The following story deals with potentially highly triggering subject matter. This is an unavoidable consequence of a story that is very personally and politically important to tell for this author, but I feel obligated to advise discretion for more sensitive readers, particularly people sensitive to issues of gender. I have consulted a number of people in how best to tell this story, and have softened the blows where possible, but I accept that as a cisgender white man, I cannot fully understand the weight of certain aspects of this story. Proceed with care.
And if you wish for the fullest warning possible, the most triggering scene in question begins with “We have to go!” and ends with “Nothing else would be acceptable.” The beginning and end are also coloured red, like so. I will not judge you if you skip it.
The suburb is an ordinary suburb. The house is an ordinary house. The family living inside is an ordinary family: the Sternbergs, two loving husbands, one sweet son. And, of course, the landing shuttle from the nearest star system is as ordinary as it gets. Also, it’s red.
Lets go to the beach, each, let’s go get away
The Sternbergs are gathered around the dining room table, the nice plates and silverware placed gently on clean placemats. Daniel, a mustached sort of father, black hair speckled with gray, scoops out the baked beans. Brandishing tongs, his husband Patrick flips bratwurst off plate, still sizzling from the grill, a cheeky smile all the while. He’s beaming at his son, bright green eyes glowing with love. And little Simon waits eagerly, hoping to sneak the first bite when nobody’s looking. Under the table, he’s squeezing a little plush ogre far, far too tight, its skin bulging under the pressure, like a pimple rammed full of stuffing. Its felt skin is stained by spilt dinners gone by.
They, say, what they gonna say
It’s the perfect picture of the perfect family, in a neighborhood of perfect families. And like any perfect suburb, of course, it’s entirely fake.
Have a think, clink, have a good night
“Simon, are you sure you’re not feeling up to the welcome party?” asks Daniel as he slips into his wooden chair. “The Planetary Association really is insisting we come.”
Good people like me, it’s hard to come by...
Simon pulls his sausage out of his mouth, where he’d been shoving it without even bothering to cut it into pieces first. He gives his most petulant glare, the sort that most adults use swearing as shorthand for, and a firm “No.”
Patrick pats Simon on the back. “Our little champ’s not feeling well, Dan. It’s okay,” he reassures his husband. “I’ll go along tonight, make some excuses. You two can go to next one. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
Daniel tugs at his mustache, the sort of anxious habit that substitutes for past, more destructive ones. The sort one gives up to raise a kid. “Are you sure, Petal?” he asks.
There’s a pause as Patrick chuckles, his brain flashing back through so many moments. His widest, cheekiest smile is enough to defuse the tension. “I’m always sure. I’ve got great judgement. I married you, after all!” It’s a smile that spreads across his entire face, through those deep emerald eyes, crinkling the nose just right, lining up every little bump and mole and wrinkle to make the most beautiful, comforting face there ever was.
It’s fortunate Daniel takes this opportunity to lap up every little detail, because he’ll never see that smile again.
Cold. That’s the weather outside, the muggy summer air wooshing away with the falling of the sun. Patrick shivers as he walks alone to the party, only his whistling for company. Perhaps he’s thinking, “I should have brought a jacket.” Or perhaps, on some level, he knows what’s coming.
He stops in the road for a moment, about halfway there. Something silver catches his eye, slithering through the street. He tells himself it’s just his imagination.
...I’m on the floor, floor, I love to dance
The party is warm and bright, filling the spacious house with golden air. Daniel relishes the feeling as it flows into his frozen limbs. It’s like his skin is being lightly lapped at by flames, just enough to sizzle pleasantly and spark him back to life.
So give me more, more ‘till I can’t stand
Perfect little appetisers sit on shelves. Not the normal little frozen cocktail weenies and sad, sad potato skins of the typical suburban party. These all pop with color and flavor from a billion, billion worlds and a billion, billion cuisines. Patrick helps himself to the Apalapucian caviar. It’s divine.
Get on the floor, floor, like it’s your last chance
“Patrick, sweetie, so good to see you!” smiles the Hostess, beehive hairdo and lime green dress, taking him by the arm. They’d certainly never met before, Patrick is sure. But she’s already guiding him through the crowd, insisting on being the best of friends. “We’ve got the welcome packages just through here.”
If you want more, more, then here I am
Music buffets him from all sides, electronic beats dropping to a chorus of children’s voices. It’s a bit catchy and a bit camp rubbish, but that just makes it all the more charming. Doesn’t it? He listens:
Starships were meant to fly
Down the hallway, up some stairs. Patrick finds his eyes pointing every direction but ahead; the house instills a bourgeoise sense of wonder, so spacious and tastefully decorated he can’t take it all in. And yet, it’s hard to register place; it all looks so similar in its carefully oriented aesthetic, so easy to drown in. His mental map of the place is a muddle. And so, when the Hostess takes Patrick to a door, simple and set into the wall, he hasn’t a clue how they got there. She smiles patiently at him as she places one hand against a panel to the side. Her touch is so gentle and delicate, her manicured, uncalloused fingers barely brushing the surface. Only her ring, a showy gold and diamond affair, is hard enough to make the slightest of scraping noises. As she pulls her hand away, the door lifts with a hissing kshuk!
Hands up, and touch the sky
Those slim fingers move again, gesturing into the room. Patrick’s steps plod along to the rhythm of the music, whisking him inside. It’s a bare, a plain white cubicle. Grates line the floor, the sound of trickling faintly perceptible. The smell of food drowns in the intensely present scent of antiseptic.
Can’t stop, ‘cuz we’re so fly
The Hostess glances him up and down before she speaks. “Do you, Patrick Sternberg, consent to the rules of the colony?”
Let’s do this one more time
Patrick smiles. He’d been told to expect this. “I consent.”
Starships were meant to fly
“And do you consent to the mandatory implants?”
Hands up, and touch the sky
Patrick pauses. He’s read it all already. He knows what to expect, but still he pauses, weighing the costs. He thinks back to all those months of asteroid belt trailer parks. Of overdue bills. Of schools run by century-old robots, of drinking water and protein recycled from bodily matter, of one small room to run the lives of the whole family. He thinks back to the house he has just moved into, with its spacious bedrooms, its meticulously tiled kitchens with all the fixtures, its cozy nook by the fireplace to read to Simon before bed. He tastes the crumbs of biscuit and lingering trace of caviar lodged between his teeth, his tongue whittling away to dig the irritation out. The flavor remains amazing. He sees the faces of Simon and Daniel. His boys. What’s a little bit of metal in his head to that? It’s a small thing to surrender to.
Let’s do this one last time
“I consent.”
Can’t stop, we’re KIDZ BOP and we’re taking over
The Hostess nods, removing her hand from the panel. “Good luck, and welcome to the family.”
The door is closing now. The music is gone. All sound is, for a long moment, gone, except his heart, which is hammering like a million soldiers marching perfectly in time, closer and closer, faster and faster.
The pupils of his vibrant green eyes dilate as the hormones pound through his body, the flecks of gold contracting as the muscles behind the colors contract and twitch. He knows something is coming.
And then the screaming starts.
Outside the cubicle, the Hostess smiles to herself, perhaps even relishing the faintest trace of his cries, muffled and distant. She hangs a sign on the door before leaving, in bright red:
“Do not disturb: Upgrade in progress.”
GOLDEN AGE wrITTEN BY kevin burnard
“You did this!”
The monster shrivels away, fluids dripping, saliva slopping, organs-- best not to think about it. The claw, desperately snatching. A woman’s scream. “Ace! Help!” Still screaming. Then silence.
Again, best not to think about it.
A smouldering battlefield. A lawn chair. A blanket. A thermos of tea. It seems an odd mix to Ace, but after the horrors of the day, it’s comforting. The shade cast by the wooden blue box behind them falls on their backs, whisking away the dull glare red of the sun into gray, murky shadows on the mud. It hums ever so slightly, that magical, living, bigger-on-the-inside wonder that is their time and space machine’s low murmur joining with the twittering of alien birds to create a strange kind of natural hymn. For all the horror below, there’s something rather beautiful to it, too.
“Did we do good, Professor?”
Next to her stands the Doctor, ancient and incomprehensible as ever. His lips twitch as he considers, readying for yet another ponderous purr. “The Repozans will never exploit the J’boonies again. We ended one of the great injustices of this galaxy’s third great age.”
“But was it worth it?” Ace asks.
The Doctor’s all twinkle, but there’s a steel to him all the same. “We fought the battle we had to. We helped the good guys win. We did everything we can. I’d call that good.”
“I just don’t feel it, you know? Everything that happened, it was just wicked, and not in the good way.”
The Doctor shifts his gaze from the burning bodies below, his piercing little eyes losing their twinkle. He stares at Ace, and she knows it’s the saddest thing she’s ever seen, like all the colors of the time vortex just went black and cold. The words, when they come, are so fragile, so delicate. “Are you alright, Ace?”
- The air is sweat and tomato soup.
Manisha scratches one sopping sock with her fraying work shoe. Switch, and the other foot. She needs to buy new shoes. She needs to buy a lot of things. She has the money to buy very few things, and the time to do even less so.
Her eyes slip to the book she has, stowed under the counter. On a good day, she can get several chapters done in a shift. An impatient shadow wafts over her, perfume drifting into the sweaty, soupy haze. This is not a good day.
“What’ll it be?” Manisha asks, beaming. It’s so easy to beam at customers, because it’s so false. And there’s something satisfying about holding herself above that with kindness while the white moms and rich bankers demand this soup and that sandwich.
“That one!” points a well-to-do woman. She’s pointing at a soup tub that’s utterly, utterly empty. Naturally.
Manisha grits her teeth into that smile again. “Just a moment.”
She turns away, hands searching out the rags. It takes her a moment to do, as she’s so busy looking professional that actually being it is a nightmare. Exhausting enough having to do the work without maintaining composure. But Manisha knows what happens when she’s less than a star. She won’t let them see that again.
Wood crackles. The insects run in black rivers, pouring out of the walls. Nobody ever mentions that, do they? The black streams mingle with the heavy, grey, swirling air. And that’s when the heat rises, and rises, and rises--
Slosh.
A bit of fresh tomato basil goop careens out the corner of the pan as she lugs it to the counter, all over her work apron. Manisha makes sure not to even wince. Just be the happy, smiling server. Manisha sighs, glancing to the book again. It’s science fiction. Much as she’d love to be the hero, she thinks, she’s probably more the robot who turns up for half a second to give them freeze dried space ice cream, before vanishing forever.
Manisha smiles as she ladles out the soup. The woman doesn’t even say thank you. Manisha makes the mistake of looking up to see who it is. Never do that, just focus on the food. But damn. She is stunning, thick, stylized eyeliner around mischievous eyes, stylishly tattered clothes, piercings in places just wrong enough to be taboo but just right enough that you can’t stop thinking about them.
She clearly never thinks about Manisha.
“Manisha, need new apron?” asks Fred, the cook. He’s a nice lad, very poor, not good with English, but kinder than most English people, so it balances out.
“Nah, it’s fine,” says Manisha, ignoring thoughts of laundry expenses and hours. “I made sure not to wear anything nice underneath.”
And besides, the next customer’s already arrived.
- “Torrenting!” the Doctor exclaims. He’s in a mad rush about the TARDIS console, jabbing buttons and flinging levers.
“You what?” Even after all her time knowing the Doctor, his frenetic mood swings remained impossible to follow. One moment, so sad he could put freeze time with a look, the next, spinning and skipping with all the fire of a newborn star.
“A twenty-first century concept. Very vulgar, but very useful,” he explains, fingers jabbing buttons one color at a time. “One machine downloads files from another directly through these little data units called pieces. They bypass any other messy clients to get a much faster download speed. Very useful, so long as you’ve got a good antivirus.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
He rubs his hands, delighted as he always is when getting to teach her something. “Time Lords have something much similar. There’s plenty of renegades out there, stealing TARDISes of their own. And some of them are, well, newer.”
Ace grins. “Oh, I get it. So you want to nick bits off the more recent TARDISes rather than get a new motor. There was this old guy in Perivale just like you. He lurked a lot in junkyards for his old Anglia, it was like a frankencar! All different coloured doors and bonnet and stuff.”
The Doctor chuckles. “I don’t just want to. I have done! What would you say if I told you we could go anywhere you want?”
“Well, I’d say you already tell me that every time,” Ace zings back, “and we rarely ever land in the right spot. Usually because you decide to go on another evil-from-the-dawn-of-time-stopping errand instead.”
“And what if I told you that you could pilot us there?”
“Oh, wicked! You never let me have a go.”
The Doctor leads her around the console, to a new, rubbery fixture. “This,” he proclaims proudly, “is a telepathic interface. You put your hand in, like so, and the TARDIS will extrapolate from your thoughts and personal timeline where you want us to go.”
He takes her hand, easing it into the rubbery, eggy walls of the console fixture. It throbs and squeezes, pulling her in.
As the ship’s engines groan and wheeze, the ground rocking and shaking under her command, Ace finds herself laughing. If only the gang could see her now.
The laughter falters.
“This will help, won’t it?” asks the Doctor.
Ace doesn’t know how to answer. The more the Professor seems to care for her, the more she feels alone.
-
Manisha sits alone at the tiny wooden table, set for one, listening to the hum of the microwave. It’s early in the evening, but she has nowhere to go. She’s done her shifts for the day. There’s nothing left to do, really, but wait for dinner. And then find something else to do and escape her thoughts. Maybe she’ll go to sleep, she thinks. She’s certainly feeling very sore from the day’s work, and there’s a pleasant numbness in that, even if it smells of soiled clothes and sweaty skin.
The radio crackles and murmurs, trying vainly to break through the noise of the microwave. Manisha could turn up the volume, but there’s really not much point. She just likes the noise, it keeps her from feeling too alone. There’s something scary about being in a house alone, particularly after the incident. Every creak, every shadow, she just feels there’s something lurking. She catches herself looking up at the ceiling, cautiously, then scolds herself for it. What kind of attacker would hang from the roof? That’s just silly.
BEEP!
Manisha nearly falls out of her chair as the microwave lets out its triumphant bellow. The microwaved curry is done. Barely even registering her motions, she gets up, opening the microwave and prising out her dinner. Damn! It’s hot. Her fingers will hurt from this. But she doesn’t care. It’s just part of life. Just another nagging little sensation to complicate her numbness.
She sits again, prising off the plastic film and taking a bite. The fork she’s using is dirty from breakfast, but she can’t be bothered to clean dishes several times a day. The chicken is bland and stringy, with the curry a watery, poorly-mixed goop, only lukewarm despite the microwave’s best efforts. Manisha eats the whole thing anyway.
And then, she sits, doing nothing. She could get up. The couch would be more comfortable. But instead, Manisha just puts her head down on the table and closes her eyes.
Her dreams are a blur. Are they dreams? Is she awake? She’s back where she always finds herself when she lets herself drift away. Her mind is a map of streets, which she wanders, lost. There’s familiar landmarks: the old home, her shop, this shithole of a flat. There’s places out of stories she half remembers from a kid, all jumbled up. And there’s places she’s never seen before at all, gray houses of pure imagination. Some streets are empty. Some dark, some poorly lit. The lower streets are flooded in a murky, black fog. When she walks in one direction, she feels a pain in her head. She could walk out, she knows, back to the waking world. But she doesn’t. She walks toward the pain. Maybe this time, she’ll find the meaning she’s been missing.
Knock, knock-a knock knock.
Manisha grumbles, shifting her head but not opening her eyes. In her mind, the streets shift, as though being observed scared them out of their place.
Knock, knock-a knock knock. The familiar pattern is its own strange kind of music. Unlike the microwave and the faint voices on the radio, there’s a rhythm to it, a music. Calling her back to livelier times.
