This logbook was recovered from Station X, on its third observation cycle. The attached documents may only be viewed if you believe you have the necessary entitlements. If you wish to query your rights, please contact the head office of the Planet Makers.
The logbook is a personal account, written by the last inhabitant of Station X. The events recorded in the log were real occurrences. The Planet Makers therefore ask that they are treated with the respect, dignity and sensitivity they deserve.
//open-file:an-endless-sky-of-honey-by-j-rivers//
Day 1
Where did it all start? That’s what I want to know.
The last thing I can remember is dying. Heading for death, at least. I was back in my kitchen, in Nan’s flat, having tea and biscuits with Autumn Rivers (now I think of it… why didn’t that strike me as weird?). Then we both seemed to realise it was time. We stepped out into the hallway, that same hallway Autumn had seen when she’d died. But Autumn wasn’t there anymore. It was just me, heading for that door, that light.
I wasn’t ready. I really, really wasn’t ready to die. I wasn’t ready to give up, and I wasn’t ready to do it alone. But I thought it was the only choice, so I did it. And then…
That’s where it gets confusing. That’s where the memory falters, like the file’s been corrupted or something. Did I just wake up here? Where is here?
One thing I’m positively sure of is that I heard the sound of the TARDIS materialising before I woke up. It could have been anywhere. Maybe I heard it leaving Hell, maybe I heard it arriving here, but I can’t see any TARDIS right now. Maybe it was just me hearing things.
Anyway, one minute I was in Hell. I’d been shot, smashed the looking-glass, had that vision, and I’m pretty sure I died. The next minute, I was here. Here -- for the purpose of making your reading a bit easier -- appears to be some sort of base. It’s very secure, lots of locks, with the keys left out for me very kindly on the desk. Quite metallic, but still strangely homely. Lots of tight spaces, very clean, very cosy. I’ve always liked clean. I’ll probably end up making a mess of it, though.
There are three rooms. Where I’m siting now is the computer room, the sort of main living area. There’s a table and two chairs, for me to eat my meals on, and presumably to pine over someone who’s not here. (That will be easy.) The computer itself is weird as heck, but I’ll go into that later. The other two rooms are the bedroom (two beds! What is this place?) and the kitchen. When I say kitchen, I don’t mean I’m self-catered here. You press a button and it gives you a choice of meals. Twelve varieties! Very kind, but I’m sure it will get boring quickly.
I woke up in the bedroom, flat on the bed. I can’t move around very well at the moment, because of the bullet wound. Gotta use these crutches. Now the really weird thing is… someone stitched up the wound. Someone put me into this bed. And then they walked off.
And outside the base? Desert. Just desert (haha!), with an almost honey-coloured sky, stretching over endless plains of sand, in the scorching heat of one obviously very powerful sun.
I’m just glad this base has its own water fountain.
Day 2
I had a nightmare last night.
Still exhausted from the injury, once I’d found a comfortable position and popped a couple of the painkillers left out for me, I slept like a log. Well, a log suffering from severe post-traumatic stress, maybe.
I was back in Hell. God was standing over me. This had all been a dream, one last stab at hoping for a better life. I was dying again. There would be no escape this time, there wouldn’t even be a chance to share a tea with my previous incarnation (I’m starting to sound like the Doctor now… scary). It was all for nothing.
And then I woke up! It wasn’t for nothing. I’m still not sure why I’m here, though. God had made it pretty clear that smashing that mirror would kill me, and everyone else on the planet would be displaced across the universe. So I guess he lied. Everyone on the planet ended up somewhere else, me on this fricking arid planet. Unless I really did die, and this is what comes next. In a weird way, after seeing Hell, that’s kinda comforting.
Now, the computer system refuses to tell me anything about this planet. It’s not like the internet, where you can look up your IP on Google. Oh, no. It’s more like a… giant Wikipedia? It lets you search for planets, anyway. You have to provide a few details, and it narrows down the list (because there are, of course… billions). That was easy at first. Moons? None. Suns? One. Supports life? Erm, I flipping hope so. So that narrows it down to, like… a million. Yipee! I think I can break it down by entering more specific categories. It wants to know the length of a planetary rotation (that’s got to be a day), and the length of a full solar rotation (that’s got to be a year).
I’m not an expert at this, okay. But I’m also not an idiot. So the sun rises on the side of my bedroom window, and I first see it rising over the plain in the distance. This is about as exact as I can get. First thing in the morning, I mark the time I first see it emerge, and then I mark that same time tomorrow morning. Luckily, these future people still use hours, minutes and seconds.
Provided no one comes to find me sooner, hypothetically, I can apply that to a whole year (as long as my watch doesn’t die on me). I measure the length of a day every day, getting sleep where I can. I observe the seasonal changes. When the sunrise and sunset times correspond to the same ones I started with, I’ll know a year has passed. These aren’t the most accurate calculations, but if they don’t bring up any results, the computer will still provide me with the closest alternatives.
And then I’ll know where I am.
Day 3
What is it with this computer system? You can find out virtually anything on it. I know I’m back in the Eighth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, where Autumn came from. I’ve got the whole place’s history. I can see social networks, transmitted messages, all sorts. I can learn things. Seriously – there are whole courses on new skills, languages, all sorts. I’m pretty sure it’s the same package Autumn had on her spaceship, which means I could even learn to fly a TARDIS and speak Gallifreyan if I wanted to.
But it gives me nothing on this planet. Nothing. And it’s impossible to transmit a message. No matter where I look or what I try, I exist completely in isolation. I can watch and I can listen, but I can’t share anything. The only option I have is this log-book. It’s the first thing I see every morning – the computer asks me if I’d like to log an entry, I say yes, and I get to write as much as I like. I submit it, it disappears, I don’t know where it goes. Could be a complete waste of time, but it’s all I’ve got.
I found something else today, too. There’s a fourth room. I realised it when I was walking around the outside of the base – ironically, considering I’ve previously spent large swaths of my life in a TARDIS, this place is bigger on the outside. So I worked out where the one part was I hadn’t explored –just beyond the kitchen. I put my hand on the wall, and just like that, the whole thing gave way. Classic thriller scene right there. There’s a whole room, really round and dark (just some floor lights – bloody eerie) with virtually nothing in it except a massive (and I mean massive) hourglass in the middle, in a lowered area. It’s about twice my height, because that’s the part of the base that reaches highest. It’s definitely emptying, slowly, but I’m getting off this planet before it finishes. Because when I say it’s emptying slowly, I mean slowly.
Oh, and the length of a day on this planet is roughly 26½ Earth hours. That’s brought it down to a few thousand results. Which is great… but guess who’s now preparing to wait out the year?
Day 5
Ed dropped the bags in the bedroom, and frowned at the arrangement.
“Two beds?”
Zoe sighed, crossing her arms.
“They must have made a mistake.” She sighed again, as if her point wasn’t clear enough. “Room for two, I said. I meant one room for two, not room for two separate people with separate lives.”
“Could we share a single?” tried Ed. The idea of spending a year in this place in his own bed was depressing, to say the least. Especially considering the price he’d paid to stay here.
“We’d have to snuggle really close.”
“Damn, what a shame…” Ed tried not to smirk. “Well, I mean, this is our honeymoon…”
“That’s why you picked a honey-coloured sky!” joked Zoe. “Oh, suddenly it all makes sense.”
“Well, I just thought…” Ed had turned serious. “Off-world, you know. A whole planet to ourselves. I thought it was romantic, in a way.”
Zoe winced slightly as the guilt hit her, and tried to get out of her corner. “Well, I mean… it is romantic. And it’s not your fault that they mistook the booking, is it?” She peered out of the window and smiled. “It’s nearly night. That honey sky is turning black. Shall we test out that single bed?”
They kissed.
Well, that’s all I’ve got so far.
I’m not sure it works. But in fairness, I don’t think I’ve written a single piece of fiction since English lessons at school, so…
It’s the best guess I’ve got so far. This is some kind of hotel, a personal suite, for those who want a quiet retreat (that rhymed! I hope they use that one in the brochure). I was sent here by accident, and I’m using all the facilities. It’s not the best theory, and there are still gaps left to fill in, but I like it. It means that soon enough, a couple of holidaymakers will turn up to save my life.
The characters need a bit of work, though. I’m trying to nail those personality traits. Ed, the guy who attempts big romantic gestures and ends up getting it a little bit wrong each time. Zoe, every inch the wordsmith, poetic but also incredibly blunt, is getting used to putting things a little bit more sensitively. Aw, they’re a cute couple, aren’t they?
Today didn’t seem so bad. You can learn a lot about a place from the stories you can tell about it.
Day 12
The last few days I’ve spent exploring, and this place definitely is a desert.
It’s just endless. I wondered if there was a sea somewhere – maybe a few miles away you can reach a beach, and over the water there’s another land, with people and cities and things. I haven’t been presented with much evidence to the contrary, but somehow I know, deep down, that this is all there is. This vast expanse of sand and sky. It’s the whole planet.
I don’t know how far I walked. It’s pretty hot, so probably not as far as it felt. A few miles, anyway. I’ve tried a different direction each day, and traced my footsteps back each evening. There are some rocky areas, and there are some particularly impressive sand dunes. So there we go, that’s today’s discovery. Rocks. How thrilling.
What can I say? I hope this is summer. ‘Cause if these are the winter months, the next visitor to this world will be having roasted Jasmine for their tea.
Day 15
The creature moved towards them, hissing and flailing, a display of anger in a language not only unfamiliar but genuinely alien. If only they could communicate with it. Tell it that they didn’t mean it harm, that they just wanted to be left alone.
But even then, what would it say? Maybe it didn’t care. Maybe it was better not to be able to speak to it, and to hang on to what little hope there was left.
“Keep it back!” cried Zoe, lifting a table. The creature hit it with a tentacle. The sheer weight of the thing sent the table flying across the room, nearly taking Ed’s head off.
“Must be native to the planet!” guessed Ed, searching for something to use. A water fountain, a computer system… it was hardly state of the art weaponry. “I don’t know how to stop it!”
Zoe leapt aside as the creature charged at her. It hit the wall. Ed and Zoe exchanged a look, a fretful stare, that told them they both knew what was about to happen. The wall gave way, and the creature entered the hourglass room.
What happened next surprised them both.
The creature took a look at the hourglass, and saw it. Not just seeing as a fleeting sensory experience. The creature SAW the hourglass, saw the sand moving from one place to the next. It was taking a long time to move, but that didn’t matter. It was moving.
And something about that scared the creature.
It darted back, leaving the way it came, and shot across the barren expanse. It had looked at that timer, that ticking clock, and seen something terrible.
A monster! I always like my stories to have monsters in them. The best monsters are the ones who’ve plotted and planned since the start – the ones who tell you yes, this happened for a reason, and you have something to fight. They give you a chance to fight for justice, punish the bad people, save the good people from them. Without monsters, there’s nowhere for your story to go.
Maybe everything does happen by chance, but I hope not. I hope there is a monster here. A giant squid burrowing at the centre of the planet, or maybe even a human. An invisible tower, somewhere out there in the wasteland. A terrible man with a lot of money and ambition, who has kept going until he forgot what the word ‘stop’ even meant.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ve worked out the full story behind this place, but I think I’ve got the gist of it. I like my theory. Cute couple on a honeymoon, find themselves on a deadly alien planet, expecting to leave as soon as they can. It means I’ve got a monster to fight, but oh well, I’m good at that. I’ve probably got the details wrong, but I reckon I’ve got the wider body right. If I’ve learnt one thing from my thus far short life, it’s that I have very, very strong intuitions.
Day 17
And now I’m scared. I lay awake last night in a state of morbid terror, pondering questions I’d never had to ponder before.
I think I might be trapped here for a long time. It wasn’t just me that God lied to, it was the Doctor. I have faith in the Doctor. I know if he sets out to do something, he’ll usually succeed. If he’s half-way across the universe right now looking for me, I know he’ll find me. But what scares me is that I don’t think he is.
The Doctor will think I’m dead. That I died saving him. I remember seeing that future Doctor, the woman who seemed so different from the rest. What she said to me now, what she said about not having to go through with it, it all makes sense. She knew – well, she thought she knew – that I was going to die. All those years on, and the Doctor still thinks I’m dead. There’s so much that scares me about that. How will he (or she) ever find me again? How will my Doctor take that? How will he tell the other people in my life? What about my poor, poor Nan?
And that’s the worst thought of all, the one that I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to shift. What if no one knows I survived?
Day 18
I’ve decided to try some of the computer courses. They’re giving me something to do as I wait out this year. I’ve had to narrow them down by a few. I always thought I’d enjoy swimming, but there’s not really the opportunity to try that here. It’s also a bit hard learning to cook when you press a button for all your meals.
Tommy was a great cook. The UNIT food was all right, but boring after a while. I wanted to learn to cook, dammit.
Anyway, I decided to learn the local language, or as local as I can find. The most widely-spoken language in the Empire; so widely-spoken, they just call it the Language, because that’s not pompous at all. I figured it would stand me in good stead if anyone turns up and starts talking to me. Besides, it’s keeping me speaking out loud; otherwise I’ll never use my voice. Just keeping those vocal chords warm, that’s the most important thing right now.
I’ve been learning a bit of history, too. A brief and somewhat macabre history of the Eighth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Know your emperors, know your atrocities, know your pop sensations. I had a little smile when Autumn Rivers came up in the Civil Rights Activists section. I’m finding Autumn’s situation increasingly relatable, right now. She spent years in that little pod, drifting through space. Watching beautiful things from a cramped little room. I, on the other hand, am watching sod all, from an infinite stretch of land. Funny that. But it’s not that different. Both alone, both waiting, both learning. Making the best out of lost time.
Day 23
And who the hell saved me?
I’ve been thinking more and more about that. Maybe I didn’t hear the TARDIS, because if I know one thing, it’s that the Doctor would never abandon me somewhere like this, not after what happened last time he thought leaving me somewhere was a good idea.
So, who was it?
Whoever it was, they saved my life. Stitched up my wounds. I was shot, and now, 23 days later, I can barely feel it. They did a good job. Medical professional, I’d say, and they put their best work into it. Not a quick job, not doing it because they had to; no, they cared about me for some reason. But they didn’t care enough to get me off this planet, or even to introduce themselves.
Why does nothing make sense here?
Day 34
Back! That was a long absence, wasn’t it? I figured I’d finally be okay to start exploring properly, what with my wound healing up. So I’ve been out and about, and being a proper explorer about it. I am, after all, technically the first person ever to find this world. Think about it. Whoever built this base was born after me, so… I’m still the first person here, right? I certainly beat Ed and Zoe to the mark. Ha.
I wrote a little message in the sand, a way out. I knew I wanted to write something, proof that I was the first to reach it. But I wasn’t sure what to go for. So, I just wrote what any teenage vandal would write in this situation, and signed my name in the most facile way possible: Jasmine was here.
Aside from that little escapade, I am now taking my duties as intrepid adventurer very seriously, and I have decided to start naming things. That rocky area I have decided to call Valley of the Time Lords, which I’ve always wanted to use on something. There’s a particularly large dune, about eight miles away, which I’ve decided to call Mount Bowie, after the King of Music. And this planet… well, that was a tough call, but in the end it could only ever have been one name.
Planet Patsy.
Patsy was my old best friend at school. We had a laugh together. She was quiet, shy around people she didn’t know, which was a shame, because that girl had talent. I mean, I’m sorry you’re stuck here now, reading this, when you could be reading something by Patsy. She had a way with words like no one else.
I always said to Patsy, if anything ever happened to me, she would be writing my eulogy. I didn’t, at the time, think that anything would happen to me. I would, obviously, live forever. There was this sort of far-flung imagined world where we’re both in, like, our late nineties, sitting around in an old people’s home, our great-grandchildren telling us off for being old-fashioned for still using our iPads. And I’d finally meet my end, very old and very satisfied, and Patsy, with nothing else to do, would go, “Hey, remember all those years ago I promised to write Jasmine’s eulogy? Let’s do it.”
Only, I actually did die. And young. I know Patsy, and I just know that she’ll have written it. She always sticks to her word, and this kind of thing matters a lot to her. She’ll have to stand up in front of all those people – probably half of UNIT, which is a scary prospect even for me (and I played electric guitar in front of the people of Gallifrey) – and she’ll be absolutely terrified. Oh, she’ll manage, but still, I feel pretty awful.
So this is my way of saying sorry. Sorry, and thanks. Thanks, Patsy, for always being there for me. Thanks for what was probably the best funeral anyone could wish for. Have this planet.
Day 50
It was the middle of the night. The monsters were gone, and the hourglass continued to mark the days and weeks they had spent here. The immediate excitement and ecstasy of the trip had gone. Life was sinking in. And Ed was sitting up in his own bed, drinking water, feeling sad, and sneezing.
It was the sneezing that woke Zoe. She was a little freaked out to see him sitting still on top of his bed, like some sort of demonic entity had decided to possess him in the middle of the night. Thankfully, demonic entities didn’t sneeze. Usually.
“What’s up?” she whispered.
“I hate it here,” said Ed, not whispering. There was no point anyway, since they were the only two people on the planet.
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, I mean… I’m bored of it. I want to go somewhere new, somewhere different.”
“With me or without me?”
“Zoe!” complained Ed. Whatever he said, she seemed to be turning it back on him. “I don’t mean it like that. I just don’t feel like I can offer you anything here anymore. All those things I used to do for you, just to let you know I loved you. I can’t make you breakfast, because there’s a little button that does that for us. I can’t take you anywhere, because everywhere is the same. And what can I treat you to? It’s like trying to date in purgatory.”
“Your grasp of philosophy is terrible, Ed. This place is nothing like purgatory.” Zoe got up from her bed, throwing her own covers on the floor. When she reached the door, she stopped, turning to Ed, and made one last comment.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “I was actually enjoying it here.”
She slammed the door. Ed sneezed again.
Happy Fifty Days On Planet Patsy Anniversary! Yay?
