The Macra were a scourge of the galaxy, controlling a small empire with humans as slaves. Eventually, though, they degenerated into unthinking animals. [568]
Walton Winkle became known throughout the Earth Empire as “Uncle Winky, the man who put a smile on the galaxy”. He founded the amusement park Winky Wonderland on Io, but entered hibernation inside his “Cosmic Mountain” on 18th December, 2367, due to a heart condition. He wouldn’t revive from stasis until shortly before the end of the universe. [569]
Around 2370, human settlers colonised Tairngaire. The capital city was built on an isthmus and named New Byzantium. The planet rapidly became one of the more prosperous colonies. The temporary lights built by the settlers eventually became the Lantern Market. [570]
2371 - Lords of the Storm [571]
The Sontarans, fresh from destroying the Rutan installation at Betelgeuse V, attempted to use captured Tzun technology against their eternal enemies. They genetically tagged the human population of the Unukalhai system, intending that a Rutan sensor sweep would indicate a Sontaran population of one hundred million. The Rutan would send a fleet from Antares and the Sontarans planned to ignite a brown dwarf using the Tzun Stormblade, destroying the Rutans and the whole system as well. The fifth Doctor and Turlough defeated the plan.
By 2375, the Bureau Tygo was Earth’s main scientific research centre, and humans were used to getting what they wanted. In May of that year, Salvatorio Moretti created Genetically Engineered Neural Imagination Engines (GENIEs) that could bend space and time to grant wishes. Earth was threatened by competing desires, so one group of people wished to go back in time and prevent the GENIEs’ creation. A GENIE survived in ancient Rome. [572]
In 2375, the police broke up the notorious Nisbett firm, a criminal gang responsible for extortion, fraud, smuggling, arms dealing, torture and multiple murder. Tony, Frankie and Dylan the Leg were all executed, but the Nisbett brothers - Charlie and Eddie - escaped. [573] Sontaran Commander Vrag’s commando squad was timescooped to the Eye of Orion by the Time Lord Ryoth, shortly after being presented with a medal by Admiral Sarg. [574]
The colony world Gadrell Major was on the brink of nuclear war in 2377, leading the population to construct fallout shelters. Around this time, the Earth was at war with the Phractons. [575] Dymok demanded isolation from Earth in 2378. Imperial Earth Space Station Little Boy II was built to oversee the planet. [576]
c 2378 - The Androids of Tara [577]
On Tara, the fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 prevented Count Grendel from usurping the throne from its rightful heir, Prince Reynart. Grendel escaped to fight another day, and the travellers obtained the fourth segment of the Key to Time.
2379 (3rd July) - Mindwarp [578]
The Mentors of Thoros Beta continued to trade across the galaxy via the warpfold relay, supplying phasers to the Warlords of Thordon, and weapons that allowed Yrcanos of the Krontep to conquer the Tonkonp Empire. They also traded with such planets as Wilson One and Posikar.
The brain of his Magnificence Kiv, the leader of the Mentors, continued to expand in his skull. He enlisted the services of Crozier, a human scientist who specialised in the transfer of consciousness. Crozier experimented on a number of Thoros Betan creatures and the Mentors’ captives, creating hybrids and experimenting with the ageing process. After a decade of hard work, he had developed a serum that allowed him to place any brain in any body.
Subsequent events are unclear - it appears that the Time Lords intervened to prevent the threat posed to the course of evolution across the universe, causing Kiv to be killed. The sixth Doctor’s companion, Peri Brown, was seemingly killed but in reality remained on Thoros-Beta, where she eventually married Yrcanos.
Time Lord intervention in Peri’s history made this but one of at least five possible outcomes. In one version of history, Queen Peri had two sons and a daughter. [579] Peri had a son, Corynus, who went on to marry Yrcanthia and have two sons (Artios and Euthys) and a daughter (Actis). [580] The late twenty-fourth century saw wars around the Rim Worlds of Tokl. [581]
c 2380 - The Price of Paradise [582]
For eighteen months, Professor Petra Shulough led an expedition in the SS Humphrey Bogart to find the Paradise Planet. An electromagnetic pulse crippled the ship, and it crashed on the beautiful forest world of Laylora. The tenth Doctor and Rose answered the ship’s distress call. The planet was rich in trisilicate - as Shulough’s father had discovered fifteen years earlier - but it was also alive and reacted to the presence of alien life by creating Witiku, fierce four-armed monsters. Shulough agreed to keep the existence of Laylora a secret.
