B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  K9 Series 1 [132]

  By 2050, London was a near-police state. Cybernetic Civic Pacification troops (CCPCs) patrolled the city and surveillance cameras and drones were ubiquitous. Giant floating screens advertised products and warned potential criminals. A totalitarian government agency, the Department, handled security and also ran Dauntless prison. The Tower of London had a facility that secretly held “Fallen Angels” - aliens - and experimented with alien technology. Most aliens were peaceful, but all were indefinitely detained. Juvenile human criminals were held in Virtual Reality detention. [133]

  People carried verometers: advanced mobile phones. [134] The currency in Britain was either the pound or the “cred”. [135] Britain had a King. [136] Omnivorous bacteria had been discovered on Pluto. [137] Experiments on cyborgs were strictly regulated. [138]

  The Mark II CCPC was introduced. It secretly used a variety of alien technology. [139] The Department was protected by hovering stun mines. The Jixen were winning their war with the Meron until the Korven began supplying the Meron with new energy weapons. [140]

  2050 - K9: Regeneration

  The activist Stark Reality, in reality a teenager named Starkey, stumbled across the house of the agoraphobic Professor Alistair Gryffen. He worked for the Department, mainly on the Time/Space Project, which reconstructed a device capable of creating portals in time and space. Darius Pike, age 15, was employed as Gryffen’s assistant.

  K9 materialised in Gryffen’s house, quickly followed by four turtle-like Jixen warriors. K9 self destructed to save Gryffen and the children, but Starkey recovered K9’s regeneration disc. This activated and caused K9 to reform, but his memdrive was damaged, meaning he could not account for where and when he was from...

  2050 - K9: Liberation

  One Jixen survived, had Starkey’s scent and pursued him. K9 and his friends broke into Dauntless prison and freed the aliens held captive there. A Meron was revealled to be working at the Dauntless disguised as a human. The Jixen was killed and the existence of Dauntless made public, forcing the Department to close it.

  2050 - K9: The Korven

  K9 assisted Starkey, who was considered a dissident and on the run, to avoid the CCPCs and their invisible Camo vehicles. A dangerous alien Korven materialised in Gryffen’s house and kidnapped him, but K9 and the children tracked them down to an iceworks. The Korven had travelled back in time to absorb Gryffen’s knowledge and use it to cool the Earth in preparation for an invasion in the twenty-fifth century, but K9 defeated him.

  2050 - K9: The Bounty Hunter

  The technology of this era included the THX1138 self-aware oven and the experimental NX2000 spacecraft. A Mr Smith won a billion pounds playing the Lottery.

  The bounty hunter Ahab arrived from the year 50,000, and attempted to apprehend K9 for the assassination of the diplomat Zanthus Pia. K9 had been framed - Ahab and the Jixen were the true culprits. Ahab escaped to exactly the same spot in his own time... but the Earth had moved by then, and Ahab was left adrift in space.

  2050 (Sunday) - K9: Sirens of Ceres

  After witnessing police brutality, the rebellious teenager Jorjie Turner threw a stone at a CCPC. She was sent as punishment to Magdalen Academy, where pupils wearing strange bracelets were unusually conformist. K9 learned that the bracelets contained Cerilium, a material that notoriously caused civilisation on Ceres to collapse after destroying its inhabitants’ free will. He also exposed the Department’s use of the material at the Academy.

  2050 - K9: Fear Itself

  Widespread riots spread across the world, putting everyone on edge. The source was an alien living in a wardrobe, but K9 isolated the alien before Drake - an agent of the Department - detonated a bomb, destroying it.

  2050 - K9: The Fall of the House of Gryffen

  The “biggest electrical event for decades”, a huge storm, affected London. This disrupted the Space-Time Manipulator installed at Gryffen’s house and released the Sporax, a creature that generated fear. It created ectomorphic replicas of Gryffen’s lost family, but K9 and his friends banished them.

  2050 - K9: Jaws of Orthrus

  K9 was caught on a coast-to-coast vidcast attempting to assassinate Drake - all part of Drake’s Project Orthus. The truth was revealled: the K9 that shot Drake was actually a duplicate, intended to frame the real K9 and have him taken into custody to be disassembled.