Day 57
I decided to write a bucket list today. Pen and paper, the old-fashioned way. I found some in the drawer. I ended up dividing the list into two columns: the possible, and the not-yet-possible. In other words, the things I could do right now, and the things I’d need to leave this planet for. Admittedly, there’s a slight deficiency in the former category. I think I’m a bit lost as to what sort of things you could really do in a desert on your own, which is why I made up senseless crap like ‘Run as fast and as far as you can in a massive circle whilst singing the lyrics to ‘Heroes.’. Ahhh. Maybe one day.
Here’s the list. If you’ll excuse my handwriting. And yes, this thing even has a webcam, not that it will actually let me communicate with anyone.
The logbook is a personal account, written by the last inhabitant of Station X. The events recorded in the log were real occurrences. The Planet Makers therefore ask that they are treated with the respect, dignity and sensitivity they deserve.
//open-file:an-endless-sky-of-honey-by-j-rivers//
Day 1
Where did it all start? That’s what I want to know.
The last thing I can remember is dying. Heading for death, at least. I was back in my kitchen, in Nan’s flat, having tea and biscuits with Autumn Rivers (now I think of it… why didn’t that strike me as weird?). Then we both seemed to realise it was time. We stepped out into the hallway, that same hallway Autumn had seen when she’d died. But Autumn wasn’t there anymore. It was just me, heading for that door, that light.
I wasn’t ready. I really, really wasn’t ready to die. I wasn’t ready to give up, and I wasn’t ready to do it alone. But I thought it was the only choice, so I did it. And then…
That’s where it gets confusing. That’s where the memory falters, like the file’s been corrupted or something. Did I just wake up here? Where is here?
One thing I’m positively sure of is that I heard the sound of the TARDIS materialising before I woke up. It could have been anywhere. Maybe I heard it leaving Hell, maybe I heard it arriving here, but I can’t see any TARDIS right now. Maybe it was just me hearing things.
Anyway, one minute I was in Hell. I’d been shot, smashed the looking-glass, had that vision, and I’m pretty sure I died. The next minute, I was here. Here -- for the purpose of making your reading a bit easier -- appears to be some sort of base. It’s very secure, lots of locks, with the keys left out for me very kindly on the desk. Quite metallic, but still strangely homely. Lots of tight spaces, very clean, very cosy. I’ve always liked clean. I’ll probably end up making a mess of it, though.
There are three rooms. Where I’m siting now is the computer room, the sort of main living area. There’s a table and two chairs, for me to eat my meals on, and presumably to pine over someone who’s not here. (That will be easy.) The computer itself is weird as heck, but I’ll go into that later. The other two rooms are the bedroom (two beds! What is this place?) and the kitchen. When I say kitchen, I don’t mean I’m self-catered here. You press a button and it gives you a choice of meals. Twelve varieties! Very kind, but I’m sure it will get boring quickly.
I woke up in the bedroom, flat on the bed. I can’t move around very well at the moment, because of the bullet wound. Gotta use these crutches. Now the really weird thing is… someone stitched up the wound. Someone put me into this bed. And then they walked off.
And outside the base? Desert. Just desert (haha!), with an almost honey-coloured sky, stretching over endless plains of sand, in the scorching heat of one obviously very powerful sun.
I’m just glad this base has its own water fountain.
Day 2
I had a nightmare last night.
Still exhausted from the injury, once I’d found a comfortable position and popped a couple of the painkillers left out for me, I slept like a log. Well, a log suffering from severe post-traumatic stress, maybe.
I was back in Hell. God was standing over me. This had all been a dream, one last stab at hoping for a better life. I was dying again. There would be no escape this time, there wouldn’t even be a chance to share a tea with my previous incarnation (I’m starting to sound like the Doctor now… scary). It was all for nothing.
And then I woke up! It wasn’t for nothing. I’m still not sure why I’m here, though. God had made it pretty clear that smashing that mirror would kill me, and everyone else on the planet would be displaced across the universe. So I guess he lied. Everyone on the planet ended up somewhere else, me on this fricking arid planet. Unless I really did die, and this is what comes next. In a weird way, after seeing Hell, that’s kinda comforting.
Now, the computer system refuses to tell me anything about this planet. It’s not like the internet, where you can look up your IP on Google. Oh, no. It’s more like a… giant Wikipedia? It lets you search for planets, anyway. You have to provide a few details, and it narrows down the list (because there are, of course… billions). That was easy at first. Moons? None. Suns? One. Supports life? Erm, I flipping hope so. So that narrows it down to, like… a million. Yipee! I think I can break it down by entering more specific categories. It wants to know the length of a planetary rotation (that’s got to be a day), and the length of a full solar rotation (that’s got to be a year).
I’m not an expert at this, okay. But I’m also not an idiot. So the sun rises on the side of my bedroom window, and I first see it rising over the plain in the distance. This is about as exact as I can get. First thing in the morning, I mark the time I first see it emerge, and then I mark that same time tomorrow morning. Luckily, these future people still use hours, minutes and seconds.
Provided no one comes to find me sooner, hypothetically, I can apply that to a whole year (as long as my watch doesn’t die on me). I measure the length of a day every day, getting sleep where I can. I observe the seasonal changes. When the sunrise and sunset times correspond to the same ones I started with, I’ll know a year has passed. These aren’t the most accurate calculations, but if they don’t bring up any results, the computer will still provide me with the closest alternatives.
And then I’ll know where I am.
Day 3
What is it with this computer system? You can find out virtually anything on it. I know I’m back in the Eighth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, where Autumn came from. I’ve got the whole place’s history. I can see social networks, transmitted messages, all sorts. I can learn things. Seriously – there are whole courses on new skills, languages, all sorts. I’m pretty sure it’s the same package Autumn had on her spaceship, which means I could even learn to fly a TARDIS and speak Gallifreyan if I wanted to.
But it gives me nothing on this planet. Nothing. And it’s impossible to transmit a message. No matter where I look or what I try, I exist completely in isolation. I can watch and I can listen, but I can’t share anything. The only option I have is this log-book. It’s the first thing I see every morning – the computer asks me if I’d like to log an entry, I say yes, and I get to write as much as I like. I submit it, it disappears, I don’t know where it goes. Could be a complete waste of time, but it’s all I’ve got.
I found something else today, too. There’s a fourth room. I realised it when I was walking around the outside of the base – ironically, considering I’ve previously spent large swaths of my life in a TARDIS, this place is bigger on the outside. So I worked out where the one part was I hadn’t explored –just beyond the kitchen. I put my hand on the wall, and just like that, the whole thing gave way. Classic thriller scene right there. There’s a whole room, really round and dark (just some floor lights – bloody eerie) with virtually nothing in it except a massive (and I mean massive) hourglass in the middle, in a lowered area. It’s about twice my height, because that’s the part of the base that reaches highest. It’s definitely emptying, slowly, but I’m getting off this planet before it finishes. Because when I say it’s emptying slowly, I mean slowly.
Oh, and the length of a day on this planet is roughly 26½ Earth hours. That’s brought it down to a few thousand results. Which is great… but guess who’s now preparing to wait out the year?
Day 5
Ed dropped the bags in the bedroom, and frowned at the arrangement.
“Two beds?”
Zoe sighed, crossing her arms.
“They must have made a mistake.” She sighed again, as if her point wasn’t clear enough. “Room for two, I said. I meant one room for two, not room for two separate people with separate lives.”
“Could we share a single?” tried Ed. The idea of spending a year in this place in his own bed was depressing, to say the least. Especially considering the price he’d paid to stay here.
“We’d have to snuggle really close.”
“Damn, what a shame…” Ed tried not to smirk. “Well, I mean, this is our honeymoon…”
“That’s why you picked a honey-coloured sky!” joked Zoe. “Oh, suddenly it all makes sense.”
“Well, I just thought…” Ed had turned serious. “Off-world, you know. A whole planet to ourselves. I thought it was romantic, in a way.”
Zoe winced slightly as the guilt hit her, and tried to get out of her corner. “Well, I mean… it is romantic. And it’s not your fault that they mistook the booking, is it?” She peered out of the window and smiled. “It’s nearly night. That honey sky is turning black. Shall we test out that single bed?”
They kissed.
Well, that’s all I’ve got so far.
I’m not sure it works. But in fairness, I don’t think I’ve written a single piece of fiction since English lessons at school, so…
It’s the best guess I’ve got so far. This is some kind of hotel, a personal suite, for those who want a quiet retreat (that rhymed! I hope they use that one in the brochure). I was sent here by accident, and I’m using all the facilities. It’s not the best theory, and there are still gaps left to fill in, but I like it. It means that soon enough, a couple of holidaymakers will turn up to save my life.
The characters need a bit of work, though. I’m trying to nail those personality traits. Ed, the guy who attempts big romantic gestures and ends up getting it a little bit wrong each time. Zoe, every inch the wordsmith, poetic but also incredibly blunt, is getting used to putting things a little bit more sensitively. Aw, they’re a cute couple, aren’t they?
Today didn’t seem so bad. You can learn a lot about a place from the stories you can tell about it.
Day 12
The last few days I’ve spent exploring, and this place definitely is a desert.
It’s just endless. I wondered if there was a sea somewhere – maybe a few miles away you can reach a beach, and over the water there’s another land, with people and cities and things. I haven’t been presented with much evidence to the contrary, but somehow I know, deep down, that this is all there is. This vast expanse of sand and sky. It’s the whole planet.
I don’t know how far I walked. It’s pretty hot, so probably not as far as it felt. A few miles, anyway. I’ve tried a different direction each day, and traced my footsteps back each evening. There are some rocky areas, and there are some particularly impressive sand dunes. So there we go, that’s today’s discovery. Rocks. How thrilling.
What can I say? I hope this is summer. ‘Cause if these are the winter months, the next visitor to this world will be having roasted Jasmine for their tea.
Day 15
The creature moved towards them, hissing and flailing, a display of anger in a language not only unfamiliar but genuinely alien. If only they could communicate with it. Tell it that they didn’t mean it harm, that they just wanted to be left alone.
But even then, what would it say? Maybe it didn’t care. Maybe it was better not to be able to speak to it, and to hang on to what little hope there was left.
“Keep it back!” cried Zoe, lifting a table. The creature hit it with a tentacle. The sheer weight of the thing sent the table flying across the room, nearly taking Ed’s head off.
“Must be native to the planet!” guessed Ed, searching for something to use. A water fountain, a computer system… it was hardly state of the art weaponry. “I don’t know how to stop it!”
Zoe leapt aside as the creature charged at her. It hit the wall. Ed and Zoe exchanged a look, a fretful stare, that told them they both knew what was about to happen. The wall gave way, and the creature entered the hourglass room.
What happened next surprised them both.
The creature took a look at the hourglass, and saw it. Not just seeing as a fleeting sensory experience. The creature SAW the hourglass, saw the sand moving from one place to the next. It was taking a long time to move, but that didn’t matter. It was moving.
And something about that scared the creature.
It darted back, leaving the way it came, and shot across the barren expanse. It had looked at that timer, that ticking clock, and seen something terrible.
A monster! I always like my stories to have monsters in them. The best monsters are the ones who’ve plotted and planned since the start – the ones who tell you yes, this happened for a reason, and you have something to fight. They give you a chance to fight for justice, punish the bad people, save the good people from them. Without monsters, there’s nowhere for your story to go.
Maybe everything does happen by chance, but I hope not. I hope there is a monster here. A giant squid burrowing at the centre of the planet, or maybe even a human. An invisible tower, somewhere out there in the wasteland. A terrible man with a lot of money and ambition, who has kept going until he forgot what the word ‘stop’ even meant.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ve worked out the full story behind this place, but I think I’ve got the gist of it. I like my theory. Cute couple on a honeymoon, find themselves on a deadly alien planet, expecting to leave as soon as they can. It means I’ve got a monster to fight, but oh well, I’m good at that. I’ve probably got the details wrong, but I reckon I’ve got the wider body right. If I’ve learnt one thing from my thus far short life, it’s that I have very, very strong intuitions.
Day 17
And now I’m scared. I lay awake last night in a state of morbid terror, pondering questions I’d never had to ponder before.
I think I might be trapped here for a long time. It wasn’t just me that God lied to, it was the Doctor. I have faith in the Doctor. I know if he sets out to do something, he’ll usually succeed. If he’s half-way across the universe right now looking for me, I know he’ll find me. But what scares me is that I don’t think he is.
The Doctor will think I’m dead. That I died saving him. I remember seeing that future Doctor, the woman who seemed so different from the rest. What she said to me now, what she said about not having to go through with it, it all makes sense. She knew – well, she thought she knew – that I was going to die. All those years on, and the Doctor still thinks I’m dead. There’s so much that scares me about that. How will he (or she) ever find me again? How will my Doctor take that? How will he tell the other people in my life? What about my poor, poor Nan?
And that’s the worst thought of all, the one that I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to shift. What if no one knows I survived?
Day 18
I’ve decided to try some of the computer courses. They’re giving me something to do as I wait out this year. I’ve had to narrow them down by a few. I always thought I’d enjoy swimming, but there’s not really the opportunity to try that here. It’s also a bit hard learning to cook when you press a button for all your meals.
Tommy was a great cook. The UNIT food was all right, but boring after a while. I wanted to learn to cook, dammit.
Anyway, I decided to learn the local language, or as local as I can find. The most widely-spoken language in the Empire; so widely-spoken, they just call it the Language, because that’s not pompous at all. I figured it would stand me in good stead if anyone turns up and starts talking to me. Besides, it’s keeping me speaking out loud; otherwise I’ll never use my voice. Just keeping those vocal chords warm, that’s the most important thing right now.
I’ve been learning a bit of history, too. A brief and somewhat macabre history of the Eighth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Know your emperors, know your atrocities, know your pop sensations. I had a little smile when Autumn Rivers came up in the Civil Rights Activists section. I’m finding Autumn’s situation increasingly relatable, right now. She spent years in that little pod, drifting through space. Watching beautiful things from a cramped little room. I, on the other hand, am watching sod all, from an infinite stretch of land. Funny that. But it’s not that different. Both alone, both waiting, both learning. Making the best out of lost time.
Day 23
And who the hell saved me?
I’ve been thinking more and more about that. Maybe I didn’t hear the TARDIS, because if I know one thing, it’s that the Doctor would never abandon me somewhere like this, not after what happened last time he thought leaving me somewhere was a good idea.
So, who was it?
Whoever it was, they saved my life. Stitched up my wounds. I was shot, and now, 23 days later, I can barely feel it. They did a good job. Medical professional, I’d say, and they put their best work into it. Not a quick job, not doing it because they had to; no, they cared about me for some reason. But they didn’t care enough to get me off this planet, or even to introduce themselves.
Why does nothing make sense here?
Day 34
Back! That was a long absence, wasn’t it? I figured I’d finally be okay to start exploring properly, what with my wound healing up. So I’ve been out and about, and being a proper explorer about it. I am, after all, technically the first person ever to find this world. Think about it. Whoever built this base was born after me, so… I’m still the first person here, right? I certainly beat Ed and Zoe to the mark. Ha.
I wrote a little message in the sand, a way out. I knew I wanted to write something, proof that I was the first to reach it. But I wasn’t sure what to go for. So, I just wrote what any teenage vandal would write in this situation, and signed my name in the most facile way possible: Jasmine was here.
Aside from that little escapade, I am now taking my duties as intrepid adventurer very seriously, and I have decided to start naming things. That rocky area I have decided to call Valley of the Time Lords, which I’ve always wanted to use on something. There’s a particularly large dune, about eight miles away, which I’ve decided to call Mount Bowie, after the King of Music. And this planet… well, that was a tough call, but in the end it could only ever have been one name.
Planet Patsy.
Patsy was my old best friend at school. We had a laugh together. She was quiet, shy around people she didn’t know, which was a shame, because that girl had talent. I mean, I’m sorry you’re stuck here now, reading this, when you could be reading something by Patsy. She had a way with words like no one else.
I always said to Patsy, if anything ever happened to me, she would be writing my eulogy. I didn’t, at the time, think that anything would happen to me. I would, obviously, live forever. There was this sort of far-flung imagined world where we’re both in, like, our late nineties, sitting around in an old people’s home, our great-grandchildren telling us off for being old-fashioned for still using our iPads. And I’d finally meet my end, very old and very satisfied, and Patsy, with nothing else to do, would go, “Hey, remember all those years ago I promised to write Jasmine’s eulogy? Let’s do it.”
Only, I actually did die. And young. I know Patsy, and I just know that she’ll have written it. She always sticks to her word, and this kind of thing matters a lot to her. She’ll have to stand up in front of all those people – probably half of UNIT, which is a scary prospect even for me (and I played electric guitar in front of the people of Gallifrey) – and she’ll be absolutely terrified. Oh, she’ll manage, but still, I feel pretty awful.
So this is my way of saying sorry. Sorry, and thanks. Thanks, Patsy, for always being there for me. Thanks for what was probably the best funeral anyone could wish for. Have this planet.
Day 50
It was the middle of the night. The monsters were gone, and the hourglass continued to mark the days and weeks they had spent here. The immediate excitement and ecstasy of the trip had gone. Life was sinking in. And Ed was sitting up in his own bed, drinking water, feeling sad, and sneezing.
It was the sneezing that woke Zoe. She was a little freaked out to see him sitting still on top of his bed, like some sort of demonic entity had decided to possess him in the middle of the night. Thankfully, demonic entities didn’t sneeze. Usually.
“What’s up?” she whispered.
“I hate it here,” said Ed, not whispering. There was no point anyway, since they were the only two people on the planet.
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, I mean… I’m bored of it. I want to go somewhere new, somewhere different.”
“With me or without me?”
“Zoe!” complained Ed. Whatever he said, she seemed to be turning it back on him. “I don’t mean it like that. I just don’t feel like I can offer you anything here anymore. All those things I used to do for you, just to let you know I loved you. I can’t make you breakfast, because there’s a little button that does that for us. I can’t take you anywhere, because everywhere is the same. And what can I treat you to? It’s like trying to date in purgatory.”
“Your grasp of philosophy is terrible, Ed. This place is nothing like purgatory.” Zoe got up from her bed, throwing her own covers on the floor. When she reached the door, she stopped, turning to Ed, and made one last comment.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “I was actually enjoying it here.”
