Shughie McPherson woke up that morning with a pounding headache and spent a full thirty minutes lying on his untidy bunk staring at a crack in his iPad while it tried and failed to connect with the local wifi. His twitter feed was a reminder of the thirty-seven years he'd muddled through with more hashtags than he'd had hot dinners, and more hot dinners than he'd been employed. He was married once but that hadn't lasted long as it had been for a reality TV show.
One day - or, to be more accurate, the first day - his wife had said to him, ‘Shughie, you’re a waste of semen!’ Then she’d taken the netflix subscription and gone back to the bachelorette mansion and the camera crew had followed her.
He had never tried to find her, but they were still facebook friends.
Of course, that was ages ago and his tweets were no more about recent events. About a week ago some of his Glasgow snapchat pals had said, ‘Shughie, we’re going to Soviet Russia to get a week's work at the nuclear reactors so we can be bit-part extras in the next series of Chernobyl! Why not come along?’
‘I’ve nae screen presence,’ he explained. ‘My youtube series 'SM Drinks Whatever's Under The Kitchen Sink And Tries Not To Die!' nae got a single subscriber! You’ll ha’ to do without me this time. Hashtag mope.'
‘We’re going in wee Jamie’s entourage,’ they replied. ‘It’ll give you background to draw upon as a background character, ya spineless goon!'
Eight of them got into the van, two in front and six mixing crystal meth in the back and by the time they reached Moscow nine hours later, Shughie had forgotten where they were going or why and was now insisting he was a Greek sponge fisherman called Spiros and that Neil Peart was the greatest drummer in human history.
He remembered waking up in this reactor the next morning. JR Ewing, a ship’s riveter from Clydeside whose mother was really in Dallas, was shaking his shoulders. ‘Shughie, rouse yoursel! We’re awa’ back to the SS Erewhon! We're gonna leave the Earth to its fiery demise and nae mistake, it's each survival ark for their selves!’
Shughie’s sleepy brain tried to make sense of the situation. ‘But I'm a sponge fisherman in Crete. I need none of this,' he said through his left nostril.
‘Och, this was nae funny the first three time!' shouted JR. He was already dressed in full radiation armor and had a pump action shotgun. He'd used metal polish instead of toothpaste and was screaming 'The end times are upon us! Climate change was real! It was nae just an excuse to shove corks up the arses of gurnsey studs!'
Jamie, the non-binary hipster who identified as a strip of turquoise wallpaper, came to the hatch of the reactor and yelled down, ‘Will you no come and get in the planetary shuttle, JR? It's heading for Proxima Centauri and waiting for nae one!‘
JR Ewing protested. ‘There’s wee Shughie here, still in bed.’
'Tch, he's nae a viable specimen for rebuilding humanity! Now if you don’t get yoursel into my colony ship double quick, you can stay here and die! Ah'm off!’
The two men scrambled up the ladder.
Shughie thought they’d both farted at him as he left. Or was that the atmosphere turning poisonous? He turned over and went back to sleep, dreaming of a much better ending to Game of Thrones.
When he woke up later the reactor was completely silent. Pangs of hunger drove him out of bed. Standing on the landing, he called out: ‘JR? Jamie? Third person whose name starts with J?’
No answer.
He went down the stairs into the hall and called again. Still no answer. He stumbled into the supply cupboard and found the words LET IT END scrawled in blood and feces on the wall and the deputy supervisor hanging from a light fitting.
However, there was a packet of Tim-Tams and as everyone knew, they were everlasting. It was only after he ate the last one he remembered that was actually just in an advert where a genie gave a wish of an everlasting Tim-Tam packet and not actually something in real life and he was probably going to starve to death.
So, with no food, no light, no electricity, rising radiation levels and dwindling oxygen supplies Shughie did the only logical thing and recorded a self-pitying reaction video until his camera battery failed. Then he found a sixpack of wicked-strength Leopard-issue vodka and spent the next four days unconscious in a pool of human waste.
After half an hour staring at the crack in the iPad and thinking about his life, Shughie McPherson got up and decided that everything he remembered was fake news and actually he was really great and popular and all his friends would come back and the world hadn't ended. Or, if it had, it was now a reality TV show and he could appear in it as a star and gain the adulation he'd neither worked for nor deserved.
He stretched and yawned, pulled on his trousers and shirt on top of his head, did a few chicken impressions and went down the ladder for a bracing cup of that glow-in-the-dark gloop dripping from the canister with that radiation logo on it. He dimly remembered someone saying this was unhealthy but screw them. He felt calmer, better rested and his teeth were now big they extended out of his jaw. He was also burping and farting pure oxygen, but his body probably knew what it was doing.
Scratching his throbbing elongated head and pulling out tufts of hair, and decided the time had come for action.
It was then he realized his genitals had dropped off during the night, so that was action off the menu for the foreseeable future.
