Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses

by Nick Harkaway

  *

  The woman who certainly wasn’t Christina de Souza was taking all this rather quietly, he thought. He had given her the basic class in time travel, the TARDIS, and himself, and she had just nodded as if each new idea just explained something she’d always wondered about. When something came along which would really worry someone else, she just dropped it into some sort of silence in her mind and it went down and away and that was that.

  It was a useful trait, he supposed, but it made her a bit less satisfying to be around. He rather liked having people shriek and goggle when they saw the TARDIS. Granted, she hadn’t seen the outside and then the inside, which was the real shocker for most of his passengers, but the console room itself was still worth a goggle. More than one. The last TARDIS, bounded but infinite, travelling through time and space with the last of the Time Lords. It’s got to be worth a second look, surely.

  So if she wasn’t Christina de Souza, who was she? The scans from the sonic had been a bit vague. Yes, she was human, in that she was human-shaped and made up of tiny bits of biological material working in close cooperation to produce a functioning organism, and she wasn’t a clone or a memory, but she was also not Earth-human, she didn’t have all the muck from red meat and burned fossil fuels and really dodgy nuclear technology. So why did she look like Christina, who had never actually been inside the TARDIS? And why did she think she was Christina? That wasn’t biological. And then again, she seemed to be a lot younger than she appeared. A lot a lot, if you believed the sonic – which he did, because sonics don’t lie – but only sort of, because time was a bit compressed and messy in the TARDIS at the moment, and one man’s week was another man’s millennium.

  She was talking. Oh, and he was answering. Multitasking. Very fashionable, but he probably ought to pay attention to his mouth in case it said anything it shouldn’t.

  ‘So you’re a time traveller.’ She was still getting her head around that.

  ‘Time Lord. Lord of Time. Yes.’

  ‘How can you be a Lord of Time?’

  ‘Well. How can you be a Lord of anything?’

  ‘You conquer it and stand on top of it waving a stick,’ she said tartly.

  ‘Right. Yes. That’s… clearly we didn’t do that. At all. That’s primitive mammalian behaviour, and we were the most advanced race in the universe.’

  ‘So who did you go to war with? Who could possibly stand up to you?’

  ‘Oh, the Daleks. They were technologically advanced but really… nasty.’

  ‘And the Time Lords were nice?’

  He thought about that. ‘On balance, no.’

  ‘But the Daleks made this thing, this temporal mine. Because it tried to destroy you.’

  ‘Um.’ She was giving him that look again, the one which said he wasn’t fooling her, the one she had dished out when he tried the psychic notepaper and she just saw… paper. He sighed. ‘I don’t know. They might have. Or not. By the end of the war… well, we’d stolen so much of their technology and they’d stolen so much of ours, there wasn’t much to choose between us, science wise. And half of these things got captured and subverted and put back out there, then recaptured and deprogrammed and put somewhere else, even the mine probably doesn’t know what side it’s on any more. And it shouldn’t be here at all. Look,’ he pointed at the display above the zoomifier, realising belatedly that she couldn’t read it. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘this is the temporal substrate. Think of it as being like an Emmental cheese. Lots of holes. And we took a single hole and we put it somewhere else and locked it there for ever.’

  ‘Another cheese?’

  That was a ridiculous way of looking at it. He rather approved. ‘Yes. A very small, perfectly isolated cheese which can never be eaten, and which will exist in its own perfect moment after this universe and the next one and the one after that have boiled away into dust.’

  She nodded.

  He went on. ‘This thing has somehow escaped from that cheese and ended up back in ours, and now it’s broken, and it’s trying to do what it’s programmed to do. Sort of.’

  ‘Can you stop it?’

  ‘Definitely. Probably definitely. I’m the Doctor.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Thhhhhat sometimes takes a bit longer. Comes to me in flashes.’

  ‘And what about Jonestown?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about Jonestown? What is it? Where did it come from? The mine’s broken. Well, old. Old and bit weird. It’s supposed to suck the TARDIS into a decohering singularity and shut the door for ever.’

  ‘Make another cheese and keep you there.’

