B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (151 page)

2009 - TW: Golden Age

The “time store” at Torchwood India required an ever-growing amount of energy, which it collected via an energy net that consumed the potential, unfulfilled history of people’s lives. Over the last few months, the net had made thousands of beggars and transients in India vanish without a trace. Captain Jack’s Torchwood team investigated the resultant temporal emissions in Delhi. The Duchess tried to widen the time store’s effect and roll the whole of Earth back to 1924, but Jack sabotaged the device. The Duchess and her colleagues were unwilling to venture into the modern world; the device exploded, destroying them and Torchwood India.

2009 - TW: The Dead Line

Professor Stella Courtney, an old flame of Jack Harkness, was now a grandmother and one of the country’s top neuroscientists. The electrical virus trapped in the disused Madoc House escaped and quickly infected twenty people - including Captain Jack - by ringing their phones. Through these victims, the virus sought to achieve the critical mass required to ring every phone across the world. Ianto and Gwen destroyed the virus with an electro-magnetic pulse, causing its victims to awaken.

2009 (Wednesday to Sunday) - TW: Risk Assessment
 [1293]

Torchwood destroyed the planet-eating Vam when it manifested on Earth, but not before it further ravaged the SkyPoint apartment complex. Agnes Havisham, the Torchwood Assessor, awoke once more from stasis and colluded with George Herbert Sanderson - her fiancé - to help the supposedly peaceful xXltttxtolxtol settle on Earth. Torchwood helped to destroy a xXltttxtolxtol bridgehead once the aliens’ conquering intentions became known, and Havisham left to start a new life with Sanderson.

(=) 2009 - TW: The Undertaker’s Gift

Hokrala Corp’s use of warp-shunt technology to send people and messages into the past had widened the Rift, and the Already Dead - beings who sought to keep the Rift from their enemies’ hands - exploited this by triggering a temporal fusion device known as the Undertaker’s Gift. The resultant explosion destroyed Cardiff. An enormous Vortex Dweller came through the widened Rift and reclaimed its child, Zero. In gratitude to Captain Jack, the Dweller rewrote history to stop the Already Dead from building their temporal device.

(=) 2009 (4th August) - The Eternal Summer
 [1294]

A hyperspatial warp-core explosion originating in 1899 caused a time-stasis field to encompass all of Stockbridge. The bubble trapped six decades of the town’s history, and the residents were made to experience their lives over and over again.

In one version of events, the entity Veridios awoke and endowed the fifth Doctor and Nyssa - who had been thrown forward in time by the explosion - with some of its life force. As “the Lord and Lady of the Manor”, they ruled Stockbridge for at least a million years. They became ancient, desiccated husks that leeched off the histories of their subjects.

In another version of events, the Doctor and Nyssa awoke in Stockbridge to find that he was regarded as the town doctor and she was its postmistress. The Lord and Lady threatened to expand the bubble so they could feed upon humanity, but the Doctor collapsed it, erasing the Lord and Lady’s timeline.

Only Maxwell Edison remembered these events. The bubble’s collapse hurled the Doctor and Nyssa into the future, to Stockbridge’s last days.

2009 (August) - TW: Consequences: “The Wrong Hands” / “Virus”
 [1295]

Jack, Gwen and Ianto recovered an alien weapon - a Torrosett 51 binary heat-cannon - that was an offering from an alien mother who had abandoned her child. Half of the cannon self-destructed, destroying the child and a Happy Price supermarket. The next day, the child’s vengeful father infected Jack and Gwen with a Kagawa Virus that paralysed them with a mental feedback loop. Ianto acquired an antidote from a black market operation selling alien tech, and destroyed the group’s base of operations with a Tregennan demolition bomb.