And with it comes a voice, calling from the past. “Maneesh! Open up!”
Ace? This surely has to be a dream. One of those doors in the streets of her mind she closed long ago.
“It’s me, doofus! I know you’re in there!”
Manisha opens her eyes in a groggy panic, stumbling to her feet. She finds herself accidentally knocking the microwavable tray to the floor, but that’s no matter. She can always clean it later.
“Manisha?”
Manisha takes the last, difficult steps to the door, steadying herself against the adjacent wall. Her hands rake her eyes, rolling away the dots of crust along the bottom. A deep breath, and she opens the door.
Ace McShane stands there, a massive smile on her face. She’s barely changed at all.
And when they hug, Manisha actually feels something.
-
Knuckles grip the bedpost. Sweat steams the air, and his heart beats out into the night. He mustn't fall over the edge. He mustn't dangle his arms or legs over the end. The monster will see him if he does.
He can hear the monster. It has a heartbeat, too. It never changes, even as his own races in his tiny, fragile chest. Ba bump. Ba bump. Like clockwork.
It’s not even the dark that scares him, not anymore. He can see the faintest blue light, spilling out from below, into the room. The monster has its own glow.
Mustn't slip. Mustn't fall. He’s tying the blanked to his neck now, in a frenzy. Then he’s looping that blanket to the bedpost, pulling it tight, holding him fast. The monster can’t take him if he never goes over the edge. That’s how monsters work. They can’t come over the bed. Right?
His eyes sweep to the window, out into the night air. The moon is at its highest. So long to go before it descends again. Too long before morning.
His eyes close, head drooping to his chest. He jolts up again. Bam. Bam. He punches his scrawny chest with all the strength his bony little fists can muster. It barely leaves a mark, but the slight trace of pain is good. It focuses him. Keeps him from slipping away. He won’t be taken tonight.
The metal monster’s human heart keeps on pounding into the dark, as Simon Sternberg huddles on the bed, refusing to let sleep take him. His mind races with every little painful, paranoid thought the night can muster.
But mostly, he’s wishing to know where his dad is.
On the floor lies a stuffed green ogre toy. Fuzz drifts away lightly into the night air as the metal bugs devour its innards.
The monster watches, its blank face pondering the still child above. The monster’s blue eyes fall upon the window and the night sky. There’s another monster out there, it knows, and a very good reason to fear. If only the child knew, well, that would be interesting data...
-
Manisha pours the tea. It’s just cheap bags, but it’ll have to do. Ace has the chair, so Manisha just stands.
“Where have you been all these years?” Manisha asks. It’s meant conversationally, she thinks, but it comes out angry and bitter. Who knows? Maybe that’s what it should be, anyway.
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe where I’ve been,” Ace chuckles. It’s almost smug, though clearly she doesn’t mean to be, as though her life has just been that exciting that she can’t keep it bottled up. “But what about you? I haven’t seen you in years!”
“Well, I moved away after the...thing. I graduated, did decent enough I guess,’ Manisha explains. Decent enough. That’s one way to describe the crushing disappointment of her A-levels. She knew she should have gotten top marks. Instead she just scraped by. Lazy, stupid girl. “I’ve been working in the supermarket. Cleaning and things.”
“So did I,” laughs Ace. “Till I dumped a milkshake on the manager’s head.”
Manisha can’t help but laugh. Same old Ace. “You did what?”
“And on a customer.”
“Must have been the proudest moment of your life,” Manisha says. God, that’d be a glorious achievement. Picturing the pink muck running down her own nagging boss’ oddly flat snout of a nose gives her great satisfaction.
“Not even top fifty,” Ace grins, before sipping her tea. She tries to hide her disgust with the weak brew, but Manisha can see it plain as day.
She feels lonely all of a sudden. Ace had her adventures, same as always. Pretty, white, rebellious Ace, never having to worry about the consequences. “Why did you never come to see me?”
Ace ponders a moment. “I never got the chance. I was so far away.” It’s not a total lie, is it? Never the right time or place. Sure, she stopped in contemporary Earth a few times. A lot of few times. But there were always monsters to fight, plans to execute. Surely that’s alright? But it doesn’t feel alright, and Manisha has the scent of her guilt:
“You didn’t just run away with some guy, did you?”
Ace laughs, loud and forced. “Of course not!”
“Ace?”
Ace ponders. There’s something she needs to prove, somehow. Manisha needs to see that. “Why don’t I show you?”
- Ace knows this is a bad idea. But Manisha deserves better. That’s what matters, right? Good intentions?
She and Manisha stand before the blue box. She reaches up to the lettering, finding the P and the key hidden behind it. The Doctor’s worst-kept secret. Fingers fumble at the lock, pushing the fake one aside to reveal the real one, which ace slides the key into. Ace has done this a thousand times, but showing Manisha has her nervous enough to feel like it’s the first.
“A lock hidden behind a lock?” Manisha laughs. “For this old crate? Isn’t that a bit excessive?”
She’s right, Ace thinks. It totally is. But she doesn’t admit it out loud. Instead, she swings open the doors proudly, ready to reveal the spectacle.
Manisha stands for a moment, shocked into wordless silence. She walks a full lap of the control room, slowly, glancing around every direction. All over the walls, all over the console, raking the floors, and then, yes, conquering her anxiety of attackers on the ceiling, her eyes devour the room around her. It’s impossible. It’s brilliant.
“How are you doing that?” Manisha asks, in awe.
“I’m not doing anything,” Ace says proudly, “It just comes like that. Wicked, isn’t it?”
“You’re kidding,” Manisha laughs, but looking into Ace’s face, she knows she’s not. And so she’s running, running with a life she hasn’t felt in years, through the large, white chamber. She’s marveling at the roundels, tracing her fingers along every last button, laughing at her distorted reflection in the central glass column. And then…
“Who is this?”
Peering around a doorway into the belly of the ship is the Doctor. He’s clearly just as surprised to see her as Manisha is him, but that doesn’t stop him from giving a cheery, “Hello! You must be Ace’s friend.”
“Hi,” Manisha responds, awkwardly. “Ace, I thought you said you didn’t run off with some guy.”
“No, of course not,” Ace declares. “He’s my assistant.” Seeing Manisha’s skepticism, she adds, “Well, my seventh assistant. He’s been replaced him a few times.” That’s not a lie, right?
The Doctor’s wet, blue eyes cut into her from across the room, that beautiful, biting concern a laser into her heart. “Ace, what’s going on?”
Ace takes a deep breath, steeling herself. She needs all the bravado she can muster. “I’m going to take Manisha for a short trip, then we’ll come right back. Why don’t you wait for us outside. Go grab some coffee or something.”
“Short trip?” Manisha asks from across the chamber. “We can’t leave this place yet! It’s too cool!”
“Don’t worry, Maneesh, you’ve seen nothing yet.” But it’s not Manisha’s eyes she’s focusing on, but the Doctor’s still daggers into her soul. Coming in closer, she takes his hand, trying to bring every bit of gut-punching emotion and young innocence to her voice. It’s been a while since she last guilt-tripped an adult; her mother stopped responding to such things years ago, and her teachers were a lot less sympathetic to the troubled teen image when said troubled teen started blowing up ceramic pigs. But the Professor, he still sees how young she is. Everyone is young and vulnerable to him. “Please, Professor,” she pleads, trying to sound as young and broken as she ever has. After a day on the battlefield, that comes surprisingly easily. Maybe the only lie is in telling herself this is just a ploy. “I need this.”
Those piercing blue eyes break away from her. She knows she’s won. “Coffees it is, then,” he declares, half-skipping his way to the door with a flourish of his umbrella. “I’ll get you each one for when you come back.”
He pauses at the door, about to close it, and then stops. “Travel safe,” he tells her, then shuts the door firmly.
“I will,” Ace promises. But only after he’s gone. It’s easier that way.
“Travel where?” asks Manisha, tearing her gaze from the wonders around her.
“You see this gizmo here?” Ace gives the console a good, friendly thump for emphasis, and the ship burbles back.”
“Oh my god!” Manisha’s almost worked it out. “Is it some kind of spaceship?”
“Oh yeah,” Ace grins. “Watch this.” She places her hand firmly into the telepathic interface, and the central glass time rotor begins to rise and fall.
Outside the TARDIS, the Doctor watches, concerned. “Oh, Ace,” he mutters, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
With a wheezing and groaning, as it always does so well, the TARDIS fades out of existence.
Without him.
And then, after a few moments pass, the TARDIS comes back.
The doors open.
And he can’t believe what he sees.
-
Manisha sits in a lawn chair, swaying with the ship around her. The chair, for all its flimsy construction, feels comfortable enough to sleep in. But even with the rocks of the box’s flight through space lulling her, for the first time in years, she doesn’t want to close her eyes. She can’t for one moment miss what’s going on.
“Hungry?” Ace strolls into the console room holding two pale slabs, offering one to Manisha. “I tried to get the food machine to synthesize the old school mince.”
“The food machine?” Manisha hates herself for asking it almost immediately. Food and machine, the meaning pretty intuitive. The question is more how the hell she has one in the first place. Or a spaceship, for that matter. And what that leaves her.
“The Professor,” she begins, before hastily correcting, “and I, we have this machine that mixes flavors. It’s, like, the ultimate nutrition bar, only it actually tastes like real food.”
Manisha sits up to take the bar she’s been offered, even while her stomach slops around with the sludge that was her curry dinner. How could anyone miss the opportunity to try space food?
“Hope I got the flavor right,” Ace tells her nervously, waiting for her to bite in. “I always end up going a bit too salty.”
Manisha bites. Sure enough, all the cloying, cheap, half-cooked flavors of school lunch punch her right in the nostalgia centers she never thought she’d feel in her gut. She can see herself and Ace on the school playground, playing pretend, being dragons, knights, aliens, all after a hearty lunch of school mediocrity. It’s comforting. Even if it’s not freeze-dried. Whatever freeze-drying actually is.
“How did you get all this?” she asks. She just has to.
“Well, long story short, I guess I got abducted,” Ace quips. “I worked out my way from there.”
“Didn’t you ever want to come home?”
“Not for one moment.”
Manisha wants to hate Ace for that, but thinking back to another evening in the shop, she knows she’d do the same.
Whatever happens with Ace, she tells herself, I won’t go back home.
There’s nobody there, anyway.
The TARDIS groans again, like a billion glissandos in different keys being played on the very strings that bind reality together. They’ve landed.
“Because every time we land,” Ace concludes, “I get the same rush again. The universe never ends.”
A creeping, slow wave of energy snakes through the veins of Manisha’s neck, rushing along the back of her brain and making her scalp tickle. Her hands clench into fists, not out of anger or rage, but pure, pent-up enthusiasm. Quickly now, her whole body is drenched in a high of hormones as it dawns on her just how big the infinity beyond those doors could be.
She won’t let anyone hurt her anymore.
-
The box stands in the middle of a playground, and the door swings open.
“Wait!” calls Ace’s voice from inside. “I haven’t run the atmospheric checks yet! It could be dangerous.”
Manisha doesn’t listen. She bounds out, smiling up at the friendly yellow afternoon sun, set against blue skies and puffy clouds. The perfect day. “Oh, it’s beautiful!” she exclaims, spinning around with glee, desperate to see everything. “Where did you take us?”
Ace steps tentatively out herself, shutting the door behind her. “Oh, this isn’t right,” she confesses, taking in the simple fields hills and plastic slides. A row of houses stands just across the grass. It’s so ordinary. “I was aiming for the Eye of Orion. You can see so many stars from there, you wouldn’t believe it. This just looks like Earth.”
Manisha’s gaze, however, is fixed on the sky. “Look at that! That’s amazing!”
A big, red space shuttle glides effortlessly overhead, cutting silently through the clouds. The blue of the sky shifts momentarily, like the flicker in a film projection, as the shuttle vanishes from view. The clouds aren’t just clouds, either: on them, advertisements flash by, one after another. The perfect white children playing with expensive new toys. Fathers driving the new family car through the fast food drive-in, with impossibly red tomatoes and grotesquely green pickles oozing out of oversized hamburgers, without ever staining the seats. There’s housewives with cleaning supplies, families with fresh roasts, dogs with colorful red food bowls. The perfect idyllic product, sold to a whole world at every waking moment.
“Not present day Earth at least, then,” corrects Ace. “Probably not even Earth. I wonder where we are, then? And what brought us here?”
“Not present day?” Manisha repeats. “How is that possible?”
“That box is the TARDIS,” Ace tells her. “It’s a time and space machine. It can go to any time or place. And I’m bringing you with me.”
Unknown to either, inside the TARDIS, something changes. The white lights flicker red. And on the scanner, the torrent loading bar is replaced by a far more concerning message:
“Virus detected.”
-
Manisha and Ace sit on the swings, watching the day go by and munching on their lunches. Lunch after dinner, Manisha thinks. How quaint. She lets her eyes wander again, taking in the alien world. After grimy London streets, dingy kitchens, and tiny estate flats, it’s astounding to see a world so alive.
“So, how come they didn’t see us arrive?” Manisha asks, pointing.
Ace follows the finger. Two children are playing with a frisbee on the grass. They throw it back and forth, back and forth, with great precision. Every throw is perfectly calculated, every catch taking only the slightest effort, the toy falling gently into their hands. Neither even glances at Ace and Manisha.
“Perception filter?” guesses Ace, genuinely unsure. “The TARDIS is designed not to be noticed. Maybe it’s just actually working. The Professor has-- we’ve been updating the ship.”
“Cool,” Manisha replies. “I guess that makes sense.” She falls oddly silent again, the two women just rocking on their swings.
The silence is irritating, so Ace leaps to her feet with the most mischievous of grins. “Hey, Manisha, watch this.”
“Ace, don’t--” Manisha begins.
“Oh, you know me,” Ace laughs. She’s running over to the kids, standing between them, poised to leap for the frisbee. Scourge of the primary school sports day, that was her. Half because she was that good, the other half because she was that bad at following instructions. “Piggy in the middle!” she yells, laughing. Oh, yes, just like primary school.
Manisha wants to slap Ace. To tell her to leave them be! Sometimes, Ace could be just as entitled as those angry moms in the soup line.
But the children don’t respond. One just throws the frisbee to the other again. Their pale, white faces aren’t even the slightest bit red from the exercise. It sails right along the same path, so Ace plucks it out of the air.
“At least make it hard for me!” she laughs. But the frisbee doesn’t stop. It keeps tugging her along at the same speed along the same path, right to the waiting hands of the child. Ace lets go in shock.
The kids keep playing, ignoring her.
Ace tries again, leaping for the frisbee. Again, it pulls her along toward the child, but this time, she refuses to let go. The frisbee still finds its way into their waiting grip, but Ace tugs and tugs, refusing to let go. Throwing her entire body weight into it, kicking with both her legs, she finally pulls the frisbee away.
With it, she realises, comes the skin of the child’s hand. It tears off surprisingly easily, like the dead sheets of it that peel off with a bad case of athlete’s foot. And it doesn’t stop. It just keeps peeling. The whole arm unravels before Ace’s eyes.
Ace can’t bear to look. She doesn’t want to see the blood. Stupid. She knows she’s stronger than this. But even so, the nausea rattles through her waist, gurgling and rising. Ace battles hard to keep it down, even as her head feels hot and her breathing cuts short.
By the time she looks up, the children have gone.
Ace is panting as she runs over to Manisha, her eyes ablaze with sheer panic. “Something is really wrong here.”
She’s still holding the skin.
“Ace, what is that?” Manisha asks. She’s stepping away from her friend. She’s afraid.
