Big Bang Generation (15 page)

‘Signals,' the Doctor said. ‘They're just like TV signals, beamed out into space, going nowhere but picked up. By someone. And deciphered.'

‘Or not,' Bernice added. ‘Half the time the guys that find this stuff are watching an episode of
Top Gear
and assume it's a comedy show about three bumbling mechanics building stupid methods of transport.'

‘It isn't?' asked Jack.

‘It isn't,' Bernice confirmed.

‘But that one with the bathtub…'

‘That's
Last of the Summer Wine.'

‘Oh.' Jack frowned. ‘What's the difference again?'

‘Aaanyway,' the Doctor continued, smiling at Jaanson, ‘the last time this happened, these Ancients of yours sent out their signal. When no one replied, they rather gave up.'

‘Went out on a binge,' Bernice added helpfully.

Jaanson looked like someone had just defiled his personal Holy Grail. ‘The Ancients are sublime! You cannot malign them in this way.'

‘I think she can,' the Doctor said.

‘I think she did,' Peter added.

‘Absolutely,' Bernice said, tapping the Glamour, or lodestone or whatever it really was. ‘This little doohickey is a transmitter trigger, shooting those signals out. Except they're not really TV signals. More like big-nasty-let's-change-the-matter-of-the-universe signals,' she added.

‘And that is not good news.' The Doctor threw an arm around Jaanson's shoulders. ‘You do see that, don't you, Professor?'

‘Not really, no.'

‘Your life's work has been not so much uncovering a potential gateway to glory and Valhalla or Avalon or Nirvana or the Axis Mundi or Paradise or even Sto'Vo'Kor. No, effectively all you've dedicated yourself to doing is finding the one switch for a big transmitter that, when it was switched on, would broadcast a pulse not just through space but through time as well, in every direction, and that ultimately would change the history of everything. And because it would go in every direction, everything would be in flux. No sooner would history be rewritten in the past than it would be rewritten in the future, which in turn would require a rewrite in the past, which would trigger a rewrite in the present and so on and so on. Are you following this?'

‘Not really,' muttered Jaanson.

‘Basically, you would turn off the universe. Oh, it'd take a few millennia as the reshaping, rewriting and remapping crawled along the Web of Time, but you wouldn't be
aware of that because you'd be you one minute, a dog the next, a grain of sand the next, a beetle for maybe a second longer and so on. Eventually, the signal would go back to either the Big Bang or forward to the Heat Death of the Universe and rewrite those and it's all over. Just a big void of perpetually imploding and exploding chronon energy that finally wipes itself out.' The Doctor smiled. ‘Simple, yes?'

Standing slightly away from the group, Kik the Assassin put a hand on Peter's shoulder. ‘In a changed reality, perhaps you could love me?'

Peter smiled at her. ‘But it would only be for less than a heartbeat.'

‘Ah, but what an exhilarating, amazing heartbeat that would be.'

Peter shook his head. ‘I still wouldn't be worth it.'

‘You would,' Kik the Assassin continued. ‘Believe me, I know myself even if you don't know yourself. It would be the most wonderful heartbeat in the history of creation.'

‘I'm sorry,' Peter said, ‘that I can't give you what you want. I wish I could. But I can't.'

Kik the Assassin nodded. ‘I understand. I shall never truly accept it, but I do understand why it can never be.'

The Doctor was standing slightly back from the Glamour, now in its rightful position on the altar, and took out his sonic screwdriver. ‘I don't think this is really going to do much, but perhaps it'll scramble the thing enough that I can buy some time to work out how to really shut it down.'

‘How?' asked Ruth.

‘I'm a Time Lord,' the Doctor said.

‘And that means what in this situation?' asked Jack, not unreasonably.

‘It means that there are many chronon-energy-based events that I can withstand better than most. Time schisms, time eddies, time distorts, time fields, time ruptures, time quakes…'

‘Cakes? What's a time cake?' Jack laughed.

‘He said “quake”, nitwit,' Ruth said, nudging him in the ribs.

‘Not “time cake”? I'd love to eat time cake,' Jack replied.

