Prologue
It was a strange feeling, losing consciousness. The Master had expected to know the moment – to feel his eyes closing and realise in that dreadful second that there was nothing he could do to stop them. Yet the moment itself went unnoticed. It was as if he lost concentration, and then refocused, realising his mistake. He sat up.
The pain had gone, and he found himself able to stand. He almost felt weightless. He surveyed his surroundings. A hospital? The architecture and interior design were clinical: square, pallid and ordered; a maze of tedium. He entered another room, and in this one there were beds against the walls, neatly arranged and without dust, as if they had just been cleaned, but not a sign of a single patient or member of staff. Or, the Master noticed, a window. He must have been in an internal room.
“I hate hospitals,” he declared to himself, and as he spoke noticed a change in the sound of his voice. It was familiar. He stared at himself in the reflection of a monitor: he had aged, and his hair was greyed and combed back. He had a beard; a mix of black and white hair, a larger nose and two cunning eyes, intimidating even him. It was an old face. It was one of his. And it should not have been possible.
“Perhaps I’m dreaming,” he suggested to himself. “A hallucination, or a near-death experience, intended to lull me out of existence. Well I will not be lulled.” He clenched his fist and wandered into another room. In this one, a large monitor stood alone in the centre of the room with a flickering screen. He approached it. “I am awake, and I am aware, and I will leave this place. I will find a way, be it relinquishing myself of my own subconscious, or escaping a greater, stranger trap. I am the Master. And for anyone who knows what that means, that should be enough.”
The screen stopped flickering and read a message, in blood-red block capitals.
THE MASTER
“Yes.”
WILL DIE
The Master stepped back, hoping desperately that what he had just seen was not the formation of a whole sentence. The screen flickered again, and a whole message showed up.
THE MASTER WILL DIE IN THIRTY MINUTES
“I don’t know who you are, or how you’ve put me here, but I’m not sure that you’re quite capable of that level of interference. Your attempts at scaring me are feeble. You can’t even face me!” The Master waited for a response. After a few seconds, he made out the sound of turning cogs. “There is only one body of people able to pose any threat whatsoever to me, and since you’re not the Time Lords…”
The Time Lords.
The Master froze. It all came together in his mind. The regeneration, the hospital, the threat and the turning of the cogs. A Time Lord legend so ancient that no one quite believed it. But they were – they were real.
“Oh my God. I know where I am.”
The pain had gone, and he found himself able to stand. He almost felt weightless. He surveyed his surroundings. A hospital? The architecture and interior design were clinical: square, pallid and ordered; a maze of tedium. He entered another room, and in this one there were beds against the walls, neatly arranged and without dust, as if they had just been cleaned, but not a sign of a single patient or member of staff. Or, the Master noticed, a window. He must have been in an internal room.
“I hate hospitals,” he declared to himself, and as he spoke noticed a change in the sound of his voice. It was familiar. He stared at himself in the reflection of a monitor: he had aged, and his hair was greyed and combed back. He had a beard; a mix of black and white hair, a larger nose and two cunning eyes, intimidating even him. It was an old face. It was one of his. And it should not have been possible.
“Perhaps I’m dreaming,” he suggested to himself. “A hallucination, or a near-death experience, intended to lull me out of existence. Well I will not be lulled.” He clenched his fist and wandered into another room. In this one, a large monitor stood alone in the centre of the room with a flickering screen. He approached it. “I am awake, and I am aware, and I will leave this place. I will find a way, be it relinquishing myself of my own subconscious, or escaping a greater, stranger trap. I am the Master. And for anyone who knows what that means, that should be enough.”
The screen stopped flickering and read a message, in blood-red block capitals.
THE MASTER
“Yes.”
WILL DIE
The Master stepped back, hoping desperately that what he had just seen was not the formation of a whole sentence. The screen flickered again, and a whole message showed up.
THE MASTER WILL DIE IN THIRTY MINUTES
“I don’t know who you are, or how you’ve put me here, but I’m not sure that you’re quite capable of that level of interference. Your attempts at scaring me are feeble. You can’t even face me!” The Master waited for a response. After a few seconds, he made out the sound of turning cogs. “There is only one body of people able to pose any threat whatsoever to me, and since you’re not the Time Lords…”
The Time Lords.
