Five-Minute Fiction

Discomfort Zone

by Ewen Campion Clarke

The Doctor knew it was always a gamble to set random coordinates, especially as a maiden voyage for two new travelling companions, but the TARDIS had done them all proud. They’d fetched up somewhere in Earth’s distant future on a verdant planet called E’et’han, materializing in a magnificent city sculpted out a single piece of something resembling polished marble.

No sooner had the Doctor, Nancy and Jacko stepped from the police box they had been met by the natives – pale blue androgynous humanoids with almond-shaped eyes and light silver robes. Their leader, Is’tar, had welcomed them without incident, accepting their strange arrival and odd appearance with inscrutable pleasantness. There was no accusations of spying or trespass, and despite the rather formal introductions, everything seemed friendly enough.

Jacko was still gossiping with Is’tar, still finding it hard to wrap his mind around the lack of clear gender among aliens but he at least was talking to them. Nancy, meanwhile, was just sitting on a bench and staring out across the countryside.

The Doctor dropped down onto the bench beside her. “Hey-up,” she grinned. “What do you think of the landscape eh? Makes a change from all those foggy cobbled streets and workhouses, doesn’t it?”

Nancy stared blankly ahead, motionless and silent.

“You know, according to our tour guide over there,” the Doctor went on, nodding at Is’tar, “this is the only city on the whole planet. Everything else is just mountains and meadows, rivers and woods. Very big lakes, but no actual oceans, but there’s no pollution, nothing. Just a communist society of institutionalized happiness. Of course, there’s probably some giant gas-eating crabs running it all behind the scenes, but it looks very nice at the moment, huh? Beautiful. And double the suns, double the sunsets!”

Still Nancy said nothing.

“All right, lass, what’s wrong?” sighed the Doctor. “This place is beautiful, if only on the surface. Worth cracking a smile, huh?”

“This is hell,” said Nancy quietly.

“You what?”

“This isn’t the world I know,” she said, tears trickling down her freckled cheeks. “A city made out of bone and filled with demons. The sky is the face Satan himself.” She drew her legs up to her chest and buried her face in her knees.

The Doctor glanced up at the sky. True, it was a rich cherry red colour and the twin suns vaguely recalled two burning orange eyes, but it was hardly demonic. “Come on, Nance,” she chided. “You’ve seen sunsets and dawns. The sky can turn red all the time. And this sky is red all the time, that’s all.”

“The sky should be blue!” fumed Nancy. “This isn’t right! This is the devil’s work!”

“Oh come on! There’s no devils, no great satanic mills…”

“This isn’t right!” Nancy insisted. “Why did you bring us here?”

The Doctor considered her answer. Reminding the barmaid of the random coordinates issue probably wouldn’t help. “I thought you’d like it,” she said simply. “You asked me about all the strange things I knew. Well, I found it out by going places like this. Worlds on the other side of the sky.”

“This is the underworld,” Nancy said. “Only the wicked would ever want to come here, where the sky’s the colour of blood and no men or women live here, just those monsters with their dead blue skin…”

“They’re not monsters, Nancy. They’re people.”

Nancy laughed bitterly. “Just how far must you have fallen to see them that way?” she demanded. “Just when did you stop seeing this as evil?”

The Doctor wasn’t smiling now. “Nancy, listen. You’ve been living in one part of one town in one country of the world. You’ve spent your life looking at shadows on a cave wall, you haven’t even seen the fire that’s casting them. You don’t even realize you were in a cave. I thought if I got you to see where you were, to realize that there is a world above the caves, that there’s more out there… I thought you’d like it. Would you really like to stay in the dark?”

“Yes!” sobbed Nancy, smacking her fist against the bench with enough force to crack a knuckle bone. “I want to stay in the dark! I don’t want to see these things that are in the light!” Her anger dwindled down into tears. “Please, Doctor. Take me back home. Please.”

The Doctor sighed. “Okay, Nance. Back to London 1888. No charge.”

