B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (202 page)

The moon-sized stellar manipulator that had shadowed the TARDIS through the Vortex appeared near Earth, and began draining energy from the Sun. The Eightfold Truth hailed this as the “rebel sun” foretold of in its teachings, and the group’s membership soared to two hundred forty-four million. Some Metebelis spiders arrived from the future, and pushed their plan to conquer a thousand worlds to fruition. The stellar manipulator’s energy was directed into the millions of Metebelis crystals held by the Eightfold Truth members, creating a hive mind. Unstopped, it would generate a psychic pulse that would ripple outward at 170,000 times the speed of light, and compel legions of worlds to worship the spiders.

The spiders’ Queen, facing dissension in her ranks, tried to possess her ally the Headhunter - who had an evolved resistance to psionics and reflected the Queen’s power back at her, killing them both. The Doctor defeated the spiders - whose surviving members returned to Metebelis in the future - and used the crystal-web’s power to make the public forget these events. He also considered how to erase the relevant media coverage.

The Doctor relocated the stellar manipulator to a remote part of the universe where it would never be found. No longer in the Headhunter’s employ, Karen Coltrane left for parts unknown. The Doctor and Lucie departed to spend Christmas in Blackpool, 2008.

w - Gillian Rose Petra released her Master’s thesis,
The Magic Feather Duster: A Brief History of Domestic Service in Victoria’s England
, and thereby caught the attention of corporate wizard Jimmy Moriarty. He suggested they use his time technology to send Gillian back to the 1880s, so she could study the seminal detective Sherlock Holmes for her doctoral thesis. She was barred from publishing its results until 2018. Gillian agreed and went into the past, returning after the eruption of Krakatoa.
 [43]

The Doctor was in Havana for Fidel Castro’s funeral, and later said, “They all loved [Castro] again by then”.
 [44]

Hex did a school project about the Crimean War and Florence Nightingale, which motivated him to mention an interest in nursing when a career officer visited that week.
 [45]
Hex’s father worked on the docks, and thought his job was safe until a strike was held in support of some men who’d been sacked. The disagreement dragged on for years, and Hex’s father finally accepted redundancy. Hex’s grandmother suggested that he should find an occupation that would always be in demand; when Hex left school, he figured that medicine was a pretty safe bet.
 [46]

c 2016 - Trading Futures
 [47]

There were no rogue states remaining and the world’s secret services kept almost every square inch of the planet electronically monitored. The only two remaining superpowers - indeed, the only two remaining sovereign powers - were the United States and the Eurozone, who dominated the world between them. But they were on the brink of war, as both were trying to extend their sphere of influence into power vacuums in North Africa and the Middle East. “Peacekeepers” from both sides took up positions.

Elsewhere in the world, Eurozone RealWar tanks were covertly sent into action against American corporate interests. The situation was a tinderbox that could have lead to World War Four. The United Kingdom was now part of the Eurozone and the semi-elected British President Minister was bound by the Articles of European Zoning, despite polls showing 84% of the British population taking the American side in the dispute. Britain secretly maintained its own intelligence service, run by the ancient Jonah Cosgrove. The American President was Felix Mather, former CIA astronaut.

There was a European national soccer team, and games were divided into eighths to fit more adverts in. Rhinos only existed in clonetivity. Human cloning was possible, but very expensive. Hypersonic jets could cross the world in a few hours. Nuclear bombs were used in civil engineering. There was a North China and a New Kabul. Kurdistan was a country in its own right, in a region blighted by civil wars. British Airways had gone bankrupt, the BBC was replaced by the EZBC. More than one channel tunnel was operating.

The international flow of money was through the IFEC computer system. Arms dealer Baskerville launched an ambitious con job to take control of it. He posed as a time traveller from ten thousand years in the future, and offered Cosgrove a time machine in return for access to the powerful EZ ULTRA computer. The CIA got wind of the plan, as did Sabbath’s Time Agents; the eighth Doctor, Anji and Fitz; and the rhino-like alien Onihrs. The Doctor and his companions uncovered Baskerville’s plan just as shootings in Tripoli triggered a potential world war.

The earliest human clones were mindless, bred for use as perishable stunt doubles in motion pictures. Humanity became uneasy with the morality of this and ended the practice. Cloning fell into disuse, but scientists periodically revived the art.
 [48]
The British government recovered dystronic missiles - weapons that could destroy all organic life in a set radius - from an Arcadian spacecraft.
 [49]

In 2017, Adelaide Brooke began her doctorate in Physics at Rice University in Texas, having studied Physics and Maths at Cambridge.
 [50]
Ramirez Harmon was president of Mexico in 2017.
 [51]

? 2017 - The Enemy of the World
 [52]

Rockets could now be used to travel between continents on Earth - the journey from Australia to Hungary took around two hours. Hovercars made shorter trips. Television pictures were broadcast via videowire.

The political situation on Earth had stabilised. National concerns were put aside and the world was reorganised into large administrative areas called Zones, such as the Australasian, North African and Central European Zones. The world was organised by the United Zones, more properly known as the World Zones Authority. Commissioners dealt with multinational concerns such as Security matters. A Controller led each Zone.

One of the major problems the world faced was famine. The scientist Salamander announced he could solve the problem using his Mark Seven Sun-Catcher satellite, which made previously desolate areas of the world into fertile farmland that robots could harvest. Within just a year, the Sun-Catcher had solved the problems of world famine, allowing crops to grow in Siberia and vineyards in Alaska. In the more fertile areas, concentrated sunlight forced growth: each summer could bring three or even four harvests. Salamander was hailed as the saviour of mankind.