The Master froze. It all came together in his mind. The regeneration, the hospital, the threat and the turning of the cogs. A Time Lord legend so ancient that no one quite believed it. But they were – they were real.
“Oh my God. I know where I am.”
The Eighth Doctor Adventures
Series 2 - Episode 12
Waking the Witch
Written by Janine Rivers
The confession dial had been spoken of many times. The Master had one: it was to be delivered to the Doctor on the day of his death, but the Master had researched the Doctor, learning that he had undertaken a journey to join the Enlightenment Team. He sighed.
The dial, he realised, was personalised for each Time Lord. A ‘purification device’, the kinder the legends had described it as: a place for a Time Lord to confront his demons before his mind being uploaded to the Matrix. The Master put the thought of the Matrix aside, leaving that to consider for later. This dial was for him – a hospital, and the promise of death.
The air had become tighter. It may have just been this room – the Master made for the door. This one, however, refused adamantly to budge. There was an ID checker next to it. He searched for identification in his pockets, but found nothing.
“I rather fear the air is about to leave this room…” The Master took a second to measure the atmospheric density. “I have roughly thirty seconds.”
He removed himself from the situation.
***
Most Time Lords have a storm room. It’s a technique taught at the academy, and our brains are wired so as to maximise our capacity to visualise them. It’s not like a human experience of ‘memory’ – once we remove ourselves from a situation, we can see our storm room as if we are standing in it. It gives us space to think, and by relaxing ourselves we make those calculations quicker than we realise.
Time Lords’ brains are some of the fastest brains of organic beings in the whole universe. The rate at which we can make calculations gives us the power to win wars by taking ten seconds out of the battlefield – and we have. The calculations are fuelled by our urge to survive, which presses our conscience at every moment. It’s how we commit atrocities and live with ourselves. We are hardwired to need to live, whatever happens, even if that means accepting something awful beyond the understanding of most beings.
And I always found that instinct more powerful in myself than any other Time Lord on Gallifrey. I always need to survive.
My storm room is the lecture theatre I taught in, mere weeks ago. Having not needed a storm room for a considerable time, my mind obviously selected this as being somehow relevant. I enjoyed lecturing: standing up and speaking freely to people who listened to my every word, carrying my teachings into their own writings and crediting me the whole way. Not that they ever understood the extent of my wisdom – and the more I think about it, the more I was used as a means to an end.
There is no one in the theatre. I stand alone. I am my own audience: I learn from my words as I hear them. I speak before I think. With that, I learn.
“The Time Lords intend that I die,” I hear myself say. “That is the ultimate aim of this endeavour: but first, they must purify me. Purification would mean acquiring a number of virtues I currently lack. The greatest virtue, of course, is honesty. If we lie, it means we are uncomfortable, or scheming, or unhappy with the way things are. None of these states of mind are fit for existence in the Matrix. We must be honest and uncompromising: we must share our thoughts with a wider mind, and must be content in the state in which we find ourselves trapped forever. We must not lie. And now, I must make up for my lies. They gave the dial a name for a reason. The room has no weapons: I am the only means to an escape.”
I close my eyes, realising, frustrated, what I must do.
“I must confess.”
***
The Master opened his eyes. Twenty-eight seconds left. He realised the dial would continue to extract confessions from him until there were none left, so devised a plan: start with the smallest, and work up.
“The Doctor,” he began, going with the first thing on his mind. “You might wonder why he always survives when I plan against him: we’re equals, are we not?” The Master found himself addressing the Time Lords, if they even cared enough to listen. “The truth is because I allow him to. More than that, I want him to. I let the Doctor survive, because having an equal to fight gives me balance. The man to whom I exert the extent of my madness is the one who gives me balance: keeps me sane. The Doctor is alive, because I decided that he would be.”
The door clicked open, and the Master advanced into the next room.
“I hate confessions,” he muttered. “Things always become real when you say them out loud. Spoken words are just sound waves, after all. Our ideas literally take form.” He surveyed the next room: a shop. Newspapers, flowers and bunches of grapes were lined up against the walls: the Time Lords’ idea of a joke, or the universal code for shopping for the ill? The Master recoiled as he nearly touched a surface.