She slammed the door. Ed sneezed again.
Happy Fifty Days On Planet Patsy Anniversary! Yay?
Day 57
I decided to write a bucket list today. Pen and paper, the old-fashioned way. I found some in the drawer. I ended up dividing the list into two columns: the possible, and the not-yet-possible. In other words, the things I could do right now, and the things I’d need to leave this planet for. Admittedly, there’s a slight deficiency in the former category. I think I’m a bit lost as to what sort of things you could really do in a desert on your own, which is why I made up senseless crap like ‘Run as fast and as far as you can in a massive circle whilst singing the lyrics to ‘Heroes.’. Ahhh. Maybe one day.
Here’s the list. If you’ll excuse my handwriting. And yes, this thing even has a webcam, not that it will actually let me communicate with anyone.
Day 86
Yes. This is the longest single gap I have left between two entries. (I think. I’m not keeping record. It feels like the longest gap.)
What have I been doing with my time, you ask? Deliberately focusing. The Tales of Ed and Zoe are on hiatus, but don’t worry, they’ll be back soon. I’m, like, half-way there learning the Language, and the history stuff is going well too. I’ve found a bit of Earth history too, which is awesome, because I think I’d have liked to have studied a bit more history when I was at school. Really ancient stuff, like Greeks and Romans. These guys actually aren’t that different from the Romans, in many respects. I wonder whether Tommy noticed that.
Day 100
“I’m sorry,” said Ed.
The two of them hadn’t spoken in three days. Zoe had spent those days wandering the desert; Ed had spent them keeping an eye on her, constantly worried that she would get lost. She didn’t. She had a better sense of direction than he did.
“I’m sorry,” Ed repeated.
Zoe was asleep, building up quite a snore, which was usually the best time to speak to her.
“I didn’t want it to go like this,” said Ed. “Sometimes I don’t enjoy things because I’m so worried about all the ways I could mess up. I just need to let go, you know? And I do it all because I love you, Zo. I’m such an idiot. You deserved better.”
“No I didn’t,” said Zoe, turning around and smiling.
“You were… listening? The whole time?”
“Uh-huh. You’re quite loud, you know.”
“I speak to you when you’re asleep all the time!”
“Yes. And I listen every time.”
“Ah.”
“Was what you said about fresher’s week really true? And didn’t that hurt for quite a while after? Especially in such a delicate ar-”
“ZOE!”
“Sorry. Here.” Zoe pulled the cover off her bed and moved up, tapping the space next to her. “Come and sit down in my lovely single bed with me.”
“Thanks.” Ed hopped in on her side. They’d both missed it. Their separate aromas, the sound of each other’s breathing. The reminder that they were not two, but one. “I’ll stay here as long as you like, Zoe. I love you.”
Zoe tapped him playfully on the nose. “We’ll stay for Christmas, and then we’ll go. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Day 115
The seasonal changes are hitting hard, now, but it’s a relief to know I’ve done with the worst of the heat. That was clearly summer. This, I think, is autumn. With a small ‘a’. Always a grammatical error that’s set me off, for reasons I’m sure you can understand.
I didn’t think deserts got cold, but apparently they do. At least, it’s getting cooler, and quite significantly. Actually, I think Antarctica is technically a desert, but I might have made that up.
I wish you could regulate the temperature in here. Seriously, the one thing this base is missing is central heating and air conditioning. No, don’t you worry, I’ll just sit here while the seasons push me this way and that, not knowing whether I’m going to have to break out the onesie or strip down to my knickers. What? Don’t look at me like that. I’m the only person on this planet; I can dress how I like.
Yes, by the way, clothes are provided. No onesies though, unfortunately. I should write a formal complaint.
Day 120
Aaaaand now the seasonal changes aren’t as funny. It only took five days for the worst of it to start. There was a major storm last night. I heard it in my bed. We used to say, back in Croydon, that they’d rattle the windows. The balcony door was always the worst – creaking, rattling, sliding about all night long. Rattling isn’t quite the word I’d use here. More like… smashing the windows. In the middle of the night. Scaring the living f…fibre out of me.
They left a repair kit out, and now I see why. And, as per usual, there are detailed instructions on the computer system on how to use the kit, but no way of contacting anyone for advice. That’s why I’m spending the next few days fixing the place up where I can. They’ve got new panes of glass and everything.
That’s my life now. DIY Jasmine. I just need a white van, and maybe a beard.
Day 138
I’m making today’s log to proudly declare my personal achievements over the last eighteen days.
First off, the window is fixed. Easy when you know how. Got a few cuts and scrapes along the way, but it was worth it to see the finished product. While I was at it, I managed to track down the duster, so I’ve given the place a quick dust too. Shame Ed didn’t find it sooner, he mightn’t have sneezed as much.
Second achievement: I’ve learnt the Language! More or less, anyway. You might think it’s impossible to accomplish such a feat in such a short space of time, but trust me, when it’s just you on your own, you can. According to the notes I’ve scribbled, I started on Day 18. That’s 120 days, and most of them focused on that task. The most important thing now is that I keep on practising, and make note of any new vocab I see, to quote my old Spanish teacher. But I’m proud of myself either way, getting off my own back to do this, and I think my old Spanish teacher should be too.
It was a better language than Spanish anyway. Phonetic, but without that masculine/feminine rubbish, which never made sense to me.
It gets colder every day, but that’s okay, I’m managing. Maybe I should do a onesie-making course on the computer next, though, just to prepare myself for winter.
To be honest, it’s amazing how well you adjust here. At first, getting used to the 26½ hour days seemed impossible; I was just confused all the time. But you kinda sync to the sun, if you get my drift. Maybe I’m lucky as a TARDIS traveller, but I reckon most people could do it if they had to. These days, it’s all I know, and I’m happy with it. Happy as I can be, anyway.
Things aren’t going too badly. We’re about half-way through the year. I will keeping pushing on. This time next year, I’ll be home.
Day 145
…or as we called it back home, Christmas.
I can’t be sure, of course. The years are different lengths, the days are different lengths, and, well, no Jesus. But personally, I was always about the real meaning of Christmas… lights, presents, and great music. You can tell my old RE teacher, I don’t even care.
It’s the best time of the year, anyway. I was a March baby, but I’ve always hated March, apart from when it snows. What’s to like about March? Summer’s ages away, Christmas has passed, exams are tapping you on the shoulder and you haven’t even opened a textbook. Bleurgh. What a horrible month.
The great thing about Christmas is that… and look, I know it’s clichéd, but Christmas really is that little light in the darkness. When the skies are closing in and everyone’s feeling miserable, it pops up and says wipe away that frown, there’s another way. If you want to be happy while there’s a thunderstorm rolling overhead, you go and be happy.
For what it’s worth, I do think they take it a bit far sometimes. I’ve never been terribly upset about not having a family, because all my friends who have family Christmases really have put me off it for life. Giving up your bedroom?! What?! Are you insane?! And I think there are people out there for whom Christmas won’t always be a relief, or a good thing. I mean, poor old Robin, losing her husband and son the day before. I’m sure there’s nothing worse in the world than staring out your window at everyone else being happy when you’ve got nothing left.
This isn’t an advert for Christmas, okay. But I still bloody love it. There’s nothing that gives me hope like the memories of those Christmases I had as a child, all those carefully-wrapped presents around the tree, Nan’s homemade crackers, waking her at the crack of dawn and her not even minding. That kind of thing is precious. It stays with you.
I’m going to finish this log here, and I’m going to celebrate, as best I can. There’s no music, which is the worst, but I can at least try. Sing a few songs on my own, see if I can download any Christmas stories online (anything by Dickens, I’ll take it), have a go at some origami, see if I can find any jokes, and maybe there are even some decorations tucked away somewhere.
No sherry. That’s sad. I think I’d be legally old enough to drink now. But I was never that fussed about it either way.
Day 146
“Where did you get the tree?”
“That’s for me to know, and you to wonder,” said Ed, with a wink. It wasn’t just a tree – he’d somehow managed to get hold of a record player, too. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, it was singing, so they decided to do just that.
Zoe took her partner’s arm, allowing him to spin her around, and almost allowing him to think he was the one leading her. She was the better dancer, with a few years of practise on her back; soon, she was spinning him around, leading him this way and that, round the Christmas tree and back, voices singing “let’s be jolly, deck the halls with boughs of holly.”
“I’m glad we stayed for Christmas,” admitted Ed.
“I knew you would be. What have you got me?” Zoe brought the dance to a close as the song ended, and examined the present beneath the tree. She unwrapped it slowly, allowing herself only a glimpse at first, before excitedly ripping open the paper like a nine-year-old child.
“The dress!” she cried. “The one I always wanted! But we only saw it that one time, and then we couldn’t find it again, so how did you, and here, how di-”
“-that’s for me to know, and you to won-”
“-no, Ed, tell me!”
“Oh, all right then.” Ed beamed. “I made a note of it the first time, knowing you’d forget. Got it delivered here.”
“Oh, Ed, it’s beautiful.” Zoe gave her husband a supportive hug. “You’re wonderful. I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you, it was so selfish…”
“Nah, don’t worry, all forgotten now. Mind you… what did you get me?”
“Well…” Zoe winked, and produced something from her pocket. Two strips of paper. “A ticket off this world, to somewhere brand new, and possibly with other people. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like our honeymoon’s only just got started. I love you.”
They kissed, under the fairy-lights of the tree. The mistletoe on the other side of the room tried not to feel jealous.
Well, I tried. With Christmas, I mean. I managed to find A Christmas Carol, which was nice, and The Haunted Man, which I hadn’t heard of but which was also very enjoyable.
The thing is… Christmas just isn’t the same on your own. Now I really know what Robin felt like. It’s almost worse than the other days, because you feel like you have to be happy, like this is your last chance. And you just can’t. Not on your own. Not without other people to dance with, without people to show your love and appreciation for. What’s the point in a Christmas dinner without anyone to cook it for? Anyway, there’s not a Christmas dinner here, the closest I could find was Option 4, Roast Chicken.
I’m really starting to miss people. There’s a basic need, I’ve realised, for humans. Human interaction. We’re sociable animals. We need to be sociable to reproduce; without going into too much detail, the whole act of keeping the species going is one of both physical and emotional closeness, and I think that says a lot about us. We form groups based on the things we have in common. We make new inventions just so that we can find new things to talk about. Even when we’re alone, we watch or read about other people and their interaction; we’re obsessed with it. We need to talk, to be talked to, to see, to be seen, to love, to be loved.
I am trying to keep my spirits up, my shoulders high, all that jazz. This will be my last Christmas on Planet Patsy. Next Christmas I’ve already planned. I’m going to tell Nan everything, somehow. Me, Nan, the Doctor, and Robin if she wants to, with her family. In the TARDIS, together.
Day 159
The dreams are getting weird now. I’m beginning to learn what sort of things you dream about when nothing is happening in your life. There’s nothing to draw on from your day, so you look back further, back to when your memories aren’t as fresh. Your sleeping mind tries to build something out of an already distorted past. You see strange things.
Some of the stranger ones are scary, but they’re not nightmares. In much the same way, some of the more ordinary ones are so dull that you can’t quite sit comfortably in them. It feels like prison. No, I’m sorry, I’m going to need a new vocabulary to describe this.
Day 163
The bags were packed, the lights were switched off. Outside, the world was as dead as ever. Ed and Zoe took tentative steps outside, preparing to say goodbye.
That was when they saw her.
A young girl, barely an adult, and probably dead. There she lay, on the ground outside the base, sand sweeping over a bloody wound in her stomach, her eyes closed. Ed took a closer look.
No… not quite dead.
“Oh God.” He turned away, feeling sick.
“Oh, get out of the way,” fussed Zoe. “Lucky I’m here, isn’t it?”
“Hmm?”
“Medical professional, remember?” She rolled her eyes, and without panicking, carefully lifted then carried the girl’s body back into the base, Ed helpfully, if a little feebly, turning the lights on after her.
“Medical supplies, medical supplies…” Zoe scanned the shelves, and found what she was looking for. “This will do.”
She set to work on the young woman, doing everything she could, and quickly. Zoe had trained for seven years, back home in the outer reaches of the Empire. There were people there who’d suffered time distortions. Gunshot wounds, which this appeared to be, were barely scrapes by comparison.
After a few hours, the couple found themselves standing there awkwardly over their patient, waiting for something to happen.
“The anaesthetic will wear off soon,” said Zoe. “She’ll be fine, she’ll recover. Best medical care in the Empire.” She winked. “Wonder what she was doing here.”
“Our lift is here in three minutes, Zoe. They don’t stop by this planet often. This will be our last chance for a long time.”
“Yeah, I know.” Zoe nodded, still not entirely happy. “Not our concern. We’ve done our bit. Come on, let’s go.”
They turned around and left, this time for good.
End of story. Hurray for Zoe and Ed! Or… not. I’ve tried my best to work myself in there, to try and explain how it was I ended up on that bed, healed, and clearly by the work of human hands. This is the best I’ve got for now. The botched honeymoon. 163 days, the computer says. Zoe and Ed might even be at the Capital by now.
Day 170
I flipping love Philosophy. And Ancient History. That’s what I’ve been reading about on the computer, anyway. Totally irrelevant, but totally brilliant. Plato’s great, isn’t he? Off his rocker, of course. Barmy, angst-driven, paranoid, up himself, borderline neurotic. But great.
Tommy had a degree in Classics. That’s all about the Ancient World, old civilisations and texts, philosophies, that kind of thing. I didn’t know much about it at the time, but I’d give anything to bring him back and have a good old chat about it, now. I’d give anything to bring him back full-stop, really. I miss him now more than ever. I don’t want people around me now. I just want him.
Day 180
The hourglass has moved.
I mean, it does that, I get it. You watch it very carefully and you can see the top section slowly emptying. But when I say slowly, I mean slowly, waiting for Christmas slowly, waiting for the Eurovision Song Contest to end slowly, watching Bruce Forsyth to see if he really does age, slowly. That kind of slowly. Like when you know that trips on the London Eye aren’t even that long, but when you look at it you’re sure you can’t see it moving.
That’s the hourglass. And after a while you think you’ve got the measure of it, emptying its little grains of sand and really doing nothing at all. So you take your eye off it. You seal the hourglass room off again, forget it’s there. Get carried away reading about Ancient History, taking walks down the Valley of the Time Lords, writing and then quickly deleting logbook entries about your dead boyfriend because you can’t believe you could ever write something that depressing (it’s okay – it’s my way of coping – I’m not as bad as you think I am).
And when you look away, it moves.
You can see it now, right at the bottom. A thin layer of sand, building up, one day to become a thick layer. The first 2%. The point where you think nah, it doesn’t matter. There’s so much to go. You keep thinking like that, until one day you realise that the 2% is what’s left at the top, and the hourglass has caught up with you, and what do you do then? You can’t empty it back the other way. Gravity doesn’t work like that.
I can’t stop it emptying. Maybe I don’t want to. A part of me wants to know what happens when all the sand reaches the bottom. The other part of me is terrified of that day, almost as if I know already.
Day 191
The dreams are getting weirder and weirder. Last night I had a dream, and I knew, even when I was having it, that it was a memory. I was sitting in a music practise room, back in school, playing the piano and eating biscuits. There was a concert that day, I knew that much. My best friend was there. She was saying things… but I couldn’t see her face. Like I couldn’t remember it. Then I woke up, and that was when the strangest thing happened.
I realised it wasn’t my memory.
I can’t play the piano. I taught myself electric guitar, when I was going through a bit of a rocker phase at fourteen. Nan got far too enthusiastic about it, bought me an electric guitar, and I self-taught. Still love it now. But that’s the extent of my musical talent. I can’t play the piano.
Autumn could.
I instinctively knew that it was Autumn’s memory, like I was remembering on her behalf. It wasn’t one that I’d recalled before, at any point in my life. I made a whole timeline of her life, back in Nan’s flat. Major events first, then later on, when I was living out in Hawaii with UNIT, bored out of my mind at our lack of progress, I added the little stuff. Every single memory I could recall. That was when I really got to know Autumn. But that one wasn’t on there, that day in the practise room. I’m sure of it, I’m positive.
So this means only one thing. Her memories are coming back.
Day 204
It’s occurred to me, these last few days, that Tommy really was perfect. I don’t mean perfect for me, I mean bleedin’ perfect, like no one is meant to be. That kinda annoys me.
We all have our flaws, right? I’m very good at believing the lies I make up, jumping to conclusions, and I don’t even quite know who I am. Autumn let her love of life become selfish and grew angry and bitter towards the world. Robin could be rash, so terribly, beautifully rash. But what was Tommy’s flaw? His hamartia?
He was a bit clumsy, I guess. He’d start a sentence better than he’d finish it. Sometimes he let his heroes off with too much, only told them to stop before it was too late. Yet I can’t seem to raise this critique with any conviction at all. To me, he was perfect. I can’t weigh up his character like I can anyone else’s. He’s just… complete. He was kind, he was charming in his awkward way, he was ambitious but in the most selfless way; he was intelligent, perceptive, thoughtful… and, well, he was very hot, and very good in… actually, let’s not go there.
Maybe that’s what it’s like to love someone. You just can’t fully process their flaws. They’re there… you know they’re there, you’re sure of it, because they have to be. But at the same time, they’re not. You don’t care about them. Everyone else is worse. The flaws don’t matter. The person you love is beautiful, you can’t see the blemishes; they’re part of the beauty, and so they’re not seen as blemishes. Again, I don’t feel like this is the right language to convey it, so I might end up changing to the Language, or even having a stab at some Spanish…
Okay. Breathe out. I’m not making that much sense, and I’m lovesick over a dead guy. But everything I offered him, he offered me in return. I know we were on the same wavelength, I know we were heading down the same path. He must have thought this way about me too. My idealism and my identity issues, they must have meant nothing to him. That’s one of the best things about being loved, now I look back. You know that the things people dislike about you are suddenly tiny, unimportant. No wonder people in relationships are always the most confident.
