Doctor Who: Infection of the Cybermen

Doctor Who: Infection of the Cybermen

By Todd Dias

On and on through the vortex the TARDIS flew, passing through the ages like a school of fish through the ocean’s waves. Within its dimensionally transcendental confines, the Doctor and his companion, Ace, were embarking on another impossible journey. But something weighed heavily on the Doctor’s hearts.

“Professor?”

“Hmmm?”

“How long are you going to go on sulking?”

“I’m not sulking…I’m brooding…there’s a difference.”

“Yeah, but, like, what’s there to brood over? So you wasted a score of scumbags. Shouldn’t you be celebrating or something?”

“Taking a life is nothing to celebrate, Ace, even if it was the entire Dalek race. There are consequences to every action”

“If it’s the Time Lords you’re worried about, I’m sure you can explain,”

“It’s not the Time Lords…it’s just…oh I don’t know. I sometimes think I should just give up this heroism and go back to intergalactic tourism.”

“How about it, then, Professor?”

“How about what?”

“How about we go on holiday?”

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. I didn’t take you to the Eye of Orion already, did I?” Too many incarnations and companions to sort out in my poor 900+ year old head, he thought.

“No.”

“Well, it is a beautiful place. You might find it dull, though. No ‘scumbags’ to ‘waste’”

“I’m game if it’ll cheer you up.”

“I’ll set the coordinates then.”

The Doctor entered the coordinates into the impossibly complex console. He then sat down in his favourite chair and sipped the Earl Grey tea that he had dispensed from his food synthesizer. He was pleased that it was actually tea that was dispensed this time and not that dreadful zuber-ale. He found that in this incarnation he was somewhat intolerant to alcohol. He pulled out his book on the Origins of the Galaxy, the 400^th edition. Still horrendously inaccurate, he thought. Ace meanwhile retired to her room to listen to her favourite Billy Idol record and prepare a fresh batch of Nitro-9, despite the Doctor’s insistence that there would no need to mindlessly blow things up where they were going. “Always pays to be prepared,” was Ace’s retort. All the while the TARDIS flew on, seemingly obeying the command to take its passengers to the Eye of Orion.

But the TARDIS is more than a machine. The Doctor had said this on a number of occasions, but even he did not fully appreciate the truth of his words. The TARDIS is highly sensitive and over the centuries of being in the Doctor’s service it had grown to understand him and the situations he preferred to find himself in. It sensed the Doctor’s angst, and knew that the only thing that would cheer him up was a problem to be solved. As it passed through the vortex it found just such a problem. The TARDIS materialized aboard a space station.

The Doctor had long given up naïvely expecting to land where he programmed it to, but all the same he was taken by surprise at how far off target they were.

“What part of ‘the Eye of Orion’ didn’t you understand, you silly old thing?” he admonished grumpily, but only slightly, like a parent to a young child who doesn’t know any better. Ace, like many of the Doctor’s companions, often questioned the Doctor’s sanity when he spoke to the TARDIS as if it was a person, but she let it go, and asked where they were instead.

“We seem to be aboard a stationary vehicle in the Zolest solar system. There was an interesting colonist migration in these parts from Earth last time I was here…”

“And that was when?”

“I really don’t know. From their point of view it might have been the future. In that case we’d better proceed with caution.”

“You mean there’s danger?” Ace gleamed with excitement at the prospect of using her fresh Nitro-9.

“Perhaps. But I was referring to avoiding time paradoxes.” The last thing the Doctor wanted was another hearing in front of the Time Lords, even though he usually got out of any serious trouble by saving their ridiculous posteriors. Still, he’d prefer not to go through those particular motions if he could help it.

The Doctor went to the coat rack and put on his plaid scarf, brown overcoat (it is cold in space, you know), and hat, and also took his trusty umbrella from its hook. Ace meanwhile put the Nitro-9 in anti-perspirant cans and loaded them in her backpack. She put on her button-laden leather jacket, and took up her trusty baseball bat. She was tempted to bring her ghetto-blaster but knew the Doctor would only give her a big long lecture about noise pollution. He just didn’t have any appreciation for good music like the Sex Pistols. They exited the TARDIS together

Given that they had intended to go somewhere relaxing, you can imagine their reaction given the scene in which they entered:

Shouts and dying screams, blasters firing but all this from Ace and the Doctor’s perspective was coming from just down the hall. Ace was thrilled and pulled out her Nitro-9. The Doctor frowned but knew that you can’t argue with the situation you find yourself in, just figure out a way to deal with it. But to deal with a situation you need to know what it is. They were soon acquainted with the situation.