“Another thing I hate,” he remarked. “Hospitals. I despise them – they’re the place for the things we cannot cure. If we could cure everything, there would be no need for hospitals: we would just have drop-in centres. Hospitals are built because sometimes people have to stay. Treatment.” The Master picked a juicy-looking grape and bit into it. It had a large stone inside. He dropped the other half on the floor. “The most abhorrent word in the universe. An admission of defeat. ‘Treating’ is just holding back an enemy you cannot fight: the stalemate of the medical world.”
He left the shop, finding himself now in a canteen, and sat down on a table with a plate of macaroni cheese. He picked up a fork and poked at it, but found no desire to try any. “And hospital food is terrifying for reasons of its own.”
“I’m tired.” He held his chest: it ached, and when he breathed in, he found his lungs clogged up. “Oh, of course.” Of course, he repeated in his mind. Of course this was going to happen. “There’s a virus in the air – microorganisms, nanogenes, whatever the Time Lords use. In thirty minutes, I’ll be dead, because the virus will have killed me. Which means I’m not facing an execution – I’m slowly dying. My confessions aren’t cures, they’re treatments.” Treatment. The Master swiped his hand and threw the plate off the table. It smashed on the floor, and cheese sauce splattered on the walls. The macaroni pieces rolled over each other as they hit the ground, like worms thrown across a garden.
“And it’ll be painful.” He stood up, already beginning to struggle, and having only just begun. “You’re purifying me, so you begin with the nigredo. You burn me; burn me until every one of my impurities is extinguished. And I am the Master.” He looked sadly at the smashed plate. “You extinguish my impurities, you may as well wipe everything I am and craft someone new.”
He felt the air thinning again. “You’ll be wanting another confession then, I suppose. Well if you’re going to burn me, I’ll show you the extent of my impurities. I am to be feared. When I enter a room, I should be feared. Anyone with any rational mind should fear me. And that’s not a threat, or an elevation of my status; this is my confession: I fear me. I am two beings. I am the Master. Everybody knows the Master.” The Master almost found himself chuckling at the thought of the Master. “The villain, the schemer, the one with the beard who’s bent on world domination and, as we established previously, often lets the Doctor live. And then there’s someone else. Then there’s me – the one who pretends to be the Master when I am something so much worse. I am an instinct: survive. And I take that desire for self-preservation and twist it into something malevolent. I take what I don’t understand about the universe and find revenge by creating chaos wherever I can. And to preserve myself, to continue creating chaos until I find the answer, I will do anything. Anything. I am scared of what I can do. The Master has limits: things he cannot do. I do not. And I am not a person. I am a combination of terrible circumstances to create an entity whose name is inexpressible, but whose danger is just about expressible enough to strike fear into even my own heart. I am more than the Master.”
The next door opened. Apparently, that was good enough. The Master advanced into his next location.
“I believe they call this a dispensary.”
The walls were lined with shelves, on which stood bottles, jars and all other kinds of containers; pills of different colours; liquids and creams; treatments. The room was warm and stuffy, and the Master was aching more and more from the virus.
“Something to numb the pain. And they say the Time Lords are heartless. Perhaps you’re just scared of me…”
The Master smiled at that thought, and reached for the pills on the fifth shelf after reading the label on them and took five. They would reduce the pain, but not his rate of decline: nothing, apparently, could cushion his fall. This fall was final, uncontrolled, and he had already stepped over the ledge.
He was drawn to a clock on the wall, and compared the time to what he had recorded when he had arrived.
“That can’t be right… I haven’t been here for twenty minutes.” He recalled the events of the day. “Of course.” He cursed. “The canteen. The virus is slowing me up – no more storm room. Time is passing quicker than I realise. I’m moving slower. I have ten minutes to live…”
He advanced into the next room. The painkiller was already taking effect: either it was of super-strength, or once again, he had miscalculated the passing of time.
“Consulting room.” The Master rolled his eyes. “Typical. Where we go to see a doctor.” There was a door at the end of the consulting room and another ID scanner next to it. This time, he decided not to bother trying – he knew what was coming. The air was already beginning to tighten. “You want a specific confession this time. You want me to tell you about the Doctor.” He sat down on the doctor’s chair, catching his breath. “The Doctor is a Time Lord like myself, but our histories extend far beyond that: the Doctor and I knew each other before either of us were Time Lords. And once, we were friends.”