The Doctor sighed dramatically. ‘As I was saying, although not for long and not always as precisely as I'd like, as a Time Lord I can withstand the changes in time that surround such events for a while. A bit. Longer than any of you lot can, anyway. So I suggest that Benny moves you all back to safety while I focus on shutting this thing down.'

Out of the corner of his eye, Peter saw something. He tried to draw his gun but he wasn't fast enough. Nor did his yell propel the Doctor or Bernice into action quickly enough.

What he saw was Professor Jaanson throwing himself at the Glamour. With a cry of ‘No, you can't do this,' the man slammed his fists down, hitting, punching and swiping everything at once.

The Doctor had a split second to recall what he and Bernice had seen back in Australia in 1934, when Tomas
Schneidter's men had vanished as the universe began rewriting itself. But, cruel as it was to think, those people had been insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Here and now, this was different because Horace Jaanson's entire heritage had probably been created purely to serve the Ancients. Here, Jaanson was right at the epicentre of it all, and he winked out of existence.

At exactly that nanosecond, Professor Jaanson's entire family tree was also erased – the human cell that brought his first ancestor into being at the dawn of time was simply never created. That cell of amino acids and DNA just became another grain of sand. All the Jaansons throughout time winked out of existence and, as the universe tried to accommodate this change and rewrite itself, all the things touched by the Jaansons in whatever major or minor way rewrote themselves. And all the things that connected with those things rewrote themselves too, backwards and forwards in time. As Jaanson's parents vanished, so did Jaanson's own potential offspring.

Time, in both directions, and quite a few sideways ‘what if' ones, just ceased to happen.

And as that series of time echoes dissipated, so others that fell into their place, like water filling a hole on a beach, ceased to exist too. And the more time and the universe tried to fill those holes, the more things were rewritten or ceased to be…

In Marbella, a barman in 1964 became a lump of coal…
In fourteenth-century Turkey, a sword became a blade of grass…

In thirty-first-century Swansea, a wedding party all turned into dinosaurs before turning into amoebas before becoming bananas before becoming…

A gumblejack swimming in the seas of Medazzaland turned into a hamster and drowned; the air escaping its lungs became fire; the smoke became granite, the tiny flakes becoming a wooden chair…

A human woman and a Martian warrior celebrating their eighteenth wedding anniversary with their three children posed for a holovid when they all became two-dimensional beings that suffocated in three-dimensional winds…

On Legion, Keri the Pakhar saw her glass of water become the molten core of a planet before she was vaporised…

The twin planets of Romulus and Remus became respectively solid gold and solid glass, the sudden change in density disrupting their solar system, causing a black hole to open up. As it began sucking everything into itself, the black hole became a small furry rabbit-like creature, unable to exist in the vacuum of space, so it exploded…

Mr Thomas Gordon Taylor hid under his bed with his wife
and daughter, wondering how they were going to survive the destruction of Sydney as his entire ancestry became cockroaches…

The Big Bang fizzled like a damp firework then blinked out…

The Heat Death of the Universe went cold and, as time fractured backwards from that, it met fractured time coming forward from the lack of Big Bang – time hit time and just ceased…

At the eye of this storm, the Doctor felt time die and pushed himself forward, exactly as he had just told his friends he could. He could see Kik the Assassin and Cyrrus Globb frozen in a beat of time, unable to move, unaware that they couldn't, oblivious to the fate that would hit them in a microsecond or a decade, depending how fast the Ancients' power affected the localised area. He reached for the controls that had destroyed Jaanson. As he stretched and stretched, they seemed to be an infinity away and yet beneath his hand at the same time.

He became aware of another hand on his, pushing him forward. In the slowest of slow motions, he managed to turn his head. In his mind he was screaming, ‘What are you doing? And how?' but of course time didn't allow those thoughts to reach the physical plane of his mouth. Instead he allowed Professor Bernice Summerfield to add her strength to his.

Then there was more. Ruth and Jack, each pushing Bernice's hand firmly against the Doctor's. They had to know what was going to happen – they weren't Time Lords, they weren't protected.

