B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (50 page)

In 1843, the first Doctor and Susan met Sherlock Holmes’ father, Siger Holmes, in India and learnt that the natives believed in a gateway to another world.
 [913]

(=) 1843 - Reckless Engineering
 [914]

The Eternine gambit reached fruition in 1843, when Malahyde activated the Utopian Engine. The eighth Doctor’s intervention meant that instead of aging Earth to death, the device advanced time on the planet’s surface forty years. This created an alternate timeline in which an estimated 95% of mature humans and animals either aged to death or died from shock. Humanity’s children, suddenly aged to adulthood, became savage creatures of instinct named the Wildren. The remaining pockets of civilisation struggled to survive in disparate settlements. In some parts, cannibalism became acceptable.

In 1844, the Doctor helped Alexandre Dumas with
The Three Musketeers.
 [915]
The Doctor met Charles Dickens.
 [916]
Dickens’ work became far darker in tone after he encountered Montague’s killer dolls in 1845.
 [917]
Thomas Brewster, a companion of the fifth and sixth Doctors, was born in or around 1846.
 [918]

1847 (winter) - Demon Quest: A Shard of Ice
 [919]

Writer Albert Tiermann was being rushed through the Murgin Pass for an audience with the King at his Winter Palace in San Clemence when the TARDIS materialised in front of his carriage. The fourth Doctor and Mike Yates showed Tiermann a book of his fairytales - a book which had yet to be written. Tiermann had run out of stories to tell the King, and was desperate to lay hands on the book. The lodge was menaced by a monster, which killed Hans the footman. The Doctor and Tiermann tracked the monster - the shapeshifter Demon that the Doctor encountered in Roman Britain and Paris - to its lair. The Doctor revealled that on this occasion, the Demon had assumed the guise of Albert’s Queen. She had engineered the Doctor’s arrival and wanted to take him to her home, called Sepulchre. The Doctor and Yates escaped her clutches, and the Doctor took Tiermann to safety, before heading back to Nest Cottage.

Tiermann related this story to his King.

A fairy-like man gave little Eleanor Maycombe a pocketbook that could make real anything she wrote within its pages. The deal required Eleanor to wake the little man up after a year and a day - but she didn’t, and he slept as she grew to adulthood. The family housekeeper, Mrs Hitch, confiscated the pocketbook and in future used it to keep herself and Eleanor off parish relief.
 [920]

1849 (3rd October) - Nevermore
 [921]

The eighth Doctor attended to some business in Baltimore, Maryland, and happened upon an ailing Edgar Allan Poe. He begged the Doctor to look after his “final message to the world”, which he’d written on some sheets of paper he kept in a bottle. After hospital orderlies took Poe away, the Doctor found that Poe hadn’t emptied the bottle before putting the paper inside - meaning the ink had run, and Poe’s text now read, “[obscured] [obscured] verdigris [obscured] [obscured] manifold [obscured] a shadow over the [obscured] [obscured] principia of the human [obscured]...” With a sigh, the Doctor poured Poe’s final writings into the gutter. Poe died soon after.

(=) Time distortion threw Edgar Allen Poe’s death into flux. In alternate histories, he either died in a gutter four days before history recorded or happily survived and stayed on a drinking binge. The distortion abated, and Poe expired on 7th October, 1849.
 [922]

w - The Great Houses’ military wing established a training facility at the future site of the Japanese city of Kobe, circa 1850. Chris Cwej, already their agent, served as the template for the Army of One project and underwent mass replication. Cwej’s duplicates, collectively called the Cwejen, fell into three types: the original blonde version (“Cwej-Prime”), a shorter, dark-haired version (“Cwej-Plus”) and an extremely rare armoured version (“Cwej Magnus”). The original Cwej increasingly became a loner, wanting less and less to do with himself.
 [923]

The traveller Edward Marlow married his beloved Georgina at Camden Chapel. They lived in his uncle’s house in Camden Town, and had two sons: Edward and Henry. The elder Edward explored the world and wrote about his discoveries, but went missing in 1850.
 [924]
In Dry Creek, a town in America, Sheriff Samuel P Hayes secretly killed the prospector William Donovan over the love of a woman. The town’s mayor and owner, Thaddeus Sullivan, blackmailed Hayes into keeping quiet as he stole the rights to Donovan’s gold mine, and in the process renamed the town “Fortune”.
 [925]

The Doctor considered 1851 to be a bit dull.
 [926]
The wormhole conveying a spaceship with the cyborg child Alex, his guardian Boolin and a Skishtari gene egg overshot its intended destination and deposited them in the village of Hexford, 1851. Boolin lost his memory, and became known as “Mr Bewley”. He tutored Alex, who was taken in by a rector, and made to wear a paper bag on his head to disguise his cyborg nature.
 [927]

1851 - The Haunting of Thomas Brewster
 [928]

When Thomas Brewster was four or five, his mother killed herself by jumping off the Southwark Bridge. Brewster never knew his father, and his first memory was that of his mother’s funeral. Brewster’s aunts and uncles blamed him for his mother’s suicide, and it was decided that he should be sent to a workhouse, to be raised by the parish.

The fifth Doctor and Nyssa were briefly at the funeral, as they were trying to determine when young Brewster came under psychic influence from beings from an alternate 2008. From his mother’s graveside, Brewster glimpsed the departing TARDIS.

1851 - Other Lives
 [929]

At the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, civil unrest was threatened when two French visitors - Monsieur de Roche and his wife Madeleine - went missing. Charley and C’rizz aided the Duke of Wellington in a deception to cover up their disappearance, but the visitors had simply time-jumped ahead in the TARDIS and returned without incident. The eighth Doctor was mistaken for the absent traveller Edward Marlow, and assisted the man’s wife in retaining her household. C’rizz was briefly imprisoned in a freak show and crippled its owner, Jacob Crackles.

