2002 - SJS: Comeback [940]
Six months after the Planet 3 broadcast that had hobbled her career, Sarah Jane continued trying to clear her name. Her associates included a computer hacker named Natalie Redfern and a young do-gooder named Josh Townsend. Sarah’s investigations took her to Cloots Coombe, where the local Squire had been feeding people to the monster that lived in the town well. Josh set fire to the Rechauffer labs, destroying the facility and incinerating the well-mutant.
Josh was actually a member of the White Chapter, and had inveigled himself into Sarah’s life to protect her.
2002 - SJS: The Tao Connection
Sarah, Natallie and Josh looked into the death of an 18-year-old whose prematurely aged body was fished from the Thames. They linked the incident to Holtooth Hall, a retirement home where the lives of aged multi-millionaries were being extended by draughts of chi-enriched blood taken from young people, who consequently aged to death. The pop star Lotus, renowned as an ageless beauty, had withdrawn from public life after she had been expelled from Holtooth and started aging. Sarah and her allies ended the operation, and the billionaire Will Butley, who had survived for three hundred years, died when denied the draughts.
2002 - SJS: Test of Nerve
Hilda Winters’ group anonymously challenged Sarah Jane to stop a sarin-gas attack slated to occur in London in the next twenty-four hours. A former soldier, James Carver, threatened to unleash sarin pellets in the Underground unless the Prime Minister met his demands for compensation to British soldiers given unsafe vaccines as test subjects. Carver eventually backed down and killed himself. Sarah Jane’s old friend - Claudia Coster, an administrator in the Ministry of Intelligence - also died during these events.
2002 - SJS: Ghost Town [941]
Sarah Jane sold Lavinia’s property in Moreton Harwood, and moved into Claudia Coster’s old flat.
Dr Mikhail Berberova, a physics professor, had perfected a means of using low-frequency electromagnetic fields to affect people’s perceptions, causing them to think they were seeing ghosts. Nefarious parties seeking to disrupt an international peace conference in Romania used this technique to terrorize the delegates. Sarah and Josh exposed an expatriate Brit - Christian Ian Abbotly - as being behind the operation. The conference resumed after a hiatus.
2002 - SJS: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre [942]
Sarah Jane travelled to India to investigate illicit genetic research being done by a company named Scala, and came face-to-face with the ex-members of Think Tank, including Hilda Winters. Winters’ group planned to kill millions by contaminating a series of dams and reservoirs - the Parambikulam-Aliyar Project - with an engineered brucella virus. Sarah and her allies thwarted their plan, but Winters escaped. Scala lost its government contracts.
c 2002 - The Fearmonger [943]
Sherilyn Harper’s New Britannia Party was gaining political influence by preaching strong anti-immigration policies. She was subject to an assassination attempt at the hands of United Front terrorists. Serious riots started spreading as the population panicked, but Harper was made to unwittingly broadcast a confession that New Britannia was secretly funding the United Front. The situation may or may not have been whipped up by the Fearmonger, an energy being from Boslin II. The seventh Doctor and Ace had been tracking the Fearmonger and destroyed it. Beryllium laser guns were top secret in this era.
2002 - Rutans: In 2 Minds [944]
The Rutan Host didn’t deem Earth of strategic importance at present. The renegade Rutan brought to the UK summoned about two dozen other such rogues, intending that they should form a new Rutan Host aware of the benefits of individuality, and overthrow the current Host. The United Kingdom’s air defences registered the rogues’ ship as an unidentified craft and destroyed it.
c 2002 - Drift [945]
The fourth Doctor and Leela landed in New Hampshire and met soldiers from the elite White Shadow unit. They were looking to retrieve a crashed fighter that was testing the Stormcore, an alien device recovered thirty years earlier. Also, an ice monster was loose in the area. The Doctor realised the Stormcore had opened a portal into another dimension, and that the monster was not intelligent, but was inadvertently killing people while trying to make contact. The Doctor crystallised the monster and handed it over to the authorities.