The Doctor… now he was flawed. Damn, he was flawed. I’m trying not to hold that against the guy. What he did on that last adventure was brave. He could have done anything with the life he lived, but he risked it all to join me in doing what he knew was right, even though (he thought) he knew he would lose. He let me make my own choices. It got me killed. Then it didn’t. But it showed that he’d listened to me, that he’d understood the things he did wrong. He stopped deciding how our stories ended and started letting us control them. He became my companion, and I was proud of him.
Even so, I find it difficult to stay positive about him. I swear I heard that TARDIS when I arrived here, and that’s not making it any better. I hear the noise and 204 days later there’s no sign of him. I just sit here, sometimes, thinking of all the things he did wrong. He messed up with Autumn and she forgave him. But he kept messing up. Planet Doctor, I mean, what the hell was that about? What a jerk. I can’t remember how I forgave him for that, but I’m not feeling as charitable as I did then. Oh, there was the stuff about him wearing other people’s faces, too. Then there was his screwing up history by changing something that led to Tommy’s death. And the whole life of Robin McKnight, which he apparently liked to slowly dismantle and rebuild where he could. He was so careless. Did he stop after my death? Did he? Heck. I bet he’s still doing it now. I hate him for that, and I see what Tommy meant, about being just a little bit frightened at the prospect that he’s out there, treating the universe like his own personal LEGO set.
Day 223
I’m starting to lose hope a bit now, in case you hadn’t gathered that from the last entry. It’s been so long.
223 days. Probably just a number to you, especially if you’re binge-reading this period of my life in one night. But let me tell you, it’s not. It’s not just a number. It’s pain. Long, drawn-out, frustrating, the kind you never forget. These 223 days will stay with me, plaguing me every sleepless night for the rest of my life. Remember how bad things were back then, Jasmine? Yes. How could I forget?
I’m getting out of the habit of talking. I learnt the Language, but I’m practising it less and less. When I do, it’s reading things online. I never speak anymore, in any language. I don’t know if you lose the art of speaking. I hope not, because I can’t see myself talking any time soon.
Day 235
My Dad.
His name was Laurence Sparks. He was a scientist. He loved astronomy, Kate Bush, and seeing new places. I don’t know if he loved my mother. I could never bring myself to ask. I think he loved me.
I saw him a few times. Every now and then, throughout my life, he’d turn up. We got on well. I was never one of those teenagers to throw a tantrum about my parents and why they weren’t paying me enough attention. I had someone who cared for me, and that was enough. I don’t think you’re obliged to care for your child as a parent, personally. I think you’re just obliged to make sure they’re cared for.
He left me in safe hands, and when I saw him, we got along quite well. There was a bit of me that thought it would have been nice if he had grown up with me, because we had so much to talk about, and there were so many interesting things we agreed on and disagreed on, for that matter.
A while later, something awful happened. He killed his whole research team, and then he killed himself. Years later, we found out why. Colonel Ward had the honour of telling me: he’d looked into a telescope and had seen the blue-shift, both close and imminent. He thought the universe was about to close in on us. He thought he was saving his friends.
I’m still not sure if I buy that. I don’t think there are many good reasons to turn around and shoot a load of people who’ve never done anything to hurt you, and I’m saying that as someone who used to be Autumn Rivers. Stuff happens, you know? He saw a prophecy, and I don’t think a prophecy justifies that kind of action. He didn’t bother to look any further; he didn’t bother to think, to refer to a higher authority, or even to appeal to the Doctor (he was in UNIT – I’m sure he must have known about the Doctor).
There we go. Tommy was perfect, the Doctor was a bit of a jerk, and my Dad? Not a clue. He’s the one man I can’t make my mind up about. I don’t think I ever will. I’ll never be able to get inside that head of his, never be able to understand the raw terror that a scientific discovery instilled in him that night.
It could be a problem for me, I guess. If I let it be. But I think we all need our daddy issues. They make us strive to be better people, while reminding us that we’re all still children inside.
(Is it daddy issues? Or is that the Freud one? If so, AWKWARD. I definitely don’t have those daddy issues.)
Day 250
I’ve been losing the motivation to write lately, but I thought I’d treat you to an entry today as it’s a big number: 250. 250. 250…
I’m running out of things to do, people to talk about, stories to tell. When I try, they’re just insipid. I wouldn’t ask anybody to read that rubbish.
Still, it can’t be long now. Nearing the end of that first year, narrowing down the results. I’ll be left with enough options that I can pick out my planet among them, and then I’ll have a course of action to take. It’s a lot of waiting around. Who needs nail scissors when you can bite them off in anticipation?
Day 274
This morning, it finally happened.
The first year has passed on Planet Patsy.
I’m only telling this from the position of the sun, and I’m no perfect observer. But the great thing about the computer system is that it takes the figures you input and also takes into account and includes in its calculations the other possibilities within a sensible parameter, as well as accounting for human error. Which means, in other words, it worked. I’ve found out where I am.
They call this planet P-1-Honey-7. Which, if you ask me, is an awful name compared to Patsy, but that’s committees for you. According to the data file on it, it’s owned by the Planet Makers, Autumn Rivers’ old best friends. (That was a joke, by the way. She brought them down with the greatest legal case in the Empire, shortly after killing half the committee.) That says a few interesting things about it. One of those things is that it may or may not have been produced, industrially, by human beings.
The Planet Makers own about 99% of the planets in the galaxy, or did until Autumn brought them down. They still have a few to their name, but not many. The government took over the initiative. About 20 of that 99% are planets the company purchased but were previously naturally-occurring; the other 79% the Planet Makers made themselves. This could be either. Going on the law of probability, I’m probably sitting right now on the surface of a planet made by giant machines and complex codes.
There are no details on the planet’s purpose whatsoever, which is strange. Almost every planet in the Empire serves a function, whether that’s providing housing, agricultural use, industrial use, whatever. The computer system is usually very good at explaining that. It gives me access based on “privileges,” which are essentially non-existent, so, whichever details are available to the general public. Either this planet is in the rare 1% of having no function at all, or its function is something people aren’t allowed to know about. In which case… am I alone here? Am I safe?
I did a bit more digging around. I did a search of ‘P-1-Honey-7’, in all files. It took about two hours to complete, and this is with the finest and sharpest technology humankind will ever create, which speaks volumes about the extent of information I have access to. There were about ten results, most of them meaningless – little fact files telling me where I am in space, as if I didn’t already know. A lone planet, orbiting a lone sun. A weird thought, though. It’s almost like I bring this place to life. Without me, there was no one to live on it, no one to notice if anything happened. It could have been blasted out of the sky, and nothing would have happened. You know what they say. If a tree falls in a forest…
I’m chattering away, more than I have in months. The reason for this is because of the best piece of news as well. There was just one result in that ten that meant something, but boy, it meant a lot.
There’s a space probe that moves around the local galaxy, carrying out brief but efficient observations of each planet. There’s a schedule for it. P-1-Honey-7 is due such a visit within the next six months (Earth time).
I’m going to need to start collecting rocks. Fast.
Day 275
I hope you enjoyed that cliff-hanger.
This is a dwarf planet, more or less. It wouldn’t take much to scan over it, at all. My base is tiny, and I’m smaller. I don’t want this probe missing me.
I’m going to make a sign, using all the rocks I can find on this planet. Well, all the ones I’m capable of lifting. There’s hundreds of them in the Valley of the Time Lords. I need thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions. Enough to make a sign that’s about, ooh, three miles across? By Christmas?
I’m keeping it simple, anyway: S.O.S.
I start tomorrow. Collecting, building. You won’t be seeing much of me for a while, but it’s all in the name of a good cause: getting the hell out of here.
Day 300
Checking in. I’m still building it. Making loads of progress. I mean, I’ve done a bit of an S, which is great, right?
Don’t look at me like that. You try making a sign out of rocks on a desert planet with no way to get a bird’s eye view of it. Trust me, the planning was the worst part.
Day 360
And it’s done.
I’m not sure how you’re reading this. I assume the log is submitted after a certain period of time (maybe when the hourglass finishes its countdown), and you get to read them all in bulk. The days are always automatically added at the start of each entry, so I don’t have to worry about counting them (I still do, though). Either there’s a list of days and all the entries I don’t fill out are just blank, or you only see the day numbers when I input them.
Either way… whatever you’re seeing cannot and will not communicate the passing of time as I have experienced. You’ll never be able to understand the sleepless nights, the nights where I got too much sleep and woke up in a panic that I’d never finish the work, the hottest and most gruelling of days, and the times I’ve hit a problem, forgotten where I was in my work, and wanted to give up altogether. You’ll be able to jump, from the day I began this work to the day I finished it, just like I used to when I was with the Doctor. And lucky you. But please don’t forget this.
Those were my days. This is my life. That last header indicated months of my life I will never get back. Months spent alone, anxious, scared. They’d better pay off.
Day 376
The probe is coming soon, and I’m feeling all manner of things at once. Excited. Terrified. Impatient. Grateful, although actually, I’m not sure who to.
The excitement and impatience have taken precedence, I’d say. I’ve packed already. Found a bag in the cupboard, packed the bucket list, a few scraps of paper I’d written important notes on, and a couple of snack packs, just for the memories. I think I’ll look back on all this fondly, in the end. My time alone. The time I needed to think, to move forward, and to move on. Maybe it will all look up after this. Maybe I’ll be able to think of Tommy with a smile instead of a tear. Or maybe both. That would be okay.
The hourglass is still emptying. I won’t be here to see the end of it. I think I’m glad.
Day 383
The probe passed today. Much to both my surprise and satisfaction, I saw it pass in the sky. A bright light, like a star, but moving and flickering like a plane. Such a regular occurrence, so far away and systematic, you’d almost believe it wasn’t the work of a civilisation. I mean, if there were people here, they’d think it was, like, Planet Patsy’s equivalent of Haley’s comet. They wouldn’t know it was watching them.
Anyway, it definitely saw my sign. If anything, I swear it lingered over the spot. I hope it’s still the universal code for Get Me The Hell Out Of Here.
Save Our Souls. All of us. All of me.
Day 390
How long does it take to dispatch a rescue craft?
The images from the probes are transmitted straight back to the Planet Makers, and arrive almost immediately. They’d have seen me by now, or my plea for help at least. I’d expected rescue sooner. Now I’m barely sleeping, worried I’ll miss them or something and get a card through the door: “Sorry, you missed your rescue slot. We left the escape shuttle on a nearby planet for your convenience.”
I’m getting very restless.
Day 424
I came to accept something monumental today.
No one is coming for me.
It’s been a long time. Longer than waiting for a dodgy third-party Amazon subscriber, longer than waiting for a message from your least reliable friend, longer than watching a marathon of every movie Matt Damon’s ever featured in (one good thing about living in Planet Patsy’s cosy base: not having to grow plants out of your own s***).
Things were getting quicker back home in the 21st Century. Next day delivery, probably more sweat shops, faster technological systems. By now, one-click delivery probably means that’s the time it takes for the thing to be delivered. Click. Knock knock. Open. Thanks.
A rescue mission would probably be even quicker, especially off a planet that’s almost definitely part of some sort of secret operation.
If they haven’t turned up by now, they’re not coming.
Why? I don’t know. Maybe they’re not allowed; maybe there’s some strict law about stepping foot on this planet, which I’m inadvertently breaking by being here. Maybe they’re too scared. Maybe they didn’t even see my sign, but I’m not buying that.
I need time to think.
Day 429
I don’t know what to do.
There’s no way I’m ever getting off this planet. I tried looking up spaceship-making courses on the computer, as one does. It turns out I don’t have the parts. Or, to be honest, the bravery. I’m not cut out for pioneer space travel. I enjoyed the easy life.
That’s it, then. The rest of my life here, alone. A part of me was saying just end it all – there are so many ways to kill yourself out here, probably more ways than there are to survive. But I can’t bring myself to do it. There’s a bit of Autumn inside me, and it’s growing. A voice inside my head, getting louder, telling me that anything, absolutely anything, is better than giving up. That pain is better than pain’s absence. That 1 is a better number than 0 because it’s going somewhere.
I thought I’d never move on from Tommy. I started doubting that; started wondering if maybe I’d find someone else, or find happiness in another form. Now I realise I was right. I’ll never get to move on, because the only company I have in this world is his memory.
I feel pathetic because I just want someone to hug me. Someone to hold me, to say new words from their own minds. Someone to share in all this. I’m so alone. I hate every second of this.
I don’t know what to do.
Day 437
We all fall sometimes. The trick to picking yourself up is finding your purpose. No, not quite, actually. The trick is making your purpose. Because that’s how purposes are created. They aren’t given to you, and they don’t just happen. You make a decision, and you claim it as your own, and that becomes your future.
I decided to dig out the bucket list. I’ve disregarded that right-hand column, since I’m never leaving. I’d already learnt a second language, which left me with two more. The novel… is coming at a later date.
The brilliant thing is that I discovered the perfect thing on the perfect day for it. I was looking for where I’d left the bucket list, searching under the computer, and I found something. There’s a transmitter. It’s nothing too impressive, in terms of changing my predicament, but it does something which may well transform the rest of my life: it plays music. And it plays music far: a good fifty feet away from the base, at least. That’s what I call surround sound.
There’s an extensive database of music throughout the ages on this computer, a sort of Space Spotify. It had everything from my time, so I knew what I had to do.
There I was, running as fast I can, in my bare feet, in a massive circle going nowhere, singing the lyrics to Heroes as loud as I could manage. And I heard it. Not just the music, not just the beat, the electric guitar and those beautiful, beautiful chords. I heard my own voice, for the first time in so long. Not in its best form, completely lost by the end of it, and definitely out of tune. But there it was, in the music, and in that moment, with the adrenaline rushing through me. I found it. Me. I remembered who I was. I remembered why I was still here today. Because I’m Jasmine Sparks, and I can be strong when I have to.
Though nothing will keep us together, we can beat them, forever and ever.
Day 458
And now for the novel, if you can call it that.
I realise, that if I’m never going to leave this planet, I need to start writing up something for whoever comes across it. Someone will; some archaeologist or tourist, some future Ed or Zoe, and I want them to know the story that brought me here. But where to start?
If I were going to be really narcissistic, it would be with my birth (which I know very little about). If I were going to be somewhat narcissistic, it would be with Autumn Rivers’ birth. But I’m not going to be. I’m alone on this planet for the rest of my life; I have a lot of time to think about me, so instead I’m going to start at the only place it would ever be right to start.
I can’t go back to the very beginning. I know about Susan, about Ian and Barbara, even about Kathleen, but I’m not going there. There are too many stories in between; I’d never finish them. I’m going to start instead with what was, for me, the most important day in the Doctor’s life. The day he met Robin Moon.
Robin McKnight (she married… as you’ll see later on in the story!) was the reason I met the Doctor. She brought us back together, in an act so selfless I still can’t comprehend it. She’s a goddess. She’s a hero. Anyone who doesn’t look up to Robin for inspiration needs to question their life ambitions, right now.
Here I am, attempting to write a story I will never do justice to. One night I didn’t get to experience in either of my lives, but which I know inside out and back to front, from the times the Doctor sat me down to make me understand where and from whom he got any of his virtues. It’s a story about Christmas, about healing, about learning that the impossible is just the name we give to what is beyond our understanding.
And I’m going to call it Miracle on Oxford Street.
Day 459
The sky was black, darkened by pollution; the vista cruelly robbed of stars which were snatched away by moving times, as their light failed to touch the ground and the moon hid sadly behind a thick layer of clouds. That was Primrose Hill, the picturesque North London home of all those who sought some inner beauty in their city. But on such a bleak evening, there was no beauty, nor identity; on the hill stood an invisible gate to a city eclipsed by the shadow of storm clouds, and amid the stillness was a tight, suffocating tension – words hovered in the air: the unspoken, the unspeakable. On that night in which decency became exhausted, silence fell over Primrose Hill.
The beginning.
Day 465
Oh dear, I don’t think I’ve done Robin justice at all. I think she started off quite well, but I’m starting to go really flat on the characterisation front.
I’m missing all her strength, her independence, her problem-solving abilities, her erratic but lovable tendency to become impassioned about the smallest and strangest of things. I don’t think words can communicate that sort of thing. No, no, that’s wrong. I don’t think I can use words to communicate that sort of thing, is what I’m really admitting.
Day 470
Whoa, that’s weird.
I sat down to write Autumn’s first scene. Decided to start off in her spaceship; to do it all from the Doctor’s point-of-view, because I think she’d appreciate that. When I went to write it, it was like… like it wrote itself.
Every time I go to write a scene, it comes back to me in my head. I find my fingers are typing something that my mind is only just coming to terms with. Writing about Autumn Rivers is bringing back her memories, in a powerful and vivid way. I’m not just seeing what happened. I’m remembering what she thought… what I thought.
No, no, no. That’s weird. Let’s move on. I’m nearly onto Sunset Forever.
Day 490
I’ve finally reached that point in the story: enter Tommy Lindsay.
This has been the hardest bit yet, in every sense of the word. Not only has it been hard on an obvious and clichéd emotional level, but also hard to be objective. Sometimes I think I’m writing him as too perfect. Too charismatic, too good. I’m reading it back and… he can’t have been that decent a man. No one is. Right?
I’m going to keep it. Because I’m happy with it. Because I know it’s the truth, even if it’s just my little truth.
Day 500
I’m planning to take some time away.
Holiday in New York? Haha, no. But really, I am going to turn this computer off, just for a while. I need time to write, to think, to walk. To you, of course, this will be a matter of seconds, of a brief paragraph break. See you in a couple of lines.
Day 564
I would say that felt like a long time, but it’s all starting to merge together now. I don’t really need time anymore. It’s not a straight line; it’s just the things that happen to the universe and how they pile up. Nothing happens to me, so it’s hard to have a sense of time.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and philosophising and of course writing. The more I seem to think or write about Autumn, the more I start to feel her memories coming back. Memories of the places she went, the people she knew, the things she thought. It’s unsettling, because I can sometimes find myself thinking them, too.
I’m not finished. I’m not resigning myself to this world, not yet. The hourglass is still emptying, but there’s a long, long way for it to go still. There’s time, if such a thing exists.