  The Department was on the verge of introducing tracker chips for people.

  2050 - K9: Dream-Eaters

  London was bombarded with psychic energy that induced sleep and gave people nightmares. Terrifying creatures from Celtic myth, the Bodachs, had been disturbed by the Department’s unearthing of an obelisk containing the Eyes of Oblivion - crystals that the Bodachs planned to use to send the world to sleep. The Bodachs were using Jorjie’s mother June as an avatar, but Jorjie broke their control by convincing her mother she got a tattoo. K9 destroyed the obelisk.

  2050 - K9: The Curse of Anubis

  A pyramid-like spacecraft approached Earth. Drake ordered its destruction, but the ship vanished before the missiles hit, and reappeared over London close to K9 and his friends. Jackal-headed aliens, the Anubians, arrived and knelt before “the mighty K9, the great liberator”: the being that freed them from the domination of the Huducts. The Anubians took over Gryffen’s house, and used Torcs to control the minds of everyone present. K9 learned that the Anubians had used the Huduct mind-control technology to conquer other races that apparently included the Alpha Centaurians, Mandrels, Sea Devils, Aeolians and Jixen. K9 and Darius broke the conditioning, and the Anubians left.

  2050 - K9: Oroborus

  Gryffen’s Space-Time Manipulator activated, seemingly by itself. K9, Gryffen and the others began to encounter time loops and reversals. Starkey’s arm itched, and a scan revealled his body was producing alien antibodies. Gryffen revealled that Starkey’s parents had experimented on him, and endowed him with an alien immune system. Despite events happening out of sequence, or twice, or not at all, K9 and his allies tracked the source of the time shifts to a snake creature: the time-consuming Oroborus. They lured the Oroborus back into the Space-Time Manipulator, and banished it.

  2050 - K9: Alien Avatar

  The Department interrogated some aliens, the Medes, who could project avatars of themselves. Drake was keen to acquire their molecular refractor technology, but his researchers were dumping an alien toxin - chenium - that was a by-product of Qualon 37, as used by the Medes in interdimensional technology, into the Thames. K9 detected the pollutant while he and Starkey were fishing, and later helped to free the Medes, who departed.

  2050 - K9: Aeolian

  A huge hurricane swept across the UK and North Sea, disrupting communications. The event was centred on Holy Cross Cathedral. Tornadoes destroyed the Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park. Drake arrested Gryffen, as Gryffen had created conditions similar to this when one of his experiments went wrong and caused the Great Cataclysm. K9 identified the disruption as indicative of the Aeolians, masters of amplification long thought wiped out. The culprit was the last of the Aeolians, left without memories following the destruction of her race - the music was a desperate mating call. Gryffen detected a mating call from another Aeolian in the Orpheus Constellation, and the two Aeolians were brought together and then left Earth, which restored the weather to normal.

  Earth’s population at this time was six billion. [141]

  2050 - K9: The Last Oak Tree

  K9, Jorjie and Starkey met Robin Hood in a virtual reality Sherwood Forest exhibition, the centrepiece of which was the last oak tree: the Major Oak of the Robin Hood legend. An alien jamming signal disrupted the exhibit, and the Major Oak was stolen. K9 found traces of an alien substance and tracked down a Centuripede, which was using the oak to build a pod to transport her eggs. The Centuripede became a butterfly and her babies hatched. She gave Starkey three acorns as a reward for saving them from the Department.

  2050 - K9: Black Hunger

  T
he Department created the Black Hunger: an all-consuming bacteria swarm made from a combination of yeast and microbes from Pluto. The Hunger was made to alleviate London’s rubbish problem, but it mutated into flesh-eaters and swarmed through the sewers. This would have destroyed all life on Earth in a week, but K9 contained the Hunger, and planned to take the swarm to Atrios. The leader of the Department, Lomax, decided that Drake had disobeyed orders too many times and replaced him with Thorne, the former governor of the Dauntless.

  2050 - K9: The Cambridge Spy

  Jorjie learned as part of a school assignment that Gryffen’s mansion was a police station in 1963, the centre of an investigation into a spy ring. The Space-Time Manipulator whisked her back to that year. Darius was briefly erased from history, but Starkey and K9 went to 1963 and recovered Jorjie, repairing the timelines.

