Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘Stop!’ he shouted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise it could die.’

  ‘And that’s a bad thing because?’

  ‘It’s a new thing in the universe. It’s special and strange and it’s growing. It’s trying to be something different from what it is.’

  Arwen Jones peered at him, then nodded. She raised her hand, and the flow of water slacked, then stopped.

  He glared at the thing on the ground, then pointed back at the car.

  ‘Don’t do that again,’ he said. ‘And don’t make me come and stop you. Because I will.’

  It glowered up at him, skittered backwards on long-fingered hands and elbows, dragging one leg. Then it got up, and ran, awkwardly, back the way it had come.

  ‘Oi!’ Chief Jones shouted. ‘It’s getting away!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Shouldn’t we stop it?’

  ‘We’d probably have to kill it.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes! And look what it did!’

  ‘And if you kill it now, all broken and running away, how would that be different?’

  She shrugged. ‘Justice, maybe.’

  ‘But you don’t think so.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I do. But Christina…’

  ‘Oh, well. Revenge is something else. You want to do revenge, be my guest. But I won’t. It’s a bad place to live, revenge.’

  He went to look again at Christina’s body and say he was sorry, even though she wouldn’t hear him because it was far too late for that. She opened her eyes. Which was completely impossible. Impossible impossible impossible, unless –

  ‘Oh, you beauty,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be familiar,’ she told him sharply. ‘We don’t know one another that well.’

  He squinted at her, and realised she had no idea. ‘You’re brilliant.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  *

  He was, she thought, slightly less annoying when he was being serious. Only slightly. But there was a germ of sensibleness in him which he hid and ignored. He could really accomplish things if he’d just let it out.

  ‘Christina, listen to me,’ he said now, very seriously. ‘There is a piece of very sharp wreckage directly beneath your chin. If you look down, it will kill you. So don’t. Just move towards me very slowly. Your clothes are stuck on some sharp edges so they may drag a bit, you’ll just have to borrow a coat once you’re out. Hang on –’ he reached down, tore a fragment from her coat – ‘gear stick, sorry.’ He put the cloth absently into his pocket.

  She glowered at him. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘If my clothes are going to have holes in, you’ll need to look the other way.’

  He held up his hands defensively and turned his head. She moved. He was right, she was well and truly stuck. She could feel the fabric tearing. These were nice clothes, damn it. He was the most expensive man she’d ever met, positively everything she owned got destroyed around him. Mentally adding another diamond to her bill, she pushed. Something grated against her rib cage. No doubt that would hurt later. The skin felt numb, and she suspected that meant some pretty serious bruising, or maybe shock. She fell out of the wrecked car onto the street, and he helped her up. She looked down at herself hastily. Yes, her clothes were torn, but no, they were not indecent. Good. He tried to walk her away, then, but she looked back into the car.

  And stopped.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, eventually. She thought about it. And then she slapped him.

  ‘What?’ he said, and when she hit him again he ducked away. ‘What? What? How is this my fault? You’re alive, that’s got to be a good thing!’

  She slapped him again.

  ‘What?’

  But he must know what. The world was upside down. She wasn’t Christina de Souza. A huge piece of the wrecked engine had passed entirely through the driver’s seat, along with the axel. There was nowhere she could have been sitting, no position she could have been in, which would have preserved her. She should be dead. She looked down at her stomach. Her clothes were whole again.

  ‘I blame you entirely,’ she said crossly. ‘Everything was ordinary until you came. And now this!’

  She wasn’t Christina de Souza. She wasn’t even human. And that meant, probably, that everything she had ever known was a lie, and that everyone she knew was also an alien who didn’t know they were an alien, and she would either have to tell them, which would be extremely awkward and probably mean they thought she was mad, or not tell them and keep secret from them something they had every right to know.

  She tried to hit him again, but this time he ducked.

  A short while later, they were standing in a room which was either a hotel room or a distant part of the TARDIS and he seemed unable to say for certain which. Surely he should know? But apparently the TARDIS was big and he didn’t always keep track, and obviously the whole of Jonestown was inside the TARDIS anyway. When she asked, he said something about how the temporal crystal was expanding and the phase differential between coterminous realities was diminishing in line with the stasis paradigm, and then refused to explain. She still thought he should be able to tell where they were, and she thought he thought so too. She worried that while they were away – if they were – Jonestown would change again, and the monster would change too.

  She was worried that the Doctor was losing control of his machine.

  More immediately, he was wiggling the sonic thing at her. Again. Again and again and for the thousandth time. And now he was peering at it and peering at her and making thoughtful noises and she was really wishing she had some sort of appalling destructive power, so that she could zap him into behaving like a human being.

  ‘I thought you might be a multiform,’ he said, ‘one of the nice ones. A Prestolian Shift-sailor, or an Adumbrated Boon. But you aren’t.’

  She scowled. ‘As soon as I figure out how to turn them on, I am going to zap you with my laser eye beams.’

  ‘Hm. Maybe don’t say things like that, just in case your weapons systems are voice activated.’

