Prologue
“It was on about the third adventure, or the fourth. I should probably number them but I never got around to it. It was all so sudden – did we even sleep? Anyway, there we were, in Victorian London. There weren’t any aliens for once; there was just that weird paper thing… whatever that was. You were busy, off investigating it as you always do, and you’d told me to wait by the TARDIS, so I didn’t, obviously. I sat there for a while, reached into my bag and got out some hand-cream, and while I was rubbing it over my hands I noticed they were still tingling – from the excitement, I mean. Just from being there, my hands were still tingling, I still got shivers up my spine, my heart was still beating a tiny bit too fast… and I couldn’t resist. Everyone does it, I figured that out later, but I thought I was unusual back then. So I just went with it, and I left.
I’d been on the street already, but stepping out again was strange. Getting all those smells again after being in the TARDIS, the change in temperature, how different the air felt. Cuz’, people step in and out of buildings every day, we’re used to moving from place to place, environment to environment, crossing thresholds and all that. But we’re not used to literally stepping from one world to another. That just… doesn’t happen. Never mind buildings… falling out of one world, into another. There’s no saying what that will do to you. Not that you ever realised it, you live your whole life that way. Worlds are your buildings, aren’t they, it takes entering another universe to blow you off your feet.
And I was thinking about it all then, meandering about without a bloody clue where I was going. And I was thinking, like… me being there. I was making an impression on the world. I hadn’t considered that sort of thing before, I was never into sci-fi and because I didn’t think time travel was possible, I never bothered to think about the way it worked. But I thought then, I wondered… what way round does it work? Is it that me being there was always a part of history? That if I hadn’t turned up there as I was meant to, history would have changed? Or is it that we were interfering? That we’d, you know, inserted ourselves into another time? Because that’s what I was really thinking – about changing the past. If I tried to do something and I was always meant to be here, my action would probably cause something; me tripping up on a cobble in medieval France could cause the French revolution to happen years down the line, or whatever. But if we really were interfering, then we could change everything. And how could we tell? I mean, okay, you could probably tell, but what about me? If I went for a wander like that, then I ended up saying the wrong thing, or buying something I wasn’t meant to, or accidentally saving the life of some guy who would end up murdering my ancestors, I could change history, even write myself out of existence. And in that moment, with you off God knows where, I was genuinely terrified, I was frozen, and just for once I could see why you had told me to wait in the TARDIS. Maybe you felt that once.
But then I snapped out of this. I had this sort of, um, maternal reflex kind of thing. There was this horse pelting down the road, rider totally oblivious, and this kid, this young boy, playing in the street. Everyone else was distracted. So I… ran out. Saved his life, I think. And I never knew – did I always save his life, or did I step into history and do it? Because then, just that once, I had made a proper, proper dent on a history that I thought was dead and gone. And I realised I could have screwed everything up, and if you’d have given that to me on some questionnaire then maybe I would have answered that I would have done something different, but when you’re there… when you’re a part of it, Doctor, there is no morality. There’s just your instincts. And in those moments your instincts don’t care about the rules, about history or sci-fi. They see a kid in danger and they respond. I’ve always listened to my instincts. If I stayed with you, maybe that would have been dangerous.”
“Nah,” was the Doctor’s utterly inadequate response. He gave his wrist a quick twirl. His hand had healed. A few minutes ago, he had asked Robin to tell him a story; something that would interest him, he said, to which Robin had no choice but to pick one of her adventures with him, considering that something from her everyday life would be like a really dull wildlife documentary to him. As she told the story, he focused. Time Lords heal quicker, he had said. But we need to concentrate; we need to be in the right frame of mind. So the story helped with the wound, apparently.
“So will you answer me now?” asked Robin. “What’s happening?”
“We’re being held hostage.” The Doctor scanned the room again. There was nothing to see: it was about the size of a police cell, but without beds or anything; a true, frustratingly simple metal box. To be sure, the Doctor took out his sonic – which had apparently not been confiscated – and gave it a quick buzz around the room. “I’m not detecting anything. I suppose one of these walls probably shifts, and is probably deadlocked so there’s really no reason to try. They haven’t even installed any cameras. Odd, don’t you think, that they’d leave us unobserved?”
“Yeah,” agreed Robin. “It’s a whole new kind of locked room mystery.”
I’d been on the street already, but stepping out again was strange. Getting all those smells again after being in the TARDIS, the change in temperature, how different the air felt. Cuz’, people step in and out of buildings every day, we’re used to moving from place to place, environment to environment, crossing thresholds and all that. But we’re not used to literally stepping from one world to another. That just… doesn’t happen. Never mind buildings… falling out of one world, into another. There’s no saying what that will do to you. Not that you ever realised it, you live your whole life that way. Worlds are your buildings, aren’t they, it takes entering another universe to blow you off your feet.
And I was thinking about it all then, meandering about without a bloody clue where I was going. And I was thinking, like… me being there. I was making an impression on the world. I hadn’t considered that sort of thing before, I was never into sci-fi and because I didn’t think time travel was possible, I never bothered to think about the way it worked. But I thought then, I wondered… what way round does it work? Is it that me being there was always a part of history? That if I hadn’t turned up there as I was meant to, history would have changed? Or is it that we were interfering? That we’d, you know, inserted ourselves into another time? Because that’s what I was really thinking – about changing the past. If I tried to do something and I was always meant to be here, my action would probably cause something; me tripping up on a cobble in medieval France could cause the French revolution to happen years down the line, or whatever. But if we really were interfering, then we could change everything. And how could we tell? I mean, okay, you could probably tell, but what about me? If I went for a wander like that, then I ended up saying the wrong thing, or buying something I wasn’t meant to, or accidentally saving the life of some guy who would end up murdering my ancestors, I could change history, even write myself out of existence. And in that moment, with you off God knows where, I was genuinely terrified, I was frozen, and just for once I could see why you had told me to wait in the TARDIS. Maybe you felt that once.
But then I snapped out of this. I had this sort of, um, maternal reflex kind of thing. There was this horse pelting down the road, rider totally oblivious, and this kid, this young boy, playing in the street. Everyone else was distracted. So I… ran out. Saved his life, I think. And I never knew – did I always save his life, or did I step into history and do it? Because then, just that once, I had made a proper, proper dent on a history that I thought was dead and gone. And I realised I could have screwed everything up, and if you’d have given that to me on some questionnaire then maybe I would have answered that I would have done something different, but when you’re there… when you’re a part of it, Doctor, there is no morality. There’s just your instincts. And in those moments your instincts don’t care about the rules, about history or sci-fi. They see a kid in danger and they respond. I’ve always listened to my instincts. If I stayed with you, maybe that would have been dangerous.”
“Nah,” was the Doctor’s utterly inadequate response. He gave his wrist a quick twirl. His hand had healed. A few minutes ago, he had asked Robin to tell him a story; something that would interest him, he said, to which Robin had no choice but to pick one of her adventures with him, considering that something from her everyday life would be like a really dull wildlife documentary to him. As she told the story, he focused. Time Lords heal quicker, he had said. But we need to concentrate; we need to be in the right frame of mind. So the story helped with the wound, apparently.
“So will you answer me now?” asked Robin. “What’s happening?”
“We’re being held hostage.” The Doctor scanned the room again. There was nothing to see: it was about the size of a police cell, but without beds or anything; a true, frustratingly simple metal box. To be sure, the Doctor took out his sonic – which had apparently not been confiscated – and gave it a quick buzz around the room. “I’m not detecting anything. I suppose one of these walls probably shifts, and is probably deadlocked so there’s really no reason to try. They haven’t even installed any cameras. Odd, don’t you think, that they’d leave us unobserved?”
