Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

by Steve Cole

  Darkness swills through his mind and he forces a smile, ready and yet never ready for the end. Still, no final words.

  But then…

  Can it be…?

  He feels it once more.

  That old, deep stirring in every bone and muscle and thought. The joy. The terror. The change, the impossible change!

  Amazed, he lifts up his hand. Stares, fascinated, as the skin ripples with a curious new gold.

  Of course. She tricked him, right at the end. Her final kiss was not a goodbye; she imprinted the Restoration within him. His lifecycle has been reset, the new man lurching outwards to be born. So this is the meaning of her final song: a whole new body to expiate the guilt. He might even pass the Restoration to another, one day.

  Suddenly, they come, in a rush, his final words. He says them aloud, but there is no one to hear, allowing them to be imagined and imagined again for ever.

  Then his nuclei turn into stars.

  Every pore blazes with light. A volcano of thick, viscous energy cannons from his neck, his hands, his feet, his guts, his hearts, his soul –

  It stops.

  The Doctor sits up. The new Doctor, next Doctor, now Doctor. He lifts up his new fingers to touch his new head. His new chin. His new nose. His new ears. He takes a deep breath into his new, dry, wide lungs. He says his first word.

  ‘Blimey!’

  5

  Rose: The Sequel

  by Russell T Davies

  Chapter 21

  Revenge of the Nestene

  One little bit survived.

  A tiny nugget of Nestene Consciousness lived on. It had escaped the Doctor’s anti-plastic by hurrying into the substrata and hiding inside the nearest available shape. The body of a clown.

  Days before, the Nestene had posted sentries along the Embankment in the form of living statues, those strange humans who decide to earn a living by dressing up as clowns, robots or statues and then standing perfectly still, waiting for people to throw money at them. What an odd, odd species. But now the plastic guards had dissolved, except for one. A white-faced Pierrot. Well, half a face. Half a head, its right half, a crescent of head perched atop a ruffed neck and glittering silver bodysuit, with one eye, bright as insanity, and a bisected leering grin.

  The Half-Head Pierrot hauled itself up onto the opposite bank of the river and looked back at the grave of the Consciousness.

  The secret underground lair had collapsed, causing the whole of the London Eye to tilt forward and collapse into the Thames. Pods had broken free, bobbing on the surface, little people inside banging on the glass and screaming for help. The Half-Head half-smiled as the pods were caught in the suction as water poured down into the vast underground chasm, a whirlpool swallowing the pods and people and screams, down, down, down, gone.

  ‘Good!’ said the Pierrot, or tried to say, but this only resulted in a gout of dirty water jetting out of its open, plastic throat.

  It turned around to look at the remnants of London. In every direction, fires burned, and bodies lay in the streets, victims of the glorious invasion. The immediate area remained flooded, overwhelmed by the tsunami resulting from the Eye’s collapse. The streets of Westminster had become a stinking swamp.

  The clown stood tall upon the rubble. Overlooking floating cars and fallen buses and weeping survivors, as it formulated…

  A plan.

  It had to survive.

  To survive, and conquer this world.

  And more than that. To survive and conquer and then destroy the Doctor. Oh, but to defeat a Time Lord would need extra strength and greater cunning. Perhaps, thought the Consciousness, an alliance? A combination of the Doctor’s greatest enemies, perhaps even the mighty empires of Daleks and Cybermen combined, to rid the universe of this pestilence.

  An excellent plan.

  But then – a spasm of pain, stabbing its plastic guts. The Nestene was dying. Its single cell could not sustain for much longer. But it knew it contained the energy for one last reconfiguration. If it burnt up its clown molecules in a final polystorm, it could plasticise itself into a new, albeit hollow shape. But what?

  Ahead, there lay a palace. The ruins of this little country’s government, river water still pouring out of its shattered windows. Inside, amongst the nation’s crowns and sceptres, the Nestene might find something it could use.