“Why couldn’t you leave us there?” Nancy sobbed.

The Doctor said nothing, musing on that question. She barely remembered much of the last few days since her last regeneration. The confused witch hunt on a copycat of Jack the Ripper had required companions for her to get to the truth, and Jacob and Nancy had been caught up in events already. The stifling male-dominated society had rubbed the newborn Time Lord up the wrong way, and she’d been eager to get away to somewhere else. Anywhere else.

And since Jacob and Nancy had ended up in the TARDIS, she’d brought them along for the ride. Widening their perspective with a display of Gallifreyan time technology usually impressed her travelling companions.

Usually.

Was expecting some 19th Century Londoners to automatically accept and embrace life on the TARDIS actually closed-mindedness on her part? She stubbornly believed Nancy would be better off exposed to the vastness of infinity, just as Nancy stubbornly believed she was been plunged into hell. Which one of them was right? Didn’t Nancy have the right to reject life with the Doctor? Was believing she was automatically superior unique to this latest incarnation, or had the Time Lords always been like that?

The Doctor patted Nancy on the back. “Come on, let’s find Jacob and get you two home,” she said gently. Together they rose and went looking for Is’tar and the others.

Maybe I’ve been the one looking at the shadows on walls. Seeing the fire for the first time isn’t always a good thing, is it?

The Enemies of Dr Who

The Annuled Annual Story Covers

9th Doctor (con't)

 
‘So what is this place?’ asked the Doctor casually. ‘Underground bunker?’

‘High security zone,’ the leader said casually. ‘This continent is officially uninhabited, and the nearest settlement is around fifty thousand kilometres away.’

‘Is it?’ the time traveler asked innocently. ‘I just trusted to my ship’s intuition.’

‘You mean your flight computer malfunctioned?’ one of the other Thals asked, curious.

‘Something like that,’ the Doctor replied vaguely. If any of the Thals had noticed the TARDIS, they certainly hadn’t recognized the strange blue box as the mythical transport of ancient legends – assuming the ancient legends existed. ‘So what’s all the security for? Are you in some sort of trouble?’

‘We shouldn’t be discussing restricted information with intruders,’ said the leader, though clearly she was enjoying having someone new to talk to. ‘Suffice it to say, important people work here. Even if you really are just a lost tourist, you’re in a lot of trouble trespassing here.’

‘Story of my life,’ the Doctor shrugged. ‘Or at least a strong recurring narrative theme, anyway.’

* * *

‘Once I see the face-mask I can work out exactly who’s tomb with a view we’re in, like reading the inscription of a grave stone. We’re not going to disturb anything here or steal anything…’

‘Even though we could,’ said Adam, examining the masks and necklaces on display near the carriage. ‘Purest gold, absolutely priceless…’

The Doctor, face aghast, turned to look at him. ‘Excuse me,’ he said in a low, sharp voice. ‘Are you suggesting we pawn this stuff at some twenty-first century auction website?’

‘Well, couldn’t we?’ Adam retorted. ‘Just the gold plate on this wood would pay off America’s gross national debt! And no one knows we’re here, no one would know if we took anything. It wouldn’t change history, would it? The archaeologists would just think it was tomb-robbers…’

‘It would be tomb-robbers!’ snapped the Doctor. ‘That’s precisely what we’d be doing! The only difference between that and digging up a grave to help yourself the corpse’s pockets is you’d be using my TARDIS – and that’s not on. We do not loot history! Rose, tell him!’

Rose tore her gaze from the shadows. ‘Yeah, the Doctor’s right. Whoever’s buried here, they were a living person and they’re entitled to rest in peace…’

‘Until the archaeologists and the other tomb-raiders do it,’ Adam retorted. ‘It’s already happened, this stuff is going to be stolen. Why shouldn’t we help ourselves?’

* * *

Rose realized that they were in some kind of pub, and Captain Jack was looking through binoculars at the blackboards on the walls, with the drinks scrawled in chalk. ‘I think I’ll order… it.’