The Master waited for the door to click open. It refused.
“That was a confession. That was enough, wasn’t it?” He sat back in his chair. “I see. You want everything concerning the Doctor. Well you might want to stop tightening the air, then – this is going to be a long story. The story of my life, in fact. Would you like it from the very beginning?”
***
And, as implied by the marginally improved air quality, I was to share the truth. So I imparted my narrative, from the day I met the Doctor until the last day we saw each other. Every shared loss; every battle. For the first time I was able to plot our chronology; relive our journey. And I realised, in this time, that I did not hate the Doctor – I could not hate the Doctor. We were best friends. We simply had different approaches.
And we were the same. That was the unspoken truth until now: we were the same. We were both Time Lords who ran away, both so desperate to live and both so shattered by the impact of landing in a world in which no answer was ever clear. We both had the capacity to do worse things than we could imagine when we relinquished our names and our promises. But while I sought to create chaos where people pretended there was order, the Doctor stitched up wounds, creating real order and administering his care on the wounds that the universe, for whatever reason, had inflicted. In truth, whilst fighting each other, we were both responding to the same enemy: the universe, or whoever was behind it. The truth, whatever it was. We were never fighting. We were competing.
***
“And I loved it,” the Master confessed, as he finished his narrative. “I loved every second of it. Why else would I be so desperate to survive? Because however many people I killed… and, all considered, however many times I lost… I loved living, and I loved life. I loved living in an evil world because it was living. And I’d do it all again.”
The door, its controller finally satisfied, opened, and as he entered the next room he felt a sensation of dread overcome him. This room had no door of its own.
It was an x-ray room, and the lights were off. In the centre of the room was the contraption, unplugged and obsolete; on the wall, a screen, displaying an image: the x-ray of a Time Lord. My x-ray, realised the Master. There were red patches over different parts of the body: a simplified diagram, detailing the spread of the virus. The pain-killers were wearing off – only intended for the short-term, for reasons which did not bear thinking about – and the Master was beginning to feel the extent of the damage. He collapsed in the corner; watched his body fall down in the UV light.
I’m finished.
“You knew exactly how far I’d make it. Maybe you knew exactly what I’d say.” The Master coughed. Even words were difficult to get out. “But all you knew about this room was that I’d die here. You can’t ever know what anyone says when they reach this one, because you can never anticipate what it feels like to die. The truth is, I was wrong for all those years…”
He tried to prop himself up. Some comfort in his final moments was the best he could wish for at this stage. Not that he had quite accepted that these were his final moments – a part of him still expected that his words would find him a way out of it.
“Death is scary, but so is infinity. Anyone who spends their life philosophising will know that. There are two terrifying thoughts in this world. One is that you stop: that one day, you fail to make it from one thought to the next, and unaware of it, you slip out of the world. You experience nothing for the rest of time. Eternity carries on without you and you never come back. You become dust, and you are aware of nothing that comes after your life. The universe, from your perspective, ceases to be, and a state of nothingness ensues. It’s a concept I ran away from my whole life. And then there’s another…”
The Master wheezed as he spoke. One lung had already stopped working – and, he suspected, so had one heart. The others would probably be down in less than a minute.
“The second thought is that you don’t die: you carry on, just as a part of me will when I am uploaded to the Matrix. That you…”
He slipped, losing his balance, and returned to discomfort.
“…that you go on forever, living every new day, until your past is so long you can no longer count it, and the future is always, at every moment, infinitely longer. And you reach a stage where you have thought every thought it is possible to think and dreamed every dream it is possible to dream, and you just carry on. Infinity is daunting, but I always preferred it because I thought it would give me a chance to come up with something better. I never did, as long as I lived. We are trapped… we are trapped between two incomprehensibly terrible concepts: living and dying. If someone did design this universe, then they designed that trap. Doctor,” he said, addressing his friend. He was beginning to lose awareness of where he was, and a part of him thought he could somehow get through to the Doctor even though he was so far away. “If you’ve sought out an explanation for the universe, then you are in more danger than anyone has ever been. You are about to face a monster so evil it created the world we live in… a monster worse… a monster worse than me and you put together. And you’re going to face it alone. I was granted death…”
He felt his other heart stop, and the room fell silent: he could no longer even hear himself.