Day 600
Everything is just a construct.
We give things names so that we can tell them apart from other things. “Go and put the paper in the printer.” Well, we can’t say “go and put that in that” in a room full of objects, can we? So, we put sounds together and form associations between the sounds and objects, different objects which perform the same function.
Our own names are no different.
Ownership is just the same. The Planet Makers say this is ‘their’ planet. But what does that mean? What does it mean to belong to someone? The fact is, it’s meaningless. If every life form in the universe suddenly perished, ‘my house’ or ‘your phone’ or ‘their planet’ wouldn’t be left. We’re just saying “this is something I’m protective of, that I want to myself, and there will be consequences if you take it off me”. But no one really owns anything. It’s a scientific impossibility. You’d need the universe’s permission if you wanted to really own something, and the universe would never give it.
It’s all just about how we see the world, and how we’re constructed to see the world. There’s a rock in the Valley of the Time Lords that looks like a face. But it doesn’t. It only looks like that because the human mind is constructed to recognise the shape and characteristics of a face in anything; to find patterns where there aren’t any, as the Doctor liked to say. And the Valley of the Time Lords? It’s not a valley of anything. It’s not even its own place; it’s part of something bigger, and could be broken apart into smaller parts.
I think we need to relinquish names. I don’t need to be Jasmine Sparks, not when there’s no one else to use it. And this planet isn’t mine. It’s not Planet Patsy, it’s just a planet. A lump of rock. A thing amongst things.
Day 615
I started to feel something else today: Autumn’s anger. So much that I couldn’t contain it; I just had to sit down here and write it.
I don’t know what she was angry at, but it’s like it’s still happening. Like that rage hasn’t quite settled, like she’s still in there, screaming at some awful, unresolved thing.
I think I’d better go back to writing. I have just killed her off at her natural biographical point, so maybe she’s cross about that.
Day 687
Jasmine took a deep breath, and nodded. She took Autumn’s hand, and they headed for the door.
“You did well by me, Jasmine. You’ve done me proud. You lived my life, and did it all a thousand times better. Thank you.”
“Thank you for letting me,” whispered Jasmine. She pushed open the door, and they stepped out together, hand in hand. The door closed behind them, and when Jasmine looked to her right, Autumn had gone.
The next part, she had to do alone.
She took a deep breath. The final door, at the end of the passage. It was wide open, and a bright light shone through it. The same light, again, brighter and beckoning.
“I’m not ready,” cried Jasmine. “How did Autumn do this? In her memories it was easy, but I’m not ready.”
She took one step closer. It was pulling her in. Or was she pulling herself in? Or was someone pushing her?
Not even the questions made sense any more.
She looked back. The rest of the corridor was disappearing.
There was no other choice. In the end, everyone ran out of places to run, unless they agreed to carry on going forwards.
“Keeping moving on,” she agreed. “That’s what makes the world go ‘round.”
Jasmine Sparks stepped over the threshold of this life, and entered the next.
…which took me here.
That’s it, now. The stories of my adventures with the Doctor are finished. I’m not sure what to call them. Admittedly I’d love to carry on telling stories about the Doctor after I’ve gone, but I don’t know what happened to him (or her). I think that would constitute fan-fiction.
I feel like these stories went well. In many ways, the toughest part for me was writing about myself. It’s hard to get yourself right, I think. You end up leaning towards something that’s almost excessively critical, or you forget your faults altogether, because you can sympathise with yourself and with your own actions more than you can anyone else’s.
There were things I didn’t talk about, stories I didn’t tell. I didn’t need to and I didn’t want to. No one will ever know the full story of Jasmine Sparks, and that’s okay.
Writing these stories has kept me alive. Writing about these ordinary people who fell out of their world and into another. Down the rabbit hole and through the looking-glass, that’s the story of my life.
Day 699
I’m starting to question what I knew about the Doctor. Maybe I went too easy on him. Here’s a list of some of the things he’s done:
I try not to hate him for all of it, for any of it; I try not to judge him. But then I think of how he’ll be off living his life without me. How we won’t have gotten trapped here. One day he’ll have forgotten me, and he’ll be making the same mistakes again.
You shouldn’t have given up on me.
Day 723
Oh, Nan.
Now there’s someone I’m sad about. My Nan was a woman called Sheila Evans. She was very old. No one knew how old; she just kept on going. One of her friends once sat me down in her living room, gave me a little smile and a cup of tea, and told me I was special. I felt uncomfortable. She relaxed me. She said I was special because I’d given Nan a reason to live again. And that I’d given her the one thing she’d always wanted: a child of her own.
Nan always seemed to be especially conscious of the fact that I was adopted. She was my aunt’s godmother, a pretty distant relation, and she’d taken me in when my dad couldn’t and my mum was dying. She’d kept me, and she’d raised me so, so well.
She was a lovely woman – the loveliest, in fact. The kind who always listened, who always tried, even at the things she wasn’t very good at (and there were a few of those, bless her). She clung onto the wheel of change, determined that she’d move into the modern world with the rest of us, and for the most part she did.
I really, really hope Nan gets to find out that I lived. I couldn’t bear the thought of her grieving for me; I think that’s almost worse than my thoughts of dying. She’ll be gone by now. She’ll have been dead for millennia. Even if time is relative, she might be gone. It’ll have been over two years since I last saw her. Maybe that was all she had left.
Day 795
This is a message for whomever finds my body.
I hope I lived a long life. It’s very short at this point. But I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that I’m going to die here, so I figured one of these entries should act as the last. You can pick this one out and stick it at the end, if you like.
What do I want to say to the world? It’s hard to think of a last statement. I want to say that I wish things could change, in every time and place. I’ve heard it said that all it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. So, I wish good men and women would get up and start taking action.
I wish things could have gone differently for the universe, but they haven’t. Oh well.
I’m scared. I’m still scared of dying, that primal fear that’s still left over from my last incarnation. But I’m also happy. Happy that I got to live, happy that I got to see all this, that I got to die looking out to the stars rather than being suffocated by the chaos back home.
Find Nan. Go to Croydon in the year 2016. Find Sheila Evans. Tell her I lived.
Day 800
I get notified every time a hundred days pass.
I’ve got very little left to say anymore, and very little energy left to say it with. I guess it’s stupid of me, checking in on this system so often. I think I should start coming back every thousand days. My little reward for still being alive.
Day 1000
I’ve been on this planet a thousand days, a few seasonal cycles, and what’s fast approaching a whole era of my life, and something incredible has happened.
Autumn’s memories are becoming my own.
I had most of them back around Day 900, like snippets from a film. But now when I look back, they’re not just things that have happened to her. They’re things that have happened to me.
I suddenly have a life that goes back further than the turn of the twenty-first century. One that goes forward, into the future, to the world that continued after I left. I was born twice, I lived twice, I died once. Or did I die at all?
Day 2000
I’ve spent the last few hundred days exploring. I packed a bag, took what I needed, bottled up food and packed water, and ventured further than I ever had before, coming back as I needed, for shelter. And I found him.
Far, far away, at least twenty miles, was a person. I mean, he was a person. Now he’s just a skeleton, a few bones sticking out of the sand. I found the skull, identified it as male (thanks to the computer’s archaeology course), and realised: there were other people on this planet before me. People like me.
I wonder how many more of us there are, buried away in the desert. I wonder how many more of us it will take before someone realises we’re dead.
I guess I was wrong about Ed and Zoe.
Day 3000
Hello again. Guess who’s now well into adulthood, and about time too.
I’ve been honing my survival skills, scouring through, studying, those less desirable computer courses: fighting, hunting, building, cooking, first aid. I might have this base to protect me, but there’s still a chance I’m getting off this planet, and if my stay here has taught me anything it’s that the universe isn’t fair.
I think I’m going to be fighting, whether on this earth or another. And I’m going to be ready for whatever is thrown at me.
Day 4000
I’ve been here roughly ten years, Earth time, as best I can calculate it. I’m in my late twenties.
What do people in their early twenties do? It’s been so long since I was around other people that I can hardly remember. People went to university. People partied. People got into relationships, got their hearts broken, got pregnancy tests, and often in a different order. People lived, and lived among other people. I didn’t.
I’ve been here, but I haven’t lived. Ten years of my life and I didn’t get to live a single one of them. The hourglass is still moving – it’s nearly a quarter empty. I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s connected to the Planet at all, or whether it’s instead connected only to me: my life, my birth, my death. The years I lost.
That probe scanned this planet and for whatever reason, no one came for me. Whoever came up with that reason, that line of legislation that said I had to be left here… I’m pretty bitter towards them.
Day 5000
I’m starting to lose my memories now. In a way you’d expect that, honestly. You don’t hang on to these things forever. But today was the worst.
I’ve forgotten Tommy’s face. The one thing I swore I would never forget. And I just sat there and cried, cried for that thing I’d never get back, cried like a baby, like Autumn had, that one lonely night, up in her spaceship.
I know his face was beautiful. I know I touched it, my skin against his, and I knew it was a place where I belonged. And I know I swore to myself that I’d never forget it; never forget the feel of his lips, the softness of his cheek, and the look on his face. Well, I shouldn’t have made that promise, but at least I can still remember how it felt.
Day 6000
I was out exploring today, and I found the strangest message.
Far away, when you’ve passed a bit of sand and you’re heading towards more sand, there’s a point that’s different to the rest. A message which somehow survived. Maybe someone wrote it as a sick joke. Maybe I wrote it. But I don’t remember it at all.
Jasmine was here.
If I did write it, then I’m grateful to myself. It was worth knowing. That Jasmine was here, once. The kind of girl who’d walk out into the desert and write a message in the sand, telling only the stars in the sky that she had lived. She must have been a brave girl. She would be disappointed in what I’ve become: a fighter, not a human.
Day 7000
I know.
I. Know.
I’ve been an idiot, but I’ve worked it out now. The base where everything is provided. The log, where you can write about the things you’re feeling.
This is all part of some sick experiment. You’ve put me on this planet and every time I write one of these logs, it’s sent off to you. I don’t know what the experiment is. How long does it take someone to crack when they’re on their own? Well, I have an answer for you. 7000 days.
That’s why you didn’t come and find me. That’s why there’s an hourglass – it’s not mine, it’s yours. The length of your experiment.
Back on Earth, we used to have this thing called “consent.” If you didn’t provide it, you didn’t take part in these things. I never told you that you could do this to me, ever.
I trusted you, reader, whoever you are. For some reason, I thought you cared, that these logs mattered. Well, I guess they do, and I guess you do care, but not for any reasons I want to think about. I’m just a thing for you to measure.
I’ve learnt survival skills. I’ve learnt how to fight, and I’ve learnt how to hunt. I’m going to use those skills on you when finally we meet. I’m going to find you, hunt you down, until you’re in a place that you can’t escape. And then, I’m going to kill you.
This is the last log I’m going to write. You’ll never know how your precious experiment ended.
You bastard. You absolute bastard.
Day 18.000
Well, here I am.
I don’t think walking away from this log achieved anything, because I’m still here. After 18,000 bloody days on this planet. I’m not even going to tell you how old I am, because it scares me.
Autumn’s memories all came back in the early thousands. Everything Autumn had ever chosen to remember, I remember. They took their place alongside Jasmine’s memories, and now I have both. Both lives. Both persons.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I think I’m both. I was wrong, all those years. Autumn wasn’t dead, she was just waiting. This time alone has made me contemplate that. When we get rid of our biology, our genetics, and we get rid of our environmental influences, who are we? I am a completely different person to Autumn, but we’re the same. What is it? What is that something that we share, that goes beyond everything else? What’s beyond the body and even the mind?
I don’t know. I can’t call myself Autumn Rivers, but I can’t call myself Jasmine Sparks either. I crossed out the name I’d written on all my books. I kept Jasmine, because that’s who I’ve lived this life as, but I thought about my family, about where I came from, and considered it appropriate that Autumn got a credit.
According to the stories I wrote, my name is Jasmine Rivers. That’s quite a nice name, I think. I chose well.
But that’s not all. There’s another reason I’m reporting back. I’m afraid I’m not very well.
The years have taken their toll. It started as a headache. One long, agonising migraine I just couldn’t shift, filling the entirety of my head. Then it hit my balance – I struggle to walk without supporting myself these days. I’m tired all the time. I forget things. Sometimes I wake up in the night, and I forget where I am, even though I’ve spent virtually my whole life in this one place.
I think I’m finally dying. It all went rather quickly, in the end.
Day 19,000
I’ve lasted another thousand days. That’s a lot more than I was expecting. I’m almost grateful.
I’m not angry anymore, because I’ve come to realise how little I really understand. In truth, I don’t know who you are, reader. I don’t know why you’re reading this. I don’t even know if you have a choice in this experiment. Maybe none of us do, not even the observers.
I don’t have the energy to be angry, and if all these years on my own have taught me anything, it’s that there’s nothing I can do with anger. I miss my family so much, and I miss my friends even more. But I’ve come to accept, slowly, that they’ll have gone on. The world will have gone on without me. It has a knack for surviving, a bit like I do, really.
Remember that post I wrote all those years ago, to whomever finds my body? I haven’t let myself forget it – there’s a little note above my computer that I see every morning, reminding me. I don’t have long now, and I want those words to be heard.
I hate the fact I’m dying. It scares me as much as it always did. It scared me when I was dying as Autumn, and it scared me when I was dying as Jasmine. Third time lucky, and I’m still terrified. But the world isn’t fair, and that’s okay. I’m not cross anymore. I can’t be. It’s my time, and I’m as close to peace as this world will allow.
My condition is getting worse. I’m so confused all the time. I hope I don’t end up in pain.
Day 19,036
I can’t remember how long I’ve been here. There are numbers on the screen but now I don’t understand them. I got up to write this and now I’m confused. I know I write this, I think it’s what I do, but I don’t know why.
Day 19,099
There’s a name I keep hearing in my head, like it’s important. I know it’s important, I’m sure it is, and I get sad every time I hear it, but I don’t know whose name it is.
I wish I could remember. This is driving me mad.
Who is Tommy?
Day 19,202
I can’t remember anymore thing ever. I do’t. Who am I.m Where, when. What is this? Don’t understand.
Its cold ever where. so scared. help me please
Day 19,220
Before the end, one last memory came back. I remembered who I was. Jasmine Sparks, Autumn Rivers… me. I remembered something that was beyond words, and it gave me the strength to do what I had to.
I remembered the hourglass, and I had to know, before I died, whether I was right. Was it really timed to my life?
I pushed on the wall, still instinctively knowing, even in my confusion, which it was. The floor lights were still shining, and I could see it. A mound of sand, built up in the lower section. And in the top…
The last few grains of sand, emptying.
I stepped down, into the lowered section where that enormous hourglass had sat for all these years, counting my seconds as grains of sands. I placed my hand on the glass. The final grain of sand fell.
It was over.
The lights on the floor grew brighter and brighter, until I was forcing my eyes closed, almost screaming with the pain of it. The room tremored, and I felt the glass growing hot to the touch, but I knew, for some reason, that I couldn’t take my hands off it.
Then it stopped. I let go.
I stepped back and opened my eyes.
The painful lights had stopped, and were back to how they were when I had entered the room. Everything was the same – except for the hourglass.
The sand was back in the upper section.
Still wondering where I was and what I was doing here, I stumbled out, back into the main area. I walked over to the computer. Again, I knew, from all the years I’d done it, that I would sit down and write. So I did. And it said something I couldn’t quite believe, something which struck terror into my heart, as well as another emotion, far more powerful and far more terrible.
Hope.
I read it again, just to be sure. I was right. Day 0.
Either I had escaped my own fate, and somehow made it through to the reset, to the arrival of the experiment’s next subject. Or something else had happened – something which hadn’t happened to me for decades.
I’d travelled in time.
I pushed open the door to the base, and stepped back out into the desert. The hot air hit my face, as it always did, like I was walking into an oven.
I stepped over the sand, trying to find my balance. It was harder to walk in the stuff, at my age. I nearly fell, but was able to stop myself. If I hadn’t, I think that would have been it. I pushed on, hearing myself wheeze.
If I died now, at least it would be at one with nature, with the stars over my head.
Half a kilometre, that must have been how far I walked. And then I saw her. She was lying in the sand, a bullet wound in her stomach, eyes shut. She didn’t even look like she was breathing. But I recognised her. I felt so many things towards her – envy, pity, guilt, fear.
Using the last of my strength, a strength I’m not even sure how I found, I lifted Jasmine Sparks, and carried her into the base.
All those years of medical courses online finally came back to me. I found the supplies beneath the bed, and began to work on her bullet wound. Looking back, with a better concept of time, I know it took me about five hours. When I was satisfied I’d done all I had to, I took one last look at her, and stepped back outside.
I knew the story from the first time. I had to leave.
There I was, walking away, that old and powerful symbol in my head: the snake, eating its own tail. That’s me – almost. The snake who stitches up its own tail, I think. This will go on forever, I understand.
I must have walked a long way, because when I turned back, I could no longer see the base. I forgot which way I’d come from. While I was getting my bearings, I fell, my face smacking into the sandy covering, not as comfortable as it looked. I think a few bones broke as I came down. It’s what you’d expect.
I stared up at the stars. Soon, it would be morning, and Jasmine Sparks would be waking up. I wish I could save her.
My eyes began to close, and I remembered one more thing.
When I arrived, I’d heard the sound of the TARDIS. I’d forgotten that sound. No. I wasn’t remembering…
I was hearing it again.
It got louder. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t.
The world began to change. I think I was laughing. The sky disappeared, and then I was somewhere else. That was the last thing I knew.
I can’t say I’ve been entirely truthful about everything, reader. Until now, I have been, but I figured you should be allowed the full story, so I decided to add this on the end. I didn’t write this log in the base – I’m actually writing it from Gallifrey. With a bit of luck, they’ll do as I request, and the send this off to be added to the rest.
You’re probably feeling sorry for me. Don’t. I lived a long and painful life on that planet, but it’s not over. Now I know why no one came for me. Why I was left to suffer for all those years, and why, on that last day, I was allowed to go back.