  She hadn’t considered that. ‘I won’t, really,’ she said hastily. No gun-sight appeared in her vision, so if she was a walking munition she was either broken or that wasn’t how she worked. She told him so.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Laser eye beams? Did they talk a lot about laser eye beams in your day?’

  ‘In comic books.’ Not really her scene.

  ‘And you knew what a mobile phone was. Come to think of it, when did you learn to do a handbrake turn?’

  ‘I can’t drive,’ she said automatically.

  ‘But you can. And you know everything about Jonestown, even though you haven’t been here for decades. You’re a psychic not-really-a-human-person person. A Pnarap.’ He raised his eyebrows for her approval. She shook her head. ‘Well, suit yourself. Anyway… Where are the police? Eh? Shouldn’t we be surrounded by Jonestown’s finest demanding to know what’s going on? But we’re not, are we? Because you know what’s going on, and they know because you know. They may not know that they know because you know, but they do. It’s not like they’re listening in now –’ he waved the sonic screwdriver vaguely – ‘because I’d know about that. But your memory and theirs is all… overlappy. Overlappy-mnemonic-psychic-not-really-a-human-person person. Ompnarap. That’s a proper alien name, that is. What, still no? All right. Anyway—’

  She waved him into silence. To her amazement, he actually shut up.

  ‘What do we do?’ It came out rather more desperate than she had intended.

  ‘Well, normally at this point I like to go and talk to whoever’s trying to destroy the universe and ask them not to.’

  She wanted to say that was absurd, that he should just go straight to whatever terrible thing he did instead when the answer was given, because she was afraid. She could see it was terrible. He hated it. He obliterates things, she realised. He shatters them. They think they’ve won because he’s
a bit vague and he waffles, but that only goes so far. It’s his shell, like a tortoise, if a tortoise was soft on the outside and dangerous on the inside. That’s how the Time War ended: he got to the bottom of his patience, and he took two entire civilisations out of the universe and locked them away, and one of them was his own. That’s how sharp his sense of obligation is.

  And he lives like that. He does it all the time.

  She really hoped Jonestown wasn’t that sort of threat. That she wasn’t. ‘So why don’t we do that? Let’s go and ask nicely.’

  ‘Because I don’t know where to go.’

  ‘I thought this Mr Heidt…’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Oh, me too. But what I don’t know is: do I go after him – it – in here, or back to the TARDIS and try to get into the mine outside?’

  She shrugged. ‘If you can’t tell where we are now, does it matter any more?’

  ‘Yes, because one’s in here and one’s out there. That one is where the mine started out, but its operating intelligence could be in here. It could be Heidt. Or all this could just be a reflection and I’d be talking to the air. The whole point of Jonestown could be so that I waste time in here when I should be out there.’

  ‘But you said that this thing is twisting space and time and trying to tear everything apart, even though that’s not how it’s supposed to work.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the TARDIS is a time machine, it tunnels…’ She screwed up her face in thought. ‘The bubbles are bigger than the cheese. It makes one bubble after another around itself.’ She stopped again.

  ‘I never told you that.’

  She brushed this aside. ‘But is it true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had the distinct impression that he was getting flustered. ‘And the temporal mine is the same thing. A TARDIS without a heart. All rage and no poetry.’

  He was definitely staring at her now. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So with the TARDIS fighting the mine… what makes you think there’s any difference any more between what’s in here and what’s out there?’

  She had the immensely satisfying experience of seeing his mouth drop open as if she’d smacked him with a kipper.

  *

  Heidt House stood on a pinnacle of stone jutting straight up from the middle of a vast chasm. It was absurd, a half-mile across, and the bottom was a very, very long way below.

  Not-Christina was looking out of the window and seemed to be thinking very hard. The Doctor frowned. She was getting cleverer all the time, as if she’d been asleep when he first met her but was now waking up, and while that was quite interesting and just a little bit attractive it was also rather worrying because his past experiences with rapidly accelerated cognition and intelligence expansion in near-human entities had been a bit negative. They tended to do things like go mad and try to destroy causality. Or they wanted to consume all the information in your brain, or they became telepathic and accidentally dominated entire star systems, or occasionally their conceptual mass just ran too hot and they flat out exploded, which was not only dangerous and sad but also disgusting.

  A single narrow bridge, just wide enough for a car, spanned the distance from the meadows and fields of Jonestown’s farms to this other place delineated by the house. Mr Heidt was standing on the front steps.

  He was definitely not the monster, or at least, not at the moment. He was short, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, and he had a vast, bristling beard.

  ‘Ms de Souza,’ he said, very politely, and his voice was a deep, elegant bass, ‘a pleasure.’ He turned. ‘And you, Doctor. Thank you for coming.’

  Somewhere beneath their feet, the world shrugged, just a little.

  Pah pah POM.

  He felt a twinge near one of his hearts, and knew the TARDIS was in real pain now. He looked at Heidt.

  ‘I tell you what,’ he said abruptly, ‘let’s toss a coin.’