  ‘No. Cheese. No, it’s… Yes, all right. A really nasty, terrifying cheese which is slowly consuming itself and everything around it until even the rind just boils away you’re left with nothing, not even the space where a cheese used to be. But that’s not what it’s doing. It’s trying to tear the TARDIS apart and implode her. You can’t do that with a TARDIS. There are safety features. Because if you did, you’d take about four per cent of the observable universe with you. So it’s like trying to open a jam jar with blancmange… except if you could get the interior space of a jam jar to start filling up with blancmange… sooner or later that would make a big bang.’ An actual Big Bang, but there was no point going into that. ‘So the question is, is Jonestown part of the attack? Which is why who you are is really important. Because if Jonestown is part of the mine, then so are you.’

  He peered at her, and wondered whether she’d suddenly turn into something strange and terrifying.

  She didn’t.

  Still didn’t.

  Didn’t.

  Didn’t.

  Apparently wasn’t going to.

  Well, that was a relief.

  And definitely not a disappointment, at all.

  *

  Of course she was the real Christina de Souza. She knew her own life perfectly. She had been born in this town, grown up, gone elsewhere and fallen unwisely and gloriously in love, lost her husband, and come home to be small and calm and to live through her days of sorrow.

  Except that she couldn’t really remember any of it. She knew it, but she knew it like something she had read, and she was increasingly uncertain if it had ever happened, or happened to her. It didn’t feel real the way the Doctor did, the way today did. It felt… flat.

  But if she was some part of an artificial intelligence, or a terrible time weapon, or something from his world… shouldn’t she understand what was going on? What if she’d just popped into existence somehow, and any moment she was just going to pop out, never knowing? Would he save her from that, at least? Would he fetch her back again? Could he?

  She glanced over at him. He was pacing and muttering. He seemed to need to talk, not just to himself but to someone else, so every so often she asked a question. It evidently wasn’t important what she said so long as it was open-ended. If she said something blatantly irrelevant, he went off on a tangent. At the moment, because she’d wondered aloud if she’d ever see her goose-down duvet again, he was talking about the sectional structure of feathers and its relationship to something called Jaffey Curvation. She looked at the dial nearest to her, then the screen over to one side.

  ‘Is this a map of the town?’ she asked, looking at it.

  ‘Mm? Yes.’

  ‘Then it’s growing.’

  He scampered over. ‘Growing?’ Took his glasses off, put them on again. ‘Yes! It is. Growing. How is it growing? That would mean that time in Jonestown… Of course! The TARDIS is functioning like a supersaturated liquid and the sheer is causing the formation of temporal crystals! Jonestown is a precipitate! That means time flows differently in there from out here. Very differently. Evolutionarily and unpredictably differently. In which case, that would probably mean…’ He glanced at her, stopped. ‘Never mind, no. Speculation, always dangerous, I never indulge. Right! Come on!’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Back to Jonestown to save the day. Chop cho
p.’ He paused. ‘It may be a bit different.’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘Well… Newer. Modern. Future-y. Time’s passed. What year is it?’

  She told him.

  He winced, sucked air through his teeth. ‘Not any more. Well, nothing for it. Gadewch i ni wneud hyn, eh?’

  She peered at him. ‘Is that some sort of Time Lord expression?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely. My mother tongue, that is. The pure form of the most perfect language in the universe.’

  ‘What is it, really?’

  He sighed. ‘It’s Welsh, Christina.’

  But now she wasn’t sure that was her name after all.

  He pulled open a door, and behind it she could see the main street, thronging with people. They went through.

  *

  The centre of Jonestown was exactly the same: a small place with small dreams and a hint of quiet sorrow, as if it was built out of the knowledge that all good things must pass. Sash windows and wooden doors opened onto flagged streets, and people still wore the same clothes with the same patches. She recognised faces and smiles, saw them all smile back. No one said ‘Where have you been?’ No one seemed to think it was remarkable that she’d been away. Her house was still burning, and the fire brigade were just turning up now in a shiny new engine. She looked around sharply, ready to run, but the storm was gone. He must have been mistaken, all the same. No time had passed at all.