“Yeah,” agreed Robin. “It’s a whole new kind of locked room mystery.”
The Eighth Doctor Adventures
Series 3 - Episode 3
Practical Calculations
Written by Janine Rivers
“When I told you off about what you didn’t tell Tommy earlier, I never asked. What happened? I mean…” Robin sat back against the wall, defeated, and let her arms rest on her knees. “Oh, God, sorry. I didn’t even ask. It must have been bad, right?”
“Yes.” The Doctor nodded, deliberately not looking Robin in the eye. “Yes, it was bad. How much did Tommy tell you?”
“He said you went on this mission thing, to find out all the ‘secrets of the universe’. And then you came back and just abandoned him like he was nothing. And he said you were angry. About Earth. About…” Robin let that one linger, forcing the Doctor to look her in the eye. “About us. So what did we do? Or what will we do, in our future?”
“I met God,” announced the Doctor without warning. It took some time for Robin to get taken back – she figured at first that it was a metaphor, or that the Doctor had turned to religion and was talking in that matter-of-fact, overly-literal way that so many religious people did. “Well, a powerful man who tells people what to do and calls himself God, but what’s the difference really, Robin? He’s in control of the universe; he could do anything he likes, so take a look around you, at where you are, how you got here, and at what he has deliberately chosen not to change. Then, when you are absolutely sure, answer me: what sort of man do you think he is?”
“You know my answer to that,” replied Robin, deliberately ignoring the Doctor’s instruction to consider it. “So what are you going to do? Go back to heaven or wherever it was you found him, kick his arse?”
The Doctor chuckled. “Yes, I might do that. I might just go and kick his arse.”
“And Autumn?”
The name still did something to the Doctor. Like the season of autumn, her name brought a chill to the air, a promise of colder, darker times once the short period of crisp beauty was over. Once upon a time, the name ‘Autumn’ had been spoken in better ways: as an instruction, or a call, or even a threat to the people who had heard of her. Now it was either an answer to why things were left the way they were, or worse, a question, expressed within her name alone: what happened?
“She was killed. Murdered.” As the Doctor looked away again, Robin sensed that he wished there were cameras observing them after all – that someone up above was hearing this. She doubted he was even directly addressing her now. “Murdered out of pure bloodlust. But I was able to save her – convince God to allow her another life, a reincarnation. Which, so he says, he did. Except I’m not allowed to see her. He refuses to tell me where she is, who she is – or what she is. Because he knows. He knows I hate knowing she’s out there and not being able to save her. Knowing the whole thing was unresolved was what brought me out there in the first place!” The Doctor raised his voice so that it echoed around the cell, then brought it down to a soft murmur. “He’s torturing me, Robin. He’s turning every second of my existence into anguish. If she knew… if she’s out there, and she knows, she’d kill him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Robin, confusingly in a tone that sounded more like the start of a new conversation.
“What for?”
“I didn’t get to know her properly. I just assumed stuff.”
“You were great with her!” protested the Doctor. “That night after I nearly got you to wipe your own memory, you let her in and made her a drink without even questioning her. And yes, she did tell me. She admired you.”
“Admired me?” retorted Robin, more aggressively than she meant to. “You’ve got to be joking! First time I met her I threatened her with a knife, and we never really saw eye to eye, even after that. Okay, so maybe we were good around each other, but admired?”
“Admired,” insisted the Doctor. “She admired the fact that you’d lost something she considered unimaginably worse than what she had – your own child – and rather than being angry, you’d just become wiser and kinder. I think she respected you.”
“Well…” Robin tried to hide the combination of sadness, thanks, and guilt that she was harbouring. “We can never be sure now, can we? And she lost way more than I did.”
“Did she?” It was Robin who hid her face now. The Doctor moved around slightly, trying to see her face so that he could work out what she was thinking.
“She lost her planet, I just lost my son.”
“No.” The Doctor shook his head. “It’s all a matter of perspective. She lost her home. You lost your world.”
Robin swallowed, deciding to move the subject on again. If a Time Lord was not prompted to move on to the next, he was capable of challenging what she had accepted to be true to an almost disturbing extent. She wondered what sitting back and thinking did to him, and to his own memories. No wonder he always ran.
“You said someone murdered her. Who?”
“The Master,” breathed the Doctor. “Remember him?” Robin nodded. “Well, he murdered her. Then he died. And now he – well, now she – is back. She’s behind this. And we’re in danger. I’m so sorry I came anywhere near you, because I’ve done this.”
“It’s fine.”
“That’s not what you said earlier.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s fine.”
“Are you just saying that?”
“Do I ever just say things, Doctor? The Master’s a nutter. It’s not your fault she’s the way she is.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” The Doctor sighed. “We were friends, as kids. She ended up getting messed up. There were lots of reasons, lots of complications.” Robin had never heard the Doctor skip over an explanation so quickly. “Some of it was my fault. She does it all to get at me.”
“Wait, hang on, back up a sec. You mean… this is because of your actions in the past? Again?”
“Uh… yes.” The Doctor had not expected Robin to respond with an interrogation. “It is.”
“Oh, of course,” hissed Robin, “because it always is! Somewhere along the line, it’s someone you’ve upset. Even Autumn Rivers nearly killed me because you’d accidentally signed the Blowing Up Planets form. If we’re both the victim of an alien invasion then I can accept that, but we aren’t, are we? This is you. Bringing your problems back to my home!”
The Doctor stayed silent. One more I’m sorry and even he would have to reach for the bucket. Searching for another reaction, he stood up unexpectedly, and walked up to a wall, stretching his hands to find the measurements. He pulled his sonic screwdriver out again and ran it down the side.
“Er…” Robin awkwardly tried not to undermine her last point. “What are you doing?”
“Getting out,” replied the Doctor bluntly. “And then I’ll take her to another planet if that keeps you happy, wage another war somewhere else.”
Robin sat back against the wall, not expecting anything to happen, and the Doctor continued buzzing away at the wall. He pressed his other hand against it, seeing if it would shift, and then balanced his knee on it as he reached up with the other hand. He stayed in that position for a few more seconds, trying to work out if the wall could shift, the sonic screeching like an excited child.
After one minute of it, Robin could no longer hold herself back, and choked up. She tried to hide her laughter by covering her mouth, but the Doctor soon caught on and turned around, his knee still pushing against the wall.
“What?” he called back, blushing. “What is it?”
Realising her attempts at concealing it were futile, Robin took her hand away from her mouth and broke into hysterics.
“What?!” cried the Doctor, a small squeak in his voice adding to Robin’s amusement. “What are you laughing at?”
“Ahh…” Robin stopped laughing and caught her breath, still grinning. “Your escape attempts are so bad. They’ve always been a bit rubbish, but this is a new level of insane.”
“I’ll have you know, Robin Moon-“ Robin ignored his failure to recognise her married name “-that I am a sophisticated traveller with years of experience and a long history of successful escapes!” Even through his justifications, the Doctor was going redder in the face.
“Of course you are,” said Robin, nodding sarcastically as if pretending to agree with a little boy that he would definitely grow up to becoming king and ban homework. The Doctor gave up and sat back down, now against the wall opposite Robin, so that they faced each other. “Oh, I don’t know,” started Robin. “We’ve had some crazy adventures.”
“Remember when you accidentally got married?” reminisced the Doctor.
“Yes! Well, I do now anyway. Do you remember the Jupiterian rabbit farm?”