  The silver clown lurched to the opposite side of the bridge. A woman looked at its half-head and screamed. The clown pushed her over the balustrade and she fell, with a wail. It staggered on. Its single eye staring, furious, fixed on the clocktower. The palace seemed to be calling to the Nestene, summoning it to the halls of power. Here, the creature would find its own kind, surely.

  It clambered over fallen masonry, waded through stinking pools, swatted aside screaming humans, fuelled onwards by memories. Remembering the day Nestenia fell.

  Not so long ago, the seventeen planets of the Plastic Conjunction had been at peace. After aeons of war, the Nestene Consciousness had abandoned the old ways, and entered into rapport with the Embodiment of Gris. Joy and harmony prevailed! The food planets churned out ample supplies of smoke and oil; the Crown Consciousness basked in happiness, its ever-changing shape writhing in a pit of plastic gold. The Embodiment showered it with favours. Some said the Nestene had found love at last.

  And then the skies opened.

  Onto hell.

  It was, the legends said afterwards, the edge of a Time War, a battleground beyond comprehension. A tumble of planets fell out of a rip in space, like stray bullets from some epic offstage gunfight. Copies of planets, stolen from different seconds of their existence; a hundred orange worlds, known as Gallifrey, a thousand black cinders once called Skaro, a dozen small blue-and-green planets which the Nestene recognised from an old campaign: Earth. A rolling, tumbling, spinning, bouncing cosmic destruction unfurled, the food planets smashed by many Skaros, the Crownworld pulverised by various Gallifreys, the Maternity Reefs crushed by 57 Earths.

  And then, beyond physical destruction, time itself advanced as a weapon. A wave of Early washed over the Consciousness, reducing it to helpless baby tendrils. A cloud of Late reduced the foodstocks to dust. A blizzard of Tick-tock sent the Embodiment insane.

  All in one second.

  And then it was gone.

  The war was sucked back into its breach, beyond the normal universe, leaving only silence. The ruins of Nestenia and its empire lay glinting in the light of a cold and dying sun.

  ‘No more,’ thought the staggering Pierrot, as it entered the ruins of the palace. ‘No more!’ The Nestene had sworn revenge after the Time War, deliberately targeting this ridiculous Earth. But now to be defeated again, by a Time Lord and human together…! This time, its revenge would be brilliant. And ruthless. And subtler than anyone could guess, even if it took fifteen years or more.

  It had reached the interior corridors. A wet green carpet underfoot. The building had been rotting, long before today’s disaster, and sections of both roof and floor had now caved in. The Thames mingled with the stink of open sewers. It seemed appropriate, somehow.

  But again, that stab of pain. The cell of Consciousness dying. Time was running out, as the clown shambled onwards, and then…

  A body. On the floor. Crushed by a concrete beam.

  And yet, the clown felt something in the substrata. A scent, a shiver, a lingering promise from the human’s form. Reeking of things which the Nestene recognised. Ambition. Lust. Greed. Joy. Power.

  The clown grinned. A grin so wide, its half-mouth split apart and the top of its head fell off. But the now-eyeless quarter-headed Pierrot was unstoppable. Giggling from its throat-tube as it crouched down. It held the hand of the body and began the final process,

  Transformation!

  The clown began to glow, its atoms becoming furnaces. And the human glowed, its cells separating to feed the ferocious polystorm.

  In a swirl of bright particles, the Pierrot ceased to be, and the human sca
ttered away into nothingness.

  And something new took shape.

  It stood proud. Alone, in a dark, wet, wrecked corridor. A new, true Auton, cradling the last of the Nestene Consciousness within.

  A perfect, plastic copy of the human male.

  It turned to consider its reflection in the broken glass of an interior door, its substrata probing the remains of the mammal’s memory. He had power, this man. He had authority. He had the potential to go so much further.

  The Auton smiled at himself. Loving this new self. The suit. The body. The face.

  The blond hair.

  Oh, this was going to be fun!

  6

  Rory’s Story

  by Neil Gaiman

  SCRIPT TITLE

  Written by

  Name of First Writer

  Based on,

  If Any

  Address

  Phone Number

  DOCTOR WHO TWITTER INTRODUCTION FOR THE DOCTOR’S WIFE.