  2050 - K9: Lost Library of Ukko

  The Department held an Open Day to look for new recruits, much to K9’s curiosity. Starkey attended and was sucked into a mysterious picture. K9 identified this as a library card from Ukko; Thorne had been planning to use it to exile criminals. Starkey was trapped on a barren world, Urlic, which had been compressed into a hologram by the Ukkans, an all-female race of archivists. An Ukkan, Yssaringintinka, arrived and retrieved Starkey.

  The major world powers currently included the United Kingdom, the Americas and the Pacific Union.

  2050 - K9: Mutant Copper

  The CCPCs were given sweeping new powers, including the ability to enter homes without warrants. K9 and the others come across a “mutant” CCPC whose connection to the Department had been broken, and who had human DNA. They named him Birdie, because he was fascinated with birds. Birdie gradually became more human, and learned new skills such as how to make toast. K9 and his friends smuggled Birdie away from London to the countryside, where he enjoyed seeing the birds.

  2050 - K9: The Custodians

  Jorjie and Darius played the new VR game Little Green Men, even as the city outside was in chaos, and emergency services were overwhelmed. The headsets for the game were alien in origin, and twenty million children had been simultaneously affected by it. Greenroom Entertainment had allied with the last of the Etydions - they were the most powerful telepaths who ever lived, and had hired themselves out to psionically repel invading forces with waves of fear, but were wiped out by their enemies. Greenroom intended that the Etrydion would create a telepathic network that would pacify youngsters into being good children, but the Etrydion secretly planned to transform the children into members of its own race. The Etrydion died when June’s emotions for Jorjie’s safety overloaded it.

  2050 - K9: Taphony and the Time Loop

  Gryffen helped to liberate Taphony, a girl trapped in a VR created by the Department. She was a Time Blank, an entity that didn’t follow the normal rules of time and could disintegrate everything she touched. She had been created within the Department by use of alien technology, but became vengeful upon learning that Gryffen was partly responsible for said experiment. Starkey, Jorjie and Darius befriended Taphony, and persuaded her to leave for a realm better suited to her.

  2050 - K9: Robot Gladiators

  Freddie Maxwell ran Destructertainment, which put on robot gladiator shows. Darius pretended to trick K9 into becoming part of Maxwell’s stable of robots - all part of a plan to end Maxwell’s illegal scam. Thorne colluded with Maxwell to develop combat robots such as the Pain-Maker, with the ultimate aim of acquiring K9’s regenerative technology. The Pain-Maker was packed with enough solarmite explosive to destroy everything in the arena apart from K9’s regeneration unit, and when K9 refused to fight, Thorne had the Pain-Maker self-destruct. The blast wasn’t enough to damage K9. Maxwell’s business was shut down, leaving Gryffen, K9 and the kids to wonder how Thorne knew that K9 could regenerate...

  2050 - K9: Mind Snap [142]

  K9 activated the Space-Time Manipulator, hoping that some siphoned temporal power would help restore his memories. Instead, it adversely affected his mind, making him confused and aggressive. Gryffen restored his memories by having K9 remember his previous adventures.

  2050 - K9: Angel of the North

  K9 deduced the co-ordinates of a Fallen Angel - the ship from which the Space-Time Manipulator was recovered - in Canada. Gryffen thought the ship might contain the device’s missing temporal stabiliser, but was unable to conquer his agoraphobia, and so travelled to Canada in a VR encasement suit. K9 and the kids used the Manipulator to teleport to the alien ship, where they encountered a Korven - one of over a hundred in the area. The Korven were the most dangerous race K9 had ever encountered, and the Manipulator had been made from their technology. Gryffen vowed to never use the temporal stabiliser upon deducing that K9’s enhancement code was somehow part of it.

  2050 - K9: The Last Precinct

  A group called The Last Precinct staged a spate of attacks on CCPCs. Fake CCPCs came to Gryffen’s house and immobilised K9 - these were actually humans, all of them all ex-policemen made obsolete by the CCPCs. Darius’ father, Harry Pike, was among their number. They planed to infect the CCPCs with a virus, but it proved unstable, and caused the CCPCs to go on a rampage. K9 deactivated the CCPCs, and the Last Precinct members were rounded up and arrested.