“Unfortunately.” The Doctor’s eyes widened at the memory, some trauma still visible. “I never knew new-borns were quite so… strong.”
“Yeah,” agreed Robin. “And purple.”
“Yes,” laughed the Doctor, “they were, weren’t they? They were very purple.”
For a short time, they both smiled and laughed together. When they looked around them they no longer saw pale, grey walls, but colours and movement; stories, memories, and adventures they had shared, still as mad and unbelievable as they were when they were lived. They could still taste the alien fruits in the air, still smell the fields and hear the strange birds. Isolation was bearable with experience as a companion.
After a while, however, those memories faded. For a moment, the pair lived under the illusion that they were back travelling together again: that this was another quick escape, and that a barmy but obvious escape plan was only seconds away. Then the Doctor looked to the side and remembered that there was no door. Robin looked down and remembered that she was back on Earth. Their smiles faded.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Oh.” The Doctor decided how to react and settled on ‘pleasantly surprised’. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Robin still did not seem convinced. “I thought I was infertile for a while, you know.”
“I did wonder,” admitted the Doctor. “After what happened…”
“I almost wish I hadn’t gone home. It was so difficult. You know how, when you’re pregnant…” Robin laughed softly. “Well, you don’t. But there’s this thing. When you’re pregnant, suddenly the whole world is pregnant. You notice every pregnant woman, every pregnancy leaflet, every pregnancy warning on a pack of pills, every maternity section in every shop. Then when your baby’s born, suddenly the whole world has given birth. You notice every baby, every woman with a pram, every baby’s cry in the street, every crèche… well, it’s like that with infertility. Except the other way round, ‘cuz the whole world isn’t infertile, that’s just you. When you think you can’t have kids, you notice all of it. Every pregnant woman, every baby, pregnancy leaflet, pregnancy warning on a pack of pills, maternity section in every shop, women with prams, then… then you notice all the people who don’t want it. Every abortion clinic, every mother slapping her child on the hand, busy on the phone to someone else. And you shouldn’t judge them.” She shook her head, causing the tears to stream down her cheeks faster. The Doctor tried to pin down their root. Sadness? Anger? Shame? “But I do. I judged all of them. Sometimes I’d even wish that they’d never had their kids, that I’d got pregnant instead because I could have done it all so much better. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong in every way, and I hate myself for thinking it, for wishing it…”
Robin sniffed and wiped her tears away. The Doctor was tempted to go to the other side of the cell to comfort her, but decided to stay where he was and give her space.
“It’s over now,” he assured. “Now it’s okay, and the whole world is back to being pregnant with you.”
“But I still thought that stuff,” argued Robin. “I still became that. And besides, it’s not like those bloody stupid ideas in the back of my head have left me alone. No, I’m thinking of something else now.” The Doctor looked back puzzled. Robin elaborated: “I’ve had a child before. I had Tommy, and he died, you know the story. And now I’m having another one, and it’s great. But what if he’s born at the same time? Because considering the conception date, that’s possible. And what if he’s a boy? What if I give birth to him and look into his eyes and see my Tommy? I am terrified of that, and of what that might do to me.”
“You won’t,” said the Doctor, with complete confidence.
“How can you be sure?”
“I just know, trust me. You won’t.”
“And how do you just know?” Robin phrased it another, blunter way. “Are you a father?”
The Doctor said nothing.
“Doctor, are you a father? And this isn’t about what happened to your kids because you’re talking to a mother who lost hers, okay, what I’m asking is whether that was ever a part of you, and after everything I have shared with you, you owe me an answer.”
“Yes,” replied the Doctor, without any kind of intonation to suggest what the implications of that fact might be. “And when I say I know it’ll be okay, I don’t say that because of my own security, Robin. I had a difficult childhood. When your own parents…” He decided not to continue.
“It all depends on how you look at it," suggested Robin. "I remember my parents said to me once, when they told me about my biological parents… they said that most kids are accidents. Happy accidents a lot of the time, even though that doesn’t make much sense. Pleasant surprises. But they said that they wanted me so much that they chose me. Now that’s how you make an adopted child feel loved. And really, they are. I was loved. It’s not the unwanted kids that always get it the worst – at least when they find someone who loves them, they love them for who they are. But if I have a boy and all I can see is my Tommy, I won’t be able to give him that. He’d be better off adopted.”
“You were adopted?”
“Erm…” Robin took a moment to process the sheer inadequacy of the Doctor’s response. “That was one of the first things I told you. Our first adventure, to the museum. I couldn’t have made it more obvious.”
The Doctor shrugged. “Must have forgotten. Oh well, doesn’t matter, it’s not important. What is important is, how do we get out of this room? We’ve been here for ages…”
Robin sat up. “It is important! That sort of thing is important, and don’t you deny it because you’ve always stressed that. You’ve always cared. So is this what happens, then? You replace us with a younger one, and then you… forget about us?”
“Robin, it’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it? Because from where I’m standing-“
“Oh, will you shut up, you insufferable human being!”
Robin covered her mouth with her hand. Her heart was beating harder now than it had been on any chase involving hyper-evolved rabbits, and her head spun more than it did when she had to process the most convoluted of time travel experiments.
“At last, some peace,” muttered the Doctor. “I’m sorry, Robin Moon, but I was starting to die in here! There’s only so much whining I can listen to. Has it ever occurred to you that no one cares about your stupid, selfish, one-note human feelings? Hmm?”
Robin laughed nervously, waiting for the Doctor to finish proving his point, to show that he was tricking her into some sort of self-evaluation. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this…”
“Really? I thought I was starting to make my feelings obvious, but apparently I don’t understand human interaction.”
“We were friends!” shouted Robin, her temper suddenly accelerating beyond what she thought was her limit. “You saved me when we first met because you cared! I thought… I really thought we had something. A friendship, a trust. Something we could help people with.”
“Robin, you’re a human from the twenty-first century. You’re not the first I’ve travelled with and you won’t be the last, and you’re about as far as possible from being the most interesting. Do you know why I picked up Autumn Rivers? Because she was intelligent. However often we disagreed, she actually thought about things. But you said it yourself, you’re all instincts. All id and no ego. You run and save the boy from the horse because some chemical reaction inside you has said so. You want to have kids and then that informs the way you live your life. But Autumn… she was something else. That’s why I miss her. She was almost a Time Lord.”
“Oh yeah, because you love your people so much, you haven’t been to see them in my entire lifetime!”
“I have reasons.”
“You always have reasons! You…” Robin thanked her work in education for helping her to manage use of expletives. “So this is what it is? You just take us around because we’re convenient, and then when our baggage gets too much, you drop up us off home?”
“Basically.”
“No.” The command in Robin’s voice forced the Doctor to look at her as she glared furiously at him. “That is not who you are.”
“Who I am?” The Doctor laughed. “You have no idea who I am. I am older than your civilisation, and I’ll go on long past it. You have no idea what it’s like to be me, and travelling with me should be a privilege. This is what I’ve always feared. You lot getting obsessive, big for your boots, bigger than the universe, and me ending up stuck in a room with you, having to listen to you going on, and on, and on, and-“
“STOP IT!” Robin stood up and the Doctor lurched back, half-expecting her to kick him. “When I get out of here, I am never seeing you again.”
“Yes you are.”
“What?”
“Yes you are,” repeated the Doctor, impatiently. “Because right now, you’re my leverage. That’s how the Master works. She thinks I care about you. So I keep you by my side, and if she wants to threaten me, she’ll use you. You’re the only person who needs to be on the front line.”