Micro fusion generators had been banned on most planets by this time, due to the toxic waste they produced.
c 2380 (21st to 22nd April) - The Romance of Crime [583]
In the late 2370s, the Ceerads (Cellular Remission and Decay) - mutants - were purged on Vanossos. Some survived and resettled on Uva Beta Uva Six, leading to conflict with the colonists in that system. The galaxy faced another recession at this time.
Xais was the last of the Ugly Mutants and the self-proclaimed Princess of the Guaal Territories. She was a genius terrorist who murdered two thousand people, and was executed by particle reversal in 2377. Xais had learned, however, how to transfer her consciousness into the substance helicon. Her mind came to reside in a helicon mask made by the artist Menlove Stokes, enabling her to possess people.
Xais teamed up with the criminal Nisbett brothers and their Ogrons, claiming to have discovered rich belzite deposits on Uva Beta Uva Eleven. In fact, the planet contained a great deal of helicon, through which Xais hoped to generate duplicates of herself and commit mass slaughter. The Nisbett brothers perished as part of this affair, but the fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 worked to stop Xais’ plan. Xais’ mind became trapped in a mass quantity of helicon, which expanded to cover the whole of Uva Beta Uva Eleven. The Doctor supplied one of his associates, the police investigator Spiggot, with a formula that could destroy the helicon and Xais within.
= c 2380 - The Infinity Race [584]
Sabbath attempted to harness the infinity forces on the planet Selonart in a parallel universe. Selonart served as host to the Trans-Global Selonart Regatta, which took place every five Earth years. The eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji joined the fourteenth Regatta, defeating Sabbath’s plan. Sabbath had released the Warlocks of Demigest to assist with his scheme, but the Doctor used time crystals formed on Selonart to erase the Warlocks’ presence from the universe.
The New Earth system was colonised in 2380. [585]
On Colony 34, a planet with two moons, Premier Leo Jaeger swept to power. But a disease left him scarred, and surgical efforts to correct this only caused greater deformity. Jaeger feared this would erode his popularity, so a Jaeger look-alike from an outer province doubled for him at public events. The doppelgänger gradually replaced Jaeger’s loyalists with his own staff, and finally took control. The genuine article was secretly kept alive so his Biometric ID could reinforce the duplicate’s appearance.
Colony 34’s resources were not as plentiful as previously thought, and an energy crisis caused unrest. Fifteen years after the real Jaeger took office, his double capitalised on the situation by restricting freedoms and postponing elections. Two years later, he tightened control using the Emergency Powers Act. Two years after that, the Chamber of Deputies was accused of widespread corruption and suspended.
Human bodies made excellent fuel if used properly, so the government secretly began harvesting Colony 34’s underclass. Jaeger’s Inner Senate advertised employment opportunities for outsiders, and interested travellers from other colonies were captured and turned into fuel. [586]
Gilbert M was exiled from Vasilip when he accidentally wiped out half the planet’s population with a germ he’d been working on. By this time, there were scheduled interplanetary flights, and he travelled to Terra Alpha with the Kandy Man’s bones in his briefcase. [587]
& 2381 (29th March) - The Dimension
Riders [588]
Half the planets colonised by humanity had been abandoned during the wars. But now, generally, this was a period of interplanetary peace. The Survey Corps existed to patrol space and deal with situations unsuitable for military or humanitarian missions. As such, Survey Corps vessels had both troopers (armed with state-of-the-art Derenna handguns) and support staff. By the end of the twenty-fourth century, however, underfunding meant that many of the Corps’ ships were obsolete.
On 22nd March, 2381, Space Station Q4 in the fifty-fourth sector of charted space, on the edge of the spiral arm and human territory, was attacked by the Garvond’s Time Soldiers. The station’s crew were aged to death. The Survey Corps vessel Icarus investigated and fell to the soldiers. The seventh Doctor, Benny and Ace aided in repelling the soldiers, who were destroyed when their energies were reflected back upon them. This prevented the Garvond from triggering temporal paradoxes and using a Time Focus to absorb the resultant chronal energy. During the battle, Darius Cheynor, second-in-command of the Icarus, distinguished himself.