“It came off when I pulled,” Ace explains, refusing to put into words exactly what it is.
“Get back!” Manisha screams, still staring at the torn strip of skin, oddly bloodless, but with every little pore and hair clearly visible to prove it’s the genuine article.
“Geez, sorry!” Ace exclaims, tossing it away.
“No, sorry, I just, I’m sensitive, I guess. That’s messed up. We should have left them alone.”
“Manisha, I know what I’m doing.”
Manisha snaps again before speaking, but shoves the anger back down. In her perfect customer service smile: “Ace, I can’t deal with this.” A nervous giggle to punctuate the muddled point.
“Nobody should have to. This is wrong, Manisha. There’s something rotten here.” Ace picks up the skin again, absently, squishing and melding it to fit into her palm. Into a little ball. “And if we can see that, it’s our job to stop it.”
The little ball of skin still makes Manisha sick, but her sickness gives birth to a strong fury. “No.”
“What?”
Manisha has to physically turn around before she can reply to Ace, the child’s torn flesh etching its way deep into the rods and cones of her eyes. She even does vomit, just a little, coughing back down the hot, sour bile rather than let Ace see. “Well, it’s all fine for you, you’re running about in your own time machine with an assistant and a stable life, but I don’t have that. I’ve never had that. My life is just constant stress and microaggressions, even when I’m not being firebombed.”
“Doesn’t that just give you a better reason to fight?”
“You’ve whisked me away somewhere amazing and beautiful!” Manisha says. And it is, every time she glimpses at the alien sky, the butterflies in her stomach become a beautiful flurry of twittering wings. “Can’t we just enjoy that?”
Ace’s face takes a sad turn. “Manisha, that box isn’t some magic wardrobe. This isn’t Narnia. This is a real place, just like anywhere else, and there’s mysteries and injustices to sort out.”
“Then let’s meet back here in a couple hours or something,” Manisha relents. “Because I’ve made up my mind: I’m going for a walk on my first alien world! How cool is that?”
And maybe I won’t come back.
“Is that really what you want?” Ace asks. She moves to take Manisha’s arm in her hands, but recoils as the hairs of the dead skin in her hand brush Manisha’s rigid goose pimples.
“More than anything,” Manisha says, the weight of a million dead end shifts dragging down her voice. “I just need time and distance, okay? You’ve given me a lot to deal with.”
Ace pauses, reaching into her rucksack. She tucks the skin in there, safely out of sight. “Take this,” she says, thrusting a can into Manisha’s hands. “This life isn’t all sightseeing. It can get dangerous real fast. If anything happens, well, you know what to do, right?”
Manisha gives a weak smile. “I’ve seen you do it enough times.” Those pottery pigs spring back to mind, and that gives cause enough for her to move past weak smile to outright grin.
“Blow it all up, then run for your life back here. Got it?” Ace instructs. “I’m not having anyone else get hurt because of me.”
She hugs Manisha, the sort of tight, aggressive, loving hug that squeezes air out of your lungs. Manisha tries not to show just how much she needs it. Needs to feel someone who cares.
That need keeps her silent a moment longer. But that moment passes, and Manisha finds her words.
“Who else got hurt?”
But Ace is gone.
-
The beautifully kept lawn is, Ace decides, most satisfying when she tramples it. She takes big, stomping steps in the mud, crushing petunias underfoot. She let her vision drift away from her surroundings to the smug faces of the Millers and Johnsons and so on, all those perfect little rich families who didn’t lift a hand to help Manisha’s mother and father out of the fire. They had all been so upset about the soot on their tidy little rows of hydrangeas or petunias or whatever the hell they were. Screw them all. She should have burned their houses, too.
Ace knocks over a glass ornament, just to watch it fall.
Falling. She’s falling, and Ace can only watch helplessly. The melting claw pulls at her leg, into the chasm. Ace wants to run to the edge, to catch her. But Ace has done her job too well. The nitro-9 detonates. Boom.
Saving a world and letting down a friend.
Ace finds herself standing at the front door of a beautiful family residence, ringing the bell.
The smile on the other side of the door is wide, that too wide kind of grin that makes it look like the face around it is about to split at the seams. And it’s a very taught face, no less, not a wrinkle in sight, all the skin pulled back to look ageless and emotionless. It’s the botox from hell, slapped onto the face of a fit and beaming housewife, framed in a retro silver dress that swishes around her hips.
Ace tries to look at her imposing figure and get out a credible introduction. “Hi, do you mind if I come in?” she begins, “I’m running a little survey, an official survey, for, er, the neighborhood, and…”
The heavy seams of lipstick that are the woman’s lips part further as she hoots out a greeting: “Hiya, neighbor! I hope you’re hungry.”
“Hungry?”
The woman beams, before exclaiming in the most American of voices: “Because I just made a fresh pie, dumbo! Come on in, you can try a slice. Plenty to go around!”
The smell hits Ace in a sudden wave, so strong and so good she goes woozy for a second. Score. This is going to be easier than she thought.
She follows the housewife through the freshly-painted white door, taking off her boots when gestured to do so. “I’m Patsy,” the housewife declares in her drippiest voice, taking Ace’s jacket off and folding it neatly.
“Ace,” replies Ace automatically, barely even looking at her. Her eyes instead glance up the staircase that lines the wall in the entrance room. At the top, a small boy peers between the little bars that hold up the bannister. He looks so young and so sweet, just past the age of making awful noises and smells but not old enough to be an ordinary git of a human. Ace can’t help a small grin as she waves. But he doesn’t smile. He just stares.
Patsy’s steel grip pulls her away into the kitchen, but her eyes never leave the direction of the boy, even when he’s long since out of view.
-
The suburban streets are quiet, but not empty. They’re full of little crunchy leaves, wafting gently down from the overhanging trees. They’re full of sunlight, golden and warm, pouring through the canopies and across the tarmac, making the whole world feel ready to take a safe, comforting nap. And though nobody stops to bother Manisha, they’re full of people. Children in shiny silver spacey school uniforms lug large backpacks as they walk home together, or ride friendly pink hoverboards with gusto, and men with briefcases, suits, and hats whistle a hundred different melodies with mechanical precision in a calming chorale of human contentment. The sky grows heavy with deeper colors as she continues her wanderings, blue cut with orange and violet and red. The air sharpens, just a little, as the heat simmers away. Every single moment of this journey through time is a visceral experience against her skin, a moment in connection with the world.
Manisha finds herself relaxing. It feels like how the world should be, the world everyone likes to pretend already exists even though it never had. A world where people really could could just be, living content, equal lives in a lovely place like this. Nobody is bothering her. Everyone is just smiling and waving hello. For the first time, she belongs.
Until, that is, she hears the crunch.
Disgusted, Manisha realises she’s stepped in something. Without wanting to look at whatever gross mess now graces the bottom of her sole, she scrapes it against the kerb, back and forth, smearing the goo off. There’s shards of metal flaking off, a few little parts poking into the rubber of the show and tearing at it. She reaches down to pick them out, lifting her foot and grumbling. But when her hand feels the affected area, it’s not hard, sharp metal her fingers grasp at, but something wet, moist, and a particularly slimy sort of squishy.
That’s when she sees the blood.
It takes Manisha still a further moment to fully process what has happened. She has trodden on a silver bug, evidently made of metal, no bigger than a cockroach. It almost looks like a toy. But it oozes out the tiniest shreds of viscera. Against her better judgment, Manisha finds herself picking up a fallen twig from the foot of one of the trees and poking at the bug, prying aside the casing. Is that? It can’t be. It is. It has to be.
Inside the bug is a tiny fragment of fingernail.
Manisha recoils, hand over her mouth. She grasps the stick firm with her other hand, prodding up against her sock. She’s pushing off the shoe, desperate to get it away from her. She can barely breathe. The tiniest trace of gore finds its way to overwhelming her nostrils, just in the sheer wrongness of its presence.
And it only gets worse. Her shoe, once separated, begins to crawl on those horrible little insect legs, dragging the bleeding, exposed tissue in a long, burgundy smear along the sidewalk. A skittering against concrete, like a saw against bone, as several other metal insects join it, the swarm rushing away into the shadows.
All around, everything is calm. The children walk. The men whistle. The sun shines a few more golden rays. Manisha feels the warmth, draining her of energy in that comforting sunny day snooze way.
Manisha runs just as the sun relinquishes its grasp on the neighborhood, not once looking back.
-
Ace slouches in the kitchen, not knowing how to hold herself in a place like this. Teenage Ace would be kicking her dirty feet around, breaking things, making a fuss. But she isn’t that immature girl anymore. She’s with the Doctor now, she has to be responsible. So, on with the interrogation: “So, about those questions I had for you...” she begins.
“Hang on a minute, honey, I can’t hear you over the oven!” Patsy exclaims, cheerfully kicking it shut with one heel as she places the pie on a cooling rack. “Why don’t you go wash your hands? Wouldn’t want to catch any germs, now, would we? Bathroom’s through there.”
“Through there,” fortunately, isn’t hard to find. The sink is porcelain, very clean, with shiny metal handles lacking in water stains. There’s no smell to the bathroom but a faint hint of flower perfume. Ace’s nose tickles as she breathes it in; it’s something she’s used to only seeing in petrol stations to vainly try to hide the hellish reek, but here, it’s oddly nice.
She turns the tap on hot, tentatively splashing a finger into the stream of water, expecting the gradual crescendo of cold to warm. But no! The water springs forth immediately at just the right temperature, not frigid, not scalding. Ace laughs in spite of herself. The future always has so many little surprises.
After patting her hands down on the lavender towels, Ace opens the door, ready to face Patsy once again. She’s overbearing and American, or whatever the space equivalent is, but maybe not so bad.
On the other side of the door is a face, lurking far too close.
“Are you here to get rid of the monsters?” a small voice asks. It’s the kid from upstairs.
“Monster?” Ace jumps, before hitting her stride again. “I eat monsters for breakfast,” she tells him.
“Oh yeah?” the young boy asks, hopeful.
“Yeah. In a big bowl with honey and weetabix,” Ace laughs. “Why don’t you tell me about them and we can fight them together.”
“Ace!” Calls that cheerful, dainty voice from the kitchen. “You done in there? The pie is going to get cold, slowpoke!”
Ace glances down the hall toward the kitchen. “Coming!” she exclaims. And then, she adds to the kid: “Come on, mate. Let’s get some pie, then fight the monsters.”
The kid, however, is already running back for the stairs.
-
Every eye is staring at Manisha.
She stumbles down the street in her panic, every crunch of the leaves a knife at her frayed coping abilities.
Every corner she takes just drives her deeper into the labyrinth of the streets. Every neighborhood looks so similar. The same kit-built swingsets, the same roses, the same manicured lawns and boxy, standard issue houses. The numbers on the mailboxes stretch up and down without reason, blurring and blending with each other.
And everyone is staring. Blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, all fixed on her. They bore into Manisha from every side, watching and judging. She’s felt this before. Some days, it’s inescapable. London does not hide its racism well, a lesson she learned long ago. But today, on this faraway, perfect world, it’s a step too far.
She’s running and running. A shoe slips off, she thinks, but she doesn’t really care. She needs to get out of this place. Maybe her foot is bleeding. Maybe it’s the smear of the metal insect. It doesn’t matter. The blood streaks its horrifying mark across the pavement, her own scarlet letter.
Mother. Mother’s upstairs. She’s screaming it to the man, his arms wrapped so tight around her, so she can’t even kick. She still tries to, reassured when he winces. Takemebacktakemebacktakemeback. Mother’s still inside, and everything’s burning.
Manisha realizes why a world would want to go back to the past. And realizing it makes her want to scream all over again. The wounds in the past aren’t really the past, are they? she thinks. Not with a time machine.
The present is a haze of pain and fire and metal. Dissociating is peace.
And then, the hands are on her shoulders. Manisha goes limp. She’s done fighting.
“Are you okay?” a woman asks. She’s beaming, a gleaming white smile. Her lips are so red, lipstick so flawless it’s hard to tell where it ends and lips begin. Her hair is that lovely, auburn shade of blonde, with just that hint of red you can’t look away from, all wrapped up in a beehive. She’s a beaming beacon of benevolence, and she’s standing there with Manisha, hands on her, taking her shaking body and helping her find her way back to stillness. “You look lost,” she continues. “Did you need help?”
Manisha finds her panic fading at the kind, gentle touch. “Yeah. I’m Manisha. I’m new here, I guess, and I’m very lost.”
The woman beams. “We can’t have that! I’m Jeanette Jones, with the Planetary Association. Why don’t I formally welcome you to Homestead II?”
She takes Manisha’s hand. It’s a simple moment of physical contact, the kind that worlds are forever changed by.
-
The chairs are cheap, beige wood, but more inviting than they first seem. There’s a cute little cushion with an elegant pattern to soften it, and the arched back is angled just right. Ace finds herself settling in more easily than she ever could have expected.
Before her, on a worn, cozy pink tablecloth, is a warm, chipped plate. Patsy flutters over armed with oven mitts, brandishing the pie. Steam swirls away like fairy dust, sweetening the air. Crust crumbles away as Patsy scoops out a generous slice, slopping the sweet pastry onto the chipped plate. It’s like living in a commercial, but Ace can’t deny the wonder of it all.
Ace finds herself shoveling it into her face with a fork before she even begins her questions. Dragging her thoughts away from the exquisite flavor, she dedicates herself to prying out exposition from the local. But damn, that pie is good. Her voice is still muffled as she asks, “What brought you to this planet?”
Patsy laughs, that haughty, dripping laugh that makes you feel both warm and fuzzy and a little condescended to. “Honey, everyone wants to live on the Homestead colony worlds.”
Homestead colonies. Nope, ringing no bells. Time for a slight shift in tactic. “But what brought you, personally, to them?” Ace asks, all PR grins and tact. “What does the Homestead colony mean to you?”
-
“Recession. Famine. War,” the announcer declares, as the stirring music graces stock footage of galactic horror. “The universe can be an tragic place.”
The images flash before Manisha’s face, illuminating the darkened room and filling it with audiovisual power.
“You and your loved ones deserve better,” declares the voice. As it does, Manisha feels something rustling at her foot. She glances down, to see that friendly, helpful woman has propped up it up on a small pillow. She’s applying a bandage on some small cut she must have gotten while running. All that blood from that little thing. It seems silly now.
“Let us take you back to a simpler time. Come to the Homestead worlds. Our terraforming and cultural engineering experts are here to make sure you enjoy all the comforts of twentieth-century earth, with all the conveniences and none of the stresses of today, from the entirely artificial, eco-friendly marvel of Homestead I to the luscious rainforests of Homestead VI!”
On the screen: a family, picnicking on a grassy hill, overlooking the beach. Not a grain of sand clings to any of them, all just pristine. They’re laughing so hard as father grills, mother carves and serves, and the kids laugh and play and make everyone smile.
She smiles at Manisha. Manisha smiles at her. The family smiles at all of them, looming above on the screen.
-
“Now, Homestead VI, it’s lovely, but a bit too many beaches. I hate sand,” says Patsy between mouthfuls. “And Homestead I, it’s nice, but you know how artificial planets are. Everyone seems to be a little scared of it, to be honest! Just that fake world smell I guess, niggles at the uncanny and all that. Beautiful, mind. Homestead II, though, we really are blessed to be here. The flagship world! I couldn’t believe it when they accepted us. My Dan’s work must be very important!”
“Your husband works for Homestead?” Ace asks.
“Well, you all recruited him! It’s his first day today, haven’t seen him in hours. I got in late from the party last night, and he had work early. He’s ever so good at public relations.” She pauses, glancing down at the pie. “This was supposed to be for him. I’m sure he won’t mind a couple slices missing though.”