“She’ll kill me! And you’re… okay with that?”
“As a practical calculation, yes.”
“I’m not. And I’m not letting you.”
“Then if you do that, if you tell her the truth,” started the Doctor, looking up darkly at Robin, “she’ll have to find other leverage. Like Tommy. Like this planet. Imagine how many people will die if you refuse to do this. That’ll all be blood on your hands, Robin Moon. Would you really risk that? Because I always knew you were the most important person in your own little world, but would you kill another child?”
“I’d kill you,” breathed Robin. “If you weren’t holding this over me, if you weren’t putting this planet on my conscience, I would kill you. Right here, right now.”
The Doctor shrugged. “I didn’t expect you to like it, Robin. I didn’t expect you to understand practical calculations, because that’s not who you are, that’s not what you’re about. But just think, just try and use that limited brain of yours for one minute and consider how many planets would have burnt if I didn’t travel round with a companion. You’re all a part of my façade. I show you up as my visible pressure point, and I can use that to manipulate my enemies. And some of you are lovely,” he said, almost reasonably. “But I can’t risk caring about you, because then I’ll have fallen for my own trap. I need you to care about me, but it’s only one-way.”
“So let me get this straight. You never cared? THE ENTIRE TIME?!”
The Doctor gulped. Robin lowered her voice.
“The entire time we spent together, everything we shared, and you never cared?”
The Doctor glared at Robin, refusing to even dignify a response. As if on cue, the wall Robin was stood against juddered, and as she stepped away from it, it gave way, sliding sideways to reveal an old brick passageway with some light. At the door stood two security guards, their expressions blank. There was no sign of the Master.
“Mrs McKnight is free to leave,” said one, with complete indifference. Keen to take the opportunity, Robin left the cell, standing between the two guards as if they were her own.
“What?” The Doctor sat up, protesting. Robin secretly revelled in watching the Doctor’s plan fall apart. “No, we need to stay together! You can’t do this.”
A part of Robin was still loyal to the Doctor’s plan – to the practical calculation that could save every child on the planet – so she stayed quiet, pretending, with very little effort required, that she still felt anything for the Time Lord. But as the guards turned, uninterested in what last words the two old friends would say to each other, Robin gave the Doctor a smile – not an ordinary smile, but a strange contortion of condescension, pity and anger. It was the last thing he saw before the wall returned, and he was trapped in the cell.
“Practical calculations,” whispered the Doctor, and returned to his plan, rolling back his sleeve so he could see his watch. He counted three minutes and fifty seconds: the approximate amount of time he calculated it would take someone to leave, based on the sounds he had heard from within the cell. When this time had passed, he took a deep breath and pointed his sonic screwdriver at the wall, pressing down and thinking. It gave way as it had when the guards entered, and when he poked his head out into the passage, he realised it was empty. He quickly buzzed the sonic again, turning off all CCTV feeds.
He felt the wall as he moved along the passage, and when he reached a ridge, activated the sonic again. The next wall gave way, opening up another cell. In this one, sat against the wall, was Sasha Ramachandran, who stared open-mouthed at a screen on the other side of the room. The screen showed a picture of the Doctor and Robin's cell, and he realised in that moment just how sick in the head the Master must have been if she even remotely understood what that would do to Sasha.
“We need to go,” uttered the Doctor, and Sasha nodded, standing up and leaving with the Doctor.
“Well I never realised you were such a monster,” hissed Sasha, keeping her voice to a low as they continued through the passage. “Robin is a good woman.”
“She is,” agreed the Doctor.
“She doesn’t deserve to be treated as collateral damage.”
“No, she doesn’t,” said the Doctor, appearing not remotely engaged in the conversation.
“And after everything, Doctor, you should love her.”
“I DO!”
The two stopped dead in their tracks. The Doctor’s roar had rendered pointless the low volume of their conversation, and they had reached the end of the corridor. Sasha studied the dead end in front of them, finding it symbolic of the conversation.
“You didn’t really believe any of that, did you?” asked the Doctor.
“Wait.” Sasha made a face as she tried to wrap her head around what had just happened – the kidnapping now seemed the simplest thing to happen today. “Hang on, what?”
“Two weeks ago I gave my sonic screwdriver a quick update,” began the Doctor, and Sasha wondered where on Earth that point was headed. “It’s got a wider range than it used to have. The Master was going on my old design. And she designed this place to deceive me – I wasn’t meant to have detected the cameras hidden in the cells, but thanks to the update I did. So I played along with it, pretended I thought we weren’t being observed.”
Sasha’s eyes widened as she started to understand what the Doctor was implying. “You mean…”
“Yes.” The Doctor nodded and looked straight as Sasha. After the greatest alienation she had ever experienced, she now felt like she knew him better than she ever thought she would. “I don’t make practical calculations. And I do care about Robin Moon. I’ll tell you what else: I know her. I know how brave she is, and how selfless she is, and… loyal. She’ll stand by me until the end, and she will fall at my side. The only way to keep her safe was first to convince the Master that she didn’t mean anything to me, and then to give her a reason not to come back for me. I had to make her believe I wasn’t worth fighting for. And yes,” said the Doctor, a few seconds ahead of Sasha’s thought processes, predicting the next question she would fire at him. “I have potentially just put everyone else on the planet in danger so that I could protect Robin McKnight. And I’m sorry.”
He carried on again, just as ruthlessly as he had lied to Robin, yet now Sasha understood that there was something else underneath that ruthless efficiency, something as passionate and determined as the part of him trying to escape this place. He stopped as the screwdriver finally settled at a point in the wall, and the wall at the end of the passage gave way as well, leading to a staircase. They pursued the light at the end of the staircase, noticing trodden gum and general signs of wear on each stair, and reached the top even more confused than they were when they had started. Turning around, the passage behind them had vanished, replaced by what anyone standing on the street they were would have expected to see: the entrance to Covent Garden underground station.
“Compressed dimensions,” cursed the Doctor, and then remembered that Sasha had a knack for spotting his phoney science. “Or something like that….”
It was a sunny, crowded day; people and cars loitered the street. Thin facades of buildings, of various sizes and architectural designs, gave the street – Long Acre – the impression of a modular Lego village. The Doctor gave himself two seconds to admire the street, then got out the mobile phone he had acquired, and dialled Tommy’s number. Much to his relief, Tommy did not come to the phone, so he was able to just leave a message.
“Tommy, it’s me, I’m back. I need you to tell Chris to get Robin out of the city, as far away as possible. I then need you to contact Colonel Ward of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce and tell him to meet me in Covent Garden. As for you…”
The Doctor considered his options. He wanted to tell Tommy to run as well – but if he shared his experiences with Robin, they would figure out the Doctor’s motives soon enough. The Doctor decided what the best thing to tell Tommy Lindsay always was.
“I don’t need to tell you what to do.”
Sasha looked around, as if searching for the source of something, and crinkled her nose. “Can you smell that?”
“Like something burning?” The Doctor nodded. “That would be your city.”
“What?”
“I worked it out while I was in the cell. I wasn’t saving Robin’s life, Sasha, I was just prioritising. Right now she’ll be able to run, and she’ll maybe survive about a week longer than the rest of you. A week was the best I could give her. Because the Master’s not playing a game against me, not this time.” The Doctor stepped into the road, nearly getting hit by a white van. A street performer, who was meant to be standing still, turned his head to see what was going on. “She’s angry, and she thinks she’s found a solution. She’s going to burn your planet. And then she’s going to take over the universe.”