Cheynor was offered command of the Phoenix. [589]
2382 - Fear of the Dark [590]
Humanity had made contact with the Vegans, a proud mining race, by this time. Earth had interests in the Antares, Betelgeuse, Denox, Kaltros Prime and Earth Colony E5150. Suspended animation was still in use, and neurolectrin was used to resuscitate sleepers. The University of Tyr specialised in temporal compression.
The fifth Doctor was drawn to the moon of Akoshemon when the Dark - an ancient being ravenous for blood - influenced Nyssa’s mind. The Dark hoped to manifest itself physically in our dimension, but the Doctor destroyed it.
? 2385 - Slipback [591]
The TARDIS was pulled out of the Vortex by illegal time experiments aboard the starship Vipod Mor. A Maston, an extinct monster, attacked the sixth Doctor and Peri. The Doctor discovered that a botched maintenance job had endowed the ship’s computer with a split personality, and one of its personas was planning to take the ship back in time to impose order on the universe. The Doctor was about to stop the time journey when a Time Lord made contact to inform him that the Vipod Mor was part of the established history - it would explode upon arrival, creating the Big Bang.
In 2386, Unreal Transfer was discovered. [592] The artist Menlove Stokes entered cryogenic sleep, hoping to awaken in an era that better appreciated his work. He was revived in the Fifty-Eighth Segment of Time. [593] When her colleagues were captured, a physicist travelled back in time to Little Caldwell, 1983. With the help of Isaac Summerfield, she returned home and freed her workmates. [594]
The same year, slow compression time - a method of slowing down time in a small area - was first theorised. Within a couple of years a slow time converter, or “time telescope” had been built. [595] The Bartholomew Transactor became very popular as a party tool, able to send messages back in time and create ghostly images of an alternate timeline for a minute at most. [596] A law enforcement agency, the Bureau, discovered an alien time corridor in the Playa del Nuttingchapel. They dispatched an agent to investigate in 1930, where he adopted the alias “Percy Closed”. [597]
2387 (29th May) - Infinite Requiem [598]
In the late 2380s, there was a famine on Tenos Beta and storms in the Magellani system. There was also more co-operation between the various elements of the Earth’s space navy. Over the next couple decades the military, the ships of the Guild of Adjudicators, the Survey Corps and the corporations’ own battle squadrons unified into the Spacefleet.
The Earth colony of Gadrell Major had been rich in porizium ore, a valuable material used in medicine, but was now mined out. Earth Central perpetrated the lie that deposits of porizium remained - a means of causing the Phractons, telepathic cyborgs with a communal mind, to attack Gadrell Major to acquire the porizium for ailing members of their race. As Earth Central had planned, this kept the Phractons away from more central Earth worlds. Darius Cheynor was considered expendable by his superiors, and was sent with the Phoenix to “investigate” as the Phracton Swarm and their tanks - flamers - devastated much of the planet. The seventh Doctor and Benny were present, and met Cheynor again.
Cheynor negotiated a settlement with the Phractons; Gadrell Major was slated to become a war memorial. Earth’s Colonial Office diverted funding to terraform an non-classed asteroid in the Magellani system. A breakaway faction of the Phractons sought retribution and killed Cheynor - this led to the Phractons achieving some vindication, and further negotiations would lead to peace.
? 2388 - The Happiness Patrol [599]
The Galactic Census Bureau at Galactic Centre surveyed every colonised planet every six local cycles and, where necessary, suggested measures to control the population size. On one such planet, Terra Alpha, the native Alphidae were driven underground by the settlers, who covered the planet in sugar fields and factories. Offworlders were restricted to the Tourist Zones. The planet was ruled by Helen A, who insisted that her citizens be happy. To this end, the planet was gaily painted, muzak poured from loudspeakers on every street corner and Helen A created the Happiness Patrol, which was composed of women authorised to murder the so-called “killjoys”. She also employed the services of the Kandy Man, an artificial being of pure sugar who created sweets that killed people.