  2050 - K9: Hound of the Korven

  Thorne showed Darius that his father was cracking up in his solitary confinement VR prison, and demanded that he fetch him K9’s regeneration unit. He also revealled he had K9’s memory disc and offered a swap. Thorne and K9 traded the components - but K9’s memory disc had been implanted with a self-destruct code that would activate if he got within range of an unknown location. A Jixen kidnapped Gryffen, and explained that the Jixen were a friendly, peaceful race marauded by the Meron, who were allied with the Korven. K9 and his allies realised that someone at the Department was working for the Korven. Although K9 rerouted the self-destruct orders on his memory disc, Thorne still had his regeneration unit.

  2050 - K9: The Eclipse of the Korven

  The Space-Time Manipulator observed a white hole and a black hole coming together - if they touched, Earth would be destroyed. K9 discovered that the Department also had a Space-Time Manipulator at their Millennium Dome base. Thorne’s army of CCPCs surrounded K9, and Thorne explained that an alien army was massing on the other side of the galaxy, ready to invade Earth via a temporal portal. The Department had engineered Trojan - a supersoldier built from the DNA of every alien species they had encountered - and fitted it with K9’s regeneration unit. Throne was working with the invaders, and had engineered the white hole and black hole to come together, knowing it would force Gryffen to use the temporal stabiliser to widen the portal. Thorne was actually as a Meron, while the head of the Department, Lomax, was a Korven.

  The spearhead of the Korven invasion force arrived through the portal, but Gryffen conquered his agoraphobia and closed the portal using his personal voice command: “Omega, Sigma, Theta, Ohm”. Lomax and the Korven were sucked into the portal and destroyed. K9 fought Trojan, and got its Jixen and Meron imperatives to destroy each other. Thorne was crushed to death when Trojan toppled on him. The more evil elements of the Department had been eliminated.

  The polar ice cap melted in the twenty-first century. [143]

  c 2050 - The Time of the Daleks [144]

  The Daleks attempted to exploit a temporal rift to enhance their time travel capabilities, but the experiment backfired and they almost lost their entire fleet. They made contact with Mariah Learman, the ruler of New Britain, who had a primitive time scanner. Learman didn’t believe the population appreciated Shakespeare, and the price for her co-operation with the Daleks was that they would assassinate Shakespeare as a youth and preserve the only copy of his works for Learman’s benefit. Rebels thwarted this plan by smuggling an eight-year-old Shakespeare from 1572 for his own protection, but this caused further time distortion. The eighth Doctor arrived, trying to explain why his companion Charley didn’t know of Shakespeare. The Doctor set hi
story back on course by returning young Shakespeare to his rightful time. The Daleks were trapped in an endless temporal loop after mutating Learman into one of them.

  It now took only a couple of hours for a shuttle rocket to travel from the Earth to the new moonbases. Around 2050, the ultimate form of weather control, the Gravitron, was built on the moon’s surface. The political implications on Earth proved complex, and the General Assembly spent more than twenty years negotiating between farmers and landowners. [145] The Butler Institute built the Gravitron. [146] Rhinos were extinct on Earth by 2051. [147]

  Harnessing gravity waves allowed artificial gravity to be installed on spacecraft and space stations. Permanent space stations were built. Flowers were cultivated on the surface of Venus. The first Doctor visited this timezone. [148] Victorian time traveller Penelope Gate and her companion Joel Mintz accidentally visited the middle of the twenty-first century. [149]

  Around the middle of the century, domesticated wolves were reintroduced into the forests of Northern Europe. It was rumoured that the Wicca Society had released wild wolves, and there was some debate as to which strain would become dominant. [150]

  In 2050, after two years of training, Steffi Ehrlich formed part of the tenth German moon mission. The following year, she married Hans Stott. Roman Groom had degrees in English and Physics, and was beginning postdoctoral work in astrophysics. He was only 17, but was accepted into NASA’s Search for Astronauts programme in January 2051, and began two years’ training. In April 2051, Margaret Cain became only the second female Briton to land on the moon. As part of that effort, she met Adelaide Brooke.