***
“Yes.” The Doctor nodded, deliberately not looking Robin in the eye. “Yes, it was bad. How much did Tommy tell you?”
“He said you went on this mission thing, to find out all the ‘secrets of the universe’. And then you came back and just abandoned him like he was nothing. And he said you were angry. About Earth. About…” Robin let that one linger, forcing the Doctor to look her in the eye. “About us. So what did we do? Or what will we do, in our future?”
“I met God,” announced the Doctor without warning. It took some time for Robin to get taken back – she figured at first that it was a metaphor, or that the Doctor had turned to religion and was talking in that matter-of-fact, overly-literal way that so many religious people did. “Well, a powerful man who tells people what to do and calls himself God, but what’s the difference really, Robin? He’s in control of the universe; he could do anything he likes, so take a look around you, at where you are, how you got here, and at what he has deliberately chosen not to change. Then, when you are absolutely sure, answer me: what sort of man do you think he is?”
“You know my answer to that,” replied Robin, deliberately ignoring the Doctor’s instruction to consider it. “So what are you going to do? Go back to heaven or wherever it was you found him, kick his arse?”
The Doctor chuckled. “Yes, I might do that. I might just go and kick his arse.”
“And Autumn?”
The name still did something to the Doctor. Like the season of autumn, her name brought a chill to the air, a promise of colder, darker times once the short period of crisp beauty was over. Once upon a time, the name ‘Autumn’ had been spoken in better ways: as an instruction, or a call, or even a threat to the people who had heard of her. Now it was either an answer to why things were left the way they were, or worse, a question, expressed within her name alone: what happened?
“She was killed. Murdered.” As the Doctor looked away again, Robin sensed that he wished there were cameras observing them after all – that someone up above was hearing this. She doubted he was even directly addressing her now. “Murdered out of pure bloodlust. But I was able to save her – convince God to allow her another life, a reincarnation. Which, so he says, he did. Except I’m not allowed to see her. He refuses to tell me where she is, who she is – or what she is. Because he knows. He knows I hate knowing she’s out there and not being able to save her. Knowing the whole thing was unresolved was what brought me out there in the first place!” The Doctor raised his voice so that it echoed around the cell, then brought it down to a soft murmur. “He’s torturing me, Robin. He’s turning every second of my existence into anguish. If she knew… if she’s out there, and she knows, she’d kill him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Robin, confusingly in a tone that sounded more like the start of a new conversation.
“What for?”
“I didn’t get to know her properly. I just assumed stuff.”
“You were great with her!” protested the Doctor. “That night after I nearly got you to wipe your own memory, you let her in and made her a drink without even questioning her. And yes, she did tell me. She admired you.”
“Admired me?” retorted Robin, more aggressively than she meant to. “You’ve got to be joking! First time I met her I threatened her with a knife, and we never really saw eye to eye, even after that. Okay, so maybe we were good around each other, but admired?”
“Admired,” insisted the Doctor. “She admired the fact that you’d lost something she considered unimaginably worse than what she had – your own child – and rather than being angry, you’d just become wiser and kinder. I think she respected you.”
“Well…” Robin tried to hide the combination of sadness, thanks, and guilt that she was harbouring. “We can never be sure now, can we? And she lost way more than I did.”
“Did she?” It was Robin who hid her face now. The Doctor moved around slightly, trying to see her face so that he could work out what she was thinking.
“She lost her planet, I just lost my son.”
“No.” The Doctor shook his head. “It’s all a matter of perspective. She lost her home. You lost your world.”
Robin swallowed, deciding to move the subject on again. If a Time Lord was not prompted to move on to the next, he was capable of challenging what she had accepted to be true to an almost disturbing extent. She wondered what sitting back and thinking did to him, and to his own memories. No wonder he always ran.
“You said someone murdered her. Who?”
“The Master,” breathed the Doctor. “Remember him?” Robin nodded. “Well, he murdered her. Then he died. And now he – well, now she – is back. She’s behind this. And we’re in danger. I’m so sorry I came anywhere near you, because I’ve done this.”
“It’s fine.”
“That’s not what you said earlier.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s fine.”
“Are you just saying that?”
“Do I ever just say things, Doctor? The Master’s a nutter. It’s not your fault she’s the way she is.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” The Doctor sighed. “We were friends, as kids. She ended up getting messed up. There were lots of reasons, lots of complications.” Robin had never heard the Doctor skip over an explanation so quickly. “Some of it was my fault. She does it all to get at me.”
“Wait, hang on, back up a sec. You mean… this is because of your actions in the past? Again?”
“Uh… yes.” The Doctor had not expected Robin to respond with an interrogation. “It is.”
“Oh, of course,” hissed Robin, “because it always is! Somewhere along the line, it’s someone you’ve upset. Even Autumn Rivers nearly killed me because you’d accidentally signed the Blowing Up Planets form. If we’re both the victim of an alien invasion then I can accept that, but we aren’t, are we? This is you. Bringing your problems back to my home!”
The Doctor stayed silent. One more I’m sorry and even he would have to reach for the bucket. Searching for another reaction, he stood up unexpectedly, and walked up to a wall, stretching his hands to find the measurements. He pulled his sonic screwdriver out again and ran it down the side.
“Er…” Robin awkwardly tried not to undermine her last point. “What are you doing?”
“Getting out,” replied the Doctor bluntly. “And then I’ll take her to another planet if that keeps you happy, wage another war somewhere else.”
Robin sat back against the wall, not expecting anything to happen, and the Doctor continued buzzing away at the wall. He pressed his other hand against it, seeing if it would shift, and then balanced his knee on it as he reached up with the other hand. He stayed in that position for a few more seconds, trying to work out if the wall could shift, the sonic screeching like an excited child.
After one minute of it, Robin could no longer hold herself back, and choked up. She tried to hide her laughter by covering her mouth, but the Doctor soon caught on and turned around, his knee still pushing against the wall.
“What?” he called back, blushing. “What is it?”
Realising her attempts at concealing it were futile, Robin took her hand away from her mouth and broke into hysterics.
“What?!” cried the Doctor, a small squeak in his voice adding to Robin’s amusement. “What are you laughing at?”
“Ahh…” Robin stopped laughing and caught her breath, still grinning. “Your escape attempts are so bad. They’ve always been a bit rubbish, but this is a new level of insane.”
“I’ll have you know, Robin Moon-“ Robin ignored his failure to recognise her married name “-that I am a sophisticated traveller with years of experience and a long history of successful escapes!” Even through his justifications, the Doctor was going redder in the face.
“Of course you are,” said Robin, nodding sarcastically as if pretending to agree with a little boy that he would definitely grow up to becoming king and ban homework. The Doctor gave up and sat back down, now against the wall opposite Robin, so that they faced each other. “Oh, I don’t know,” started Robin. “We’ve had some crazy adventures.”
“Remember when you accidentally got married?” reminisced the Doctor.
“Yes! Well, I do now anyway. Do you remember the Jupiterian rabbit farm?”
“Unfortunately.” The Doctor’s eyes widened at the memory, some trauma still visible. “I never knew new-borns were quite so… strong.”
“Yeah,” agreed Robin. “And purple.”
“Yes,” laughed the Doctor, “they were, weren’t they? They were very purple.”
For a short time, they both smiled and laughed together. When they looked around them they no longer saw pale, grey walls, but colours and movement; stories, memories, and adventures they had shared, still as mad and unbelievable as they were when they were lived. They could still taste the alien fruits in the air, still smell the fields and hear the strange birds. Isolation was bearable with experience as a companion.
