by Steve Cole
‘How can you be in my mind?’
‘What if I were to tell you, I’m talking to you through an earpiece?’
Karpagnon rapidly processed this intelligence. ‘How could my defences be breached and an earpiece applied?’
‘Wrong question.’
‘How could an earpiece rewire my internal logic relays?’
‘Still the wrong question.’
Karpagnon reached up to locate the earpiece, but –
‘Don’t touch it,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘Touch the earpiece, and this is over. I will not help you.’
‘I do not take orders!’ thundered Karpagnon – though he couldn’t help noticing he’d lowered his hand. ‘Why would a DeathBorg 400 need your help?’ he protested, in a slightly higher register than he really intended.
‘Because you want to get out of here,’ replied the Doctor. ‘Which is fine by me, because I don’t want a DeathBorg 400 wandering around a children’s home. The front door is 20 feet in front of you, shall we get going?’
‘First I must destroy this installation, and all humans within it.’
‘It’s not an installation, it’s a children’s home.’
‘First I must destroy this children’s home and all the humans within it.’
‘Well that seems a bit mean to me, but OK. Better go to the kitchen, yeah?’
‘Why the kitchen?’
‘It’s where they keep all the burny stuff. You know where the kitchen is, don’t you, Karpagnon?’
‘Of course!’ Karpagnon descended the rest of the stairs and headed through the shadowed, silent corridors to the kitchen.
‘Why are you so afraid of humans?’ asked the Doctor.
‘I do not fear humans. I despise them.’
‘Oh, come on, I’m sitting in your ear, I can see your whole brain. Of course you fear them.’
‘I hate all humanity.’
‘Yeah, but that’s the point, isn’t it? You hate them. Hate is just fear out loud.’
‘I know nothing of fear,’ said Karpagnon, as he entered the deserted kitchen.
‘Well I know everything. I’d have to, me. What with the Daleks, and the Cybermen, and the Weeping Angels.’
‘These creatures are known to me.’
‘Of course they are, everyone’s scared of them. And the Sontarans and the Slitheen. And of course, the Umpty Ums.’
Karpagnon scanned his databanks twice. ‘The… Umpty Ums?’
‘Oh, they’re the worst. Nothing scares me like the Umpty Ums.’
‘They are unknown to me!’
‘Oh, if you know about me, you know about the Umpty Ums. But never mind that now. We’re in the kitchen! What are we actually going to do?’
Karpagnon stood in the middle of the large, dark kitchen and found himself reluctant to do anything at all. Finally he said, ‘This house must burn.’
‘Oh, do you think so? Isn’t that a bit much?’
‘This house must burn,’ he insisted, louder this time.
‘All the people will burn too. That’s a bit unfair. There’s a lot of kids here, you know.’
‘I care nothing for humanity. This house will burn.’
‘But the thing is… you don’t really want to do that – do you, Karpagnon?’
Karpagnon scanned his Function Drives. It was true, he was detecting… what was that? Reluctance? Had this strange, prattling woman, who was also the most dangerous warrior in the universe, interfered with his base programming?
‘Do you want to know why you’re reluctant, Karpagon?’
‘I am not reluctant,’ he lied.
‘Strategy! That’s all. Proper military strategy. I mean, you’re a DeathBorg 400 on an undercover mission on planet Earth – burning this house down will only draw attention to you.’
Karpagnon considered. ‘Correct!’ he declared.
‘So. Here’s a compromise. Instead of burning the house down, why don’t we… turn the heating up really high!’
‘The heating?’
‘Yeah. That’ll show ’em! They’ll be sweating all night, the human fools! Oh, those sheets will be dripping.’
‘But I require vengeance,’ protested Karpagnon. ‘Vengeance isn’t turning the heating up.’ But he couldn’t help noticing he’d already twisted the heating control dial right up to maximum.
‘Well done, Karpagnon! They’ll know better than to mess with you in future. Now let’s get out of here and leave these puny humans to get uncomfortably hot!’
‘No!’ said Karpagnon.
‘Oh, come on! This escape is taking forever. I mean, I like to draw them out a bit, but this is ridiculous.’