It all makes sense now. I have a job to do. Something I never thought I’d do, but which I put on my bucket list anyway, just in case. I’m scared. I think this is right. I hope this is right. Because it will change everything.
I take another look at the list. One last time. Just to be sure that I’m going to do it.
Yes. Yes, I am.
Change the world.
Yes. This is the longest single gap I have left between two entries. (I think. I’m not keeping record. It feels like the longest gap.)
What have I been doing with my time, you ask? Deliberately focusing. The Tales of Ed and Zoe are on hiatus, but don’t worry, they’ll be back soon. I’m, like, half-way there learning the Language, and the history stuff is going well too. I’ve found a bit of Earth history too, which is awesome, because I think I’d have liked to have studied a bit more history when I was at school. Really ancient stuff, like Greeks and Romans. These guys actually aren’t that different from the Romans, in many respects. I wonder whether Tommy noticed that.
Day 100
“I’m sorry,” said Ed.
The two of them hadn’t spoken in three days. Zoe had spent those days wandering the desert; Ed had spent them keeping an eye on her, constantly worried that she would get lost. She didn’t. She had a better sense of direction than he did.
“I’m sorry,” Ed repeated.
Zoe was asleep, building up quite a snore, which was usually the best time to speak to her.
“I didn’t want it to go like this,” said Ed. “Sometimes I don’t enjoy things because I’m so worried about all the ways I could mess up. I just need to let go, you know? And I do it all because I love you, Zo. I’m such an idiot. You deserved better.”
“No I didn’t,” said Zoe, turning around and smiling.
“You were… listening? The whole time?”
“Uh-huh. You’re quite loud, you know.”
“I speak to you when you’re asleep all the time!”
“Yes. And I listen every time.”
“Ah.”
“Was what you said about fresher’s week really true? And didn’t that hurt for quite a while after? Especially in such a delicate ar-”
“ZOE!”
“Sorry. Here.” Zoe pulled the cover off her bed and moved up, tapping the space next to her. “Come and sit down in my lovely single bed with me.”
“Thanks.” Ed hopped in on her side. They’d both missed it. Their separate aromas, the sound of each other’s breathing. The reminder that they were not two, but one. “I’ll stay here as long as you like, Zoe. I love you.”
Zoe tapped him playfully on the nose. “We’ll stay for Christmas, and then we’ll go. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Day 115
The seasonal changes are hitting hard, now, but it’s a relief to know I’ve done with the worst of the heat. That was clearly summer. This, I think, is autumn. With a small ‘a’. Always a grammatical error that’s set me off, for reasons I’m sure you can understand.
I didn’t think deserts got cold, but apparently they do. At least, it’s getting cooler, and quite significantly. Actually, I think Antarctica is technically a desert, but I might have made that up.
I wish you could regulate the temperature in here. Seriously, the one thing this base is missing is central heating and air conditioning. No, don’t you worry, I’ll just sit here while the seasons push me this way and that, not knowing whether I’m going to have to break out the onesie or strip down to my knickers. What? Don’t look at me like that. I’m the only person on this planet; I can dress how I like.
Yes, by the way, clothes are provided. No onesies though, unfortunately. I should write a formal complaint.
Day 120
Aaaaand now the seasonal changes aren’t as funny. It only took five days for the worst of it to start. There was a major storm last night. I heard it in my bed. We used to say, back in Croydon, that they’d rattle the windows. The balcony door was always the worst – creaking, rattling, sliding about all night long. Rattling isn’t quite the word I’d use here. More like… smashing the windows. In the middle of the night. Scaring the living f…fibre out of me.
They left a repair kit out, and now I see why. And, as per usual, there are detailed instructions on the computer system on how to use the kit, but no way of contacting anyone for advice. That’s why I’m spending the next few days fixing the place up where I can. They’ve got new panes of glass and everything.
That’s my life now. DIY Jasmine. I just need a white van, and maybe a beard.
Day 138
I’m making today’s log to proudly declare my personal achievements over the last eighteen days.
First off, the window is fixed. Easy when you know how. Got a few cuts and scrapes along the way, but it was worth it to see the finished product. While I was at it, I managed to track down the duster, so I’ve given the place a quick dust too. Shame Ed didn’t find it sooner, he mightn’t have sneezed as much.
Second achievement: I’ve learnt the Language! More or less, anyway. You might think it’s impossible to accomplish such a feat in such a short space of time, but trust me, when it’s just you on your own, you can. According to the notes I’ve scribbled, I started on Day 18. That’s 120 days, and most of them focused on that task. The most important thing now is that I keep on practising, and make note of any new vocab I see, to quote my old Spanish teacher. But I’m proud of myself either way, getting off my own back to do this, and I think my old Spanish teacher should be too.
It was a better language than Spanish anyway. Phonetic, but without that masculine/feminine rubbish, which never made sense to me.
It gets colder every day, but that’s okay, I’m managing. Maybe I should do a onesie-making course on the computer next, though, just to prepare myself for winter.
To be honest, it’s amazing how well you adjust here. At first, getting used to the 26½ hour days seemed impossible; I was just confused all the time. But you kinda sync to the sun, if you get my drift. Maybe I’m lucky as a TARDIS traveller, but I reckon most people could do it if they had to. These days, it’s all I know, and I’m happy with it. Happy as I can be, anyway.
Things aren’t going too badly. We’re about half-way through the year. I will keeping pushing on. This time next year, I’ll be home.
Day 145
…or as we called it back home, Christmas.
I can’t be sure, of course. The years are different lengths, the days are different lengths, and, well, no Jesus. But personally, I was always about the real meaning of Christmas… lights, presents, and great music. You can tell my old RE teacher, I don’t even care.
It’s the best time of the year, anyway. I was a March baby, but I’ve always hated March, apart from when it snows. What’s to like about March? Summer’s ages away, Christmas has passed, exams are tapping you on the shoulder and you haven’t even opened a textbook. Bleurgh. What a horrible month.
The great thing about Christmas is that… and look, I know it’s clichéd, but Christmas really is that little light in the darkness. When the skies are closing in and everyone’s feeling miserable, it pops up and says wipe away that frown, there’s another way. If you want to be happy while there’s a thunderstorm rolling overhead, you go and be happy.
For what it’s worth, I do think they take it a bit far sometimes. I’ve never been terribly upset about not having a family, because all my friends who have family Christmases really have put me off it for life. Giving up your bedroom?! What?! Are you insane?! And I think there are people out there for whom Christmas won’t always be a relief, or a good thing. I mean, poor old Robin, losing her husband and son the day before. I’m sure there’s nothing worse in the world than staring out your window at everyone else being happy when you’ve got nothing left.
This isn’t an advert for Christmas, okay. But I still bloody love it. There’s nothing that gives me hope like the memories of those Christmases I had as a child, all those carefully-wrapped presents around the tree, Nan’s homemade crackers, waking her at the crack of dawn and her not even minding. That kind of thing is precious. It stays with you.
I’m going to finish this log here, and I’m going to celebrate, as best I can. There’s no music, which is the worst, but I can at least try. Sing a few songs on my own, see if I can download any Christmas stories online (anything by Dickens, I’ll take it), have a go at some origami, see if I can find any jokes, and maybe there are even some decorations tucked away somewhere.
No sherry. That’s sad. I think I’d be legally old enough to drink now. But I was never that fussed about it either way.
Day 146
“Where did you get the tree?”
“That’s for me to know, and you to wonder,” said Ed, with a wink. It wasn’t just a tree – he’d somehow managed to get hold of a record player, too. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, it was singing, so they decided to do just that.
Zoe took her partner’s arm, allowing him to spin her around, and almost allowing him to think he was the one leading her. She was the better dancer, with a few years of practise on her back; soon, she was spinning him around, leading him this way and that, round the Christmas tree and back, voices singing “let’s be jolly, deck the halls with boughs of holly.”
“I’m glad we stayed for Christmas,” admitted Ed.
“I knew you would be. What have you got me?” Zoe brought the dance to a close as the song ended, and examined the present beneath the tree. She unwrapped it slowly, allowing herself only a glimpse at first, before excitedly ripping open the paper like a nine-year-old child.
“The dress!” she cried. “The one I always wanted! But we only saw it that one time, and then we couldn’t find it again, so how did you, and here, how di-”
“-that’s for me to know, and you to won-”
“-no, Ed, tell me!”
“Oh, all right then.” Ed beamed. “I made a note of it the first time, knowing you’d forget. Got it delivered here.”
“Oh, Ed, it’s beautiful.” Zoe gave her husband a supportive hug. “You’re wonderful. I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you, it was so selfish…”
“Nah, don’t worry, all forgotten now. Mind you… what did you get me?”
“Well…” Zoe winked, and produced something from her pocket. Two strips of paper. “A ticket off this world, to somewhere brand new, and possibly with other people. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like our honeymoon’s only just got started. I love you.”
They kissed, under the fairy-lights of the tree. The mistletoe on the other side of the room tried not to feel jealous.
Well, I tried. With Christmas, I mean. I managed to find A Christmas Carol, which was nice, and The Haunted Man, which I hadn’t heard of but which was also very enjoyable.
The thing is… Christmas just isn’t the same on your own. Now I really know what Robin felt like. It’s almost worse than the other days, because you feel like you have to be happy, like this is your last chance. And you just can’t. Not on your own. Not without other people to dance with, without people to show your love and appreciation for. What’s the point in a Christmas dinner without anyone to cook it for? Anyway, there’s not a Christmas dinner here, the closest I could find was Option 4, Roast Chicken.
I’m really starting to miss people. There’s a basic need, I’ve realised, for humans. Human interaction. We’re sociable animals. We need to be sociable to reproduce; without going into too much detail, the whole act of keeping the species going is one of both physical and emotional closeness, and I think that says a lot about us. We form groups based on the things we have in common. We make new inventions just so that we can find new things to talk about. Even when we’re alone, we watch or read about other people and their interaction; we’re obsessed with it. We need to talk, to be talked to, to see, to be seen, to love, to be loved.
I am trying to keep my spirits up, my shoulders high, all that jazz. This will be my last Christmas on Planet Patsy. Next Christmas I’ve already planned. I’m going to tell Nan everything, somehow. Me, Nan, the Doctor, and Robin if she wants to, with her family. In the TARDIS, together.
Day 159
The dreams are getting weird now. I’m beginning to learn what sort of things you dream about when nothing is happening in your life. There’s nothing to draw on from your day, so you look back further, back to when your memories aren’t as fresh. Your sleeping mind tries to build something out of an already distorted past. You see strange things.
Some of the stranger ones are scary, but they’re not nightmares. In much the same way, some of the more ordinary ones are so dull that you can’t quite sit comfortably in them. It feels like prison. No, I’m sorry, I’m going to need a new vocabulary to describe this.
Day 163
The bags were packed, the lights were switched off. Outside, the world was as dead as ever. Ed and Zoe took tentative steps outside, preparing to say goodbye.
That was when they saw her.
A young girl, barely an adult, and probably dead. There she lay, on the ground outside the base, sand sweeping over a bloody wound in her stomach, her eyes closed. Ed took a closer look.
No… not quite dead.
“Oh God.” He turned away, feeling sick.
“Oh, get out of the way,” fussed Zoe. “Lucky I’m here, isn’t it?”
“Hmm?”
“Medical professional, remember?” She rolled her eyes, and without panicking, carefully lifted then carried the girl’s body back into the base, Ed helpfully, if a little feebly, turning the lights on after her.
“Medical supplies, medical supplies…” Zoe scanned the shelves, and found what she was looking for. “This will do.”
She set to work on the young woman, doing everything she could, and quickly. Zoe had trained for seven years, back home in the outer reaches of the Empire. There were people there who’d suffered time distortions. Gunshot wounds, which this appeared to be, were barely scrapes by comparison.
After a few hours, the couple found themselves standing there awkwardly over their patient, waiting for something to happen.
“The anaesthetic will wear off soon,” said Zoe. “She’ll be fine, she’ll recover. Best medical care in the Empire.” She winked. “Wonder what she was doing here.”
“Our lift is here in three minutes, Zoe. They don’t stop by this planet often. This will be our last chance for a long time.”
“Yeah, I know.” Zoe nodded, still not entirely happy. “Not our concern. We’ve done our bit. Come on, let’s go.”
They turned around and left, this time for good.
End of story. Hurray for Zoe and Ed! Or… not. I’ve tried my best to work myself in there, to try and explain how it was I ended up on that bed, healed, and clearly by the work of human hands. This is the best I’ve got for now. The botched honeymoon. 163 days, the computer says. Zoe and Ed might even be at the Capital by now.
Day 170
I flipping love Philosophy. And Ancient History. That’s what I’ve been reading about on the computer, anyway. Totally irrelevant, but totally brilliant. Plato’s great, isn’t he? Off his rocker, of course. Barmy, angst-driven, paranoid, up himself, borderline neurotic. But great.
Tommy had a degree in Classics. That’s all about the Ancient World, old civilisations and texts, philosophies, that kind of thing. I didn’t know much about it at the time, but I’d give anything to bring him back and have a good old chat about it, now. I’d give anything to bring him back full-stop, really. I miss him now more than ever. I don’t want people around me now. I just want him.
Day 180
The hourglass has moved.
I mean, it does that, I get it. You watch it very carefully and you can see the top section slowly emptying. But when I say slowly, I mean slowly, waiting for Christmas slowly, waiting for the Eurovision Song Contest to end slowly, watching Bruce Forsyth to see if he really does age, slowly. That kind of slowly. Like when you know that trips on the London Eye aren’t even that long, but when you look at it you’re sure you can’t see it moving.
That’s the hourglass. And after a while you think you’ve got the measure of it, emptying its little grains of sand and really doing nothing at all. So you take your eye off it. You seal the hourglass room off again, forget it’s there. Get carried away reading about Ancient History, taking walks down the Valley of the Time Lords, writing and then quickly deleting logbook entries about your dead boyfriend because you can’t believe you could ever write something that depressing (it’s okay – it’s my way of coping – I’m not as bad as you think I am).
And when you look away, it moves.
You can see it now, right at the bottom. A thin layer of sand, building up, one day to become a thick layer. The first 2%. The point where you think nah, it doesn’t matter. There’s so much to go. You keep thinking like that, until one day you realise that the 2% is what’s left at the top, and the hourglass has caught up with you, and what do you do then? You can’t empty it back the other way. Gravity doesn’t work like that.
I can’t stop it emptying. Maybe I don’t want to. A part of me wants to know what happens when all the sand reaches the bottom. The other part of me is terrified of that day, almost as if I know already.
Day 191
The dreams are getting weirder and weirder. Last night I had a dream, and I knew, even when I was having it, that it was a memory. I was sitting in a music practise room, back in school, playing the piano and eating biscuits. There was a concert that day, I knew that much. My best friend was there. She was saying things… but I couldn’t see her face. Like I couldn’t remember it. Then I woke up, and that was when the strangest thing happened.
I realised it wasn’t my memory.
I can’t play the piano. I taught myself electric guitar, when I was going through a bit of a rocker phase at fourteen. Nan got far too enthusiastic about it, bought me an electric guitar, and I self-taught. Still love it now. But that’s the extent of my musical talent. I can’t play the piano.
Autumn could.
I instinctively knew that it was Autumn’s memory, like I was remembering on her behalf. It wasn’t one that I’d recalled before, at any point in my life. I made a whole timeline of her life, back in Nan’s flat. Major events first, then later on, when I was living out in Hawaii with UNIT, bored out of my mind at our lack of progress, I added the little stuff. Every single memory I could recall. That was when I really got to know Autumn. But that one wasn’t on there, that day in the practise room. I’m sure of it, I’m positive.
So this means only one thing. Her memories are coming back.
Day 204
It’s occurred to me, these last few days, that Tommy really was perfect. I don’t mean perfect for me, I mean bleedin’ perfect, like no one is meant to be. That kinda annoys me.
We all have our flaws, right? I’m very good at believing the lies I make up, jumping to conclusions, and I don’t even quite know who I am. Autumn let her love of life become selfish and grew angry and bitter towards the world. Robin could be rash, so terribly, beautifully rash. But what was Tommy’s flaw? His hamartia?
He was a bit clumsy, I guess. He’d start a sentence better than he’d finish it. Sometimes he let his heroes off with too much, only told them to stop before it was too late. Yet I can’t seem to raise this critique with any conviction at all. To me, he was perfect. I can’t weigh up his character like I can anyone else’s. He’s just… complete. He was kind, he was charming in his awkward way, he was ambitious but in the most selfless way; he was intelligent, perceptive, thoughtful… and, well, he was very hot, and very good in… actually, let’s not go there.
Maybe that’s what it’s like to love someone. You just can’t fully process their flaws. They’re there… you know they’re there, you’re sure of it, because they have to be. But at the same time, they’re not. You don’t care about them. Everyone else is worse. The flaws don’t matter. The person you love is beautiful, you can’t see the blemishes; they’re part of the beauty, and so they’re not seen as blemishes. Again, I don’t feel like this is the right language to convey it, so I might end up changing to the Language, or even having a stab at some Spanish…
Okay. Breathe out. I’m not making that much sense, and I’m lovesick over a dead guy. But everything I offered him, he offered me in return. I know we were on the same wavelength, I know we were heading down the same path. He must have thought this way about me too. My idealism and my identity issues, they must have meant nothing to him. That’s one of the best things about being loved, now I look back. You know that the things people dislike about you are suddenly tiny, unimportant. No wonder people in relationships are always the most confident.
The Doctor… now he was flawed. Damn, he was flawed. I’m trying not to hold that against the guy. What he did on that last adventure was brave. He could have done anything with the life he lived, but he risked it all to join me in doing what he knew was right, even though (he thought) he knew he would lose. He let me make my own choices. It got me killed. Then it didn’t. But it showed that he’d listened to me, that he’d understood the things he did wrong. He stopped deciding how our stories ended and started letting us control them. He became my companion, and I was proud of him.