After a while, however, those memories faded. For a moment, the pair lived under the illusion that they were back travelling together again: that this was another quick escape, and that a barmy but obvious escape plan was only seconds away. Then the Doctor looked to the side and remembered that there was no door. Robin looked down and remembered that she was back on Earth. Their smiles faded.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Oh.” The Doctor decided how to react and settled on ‘pleasantly surprised’. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Robin still did not seem convinced. “I thought I was infertile for a while, you know.”
“I did wonder,” admitted the Doctor. “After what happened…”
“I almost wish I hadn’t gone home. It was so difficult. You know how, when you’re pregnant…” Robin laughed softly. “Well, you don’t. But there’s this thing. When you’re pregnant, suddenly the whole world is pregnant. You notice every pregnant woman, every pregnancy leaflet, every pregnancy warning on a pack of pills, every maternity section in every shop. Then when your baby’s born, suddenly the whole world has given birth. You notice every baby, every woman with a pram, every baby’s cry in the street, every crèche… well, it’s like that with infertility. Except the other way round, ‘cuz the whole world isn’t infertile, that’s just you. When you think you can’t have kids, you notice all of it. Every pregnant woman, every baby, pregnancy leaflet, pregnancy warning on a pack of pills, maternity section in every shop, women with prams, then… then you notice all the people who don’t want it. Every abortion clinic, every mother slapping her child on the hand, busy on the phone to someone else. And you shouldn’t judge them.” She shook her head, causing the tears to stream down her cheeks faster. The Doctor tried to pin down their root. Sadness? Anger? Shame? “But I do. I judged all of them. Sometimes I’d even wish that they’d never had their kids, that I’d got pregnant instead because I could have done it all so much better. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong in every way, and I hate myself for thinking it, for wishing it…”
Robin sniffed and wiped her tears away. The Doctor was tempted to go to the other side of the cell to comfort her, but decided to stay where he was and give her space.
“It’s over now,” he assured. “Now it’s okay, and the whole world is back to being pregnant with you.”
“But I still thought that stuff,” argued Robin. “I still became that. And besides, it’s not like those bloody stupid ideas in the back of my head have left me alone. No, I’m thinking of something else now.” The Doctor looked back puzzled. Robin elaborated: “I’ve had a child before. I had Tommy, and he died, you know the story. And now I’m having another one, and it’s great. But what if he’s born at the same time? Because considering the conception date, that’s possible. And what if he’s a boy? What if I give birth to him and look into his eyes and see my Tommy? I am terrified of that, and of what that might do to me.”
“You won’t,” said the Doctor, with complete confidence.
“How can you be sure?”
“I just know, trust me. You won’t.”
“And how do you just know?” Robin phrased it another, blunter way. “Are you a father?”
The Doctor said nothing.
“Doctor, are you a father? And this isn’t about what happened to your kids because you’re talking to a mother who lost hers, okay, what I’m asking is whether that was ever a part of you, and after everything I have shared with you, you owe me an answer.”
“Yes,” replied the Doctor, without any kind of intonation to suggest what the implications of that fact might be. “And when I say I know it’ll be okay, I don’t say that because of my own security, Robin. I had a difficult childhood. When your own parents…” He decided not to continue.
“It all depends on how you look at it," suggested Robin. "I remember my parents said to me once, when they told me about my biological parents… they said that most kids are accidents. Happy accidents a lot of the time, even though that doesn’t make much sense. Pleasant surprises. But they said that they wanted me so much that they chose me. Now that’s how you make an adopted child feel loved. And really, they are. I was loved. It’s not the unwanted kids that always get it the worst – at least when they find someone who loves them, they love them for who they are. But if I have a boy and all I can see is my Tommy, I won’t be able to give him that. He’d be better off adopted.”
“You were adopted?”
“Erm…” Robin took a moment to process the sheer inadequacy of the Doctor’s response. “That was one of the first things I told you. Our first adventure, to the museum. I couldn’t have made it more obvious.”
The Doctor shrugged. “Must have forgotten. Oh well, doesn’t matter, it’s not important. What is important is, how do we get out of this room? We’ve been here for ages…”
Robin sat up. “It is important! That sort of thing is important, and don’t you deny it because you’ve always stressed that. You’ve always cared. So is this what happens, then? You replace us with a younger one, and then you… forget about us?”
“Robin, it’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it? Because from where I’m standing-“
“Oh, will you shut up, you insufferable human being!”
Robin covered her mouth with her hand. Her heart was beating harder now than it had been on any chase involving hyper-evolved rabbits, and her head spun more than it did when she had to process the most convoluted of time travel experiments.
“At last, some peace,” muttered the Doctor. “I’m sorry, Robin Moon, but I was starting to die in here! There’s only so much whining I can listen to. Has it ever occurred to you that no one cares about your stupid, selfish, one-note human feelings? Hmm?”
Robin laughed nervously, waiting for the Doctor to finish proving his point, to show that he was tricking her into some sort of self-evaluation. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this…”
“Really? I thought I was starting to make my feelings obvious, but apparently I don’t understand human interaction.”
“We were friends!” shouted Robin, her temper suddenly accelerating beyond what she thought was her limit. “You saved me when we first met because you cared! I thought… I really thought we had something. A friendship, a trust. Something we could help people with.”
“Robin, you’re a human from the twenty-first century. You’re not the first I’ve travelled with and you won’t be the last, and you’re about as far as possible from being the most interesting. Do you know why I picked up Autumn Rivers? Because she was intelligent. However often we disagreed, she actually thought about things. But you said it yourself, you’re all instincts. All id and no ego. You run and save the boy from the horse because some chemical reaction inside you has said so. You want to have kids and then that informs the way you live your life. But Autumn… she was something else. That’s why I miss her. She was almost a Time Lord.”
“Oh yeah, because you love your people so much, you haven’t been to see them in my entire lifetime!”
“I have reasons.”
“You always have reasons! You…” Robin thanked her work in education for helping her to manage use of expletives. “So this is what it is? You just take us around because we’re convenient, and then when our baggage gets too much, you drop up us off home?”
“Basically.”
“No.” The command in Robin’s voice forced the Doctor to look at her as she glared furiously at him. “That is not who you are.”
“Who I am?” The Doctor laughed. “You have no idea who I am. I am older than your civilisation, and I’ll go on long past it. You have no idea what it’s like to be me, and travelling with me should be a privilege. This is what I’ve always feared. You lot getting obsessive, big for your boots, bigger than the universe, and me ending up stuck in a room with you, having to listen to you going on, and on, and on, and-“
“STOP IT!” Robin stood up and the Doctor lurched back, half-expecting her to kick him. “When I get out of here, I am never seeing you again.”
“Yes you are.”
“What?”
“Yes you are,” repeated the Doctor, impatiently. “Because right now, you’re my leverage. That’s how the Master works. She thinks I care about you. So I keep you by my side, and if she wants to threaten me, she’ll use you. You’re the only person who needs to be on the front line.”
“She’ll kill me! And you’re… okay with that?”
“As a practical calculation, yes.”
“I’m not. And I’m not letting you.”
“Then if you do that, if you tell her the truth,” started the Doctor, looking up darkly at Robin, “she’ll have to find other leverage. Like Tommy. Like this planet. Imagine how many people will die if you refuse to do this. That’ll all be blood on your hands, Robin Moon. Would you really risk that? Because I always knew you were the most important person in your own little world, but would you kill another child?”
