B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (134 page)

Iris and Panda went to San Francisco, New Year’s Eve, 1999, to find the biggest, happiest party in history - but Iris opened up a multi-dimensional rift after spilling gin into her bus’ engine. Lional Pandeau, a version of Panda from a parallel universe, was drawn through the rift and poured more gin into the engine, widening the rift and summoning an army consisting of versions of himself/Panda from alternate realities. Parts of San Francisco were beset by flying vampire Pandas from five million years in the future, as well as the lumbering monstrosity Panda-zilla. Panda pulled Lionel and himself into the rift, sealing it and returning the other Pandas to their native realities. Iris went in search of her lost friend as San Francisco authorities dismissed reports of the Pandas as a hoax or part of the millennium festivities.

1999/2000 (30th December to 1st January) - Doctor Who - The Movie
 [862]

The seventh Doctor was transporting the Master’s remains to Gallifrey from Skaro when the Master - now a gelatinous creature - forced the TARDIS to make an emergency landing. The Doctor was shot in San Francisco and died on the operating table when surgeons misunderstood his alien physiology, regenerating into his eighth incarnation. The Master took over the body of an ambulance worker. He attempted to steal the Doctor’s remaining lives by use of the TARDIS’ Eye of Harmony, and his scheme threatened to destroy the entire planet. The Doctor stopped the Master with the help of heart surgeon Grace Holloway, and the Master was sucked into the TARDIS’ Eye.

UNIT spread a cover story blaming the freak effects caused by the opening of the TARDIS’ Eye of Harmony on “freak fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic pole”.
 [863]

2000 (Saturday, 1st January) - Millennium Shock
 [864]

Silver Bullet Solutions developed chips to help combat the Y2K bug, but this was a front by the Voracians, who were trying to re-assemble the sentient computer virus Voractyll and seize control of Earth’s computers. The Silver Bullet chips exacerbated the switch-over from 1999 to 2000, temporarily cutting power in Malaysia, Auckland and parts of Britain, and jamming Hong Kong’s traffic. The fourth Doctor, working with MI5 agent Harry Sullivan, re-programmed the Silver Bullet chips to also endow Voractyll with a Y2K sensitivity. The creature terminated, and the Voracians, serving as part of Voractyll’s command nodes, perished also.

Disgraced Prime Minister Terry Brooks tried to exploit the chaos and declare martial law to advance his private agenda. Officially, it was said that his Cabinet lost faith in him, and he resigned “for personal reasons”. Philip Cotton, Brooks’ deputy, was appointed his successor.

2000 (1st January) - “The Forgotten”
 [865]

The fourth Doctor brought the second Romana to Paris again, this time for the turn of the millennium. They saw a mime vanish into a space-time portal and followed him, meeting soldiers from 1810. Together, they disturbed the sanctum of Taureau the Minotaur, who demanded the answer to his riddles in return for the key to the portal. The Doctor pickpocketed the key, and Taureau was destroyed when he opened the door.

At the turn of the Millennium, the Brigadier became a media icon as he led King Charles’ troops in a blockade of Westminster Bridge. The King offered him a role in the Provisional Cabinet, but he declined.
 [866]

The Twenty-First Century

“The twenty-first century is when everything changes, and you’ve gotta be ready...”
 [867]

The nonprofit organisation Livingspace was formed at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
 [868]
News interpretation software sifted the media for the user’s own preferences. Televisions could be set so that news bulletins automatically interrupted regular broadcasts.
 [869]

Early in the twenty-first century, Britain joined the Ecu, the single European Currency.
 [870]
The pacifying gas pacificus was developed in the twenty-first century.
 [871]
Walton Hummer was a popular three-foot tall kazoo player from the twenty-first century.
 [872]
The musician Sting was assassinated in the early twenty-first century.
 [873]

Since 1969, Billy Shipton had “got into” publishing, then video, then DVD production. On the tenth Doctor’s instructions, he secretly inserted Easter Eggs onto seventeen DVDs that Sally Sparrow would come to own in future.
 [874]

The Doctor theorised that if Queen Victoria was infected by an alien werewolf cell, it might take “one hundred” years to mature in her children, and “be ready” by the early twenty-first century.
 [875]

The broadcast journalist Riley Smalls was cryo-frozen in the early twenty-first century, and would be revived as a Cryogen in the twenty-sixth.
 [876]
Archaeologists excavated the throne room containing the robotic version of Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the early twenty-first century.
 [877]

2000

By the year 2000, the
Hourly Tele-press
kept the world’s population up to date with events around the globe. One of the
Tele-press’
most popular features was the strip-cartoon adventures of The Karkus.
 [878]

The first Space Wheel was constructed in 2000.
 [879]
In the same year, Arthur Tyler III was working on the Space Dart and Earthrise private space projects. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he threw himself into his task.
 [880]

Based upon
The Book of Tomorrows
, the White and Crimson Chapters of the Orphans of the Future both believed that aliens would return to Earth in the year 2000. When this failed to happen, the Chapters fell into a philosophical crisis, and their representatives met for the first time in a century. They increasingly focused upon mention in the
Book
of a human herald - variously identified as “Sarah” and “SJS” - who would serve as a harbinger of the aliens’ return. They increasingly believed that Sarah Jane Smith was this very herald.
 [881]

NASA discovered the six-billion-year-old Cthalctose Museum on the Moon. Construction started on Tranquillity Base to better study the alien artifact, and there were regular moonshots to service it.
 [882]
The Greytest Hips of Johnny Chess
was released in the early 2000s.
 [883]