‘First I must destroy the human known as Dr Petrie.’
‘Oh, OK. If we must, we must. Let’s pop along and destroy Dr Petrie, then. Where would we find him this time of night?’
As usual, Dr Petrie had been working late in his office. When Karpagnon slipped silently through the door (maximum stealth mode), he saw Petrie sprawled in his chair, with his head hanging over the back. He was snoring so heavily it almost seemed to rattle the teacup on his desk. Under the teacup Karpagnon noticed a scatter of papers, mostly with photographs pinned to them. The photographs were all of David – Karpagnon’s hologram disguise.
‘Well then, what shall we do with him?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Melt him? Miniaturise him? Random phase his atomic structure? I don’t really know how to do that last one, but it sounds cool.’
Again, Karpagnon found himself reluctant to act. What was wrong with him? He hated Dr Petrie more than any other living thing – and he hated quite a lot of living things.
‘Why do you hate him, Karpagnon?’
Karpagnon hesitated. ‘He… humiliated me.’
‘Oh, I don’t think he meant to. He was trying to help. Remember, he thinks you’re a little boy called David with a dissociative personality disorder. Not a DeathBorg 400 from the weapon groves of Villengard.’
‘David is a fiction.’
‘Oh, yeah, course he is. I know that. But you see, you put so much detail into the disguise. Abandoned by his parents, all those people being so cruel to him… I don’t think Dr Petrie was humiliating you, I think he was trying to help. He just didn’t know you were a DeathBorg – you must get that a lot.’
‘No matter. I will not be pitied, I will have my vengeance. He will be destroyed.’
‘Fair enough. Your call. On you go, then – melt away.’
But once again Karpagnon found himself strangely reluctant to act. And Dr Petrie just kept on snoring, louder and louder.
‘You know what the problem is,’ said the Doctor at last. ‘It’s strategy again. If you destroy Dr Petrie, it will draw attention to you. You can’t blow your cover like that. So what we need is another clever compromise.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Well. Instead of boring old destroying him, why don’t we do the one thing human beings really can’t stand? Why don’t you… go with me on this… draw a moustache on him!’
‘Drawing a moustache is not proper vengeance,’ said the DeathBorg 400 as it reached for a marker pen.
At last the front door stood in front him – unguarded, noted Karpagnon, with grim satisfaction. Freedom was now only inches away.
‘What are you waiting for?’ said the Doctor in his ear.
Karpagnon reached for the door handle. Hesitated.
‘Don’t worry, it’s quiet out there,’ said the Doctor. ‘No Cybermen or Daleks. Not even a trace of an Umpty Um.’
Karpagnon steeled himself and opened the door. The cold air filled his lungs. The wind rushed in the trees, and distantly there was the sound of traffic. The sky was packed with clouds but the moon peeked through.
‘Lungs?’ said the Doctor. ‘What do you mean lungs?’
Karpagnon took another breath. So cold. He found himself shivering.
‘How can you have lungs if you’re a DeathBorg 400? DeathBorgs don’t have lungs.’
A cat was slinki
ng along a wall. It glanced at Karpagnon and flicked out of sight. The traffic sighed, and a train rattled, and the wind stirred in his hair.
The Doctor’s voice was gentler now. ‘Close the door, David. You’ll catch your death.’
‘No!’ roared the mind of Karpagnon. ‘No, this shall not be!’ He strode out into the night. The concrete was freezing on his bare feet and the wind tugged at his pyjamas. He stumbled to a halt, and found himself rooted to the spot. He wasn’t programmed for terror, but somehow he was feeling it now.
‘Come on, David,’ said the Doctor. ‘You understand now, don’t you? I know you do!’
‘Cease your words of lies!’ cried Karpagnon.
‘If you’re tired of my words, David, why don’t you take out the earpiece.’
David reached to his ear. Then he tried the other ear. ‘There is no earpiece.’
‘More to the point, there are ears. Why would a DeathBorg have ears, David? A DeathBorg with ears and lungs? What kind of cyborg is that?’
‘But I hear your voice.’