“I’d kill you,” breathed Robin. “If you weren’t holding this over me, if you weren’t putting this planet on my conscience, I would kill you. Right here, right now.”
The Doctor shrugged. “I didn’t expect you to like it, Robin. I didn’t expect you to understand practical calculations, because that’s not who you are, that’s not what you’re about. But just think, just try and use that limited brain of yours for one minute and consider how many planets would have burnt if I didn’t travel round with a companion. You’re all a part of my façade. I show you up as my visible pressure point, and I can use that to manipulate my enemies. And some of you are lovely,” he said, almost reasonably. “But I can’t risk caring about you, because then I’ll have fallen for my own trap. I need you to care about me, but it’s only one-way.”
“So let me get this straight. You never cared? THE ENTIRE TIME?!”
The Doctor gulped. Robin lowered her voice.
“The entire time we spent together, everything we shared, and you never cared?”
The Doctor glared at Robin, refusing to even dignify a response. As if on cue, the wall Robin was stood against juddered, and as she stepped away from it, it gave way, sliding sideways to reveal an old brick passageway with some light. At the door stood two security guards, their expressions blank. There was no sign of the Master.
“Mrs McKnight is free to leave,” said one, with complete indifference. Keen to take the opportunity, Robin left the cell, standing between the two guards as if they were her own.
“What?” The Doctor sat up, protesting. Robin secretly revelled in watching the Doctor’s plan fall apart. “No, we need to stay together! You can’t do this.”
A part of Robin was still loyal to the Doctor’s plan – to the practical calculation that could save every child on the planet – so she stayed quiet, pretending, with very little effort required, that she still felt anything for the Time Lord. But as the guards turned, uninterested in what last words the two old friends would say to each other, Robin gave the Doctor a smile – not an ordinary smile, but a strange contortion of condescension, pity and anger. It was the last thing he saw before the wall returned, and he was trapped in the cell.
“Practical calculations,” whispered the Doctor, and returned to his plan, rolling back his sleeve so he could see his watch. He counted three minutes and fifty seconds: the approximate amount of time he calculated it would take someone to leave, based on the sounds he had heard from within the cell. When this time had passed, he took a deep breath and pointed his sonic screwdriver at the wall, pressing down and thinking. It gave way as it had when the guards entered, and when he poked his head out into the passage, he realised it was empty. He quickly buzzed the sonic again, turning off all CCTV feeds.
He felt the wall as he moved along the passage, and when he reached a ridge, activated the sonic again. The next wall gave way, opening up another cell. In this one, sat against the wall, was Sasha Ramachandran, who stared open-mouthed at a screen on the other side of the room. The screen showed a picture of the Doctor and Robin's cell, and he realised in that moment just how sick in the head the Master must have been if she even remotely understood what that would do to Sasha.
“We need to go,” uttered the Doctor, and Sasha nodded, standing up and leaving with the Doctor.
“Well I never realised you were such a monster,” hissed Sasha, keeping her voice to a low as they continued through the passage. “Robin is a good woman.”
“She is,” agreed the Doctor.
“She doesn’t deserve to be treated as collateral damage.”
“No, she doesn’t,” said the Doctor, appearing not remotely engaged in the conversation.
“And after everything, Doctor, you should love her.”
“I DO!”
The two stopped dead in their tracks. The Doctor’s roar had rendered pointless the low volume of their conversation, and they had reached the end of the corridor. Sasha studied the dead end in front of them, finding it symbolic of the conversation.
“You didn’t really believe any of that, did you?” asked the Doctor.
“Wait.” Sasha made a face as she tried to wrap her head around what had just happened – the kidnapping now seemed the simplest thing to happen today. “Hang on, what?”
“Two weeks ago I gave my sonic screwdriver a quick update,” began the Doctor, and Sasha wondered where on Earth that point was headed. “It’s got a wider range than it used to have. The Master was going on my old design. And she designed this place to deceive me – I wasn’t meant to have detected the cameras hidden in the cells, but thanks to the update I did. So I played along with it, pretended I thought we weren’t being observed.”
Sasha’s eyes widened as she started to understand what the Doctor was implying. “You mean…”
“Yes.” The Doctor nodded and looked straight as Sasha. After the greatest alienation she had ever experienced, she now felt like she knew him better than she ever thought she would. “I don’t make practical calculations. And I do care about Robin Moon. I’ll tell you what else: I know her. I know how brave she is, and how selfless she is, and… loyal. She’ll stand by me until the end, and she will fall at my side. The only way to keep her safe was first to convince the Master that she didn’t mean anything to me, and then to give her a reason not to come back for me. I had to make her believe I wasn’t worth fighting for. And yes,” said the Doctor, a few seconds ahead of Sasha’s thought processes, predicting the next question she would fire at him. “I have potentially just put everyone else on the planet in danger so that I could protect Robin McKnight. And I’m sorry.”
He carried on again, just as ruthlessly as he had lied to Robin, yet now Sasha understood that there was something else underneath that ruthless efficiency, something as passionate and determined as the part of him trying to escape this place. He stopped as the screwdriver finally settled at a point in the wall, and the wall at the end of the passage gave way as well, leading to a staircase. They pursued the light at the end of the staircase, noticing trodden gum and general signs of wear on each stair, and reached the top even more confused than they were when they had started. Turning around, the passage behind them had vanished, replaced by what anyone standing on the street they were would have expected to see: the entrance to Covent Garden underground station.
“Compressed dimensions,” cursed the Doctor, and then remembered that Sasha had a knack for spotting his phoney science. “Or something like that….”
It was a sunny, crowded day; people and cars loitered the street. Thin facades of buildings, of various sizes and architectural designs, gave the street – Long Acre – the impression of a modular Lego village. The Doctor gave himself two seconds to admire the street, then got out the mobile phone he had acquired, and dialled Tommy’s number. Much to his relief, Tommy did not come to the phone, so he was able to just leave a message.
“Tommy, it’s me, I’m back. I need you to tell Chris to get Robin out of the city, as far away as possible. I then need you to contact Colonel Ward of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce and tell him to meet me in Covent Garden. As for you…”
The Doctor considered his options. He wanted to tell Tommy to run as well – but if he shared his experiences with Robin, they would figure out the Doctor’s motives soon enough. The Doctor decided what the best thing to tell Tommy Lindsay always was.
“I don’t need to tell you what to do.”
Sasha looked around, as if searching for the source of something, and crinkled her nose. “Can you smell that?”
“Like something burning?” The Doctor nodded. “That would be your city.”
“What?”
“I worked it out while I was in the cell. I wasn’t saving Robin’s life, Sasha, I was just prioritising. Right now she’ll be able to run, and she’ll maybe survive about a week longer than the rest of you. A week was the best I could give her. Because the Master’s not playing a game against me, not this time.” The Doctor stepped into the road, nearly getting hit by a white van. A street performer, who was meant to be standing still, turned his head to see what was going on. “She’s angry, and she thinks she’s found a solution. She’s going to burn your planet. And then she’s going to take over the universe.”
***
The Destiny Institute
“Come in.” The Master reached for the volume controls underneath her desk, and turned the sound down a notch as the next track came on.
“Boss,” said the assistant, quaking in his virtual reality boots just as he always did when he first greeted his superior. “The Doctor has escaped.”
“I know,” said the Master, nonchalantly. “I was watching. It was quite entertaining, especially the argument. Did you let Mrs McKnight go as I asked you to?”
“Yes. But there’s still time to kill her if you change your mind.”
“I won’t. I enjoyed watching the Doctor’s face when the guards opened the door and saw that I was listening in on the whole thing. To think he believed he had one up on me… sit down, please.”
