1707]

  In the Fifty-Eighth Segment of Time, human refugees colonised the planet Metralubit. There was peace for two thousand years, but then a planet-wide war suddenly wiped out two-thirds of the population. This had been engineered by the Hive, an evolved gestalt of flies that fed on dead bodies. There were four more such wars at roughly two-thousand-year intervals. The Helducc civilisation emerged from the sixth war, but also fell to conflict. A new civilisation rose and developed the Femdroids, led by Galatea, to increase male efficiency.

  The Black Guardian brought a Chelonian squad from the distant past in a timestorm. The Chelonians claimed the planet Barclow, close to Metralubit, and the two races fought a short war until the Bechet Treaty was signed. Galatea learned the secret of the devastating world wars, evacuated most of the Femdroids to Regus V and plotted to lure the Hive back.

  The fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 found that the Black Guardian was trying to trick the Doctor into releasing the Hive in the twenty-sixth century, which would destroy humanity. The Doctor defeated the Guardian by removing himself and Romana from time and space altogether.

  This was the end of the Humanian Era. [1708]

  The Navarino civilisation was the only one to survive the war on its home planet - their culture was based on frivolity, and they were having too good a time to join in the conflict. The Navarinos had time tourism, but paid exorbitant taxes to the Time Lords for the privilege. [1709]

  ? - Delta and the Bannermen [1710]

  The Bannermen invaded the Chimeron homeworld, but the Chimeron Queen escaped to Tollport G715. She joined the seventh Doctor, Mel and a party of Navarinos on a Nostalgia Trips tour to America in the 1950s. Nostalgia Trips were notorious following an incident with the Glass Eaters of Traal, and true to form, their Hellstrom II cruiser wound up at a holiday camp in Wales by mistake. The Bannermen pursued them back in time.

  Six weeks into a war between two colonies in Cassiopeia, a time traveller was b
rought before Uglosi, a high-ranking prosecutor, on vagrancy charges. The traveller told Uglosi that in three months, General Verdigast would travel to Corinth Minor - a planet with volcanoes that showered gemstones, and so had become a popular holiday destination for the rich and famous - and broker a peace treaty with the rival colony. This would create the Corinth Compact: an empire that would be “an unstoppable blight on the region”. A rival general, Morella Wendigo, concurred with Uglosi that this must be averted, and killed the treaty-makers with a bacteriological weapon that ravaged Corinth Minor’s troposphere. This stratagem bankrupted both armies, ending the war. Faced with the prospect of a flesh-eating plague in such a densely populated area, the authorities appealed to the Time Lords - who passed Corinth Minor through a cloud of super-violet radiation, sterilising it.

  Corinth Minor was renamed Nevermore to symbolically denote the folly of war (not that many in Cassiopeia heeded this). A war crimes tribunal sentenced Wendigo to exile on Nevermore, and Uglosi - being obsessed with the works of Edgar Allan Poe - both designed her prison and equipped it with robot ravens. [1711]

  ? - Nevermore [1712]

  The Time Lords directed the eighth Doctor and Tamsin Drew to the planet Nevermore, where the Doctor pardoned and released General Morella Wendigo. In doing so, he curtailed the lethal mutant shadows who had sprung into being after the holocaust on Corinth Minor, and were now using Wendigo as a host.

  The Master stole a force field from a Farquazi Time Cruiser during the 300th Segment of Time. [1713]

  The Vulgar End of Time - The One Doctor [1714]