2002 (late August) - Time Zero [946]
The reclusive billionaire Maxwell Curtis had learned that his body contained a microscopic remnant of the Big Bang, masquerading as an ordinary atom, which was in danger of collapsing and turning him into a black hole. He had founded the Naryshkin Institute in Siberia as a means of researching black hole phenomena.
Led by Control, a division of the American CIA suspected the Institute was conducting time travel experiments. Control’s agents constructed a temporal detector and identified Anji as a time traveller. They made her accompany them to Siberia.
In Siberia, the eighth Doctor found that Curtis’ black hole matter was distorting space-time in the region. This allowed the Doctor to free Fitz and George Williamson from the icy prison from which they had been trapped in 1894. Williamson existed in a ghostly state, as the universe couldn’t decide if he’d survived or not.
Curtis travelled down a time corridor into the past that Williamson’s pseudo-existence had generated, hoping to reach Time Zero and spare Earth by unleashing his black hole matter there. The Doctor realised that if the black hole within Curtis erupted before time began, it would destroy the universe. The Doctor convinced Williamson to go back with him to 1894 and avert Williamson getting trapped in the ice, which nullified the time corridor’s existence. Curtis travelled back no further than 1894, and died in a comparatively minor explosion.
Curtis’ black hole mass attracted light from a far distant o-region to Earth. The o-region light contained something organic, which lodged itself on Earth’s past and would manifest in the late nineteenth century as a fire elemental.
Trix, a disguise artist who sometimes worked for Sabbath, took the opportunity to stow herself aboard the TARDIS.
2002 (November) - Unnatural History [947]
A dimensional scar, the after-effect of the singularity that befell Earth on New Year’s Eve, 2000, appeared in San Francisco. The eighth Doctor investigated the anomaly, but his companion Samantha Jones was lost to it. He sought out Sam’s original self, a dark-haired drug user, to assist. The Doctor also recruited Professor Joyce, a resident of Berkeley, to craft a dimensional stabiliser. Fitz and the dark-haired Sam became lovers.
Griffen the Unnaturalist, an agent of a secret Society that catalogued all aliens, arrived at this time to collect specimens for his catalogue. Dark-haired Sam sacrificed herself to the anomaly to restore blonde-haired Sam, who helped the Doctor to unleash the Unnaturalist’s extra-dimensional specimen case. The freed specimens drove the Unnaturalist into the dimensional scar, and the case sealed it permanently.
The Doctor later realised that blonde Sam’s timeline came about because she touched his biodata within the scar, meaning that she paradoxically facilitated her own creation.
On 30th November, 2002, the gunman Murdock killed five people... although Ace’s interference in history reduced this total to three. This was about as far in the future as she could travel using her time hopper. [948] The Day the World Turned Dayglo, Hollywood’s take on the Jex-Canavitchi war, was released in late 2002. Reporter Gabrielle Graddige approached the Brigadier in January 2003 for the true story. [949]
2003
With time destabilised, the eighth Doctor, Anji, Fitz and the stowaway Trix were drawn into a series of adventures in alternate histories... [950]
(=) 2003 - The Domino Effect [951]
The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji discovered a version of history where the British Empire ruled the world. There was widespread racial and sex discrimination. This timeline had developed because an alternate version of Sabbath had murdered key figures in the history of computing, including Babbage and Zuse, thus preventing the develop
ment of computers. The alternate Sabbath had learned that the Time Vortex was disintegrating following Gallifrey’s destruction, and hoped to preserve his Earth in a temporal focal point. He was betrayed by a Vortex creature devoted to chaos, and the focal point collapsed. The entire past, present and future of this timeline were consumed.
(=) 2003 - Reckless Engineering [952]
The Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrived in an alternate Bristol after “the Cleansing” effect had ravaged Earth, and found the Utopian Engine still generating a slow-time effect around Jared Malahyde’s estate. After linking the Utopian Engine to the TARDIS’ systems, the Doctor rolled back time a hundred and sixty years and averted “the Cleansing” timeline altogether.
(=) 2003 - The Last Resort [953]
Fourteen-year-old Jack Kowaczski had built a time machine, and thus created many thousands of variant histories. This included his own, in which President Robert Heinlein presided over the USA and Mars - along with the Martians - had been conquered.