Soon after Salamander’s announcement, a series of natural disasters struck, including a freak tidal wave that sank a liner full of holidaymakers in the Caribbean and the first volcanic eruptions in the Eperjes-Tokaj mountain range since the sixteenth century. These were caused by Salamander’s followers in a bunker below Kanowa using his technology. Salamander had convinced them that the Earth’s surface was highly radioactive, and that they had to fight back against the aggressors.

The second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria uncovered the truth: that Salamander had been gradually assassinating his political opponents within the United Zones and replacing them with his own people in a bid to become the dictator of Earth. Salamander was defeated when his followers in Kanowa learned there had been no global nuclear war. He tried to escape in the TARDIS, but was sucked into the Vortex when the Ship’s door opened in flight.

In 2017, UNIT closed their file on the Quadrant Incident.
 [53]
Kakapos were extinct on Earth by 2017.
 [54]
The Doctor placed a personal advert “Ace - Behind You!” in an
NME
from 2018. Ace bought a copy outside Ladbroke Grove hypertube station.
 [55]
Paletti wrote the opera
The Fourth Sister
, including the stirring
Rebirth Aria
.
 [56]

The risk of nuclear warfare diminished after the Southport Incident, when governments realised that the stockpiling of atomic weapons could only lead to a serious accident or all-out nuclear warfare.
 [57]

The Doctor acquired a ten pound coin from the time of King William V.
 [58]
Single Molecule Transcription replaced the microprocessor in 2019.
 [59]

From around 2019, Earth experienced forty long years of chaos including climate change, difficulty with the ozone layer and an “oil apocalypse”. The human race almost reached extinction.
 [60]

2020 - The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood
 [61]

The eleventh Doctor, Rory and Amy arrived in the village of Cwmtaff, South Wales, in the right year but the wrong place, as they had been aiming for Rio. Rory and Amy saw their future selves in the distance, but the Doctor was more interested in patches of blue grass: evidence of minerals unseen in Britain for twenty million years.

Cwmtaff was the site of the most successful recorded boring in human history - a shaft had been drilled to a depth of 21 km. The drill threatened an underground Silurian city, and its automatic systems awoke Silurian warriors to stage a response. The Doctor found that these were a different branch of the species to the one he had previously encountered.

One Silurian, Alaya, was killed. Her enraged sister Restac attempted a coup against Eldane, a peaceful Silurian leader willing to negotiate with humanity. Eldane decided that his people were not ready to share the planet and activated a decontamination programme, forcing the warriors to return to their cryochambers. The humans Nasreen Chaudhry and Tony Mack accompanied them into stasis. The Doctor altered the Silurians’ systems to awaken them in a thousand years, when they would hopefully be welcomed by humanity. The drilling site was destroyed.

Restac killed Rory, who was dematerialised by a Crack in Time. Amy lost all memory of him, and remembered seeing only her future self, not Rory, in the distance.

The population of Earth was six billion.
 [62]

2020 (17th July) - TimeH: Kitsune
 [63]

Ikari, the brood mother of the White Claw Kitsune, thought the developed world had lost its way and sought to punish humanity for it. She started a clothing business, Hide and Chic, whose offerings were woven with chaos-inducing hair. Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish averted an apocalypse by convincing Ikari to refrain from unleashing animal spirits of vengeance, and to instead take her kitsune and find a new world.

2020 - House of Blue Fire
 [64]

Eve Pritchard’s work into Rapid-Emotional Programming (REP) technology - a means of extracting phobias, either to create fearless soldiers or to cripple a target population with “fear bullets” - reached an apex at Fulton Down Military Base. Four test subjects with chronic fears, including Private Sally Morgan (who had athazagoraphobia, the fear of being forgotten about) were connected to an REP control apparatus: the Blue Fire System. The seventh Doctor prevented the Mi’en Kalarash from manifesting via Blue Fire and triggering global Armageddon, and banished it back to the wasteland between realities. Afterward, he accepted Sally as his new travelling companion.

2020 - The Power of the Daleks
 [65]

The colony on Vulcan was in danger of being “run down”. Mining operations had not proved economically successful and the governor of the colony, Hensell, faced mutiny. An Examiner from Earth was due to assess the Vulcan colony in two years.

The chief scientist, Lesterson, discovered what he thought might be the colony’s salvation - a buried alien spaceship. He quickly determined that the capsule was constructed of a metal that wasn’t found on Vulcan and could revolutionise space travel. Lesterson opened the capsule and discovered that it contained three inert Daleks. The lure of reviving them proved too great for the human colonists.

At first, the Daleks cunningly pretended to be servants, dependent as they were on the power provided by the humans. The Daleks promised to build a computer that could predict meteorite showers and protect the weather satellites, a move that offered huge financial savings and won the colonists’ trust. All the time, though, the Daleks were setting up their production line. Dozens of Daleks swarmed across the colony within a matter of hours, exterminating every human in their path.

The newly regenerated second Doctor, Ben and Polly witnessed the Daleks’ rampage. Once again, though, the Daleks’ external power sources proved their undoing - although they guarded their static electricity generator, it proved possible to destroy the power source. This rendered the Daleks immobile once more.

Steffi Ehrlich, a future Mars colonist, was born in Iserlohn, Germany, in September 2021.
 [66]

2021 (12th October) - The Harvest
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