  Then she raised her eyes, and saw the silver spears of the skyscrapers, the perfect gleaming bridges and the cable cars connecting them all like beetles climbing from branch to branch in a forest made of glass. Or diamond. She wondered if the Doctor would really buy her a new house. She wondered if she wanted him to. She wondered how she would explain a fortune in diamonds to Mr Epley Jones the bank manager.

  She saw a woman she didn’t know – oh, wait, it was Arwen Jones the fire chief, tall and whipcord lean – directing the fire crew, and that wasn’t a hose, it was a great big… thing. It was familiar, somehow. They pointed it at the fire, threw a switch, and the flames dwindled and guttered. Arwen nodded, well done all, good effort, now let’s make the building safe. And in they went, and the charred structure was stone cold. Their uniforms relaxed, turned into ordinary clothes.

  She was in the future.

  But that meant her house had been on fire for years. Decades. It was impossible. She was getting a headache.

  The Doctor looked absolutely delighted. ‘Morning, Fire Chief! I’m the Doctor. Don’t worry, I won’t get in the way. Very nice work, though. Top notch.’ He was shaking Arwen’s hand with that same ridiculous enthusiasm, and Arwen seemed not at all averse.

  ‘If you like,’ Arwen looked over at Christina: is this man yours? He’s a bit in the way. Not that he isn’t picturesque, I will say.

  ‘When did you stop using water, may I ask?’ the Doctor wanted to know.

  ‘These are new,’ Arwen said, and she was warming to him, of course she was, she loved to talk shop. ‘Sonic firefighting. Developed locally, I’ll have you know, and now the higher-ups taking an interest. Rolled out nationally in the spring, and good for Mr Heidt, I say.’

  ‘Sonic?’

  ‘That’s what they tell me. Well, to be honest, it’s point and shoot, isn’t it?’ She indicated the fire engines, and he saw the Heidt symbol, a broken tablet seemingly held together by a tangle of lines twisting amongst one another like a bramble snarl.

  ‘And the uniforms?’

  ‘Psychic response weave. The cloth knows what you need it to be. Reads your mind. They’re his as well.’

  ‘His?’

  ‘Heidt. Brilliant man, but shy. Not everyone’s keen. Well, he’s not local, see?’

  ‘Brilliant, is he? Well, yes, I should say. And I know brilliant. If I think it’s brilliant then it’s really glow-in-the-dark, Einstein on his best day, flying cars and jetpacks brilliant. And this is brilliant. Just by the way: have you still got a hose, just in case?’

  She smiled. ‘Belt and braces, that’s the fire service. Mind you, better for Christina’s house to use the sonic, eh?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I love health and safety, I really do. Do you two know each other, then?’

  ‘Only in passing, Doctor, as they say. But it’s a small town here, even if it is bigger than it was. We keep up.’

  ‘Indeed, you do! The only thing you need to be the perfect fire crew is a time machine!’

  Arwen chuckled. ‘Yes, that would be handy. I’ll talk to the engineers, see what they come up with. Temporal and reactive deflammablisation inductive suppression. Right! Allons y, as they say in Tokyo. Just my little joke; that’s French, that is.’

  She trotted off, and a moment later they were gone.

  ‘Sonic firefighters,’ the Doctor said. He paused. ‘Well, all right, then.’

  ‘What?’ Christina hated herself for saying ‘what?’ She felt she was filling a role, doing what people always did around him, as if his personal gravity was so enormous that you just went into orbit around him until he chose to let you go again.

  His personal gravity.

  That didn’t sound like her at all. It sounded like him. She didn’t have thoughts like that. She should have thought ‘charm’. But she hadn’t, and this was the world. Perhaps she was just adapting very well.

  *

  Sonic firefighters were brilliant. And impressive. Adapting the technology of his screwdriver to achieve a fire suppression field was a teensie bit genius. It would have taken him days. Probably hours, at least. More than twenty minutes, anyway. And how had they got a look at his screwdriver in the first place? Because this was, in the best possible way, a derivative technology. As for psychic jackets – why didn’t he have a psychic jacket? He was exactly the sort of person who’d look great in a psychic jacket. He should have a psychic jacket.