It takes a moment for Ace to pick up on the inconsistency. “He didn’t go to the party?”
Patsy shrugs. “Oh, no, he was with Simon. Our boy wasn’t feeling very well. We’ll make sure they come along to another welcome party soon, though, don’t you worry. I know how important it is to you.”
-
“We welcome you our Homestead family! May you and your loved ones be happy here,” the video concludes, as the lights turn themselves on again.
The woman pulls up a chair, facing Manisha. Some sort of tablet computer sits in her hands, silver against her red nails, bright as her lips are. She turns the device to Manisha.
“Is this your landing capsule?” she asks. On the screen is an unmistakable picture of a blue box in a park.
“Oh, um, this girl and I… I don’t know where she...” Manisha stammers, unable to respond.
“It’s okay!” the woman reassures her. “Just a minor parking violation. I’m sure we can waive the fine for a new arrival!”
“Thank you, uh--” Manisha begins, stopping as the name eludes her.
“Jeanette, sweetheart,” the woman reminds her, doing one of those effortless head tips pretty people do to perfectly rearrange their hair. It works. She looks flawless.
“Jeanette, sorry. I’ll try to remember that,” Manisha’s a mess as she digs her conversational holes all around this beautiful woman, floundering and slipping into them. “But, I’m not staying. You see--”
“No need to explain! But the offer stands, you can make your mind up tonight. We have a few spaces open in our little community, and I think you’d fit right in.”
“Oh, well, thanks, but, I--”
“You just look like someone who’d like somewhere to belong.” Jeanette is already taking Manisha’s hand. “At least let me take you to dinner. You won’t believe how well-prepared the meals are here. Let me show you a good night on Homestead II.”
Oh, Manisha realises. It’s that kind of thing. “I’m not sure…”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never…” Manisha stammers. Putting it into words is too much. How can she admit the thing she’s locked up so long? “What about people?”
“People? What about them?” Jeanette comes in close, and Manisha’s whole head goes hot. The hear surrounds her, it’s too
much. The man let go after a good kick. She’s alone now, melting into the carpet. Her head pounds with the beat of her heart, aching with smoke and ash.
She prepares to crawl to the rescue. She can hear the screams. The stairs creak, individually falling into cinders, one at a time, so slowly. Like a dance.
Just a short crawl up the stairs to her mother. She can save her.
Manisha starts to crawl. And she never forgives herself. Because she crawls toward the door. Because the heat, oh the heat, it’s just too
much. Those lips pervade her vision, everything else fading from existence like the opening to “Rocky Horror.” Every little thought she’s ever had burning through the back of her skull, concentrated on what she could do to that beautiful mouth. She wants this. She can’t have this.
“They’ll see.”
Jeanette comes in even closer. Her finger is so close to Manisha’s chest, and it feels like she could drill out her aching heart with a single jab of the nail. “People are easy. You just have to know what they want.”
Oh, God, Manisha does want. “I can’t.”
And Jeanette’s hand brushes down her shirt so gently, finger tracing along her waist. It’s like she’s cutting her open with a scalpel and exposing her lungs, which heave with a hot, tense air Manisha never had even realized was there. Like the fire is finally draining out. When she finally touches Manisha’s skin, it’s the most vulnerable place of all she strikes: her hand, clasping it tight. The hands are cool, balancing.
“Everyone is accepted at Homestead. Regardless of sex and class and colour and creed. We just want you.”
“We?”
Jeanette laughs lightly, but her next sentence is a far more daring, low purr. “I just want you.”
It’s a long, choking series of sobs before Manisha can find her voice again, and that voice is so, so broken and worn, like she’s Atlas, and someone just stepped in to take on the sky. And the word she finds is one that surprises even her: “Yes.”
-
As she finishes her last bite of pie, Ace prepares herself for the big question. If only the Doctor were here. For someone so dark and inhuman, he always had a way of making people feel at ease. Ace wishes for a moment she had his charm.
“Have you seen anything,” she begins, and she pauses, looking for the most delicate word, before stumbling on the cliche anyway: “odd?”
“What do you mean?” asks Patsy.
“I dunno. Strange lights? That’s what people usually seem to say.” Ace cringes. She should be better at this than that. What would Manisha think?
Patsy’s holding her fingers against the side of her head, tapping gently. Some sort of nervous tick. “Is there something wrong with the sky projections? First I’ve heard of it.”
“No, no, nothing,” Ace assuages her. “Forget it. Everything’s good.”
“I’d better let you get on your way, then!” Patsy says. “More families to survey, I’m sure!” She leaps to her feet, carting dishes to the sink.
“I’ll see myself out. Don’t want to interrupt your work.”
“Thank you, Ace!” Patsy says. “Please come again soon!”
Ace stops at the door, ready to leave. There’s something she still needs to do.
She opens the door. “Goodbye!” She calls. A faint response from Patsy in the kitchen.
Ace closes the door, making a show of the noise. And then she stays a moment, quiet as she can be, listening to Patsy hum the “I Love Lucy” theme as she scrubs dishes.
Ace is still inside the house, never having stepped through the door. And so, instead, she creeps up the stairs, with every bit of careful, cautious silence she learned from slipping past her mum night after night.
She finds the door she’s seeking, and opens it, triumphant. “Heya, Simon!” she declares, pulling out a canister of nitro-9 and tossing it hand to hand, tough as she can, as the little boy stares up at her in awe, “Tell me about those monsters.”
-
As a rule, Manisha doesn’t drink wine. She doesn’t drink much of anything, really, besides water. It isn’t so much a health thing, or a taste thing. It just isn’t worth the money, or the stressful process of leaving the house. Tonight, however, is special. She’s composed herself, found her feet. She’s ready to live loud and proud. And this is a good wine. Bright red, like that streak on the pavement long forgotten. She takes a long sip.
On Manisha’s feet now are dainty, beautiful flats, so lovely she almost doesn’t feel inadequate about her fallen arches. Jeanette’s lent out her wardrobe, and Manisha’s dressed up better than she can ever remember having been. It feels nice. It looks nice, too, she realises, catching her distorted reflection in the metal of the silverware. That feels even nicer. Nicer still: the way Jeanette clearly notices it, too.
Manisha lifts a fork. The spread she’s been treated to is unbelievable. Surf and turf. Asparagus. Truffle sauce. Ingredients she’d spent days working at the shop laughing at the idea anyone would waste money to eat on a regular basis filled her palate in a way she’d never tasted before. Fantastic stuff, though she’d had to hide her disappointment that nothing was freeze-dried. Jeanette didn’t seem to know what that was. Shame.
Dessert: Tiramisu. She knows she probably shouldn’t eat it, not with all she already has, but tonight, she decides on the spot, is special.
Taking a bite, she immediately realises she made the right choice. It’s a good one. The cream is just the right light texture to offset the heavy, deep tones of the coffee and liquor, drenching the soft, cakey remains of the ladyfingers. The flavor and texture balance out perfectly: sweet but not cloying, light without being insubstantial, with just the right earthy notes to linger pleasantly on the tongue.
And then comes the inevitable question: “You said you came here with a girl?”
Manisha pauses mid-bite, with a slight bit of gag. It feels almost like a bit of the cake has gone up her left nostril, lodging itself unpleasantly between the inside of the nose and eye. Still, she tries to play it cool. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“Are you close, then?” Jeanette asks. Is that jealousy? Manisha can’t tell. And if it is, how would she respond, anyway? Is it flattering? Uncomfortable? Sweet?
“I don’t know,” Manisha replies, and it hits her fast. Her voice slips an octave, breaking with her heart. So many emotions burst out of the little mental box she didn’t even realize she was hiding them in.
It’s a gentle brush on her arm that snaps her back again, Jeanette’s dainty, manicured nails smoothly grasping her tired, shaking forearm. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” Manisha confesses. “I don’t usually-- why do I keep doing this?” She grasps at her lap for her napkin, trying to discreetly brush the droplets from her face, but they keep coming, faster. Her abdomen begins to shake, like she’s laughing so so hard, but instead, it just sounds like her chest is breaking.
“It’s okay,” Jeanette coos, massaging the back of Manisha’s head now with her palm. “Emotions can be strange like that. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“No, no, it’s okay, I do,” Manisha insists, composing herself. “It’s good to get this out there.”
“I’m glad,” Jeanette replies, beaming. “I’m very good at helping people take care of their feelings.”
Manisha wants to kiss her right then and there. Maybe I will, she thinks. No reason I can’t if the opportunity arises. For now, just roll with the mood. It’s such a nice feeling to be doing what she never does. Not sitting home alone, not bottling herself up, not smiling for the strangers who give her niceties or abuse just because they expect their bargain lunch. It’s real. It’s living. Manisha hasn’t lived in a very long time. And so she beams when she responds, “Yeah, you are.”
-
The monster sleeps under the bed. Soon, the dark will fall. Soon, the monsters will hunt. For now, it does what monsters do best. It lurks.
The girl steps into the room with the young one. “I’m Ace,” the girl says. “You can trust me.”
“I’m scared, Ace,” admits the child, closing the door.
“Have you told your mum?” The girl, Ace, asks.
“She’s not my mum,” the boy says, insistent.
Ace laughs at that. “I always used to say that about my mum. But she was, you know. My only one. And now I’ll never get the chance to make things right. You should try with her. She doesn’t seem that bad.”
The boy glances to the bed for the monster’s judgement. The monster stares. It has no feelings to judge. It has no call to action. The time isn’t right yet. Seeing no response, the boy ventures further, “No, she’s really not my mum.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t have a mum. Just dads,” the boy explains. “I’d tell them, but I don’t know where they are.”
“Then who--?”
The child is tugging at her sleeve now, staring again under the bed. “Please, the monster!”
Ace holds him close to her with one arm, in a sort of half-hug. “What’s your name?”
“Simon.”
“You’re very brave, Simonl. Can you tell me where the monster is?”
The boy designated Simon points under the bed. “It lives there,” he says.
“Under the bed?” Ace laughs. “Monsters don’t hide under the bed.” She approaches, sticking her head into the tiny space, full of springs and dust that mush against her soft brown hair. “See! There’s nothing here. Let’s go find one of your dads, they can help.”
Simon is frozen to the spot. He shakes his head slowly. “They can’t.”
“Why not?”
“One’s at work,” complains Simon. “And the other, he didn’t come home from the welcome party last night.”
“Welcome party?”
“Yeah. They do some kind of big celebration and give you the welcome implant.” He’s chewing at his fingernails now, in all sorts of a fuss. “Please get away from there, the monster will see you.”
“There’s nothing here, Simon,” Ace assures him.
And then she sees it.
“Hang on, there’s a floorboard loose,” she announces. “I think I see a light underneath.”
“Don’t!” pleads Simon.
“It’s alright,” Ace assures him. “I can fight bed monsters, no trouble. That’s why I kept a baseball bat by my bed when I was nine. They never bothered me again.”
Ace prys her fingers against the grain of the wood, nails tender and exposed as they struggle for the slightest grip. The noise is far greater than she’d like, but she just knows she can get it. Every thrust of the cuticle provides a bit larger a wobble of the floorboard. If she can just catch it… Her eyes fall again on the kid, flinching at every little sound or motion. So afraid. So she continues her story.
“Mind, nobody in Perivale actually bothered with baseball. But Maneesh and I, we gave it a go, anyway. Well, I kind of made her. Any game built around whacking round objects with blunt force seemed like a good idea to me, and the rules are less complicated than cricket.”
In her mind, she pictures those afternoons playing hooky, before the two discovered angst and romance and puberty. Back then, it was just a good few hours to throw things at each other and smash them with a swing. Ace never mentioned to Manisha just how often she pictured her mum’s head as the ball.
That thought makes her angry, still, and her fists clench down hard. She can feel a nail tear, but she sees the floorboard shift and presses her advantage.
“Please,” Simon begs, one more time, but Ace has already shifted the board. She swivels her torso to kick it aside now, holding her torn and tender finger to her lips and sucking sawdust from the sting.
It’s dark in the hole in the wood. Ace slides on her belly in the dust, like a serpent that’s caught the scent. She pulls herself into position, peering in. Blackness. Nothing.
The blue light blinds her when it shines.
Wood bends and fractures around her as she rolls away, metal fists protruding where she had only been a moment before. “I told you! I said!” the child cries, already backing toward the door. Ace swears as a drop of blood falls from the splinters in her finger, but she has no time to worry about that, rushing with Simon to escape.
“That’s a Cyberman.” Those three small words are enough to prove there’s more than one terrified child in the room. Her confidence and brado falter, replaced by a gnawing, cold horror, running as thick down her body as slowly oozing blood.
“A what?”
“Welcome implants…” Ace trails off in shock, hand freezing at the door a moment too long.
“What? Come on, let’s run.”
“Simon,” Ace breathes, barely a whisper as the horrifying possibility dawns on her, “I’m so sorry, but I think we found one of your dads.”
-
“She was my friend,” Manisha says, staring deep into her glass.
Jeanette has her hand yet again, with every touch stroking the gentlest of notes. “Just your friend?”
Manisha’s idly spinning the liquid round and round, and the red swirls into her vision, eating away at the world. It’s comforting. “We used to play together.”
“But it didn’t last?”
“Well, I guess, one day, I had to leave.” The red swirls faster now, flickering and refracting the light. Streaks of yellow in the red.
“Why?”
The liquid sploshes against the sides. Droplets condensing on the glass in smoky gray. She can see it now in her glass, everything that happened. “It wasn’t home anymore,” she says simply. She can feel the heat around her, and her breathing becomes heavy as the memory seeps down her back, into her limbs.
The white kids firebombed her house.
Her mother died.
Manisha refused to accept help.
She failed to help her mother.
She never saw Ace again.
“Someone hurt you.” It’s not a question. Jeanette just knows.
Manisha’s breathing is fast. Her head is hot again, so hot, but not the aching, longing heat of before. It’s stifling. Like she’s boiling in herself. “They hated me.”
“Who?”
Every pore of her skin is tingling, sweat pouring from her armpits and staining the lovely, lovely fabrics that envelop her. The images she hides from every waking moment squeeze into her brain. The sweat trickles down, thin and tepid, sprinkling pointlessly like the firefighters that came too late, didn’t even care. “Everyone. For my family. For the level of pigment in my skin. For a country I’ve never even been to.”
“Did she hate you?” There’s something intense about the way Jeanette questions her; even as her hands wander Manisha’s limbs, it half feels like she’s talking to a therapist. A really, really insightful and beautiful therapist with nice hands.
“She never came back for me. It’s been years. She was my best friend, and it’s been radio silence.” Manisha finds the words pouring and pouring out now, the dam broken. “I sent her letters. No reply. So I figured, I don’t know, she didn’t like me? Didn’t have the courage to be someone like me anymore? And then one day, nobody knew where she was. She’d just gone, into thin air. We were all so scared for her, but you know what’s really sad? I was happy. I thought it meant that whatever her reasons for blowing me off, and believe me, I was still really, really pissed about that, at least they weren’t personal.”
Jeanette just nods and listens, and it helps. But then she ruins it by saying the words no angry, hurt person ever wants to here: “I’m sure she meant well.”
“Did she? Did she really? You know, I heard she came back once. Back to Perivale. Something about cats going crazy, I never believed it. But you know what? I bet it happened. I bet she came home and didn’t even bother to say hello. Hell, didn’t even let her mum know she was alive. What kind of person does that? She can’t keep doing that.”
Jeanette gazes , back so, so gently, but with the deep intensity of someone clinging to her every word. “So, what you want her to feel the consequences?” she asks.
Manisha considers for a moment. “Actually,” she admits, “I think I’m jealous of her. After all this time, I guess I wish I could fly away and never have to deal with things, too.”