“What will you have to face instead?”
And with that, after a life longer than any Time Lord had ever lived, the Master slumped to the floor in an x-ray room, consumed by his worst fear. He was, as the rules of the universe forbid any poet from being able to put another way, very much dead.
The dial, he realised, was personalised for each Time Lord. A ‘purification device’, the kinder the legends had described it as: a place for a Time Lord to confront his demons before his mind being uploaded to the Matrix. The Master put the thought of the Matrix aside, leaving that to consider for later. This dial was for him – a hospital, and the promise of death.
The air had become tighter. It may have just been this room – the Master made for the door. This one, however, refused adamantly to budge. There was an ID checker next to it. He searched for identification in his pockets, but found nothing.
“I rather fear the air is about to leave this room…” The Master took a second to measure the atmospheric density. “I have roughly thirty seconds.”
He removed himself from the situation.
***
Most Time Lords have a storm room. It’s a technique taught at the academy, and our brains are wired so as to maximise our capacity to visualise them. It’s not like a human experience of ‘memory’ – once we remove ourselves from a situation, we can see our storm room as if we are standing in it. It gives us space to think, and by relaxing ourselves we make those calculations quicker than we realise.
Time Lords’ brains are some of the fastest brains of organic beings in the whole universe. The rate at which we can make calculations gives us the power to win wars by taking ten seconds out of the battlefield – and we have. The calculations are fuelled by our urge to survive, which presses our conscience at every moment. It’s how we commit atrocities and live with ourselves. We are hardwired to need to live, whatever happens, even if that means accepting something awful beyond the understanding of most beings.
And I always found that instinct more powerful in myself than any other Time Lord on Gallifrey. I always need to survive.
My storm room is the lecture theatre I taught in, mere weeks ago. Having not needed a storm room for a considerable time, my mind obviously selected this as being somehow relevant. I enjoyed lecturing: standing up and speaking freely to people who listened to my every word, carrying my teachings into their own writings and crediting me the whole way. Not that they ever understood the extent of my wisdom – and the more I think about it, the more I was used as a means to an end.
There is no one in the theatre. I stand alone. I am my own audience: I learn from my words as I hear them. I speak before I think. With that, I learn.
“The Time Lords intend that I die,” I hear myself say. “That is the ultimate aim of this endeavour: but first, they must purify me. Purification would mean acquiring a number of virtues I currently lack. The greatest virtue, of course, is honesty. If we lie, it means we are uncomfortable, or scheming, or unhappy with the way things are. None of these states of mind are fit for existence in the Matrix. We must be honest and uncompromising: we must share our thoughts with a wider mind, and must be content in the state in which we find ourselves trapped forever. We must not lie. And now, I must make up for my lies. They gave the dial a name for a reason. The room has no weapons: I am the only means to an escape.”
I close my eyes, realising, frustrated, what I must do.
“I must confess.”
***
The Master opened his eyes. Twenty-eight seconds left. He realised the dial would continue to extract confessions from him until there were none left, so devised a plan: start with the smallest, and work up.
“The Doctor,” he began, going with the first thing on his mind. “You might wonder why he always survives when I plan against him: we’re equals, are we not?” The Master found himself addressing the Time Lords, if they even cared enough to listen. “The truth is because I allow him to. More than that, I want him to. I let the Doctor survive, because having an equal to fight gives me balance. The man to whom I exert the extent of my madness is the one who gives me balance: keeps me sane. The Doctor is alive, because I decided that he would be.”
The door clicked open, and the Master advanced into the next room.
“I hate confessions,” he muttered. “Things always become real when you say them out loud. Spoken words are just sound waves, after all. Our ideas literally take form.” He surveyed the next room: a shop. Newspapers, flowers and bunches of grapes were lined up against the walls: the Time Lords’ idea of a joke, or the universal code for shopping for the ill? The Master recoiled as he nearly touched a surface.
“Another thing I hate,” he remarked. “Hospitals. I despise them – they’re the place for the things we cannot cure. If we could cure everything, there would be no need for hospitals: we would just have drop-in centres. Hospitals are built because sometimes people have to stay. Treatment.” The Master picked a juicy-looking grape and bit into it. It had a large stone inside. He dropped the other half on the floor. “The most abhorrent word in the universe. An admission of defeat. ‘Treating’ is just holding back an enemy you cannot fight: the stalemate of the medical world.”