Round the corner came two young soldiers running from…a Cyberman. Or rather a partly constructed Cyberman. It was missing certain features like outer casing but the distinctive head pieces was there. Ace wasted no time and threw a can of Nitro-9 at it…wiping it out completely.

“Ace!” she said in self-congratulation.

“I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but you’d better come along with us,” said one of the thankful soldiers. They obliged. They moved to an area of relative security where more of the soldiers were.

“Who are these people?” their commanding officer asked both in shock and annoyance.

“I don’t know sir but that they saved our lives”, said one of the two.

“My name’s Ace and this is the Professor” Ace said.

“Doctor,” he corrected.

“Not THE Doctor?” The C.O. queried.

“Well if you mean someone who travels through space and time in a blue box saving people from all kinds of nasties, then yes I am.”

“I was but a girl when I heard of how you defeated a troop of Sontarons flying through this area, by convincing them that the Rutons held a secret weapon on the volcanic world of Scanos…a world that was just about to have a major series of eruptions. Amazing.”

“Well, outwitting Sontarons is child’s play but tiresome nonetheless.”

“I had hoped for a miracle and now I see we have been granted one.”

“We shall see. What is the situation?”

She explained how the Human Colonists, after the Sontaron affair, built this station to throw a giant force field around their new home planet. This kept the odd marauding alien race from invading. Then the Cybermen came. Though they were unable to penetrate the force-field, nor directly attack the station, they found a way to infiltrate the station.

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” the Doctor said here where she paused.

“You may have noticed how…incomplete the Cybermen are aboard this station.”

“We only saw the one but if they are all like that…”

“What of it?” Ace completed the Doctor’s sentence where he trailed off in thought, no doubt trying to piece it together himself.

“Those Cybermen are, or were, some of my troops.”

“What?” Ace exclaimed

“They must have figured out a way to convert humanoids without being present themselves,” the Doctor postulated darkly.

“Correct, Doctor. They had those disgusting cybermats hidden in our supplies. They carry some kind of infectious agent that converts whomever they infect into Cybermen.”

“Must be some kind of techno-organic virus,” the Doctor thought aloud.

You can help us, then?” The C.O was hopeful.

The Doctor sighed inwardly. He just could not get away from the role of wandering guardian angel.

“I shall need a sample of the virus.” His wish was all-too-soon granted.

“Cybermat!” Someone shouted.

The Doctor pulled out of his pockets a freezing agent that held the cybernetic rodent in place. In his other hand was a syringe, which he used to extract the virus. He took another curious object out of his pocket: It looked liked a metallic net. He squeezed out the virus onto the net-like thing and with a quick wave of his hand, the net came together into a glowing sphere.

“Shield-generated container;” the Doctor explained, “handy when dealing with infectious agents.”

“What are you going to do, Professor?”

“I shall study it. Look for weakness, etc. Meanwhile, I think the C.O. could use your special skills.”

“My skills? You mean ‘wasting scumbags’?” Ace asked, a little skeptical of the Doctor’s sudden esteem of her aptitude for blowing up the enemy.

The Doctor winked in affirmation. He could be an insufferable bore, and a serious grump, Ace thought, but when he believed in you, for whatever reason, it meant the Universe.

Ace and a squad of troopers did a patrol of the corridors of the station looking for cyber-converts. Ace put her pyrotechnic skills to use taking out a number of the ones the squad found. “Brutal!’ She had exclaimed with some degree of excitement. But that excitement was tempered when a cybermat appeared on their way back and leapt onto the soldier to her left’s neck infecting him.

The transformation was as horrific to witness as it was to experience first hand. The poor soldier writhed and screamed in agony as his was invaded until he was covered in living technology and screams no longer sounded human but metallic. Ace soon realized that this was the problem these people were facing: they’d wipe out as many cybermen as they could (in this case all of them), only to have more be generated out of your very comrades. After Ace used her last canister of nitro-9 on what Ace hoped was the last convert, the squad fell back to their makeshift HQ, and found the Doctor still tinkering with the virus. He seemed, to Ace’s annoyance, to be enjoying himself.

“Professor…”
“This is extraordinary…”

“Doctor!” she said more forcefully.

“What is it?”

“We’re doing our part wiping out these…things” She was going to say ‘scumbags but she was starting to appreciate what the Doctor was saying about the taking of a life. All the same this realization didn’t take away the frustration she felt. “What have you been doing?”

“Well, if you must know, I’ve done a complete analysis…”

“And?”