He climbed out of the reactor core and into the shattered ruins of Russia. Not a building was still standing, no pane of glass was intact. The clouds had been ripped from a sky that burnt with a blistering ultraviolet purple. There were tumors growing on trees and dead birds lay everywhere.
Shughie's huge muscular arms got him to the surface and the refreshing lack of air and he went about looking for other survivors or ideally a TV camera crew. On the way he ate all the dead birds, which tasted better than KFC. Idly Shughie began to wish he was back in Glasgow, in the friendly district where he had always lived until Brexit had forced them to film Eastenders in Scotland and all the natives had been deported.
A sudden panic gripped him. Where was everyone? Were they all dead?
He started running and shouting. Street after street was deserted, front doors of houses gaping open, roasted corpses sizzling in the open air.
Shughie stopped dead, fell to his knees, clasped his hands together, and realized that if he was the only living thing left on Earth than that meant he was the best-dressed man in the world and the target demographic for every possible media outlet. He was famous. He was vital. He was important.
He was a snarling toothy nuclear-blooded mutant on an orphan planet.
Hashtag Feeling The Same Energy!
Chapter 1 - Unwanted Tranquility
It was a beautiful summer’s day. From a clear blue sky, the sun shone down on the perfect leisure resort in the perfect paradise planet. It was a place to dream of: the ideal holiday destination, a long-awaited haven for retirement and relaxation.
It was also the home of an unseen menace that threatened all life.
Soon, it was to be the scene of the Doctor’s most grotesque and terrifying adventure.
Yeah, that's official. It's canon now. It's written down.
***
Through the vortex, that mysterious region where time and space are one, sped an extraordinary police box that was not a police box at all. It was, in fact, a highly sophisticated space/time ship called the TARDIS, a name taken from its initials, Time and Relative Dimension in Space.
The TARDIS was dimensionally-transcendental and inside was an impossibly large control room, dominated by a many-sided central control console. In the centre of
the console was a giant rude-looking yellow crystal called the time rotor that thrust purposefully up and down when the TARDIS was in flight.
Right now, a strange ill-sorted group were trying to tidy up a giant suckered tentacle that been severed off a gigantic space-squid and left twitching in an evil-smelling goop on the control room floor.
Busy with a scrubbing broom was that mysterious traveller in space and time the Doctor herself, a blonde-haired young woman with an elfin face and eyes that twinkled with a whimsical intelligence. She wore a long lilac overcoat, a rainbow-striped T-shirt with suspenders holding up petrol-coloured culottes.
Helping her was a younger girl of about twenty in slacks and a blouse, trying not to inhale too much of the ichor dripping off the severed tentacle. Her name was Yasmin Khan and no one would have been surprised to learn she was, or rather had been, a probationary police officer. Especially as she never shut up about it.
Next to her was a cheerful-looking young man in a jacket and jeans. He too was a native of 2018 Sheffield and his name was Ryan Sinclair and no one would have been surprised to learn he had dyspraxia and was, or rather had been, estranged from his father. Especially as he never shut up about it.
The fourth member of the group appeared to be the eldest, a man of about sixty with short grey hair and a big smile that showed off his laughter lines. His name was Graham O'Brien and he called Ryan 'grandson', and no one would have been surprised to learn he was, or rather had been, a married to his chemotherapy nurse. Especially as he never shut up about it.
The odd company had been carried off through time and space in an extraordinary series of adventures. Ricocheting between Earth and a variety of alien planets they had encountered the Stenza, the Remnants of Desolation, racists in the Deep South, giant spiders chasing someone who wasn't Donald Trump, racists in the Punjab, creepy delivery bots in Space Amazon, mud-witches during the reign of King "Ducky" James, a sentient universe shaped like an unconvincing rubber frog and even Daleks. Who were also racist.
In many ways, their most recent adventure had been the most unsettling of all. Once again they had returned to Earth only to encounter a deadly danger with an invasion from another universe by glowing energy beings intending to turn humanity into organic harddrives for a nefarious reason never truly explained. They had also encountered a regenerated version of the Doctor's former friend and worst enemy, the Master, who had also dragged the Doctor to 1940s Paris under the jackboot heel of the Nazis because they hadn't met racists for at least five minutes.
Luckily, the Master looked like he'd had a lick of the tar brush about him so the Nazis, being racists, turned on him. And probably sent him to concentration camp. Or maybe not. Either way, the Master had tried to kill everyone and then left the Doctor a voicemail message explaining that everything she knew was a lie, her entire life had been based on a conspiracy, and that he'd also destroyed their home planet Gallifrey in a massive off-screen massacre that was too expensive to feel.
Somehow the fact that this terrifying adventure
Couldn't they just have a day off? Was that too much to ask?
Deciding the first thing to do was have a holiday, the Doctor resumed scrubbing the giant rubber tentacle off her floor. Typical, she'd just been about to suggest some fried calamari for supper and now this...
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