  INT. RORY’S HOUSE – DAY. OR NIGHT.

  Hello Arthur. So, the idea of this is it’s Rory Williams, eight years after he was sent back in time to 1938. So it’s 1946.

  And because you’re doing this at home, wear anything you can that could conceivably have been worn in 1946. A white shirt and tie, or a string vest, or (if you don’t have anything knocking around) DON’T WORRY.

  And shoot it against a blank wall if you can. The idea is that Rory is dictating his biography

  RORY

  So. Hullo baby Anthony. This is Rory Williams, dictating my book for you. I’m not actually known as a writer. My wife, your new mum, Amelia – Amy – she writes the Melody Malone books. You’ll read them when you’re older.

  RORY (CONT’D)

  So. It’s 1946. And even knowing how the war was going to turn out, I’m glad it’s finally over. And I’m mostly impressed by people. They can get through so much, just by being brave, and optimistic, and resilient. Next week, little Anthony, you’ll be coming home, here, to me and your new mum. Which is why I’m recording all this for you, on the only working smartphone in the world.

  RORY (CONT’D)

  Right. In previous chapters, I’ve talked about how I met your mum, at school, about 43 years from now. How we got engaged. How I was killed by an old lady alien but it was a dream. Then how I was killed by a Silurian and stopped existing completely. How I was a Plastic Centurion waiting for your mum for about 2,000 years. And then how the universe ended and I died again.

  RORY (CONT’D)

  Then we got married and then I was shot on a dam, and then I drowned, but I was rescued by a mermaid, and your mum gave me CPR. Which brings me to the chapter that follows. In which your mum had to deal with me getting very old, and angry, and, well, dead. Right.

  RORY (CONT’D)

  So. This is the next chapter of what happened to me and your mother when we used to hang around with… your future brother-in-law. I call this chapter: ‘I’m the Pretty One.’

  Amy (off) shouts, via the magic of technology:

  AMY (O.S.)

  Rory! Stop faffing about in there and come and help me paint the baby’s room!

  And Rory shuts off the camera…

  7

  One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes

  by Neil Gaiman

  The Corsair ran down the dusty stairs as fast as she possibly could without losing control and tumbling headfirst, followed, in a stately and much more dignified way, by a large, levitating metal-and-leather box, slightly bigger than a coffin.

  They were in the City Obsidian, deserted and forbidden these last hundred years or more, in the Imperial Edifice of Infinite Steps. The steps were, in truth, finite, but there were an awful lot of them. It had taken her hour after weary hour to walk up them. Going up them, though, had been easier than running down.

  The stairs were of volcanic glass, they went down for a very long way, and nobody, the Corsair reflected, as she went down them in a headlong sort of run, ought ever to go down them at a headlong run.

  But there was an army close behind her. Not the kind of army that you’d actually want to have behind you, shouting things like ‘We’d follow you into battle or anywhere, Corsair,’ or even ‘Don’t worry! We’ve got your back!’ This was the other kind of army: the kind someone would normally deploy, if that someone was, say, Supreme Leader of several inhabited star systems, against the inhabitants of a very small planet that was really, deeply irritating them, with instructions to the army not to come back until the small planet was an even smaller lump of utterly uninhabitable rock, and with explicit orders to leave no survivors. Only in this case, the army wasn’t being deployed against anything as big as a planet, but just against one woman with an impressively plumed hat, running as fast as she could down an almost endless flight of stairs…

  ‘Honestly, I should be flattered,’ the Corsair had observed, precisely ten minutes earlier, as the first of the troopships had descended from the stars on a pillar of fire.

  She had been in one of the topmost rooms in the tallest tower of the Imperial Edifice when the army landed. She had just attached a small silver box to the wall, trying cosmic cheat code after cosmic cheat code in an attempt to open the door of the final room.

  ‘Flattened, more like,’ her parrot had replied gloomily. ‘What did you think was going to happen? You set off an alarm in a forbidden city on a planet that’s off-limits, and that’s local security arriving to drag us outside and make us miserable. Let’s get back to the Esperanza. Now.’