Henry Louis Noone, a friend of Ace, was born on 10th February, 2000.
 [884]
When Thomas “Hex” Schofield was two, his mum left him in Bolton with her mother, Hilda Schofield, while she sought work in London.
 [885]
When Eve Pritchard was four, she was struck by a car, and entered a near-death state in which the Mi’en Kalarash inserted a shard of itself into her mind. Over the next twenty years, it influenced her to develop Rapid-Emotional Programming technology.
 [886]

Hokrala Corp, a law firm in the forty-ninth century, believed that Torchwood and humanity as a whole would bungle the challenges of the twenty-first century, and wanted to sue Earth for a mismanagement of history. To this end, Hokrala commenced, once every year since the turn of the century, trying to land a writ on - or otherwise assassinate - Captain Jack Harkness.
 [887]

(=) 2000 - “The Glorious Dead”
 [888]

In an alternate timeline, Paradost was a planetary museum that celebrated a million alien races. Earth, known as Dharkan, was a wasteland ruled by Cardinal Morningstar - who the Doctor previously knew as Katsura Sato. The eighth Doctor, Izzy and Kroton were on Paradost when it was invaded. Kroton left the Doctor’s company to take control of a reality-bending device known as the Omniversal Spectrum, and restored the established timeline.

2000 - Sontarans: Old Soldiers
 [889]

Brak had now been held captive for eighty years, and had lived longer than any Sontaran in history. Captain Alice Wells of UNIT escorted Brak to the Weapons Crisis Conference in Geneva, where he was to testify concerning his ties to Kobalt Blue. Brak planned on providing the secret of harnessing Kobalt Blue, but before he could do so, a Sontaran operative executed him for cowardice.

? 2000 - Time and the Rani / The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind
 [890]

The newly regenerated seventh Doctor and Mel prevented the Rani from creating a Time Manipulator - a world-sized cerebral mass, with immense powers over time and space - on the planet Lakertya. Afterwards, the Rani’s bat-like servants, the Tetraps, rebelled and forcibly took her back to their homeworld, Tetrapyriabus, so that she could develop additional supplies of plasma for them...

Tetrapyriabus was once populated with a species not unlike dinosaurs, but these had gone extinct, and so the Tetraps had turned to animal husbandry of other species. The Rani escaped Tetrapyriabus, but was forced to leave her TARDIS behind. She intended to re-engineer a conventional spacecraft so that it could travel in time, and to then exact revenge upon her former servant, Urak.

c 2000 - Grave Matter
 [891]

The European space probe Gatherer Three explored the outer planets and returned to Earth, where it was discovered to have picked up alien DNA. This was named “Denarian”, and seemed to have miraculous medical properties. In actuality, Denarian was an alien creature that possessed bodies to survive. A team of scientists relocated to the Dorsill islands off the south west coast of the UK and began secret experiments on animals and the local population. The sixth Doctor and Peri found the islands overrun with walking corpses, but the Doctor discovered that a second dose of Denarian cancelled out the first.

c 2000 - Imperial Moon
 [892]

The fifth Doctor and Turlough materialised near Earth’s moon to avoid hitting themselves in the Vortex. A time safe aboard the TARDIS opened and revealled a diary purporting to be the log of a Victorian expedition to the moon - which historically did not occur. They went to 1878 to learn the truth.

c 2000 - The Marian Conspiracy
 [893]

Time disturbances surrounded history professor Evelyn Smythe. The sixth Doctor met her and concluded that the problem lay with her ancestor John Whiteside-Smith, who lived at the time of Elizabeth I. They departed to investigate.

(=) By Evelyn’s time, the immortal Mozart had been producing substandard works for hundreds of years. Some thought that “Mozart” was a shared alias. He’d begun work on his 10,000th symphony (the soundtrack to a remake of
The Italian Job
), had started to use electronic drum kits, had appeared in various Eurovision entries, and, tragically, had discovered hip-hop.
 [894]

Evelyn Smythe told her student Sally about the time she and the Doctor met some pirates.
 [895]

c 2000 (October) - The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
 [896]

Lethbridge-Stewart, occasionally performing surveillance work for UNIT, looked into the latest of a string of mysterious deaths in the Lanyon Moor area. An archaeological expedition there had woken up the Tregannon scout Sancreda after eighteen thousand years of semi-dormancy, and Sancreda sought to use his vast mental abilities to exact revenge on his brother Screfan for abandoning him. The sixth Doctor and Evelyn aided the Brigadier as Sancreda summoned his survey ship from space, but Sancreda discovered that he had inadvertently killed his brother during their initial survey on Earth. Sancreda tried to destroy Earth, but the Brigadier swapped out a crucial component from Sancreda’s psionic cannon. The resultant energy backlash destroyed Sancreda and his survey ship.

c 2000 - Excelis Rising
 [897]

On the highly-industrialised planet Artaris, border disputes sprang up between the city-states of Gatracht and Calann. The public came to regard “the warlord Grayvorn and his lost treasure” as the stuff of myth, although officials at the Imperial Archives’ Black Museum privately acknowledged the tales as true.

The Relic had become the property of the Excelis Museum, and an Imperial Edict forbade the head curator from turning the object over to anyone beyond the Empress, her Regent or the Etheric Minister. Possibly due to the Relic’s presence in the city, mediums were able to commune with the dead.

At the Museum, the sixth Doctor found the former warlord Grayvorn trying to re-acquire the Relic. An altercation between them resulted in a discharge of the Relic’s energies, which dissipated Grayvorn’s physical form. His consciousness became embedded in the Museum’s stone walls, and he waited for someone to die in the museum so he could inhabit their body.