2009 (August) - The Three Companions
 [1296]

Garry Lendler was still working as a merchantman and purveyor of quality goods for extra-terrestrial clients. He found the Doctor’s TARDIS adrift in space with Thomas Brewster inside, and gave Brewster a job overseeing his warehouse. Brewster’s negligence caused a coffin-loader - the ultimate space-scavenger, swarms of which would appear in the last few days of a doomed world - to hatch.

The coffin-loader hid under London, and started generating a mould that triggered an environmental crisis. The Amazon basin went without precipitation for four months, but London had six straight days of rainfall. Flooding was reported halfway up to Farringdon, and Westminster was only approachable by boat. Parts of the Underground were closed, and the government relocated to Birmingham. Cliff Jones, now attached to the Institute of Mycology in Brazil, attended an emergency summit in New York concerning the crisis. The profit-minded Lendler coordinated with Jones to seed Earth’s clouds with a substance that would eliminate the mould.

On Lendler’s orders, Brewster searched for the Doctor’s former associates, and tracked down Polly Wright and the Brigadier. Polly now worked in a governmental office in Westminster. On Tuesday the 18th, Brewster had Polly and the Brigadier meet at the Hope Springs Café on Beagle Street. They aided him as an alien hunter died while exterminating the coffin-loader, in a struggle that ravaged half of Trafalgar Square with fire. Lendler’s cloud-treatment eliminated the coffin-loader’s mould, and Polly and the Brigadier coerced Lendler into providing further clean-up services at reduced charges. Brewster left in the TARDIS.

2009 - TW: Ghost Train
 [1297]

The computer directing space traffic for legions of Powell clones sought to leave its dying homeworld. It opened up a wormhole to Earth, and used its trains to send its components through for reassembly. An escapade with one such train resulted in Rhys being thrown back in time two weeks. With help from Ianto, Rhys’ future self set about creating the very events that had led to his involvement in the incident - including a disruption to Cardiff’s satellite navigation and the theft of at least three dozen fridges.

2009 - TW: Consequences: “Consequences”

Nina Melanie Rogers, a history student at Cardiff University, happened upon the sentient book that had an interest in Torchwood. The book compelled Nina to observe Torchwood, but Jack, Gwen and Ianto fulfilled history by sending the book through the Rift to 1899, then Retconned Nina to eliminate the book’s influence on her.

2009 - TW: “Fated to Pretend”

Dozens of people transformed by Monsieur Jechiel into undead beings had felt compelled to congregate beneath Cardiff. One of the undead went rogue and killed sixteen people, whereupon Jack - to prevent more such incidents - told the undead that he could either take them to live as workers on the Heretical Moons... or they could end their lives simply by walking into the rain. They opted for the latter.

2009 - TW: “Somebody Else’s Problem”

Gwen traced production of R’Ochni - a street drug that killed any human who used it - to Mister Quatnja’s operation at the run-down Huffern Estate. She convinced Jack to put Quatnja out of business.

2009 - TW: “Hell House”

The shadowy horror that Jack defeated in 1902 sought revenge, but Torchwood drained its essence into an improved version of Lionel Barrett’s spectral containment unit.
 [1298]

2009 - TW: Department X

The economic downturn motivated Firestone Finance to return to the practice of finding and selling alien technology. One of Firestone’s customers - a bullion facility in the Ural Mountains - wanted the alien within Gareth Robert Owen as a defence system. The formerly tiny alien was now mature and ravenous, and had killed thirty-four people. Torchwood destroyed the creature, and Owen resumed ownership of his family’s department store.

2009 - TW: Ghost Train
 [1299]

The inter-dimensional link formed by the alien traffic computer caused some maladies afflicting its homeworld to bleed through to Cardiff. Torchwood variously dealt with a rain of fire (officially cited as the result of climate change) on Cardiff’s west side, dragons, shapeshifting assassins, a “yellow, blotchy” plague in Ryder that Ianto cured, a few outbreaks of mass hysteria and an increase in the Rift’s “field of despair”. Jack and Rhys commandeered one of the computer’s inter-dimensional trains and attempted to out-race a fireball headed down the link - causing Rhys to be thrown back in time while Jack crashed the train into the defunct Queen Street Station, killing three hundred Powell replicants. The inter-dimensional link was severed, and Jack put the alien computer to work managing Cardiff’s traffic lights.

