B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (209 page)

Zoe Heriot read the ingredients of a tea box in a kitchen on Pluto.
 [223]

2092 (29th August) - “Ground Zero”
 [224]

Ace was arrested on suspicion of theft at the Notting Hill Carnival, but the policeman was actually Dixon, an agent of Threshold. The seventh Doctor met another agent, Isaac, who showed him the abducted Susan.

Meanwhile, Ace met the similarly kidnapped Sarah Jane and Peri. The Doctor learned that Threshold were an organisation that opened doors in space and time for their clients - their clients in this case being creatures living with the collective unconscious of mankind, the Lobri, who manifested as giant fleas. The TARDIS interior was heavily damaged. Ace sacrificed her own life to save the Doctor from the creatures - but the last Lobri nonetheless started to manifest on Earth. The Doctor materialised the TARDIS inside the Lobri, destroying it. He then returned his surviving companions to their rightful places in time, and was left travelling alone.

Tracks for a linear-induction monorail on Mars were first laid in 2093. Terraforming efforts started in 2095; the University of Mars was founded in the same year.
 [225]

2096 - The Indestructible Man
 [226]

Inter-continental travel was impossible, and the world was broken into city-states. France and the former United States of America were in a state of civil war. Japan had invaded New Zealand. There was a United Zion Arab States. Only Australia was spared the worst effects of a collapsing society. The second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe defeated the Myloki’s plan to use Captain Grant Matthews as the ultimate agent of mankind’s destruction.

In 2097, the eighth Doctor, Fitz and Trix prevented an unnamed alien race from exterminating the Pope on Mars, allowing her to consecrate the first cathedral on another planet.
 [227]

The economic boom promised by the Transit system didn’t arrive. Instead, the ability to move freely around the solar system caused massive economic and social upheaval. Small companies saw an opportunity to undermine the industrial zaibatsu. Household names such as Sony, IBM and Matsui went under, and new companies from Brazil, China and Africa - such as Imbani Entertainment, Mtchali and Tung-Po - took their place. Power shifted to Washington, Brazilia, Harare, Beijing, Tehran, Jacksonville and Zagreb. Japan’s economy collapsed and plans to terraform Mars proved more costly than had been expected. The money ran out, the floating cities planned for the Ionian Sea were never built and Australia starved. A new genre, silicon noir, charted the resultant corporate battles in the datascape.

The recession was not harsh on everyone. Relatively speaking, Europe was less prosperous than before, but many in Brazil, Africa and China were a great deal wealthier. For millions in Australia, though, and at the Stop - the end of the Transit line at the Lowell Depot - extreme poverty became a way of life. Whole areas became dead-end ghettos, and urban areas became battlegrounds for streetgangs. Vickers All-Body Combat Systems offered the option of using the Melbourne Protocols, automatically preventing the wearer from shooting civilians. Millions fled the riots using the Transit system, and relief workers rehoused the poor anywhere that would take them, mostly on Mars. Private security firms such as the KGB and V Soc became very rich. With freedom of transport, humanity became more open to ideas from other cultures and to more experimental ways of living. Communal marriages enjoyed a brief vogue.

In 2090, Yembe Lethbridge-Stewart came out of retirement one last time and raided the headquarters of the genetics company IMOGEN. He stole a single child, the first of the second-generation ubersoldaten, and all the files pertaining to her creation. He named her after his great-grandmother, the historian Kadiatu.
 [228]

Two hundred years after they’d travelled with Pierre Bruyere, the tenth Doctor and Martha visited a museum of Polar Exploration.
 [229]

Out to the Stars

After mankind “had sacked the solar system they moved on to pastures new”.
 [230]
Twenty-first century ships still travelled slower than the speed of light and the crews were placed in suspended animation. It was not unusual to discover such ships many centuries later.
 [231]
These were NAFAL ships, meaning Not As Fast As Light.
 [232]
Nuke burning cadmium-damped spacebuckets were the first ships used to conquer the stars. The galaxy was full of the so-called “nukers” at one time. The first ships Earth built for deep space exploration were the starjammers, and great fleets of them were constructed. By 51,007, only one ship of this type, the
Paine
, remained.
 [233]

Huge Pioneer stations were set up, lining the way to the stars. They helped with refuelling and restocking of colony ships.
 [234]

Manned space travel remained enormously expensive prior to the advent of gravity plating. Once the hyperdrive was developed, Earth authorities - including the United Nations Aeronautics and Space Administration (UNASA) sent out unmanned Van Neumann probes to the first colony worlds to prepare them for human habitation. The probes were extremely adaptive but often disruptive - one landed on Arcturus and started to build a city, oblivious to the fact that the planet was already inhabited.
 [235]

The children of Susie Fontana Brooke and their children forged their way across the stars to the Dragon Star and the Celestial Belt of the Winter Queen. They mapped the Water Snake Wormholes. A Brooke fell in love with a Tandorian prince, which was the start of a whole new species.
 [236]

Prospectors such as Dom Issigri and Milo Clancey were the first men into deep space. Clancey’s ship, the “C” Class freighter LIZ 79, remained in service for forty years. Spacecraft at that time were built with the metal tillium and used a thermonuclear pile to supply power. Mined ore was sent to refineries in “floaters”, slow unmanned vessels. An almost indestructible metal, argonite, was found on some of the planets in the fourth sector. Soon, all ships were made from argonite, which became the most valuable mineral known to man.