Even so, I find it difficult to stay positive about him. I swear I heard that TARDIS when I arrived here, and that’s not making it any better. I hear the noise and 204 days later there’s no sign of him. I just sit here, sometimes, thinking of all the things he did wrong. He messed up with Autumn and she forgave him. But he kept messing up. Planet Doctor, I mean, what the hell was that about? What a jerk. I can’t remember how I forgave him for that, but I’m not feeling as charitable as I did then. Oh, there was the stuff about him wearing other people’s faces, too. Then there was his screwing up history by changing something that led to Tommy’s death. And the whole life of Robin McKnight, which he apparently liked to slowly dismantle and rebuild where he could. He was so careless. Did he stop after my death? Did he? Heck. I bet he’s still doing it now. I hate him for that, and I see what Tommy meant, about being just a little bit frightened at the prospect that he’s out there, treating the universe like his own personal LEGO set.
Day 223
I’m starting to lose hope a bit now, in case you hadn’t gathered that from the last entry. It’s been so long.
223 days. Probably just a number to you, especially if you’re binge-reading this period of my life in one night. But let me tell you, it’s not. It’s not just a number. It’s pain. Long, drawn-out, frustrating, the kind you never forget. These 223 days will stay with me, plaguing me every sleepless night for the rest of my life. Remember how bad things were back then, Jasmine? Yes. How could I forget?
I’m getting out of the habit of talking. I learnt the Language, but I’m practising it less and less. When I do, it’s reading things online. I never speak anymore, in any language. I don’t know if you lose the art of speaking. I hope not, because I can’t see myself talking any time soon.
Day 235
My Dad.
His name was Laurence Sparks. He was a scientist. He loved astronomy, Kate Bush, and seeing new places. I don’t know if he loved my mother. I could never bring myself to ask. I think he loved me.
I saw him a few times. Every now and then, throughout my life, he’d turn up. We got on well. I was never one of those teenagers to throw a tantrum about my parents and why they weren’t paying me enough attention. I had someone who cared for me, and that was enough. I don’t think you’re obliged to care for your child as a parent, personally. I think you’re just obliged to make sure they’re cared for.
He left me in safe hands, and when I saw him, we got along quite well. There was a bit of me that thought it would have been nice if he had grown up with me, because we had so much to talk about, and there were so many interesting things we agreed on and disagreed on, for that matter.
A while later, something awful happened. He killed his whole research team, and then he killed himself. Years later, we found out why. Colonel Ward had the honour of telling me: he’d looked into a telescope and had seen the blue-shift, both close and imminent. He thought the universe was about to close in on us. He thought he was saving his friends.
I’m still not sure if I buy that. I don’t think there are many good reasons to turn around and shoot a load of people who’ve never done anything to hurt you, and I’m saying that as someone who used to be Autumn Rivers. Stuff happens, you know? He saw a prophecy, and I don’t think a prophecy justifies that kind of action. He didn’t bother to look any further; he didn’t bother to think, to refer to a higher authority, or even to appeal to the Doctor (he was in UNIT – I’m sure he must have known about the Doctor).
There we go. Tommy was perfect, the Doctor was a bit of a jerk, and my Dad? Not a clue. He’s the one man I can’t make my mind up about. I don’t think I ever will. I’ll never be able to get inside that head of his, never be able to understand the raw terror that a scientific discovery instilled in him that night.
It could be a problem for me, I guess. If I let it be. But I think we all need our daddy issues. They make us strive to be better people, while reminding us that we’re all still children inside.
(Is it daddy issues? Or is that the Freud one? If so, AWKWARD. I definitely don’t have those daddy issues.)
Day 250
I’ve been losing the motivation to write lately, but I thought I’d treat you to an entry today as it’s a big number: 250. 250. 250…
I’m running out of things to do, people to talk about, stories to tell. When I try, they’re just insipid. I wouldn’t ask anybody to read that rubbish.
Still, it can’t be long now. Nearing the end of that first year, narrowing down the results. I’ll be left with enough options that I can pick out my planet among them, and then I’ll have a course of action to take. It’s a lot of waiting around. Who needs nail scissors when you can bite them off in anticipation?
Day 274
This morning, it finally happened.
The first year has passed on Planet Patsy.
I’m only telling this from the position of the sun, and I’m no perfect observer. But the great thing about the computer system is that it takes the figures you input and also takes into account and includes in its calculations the other possibilities within a sensible parameter, as well as accounting for human error. Which means, in other words, it worked. I’ve found out where I am.
They call this planet P-1-Honey-7. Which, if you ask me, is an awful name compared to Patsy, but that’s committees for you. According to the data file on it, it’s owned by the Planet Makers, Autumn Rivers’ old best friends. (That was a joke, by the way. She brought them down with the greatest legal case in the Empire, shortly after killing half the committee.) That says a few interesting things about it. One of those things is that it may or may not have been produced, industrially, by human beings.
The Planet Makers own about 99% of the planets in the galaxy, or did until Autumn brought them down. They still have a few to their name, but not many. The government took over the initiative. About 20 of that 99% are planets the company purchased but were previously naturally-occurring; the other 79% the Planet Makers made themselves. This could be either. Going on the law of probability, I’m probably sitting right now on the surface of a planet made by giant machines and complex codes.
There are no details on the planet’s purpose whatsoever, which is strange. Almost every planet in the Empire serves a function, whether that’s providing housing, agricultural use, industrial use, whatever. The computer system is usually very good at explaining that. It gives me access based on “privileges,” which are essentially non-existent, so, whichever details are available to the general public. Either this planet is in the rare 1% of having no function at all, or its function is something people aren’t allowed to know about. In which case… am I alone here? Am I safe?
I did a bit more digging around. I did a search of ‘P-1-Honey-7’, in all files. It took about two hours to complete, and this is with the finest and sharpest technology humankind will ever create, which speaks volumes about the extent of information I have access to. There were about ten results, most of them meaningless – little fact files telling me where I am in space, as if I didn’t already know. A lone planet, orbiting a lone sun. A weird thought, though. It’s almost like I bring this place to life. Without me, there was no one to live on it, no one to notice if anything happened. It could have been blasted out of the sky, and nothing would have happened. You know what they say. If a tree falls in a forest…
I’m chattering away, more than I have in months. The reason for this is because of the best piece of news as well. There was just one result in that ten that meant something, but boy, it meant a lot.
There’s a space probe that moves around the local galaxy, carrying out brief but efficient observations of each planet. There’s a schedule for it. P-1-Honey-7 is due such a visit within the next six months (Earth time).
I’m going to need to start collecting rocks. Fast.
Day 275
I hope you enjoyed that cliff-hanger.
This is a dwarf planet, more or less. It wouldn’t take much to scan over it, at all. My base is tiny, and I’m smaller. I don’t want this probe missing me.
I’m going to make a sign, using all the rocks I can find on this planet. Well, all the ones I’m capable of lifting. There’s hundreds of them in the Valley of the Time Lords. I need thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions. Enough to make a sign that’s about, ooh, three miles across? By Christmas?
I’m keeping it simple, anyway: S.O.S.
I start tomorrow. Collecting, building. You won’t be seeing much of me for a while, but it’s all in the name of a good cause: getting the hell out of here.
Day 300
Checking in. I’m still building it. Making loads of progress. I mean, I’ve done a bit of an S, which is great, right?
Don’t look at me like that. You try making a sign out of rocks on a desert planet with no way to get a bird’s eye view of it. Trust me, the planning was the worst part.
Day 360
And it’s done.
I’m not sure how you’re reading this. I assume the log is submitted after a certain period of time (maybe when the hourglass finishes its countdown), and you get to read them all in bulk. The days are always automatically added at the start of each entry, so I don’t have to worry about counting them (I still do, though). Either there’s a list of days and all the entries I don’t fill out are just blank, or you only see the day numbers when I input them.
Either way… whatever you’re seeing cannot and will not communicate the passing of time as I have experienced. You’ll never be able to understand the sleepless nights, the nights where I got too much sleep and woke up in a panic that I’d never finish the work, the hottest and most gruelling of days, and the times I’ve hit a problem, forgotten where I was in my work, and wanted to give up altogether. You’ll be able to jump, from the day I began this work to the day I finished it, just like I used to when I was with the Doctor. And lucky you. But please don’t forget this.
Those were my days. This is my life. That last header indicated months of my life I will never get back. Months spent alone, anxious, scared. They’d better pay off.
Day 376
The probe is coming soon, and I’m feeling all manner of things at once. Excited. Terrified. Impatient. Grateful, although actually, I’m not sure who to.
The excitement and impatience have taken precedence, I’d say. I’ve packed already. Found a bag in the cupboard, packed the bucket list, a few scraps of paper I’d written important notes on, and a couple of snack packs, just for the memories. I think I’ll look back on all this fondly, in the end. My time alone. The time I needed to think, to move forward, and to move on. Maybe it will all look up after this. Maybe I’ll be able to think of Tommy with a smile instead of a tear. Or maybe both. That would be okay.
The hourglass is still emptying. I won’t be here to see the end of it. I think I’m glad.
Day 383
The probe passed today. Much to both my surprise and satisfaction, I saw it pass in the sky. A bright light, like a star, but moving and flickering like a plane. Such a regular occurrence, so far away and systematic, you’d almost believe it wasn’t the work of a civilisation. I mean, if there were people here, they’d think it was, like, Planet Patsy’s equivalent of Haley’s comet. They wouldn’t know it was watching them.
Anyway, it definitely saw my sign. If anything, I swear it lingered over the spot. I hope it’s still the universal code for Get Me The Hell Out Of Here.
Save Our Souls. All of us. All of me.
Day 390
How long does it take to dispatch a rescue craft?
The images from the probes are transmitted straight back to the Planet Makers, and arrive almost immediately. They’d have seen me by now, or my plea for help at least. I’d expected rescue sooner. Now I’m barely sleeping, worried I’ll miss them or something and get a card through the door: “Sorry, you missed your rescue slot. We left the escape shuttle on a nearby planet for your convenience.”
I’m getting very restless.
Day 424
I came to accept something monumental today.
No one is coming for me.
It’s been a long time. Longer than waiting for a dodgy third-party Amazon subscriber, longer than waiting for a message from your least reliable friend, longer than watching a marathon of every movie Matt Damon’s ever featured in (one good thing about living in Planet Patsy’s cosy base: not having to grow plants out of your own s***).
Things were getting quicker back home in the 21st Century. Next day delivery, probably more sweat shops, faster technological systems. By now, one-click delivery probably means that’s the time it takes for the thing to be delivered. Click. Knock knock. Open. Thanks.
A rescue mission would probably be even quicker, especially off a planet that’s almost definitely part of some sort of secret operation.
If they haven’t turned up by now, they’re not coming.
Why? I don’t know. Maybe they’re not allowed; maybe there’s some strict law about stepping foot on this planet, which I’m inadvertently breaking by being here. Maybe they’re too scared. Maybe they didn’t even see my sign, but I’m not buying that.
I need time to think.
Day 429
I don’t know what to do.
There’s no way I’m ever getting off this planet. I tried looking up spaceship-making courses on the computer, as one does. It turns out I don’t have the parts. Or, to be honest, the bravery. I’m not cut out for pioneer space travel. I enjoyed the easy life.
That’s it, then. The rest of my life here, alone. A part of me was saying just end it all – there are so many ways to kill yourself out here, probably more ways than there are to survive. But I can’t bring myself to do it. There’s a bit of Autumn inside me, and it’s growing. A voice inside my head, getting louder, telling me that anything, absolutely anything, is better than giving up. That pain is better than pain’s absence. That 1 is a better number than 0 because it’s going somewhere.
I thought I’d never move on from Tommy. I started doubting that; started wondering if maybe I’d find someone else, or find happiness in another form. Now I realise I was right. I’ll never get to move on, because the only company I have in this world is his memory.
I feel pathetic because I just want someone to hug me. Someone to hold me, to say new words from their own minds. Someone to share in all this. I’m so alone. I hate every second of this.
I don’t know what to do.
Day 437
We all fall sometimes. The trick to picking yourself up is finding your purpose. No, not quite, actually. The trick is making your purpose. Because that’s how purposes are created. They aren’t given to you, and they don’t just happen. You make a decision, and you claim it as your own, and that becomes your future.
I decided to dig out the bucket list. I’ve disregarded that right-hand column, since I’m never leaving. I’d already learnt a second language, which left me with two more. The novel… is coming at a later date.
The brilliant thing is that I discovered the perfect thing on the perfect day for it. I was looking for where I’d left the bucket list, searching under the computer, and I found something. There’s a transmitter. It’s nothing too impressive, in terms of changing my predicament, but it does something which may well transform the rest of my life: it plays music. And it plays music far: a good fifty feet away from the base, at least. That’s what I call surround sound.
There’s an extensive database of music throughout the ages on this computer, a sort of Space Spotify. It had everything from my time, so I knew what I had to do.
There I was, running as fast I can, in my bare feet, in a massive circle going nowhere, singing the lyrics to Heroes as loud as I could manage. And I heard it. Not just the music, not just the beat, the electric guitar and those beautiful, beautiful chords. I heard my own voice, for the first time in so long. Not in its best form, completely lost by the end of it, and definitely out of tune. But there it was, in the music, and in that moment, with the adrenaline rushing through me. I found it. Me. I remembered who I was. I remembered why I was still here today. Because I’m Jasmine Sparks, and I can be strong when I have to.
Though nothing will keep us together, we can beat them, forever and ever.
Day 458
And now for the novel, if you can call it that.
I realise, that if I’m never going to leave this planet, I need to start writing up something for whoever comes across it. Someone will; some archaeologist or tourist, some future Ed or Zoe, and I want them to know the story that brought me here. But where to start?
If I were going to be really narcissistic, it would be with my birth (which I know very little about). If I were going to be somewhat narcissistic, it would be with Autumn Rivers’ birth. But I’m not going to be. I’m alone on this planet for the rest of my life; I have a lot of time to think about me, so instead I’m going to start at the only place it would ever be right to start.
I can’t go back to the very beginning. I know about Susan, about Ian and Barbara, even about Kathleen, but I’m not going there. There are too many stories in between; I’d never finish them. I’m going to start instead with what was, for me, the most important day in the Doctor’s life. The day he met Robin Moon.
Robin McKnight (she married… as you’ll see later on in the story!) was the reason I met the Doctor. She brought us back together, in an act so selfless I still can’t comprehend it. She’s a goddess. She’s a hero. Anyone who doesn’t look up to Robin for inspiration needs to question their life ambitions, right now.
Here I am, attempting to write a story I will never do justice to. One night I didn’t get to experience in either of my lives, but which I know inside out and back to front, from the times the Doctor sat me down to make me understand where and from whom he got any of his virtues. It’s a story about Christmas, about healing, about learning that the impossible is just the name we give to what is beyond our understanding.
And I’m going to call it Miracle on Oxford Street.
Day 459
The sky was black, darkened by pollution; the vista cruelly robbed of stars which were snatched away by moving times, as their light failed to touch the ground and the moon hid sadly behind a thick layer of clouds. That was Primrose Hill, the picturesque North London home of all those who sought some inner beauty in their city. But on such a bleak evening, there was no beauty, nor identity; on the hill stood an invisible gate to a city eclipsed by the shadow of storm clouds, and amid the stillness was a tight, suffocating tension – words hovered in the air: the unspoken, the unspeakable. On that night in which decency became exhausted, silence fell over Primrose Hill.
The beginning.
Day 465
Oh dear, I don’t think I’ve done Robin justice at all. I think she started off quite well, but I’m starting to go really flat on the characterisation front.
I’m missing all her strength, her independence, her problem-solving abilities, her erratic but lovable tendency to become impassioned about the smallest and strangest of things. I don’t think words can communicate that sort of thing. No, no, that’s wrong. I don’t think I can use words to communicate that sort of thing, is what I’m really admitting.
Day 470
Whoa, that’s weird.
I sat down to write Autumn’s first scene. Decided to start off in her spaceship; to do it all from the Doctor’s point-of-view, because I think she’d appreciate that. When I went to write it, it was like… like it wrote itself.
Every time I go to write a scene, it comes back to me in my head. I find my fingers are typing something that my mind is only just coming to terms with. Writing about Autumn Rivers is bringing back her memories, in a powerful and vivid way. I’m not just seeing what happened. I’m remembering what she thought… what I thought.
No, no, no. That’s weird. Let’s move on. I’m nearly onto Sunset Forever.
Day 490
I’ve finally reached that point in the story: enter Tommy Lindsay.
This has been the hardest bit yet, in every sense of the word. Not only has it been hard on an obvious and clichéd emotional level, but also hard to be objective. Sometimes I think I’m writing him as too perfect. Too charismatic, too good. I’m reading it back and… he can’t have been that decent a man. No one is. Right?
I’m going to keep it. Because I’m happy with it. Because I know it’s the truth, even if it’s just my little truth.
Day 500
I’m planning to take some time away.
Holiday in New York? Haha, no. But really, I am going to turn this computer off, just for a while. I need time to write, to think, to walk. To you, of course, this will be a matter of seconds, of a brief paragraph break. See you in a couple of lines.
Day 564
I would say that felt like a long time, but it’s all starting to merge together now. I don’t really need time anymore. It’s not a straight line; it’s just the things that happen to the universe and how they pile up. Nothing happens to me, so it’s hard to have a sense of time.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and philosophising and of course writing. The more I seem to think or write about Autumn, the more I start to feel her memories coming back. Memories of the places she went, the people she knew, the things she thought. It’s unsettling, because I can sometimes find myself thinking them, too.
I’m not finished. I’m not resigning myself to this world, not yet. The hourglass is still emptying, but there’s a long, long way for it to go still. There’s time, if such a thing exists.
Day 600
Everything is just a construct.
We give things names so that we can tell them apart from other things. “Go and put the paper in the printer.” Well, we can’t say “go and put that in that” in a room full of objects, can we? So, we put sounds together and form associations between the sounds and objects, different objects which perform the same function.
Our own names are no different.
Ownership is just the same. The Planet Makers say this is ‘their’ planet. But what does that mean? What does it mean to belong to someone? The fact is, it’s meaningless. If every life form in the universe suddenly perished, ‘my house’ or ‘your phone’ or ‘their planet’ wouldn’t be left. We’re just saying “this is something I’m protective of, that I want to myself, and there will be consequences if you take it off me”. But no one really owns anything. It’s a scientific impossibility. You’d need the universe’s permission if you wanted to really own something, and the universe would never give it.