‘I’m not in your ear, David. I’m in your head. And you’re not a DeathBorg, you are a little boy called David Karpagnon and it is way past your bedtime.’
‘This is not true. You are using your Time Lord powers to disable and corrupt my data systems.’
‘No, I’m not. And I couldn’t if I wanted to. Do you know why I couldn’t, David?’
‘The Doctor is known to have telepathic skills beyond those of ordinary mortals.’
‘Who told you that? How do you know so much about me? Where did you learn it all from?’
‘I…’
Karpagnon broke off, as a terrible truth unfolded in his mind.
‘I…’
It couldn’t be true. It simply couldn’t. And yet, as he stood there in the cold and the dark, he saw that it was as true as anything ever could be. He took another breath of the freezing air and said the words out loud: ‘I watched you on television.’
‘Yeah. Great show, isn’t it?’
‘Doctor Who.’
‘That’s the one. That’s me. But I’m not allowed to call myself that on screen. I don’t know why, it’s a brilliant name.’
‘You’re… not real.’
‘Well not in the limited sense of real, no. But I kept you straight tonight, didn’t I? I’m real enough for that.’
‘You’re a character… in a TV show.’
‘Yes, that’s right, I am. But really, I’d like to direct.’
David stood in silence. He barely felt the cold now.
‘Do you like the music, by the way? Always scares me. Umpty-um umpty-um, umpty-um umpty-um.’
‘I don’t understand…’
‘Well it’s a scary noise, isn’t it? I always get wound up when I know I’m about to hear it. That’s why I start shouting towards the end of episodes.’
‘But how can you be in my head?’
‘I go where there are monsters to fight. We’ve been fighting monsters tonight, you and me. You see, that’s the story of the music, I always think. The Umpty-Ums, that’s the noise of the monsters. But then it goes Woo-Hoo. I think the Woo-Hoo is me riding to the rescue.’
‘You can’t rescue anyone. You’re just a story.’
‘We’re all stories in the end. But do you know what a story is, David? It’s an idea. And do you know what an idea is? It’s a thought so big and so clever it can outlive you. It can fly out of your head, and into other people’s. Like I’m in your head, right now. Keeping you right. Never cruel, never cowardly. Always the Doctor.’
David sighed. He was starting to feel the cold again. He looked back at the house, which suddenly looked so warm.
‘It won’t be easy,’ said the Doctor. ‘None of it will be easy, ever. But I’ll always be there.’
David walked back into the house, went up the stairs, and got into bed.
A few hours later David woke up and stared at the ceiling for a while, thinking about things.
‘I get very scared sometimes,’ he said.
‘Woo-hoo,’ said the Doctor.
4
Doctor Who and the Time War
by Russell T Davies
This was never meant to exist.
Way back, maybe early 2013, Tom Spilsbury, the editor of Doctor Who Magazine, asked me if I wanted to contribute to DWM’s great 50th special. Maybe addressing that huge gap in Doctor Who lore, how did the Eighth Doctor regenerate into the Ninth?
I said well, yeah, no, but, isn’t that best left to the imagination? If I write a script, it would be too real, too fixed, too canonical. But Tom’s never one to give up. He said okay, what if you wrote, say, the final pages of a Target novel? About the last days of the Time War. The Doctor’s final moments. And we could present it like a surviving fragment of the Novel That Never Was, so it exists in that half-real space of the spin-offs, possible but not factual, just slightly canon, if you so choose.
Okay, Tom. You temptress. I’m in.
So I wrote this. It even starts mid-sentence, as if you’ve just turned to the last pages. Lee Binding created a beautiful cover. We were excited! And then Tom said, I’d better run this past Steven Moffat, just in case…
Oh, said Steven. Oh.
How could we have known? That The Day of the Doctor would have an extra Doctor, a War Doctor? And Steven didn’t even tell us about Night of the Doctor, he kept that regeneration a complete surprise! He just said, sorry, can you lay off that whole area? I agreed, harrumphed, went to bed and told him he was sleeping on the settee that night.
So the idea was snuffed aborning.