  Well, all right, he did have a psychic jacket, from Spurrier’s of Jermyn Street, and he never wore it because it babbled like a lunatic, and when it wasn’t just endlessly wittering away it was telling people things he didn’t want them to know.

  But psychic firefighter jackets were brilliant, and the firefighters themselves must be more than a little bit psychic to project strongly enough to change the physical make-up of the cloth. Psychic firefighters! Marvellous. And as for time-travelling psychic firefighters… that would be even more brilliant. Not that it would happen. Cracking time travel was hard. Cracking time travel inside an operating time machine? Really very, very, extremely, completely impossible. You can’t travel in something you can’t touch properly in the first place.

  He looked around. Not-Christina was watching him. She was like that. She watched. He wondered if he should call her ‘Not’ for short. Then he wondered if she was psychic, too. Could she hear him calling her ‘Not-Christina’? He frowned and thought hard about things which would really annoy her. She didn’t react. Which didn’t prove anything, really, because she might have heard him wondering if she could hear him and then she might have heard him planning to zap her with annoyances and she…

  Focus.

  Focus, focus, focus.

  He looked around at the new Jonestown, at the familiar people and the old houses, and at the soaring city beyond, and humphed. ‘What we need,’ he said, ‘is a local data repository. Somewhere you can access everything that’s happening anywhere. Where information is in the air.’

  Not-Christina pondered. ‘There’s a library on Glyndwr Street,’ she said. ‘They have terminals there.’

  Terminals. Ten minutes ago she had been from the time before telephones, but now she knew there were terminals in the library. She probably knew how to use the internet, too. Little bit psychic, or he was an Ood. That was a thought: maybe they were all human-like Ood. Although they didn’t seem very Ood-y. They were a bit chatty. Out of the Ood-inary.

  He sighed. No one here would see why that was funny. What a waste.

  Focus.

  He looked across the road, getting his bearings. ‘Town
hall.’ He nodded. ‘Fishmonger.’ He nodded again. ‘Bus stop. Post Office. Newsagent. Aaand… there!’

  She followed his pointing finger. ‘That’s the pub.’

  ‘Yes! Beating heart of the community. Receiving and transmitting station for all the important news of the day! Last time I went there I learned all kinds of interesting things. And, look, they do afternoon tea. I like tea.’

  He did. Tea was great. But gossip was even better.

  The pub was the same as it had been last time he was here, down to the stains on the old wooden boards. He looked around the little, low-ceilinged room, and sat at the table next to a lady with a dog in a handbag, because he’d always found that fascinating.

  *

  She’d realised she was going to have to pay for tea, because he wasn’t carrying any money. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but he wasn’t. He had his psychic notepaper – which hadn’t worked on her and wouldn’t work here either – and he had a pocket full of diamonds which would almost certainly cause a bit of a stir. On the other hand, he had a pocket full of diamonds and he was going to give them to her to buy a new house, so she could afford to be a bit generous about tea.

  When she got back to the table, he was talking to the old woman with the dog, and he had established that his new friend preferred Regency furniture, hated Italian food, and wasn’t fond of the new girl in the butcher who was too cheeky by half. And she was going home soon because the streets weren’t safe after dark.

  ‘I don’t hold with this new fellow, I must say,’ she was saying, ‘this Mr Heidt. Not a proper name, really, is it?’

  ‘Not like Jones.’

  ‘No! Exactly. Not like Jones, at all. If Jones was good enough for my late husband, why not for this outlandish fellow who wants to develop the place? Wants to come and put those tall towers in the middle of the square, I shouldn’t wonder, and here we are after all these years having kept that sort out. There’ll be supermarkets and unpleasantness, no doubt.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want that. Best to keep to the old ways.’

  ‘I don’t say progress isn’t very fine,’ she said sharply. ‘There are gizmos and what all making life better, no question. But in their place. And this person with the Teutonic name is out of his. Well, perhaps he’s a good enough sort, I’m sure I’ve not a notion. But just since he’s been it’s all wrong, is what I say.’