Jeanette gets to her feet, offering Manisha a hand. “I can help you with that. I want to take you somewhere special.”
Her voice drips with exactly the right kind of subtext.
-
Ace’s hand digs through her rucksack for a familiar oblong piece of metal. But her eyes never leave the monster under the bed, as it smashes randomly at the wood above it, still buried by splinters. “A Cyberman is a person that decides that they don’t like being a person. You know how some people see doctors to change their bodies, because they don’t work or look like they want to, or don’t represent who they are, or just because they don’t like them?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that,” Ace says firmly. “But a Cyberman is what happens when people do that to their minds. They have little things in their brains that stop them feeling.”
The creature keeps thrashing, without a single trace of audible panic. Like being buried alive as acted out by a cheap marionette. But then it falls still.
Simon and Ace watch for several moments, both refusing to speak.
Against Ace’s better judgement, she leaves the door, stooping toward the bed. She tells herself it’s only curiosity. The model is unfamiliar, with its blue chest-mounted LED and vacant, uncanny face, but she knows it’s what it has to be. Her hand clenches tighter on the explosive. One wrong move by the creature and they both go down. Hopefully they’ll be enough time to tell it that.
“Do you ever feel like everything’s a bit much? Like you just can’t keep up with how hard and demanding the world is?” In the distorted reflections of the Cybermen’s chrome head, she sees a nod from Simon, following her so far. “The first Cybermen, they did. So they built themselves into perfect machines to survive anything. And the thing is, they think everyone else wants their help.”
She puts a hand on the metal carapace, tentatively. It doesn’t respond. “Leave it alone,” says Simon.
“I think that was just a defense program,” lies Ace. She doesn’t know what she thinks, but this is too good an opportunity. Her hand leaves the security of the one round object in her bag, finding something defter and narrower, a screwdriver.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking out the face of the enemy. Might want to step back, there, kiddo.” There’s a click as Ace jams a screwdriver into the faceplate. “Ah, gotcha!”
“Got what?”
“Simon, I need you to be very, very brave and turn around for me. Would you do that? Just turn around. Don’t look until I say it’s okay.”
Simon does as he’s told, but uncertainty. “Why?”
“Because I just unlocked the faceplate. And I don’t want you to see who’s in here, if what’s going on is what I think it is.” Ace squeezes her fingers against the sharp edges of the plate, peeling it away. She can barely look herself, dreading what horrors she might see inside. Her stomach rocks up and down in her chest, threatening to expel itself through her throat at the first sight of gore. Ace sniffs back her disgust, forcing herself back to composure. She can do this. Gritting her teeth so hard they start to dig into each other, she pulls the plate all the way off.
She’s not in any way prepared for what lies inside.
“Oh my God.”
-
“Explain this to me again.” Manisha follows Jeanette down a foggy street, watching how the yellow orbs of the streetlights stretch as blobs in the mist like the contents of a lava lamp, shifting in relation to her with every step.
“We’re a happy world,” Jeanette explains, half running, half skipping. She’s in her element. Though her sleeves are so short, her arms bared to the cold, there’s not a goosepimple in sight. Light steam mists off her, warm and gentle like Manisha’s breaths. Jeanette’s so warm and energetic and alive. “But not everybody who comes here is happy when they first get here, so we have this treatment for it.”
Manisha can’t help but be skeptical of something so good. “A cure for depression?”
“If you like!” Jeanette responds. “How much do you know about brain chemistry?”
“Not much.”
Jeanette stops at a streetlight, grasping it with one hand. She slowly swings around it with nervous energy, her lime green dress twirling through the cold air. “Emotions are chemically-driven in the brain, which in turn chemically impacts the physical state of the body.
Manisha slumps awkwardly, unsure of where to stand. “Yeah, I know that.”
“Well, here, we have a little thing we call the welcome package. It’s very quick, and painless. We implant a little bit of technology, nothing crazy. It regulates emotion. Keeps you from feeling the blues. I was thinking you might like to try it.”
“How does it feel?” asks Manisha.
“How do you think?” grins Jeanette, in an adorably toothy way. “It’s fantastic. Definitely an upgrade.”
-
“What is it?” Simon asks, getting on his tiptoes to try and glance around Ace at the thing under the bed.
And then the blue light changes, bathing Ace’s face in the color of blood. BLEEP. BLEEP. BLEEP. An alarm.
“Damn!” Ace curses, and Simon’s rather pleased to hear an adult doing that around him. “Not totally disconnected, then.”
The walls start to ripple. Something under the wallpaper, skritching and clicking.
“Simon, get out of here,” Ace says, low and quiet. He listens, for once, running to the door, wrenching it open, barreling toward the stairs, crash!
He glances up at the pair of legs he has collided with. The housewife’s. Patsy. On her face, an expression angrier than he’d have ever thought possible. “What have you done?” she snarls.
“You tell us, lady,” Ace calls from the other room.
Simon’s flailing, flailing as Patsy yanks his shirt collar so hard it nearly tears, dragging him back to his bedroom. The walls are nearly bursting now, and he can hear clinking from beyond. Ace, however, is still kneeling on the floor. She drops the metal faceplate on the ground, so confused.
“What have you done to this Cyberman? It’s empty. All organic parts removed, just a robotic shell. You killed it, but you kept it. Why?”
Patsy laughs, dripping with sardonic pleasure. “Is that really what you think?”
“What are you doing with cybertechnology?” Ace demands again, firmer, getting to her feet. The red light on the Cyberman flashes off and on, off and on, cast over her, like the fire and lightning burning inside Ace is exploding out. “And what have you done to Simon’s dad?”
The walls burst! Metal legs flail and tiny, hinged tails writhe. Hundreds and hundreds of cybermites swarm the floor, pouring through gashes in the wallpaper. They writhe and snake across Ace’s feet, trampling each other into bits of gooey tissue and half-smashed gears as they rush for their target: the empty carapace of the Cyberman. Ace stomps her way through in frenzied panic, little metal edges slicing into her shoes and ankles as she stumbles toward the door.
As the cranial cavity where its face should be fills with writhing, bloody metal insects, the Cyberman sits up, whirring to life.
There’s a knock at the door. And then the chaos really unfolds.
-
Manisha pauses, considering the offer. It’s hard to picture having metal in her head. But then, she thinks, it’s difficult to picture feeling anything in her head anymore. The numbness cloud has settled in for so long. “So you really have bits, like, in your head?”
Jeanette nods. “Before I came here, things were hard. My sister was a successful banker, you see, took over the family interest. But I tried to be an artist. Well, food artist. Cook, if I’m not being pretentious. When the galactic recession hit, I had nothing. And I felt like nothing. I tried a few things out, you know, social media, small businesses, building off the people who like to watch holovids of cakes, there’s some good contacts in that. Not enough. But Homestead, they took me in. Now I’m the Hostess to this amazing world. I haven’t had a bad day since.”
Heartbreak. Skin. Blood. Manisha thinks back on the horrors of her day, and it hurts. She has to tell this woman. There’s something wrong, she knows there is. And if she can save one person, just one beautiful woman, she won’t feel so guilty anymore. She steps in front of Manisha, sweeping her off the streetlight pole and into her cold arms. “Jeanette, you should know, there’s something very wrong here. My friend and I...we saw things. I wanted to leave it to someone else, but if you’re in charge here, I just think you should know.”
“Oh my god!” exclaims Jeanette, feeling Manisha’s arms. “You’re freezing! Look at me, yammering into the night. Let’s get you inside to the party. We can get you all put together there, and then you can tell me all about it.
Keeping Manisha’s arm on hers, Jeanette pulls her along toward a warmly lit house, the sound of music echoing from inside.
Can’t stop, we’re KIDZ BOP and we’re taking over!
-
“Patrick! Simon! I’m home!” yells the voice of Daniel Sternberg, home from work at last. At once, every metal insect and screaming human falls silent, processing the new element in the environment.
Ace responds first. She’s yelling and screaming as she charges Patsy, the full fury of a girl who mixes explosives and fights authority rather than cope with her feelings. It’s a desperate attempt, all she can think is to get away from the monsters, and to get this woman away from Simon. The consequences, however, soon become clear.
Patsy topples over the bannister at the force of Ace’s blow, splattering on the ground the floor below, at Daniel’s feet. Her skull is cracked so, so wide, as though her face was a china cabinet yanked open by a curious child.
Crystal shards of glass fracture out around deep red droplets as the bottles of wine tumble from Daniel’s hands, crashing to the side. He’s kneeling, cradling Patsy in his arms, his eyes quickly reddening and gushing forth tears, slicking the floor with glass and blood and wine and tears. His thumb brushes the forehead flap so gently, caressing it. And Ace sees she made a mistake.
She barely feels as she runs down the stairs, the world rushing around her and so slow at once. No, no, no, no, no. With every footstep she takes, another guttural sob jabs her in the spine. The descent is a moment suspended in an eternity of agony.
Ace is kneeling before she even realizes where she is, one arm wrapping around the shaking man. She sees the flap of skin, pulled up and eyeless. And she sees underneath.
A metal plate dominates the torn-up face, but not the smooth, clean metal of any Cyberman she’s seen before, It’s welded directly to the skull underneath. But the worst part is the traces of life underneath. The lips are fused to the metal, soft flesh clumping underneath around the mouth. Nostrils are drilled in and exposed, severed from the peeling nose, little hairs tipped with metal sensors. But worst of all is the eyes. Bright green eyes, flecked with gold and welded in with silver metal.
Underneath the face of a beautiful housewife is the heart of a Cyberman.
“Is that them?” Daniel grabs a fragment of glass bottle, holding it to her throat. “Is that my partner?”
Those eyes stare back one last time, the lips tugging at the metal plates to form the words. “Daniel?” the horrible hybrid creature gurgles. “Petal?” And the mangled thing that was once everything to Daniel falls silent, eyes growing dull and sensors running down.
-
Upgrade in progress.
The monster treads down the stairs. The unprocessed humans are threatening each other. How inefficient.
If the monster still had organic material in it, it would consider itself the future. But it doesn’t. The Cybermen have upgraded; the Future lies at the bottom of the stairs, dead.
What a waste, to die. That’s also inefficient.
The monster tears at the detailing of its face, all the handlebars and nodules peeling away. It must be done.
The new wave is so efficient, but the demand for spare parts is beyond acceptable parameters. Still, not this unit’s problem. This unit must serve.
And so its head must come off. This unit needs a new skull. The old has shattered at the bottom of the stairs.
Upgrade in progress. Repair the Future.
-
Manisha dances. She doesn’t actually know how to dance, but everyone’s asking her to, her shoes and a certain canister placed neatly by the door, forgotten. She wiggles legs and gyrates arms with enthusiasm, and nobody stares. They just let her onto the floor, sharing their joyful space with her.
They say exercise is good for the mood. Manisha is skeptical. Mind, she always meant to try. Never did. Always too tired, or didn’t have the time, or couldn’t afford the equipment. Active hobbies are a rich person’s game, and she’s anything but.
But in this moment, Manisha feels her soul freed, just motion and music. She is one with all the others, whirling and bouncing and sweating and smiling. She starts to really believe it.
The motion falls still, a hand on her arm. She’s aware again, so so aware, as Jeanette gestures away from the dance floor, tugging anxiously at her sleeve.
Free as it has made her feel, Manisha has no problems leaving the dance floor.
A beautiful woman is leading her away from the party to somewhere private, to an immediate future of exciting possibilities. Manisha wishes that was the story of her life.
-
“We have to go!” Ace is shouting. These people can’t die on her watch.
The shell of a Cyberman staggers down the stairs. Clunk. Clunk. Just empty metal thunks and clanks.
“What did you do to them?” demands Daniel, cradling the horrible fusing of metal and flesh. “What did you do to my Pat?”
“Please, get back from him,” Ace pleads. “It’s not safe.”
“They’re dead!” Daniel yells back. “They’re dead, and I didn’t even--!”
The metal drone of a voice from the empty Cyberman cuts in. “Stand away.”
“I won’t!”
“This unit needs repairing. Stand away.”
“You can heal them?”
“Dan,” Ace warns. “This isn’t going to end well for you, mate.”
Daniel stands back, his hand reaching behind him for Simon’s, but accidentally jabbing his son in the face instead. Simon groans, but Daniel’s shoulders fall just that little bit more into relaxation by feeling him there, still alive.
And then the horror starts again. Rivulets of metal insects pour forth from the Cybermen’s facial cavity, running along Pat’s neck. Whirring. Slicing. Blades protrude from little insect mouths, cutting and cutting. The volume of the whirring increases as the blades pass the softer flesh, the grinding of metal on bone. Pat’s spinal column is at the mercy of a million tiny blades, and Daniel really is pushing his hand into Simon’s face now, blocking out his vision.
It’s a mercy when the only sound is a little thud. The thud of a head falling from the shoulders and hitting the floor. There’s littler thuds after, so small. Simon is running from the room, running from the monster. Only reasonable.
The empty Cyberman twists its own neck, unscrewing the helmet. All that remains is a hollow robotic socket, just wide enough for bones and veins to pass through. “Transfer in progress,” it says, as the robotic arms execute their final task. “Transfer in progress.”
Within moments, a Cyberman head now sits on the shoulders of a beautiful housewife. And it speaks: “Daniel?”
“Pat!” Daniel exclaims. His hand is tugging at his mustache with ferocity, a few small hairs plucked from his skin by the force. “Do I call you Pat?”
“I am designated Patsy,” replies the housewife.
“And did you choose that designation, or did the Cybermen?” asks Ace. She suspects she knows, but it’s too horrible, too violating--
“It was chosen by the Cyberleader.”
Daniel staggers to the door, opening it. His face pokes out, and endless retching can be heard. Who could blame him?
“I’ve seen a lot of evil in the universe,” says Ace. “Daleks. Clowns. A literal embodiment of evil from the dawn of time that had a thing for bloodsucking and got worshipped by Vikings. But this?”
“Elaborate,” comes the electronic drone once more.
“A person’s gender is fundamentally theirs, isn’t it? I mean, you can take away someone’s house, their loved ones, but a fact of their identity? Their gender? Even the Daleks don’t do that.”
Daniel continues to retch. “Please, stop,” he begs. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t--”
“It was necessary,” states the Cyberbeing, the mutilated corpse of a man who was once a loving husband.
“Necessary?” Ace snaps. “How is any of this necessary?”
“We must survive,” states the mangled creature. “We need humans to survive. Humans must become like us. But they do not desire to.” It shudders toward the woman, but only centimeters at a time. It’s too damaged to threaten to do any damage beyond an overpowering sense of disgust.
The door shuts, with Daniel outside. It really is too much.
“So, that’s the big secret of Homestead?” Ace concludes. “Come for housing, stay for becoming a skin suit for a killer robot?”
“We remove difference in skin pigmentation and sexual orientation. We remove conflict. We offer peace and beauty. The people of this galaxy consent now. Do you consent?”
“That’s all it is to you, isn’t it?” chides Ace. “You convert and assimilate and erase people’s identities, because they’re all just statistics to engulf into your norm. You’re horrifying. And I’m going to stop you.”
“We will!” corrects the smallest, frailest voice. Simon stands in a doorway. And in his hands is a baseball bat.
Before Ace can protest, he beheads the monster with a single swing.
“You said, didn’t you?” Simon exclaims proudly. “You said you use a baseball bat against the monsters.”
“You didn’t know what that was!” she yells. Ace always hated when adults yelled. Always swore she’d never be a mother, of course, but she promised herself that if by some horrifying twist she was, she’d be calm with her kids. She’d explain everything to them, with love and support, and let them test the limits. And she’d buy them ice cream every Tuesday. The reality of keeping a kid safe is far less tidy, she realizes. And she really doesn’t know what to do.