Until 2020. When a science fiction-shaped virus came along to change our lives (honestly, I’ve written the end of the world 100 times, but I never imagined everyone just sitting at home). Emily Cook of DWM created the livestream of The Day of the Doctor, then turned to Rose, and asked me if I had anything to offer…? At exactly the same time, Chris Chibnall emailed me, saying we need the Doctor more than ever these days, and could I think of any material?
By some miracle this file still existed. And then, like a story within a story, I discovered that this chapter was nothing to do with Tom and DWM after all! My memory had become a blurry spinning vortex. Truth is, it was actually written for BBC Books and was going to be part of their 50th Anniversary book, The Doctor: His Lives and Times. Lee still had his illustration (naturally, because he was under a Binding contract, oh I’m so funny). And strangely, looking back, it’s funny how things fit; the Moment is described here as oak and brass, which isn’t far from the final idea (I don’t mean Billie). I wonder; I suspect, without realising, if Steven and I were both riffing off Eighth Doctor-style designs, maybe…?
More importantly, the idea has come of age. This chapter only died because it became, continuity-wise, incorrect. But now, the Thirteenth Doctor has shown us Doctors galore, with infinite possibilities.
All Doctors exist.
All stories are true.
So come with me now, to the distant reefs of a terrible war, as the Doctor takes the Moment and changes both the universe and themselves forever…
but the Daleks and the Time Lords scream in vain, too far away to stop him now. And so the Doctor stands alone.
He looks out from his eyrie, across the wreckage of a thousand worlds. Below him, fragments of the Time War, broken reefs of Gallifrey and Skaro washed up into this backwater, to rot. His creaking wooden platform shivers with ice, a mile high, atop fragments of Morbius’s Red Capitol, its vile towers fused into the black, friable spires of Yarvelling’s Church. And yet the Doctor can see glimpses of Earth. The planet had been replicated a million times, to become the bullets fired into the Nightmare Child’s skull, and now splinters of human society have gouged themselves into the wasteland below – relics of Mumbai, shards of Manhattan, a satire of Old London Town. Remnants of better days.
The Doctor looks down.
Her skeleton lies at his feet. The bones relax into dust, and she is gone.
The Doctor looks up.
In front of him, at the edge of the platform, a brass handle, mounted in a simple oak casement; the only remaining extrusion of the Moment into this world, the rest of its vast bulk hidden, chained to an N-form, churning behind the dimensional wall. Screaming to be used.
He steps forward. He grips the handle. He wonders what his last words should be. He decides that last words are useless. He pulls the handle down, flat.
The Moment happens.
The universe sings.
The war ends.
Surrounded by brightness, the Doctor sees the sky above parting to reveal, just as Bettan and the Deathsmiths of Goth had predicted, the final event. Gallifrey Original convulses and rolls into flame. Its concentric rings of Dalek warships become silhouettes, then ashes, and then –
The Doctor falls. Every atom around him is sucked upwards, towards the fire, but he alone is capable of falling, saved – or damned – by the Moment’s shadow. Above him, he feels the Time Lock solidify, sealing off the war from reality, and as his body tumbles out of existence, into plasmaspace, then foulspace, then beyond, the Doctor leans into the fall, head first, arms wide, diving into infinity.
Alone.
Except…
There.
Something else.
Falling.
Spinning…?
A whirl of blue. That faithful blue. Then a rectangle of white, widening, a doorway, coming closer, towards him and, as the grind of ancient engines reaches a crescendo, he thinks: I’m going home.
The Doctor lies on the TARDIS floor. His bones broken from the fall, his hearts hollowed by his loss. Around him, the console room buckles, warps, shudders, still suffering from the High Council’s resurrection of the Master, long ago. It aches for a new shape. ‘Me too,’ mutters the Doctor with a grim smile, though he knows regeneration is impossible. The Moment has fixed his existence, and this life is his last.
He wonders what age he’s finally reached. The Time War used years as ammunition; at the Battle of Rodan’s Wedding alone, he’d aged to five million and then regressed to a mewling babe, merely from shrapnel. Now, the ache in his bones feels… one thousand years old? Well. Call it nine hundred. Sounds better.