1851 (12th September) - “Claws of the Klathi!”
 [930]

The seventh Doctor landed in London at the time of the Great Exhibition, and met Nathaniel Derridge of the New Lunar Society, a scientific club. The Doctor learned that some curious murders had taken place in Docklands, and was attacked by a robot at the scene of the crime. He evaded the robot to discover a crashed spacecraft.

Nearby, the Wyndham’s Freakshow included some live aliens. The Doctor met one, Caval of the Joebb, whose race was lifted out of squalor by the Klathi - ruthless aliens who were also in London. The Klathi need a large crystal to power their ship, but activating the reflective lattice would kill people over a vast area. The Doctor confronted the Klathi at Crystal Palace, but they didn’t care about the human casualties. Joebb rebelled, and the aliens were killed when their spacecraft exploded.

The
America
crossed the Atlantic in seventeen days in 1851.
 [931]
Henry Gordon Jago attended the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, 1851, and saw Michael Faraday demonstrate the benefits of electricity.
 [932]
Jackson Lake, a mathematics teacher from Sussex, arrived in London with his family to take a post at university. They encountered a group of Cybermen that had fallen through time from the Void. Lake’s wife Caroline was killed, his son Frederic was abducted and Lake himself was riddled with energy from an infostamp - an device containing the Cybermen’s database on the Doctor’s activities. Lake believed he
was
the Doctor, and in such a capacity saved a young woman, Rosita, from the Cybermen at Osterman’s Wharf.
 [933]

1851 (Christmas Eve to Christmas Day) - The Next Doctor
 [934]

The tenth Doctor was surprised to encounter “the Doctor” - actually Jackson Lake - and his “companion” Rosita as they fought the Cybermen and the Cybershades, their beast-like servants. Mercy Hartigan, the matron of St Joseph’s Workhouse, aided the Cybermen operating in this time zone as they built a CyberKing: a Dreadnought-class mechanoid that would be the front line of an invasion, and housed a Cyberfactory capable of converting millions. To this end, they rounded up children from workhouses to serve as a workforce.

The Cybermen Cyber-converted Miss Hartigan into the last component of the CyberKing, but her mind proved strong enough to resist total conversion, and she took control of the Cybermen. The Doctor and his allies freed the children, including Lake’s son Frederic. The CyberKing emerged as a vast robot that began to stomp across London, but the Doctor confronted the CyberKing in Lake’s hot air balloon, the Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style (TARDIS). The Doctor offered to send Hartigan and her Cybermen to an uninhabited world, and when she refused, he destroyed them all. He also sent the CyberKing’s remains into the Vortex, where it would disintegrate.

The Doctor stayed on to have Christmas Dinner with Jackson Lake, Frederic and Rosita.

Roget was a very good friend of the Doctor.
 [935]
The Doctor claimed that he once told Livingstone: “That’s all very well… but the elephant in the gorilla suit has to go.”
 [936]
Around this time, Jacob Grimm discovered the Law of Consonantal Shift.
 [937]

Albert, the Prince Consort, frequently lodged at Torchwood Estate with the father of Sir Robert MacLeish. The two of them dared to imagine that local stories about a werewolf and the brethren that protected it were true, and fashioned a trap for the beast. A light chamber was constructed, and Albert had the Koh-i-Noor, the diamond given to Victoria as spoils of war, recut to serve as the chamber’s focusing device.
 [938]

Victoria Waterfield, a companion of the second Doctor, was born in 1852.
 [939]
The Doctor met Thackeray, Baudelaire, Delacroix and Manet.
 [940]
In 1853, Saul, a living church in Cheldon Bonniface, was baptised in his own font.
 [941]

1854 - The Four Doctors
 [942]

The seventh Doctor visited Professor Michael Faraday, and dealt with a Dalek time corridor that ended at Faraday’s laboratory at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

On 20th September, 1854, during the Crimean War, the British readied to besiege the port city of Sevastopol. A British officer, Brigadier-General Bartholomew Kitchen, tried to avert bloodshed by inventing a story that the Russians were preparing to surrender, causing the British fleet to hold back and according the Russians time to fortify themselves. Kitchen had expected that the British would withdraw entirely once they learned of the Russians’ preparations, but the attack proceeded anyway, causing massive casualties...
 [943]

1854 (25th September to 19th November) - The Angel of Scutari
 [944]

The seventh Doctor and Ace arrived during the siege of Sevastopol on 25th September, 1854, to investigate accounts that the Doctor was a traitor to the crown. A cannonball hit the TARDIS and triggered the Ship’s Hostile Action Displacement System (HADS), causing it to retreat into the Vortex to heal.

The Russians incarcerated the Doctor and Ace, and accused him of trying to signal the British fleet; Tsar Nicholas I was indifferent as to the Doctor’s guilt or innocence. Ace befriended the future author Leo Tolstoy, who was currently a Russian soldier. He had lost his family home - and three hundred fifty peasants - while playing cards, and to date had only published two stories in
The Contemporary
.

On October 7th, the Doctor learned that the Tsar had authorised his execution; Ace escaped at roughly the same time. Brigadier-General Kitchen pinned his traitorous actions at Sevastopol on the Doctor, and reported to his superiors that the Russians were mistakenly executing one of their own double agents. The Doctor fulfilled causality by making sure that correspondence from Sir Hamilton Seymour - the British ambassador in St. Petersburg - to the Minister of War backed up Kitchen’s claims, then escaped with Seymour’s help. Ten days later, the Doctor and Ace were reunited in Kursk and summoned the TARDIS, intending to retrieve Hex from mid-November of the same year. Kitchen became unhinged upon witnessing the Ship’s departure, and reported that he’d killed the Doctor.