The assistant took a seat opposite the Master, puzzled. She never asked him to sit down. She never asked anyone to sit down. Sometimes people even wondered if the chair was not a properly-constructed virtual object; that they might just fall straight through it, but it was surprisingly comfortable.
“I want to tell you something,” began the Master, leaning forward. The assistant studied her, trying not to stare. There seemed to be more purple streaks in her hair now, forming a sort of pattern, and he noticed that her lipstick was purple, too. “I told you I was doing this for the Empire but I never really explained why. It all started a long time ago, you see…” She pulled open her drawer and took out a photograph. In the picture was a man: middle-aged, bearded, somewhere between the local vicar and a fascist dictator. “That was me, before I was killed. I was hanging onto a code – I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was precious. A woman, Autumn Rivers, put the code inside me. I was ripped open for it, and just after I managed to exact my revenge on her, I fell down, dead. Autumn killed me. But it wasn’t just her – she was old the mercenary of a greater system. The Empire killed me.”
The assistant shuddered. From anyone else, that would be blasphemy.
“That code was created by your government, by technology left over from the Planet Makers. Technology which they eventually used to create God himself. Your government.” The Master smirked, enjoying being the one to deliver the news. “Making God, for you. Your species, your Empire, is now in control of the entire universe for the rest of time. I don’t feel terribly comfortable with that. So tell me. Why are we here?”
“Medical research,” answered the assistant, wondering if this was a test to see if his training had paid off. “We’re here to test the effect of new drugs on patients transported to a virtual reality during a dream state.”
“No,” uttered the Master, her voice merely a whisper. “Another organisation tried that a long time ago. The experiment was discontinued because they discovered that after the operation continued for a prolonged amount of time, people were beginning to bring parts of the virtual world back with them. These became entities – creatures – born in the virtual world. To them, the real world was like a dream, and they developed abilities. They could manipulate the elements. They were like gods. Except…”
“Um…” The assistant wondered if she expected him to know the answer. “Except?”
The Master rolled her eyes. “The real world was like a dream, so they never knew how. But now, I’ve given them purpose. They know what their mission is now, my… sleepwalkers. Every single person we have tested from the 21st Century is going to now bring an entire army back into the world, and they will burn it.” She giggled. “Ancient Earth, the place of your ancestors, turned to dust so that your Empire can never come into being… so that your God can never have cause to exist. And with an army on my hands, just for good measure, I think I might become the new ruler.”
“Oh.” The assistant trembled, trying to think of positive questions. If I stay loyal, will I be able to carry on working for her? Or will I cease to have ever existed?
“Now, at any moment, this dream will collapse, and the army will awake. But first, I want to know something, assistant; the same thing you asked of me. Your name.”
“Oh. Um.” The assistant was startled by how long it took him to recall it. “Jackson.”
The Master calmly picked up her telephone and dialled a number, humming along to the tune as she waited for an answer. “Ah yes, hello there. It’s me. I need you to file another casualty. Jackson. Thank you!” She put the phone back and her eyes darted back at Jackson.
“Wait… what?”
Before Jackson could form a coherent sentence, the Master flicked a switch on her desk, and his chair exploded. He was reduced to a pile of dust after a quick scream. The Master stood up, able to dance along to the song now she was on her own. As she bopped her head, she used her hand, still in-rhythm, to waft away the sound of burning flesh. Using her mind alone, she willed the volume up again, and it was all that could be heard.
“Say love, say love, oh love’s gonna get you down…"
“Come in.” The Master reached for the volume controls underneath her desk, and turned the sound down a notch as the next track came on.
“Boss,” said the assistant, quaking in his virtual reality boots just as he always did when he first greeted his superior. “The Doctor has escaped.”
“I know,” said the Master, nonchalantly. “I was watching. It was quite entertaining, especially the argument. Did you let Mrs McKnight go as I asked you to?”
“Yes. But there’s still time to kill her if you change your mind.”
“I won’t. I enjoyed watching the Doctor’s face when the guards opened the door and saw that I was listening in on the whole thing. To think he believed he had one up on me… sit down, please.”
The assistant took a seat opposite the Master, puzzled. She never asked him to sit down. She never asked anyone to sit down. Sometimes people even wondered if the chair was not a properly-constructed virtual object; that they might just fall straight through it, but it was surprisingly comfortable.
“I want to tell you something,” began the Master, leaning forward. The assistant studied her, trying not to stare. There seemed to be more purple streaks in her hair now, forming a sort of pattern, and he noticed that her lipstick was purple, too. “I told you I was doing this for the Empire but I never really explained why. It all started a long time ago, you see…” She pulled open her drawer and took out a photograph. In the picture was a man: middle-aged, bearded, somewhere between the local vicar and a fascist dictator. “That was me, before I was killed. I was hanging onto a code – I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was precious. A woman, Autumn Rivers, put the code inside me. I was ripped open for it, and just after I managed to exact my revenge on her, I fell down, dead. Autumn killed me. But it wasn’t just her – she was old the mercenary of a greater system. The Empire killed me.”
The assistant shuddered. From anyone else, that would be blasphemy.
“That code was created by your government, by technology left over from the Planet Makers. Technology which they eventually used to create God himself. Your government.” The Master smirked, enjoying being the one to deliver the news. “Making God, for you. Your species, your Empire, is now in control of the entire universe for the rest of time. I don’t feel terribly comfortable with that. So tell me. Why are we here?”
“Medical research,” answered the assistant, wondering if this was a test to see if his training had paid off. “We’re here to test the effect of new drugs on patients transported to a virtual reality during a dream state.”
“No,” uttered the Master, her voice merely a whisper. “Another organisation tried that a long time ago. The experiment was discontinued because they discovered that after the operation continued for a prolonged amount of time, people were beginning to bring parts of the virtual world back with them. These became entities – creatures – born in the virtual world. To them, the real world was like a dream, and they developed abilities. They could manipulate the elements. They were like gods. Except…”
“Um…” The assistant wondered if she expected him to know the answer. “Except?”
The Master rolled her eyes. “The real world was like a dream, so they never knew how. But now, I’ve given them purpose. They know what their mission is now, my… sleepwalkers. Every single person we have tested from the 21st Century is going to now bring an entire army back into the world, and they will burn it.” She giggled. “Ancient Earth, the place of your ancestors, turned to dust so that your Empire can never come into being… so that your God can never have cause to exist. And with an army on my hands, just for good measure, I think I might become the new ruler.”
“Oh.” The assistant trembled, trying to think of positive questions. If I stay loyal, will I be able to carry on working for her? Or will I cease to have ever existed?
“Now, at any moment, this dream will collapse, and the army will awake. But first, I want to know something, assistant; the same thing you asked of me. Your name.”
“Oh. Um.” The assistant was startled by how long it took him to recall it. “Jackson.”
The Master calmly picked up her telephone and dialled a number, humming along to the tune as she waited for an answer. “Ah yes, hello there. It’s me. I need you to file another casualty. Jackson. Thank you!” She put the phone back and her eyes darted back at Jackson.
“Wait… what?”
Before Jackson could form a coherent sentence, the Master flicked a switch on her desk, and his chair exploded. He was reduced to a pile of dust after a quick scream. The Master stood up, able to dance along to the song now she was on her own. As she bopped her head, she used her hand, still in-rhythm, to waft away the sound of burning flesh. Using her mind alone, she willed the volume up again, and it was all that could be heard.
“Say love, say love, oh love’s gonna get you down…"