  The parrot was a glorious blue from its hyacinth-blue wings and tail to its dusty deep blue head, with a golden yellow splash around each eye. The Corsair, in contrast, was dark brown of skin and unlikely scarlet of hair. Her coat was viridian green, her clothes of tan leather and dark-cherry-coloured velvet were patched and battered. The plumes in her tricorn hat were hyacinth blue, and had been donated by the parrot following its last moult.

  ‘Nope. Not leaving yet. Job’s not finished,’ said the Corsair. ‘The Hand of Omega isn’t going to steal itself.’

  ‘Whatever this Time Lord is paying you,’ said the parrot, as it watched the troopships land, ‘it honestly isn’t enough.’

  ‘This particular Time Lord is going to pay me with the satisfaction,’ said the Corsair, with a smile, ‘of a job well done.’

  The parrot was still trying to come up with a sufficiently unimpressed reply when the silver box blinked and beeped to inform them that a cheat code had worked. Simultaneously the far wall faded from existence, to reveal an unlit room on the other side of it, containing what appeared to be a large leather steamer trunk.

  The parrot fluttered off the Corsair’s shoulder and landed on the steamer trunk. ‘Is this it?’ it asked, unimpressed.

  ‘Yup. The Hand of Omega. Very important. Stellar manipulator. You can turn a star inside out with this little rascal.’

  Parrots can’t sniff, they don’t have the nasal equipment for it. Still, the parrot performed a perfect impression of the sniffing noise the Corsair made when she was told something she was not going to allow herself to be impressed by. The Corsair tried her best not to smile, and failed.

  ‘Right,’ said the Corsair. ‘Back to the Esperanza!’ She tugged, with all her strength, at one of the steamer trunk’s handle-like protuberances. The trunk moved perhaps a couple of millimetres.

  ‘Mm,’ said the parrot, unimpressed. ‘I’m not sure how we’re going to carry that down several miles of stairs. And when I say “we” here, I mean “you”, because I won’t actually be carrying anything. It’s the wings. And the load-bearing capacity.’

  There were loud booms from outside: hundreds of transporters, each transporter filled with scores of soldiers, were blasting towards them from the troopships.

  ‘Maybe we should, y’know, leave the box here and just fly for our lives,’ said the parrot. ‘It’s not worth getting dead over.’

  ‘Next time round,’ said the Corsair, thoughtfully, ‘or perhaps
the time after that, I want a body with muscles. Big. Strapping. Made for hauling things. With one of those faces people just trust.’

  She made no move to leave, though. She just stood and stared at the heavy box. She kicked it, hard, and hurt her foot through her boot.

  ‘You’re not helping,’ she said to the box.

  ‘I’m advising you on a sensible course of action,’ said the parrot. ‘They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Let’s run!’

  There was a crackling noise and a ghost appeared in the centre of the room, drained of all colour: an elderly male with white hair and a black fur hat. The hat rose to a triangular peak. The figure flickered, looked around the room irritably, and then focused on a corner that didn’t actually contain the Corsair.

  ‘Do you, um. Have the, the thing yet?’ it asked the empty corner.

  ‘I’ve got it. I just can’t move it. It’s heavy,’ said the Corsair. ‘You didn’t mention that it was going to be heavy. I would have brought movers. I’m thinking about just pushing it out of the window.’

  ‘Good gracious me. Don’t do that. Whatever are you thinking of? You could destroy the continent! Have you tried talking to it?’

  ‘Talking to it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s sentient. More or less. It will certainly appreciate being addressed civilly, young lady. Politeness costs nothing.’ He pulled a pocket watch from the pocket of his long, black coat. ‘But hurry up. We are running out of time.’

  ‘We’re Time Lords,’ said the Corsair. ‘We have all the time there is.’

  ‘No excuse for wasting it then,’ said the elderly gentleman testily. He crackled, momentarily, in black and white, and vanished.