The Doctor, Fitz and Anji landed in one such history, where the time-travel holidays of Good Times Inc, founded by Jack’s father Aaron, had turned the whole of human history into an homogenous tourist resort. The constant time travel, though, had destabilised reality and generated hundreds if not thousands of versions of events - including duplicate Doctors and companions. Sabbath was the only being unaffected by this process. The Doctor carefully sacrificed all but one version of himself and his companions, thus restoring the timeline.
c 2003 - Timeless [954]
The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrived back in the London of their reality. They found that Erasmus and Chloe, two survivors of a destroyed homeworld, had set up Timeless Inc. as a means of “helping people”. Chloe and her time-active dog Jamais would visit parallel realities to find persons in pain, then bring them to the proper reality. Jamais would transfer each person’s soul into their parallel counterpart, creating a merged soul with an improved timeline. Clients of Timeless Inc. paid £75,000 in diamonds for the privilege of murdering the parallel reality version, preventing the merged souls from defaulting back to their original state. Erasmus eventually realised that his goal of helping people had failed and killed himself, ending Timeless.
The genetic manipulations performed by Kalicum in the eighteenth century culminated in the British government worker Guy Adams. He possessed the DNA needed to house an intelligence that Kalicum and Sabbath had gestated, in a pile of diamonds, on behalf of the Council of Eight. The Doctor and his allies followed Sabbath back to the beginning of time, where he and Kalicum tried to seed the intelligence into the universe’s beginnings.
Afterwards, Anji left the TARDIS crew to return to her old life in 2003. Aided by forged documents produced by Trix, she adopted Chloe and Jamais. Chloe introduced Anji to a man named Greg, whom she predicted Anji was going to get to know a lot better.
c 2003 - The Forge: Project: Valhalla [955]
A maximum-security spaceship holding the Nyathoggoth - a sentient liquid that had killed billions to slacken its hunger for blood - was dispatched to fly into a black hole, but instead crashed in Lapland. Nimrod and Cassie Schofield of the Forge investigated the incident, and Nimrod - thinking the Nyathoggoth was uncontrollable - caused the ship to self-destruct, killing the creature. Afterwards, Nimrod became the Forge’s deputy director.
Cassie received a promotion after the Nyathoggoth affair and became “Artemis”, Nimrod’s top field agent in northern Europe. [956]
Professor Edgar Nelson-Stanley died - he was an accomplished adventurer who had learned much about extra-terrestrials, and deemed Sontarans the “silliest-looking aliens in the galaxy”. His wife Bea would become a resident of the Lavender Lawns rest home. [957] The mother of Esther Drummond, a future Torchwood operative, died in 2003. [958] A young woman named Kelly started helping out behind the counter at the Great Big Book Exchange in Darlington. Over the next seven years, she absorbed the reverberations from a magical text there, the Aja’ib - an unfinished, and endless, sequence of tales and puzzles from the planet Hyspero. [959]
2003 (10th and 16th April) - Touched by an Angel [960]
Rebecca Whitaker died in a lorry accident after visiting her parents in Chilbury. The older version of Mark Whitaker attempted to prevent this - had he succeeded, the Weeping Angels would have fed off the resulting paradox, and become strong enough to endanger Earth.
The eleventh Doctor, Amy and two versions of Rory arrived from 2001 to stop the Angels. One of the Rorys was touched by an angel, and sent back in time two years. The lights, cameras and monitors that Rory pre-ordered while he was there enabled the Doctor to spring a trap - the Angels, already malnourished, were caught in a closed circuit and erased. One Angel survived, and would encounter the contemporary Mark in 2011.
The older Mark realised the havoc his saving Rebecca would have caused, and allowed her car accident to proceed as scheduled. She died in his arms.
On 16th April, the Doctor, Amy, Rory and the older Mark attended Rebecca’s funeral in secret. The travellers then took Mark, who was now 46, for one last meeting with his wife in 1993.