Clancey and Issigri became rich over the next fifteen years of working together, especially after they had spent ten years strip-mining the planet Ta in the Pliny system. Clancey became something of a legend on Reja Magnum. The partners eventually split, though, and Issigri went on to found the Issigri Mining Company.
 [237]

Robots such as the self-activating Megapodic Mark seven-Z Cleaners had some degree of autonomy. Scanners were developed that could track individuals. Miracle City had been masterpiece of the architect Kroagnon, but he refused to move out and let the residents sully his work by moving in. He was forced out, but the booby-traps he left behind massacred many of the residents. Kroagnon fled and was allowed to build Paradise Towers. During the war, youngsters and oldsters were evacuated to the 304-storey building, where the authorities forgot all about them.
 [238]

Earth’s Colonial Age began in the 2090s. Multinational conglomerates started the Century Program, sending colony ships to a dozen worlds in the hope of alleviating the population crisis on Earth.
 [239]

Slow Century Class ships were sent into deep space - once they arrived at their destination, they became useful space stations. Two such vessels, the
Castor
and the
Pollux
, were sent out into a demilitarised sector by the New Rome Institute to house dangerous criminals. Earth at this time was ruled by a World Minister. The Pacific Rim Co-operative was in conflict with the SubSaharan Autonomies. Quad fuel cars were operating.
 [240]

The Pinkerton Intergalactic Agency of detectives soon followed colonists into space, solving crimes on colony worlds where law enforcement was often erratic or corrupt.
 [241]
The prison planet Varos was established in the late twenty-first century to remove the criminally insane from galactic society.
 [242]
Humanity converted the moon Erratoon into a prison planet by encasing it in a geodesic sphere.
 [243]
The seven planets of the binary Meson system were colonised at this time.
 [244]

Human Travellers fled oppression on Earth by stealing a ship. When human ships reached Arcturus Six, the Earth ambassador was told that Travellers had already landed.
 [245]
Developers filled in the Serpentine in the late twenty-first century.
 [246]
The corporation Imogen built a facility on Titan to clone generation two ubersoldaten. The Doctor visited this period to download Kadiatu’s user manual.
 [247]

The Global Mining Corporation replaced the US Army, and provided military training for corporations. The world language was “International American”.
 [248]
Galactic Salvage and Insurance went bankrupt in 2096.
 [249]
Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart acquired a Triangulum Swift 400, a ship built in the twenty-first century.
 [250]

In Salzburg, 2098, the leader of the Eugenic Cult - Eldritch Valdemar - was betrayed by his colleagues and convicted of treason, murder and mental domination. He was given a death sentence.

(=) The time child Chiyoko transported Valdemar back to nineteenth century Earth.
 [251]

2099 - Snowglobe 7
 [252]

Global warming had now accelerated the melting of the polar ice caps to the point that the world’s governments preserved large portions of the Arctic and Antarctic in ten enormous domes around the globe. Seven of these were transferred from public to private ownership and became holiday resorts. Service Robots were common in this era.

The TARDIS landed in Snowglobe 7 in Saudi Arabia, where the tenth Doctor and Martha found that the sole-surviving Gappa had been disturbed from its dormancy in the ice, and was hatching offspring from eggs. The Doctor destroyed the Gappa, and Snowglobe 7, by detonating the fusion core of the spacecraft that had brought the Gappa to Earth a hundred thousand years before.

c 2099 - “Sun Screen”
 [253]

The Great Solar Shield - a series of networked mirrors in space that decreased the sunlight that fell on Earth, and was a stop-gap means of reducing global warming - was one of mankind’s greatest technological achievements in the twenty-first century. Energy parasites, the Silhouettes, were drawn to the Shield’s energy, then Earth. The tenth Doctor and Martha re-attuned the Shield to project a rainbow that destroyed the Silhouettes, but the Shield broke up. The Doctor ferried the Shield crew back to Earth in the TARDIS, and told Martha that humanity would develop an ingenious means of dealing with global warming in a few years’ time.

The sixth Doctor and Grant Markham went back to see the
New Hope
leave for the Centraxis system in 2100. Within ten years, the colonists aboard would found Grant’s home planet of Agora.
 [254]

Mankind didn’t develop particle guns until after the twenty-first century.
 [255]

The Twenty-Second Century

The Doctor flew a Spitfire in the twenty-second century.
 [256]
He also took Victoria to the NovaLon Hypercities of the twenty-second century.
 [257]
Vincent Grant, the Butcher of Strasbourg, unified the Western Alliance in the early twenty-second century.
 [258]

c 2100 - Paradise Towers
 [259]

Paradise Towers, a self-contained, award-winning tower block that had been abandoned during the war, was rediscovered in the early twenty-second century. With only old and young people in residence, society became stratified. The young girls became Kangs - with an array of “icehot” slang and “high fabsion” (sic) clothing - the old women became Rezzies and the Caretakers tried to maintain the building by rigidly sticking to their rule book. Each group had a distinctive language, and each preyed mercilessly on the other. At least two of the residents resorted to cannibalism.

The Kangs split into three rival factions - Red, Blue and Yellow - although “wipeouts” or “making unalive” was forbidden (as were visitors, ball games and fly posting).

Kroagnon’s disembodied mind had been exiled to the Towers’ basement, but he now possessed the Chief Caretaker using the science of corporal ectoscopy. He put the Towers’ robotic cleaners to the task of eliminating the residents, but the various social factions united alongside the seventh Doctor and Mel. A war deserter, Pex, sacrificed himself to kill Kroagnon. Social order was restored, and Pex was remembered in wallscrawls.