2009 – TW: The Devil and Miss Carew
 [1300]

“Fitzroy”, a single entity who wandered the stars, and had been born of nothing, desired a home. It struck bargains with pensioners, rejuvenating their vigor in exchange for their aid. Rhys Williams’ great uncle, Bryn Williams, refused to bargain with Fitzroy and was given a fatal heart attack.

Joanna Carew, the octogenarian head of First Valley Computings - a developer of operating systems for utilities companies, and so had unique access to the Western World’s power supplies - accepted Fitzroy’s bargain. She began dampening electrical systems first in the UK, then Europe, so Fitzroy could arrive on Earth without facing electrical interference. Torchwood intervened - Carew fell to her death, and Fitzroy was kept at bay in deep space.

2009 – TW: Submission

Torchwood dealt with an alien casino, and blew up some aliens as they fled in a minivan down the M4 - at the cost of also damaging the Severn Bridge.

The alien aboard the
Guernica
in the Mariana Trench had exhausted Captain Doyle’s memories, and sent out a cry for help - between 23:42 to 23:46, GMT, anyone in the world who had their head under water heard a distorted form of it. Ianto asked Carlie Roberts - a marine biologist, old flame and former Torchwood coworker - for help. Jack pulled rank at UNIT using the Doctor’s name. Torchwood was transported in the USS
Calvin
, an Arleigh Burke class destroyer, to the
Octopus Rock
: the first in a new class of submarine, equipped with diving suits made from dwarf star alloy. Jack, Gwen, Ianto and Carlie visited the Trench and encountered the alien, which died as they returned to the surface.

Martin Trueman was an astrologer... and a fraud. Just as he confessed this to one of his clients, he was hit by a shooting star charged with the power of the Ancient Lights, and turned into a genuine psychic.
 [1301]
A partner in a law firm, Peter Anthony Dalton, died after falling down a stairwell in his home.
 [1302]

(=) Dalton accepted the Trickster’s offer to live again, and became a pawn in one of the Trickster’s gambits against Sarah Jane Smith. Peter later cancelled out the deal, which restored his death.

Torchwood Series 3: Children of Earth

2009 (a Tuesday to Saturday in September) - TW: Children of Earth
 [1303]

The 456 heralded its return to Earth with a transmission that caused all of humanity’s children to stand frozen in silence for one minute at 8:40 GMT. Hours later, the 456 made the children stop and chant, in English, in unison, “We... we... we... are... we are... coming.”

John Frobisher, the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, ordered the deaths of anyone connected to the 1965 incident with the 456 - Captain Jack Harkness included - to prevent the government’s previous dealings with the aliens becoming known. Government operatives wrongly believed that Jack’s immortality stemmed from the Torchwood Hub, and so destroyed it with a bomb planted in Jack’s stomach. Simultaneous to the Hub’s obliteration, Earth’s children chanted, “We are coming... back.”

On Day Two of the crisis, the 456 sent the UK government instructions for the construction of an environmental chamber suitable for the 456’s representative. This was built in the M15 headquarters, Thames House. The children of Earth stopped and chanted: “We are coming tomorrow.”

On Day Three, the children of Earth pointed toward London as the 456’s representative descended from the skies in a column of fire, and occupied the chamber in Thames House. Humanity’s children declared: “We are here.” Prime Minister Brian Green withdrew from dialogue with the 456 per objections raised by General Austin Pierce of the US and Colonel Oduya of UNIT. It was agreed that the UK civil service, as a nonelected branch with no authority of state, would conduct the talks; Frobisher was chosen as Earth’s ambassador. The 456 told Frobisher that it wanted a “gift”: 10% of the children of the entire human race.