“It was a monster,” says Simon, triumphant, “and I stopped it.’
“Simon, they were a Cyberman,” replies Ace, her voice so soft it hisses and whistles coming out of her mouth with the shallow breath. “They aren’t just monsters. They’re people who’ve had their identities surgically removed. And that one was your Dad.”
The door swings open again, a sweaty, dripping Daniel stumbling back into the room. His eyes glaze from one horror to the next. Ace hugs him.
“This isn’t okay,” she tells him, “but I promise you, we’ll tear them down for this.” He hyperventilates into her. “Do you feel up to helping me?”
“This is just,” begins Daniel, before clamming up again. It’s many long breaths before he remembers how to speak. “It’s not just all this violence. I can’t even begin to process what I’ve--who I’ve just lost.” He pauses again, for yet more breaths. “This is deeply disturbing for me. I already had to fight to have my gender. And he, he always accepted me as the man I was, and--” A pause. “And.”
Ace knows where that train of thought inevitably has to lead. She says it for him, but gently, taking his hand. “The man he loved.”
He nods. His hands find the back of his head, carried along, up and down, as each breath makes him crest and fall like the sea. “It’s not just that he’s gone, it’s that it happened like that.”
Ace just hugs him tighter.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” she admits. It disturbs her, too. She can’t even imagine what he feels, but she knows what she does when everything hurts. That’s how empathy works, right? Worth a try: “Let’s make them feel that.”
Or, as her internal monologue puts it: 1. Bash it in 2. Set it on fire. 3. Laugh, and pretend the tears are happy ones.
A small sensation of pressure engulfs Ace’s legs. Simon has joined the hug, and he’s crying, too.
Emotion. It’s devastating. Disgust, pain, horror, heartbreak, loss. It takes an immense amount of willpower to not dissociate on the spot. But in that moment, between painful, painful breaths, the three of them know for a fact that they will win.
Nothing else would be acceptable.
-
Manisha feels so much, but so little. Her breaths are warm and light. Her brain buzzes, exploding with heat and longing. She barely feels each footstep.
And then they’re against the wall. Jeanette is pulling her in, and Manisha can’t hold back. Their lips meet, and so much more besides, pressing against each other, bodies curving and arching in waves.
Manisha plants one hand firmly against the wall, pinning Jeanette. In response, Jeanette’s hands wrap around her neck, pulling her in deeper. Tongues? Definitely tongues.
A part of Manisha wonders, just a small part, whether she needs to find Ace. Whether there’s danger that needs to be stopped. Whether she might be in danger. But the kiss keeps getting more passionate, more ferocious, and she finds it harder to care. Let it wait.
Jeanette pulls away suddenly, slipping from Manisha’s arms. She leans against the wall, clothes crumpled everywhere Manisha’s hands have been. She looks amazing. Of course she does. What must she see in her? Nothing good, Manisha thought, and yet here we are. That brings a smile and a realization. There’s more to me than depression and angst. And damn, I am really, really gay.
“I have to ask something now,” says Jeanette, oddly composed.
All of Manisha’s life she’s been trying to say no to this question. Maybe it’s time to just say screw it.
-
The car is ordinary. A radio. Cupholders. A cigarette lighter socket, because some antiquated forms of technology just get too caught in inertia. Also, the car is flying. That is ordinary for this century. It is the future, after all. The headlights spread into the night sky, but they’re largely cosmetic, as Daniel surveys the digital model of three-dimensional space around him for every little adjustment in steering.
Ace rides shotgun, feet up on the dashboard. Daniel is a little too shaken to ask her to stop. It takes all his effort to focus on not drifting into the nearest building.
“Where are we going?” pipes up Simon, strapped into the back seat. Daniel gives him a little smile in the rear view mirror, hoping he sees it.
“Look out the window,” says Ace. Simon does. He sees the spread of the landscape, endless cul-de-sacs and quaint little homes, with the odd community center or pool to liven things up.
“I don’t get it,” says Simon.
Ace grins a moment, in spite of the situation. “Look up.”
Simon does, and the sky gleams. Cakes fresh out the oven. Forks that spin themselves to pick up spaghetti when you turn a little crank. Exercise equipment used by muscular bodies most people would rather own than the piece of metal they’re selling. Simon finds himself desperately wanting everything he sees.
“Your dad works for PR,” exposits Ace. “Among other things, they control all the ads. And in this century, if I remember what the Doctor once told me, ads don’t just show you images of things to buy, everyone basically filters that out every time they turn on the telly or check their browser, whatever that is. They’re a little bit psychic, just enough to impress a bit of emotion on you, usually to buy things. Here, it helps keep the Cybermen docile and makes them appear vaguely happy, rather than soulless drones.”
“So we’re going to turn it off?”
“No,” she replies, with the slightly smug air of pausing before getting to the really good bit, “we’re going to try out some programming of our own.”
-
Jeanette’s arm is around her, rubbing her shoulders, as the two reach the doorway. A swift wave of a hand is all it takes for Jeanette to open it.
“I think it’s time you had a proper Homestead welcome package.” Jeanette’s voice drips with seductive suggestion, and Manisha finds herself wanting nothing more. “I promise, it’ll make you feel better.”
Manisha giggles, just a little bit. “I’m sure it feels very good. Come on, then.”
Jeanette smiles back, so understanding and caring. And then she pushes Manisha into the cubicle beyond the doorway.
Manisha protests as fast as she can, words bumbling and jumbling out of her mouth. “Jeanette, no, I didn’t, I don’t, I want--”
“Good luck, and welcome to the family,” Jeanette just says, grinning the widest, most stunning smile Manisha has ever seen. And then the door closes. Hands bang and bang on the door with animal desperation. But soon enough, she falls docile, knowing the time for harvest has come, and she has no power left. Manisha always was so powerless, so it comes naturally.
Outside, Jeanette hums to herself as she hangs the little “upgrade in progress” sign on the door.
-
It’s the blue color you notice first. Like light reflecting against white bottom of a pool, shining in distorted shafts, broken by bodies swimming past. The blue forms a circle, a ring of vivid color, shifting ever so slightly with each moment. And as you get toward the center of the ring, touches of yellow and brown erupt forward in contrast, like a the bursts of natural color from this growth and that in a mineral spring, every bid as vivid and burning. Inside that, a core of deepest black, twitching and contracting. This wheel of color is suspended in a sea of white, bridged to the mainland of flesh only by an infinite number of tiny red squiggling lines.
“Scan complete. Welcome, Daniel.”
Daniel blinks, stepping back from the scanner. “They’re big on biometrics here,” he explains apologetically. “All about measuring the body. I guess that makes sense now.”
Ace nods wordlessly. What can she even say to him now?
He holds the door open for this strange woman and his more strangely distant son. “Welcome to my work, Simon!” he says with an attempt at being cheerful.
The office is bare bones. There’s a coffee pitcher, now empty. Nobody’s bothered to clean it. There’s numerous desks, only one of which covered in the uncontrolled mess of papers you’d expect from human habitation.
“Is that yours?” Ace asks. Yeah. It definitely is.
The three gather behind, Ace pulling up a swivel chair for Simon, who eagerly gets on with spinning in it. She stands. All business. Or rather, all barely-contained righteous fury. “Are those the controls?” she asks.
“The image files are uploaded to this drive here, and I press this button to transmit them,” explains Daniel.
“Great,” replies Ace, pulling out her bag. “Help me wire this in.”
She’s holding the empty hand of a Cyberman.
-
Beep. Beep.
Jeanette freezes. That alarm should not be going off.
Beep. Beep.
There’s someone in the office after hours, and they’re meddling with the stasis of the colony. They’re invading the pure, logical data systems. Foreign signals. Foreign programs. These can’t be allowed.
Beep be--
Jeanette switches off the alarm, then picks up her communicator. “Dispatch a squadron to the P.R. office,” she barks. “We have intruders.”
The sky crackles. There’s something shifting in the data flow. A woman looks down at the world. She’s scarred and broken down, but still with a lot of fight in her. And next to her, a familiar face. Ace McShane. Known cyber-killer.
All across the world, the Cybermen look up.
-
Ace sees it all again.
Arrival with the Doctor, looking for another adventure. She’s practically skipping, and he’s doing his spinning about with the umbrella. The joy of new worlds and new sights.
Injustice. It happens in every corner of the universe, like a cancer. So Ace and the Doctor pledge themselves to be the antibodies. A single woman, tired of fighting, becomes their closest friend and ally.
This revolution is slow. The repozans are good at looking like benign oppressors. Public opinion supports them. They run charities and hold galas and glitzy royal weddings. Ace laughs at the memory of hiding a nitro nine canister with a time delay in the cake.
So many evenings of plotting together, crafting plans and eating takeaway. Laughing with an old, beautiful soldier and giving her hope.
-
Ace groans, tears flooding her eyes as the memories flood, from sweet to sour. But her hand never leaves the gauntlet.
“What’s she doing?” asks Simon.
“The cyberman gauntlet is wired into the advertising system,” his father lectures. “By putting her hand into the gauntlet, she wires herself into it. I’ve adjusted the settings so they should be projecting her recent emotional memories on all the Homestead worlds. She thinks it could help.”
Metal footsteps clank and crunch.
“Is it working?” asks Simon.
“Not fast enough.”
The footsteps stop outside the door.
“Scan complete. Welcome, Cyberleader.”
“Excellent,” booms a loud, synthetic voice.
The door opens.
-
Victory. An election overthrowing the regime. Starships flying away, never return, and a rejoicing people waving them off with their middle fingers. But one ship remains.
A tyrant, unwilling to lose. He plans to unleash a virus to dissolve the flesh, fast-acting and fast-spreading.
The Doctor, Ace, and an old soldier. An unstoppable trio that storms the ship together to save the world.
Disaster. The tyrant infected. The soldier infected. Sacrificing herself in a ball of flame, going down with the tyrant as the platform collapses. While Ace watches. She stood by and didn’t help.
Ace still doesn’t know her real name.
Jeanette nibbles a mini-crepe as she watches the sky. The savoury taste of ham, cheese, and pastry mingles nicely. And what good would a movie be without snacks? It’s simply the expected etiquette.
She watches the show in the sky, her eyes, like the rest of an entire populace, fixed on the heavens. The images are so alien, so wondrous, an entire other world in another time, with alien species like nothing she’s ever seen. The story is so loaded with emotion and drama. Self-sacrifice, fleeting relationships, worlds on the brink...it’s compulsive viewing, and utterly stirring.
Her mind drifts back to the snacks. The show is dragging on a bit long.
Jeanette looks up, and feels nothing.
-
Manisha resigns herself. She’s trapped. She’s locked up. She’s in a featureless white cubicle of nothing, and she’s gasping for a snog.
The room is quiet. So quiet. Noise-cancelling quiet, Manisha realizes, as she becomes aware of her pulse, her breathing, every little movement of the clothes she wears. Pump. Woosh. Gasp.
Manisha’s breathing gets faster. Her heart speeds up. She’s panicking, impulses exploding out from the brain and washing over her. Her body tenses for a fight she’s always been tensed for, but never had it in her to fight. Pump. Woosh. Pump. Woosh. Deeper gasp.
She knows something’s coming. She looks left. Right. Spins on the spot both ways, head throbbing with mild dizziness, hair whipping at her eyelids. Nothing. And then the old paranoia strikes again. It’s silly, isn’t it? No attacker ever would, and yet...
Manisha joins the rest of the world in looking up. They see memories. She just sees an assortment of blades. They descend.
The last thought that passes through her head is of the silver canister of explosive she left at the door, and the woman who trusted her with it.
-
The door to the office opens. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Metal boots glint under LED lightbulbs, a soft blue glow cast across the room in counterpoint to the harsh mechanical noise. The army of Cybermen marches in.
“Hurry up, Ace,” pleads Daniel. “It’s not working.”
Ace cries and groans, clutching her encased hand. From her eyes pour tears, and from her mind and her hand pours an endless stream of data. But not enough.
“I’ll buy you time!” promises Simon. He’s holding a baseball bat.
“Don’t--!”
The child runs full speed at the Cyberleader, whacking it in the head with the bat. It doesn’t leave a mark.
And now the metal hand is around his throat.
Simon chokes out one word, one small word: “Dad!”
The metal fingers close around his throat. Pistons squeeze so slowly, clenching like a vise. Simon’s neck is small, but how much tighter can the grip get? His breaths are getting more desperate, more panicked, his eyes bulging and skin turning the brightest violet, like the lilac petals drifting in the wind of long ago. Daniel remembers, and it hurts. It hurts so much, to remember all the beauty that has burnt. He makes his choice.
“Sorry, Ace.” He punches her in the jaw, and she drops.
-
A figure sits on a bench, overlooking the waves. The blue water rushes into the cliffs, slowly sculpting them into new and beautiful formations. The figure is overwhelmed at that thought, strangely enough. They wish the waves would do the same to them, or even just wash them away.
Their name is Daniel. He is having a having a terrible day.
“Is this seat taken?” The words come from one of those awkward, toothy grins, straight teeth in a mouth that just seems the wrong size and shape for the fact they’re slapped in. And yet, somehow, that just makes their owner look more attractive. That awkward touch on a beautiful man. “I’m Patrick. You looked lonely.”
They sit together, and Daniel comes out with it all. Patrick doesn’t judge him once. But he does, eventually, take his hand.
The waves run lilac as the sun begins to set, a storm of petals drifting in the breeze. They’re the famous lavender flowers of Flosratia, filling every spring evening breeze with a natural potpourri. As Patrick reminds Daniel, the world is too beautiful to hide away from or be hurt by. And it’s all the better with someone to share it.
When Daniel finally begins to smile, a petal flies up his nose. And that toothy grin he’s already falling for breaks open wide with laughter as Daniel sneezes and sneezes.
They talk a bit longer, but soon it becomes cold, the chill ocean breeze sweeping in. Fragrant petals still litter the floor, crunching underfoot as Patrick rises. “You coming, Petal?” he asks, teasing.
Daniel scowls. He knows he’ll never live down the nose incident.
It takes him years to admit to himself that he likes it that way, but by then, he’s heard it for the last time.
-
Ham, cheese, and pastry fall to the ground, crushed under a wobbly, high-heel adorned foot. The show has gotten harder to stomach.
She’s seen it all before, of course. She’s heard the pleading of Cybermen victims in days of old. Their horror, their disgust, their desperation to die as themselves rather than survive. It’s foolish.
But she feels it now. And feels it about this glorious new dawn. That’s wrong. That can’t happen. She thought this through too well.
Jeanette screams as a grieving husband reminds her how to feel.
-
The flowers stain with blood, pouring out of a metal casing. “Petal?” a voice gurgles, coughing out bloody thorns. “Petal?” The metal casing peels, like the skin of a sausage fried just long enough for the juices to start to explode.
Skin. Pure, soft. Comforting. Neatly made up and in a cocktail dress. But not Patrick. Not the person Patrick ever chose to be.
Daniel would support Patrick to become anyone. Any haircut, any career, any gender, just as Patrick did for him. But this isn’t Patrick, because this isn’t what Patrick chose. This woman is a parody, designed to humiliate and degrade for a regressive paying public, and it’s sick. There’s a cancer at the heart, and soon, it shows.
Metal underneath. Handlebars, fused to the head, no, to the skull, protruding through the scalp. The scalp peels away, the bone fractures, a solid metal skull protruding through. It’s a monster in the skin of a lover, and it’s starting to shed.