Terrorists, protest groups and the Alphidae (now confined to the sugar-pipe network) all resisted, and Helen A authorised the “routine disappearance” of some 499,987 people, 17% of the population. The seventh Doctor and Ace brought down Helen A’s regime in one night. The Kandy Man’s candy centre melted.
The Protestant Church officially accepted all scientific disciplines, including genetic engineering, as valid. In response, Marunianism - founded by Marunia Lennox, a Scottish Protestant - declared that all science was evil. [600]
Near the end of the twenty-fourth century, the dictator Hugo Gamaliel ripped many colonies from Earth control so his corporation could avoid paying taxes. His campaigns against the Knights of Jeneve culminated in the Battle of Bocaro (a.k.a. Bosarno), where the Knights tricked Gamaliel into believing that he’d wiped them out. The Gamalian Dragon - an emblem of the Knights’ power - served as a symbol of Gamaliel’s victory, but a camera within it let the Knights spy on Gamaliel’s operations. It also contained a low-grade nuclear device, so the Knights could obliterate Gamaliel if needed. [601]
A plague halved the population of Sarah-361. The local prytaneium outlawed celibacy, made monogamy a social sin and instituted mandatory pornography. [602]
On Kasagrad, the radiation in Rablev’s tomb fell to safe levels. [603]
The Intergalactic Taskforce served the Inner Planets in the late twenty-fourth century. Throughout the latter half of the twenty-fourth century, the notorious criminal Sheldukher - a ruthless murderer, thief and extortionist - menaced the galaxy. He destroyed the entire Krondel constellation for no apparent reason other than that he could. In 2389, he planned his biggest coup yet, and set about recruiting accomplices.
Marjorie Postine had been an aggressive child, and her parents sold her to the military, a common practice in the commercially-minded twenty-fourth century. She became a mercenary, and Sheldukher secured her services by offering her a Moosehead Repeater, a rifle capable of blowing a hole in a neutron star. She was the veteran of seventeen front-line conflicts. Her right arm was a graft-job, performed by an unqualified surgeon in a trench on Regurel, and her bald head was scarred and lumpy.
A couple of years before, Rosheen and Klift had infiltrated McDrone Systems and embezzled a vast sum of money. The central markets collapsed, causing entire planetary economies in the fourth zone to collapse into starvation and war. Millions died. The planet Tayloe was flooded with imports. Rosheen and Klift fled to the luxury of the North Gate, where Sheldukher tracked them down. The locals gladly handed them over to him.
Sheldukher had converted a Kezzivot Class transport freighter, welding on a furnace engine, installing sleep suspension chambers stolen from the
Dozing Decades company and fitting heavy weaponry such as the cellular disrupter and the spectronic destabiliser. His team raided Checkley’s World, stealing Project FXX Q84 - the Cell - an advanced telepathic, organic computer. Although this brought down the wrath of the Intergalactic Taskforce, it was only the beginning of Sheldukher’s scheme. He planned to locate the legendary planet Sakkrat, and the greatest prize in the galaxy: the Highest Science.
The mysterious Highest Science had preoccupied the galaxy’s population for generations. In 2421, the explorer Gustaf Urnst claimed to have discovered Sakkrat, the planet which housed its secrets. No-one took Urnst seriously, although his books remained in print even after his mysterious disappearance. Unknown to the public, a Fortean Flicker had transported him to the twentieth century.
For the next three hundred years, the F61 searched the galaxy for Sakkrat, travelling past the stellar conjunctions of Naiad, the crystal quasars of Menolot and the farthest reaches of Harma. Over the centuries many lesser criminals would imitate Sheldukher, but none matched him. [604]
Archaeologists of this period believed the stories of HP Lovecraft were historically accurate. [605] Convergence, a cargo ship, mysteriously disappeared over Dymok in 2396. [606]
? 2397 - “Planet Bollywood” [607]
A sentient construct, the Muse, was fashioned as an amusement for the elephantine Maharani of Baloch; it had the ability to make beings in her vicinity break into song and dance. The Maharani’s attendants spirited the Muse away to a low-tech world when the Shasarak, a war-mongering people, deduced that her powers could force people to kill. The Shasarak tracked the Muse, but the eleventh Doctor and Amy helped the Muse to recalibrate her systems, and she forced the Shasarak to sing and dance until the Maharani could take them into custody.
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