‘“It?”’ echoed the Doctor, unimpressed.

‘As in “all of”,’ Jack explained. ‘Everything.’

‘Well, you’re paying,’ said Rose, having to yell to be heard.

Captain Jack delved into his jacket pocket and took out what appeared to be single pound coin. As he held it out, Rose saw the coin had become a diamond-like gem. ‘It’s a mesomorphic rock, should cover the costs. Don’t spend it all at once, though.’

‘Those,’ said the Doctor in a smug, holier-than-thou voice, ‘are illegal tender in seven galaxies. Including this one. The staff have probably been taught how to spot it.’

‘Yeah, but given it takes four hours minimum to be sure, and given how packed this place is, I think they’ll take it,’ Captain Jack retorted. ‘Besides, who would suspect a pretty girl with brown eyes?’

‘Never been to an estate, then,’ Rose replied, then began to struggle her way through the crowd over to the bar.

* * *

‘Still, someone’s alive,’ said Rose, trying to stay cheerful. She called into the darkness. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello?’ came the faint response. It was Rose’s voice.

‘You were right about the echo,’ Rose told Jack.

‘An echo,’ said the Doctor, joining them at the doorway. ‘Or a mimic.’ He pulled a slim pen-torch from his pocket and shone it down the corridor ahead. The corridor was quite messy compared to the one they’d just left; rather than neat arrangements of organized plants, flowering vines and thick foliage spilled over onto the floor, or tangled and matted themselves on the walls and ceilings despite the lack of any trellises.

The passageway was deserted.

‘Maybe it was a trick of the, well, not light,’ Rose mused. ‘But noise.’

‘The quiet playing tricks?’ The Doctor didn’t sound convinced. ‘Come on, let’s start with the new seedlings section. There must have been someone there when the emergency happened. Bound to be clues.’

‘Did this distress call have any details?’ asked Jack as they moved down the corridor.

‘Nope,’ said the Doctor unhelpfully. ‘Just three words in no particular order.’

‘SOS?’ Rose guessed.

‘Somebody Help Me,’ the Doctor replied.

* * *

The voice that had filled their minds spoke once again. We are affecting your retinas so you can see us, that is correct. We have no true forms, no physical bodies, for you to perceive or find comfort in.

‘What are they?’ asked Jack, his voice unusually hushed. Like Rose, he felt like he was in the presence of something that should be shown deference. ‘Some kind of electromagnetic radiation?’

‘Something like that, yeah,’ said the Doctor, completely unimpressed.

We are composed of electrical energy, the basic raw existence of which all primal matter is composed. There is no need to fear us, the voice went on. All participants’ physical needs are supplied, and no harm comes to anyone. They came from their own spheres of their own free will to yield their minds to us. You yourselves are not in any discomfort or pain?

‘No,’ Rose admitted.

‘But we didn’t come here of our own free will,’ Jack added.

Your vessel arrived in our complex, the voice replied. We did not bring it here.

‘Could be a malfunction,’ the Doctor conceded. ‘Could be anything. But why do you need to do any of this? Why do you need to do a massive census survey on at least five million species in that one corridor?’

We require their input, said the voice. It obviously didn’t feel like giving any more detail.

‘You’re recording everything in their brains,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a lot of input.’

It is required, the voice repeated.

‘Why?’ Rose challenged.

The explanation is both long and complicated.

‘Then talk quickly and use simple words,’ the Doctor retorted.

* * *

Six novellas set in the universe of the Ninth Doctor, featuring enemies and friends old and new. In a universe changed top-to-bottom by the Time War, does the Last of the Time Lords still have a place in this new order? Given options to reclaim the past or embrace the future, the Doctor will depend on his companions more than ever before - but will they be up to the challenge?

Coming soon from Nigel Verkoff Publishing

a subsidiary of the Order of St. Macka the Usurper Inc...