He left the shop, finding himself now in a canteen, and sat down on a table with a plate of macaroni cheese. He picked up a fork and poked at it, but found no desire to try any. “And hospital food is terrifying for reasons of its own.”
“I’m tired.” He held his chest: it ached, and when he breathed in, he found his lungs clogged up. “Oh, of course.” Of course, he repeated in his mind. Of course this was going to happen. “There’s a virus in the air – microorganisms, nanogenes, whatever the Time Lords use. In thirty minutes, I’ll be dead, because the virus will have killed me. Which means I’m not facing an execution – I’m slowly dying. My confessions aren’t cures, they’re treatments.” Treatment. The Master swiped his hand and threw the plate off the table. It smashed on the floor, and cheese sauce splattered on the walls. The macaroni pieces rolled over each other as they hit the ground, like worms thrown across a garden.
“And it’ll be painful.” He stood up, already beginning to struggle, and having only just begun. “You’re purifying me, so you begin with the nigredo. You burn me; burn me until every one of my impurities is extinguished. And I am the Master.” He looked sadly at the smashed plate. “You extinguish my impurities, you may as well wipe everything I am and craft someone new.”
He felt the air thinning again. “You’ll be wanting another confession then, I suppose. Well if you’re going to burn me, I’ll show you the extent of my impurities. I am to be feared. When I enter a room, I should be feared. Anyone with any rational mind should fear me. And that’s not a threat, or an elevation of my status; this is my confession: I fear me. I am two beings. I am the Master. Everybody knows the Master.” The Master almost found himself chuckling at the thought of the Master. “The villain, the schemer, the one with the beard who’s bent on world domination and, as we established previously, often lets the Doctor live. And then there’s someone else. Then there’s me – the one who pretends to be the Master when I am something so much worse. I am an instinct: survive. And I take that desire for self-preservation and twist it into something malevolent. I take what I don’t understand about the universe and find revenge by creating chaos wherever I can. And to preserve myself, to continue creating chaos until I find the answer, I will do anything. Anything. I am scared of what I can do. The Master has limits: things he cannot do. I do not. And I am not a person. I am a combination of terrible circumstances to create an entity whose name is inexpressible, but whose danger is just about expressible enough to strike fear into even my own heart. I am more than the Master.”
The next door opened. Apparently, that was good enough. The Master advanced into his next location.
“I believe they call this a dispensary.”
The walls were lined with shelves, on which stood bottles, jars and all other kinds of containers; pills of different colours; liquids and creams; treatments. The room was warm and stuffy, and the Master was aching more and more from the virus.
“Something to numb the pain. And they say the Time Lords are heartless. Perhaps you’re just scared of me…”
The Master smiled at that thought, and reached for the pills on the fifth shelf after reading the label on them and took five. They would reduce the pain, but not his rate of decline: nothing, apparently, could cushion his fall. This fall was final, uncontrolled, and he had already stepped over the ledge.
He was drawn to a clock on the wall, and compared the time to what he had recorded when he had arrived.
“That can’t be right… I haven’t been here for twenty minutes.” He recalled the events of the day. “Of course.” He cursed. “The canteen. The virus is slowing me up – no more storm room. Time is passing quicker than I realise. I’m moving slower. I have ten minutes to live…”
He advanced into the next room. The painkiller was already taking effect: either it was of super-strength, or once again, he had miscalculated the passing of time.
“Consulting room.” The Master rolled his eyes. “Typical. Where we go to see a doctor.” There was a door at the end of the consulting room and another ID scanner next to it. This time, he decided not to bother trying – he knew what was coming. The air was already beginning to tighten. “You want a specific confession this time. You want me to tell you about the Doctor.” He sat down on the doctor’s chair, catching his breath. “The Doctor is a Time Lord like myself, but our histories extend far beyond that: the Doctor and I knew each other before either of us were Time Lords. And once, we were friends.”
The Master waited for the door to click open. It refused.
“That was a confession. That was enough, wasn’t it?” He sat back in his chair. “I see. You want everything concerning the Doctor. Well you might want to stop tightening the air, then – this is going to be a long story. The story of my life, in fact. Would you like it from the very beginning?”