2003 (April) - Eternity Weeps [961]
Liz Shaw was Chief of Operations at Tranquillity Base on the moon, where co-operation with the Silurians had led to the construction of an experimental weather control gravitron. Shaw and the Silurian Imorkal were in a close relationship.
Mount Ararat and Mahser Dagi were now in territory disputed by Turkey and Iraq, but an expedition to find Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat set off anyway. Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane joined the team, although Benny found the Tendurek Formation, six billion years old and utterly alien. The Cthalctose terraforming virus - dubbed Agent Yellow - was set off and triggered catastrophic geological changes on Earth.
The US launched a nuclear strike in the area, but only succeeded in speeding up the process. This wiped out many cities including Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Almawsil, Tbilisi and Krasnodar. President Springsteen ordered the targeting of the moonbase, believing the crew there to be responsible. Jason fled billions of years back into the past and returned. The Agent was spreading as far as the Alps, the Sahara and Asia. The seventh Doctor engineered an x-ray burst using singularities to sterilise the Agent. This wiped out one tenth of all life on Earth, including six hundred million people.
Imorkal perished during these events, and Liz Shaw appeared to die also. Benny and Jason agreed to separate. Suborbital flights could be used to travel quickly around the world.
c 2003 (late May to June) - Rip Tide [962]
A peaceful alien race used spatial gateways to become tourists on other worlds. Two young members of the species, genetically altered to resemble human beings, violated their people’s strict rule against risk of discovery by visiting a small Cornish fishing village. One of them died in a sightseeing accident, losing the “key” to their spatial gateway in the process. His stranded mate adopted the name “Ruth”, but began dying from prolonged exposure to Earth’s environment. Nina Kellow, age 17, aided the eighth Doctor in rescuing Ruth, and he transported her back home.
A Fortean Flicker transported a group of train-riders on the 8:12 out of Chorleywood to the planet Hogsumm in the twenty-seventh century. They were later returned to Rickmansworth Station in their native time. [963] In 2003, Detective Inspector Tom Cutler discovered that an alien entity in Hammersmith had possessed Mark Palmer, and compelled him to rape and murder three boys. Torchwood London drew the entity out of Palmer, but left Palmer to be arrested. Cutler testified to falsifying evidence, sparing Palmer from a life sentence. Palmer wound up in a mental hospital, and Torchwood permitted Cutler to keep his memories of the incident. [964]
2003 - The Quantum Archangel [965]
Stuart Hyde was now the Emeritus Professor of Physics at West London University. He had used the discarded technology from TOMTIT to build TITAN, a dimensional array intended to penetrate the higher dimensions called Calabi-Yau Space. Thanks to TITAN, businesswoman Anjeliqua
Whitefriar became infused with the core of the Calabi-Yau and gained reality-warping powers. She became “the Quantum Archangel”, and channelled her newfound reality-warping powers through the Mad Mind of Bophemeral, the super-computer that triggered the Millennium War, in a benevolent attempt to create separate utopias for each person on Earth. This threatened to plunge the universe into chaos.
(=) The alternate realities created by the Quantum Archangel included ones where Mel was British Prime Minister, and faced a Cyberman invasion; the Doctor was President of Gallifrey, leading his people against the Master and the Daleks; and the Master, the Monk, the Rani and Drax altered Earth’s DNA. [966]
The sixth Doctor persuaded Anjeliqua to restore order and relinquish her power, while the Chronovore named Kronos sacrificed himself to destroy Bophemeral.
2003 - Minuet in Hell [967]
Hellfire Club leader Brigham Elisha Dashwood III believed he’d allied himself with a group of demons, and set about using their support to booster his organisation. In truth, he’d contacted alien Psionivores, members of a species of cosmic parasites that feasted on negative emotions. With the Psionivores’ help and technical expertise, Dashwood seceded a small portion of America, renamed it “Malebolgia” and dedicated it to a social program of devil worship. The Psionivores helped Dashwood perfect the PSI-895, which was capable of rewriting or transferring human memories, and Dashwood hoped this would let him install Psionivores in his political opponents’ bodies.
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