Then there was Peter, also grasping his mother's hand, his strength a real asset. But they were going to die, they were going to have never existed. Everything they had done, every scheme, every adventure, every wrong they had righted would be unravelled.

Not that it would matter to Time. Because if the Doctor could stop the Ancients' power, everything should snap back into place. He could hear the voice of his old tutor at the Academy on Gallifrey…

‘What are the time streams of ephemeral beings when weighed against universal, multiversal cataclysm? Sacrifices must be made.'

For a brief second, as all their hands hit the Ancients' device, there was utter calm. Utter serenity.

‘How are you doing this?' the Doctor asked.

Bernice grinned. ‘All those years travelling with you, years using Time Rings, years frankly just messing around with causality – it's affected me, too, made me immune to Time, to some extent. Why do you think I age so slowly? And gracefully, I know you're thinking gracefully.' She smiled. ‘And if all that extra juice, all that stored-up chronon energy means I have to sacrifice it to save a universe, hell, Doctor, I can't say it hasn't been fun.'

Ruth was staring at Jack. ‘I do love you, you know. And if I'm going to die here, dying with you beside me makes me happy, not sad.'

Before Jack could reply, Peter just swore. ‘You're making a little bit of sick creep into my mouth.'

Then they were gone – a brief flash of white, and Ruth, Jack and Peter were not even memories. The Doctor looked at Bernice. Kind, clever, witty (caustically so at times) and strong Bernice Summerfield. And she smiled at him, knowing her time was over. And the Doctor watched as her face blurred and changed. And he was facing Clara Oswald. Who smiled, blurred and became Amy Pond. Who blurred and became Rory Williams, then River Song, then Wilfred Mott then Donna Noble, Martha Jones, Jack Harkness, Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler, Cinder, Molly O'Sullivan, Tamsin Drew, Lucie Miller, C'rizz, Charlotte Pollard, Samson Griffin, Gemma Griffin, Mary Shelley, Grace Holloway, Ace McShane, Hex, Mel Bush, Evelyn Smythe and so many others…Face after face after face, his past companions swam into existence and out again, getting faster and faster so that he couldn't discern them until, with a final flash, there was one face. Small, dark-haired, elfin featured, a big grin on her face.

‘You came back after all, Grandfather,' she said.

Then she too was gone.

And the Doctor was…elsewhere.

It was dark, so very dark, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't adjust. But he knew, somehow, that he hadn't gone blind, it really was just too dark to see anything.

After a few seconds that might have been minutes or hours or days – he had no way of telling because he had no
real sense of self other than his own mind telling him this was real, this was happening, this was –

Light. Something shimmering towards him; high, high up. He let his eyes focus on it, letting it all come into full vision. When it did, he understood what he was witness to.

There were three beings before him, and many others further off, he was sure of that, although he couldn't actually discern anything of them.

In fact he couldn't really discern those close to him. They had more a suggestion of shape, of physicality, of being rather than actually being there.

‘Hullo,' he said, surprised but pleased that his voice worked.

There was silence. Then a voice echoed back ‘Hullo', but not in mimicry.

‘I'm the Doctor. Where am I?'

‘I'm the Doctor. Where am I?'

‘Last time this happened to me, people repeating my words, it really didn't go very well for me, so if we could avoid all that. I'm guessing that you are trying to translate my speech, understand my language. So maybe if I keep talking, you'll just let me know when you're done, and that way I'll know when to shut up, because it is very exhausting doing this. I mean, have you any idea just how exhausting it is talking into a void and—'

‘You are the Doctor. Welcome, Time Lord. That is a vast and powerful domain to claim lordship over.'

The Doctor smiled wryly. ‘Some would say differently.'

‘Some would be wrong. Time is everything. Time is all. Without Time, nothing can exist, no flow, no flux. Destruction.'

A little light glowed off to the right and the Doctor could see some shapes. It was Bernice and her friends, but they were in slightly different clothes. Globb, Kik the Assassin, Jaanson and some military types were there too – all of them, frozen in a moment of time.