***
And, as implied by the marginally improved air quality, I was to share the truth. So I imparted my narrative, from the day I met the Doctor until the last day we saw each other. Every shared loss; every battle. For the first time I was able to plot our chronology; relive our journey. And I realised, in this time, that I did not hate the Doctor – I could not hate the Doctor. We were best friends. We simply had different approaches.
And we were the same. That was the unspoken truth until now: we were the same. We were both Time Lords who ran away, both so desperate to live and both so shattered by the impact of landing in a world in which no answer was ever clear. We both had the capacity to do worse things than we could imagine when we relinquished our names and our promises. But while I sought to create chaos where people pretended there was order, the Doctor stitched up wounds, creating real order and administering his care on the wounds that the universe, for whatever reason, had inflicted. In truth, whilst fighting each other, we were both responding to the same enemy: the universe, or whoever was behind it. The truth, whatever it was. We were never fighting. We were competing.
***
“And I loved it,” the Master confessed, as he finished his narrative. “I loved every second of it. Why else would I be so desperate to survive? Because however many people I killed… and, all considered, however many times I lost… I loved living, and I loved life. I loved living in an evil world because it was living. And I’d do it all again.”
The door, its controller finally satisfied, opened, and as he entered the next room he felt a sensation of dread overcome him. This room had no door of its own.
It was an x-ray room, and the lights were off. In the centre of the room was the contraption, unplugged and obsolete; on the wall, a screen, displaying an image: the x-ray of a Time Lord. My x-ray, realised the Master. There were red patches over different parts of the body: a simplified diagram, detailing the spread of the virus. The pain-killers were wearing off – only intended for the short-term, for reasons which did not bear thinking about – and the Master was beginning to feel the extent of the damage. He collapsed in the corner; watched his body fall down in the UV light.
I’m finished.
“You knew exactly how far I’d make it. Maybe you knew exactly what I’d say.” The Master coughed. Even words were difficult to get out. “But all you knew about this room was that I’d die here. You can’t ever know what anyone says when they reach this one, because you can never anticipate what it feels like to die. The truth is, I was wrong for all those years…”
He tried to prop himself up. Some comfort in his final moments was the best he could wish for at this stage. Not that he had quite accepted that these were his final moments – a part of him still expected that his words would find him a way out of it.
“Death is scary, but so is infinity. Anyone who spends their life philosophising will know that. There are two terrifying thoughts in this world. One is that you stop: that one day, you fail to make it from one thought to the next, and unaware of it, you slip out of the world. You experience nothing for the rest of time. Eternity carries on without you and you never come back. You become dust, and you are aware of nothing that comes after your life. The universe, from your perspective, ceases to be, and a state of nothingness ensues. It’s a concept I ran away from my whole life. And then there’s another…”
The Master wheezed as he spoke. One lung had already stopped working – and, he suspected, so had one heart. The others would probably be down in less than a minute.
“The second thought is that you don’t die: you carry on, just as a part of me will when I am uploaded to the Matrix. That you…”
He slipped, losing his balance, and returned to discomfort.
“…that you go on forever, living every new day, until your past is so long you can no longer count it, and the future is always, at every moment, infinitely longer. And you reach a stage where you have thought every thought it is possible to think and dreamed every dream it is possible to dream, and you just carry on. Infinity is daunting, but I always preferred it because I thought it would give me a chance to come up with something better. I never did, as long as I lived. We are trapped… we are trapped between two incomprehensibly terrible concepts: living and dying. If someone did design this universe, then they designed that trap. Doctor,” he said, addressing his friend. He was beginning to lose awareness of where he was, and a part of him thought he could somehow get through to the Doctor even though he was so far away. “If you’ve sought out an explanation for the universe, then you are in more danger than anyone has ever been. You are about to face a monster so evil it created the world we live in… a monster worse… a monster worse than me and you put together. And you’re going to face it alone. I was granted death…”
He felt his other heart stop, and the room fell silent: he could no longer even hear himself.
“What will you have to face instead?”
And with that, after a life longer than any Time Lord had ever lived, the Master slumped to the floor in an x-ray room, consumed by his worst fear. He was, as the rules of the universe forbid any poet from being able to put another way, very much dead.
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NEXT TIME
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