  Heidt peered up at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Let’s toss a coin. Not that I don’t appreciate the drama. Impossible village, impossible house, giant monster inside the TARDIS. It’s masterful. And I have a high standard of evil plots. When I use the word “masterful”, it means something. But if you want to be really different, let’s skip the banter and games of chess and ridiculous methods of execution and get right to it. You toss a coin, I’ll call. If I get it wrong, you win. I die, you leave everyone else alive, because – well, they’re not exactly Time Lords or Daleks, are they? They’re humans. Or nearly humans. They’re small potatoes and you know it. Everyone lives except me. Buuuuut If I get it right, you leave. Everyone lives, even you. No exterminations. No xenocide. Just peace. How about that?’

  Not-Christina stared at him.

  Heidt nodded slowly. ‘It’s a very good deal, Doctor. Unfortunately, I can’t take it.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘I really can’t. Because I didn’t ask you here to play cat and mouse. I need your help. If you don’t help me, I’ll die, the temporal mine will fulfil its function, and you and the TARDIS and quite a lot of time and space will cease to exist.’

  ‘But you are the mine!’

  Heidt shook his head. ‘Not any more,’ he said.

  *

  Once upon a time, there was a terrifying weapon of high technology and fury. It was one of thousands. It was alive, after a fashion, given intelligence to make it more dangerous. It was adaptive, cunning, and hungry. It thought of itself as Son 11-21.

  Son 11-21 was seeded in a remote part of time and space, the littoral plain of a rift, and there it waited and waited for its moment. Opportunities came and went, but they were wasteful, incomplete. It was programmed to optimize its impact, and these small chances were not enough. It was there to strike a decisive blow, to turn the tide of a battle, to immobilise a vital convoy, to capture a crucial messenger.

  That was fine. Waiting was something it did well, part of its core identity. It settled into a tiny trapdoor universe spun off from the real one, and it waited.

  And then suddenly it had waited too long.

  The Time War ended, and was won, was lost. The little trapdoor universe was sucked along with everything else into the lock.

  But the enemy was not contained. There were loopholes: fabulously arcane and difficult to create, dangerous to the greater fabric of existence in ways which were painful to think about, but they were possible – just. They could be forced, if one were mad enough, dedicated enough. In consequence, these eruptions when they did happen were always the action of the worst or the best, always the consequence of schemes whose scope and ambition were dauntingly vast. Arks; helix tunnels; alternate realities and paradox engines: the lock was incomplete.

  That was intolerable. Son 11-21 watched single entities whisper away into the originating universe. And realised it could follow.

  Its position was unique. Creating its trapdoor universe where it had done, it had woven rift energies into the web, and those energies had made the trapdoor less absolute than it might be, less stable. In the originating universe, that had been a flaw which might leave Son 11-21 vulnerable to assault from within its own trap, so it had fortified itself. But now, here, that same flaw could become a doorway. The trapdoor universe might open not out into the timelocked region, but back into normal space.

  Son 11-21 reached, tore, and fell.

  The passage was appalling. It was not how reentry should be. It was violent and corrosive. Son 11-21 was compromised, scrambled, damaged. Its ability to create such passages was burned away. It huddled in space, trying to repair itself, and mostly failing. Processors were vaporised, great parts of its mind simply turned to gas and ash. Its consciousness fragmented, had to be loaded into discrete systems to maintain some form of rational thought. It tried to repair itself, but much information was gone and simply could not be retrieved. Amongst which: Son 11-21 no longer knew which side of the war it had been on.

  And then the TARDIS came.<
br />
  The damaged mind within Son 11-21 found that it was in a dispute with other aspects of itself. It argued for patience, for repair, but the self in the weapons system was now hardwired for destruction and was prepared to accept allied casualties in the hope of punishing an escaped enemy. The war had been like that, towards the end.

  It couldn’t destroy the TARDIS outright, couldn’t take it out of the universe and hold it. But it could do other things which would work as well, in the end. It struck, pushing at the TARDIS’s own temporal dislocations, unbalancing them, sucking and undermining and buffeting, forcing time to flow differently in and around the vessel, stressing the fabric of it, draining its energy. It was a new method of attack, untested and uncertain, but it was what was available and it was working, if slowly.

  In desperation, the mind of Son 11-21 opened a doorway onto the TARDIS and stepped through, only to drag the feral entity from the weapons system along with it. Son 11-21 struggled with his twin as they rampaged through Jonestown, shattering and smashing, but it was only when the electrophysical presence they inhabited was briefly disrupted with jets of water that he was able to seize control of their shared body and force the feral self temporarily away.

  *

  Heidt spread his hands. ‘And here we are.’

  ‘Son 11-21?’

  Heidt nodded. ‘Yes. Or maybe that honour belongs to the monster, and I’m the aberration.’ He paused. ‘Do you happen to know, Doctor, which side I was on?’

  ‘No. And there’s a fifty per cent chance I wouldn’t tell you if I did. All right, what do you want? Can you stop this?’

  ‘Yes. If you repair the mine, I can take control and stop the attack.’

  ‘Give you the keys to the kingdom. The launch codes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Christina raised one hand as if she was at school. ‘Or, alternatively, that might all be so much rubbish and you just need a hand to reset your zap gun and when we do it we die and you win.’

  ‘That is possible.’

  ‘You couldn’t just tell us how to beat your monster? Or escape?’