It’s all just about how we see the world, and how we’re constructed to see the world. There’s a rock in the Valley of the Time Lords that looks like a face. But it doesn’t. It only looks like that because the human mind is constructed to recognise the shape and characteristics of a face in anything; to find patterns where there aren’t any, as the Doctor liked to say. And the Valley of the Time Lords? It’s not a valley of anything. It’s not even its own place; it’s part of something bigger, and could be broken apart into smaller parts.
I think we need to relinquish names. I don’t need to be Jasmine Sparks, not when there’s no one else to use it. And this planet isn’t mine. It’s not Planet Patsy, it’s just a planet. A lump of rock. A thing amongst things.
Day 615
I started to feel something else today: Autumn’s anger. So much that I couldn’t contain it; I just had to sit down here and write it.
I don’t know what she was angry at, but it’s like it’s still happening. Like that rage hasn’t quite settled, like she’s still in there, screaming at some awful, unresolved thing.
I think I’d better go back to writing. I have just killed her off at her natural biographical point, so maybe she’s cross about that.
Day 687
Jasmine took a deep breath, and nodded. She took Autumn’s hand, and they headed for the door.
“You did well by me, Jasmine. You’ve done me proud. You lived my life, and did it all a thousand times better. Thank you.”
“Thank you for letting me,” whispered Jasmine. She pushed open the door, and they stepped out together, hand in hand. The door closed behind them, and when Jasmine looked to her right, Autumn had gone.
The next part, she had to do alone.
She took a deep breath. The final door, at the end of the passage. It was wide open, and a bright light shone through it. The same light, again, brighter and beckoning.
“I’m not ready,” cried Jasmine. “How did Autumn do this? In her memories it was easy, but I’m not ready.”
She took one step closer. It was pulling her in. Or was she pulling herself in? Or was someone pushing her?
Not even the questions made sense any more.
She looked back. The rest of the corridor was disappearing.
There was no other choice. In the end, everyone ran out of places to run, unless they agreed to carry on going forwards.
“Keeping moving on,” she agreed. “That’s what makes the world go ‘round.”
Jasmine Sparks stepped over the threshold of this life, and entered the next.
…which took me here.
That’s it, now. The stories of my adventures with the Doctor are finished. I’m not sure what to call them. Admittedly I’d love to carry on telling stories about the Doctor after I’ve gone, but I don’t know what happened to him (or her). I think that would constitute fan-fiction.
I feel like these stories went well. In many ways, the toughest part for me was writing about myself. It’s hard to get yourself right, I think. You end up leaning towards something that’s almost excessively critical, or you forget your faults altogether, because you can sympathise with yourself and with your own actions more than you can anyone else’s.
There were things I didn’t talk about, stories I didn’t tell. I didn’t need to and I didn’t want to. No one will ever know the full story of Jasmine Sparks, and that’s okay.
Writing these stories has kept me alive. Writing about these ordinary people who fell out of their world and into another. Down the rabbit hole and through the looking-glass, that’s the story of my life.
Day 699
I’m starting to question what I knew about the Doctor. Maybe I went too easy on him. Here’s a list of some of the things he’s done:
- Consented to the Planet Makers’ acts of genocide
- Inadvertently caused the death of Robin’s best friend
- Created androids for companions and ditched them in a village inside the TARDIS
- Created an entire civilisation for… reasons…
- Inadvertently created organised religion in another universe
- Intimidated a mentally-ill man
- Made racist assumptions about the Zygons
- Wore a dead man’s face
I try not to hate him for all of it, for any of it; I try not to judge him. But then I think of how he’ll be off living his life without me. How we won’t have gotten trapped here. One day he’ll have forgotten me, and he’ll be making the same mistakes again.
You shouldn’t have given up on me.
Day 723
Oh, Nan.
Now there’s someone I’m sad about. My Nan was a woman called Sheila Evans. She was very old. No one knew how old; she just kept on going. One of her friends once sat me down in her living room, gave me a little smile and a cup of tea, and told me I was special. I felt uncomfortable. She relaxed me. She said I was special because I’d given Nan a reason to live again. And that I’d given her the one thing she’d always wanted: a child of her own.
Nan always seemed to be especially conscious of the fact that I was adopted. She was my aunt’s godmother, a pretty distant relation, and she’d taken me in when my dad couldn’t and my mum was dying. She’d kept me, and she’d raised me so, so well.
She was a lovely woman – the loveliest, in fact. The kind who always listened, who always tried, even at the things she wasn’t very good at (and there were a few of those, bless her). She clung onto the wheel of change, determined that she’d move into the modern world with the rest of us, and for the most part she did.
I really, really hope Nan gets to find out that I lived. I couldn’t bear the thought of her grieving for me; I think that’s almost worse than my thoughts of dying. She’ll be gone by now. She’ll have been dead for millennia. Even if time is relative, she might be gone. It’ll have been over two years since I last saw her. Maybe that was all she had left.
Day 795
This is a message for whomever finds my body.
I hope I lived a long life. It’s very short at this point. But I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that I’m going to die here, so I figured one of these entries should act as the last. You can pick this one out and stick it at the end, if you like.
What do I want to say to the world? It’s hard to think of a last statement. I want to say that I wish things could change, in every time and place. I’ve heard it said that all it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. So, I wish good men and women would get up and start taking action.
I wish things could have gone differently for the universe, but they haven’t. Oh well.
I’m scared. I’m still scared of dying, that primal fear that’s still left over from my last incarnation. But I’m also happy. Happy that I got to live, happy that I got to see all this, that I got to die looking out to the stars rather than being suffocated by the chaos back home.
Find Nan. Go to Croydon in the year 2016. Find Sheila Evans. Tell her I lived.
Day 800
I get notified every time a hundred days pass.
I’ve got very little left to say anymore, and very little energy left to say it with. I guess it’s stupid of me, checking in on this system so often. I think I should start coming back every thousand days. My little reward for still being alive.
Day 1000
I’ve been on this planet a thousand days, a few seasonal cycles, and what’s fast approaching a whole era of my life, and something incredible has happened.
Autumn’s memories are becoming my own.
I had most of them back around Day 900, like snippets from a film. But now when I look back, they’re not just things that have happened to her. They’re things that have happened to me.
I suddenly have a life that goes back further than the turn of the twenty-first century. One that goes forward, into the future, to the world that continued after I left. I was born twice, I lived twice, I died once. Or did I die at all?
Day 2000
I’ve spent the last few hundred days exploring. I packed a bag, took what I needed, bottled up food and packed water, and ventured further than I ever had before, coming back as I needed, for shelter. And I found him.
Far, far away, at least twenty miles, was a person. I mean, he was a person. Now he’s just a skeleton, a few bones sticking out of the sand. I found the skull, identified it as male (thanks to the computer’s archaeology course), and realised: there were other people on this planet before me. People like me.
I wonder how many more of us there are, buried away in the desert. I wonder how many more of us it will take before someone realises we’re dead.
I guess I was wrong about Ed and Zoe.
Day 3000
Hello again. Guess who’s now well into adulthood, and about time too.
I’ve been honing my survival skills, scouring through, studying, those less desirable computer courses: fighting, hunting, building, cooking, first aid. I might have this base to protect me, but there’s still a chance I’m getting off this planet, and if my stay here has taught me anything it’s that the universe isn’t fair.
I think I’m going to be fighting, whether on this earth or another. And I’m going to be ready for whatever is thrown at me.
Day 4000
I’ve been here roughly ten years, Earth time, as best I can calculate it. I’m in my late twenties.
What do people in their early twenties do? It’s been so long since I was around other people that I can hardly remember. People went to university. People partied. People got into relationships, got their hearts broken, got pregnancy tests, and often in a different order. People lived, and lived among other people. I didn’t.
I’ve been here, but I haven’t lived. Ten years of my life and I didn’t get to live a single one of them. The hourglass is still moving – it’s nearly a quarter empty. I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s connected to the Planet at all, or whether it’s instead connected only to me: my life, my birth, my death. The years I lost.
That probe scanned this planet and for whatever reason, no one came for me. Whoever came up with that reason, that line of legislation that said I had to be left here… I’m pretty bitter towards them.
Day 5000
I’m starting to lose my memories now. In a way you’d expect that, honestly. You don’t hang on to these things forever. But today was the worst.
I’ve forgotten Tommy’s face. The one thing I swore I would never forget. And I just sat there and cried, cried for that thing I’d never get back, cried like a baby, like Autumn had, that one lonely night, up in her spaceship.
I know his face was beautiful. I know I touched it, my skin against his, and I knew it was a place where I belonged. And I know I swore to myself that I’d never forget it; never forget the feel of his lips, the softness of his cheek, and the look on his face. Well, I shouldn’t have made that promise, but at least I can still remember how it felt.
Day 6000
I was out exploring today, and I found the strangest message.
Far away, when you’ve passed a bit of sand and you’re heading towards more sand, there’s a point that’s different to the rest. A message which somehow survived. Maybe someone wrote it as a sick joke. Maybe I wrote it. But I don’t remember it at all.
Jasmine was here.
If I did write it, then I’m grateful to myself. It was worth knowing. That Jasmine was here, once. The kind of girl who’d walk out into the desert and write a message in the sand, telling only the stars in the sky that she had lived. She must have been a brave girl. She would be disappointed in what I’ve become: a fighter, not a human.
Day 7000
I know.
I. Know.
I’ve been an idiot, but I’ve worked it out now. The base where everything is provided. The log, where you can write about the things you’re feeling.
This is all part of some sick experiment. You’ve put me on this planet and every time I write one of these logs, it’s sent off to you. I don’t know what the experiment is. How long does it take someone to crack when they’re on their own? Well, I have an answer for you. 7000 days.
That’s why you didn’t come and find me. That’s why there’s an hourglass – it’s not mine, it’s yours. The length of your experiment.
Back on Earth, we used to have this thing called “consent.” If you didn’t provide it, you didn’t take part in these things. I never told you that you could do this to me, ever.
I trusted you, reader, whoever you are. For some reason, I thought you cared, that these logs mattered. Well, I guess they do, and I guess you do care, but not for any reasons I want to think about. I’m just a thing for you to measure.
I’ve learnt survival skills. I’ve learnt how to fight, and I’ve learnt how to hunt. I’m going to use those skills on you when finally we meet. I’m going to find you, hunt you down, until you’re in a place that you can’t escape. And then, I’m going to kill you.
This is the last log I’m going to write. You’ll never know how your precious experiment ended.
You bastard. You absolute bastard.
Day 18.000
Well, here I am.
I don’t think walking away from this log achieved anything, because I’m still here. After 18,000 bloody days on this planet. I’m not even going to tell you how old I am, because it scares me.
Autumn’s memories all came back in the early thousands. Everything Autumn had ever chosen to remember, I remember. They took their place alongside Jasmine’s memories, and now I have both. Both lives. Both persons.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I think I’m both. I was wrong, all those years. Autumn wasn’t dead, she was just waiting. This time alone has made me contemplate that. When we get rid of our biology, our genetics, and we get rid of our environmental influences, who are we? I am a completely different person to Autumn, but we’re the same. What is it? What is that something that we share, that goes beyond everything else? What’s beyond the body and even the mind?
I don’t know. I can’t call myself Autumn Rivers, but I can’t call myself Jasmine Sparks either. I crossed out the name I’d written on all my books. I kept Jasmine, because that’s who I’ve lived this life as, but I thought about my family, about where I came from, and considered it appropriate that Autumn got a credit.
According to the stories I wrote, my name is Jasmine Rivers. That’s quite a nice name, I think. I chose well.
But that’s not all. There’s another reason I’m reporting back. I’m afraid I’m not very well.
The years have taken their toll. It started as a headache. One long, agonising migraine I just couldn’t shift, filling the entirety of my head. Then it hit my balance – I struggle to walk without supporting myself these days. I’m tired all the time. I forget things. Sometimes I wake up in the night, and I forget where I am, even though I’ve spent virtually my whole life in this one place.
I think I’m finally dying. It all went rather quickly, in the end.
Day 19,000
I’ve lasted another thousand days. That’s a lot more than I was expecting. I’m almost grateful.
I’m not angry anymore, because I’ve come to realise how little I really understand. In truth, I don’t know who you are, reader. I don’t know why you’re reading this. I don’t even know if you have a choice in this experiment. Maybe none of us do, not even the observers.
I don’t have the energy to be angry, and if all these years on my own have taught me anything, it’s that there’s nothing I can do with anger. I miss my family so much, and I miss my friends even more. But I’ve come to accept, slowly, that they’ll have gone on. The world will have gone on without me. It has a knack for surviving, a bit like I do, really.
Remember that post I wrote all those years ago, to whomever finds my body? I haven’t let myself forget it – there’s a little note above my computer that I see every morning, reminding me. I don’t have long now, and I want those words to be heard.
I hate the fact I’m dying. It scares me as much as it always did. It scared me when I was dying as Autumn, and it scared me when I was dying as Jasmine. Third time lucky, and I’m still terrified. But the world isn’t fair, and that’s okay. I’m not cross anymore. I can’t be. It’s my time, and I’m as close to peace as this world will allow.
My condition is getting worse. I’m so confused all the time. I hope I don’t end up in pain.
Day 19,036
I can’t remember how long I’ve been here. There are numbers on the screen but now I don’t understand them. I got up to write this and now I’m confused. I know I write this, I think it’s what I do, but I don’t know why.
Day 19,099
There’s a name I keep hearing in my head, like it’s important. I know it’s important, I’m sure it is, and I get sad every time I hear it, but I don’t know whose name it is.
I wish I could remember. This is driving me mad.
Who is Tommy?
Day 19,202
I can’t remember anymore thing ever. I do’t. Who am I.m Where, when. What is this? Don’t understand.
Its cold ever where. so scared. help me please
Day 19,220
Before the end, one last memory came back. I remembered who I was. Jasmine Sparks, Autumn Rivers… me. I remembered something that was beyond words, and it gave me the strength to do what I had to.
I remembered the hourglass, and I had to know, before I died, whether I was right. Was it really timed to my life?
I pushed on the wall, still instinctively knowing, even in my confusion, which it was. The floor lights were still shining, and I could see it. A mound of sand, built up in the lower section. And in the top…
The last few grains of sand, emptying.
I stepped down, into the lowered section where that enormous hourglass had sat for all these years, counting my seconds as grains of sands. I placed my hand on the glass. The final grain of sand fell.
It was over.
The lights on the floor grew brighter and brighter, until I was forcing my eyes closed, almost screaming with the pain of it. The room tremored, and I felt the glass growing hot to the touch, but I knew, for some reason, that I couldn’t take my hands off it.
Then it stopped. I let go.
I stepped back and opened my eyes.
The painful lights had stopped, and were back to how they were when I had entered the room. Everything was the same – except for the hourglass.
The sand was back in the upper section.
Still wondering where I was and what I was doing here, I stumbled out, back into the main area. I walked over to the computer. Again, I knew, from all the years I’d done it, that I would sit down and write. So I did. And it said something I couldn’t quite believe, something which struck terror into my heart, as well as another emotion, far more powerful and far more terrible.
Hope.
I read it again, just to be sure. I was right. Day 0.
Either I had escaped my own fate, and somehow made it through to the reset, to the arrival of the experiment’s next subject. Or something else had happened – something which hadn’t happened to me for decades.
I’d travelled in time.
I pushed open the door to the base, and stepped back out into the desert. The hot air hit my face, as it always did, like I was walking into an oven.
I stepped over the sand, trying to find my balance. It was harder to walk in the stuff, at my age. I nearly fell, but was able to stop myself. If I hadn’t, I think that would have been it. I pushed on, hearing myself wheeze.
If I died now, at least it would be at one with nature, with the stars over my head.
Half a kilometre, that must have been how far I walked. And then I saw her. She was lying in the sand, a bullet wound in her stomach, eyes shut. She didn’t even look like she was breathing. But I recognised her. I felt so many things towards her – envy, pity, guilt, fear.
Using the last of my strength, a strength I’m not even sure how I found, I lifted Jasmine Sparks, and carried her into the base.
All those years of medical courses online finally came back to me. I found the supplies beneath the bed, and began to work on her bullet wound. Looking back, with a better concept of time, I know it took me about five hours. When I was satisfied I’d done all I had to, I took one last look at her, and stepped back outside.
I knew the story from the first time. I had to leave.
There I was, walking away, that old and powerful symbol in my head: the snake, eating its own tail. That’s me – almost. The snake who stitches up its own tail, I think. This will go on forever, I understand.
I must have walked a long way, because when I turned back, I could no longer see the base. I forgot which way I’d come from. While I was getting my bearings, I fell, my face smacking into the sandy covering, not as comfortable as it looked. I think a few bones broke as I came down. It’s what you’d expect.
I stared up at the stars. Soon, it would be morning, and Jasmine Sparks would be waking up. I wish I could save her.
My eyes began to close, and I remembered one more thing.
When I arrived, I’d heard the sound of the TARDIS. I’d forgotten that sound. No. I wasn’t remembering…
I was hearing it again.
It got louder. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t.
The world began to change. I think I was laughing. The sky disappeared, and then I was somewhere else. That was the last thing I knew.
I can’t say I’ve been entirely truthful about everything, reader. Until now, I have been, but I figured you should be allowed the full story, so I decided to add this on the end. I didn’t write this log in the base – I’m actually writing it from Gallifrey. With a bit of luck, they’ll do as I request, and the send this off to be added to the rest.
You’re probably feeling sorry for me. Don’t. I lived a long and painful life on that planet, but it’s not over. Now I know why no one came for me. Why I was left to suffer for all those years, and why, on that last day, I was allowed to go back.
It all makes sense now. I have a job to do. Something I never thought I’d do, but which I put on my bucket list anyway, just in case. I’m scared. I think this is right. I hope this is right. Because it will change everything.
I take another look at the list. One last time. Just to be sure that I’m going to do it.
Yes. Yes, I am.
Change the world.