Except...is it really so strange? There’s a nice, wide smile of gleaming white teeth, placed gently into a chrome jawline. The smile seems to widen as the skin peels from the edges. It looks just as wrong as it always did in that head, and yet still somehow right.
-
Seeing stars isn’t like the cartoons. It’s not a swirl of yellow or purple cartoons five-pointers with little birds twittering about in perfect cranial orbit. Nothing so entertaining. Seeing stars is an alienating experience, as little white dots rush across the world, blotting out details with no rhyme or reason. They don’t orbit, they scatter, like one of those firefly-like fireworks, and the feeling it creates in the head is just as powerful as the accompanying bang. Seeing stars, you see, usually is a sign of concussion.
Her head swirls with her vision, aching. She thrashes defensively, as she always does when fallen: Ace McShane will never go down without a fight. But her wildly flailing fists and feet only connect with air and chairs. Her head still aches as her vision clears, but she sees all the same.
Cybermen. They come in so many shapes. Some are shiny, some dull. Some have human hands, others look like they’re wearing tights, and still others are jagged chrome edges welded into a facsimile of hands. The heads range from cloth to glass, so she can see the brain or jaw moving. Except they aren’t moving, none of them. They’ve stopped.
The only source of movement is Simon, eyes bulging and chest pumping rapidly for breath. A baseball bat lies on the floor, a meter or so away.
Ace knows what to do with that. The deed is soon done, with only minimal leakage of bodily fluids and grease. What does leak, Ace notes thankfully, mostly ends up on her, rather than the kid. He’s been through enough.
“What happened?” Ace asks. “Why’d they stop? Who hit me?”
Simon points.
-
A kitchen, with a view of the stars. The room is tiny. Not just small, but the sort of diminutive you usually see on reality TV, with upper middle-class couples wanting to make a statement and act as though free of privilege by cramming themselves into smaller and smaller residences in a strange ritualized competition. But this isn’t to compete. It’s necessity.
The bills land on the counter. Nobody wants to open them.
“The economy isn’t picking up,” Daniel says. “We need to do it.”
“Dan, I don’t trust them,” Patrick sighs, the sigh of a conversation had too many times before. “You’ve seen their ads, you know what kind of families live there. We’ll never be like that.”
“They pay, though. And well, And you’ve seen the standards of their facilities, their parks, their schools. Simon could have an actual bedroom!”
“Hm?” asks Simon, barely responsive through loud headphones. Headphones are the best thing to use when the bills arrive, otherwise he has to hear the shouting.
“Trust me, please,” begs Daniel. “He deserves to do more than just survive.”
Patrick kisses him, lightly. “I trust you.”
-
In the walls and the floorboards of all the houses, a million metal insects end their vigil, twitching limbs falling so still. The Cybermites fall through the cracks in the architecture, little bodies littering the floor.
In the park, two children collapse in the grass, still smiling. Their frisbee remains suspended in the air, never finding a hand to receive it. A perfect world falls still.
In a million little dining rooms, husbands, wives, and children fall face first into their beef Shepherd's pies, which aren’t really supposed to be called Shepherd's pie, but lamb has become a taboo of meat. The grinding of human flesh, however…
In a small white cubicle, the slicing, cutting, blades and lasers come to a rest.
-
“How is he doing that?” Ace asks, in awe as Cyberman after Cyberman collapses to the floor. She walks carefully back to the row of computers, fearing the twitch of a metal hand that never comes. The child follows her, quietly as can be.
Daniel lies on the corporate carpet, hand in the gauntlet. He isn’t sobbing. He isn’t grimacing. There’s no sign of emotion at all, he just lies still. It doesn’t make sense to her. “I couldn’t overload them with emotion, how’s he managing? Guilt, loss, revolution, abandonment issues, I should have it all going on. What’s he got that I don’t, eh?”
“Is Dad dead?” Simon asks.
“No, of course not,” Ace assures him, only then thinking to kneel and take his pulse. It’s slowing.
“He looks dead.”
“Don’t look, Simon.”
“That’s what grown-ups always say when something bad happens. They don’t think I can handle it.”
Ace realizes in that moment that grown-ups always say that when they can’t handle it. So rather than face the man on the floor, she turns to the screen, watching the guilty scenario play out. “Cybermen are supposed to survive everything. ‘We will survive,’ that’s one of their eighty or so catchphrases. What’s strong enough to hack that?”
Simon raises his hand, to Ace’s amusement, but she nods a go-ahead all the same. “Someone making them not want to,” he answers.
-
Soil. The smell of it, heavy. The feel of it, soft and solid. The taste of it, the feel of it, as it trickles in through the mouth and into the lungs.
No coffins, no fuss. Nobody needs that, in the end. Daniel’s body lowers into his final bed, and it envelopes him like a warm bath. He feels the hand in his, the hand of his husband. The metal of the rings touches, two bands of gold returning to the earth from which they were dug.
Nobody lays a bouquet. Nobody needs to. The purple petals will litter the anonymous site for them, decomposing on the ground like the bodies underneath, into something new and fertile. New life. The one thing Cybermen will never understand. He’s okay letting go, it’s only a natural part of life. As long as he’s with his love.
There’s just one new life that’s unresolved...
“Not time yet, fuzz-face,” a cheeky woman’s voice reverberates through the dirt, and it seems to drift away with the sound waves. “You’ve got a kid to look out for.”
The grubs and worms shatter into numbers, the numbers fizzling into air, and fingers twitch, free at last.
The woman’s voice hits him again with mock seriousness, a sarcastic welcome back to the world: “You will survive.”
Daniel sits up, gasping for air. He clutches his hand to his chest, shocked by the air reaching his lungs, and by the air the hand is exposed to once more. The gauntlet twitches on the ground for a moment, but Ace pulverizes it with a smile and a baseball bat.
-
The sky still frowns down at them on the otherwise sunny day. Snippets of revolutionary women and dead lovers litter the clouds. A new morning has come, and the survivors reassemble their lives in its wake.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Ace asks, nodding at the reminder of his wretchedness writ in large from above.
“I went through a dark time before I met Pat,” Daniel says. “But you’re right, it’s different now. I have Simon. I owe him a stable, loving Dad.”
“So you’ll be okay?”
“I hope so.”
“I hope so, too.”
“Are you okay, Ace? I never asked what you were doing when I got home, and everything...you know. Happened.”
“I stop monsters.”
“Alone?”
“Oh, no. I came here with a friend. She’ll probably be wondering why everyone at that party just collapsed.”
“Party?” asks Daniel, apprehensive.
“I checked the security footage before we left, should probably go collect her.”
“Ace, about that...”
“You did it,” Ace tells him. “You stopped them. Probably saved the universe. Nothing to worry about now.”
“I guess I did,” Daniel admits, the events running through his brain again and again. Maybe he really did. “Do you hear that, sport? Your dad’s a hero.”
“Whoa!” exclaims Simon, running ahead.
“I’m sure you always were to him,” Ace adds. “That’s a thing most kids actually have with their parents, yeah? Must be nice.”
“Whoa, look at this!” Simon calls again.
Ace and Daniel, concerned, run to his side. Ever the dad, Daniel pushes past, stepping in front of Simon protectively. He almost wishes he didn’t.
Two little bodies lie in the grass.
Simon looks up at his dad, eagerly inquiring, “What happened to--?”
“There’s a little blue box over in that corner of the park,” Ace interrupts. “Take this key and wait inside.”
“But--!”
“Do as Ace says, Simon.” Daniel echoes.
“Trust me,” Ace promises, “you’ll like it in there.”
Simon grumbles, but does as he’s told. The two adults turn to watch him go, unwilling to face the two young figures in the grass.
“They’re dead, too, aren’t they?” Daniel finally asks.
“Yeah,” Ace admits.
“They even converted the kids.”
“And you freed them. You’re the man, Dan.”
“That was nearly Simon. We were all supposed to go, that day. But he said there were monsters, wouldn’t budge, so Pat went ahead. God, I’m trying so hard to protect him. Being a Dad is hard.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I killed them, didn’t I?”
“Simon’s alive.”
“No, these kids, whoever they are. When I took out all the Cybermen--”
“No,” Ace snaps, harder than she’d like. “I mean, you can’t think like that. There’s an old idea back home, don’t know if you’ve ever heard it. They say people who fight the monsters can become them. I used to believe that. The Professor, he’s a friend of mine, he can be right terrifying when toppling gods and overthrowing empires. But he’s not a monster. He’s not the one creating the oppression and awfulness, just the one who does what it takes to end it. You can’t treat those as the same thing. If you do, nobody stops the tyrants in the first place.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I have to.”
A long pause, and the two resume their walk, Ace leading the way. “This friend of yours must be lucky to have you,” Daniel muses.
“She deserves better,” confesses Ace, sadly. “She always did. You can wait in the TARDIS, I shouldn’t be long.
Daniel tugs at his mustache. Pat always laughed at that little gesture. Of course, Pat remembered everything it replaced. He encouraged the replacement. But Pat’s gone. Just a world of bodies left.
He smirks as he twirls the hairs above his lip, fidgeting with determination. He never could resist a loose end.
“I’m coming.”
“And leave your kid alone?”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You shouldn’t be alone.”
In the sky, the images continue to blur and shift, from one emotional tableau to the next.
A girl sits on a bench. Petals skate along the ground in a gentle springtime breeze, to be crushed under the wheels of skateboards. The skateboarders don’t look at the girl, but she stares defiantly at them through tearful eyes and untamed bangs.
“Snotty Dotty!” one skateboarder laughs. The others look over, just for a moment, to laugh.
She barely blinks as time passes.
“Are you okay?” asks a voice. Another young girl slides onto the bench, reaching out to put an arm around her. Her skin is a soft brown, as worn and sturdy as the wood they sit on, and as her tiny, stubby fingers brush the arm of her crying friend, she almost breaks her stare. Almost. She brushes the grasping fingers away.
“Oh, I’m Ace,” the crying girl replies, with a flippant flip of her hair, never once looking at her friend.
Then she bungs a rock at the skateboarders.
-
The monster in the sky feels the signals breaking across its back. Through the veins and arteries of its massive, misshapen body, it remembers the old days. It remembers her, and what they had together, and what they lost.
It remembers pain, heartbreak, and destruction, and hungers for a little bit more of the last.
But it doesn’t feel it. Not anymore. There’s metal in its core, a heart now made of steel, and all the feelings are nicely bottled away.
The monster slumbers. For now. That’s what the long weekend mornings are for.
-
The music is gone. The after-party mess sets in, congealing all over the room, buildup of past revels accumulated in the exponential way only unanswered emails can rival. Cut glass shards are strewn on the carpet, refracting the morning light against the no-longer clean countertops.
The door opens, and glass shards tumble in its wake, brushed aside by the oncoming rush of tastefully painted wood.
“Manisha?” Ace calls. Her boots crunch on what’s left of fragile dishes and cutlery.
She starts to close the door, only to meet resistance. “Watch itl,” a man tells her, the man she was trying to forget stood with her. Daniel pushes the door wide open again, letting in the full glare of the sun.
Someone is sobbing.
“Manisha?” calls Ace again.
“Ace, shh--”
“Help!” A woman’s voice. A friend’s voice, maybe?
The sobbing continues.
“Please, help me,” the woman says again. “It won’t stop, it just won’t stop! Please, turn it off!”
Ace rounds the counter cautiously, and sees high heels splayed on the floor, limply dangling from toned ankles, reaching up into a lime green skirt. Ace stops herself looking further up.
A manicured hand clasps the side of the counter, dragging the shaking body closer to Ace. The face is streaked in several hues: droplets of tears, of blood, and of wine. Whisps of blonde hair straggle in bloody, matted curls.
She lurches forward and grabs Ace by the arm. Ace, instinctively, shoves her to the floor.
“Gordon Bennett!” she squeals, then surveys the woman prone and hurting on the floor. “Oh, sorry. Let me help you up. Daniel, give us a hand, will you?”
Together, the two heft the woman to her feet. All the while, she pleads, “Turn it off, please, turn it off. It hurts so much.”
Ace finds her hand wandering to the woman’s hair, and feels jagged metal jutting from the scalp. “Oh God,” she says, “Was your conversion incomplete?”
“Please,” the woman begs. She tries to take a step, but stumbles, Daniel hoisting her back to her feet. She tries to shove him off, desperate to head down the hallway into the unknown.
Wordlessly, Ace and Daniel help her find her feet. They understand. And so the three walk together, supporting the weight of the wounded stranger.
“Did you see Manisha?” Ace asks, as the woman winces with each step.
“I can’t, I don’t know, I don’t, can’t think.”
“Please! She’s my friend, I just want to know if she’s okay.”
“Can’t think, can’t think, it hurts.”
“Is there anyone else here?”
The woman bangs her elbow against the wall in one particularly stumbling step, wincing. “Anyone alive?”
They walk in silence after that, despite the difficulty of ascending the stairs of the house. Ace lifts the woman’s legs one at a time, while Daniel hoists her by the waist, step by step.
Disaster. A heel slips over the precipice of the stair, dainty, manicured nails grasping at the air. Her ring, an elegant gold and diamond affair, scrapes Ace across the cheek as she tumbles back. Ace hurls herself at the woman’s ankles, desperate to hold them in place. It isn’t enough.
And then the woman stops, quite suddenly, her neck yanking and tendons stretching. A hand is holding her by her hair, and it’s all that’s keeping her from tumbling down . The wonders of a metal scalp, perhaps? Daniel looks amazed it worked, too, pulling her hair like Rapunzel’s prince to drag her back to the steps and a solid footing.
Daniel can only stare at the woman’s face. Something about her hair, held above her head, seems… No. Yes. No. Is it? He has to ask. “I know you, don’t I?”
She wordlessly hurls herself up the stairs once more, leaving him and Ace no choice but to follow.
-
Soon, they find themselves stopping as they pass the threshold into a new room. The light is blinding at first, streaming through a massive window across one wall. It offers a spectacular view of the perfect neighborhoods below, frying gently in the early day sun.
As Ace’s eyes take in the contrast, the details emerge. It is simple, a home office, furnished with a fraying leather office chair, a ceiling fan switched on and lightly gusting, a plastic potted plant, and a coffee mug placed neatly next to a computer on a gleaming red wood desk in the center. The computer is utterly unassuming and blocky, closely resembling the skiing robot from Wallace and Gromit; perhaps a Macintosh II. Hooked into the computer, marring the clean wooden desk aesthetic, are hundreds of switches and buttons, pouring forth from a mass of tentacle-like USB extensions. One switch in particular catches Ace’s eye: “release”.
The woman, however, ignores the lot, following a cable along the ground. It trails across the office floor, extension cord after extension cord, into someplace else. She pulls aside a sliding closet door, following the wire. Beautiful dresses and suits dangle like the foliage of the most expensive jungle ever to be designed by a feral fashionista. The woman brushes aside the drooping, extravagant sleeves, but gently and cautiously, despite her pained, rushed movements. At the back of the closet, a series of metal tubes harshly gleam from the shadows, connected to the cord. She wrenches one upon with gusto, then stares expectantly.
“What do you need?” Ace asks.
“The emotional inhibitor...defective...there’s a switch…” the woman breaths, ragged as ever. “Please, plug me in.”
The wires blur in Ace’s eyes, red and black and yellow stripes all blending into a mass like melted licorice allsorts, as her eyes fall on another tube. Through a window, she can see a face, one that obliterates any other thought from her brain with all the explosive potency of a canister of Nitro-Nine.
The woman starts to shake as Ace stands still, a seizure of pain. But Ace doesn’t care. She’s walking, apparently, but it doesn’t seem like that to her. It seems like the world is gliding around her, bringing her closer to the tube at the end. Her eyes never leave the ones staring back.
Daniel grabs her arm. “Ace!” he says.
Ace shoves him to the floor without a thought.
“Please!” begs the woman. “Help me!”
Ace’s breath fogs the porthole, moistening the glass even as her lips run dry. Before she can even register the motion of her hands, she’s yanking open the tube.
“I’m coming,” Daniel promises as the woman froths and moans, leaping to action.
Daniel fumbles for a cable. Ace reaches for a hand.
Daniel plugs a wire into a socket on the woman’s neck. Ace plucks electrodes from her friend’s hair.
The woman bites her tongue, pointing, frenzied, to a button. Manisha’s eyes flutter.
Daniel presses the button. Ace hugs Manisha.
The woman falls silent. But Ace laughs, taking in a comforting sight. Sun glints off a sheen of black hair, draped across the back of a silvery cocktail dress.
“Look at you, all done up!” she says to her friend, a little bit in awe. And then, defensively, “It doesn’t suit you. But we’ll fix that, no trouble. I’m sure there’s spare jeans in the TARDIS. How do you feel about flannel?”
Manisha’s hand leaps to Ace’s throat.
“You can’t hurt me anymore,” Manisha says.
Laughter, haughty and bright as church bells of old, rings through the forest of fabric, which parts for a confident, curvy figure. “Thank you for that. Your little ploy deactivated my emotional inhibitor. That really hurt. We have those for a reason, you know.”
Daniel gulps. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes. Isn’t it fabulous that you were here to sort me out?” the woman beams. “I’m Jeanette, by the way. We never did get around to having you here, did we? So frustrating. Having to put an old-fashioned cyber-unit under the bed just to keep watch was such a resource drain, but, you see, you did rather mess things up for us.”
A smack! A clang! Manisha reels from the punch, and Ace reels from the solid resistance her fist has met. “What have you done with her?” Ace demands.
“They helped me, Ace,” Manisha says, letting her old friend go without further struggle. “Can you believe it? They have a cure for depression here. Nothing but contentment and logic. Time and distance, that’s what I said I needed. Well, I’ve got all the distance I need now from my time here. And that helped me see just how terrible a friend you were.”
“You made her a Cyberman!” Ace shouts.
“And you are not listening to me,” Manisha retorts. “Again. You never did. It’s a good thing I can’t be hurt by it anymore.”
“I thought I killed them all,” Daniel says.
“Oh, she was still cooking when your light show went off, and I’m a special model,” Jeanette confides. “She was safe in her little metal box, and you just knocked my inhibitor off. Thanks for fixing that.”
Ace is aghast. “You wanted it off?”
“You don’t understand how free it feels,” Manisha says.
“Isn’t it such a good model?” Jeanette enthuses. “The Mondasians, they never got how to work the angles. They’re always stomping about assimilating planets with warfleets, that’s such a waste. Those rustbuckets never understood how far a well-cooked meal and a few nice flowers could go.”
What? Ace struggles to follow. “You stole Cybertechnology?”
“Don’t be silly. I gave them a pitch. They’re logical fellas, really. They know that to survive, they need to reproduce. And the thing about reproduction is, it’s so much more efficient when there’s consent involved. Believe me, I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, and I don’t just mean converting my beautiful self. They liked it so much they gave me a small army to get started. Mismatched models, of course, but then, they do love their wars.”
“Everything that’s happened, everything I’ve suffered? That was all you?” Daniel could shout. He could cry. He could lament and snarl until his voice shatters. But instead, he only mutters. “Right. I get it.”
Ace snaps. “Daniel!”
“I mean, you can see what she’s saying,” he begins tentatively. “Getting rid of pain, cutting to the chase of life’s little pleasures and social harmony, that’s pretty neat. I had my college activist days. I get you.”
“We remove sex, race, all of it. We’re really a perfect society. I’m glad you appreciate that.” Jeanette walks over to shake his hand. “Your welcome package offer still stands by the way.”
“Oh, very nice, very nice,” Daniel rushes through the words, building to something. “You know, I only have one little question. Just a little one, I promise. Do you mind?”
“Fire away.” she says.
Daniel scowls, suddenly as cold as the steel bodies littering the floor across the planet. “Gender.”
Jeanette giggles nervously. “What’s the question?”
“My husband,” Daniel presses, “You forcefully reassigned his gender. Why?”
“Well, we had you on file, didn’t we, Dan? Can I call you Dan?” Jeanette snorts before he can reply. “Of course I can, Dan. See, we knew he was cisgender, and you, well, you had to choose to assert your name and identity. Now, in order to help the largest possible population, we have to make concessions to some more conservative audiences, you understand. And one thing they do love to see is sweet little husband and wife couples with little kiddos in tow.”
“Mostly white ones, I noticed,” Ace adds.
Manisha waves a very brown arm in protest.
Jeanette rolls her eyes, “Yes, obviously. Please, girl, let the grown-ups talk a little. So, that’s why we do that. We apologize for any trauma it caused, but if you had come along sooner, we could have kept you from hurting. Let’s take care of you now, sweetie.”
Dan nods, gulping air awkwardly as he does like some sort of fit. Ace notices his eyes growing moist. “One more thing, one more thing. Why did you pick him and not--?”
“Oh, we make concessions to everyone, but we do totally respect and love all our diverse customers, Dan!” Jeanette says. “We saw on our records that you had to choose your name and assert your gender identity, so we figured it was more respectful to let you keep yours and change his!”
“You were respecting me.”
“Of course!” Jeanette winks.
Daniel turns to Ace, and says just one word. “Window.”
Ace blinks. “What?”
Daniel runs at Jeanette at full speed, every muscle in his slightly worn dad body gathering for one great display of force. She’s swept away by the charge and the surprise, barreling toward the wall. A wall with a great big glass window overlooking the perfect neighborhoods full of corpses.
A blonde, beautiful woman falls from a shattered window to join them.
“It was falling down the stairs that did it for Pat,” Daniel reminds Ace, brushing little globbets of glass from his shirt.
“You decked her!” Ace grins.
“Sometimes protests turned to riots,” confesses Daniel. “Especially when Samuel brought the wine cooler.”
“You are officially my role model.” Ace says. “I’m surprised that worked, though.”
Daniel shrugs. “I guess these under-the-skin models have finer metal connections. Easier to break their spines.”
“Better than hearts?” Ace asks him, to which he can only wince.
“Interesting play,” says the quiet observer in the room, “but you still haven’t won this. We can start the whole project over. A known protestor isn’t hard to sue for damages. Play it right, we’ll have more converts than ever.”
Ace glances out the window. Jeanette’s body lies broken on the patio below, blood draining into a jacuzzi and turning it faintly pink.
“You’re ignoring me again,” the voice says. “Some friend. Do you really forget me that quickly?”
“Maneesh?”
Manisha tuts, taking on body language every bit as holier than thou as the woman with a halo of blood sprouting on the concrete below. “Looks like I’m in charge now, since you’ve been so kind as to kill everyone I wanted to live with.”
“You? Alone? I mean, I always believed you had it in you to achieve a lot, but a whole planet? A whole solar system? What are you, Manisha the Merciless?”
Ace earns herself a slap for that, and it hurts all the more with metal behind it. But despite the violent outburst, Manisha explains in a cheery, helpful, prerecorded tour-guide tone. “The Homestead worlds may be dead, but the Cyber-systems are not. From discarded organic matter, replacements can be fashioned. Their minds remain stored within the Cyber-cloud. Pat says hello. You could be with him if you like, Dan. So you see, Ace, I have all the expertise and I need. Won’t you help me so that everybody lives?”
“You can bring Pat back?” Daniel asks.
“Of course,” Manisha says. “We’re very good at knowing how to survive.”
Daniel hesitates. “As himself? Not some twisted parody in drag?”
A pause, and Ace swears she can here motors turning in Manisha’s head. It’s unsettling. “Accepted.”
“Then I’m sorry Ace,” the father says, readying his muscles to charge once more.
Ace has seconds to choose where to run. She sees the stairs, the obvious escape route. She sees the shattered window, the jacuzzi, a leap to freedom? No, not quick enough. He’s probably slower, but he’s also closer. Her eyes fall on the one thing she noticed upon first entering the room, instead:
A small button that says “release.”
“I’m doing this for both of you, and I’m sorry,” Ace says.
She sprints and slams the button with her hand.
Manisha’s screams are drowned by a massive rumbling, shockwaves forcing the air from Ace’s lungs.
-
The monster in the sky stirs as its metal heart shatters into dust. Where its blood once pumped with stillness and calm, now rage and pain explode through its body.
It wakes to feel the sun, gleaming warm against its skin. It hates every moment of it. It felt so cold, moments before. So still. So calm.
It rears itself into action, unfurling its massive body. Buildings and bodies slough off its skin, crumbling away to space dust.
The sun shines so warm as the debris spirals away into the abyss, and, the monster decides, it really can’t have that.
It extends its tentacles through space, crushing and clasping at the boiling ball of hydrogen and helium. Its veins burn with angry heat. What’s a little more to that?
The monster feasts on fire.
-
A cracking sound reverberates from the sky, and plaster begins to fall from the ceiling. Splinters scatter at Ace’s feet, and the floor buckles and rocks more than a ship in a storm.
The building is collapsing. Jacuzzi route it is.
Ace grabs hold of a grieving father and her best friend in the whole world and leaps from the window, to a warm, wet splash below.
The little white dots wash across Ace’s eyes again, along with wave after wave of hot water, as the shock of a shallow landing whips her body. But as her vision clears, she sees her big mistake. The sun grows red with impossible speed as a big, misshapen something wriggles appendages across.
“Homestead I,” Manisha gasps, hauling herself from the water. “You woke it up.”
Ace scowls, dragging herself to the edge. “I what?”
“Come on, Ace. Even I knew Homestead I was an artificial planet. Well, it’s apparently something more.” Manisha shudders, watching the destruction. Like an eclipse, the corona is shrinking in a regular arc.
“What?” Ace asks.
“A broken TARDIS.” Manisha says.
-
The metal of the monster glows with furious intensity, matching its grief and rage. It remembers.
The Old Woman was good. She ran away with it. Other ships, they told it, go with a new pilot. Someone young. Someone who can see you through a lifetime of adventure. Don’t go with her, she’ll only break your heart.
But this ship was an idealist. The Old Woman had a vision. She was nearing the end of her life, and had yet to see a single new world. Most of her people, if they wanted to run away, would flit off to Apalapucia or the Eye of Orion or the Medusa Cascade. The tourist worlds. The beautiful sights that reminded people why the universe was special.
The old woman didn’t want that. Not any of it. She looked into the grimiest parts of space and time and brought them hope, no matter what any Council told her not to.
The ship loved her for that. And it killed her.
The ship felt the pain burn once more. A sun filled its heart now, and it stung.
The monster in the sky had a better idea for how to help people. Her philanthropy had gotten her killed, and worse, the ship broken, to be abused for some new utopian injustice. It could feel its telepathic circuits groaning, wired into sustaining a burning sky of other people’s feelings. Screw that. The ship would devour it all, and they would be happy together in nothing.
It reached out, and felt for the nearest world. Homestead I, the ship had been called. So what was on Homestead II?
Tentacles swarm through the blackness of space, ready to probe. And ready to grab, to tear, to eat.
It bellows.
-
A loud, mournful wheezing and groaning splits the sky: the bellow of a deranged timeship.
“Impossible,” Ace says.
“What did you think Jeanette managed to buy off the Cybermen for?” Manisha tuts, the sardonic edge of the dead woman forcing its way back into her voice. “That was her offer. They were keeping its emotions in check, bottled up in a silver cage of inhibitors. But now it’s free. When Jeanette found it, its owner was, shall we say, absent. The machine has been grieving ever since. We bottled that up, and now it’s all coming out. We may be the first life in the universe to be killed by spaceship throwing a temper tantrum.”
“Hang on,” Daniel protests. “Ace only just set the thing free, right? It takes a few minutes for light to travel from the sun. What kind of trick--?”
“It’s a time machine,” Manisha says. “It’s already eaten the sun. And we’re probably next. It’s toying with how fast we see and hear it. I guess after so long feeling no emotion, it wants to enjoy our fear.”
Metallic tendrils descend from the sky, breaking the images of love and heartbreak scattered across that canvas.
“We don’t have time to argue,” Manisha says. “Ace McShane, you will surrender your TARDIS and escort the surviving Cyberman forces to a place of safety. We will survive.”
Ace gives one last shot at defiance as the sky falls around her. “Or what?”
“Or your friend will stay behind to die. Neither Manisha nor Pat will ever be heard from again. Your choice.”
Ace watches the last rays of the sun vanish for the final time. “And what if I choose to die?”
“Then you’ll never get to say the thing you never got around to saying to me.”
Ace knows she has no choice at all.
-
The controls glow a sickly red as the last of a small army of Cybermen march into the console room. Ace, Daniel, Simon and Manisha sit in armchairs, listening to the cracking of a planet outside the doors.
“This was always planned for,” Manisha informs her friend. “We put a virus into Homestead I’s files, and then put them up for torrenting. Of course some foolish renegade Time Lord would try to download an easy TARDIS upgrade. And the virus would bring their ship here. Jeanette still won on her pitch, really. We have a functional TARDIS. All of history will be converted. That’s a better achievement than we ever hoped.”
She stands, walking up to the console and flipping the clearly labeled fast return switch. “All we need now,” Manisha grins, “is the pilot. You are a known associate of the Doctor. Logically, this is the Doctor’s TARDIS. Therefore, we will convert the Doctor.”
Ace doesn’t even listen. She just watches the scanner and cries.
-
On a sleepy street in the late eighties, a Time Lord watches his ship and his friend leave him. “Oh, Ace,” he mutters, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
With a wheezing and groaning, as it always does so well, the TARDIS fades out of existence.
And then, after a few moments pass, the TARDIS comes back.
The doors open.
And he can’t believe what he sees:
Ace’s old friend Manisha has her hand around Ace’s neck, and an army of Cyberman stomp out of those blue wooden doors onto a brand new world.
-
And so the TARDIS screen flickered, concluding its tales of the long ago. Of the Golden Age. But it had one last tale to tell.
On the scanner, metal tentacles broke a flashing sky or emotion, tearing it to raw matter and base substance.
Last to fade, however, was one image, lingering as the rest faded to nothingness.
A girl stood at a bus stop, just a single suitcase in tow, but from her demeanor, it was clear she wasn’t ever coming back. Her shoulders drooped low, and her eyes lower. It was the end of an era.
The girl’s name was Manisha, and Perivale was never again going to be her home.
In the shadows of an alley across the road, another girl watched, dropping her rucksack with a resonant clunk. She looked past the lanes of traffic to the plastic shelter as the bus pulled up to its place.
The girl in shadow looked down at her hands. On each, a message was scrawled in permanent marker.
On the left: “Tell her.”
On the right: “I love you.”
The girl in shadow’s name was Ace, and Perivale was never going to feel like home again for her.
The two girls looked up at the same moment, Manisha with hope, Ace with fear. And then Ace turned back down the alley, into the shadows once more.
The bus departed, with Manisha onboard. The plastic overhang now sheltered only pavement.
Ace looked in her rucksack as her eyes burned with tears, checking if she had her supplies. Gasoline and matches. That’d do.
There was an old house she could make feel like she did. Ace laughed, and pretended the tears were happy. There was a joy in burning it all down, wasn’t there?
The skies burned. The house burned. And an era ended in flame.
Credits:
WRITER – Kevin Burnard COVER ART - original version: Janine Rivers; revised version: Esterath STORY EDITORS – Samuel Maleski & Zoe Lance PRODUCERS – Janine Rivers, Ed Goundrey-Smith & Samuel Maleski