“And although the virus only attacks organics, not technology, the virus is both technological and biological in nature.”

“So?”

“So it can be given commands like any other binary operated construct, it also obeys the laws of biology. And before you say “so?” in that infuriating tone, this is what it means: I can get it to replicate itself beyond the point where it can sustain itself, and will leave the host’s body which will create an anti-body in the host. I can replicate the anti-body and immunize the entire station. “

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“Don’t you need a ‘host’ to infect?”

“Oh yes…of course…Very good, Ace. Very bad, ‘Professor.’ I’ll need a volunteer.”

“A guinea pig, more like.”

“Well…umm…sort of”

“I’ll do it, Professor, but you’d better be right.”

Ace had said when she first met the Doctor that she wasn’t scared of anything.

.Truth be told she had this put to some serious testing. She realized something else, something the Doctor once mentioned in passing about courage: that one could only be courageous in reference to a situation that brings about fear, that is you feel afraid and yet find it within you to do what must be done. So she bit her lip and allowed the Doctor to inject her with the virus. The Doctor in turn called upon all the Divine Spirits of the Universe to grant to him the courage and faith that he was right.

The virus overtook her and it was every bit as painful as she expected it to be.

The Doctor meanwhile pulled out his sonic-screwdriver. He pulled down on the handle and the vibrations manipulated the nanos in the virus ordering them to grow more and more and thus it grew to an enormous size…too large to sustain itself any longer within Ace’s body, so it let it go, and crumbled when it found nothing to sustain it.

The Doctor came to Ace’s side with great concern.

“We did good didn’t we, Doctor?”

“Better than good, Ace. You did very well.”

The Doctor isolated the antibody and created the vaccine and injected it into the remaining crewmembers and soldiers aboard the station. This made it safe to round up the cybermats. The Doctor pondered further though. All this seemed to him, who had much experience dealing with the Cybermen, to be just another attempt to soften the humans defenses while they find alternative ways of breaking through the defenses. This was just the test of the virus. If it was successful they would have the base and could deactivate the field and move to infect the colony. But the Doctor wasn’t convinced that the force field would hold them off for long. If they broke through, the Doctor couldn’t immunize everybody, so the danger was still very present. The only thing he could do was strike at the root. And that meant laying a cunning trap.

The sense that the Doctor had was that all this spoke of a desperation to get to the Colony when they had the entire Cosmos to exploit, suggesting that the Cybermen of this era must have dwindled resources. Certainly they had created a fascinating virus but it was far from miraculous. They must be close and waiting for the signal to start the invasion. If he was right, he could catch them all.

He took the helmet piece from one of the dead Cybermen, cleaned it and put it on his head and met the connection from the probe to his head. He had learned long ago from an old hermit how to control his mind, to open it up and project it outward. He took several deep breathes and waited upon the silence like his mentor taught him. He then channeled his thought-waves through the helmet to communicate with the Cybermen reporting that the mission was a success and that they may begin landing their troops.

He signaled the C.O. to drop the force-field.

As the Cyberfleet moved within the field, the Doctor signaled the C.O. to raise the field, but slowly. The Ships were first surrounded then engulfed in the force-field which grew in power until the ships exploded in brilliant lights until they were all destroyed. Ace didn’t sy it but she knew this was another act of violence that the Doctor despised but was forced to commit.

“Well,” he said stoically, “that’s that.” He and Ace said their goodbyes and they walked to the TARDIS.

“Doctor?” Ace said after much thought

“Hmm”

“Is this…I mean…are you…?”

“Am I alright, you mean? I detest violence, Ace. But I can’t sit by and allow evil to go on while I twittle my thumbs. So yes I am alright. Now I believe you and I have a date with the Eye of Orion…if that’s alright with you,” addressing this to the TARDIS. Ace laughed and they entered. The door closed and a familiar wheezing and groaning sound resounded the station and then left it behind.

Doctor Who: The Misguided Youth

Doctor Who: The Misguided Youth

by Todd Dias

Through the Vortex the TARDIS flew. The column rose and fell as it had on countless occasions before. I had just finished with the affair with the Sontarons on my home planet of Gallifrey. K-9 mark II was plugged into the TARDIS console absorbing information. This version would be infinitely more knowledgeable than his…its predecessor. The original K-9 along with my companion Leela decided to remain on Gallifrey. Well, they could have Gallifrey if they really want it, I thought, but I had plenty of places to see before I was willing to return to a life of observing from a far. I was adding my own memories to the mix of information that K-9 was taking in. Why not, I had thought. He deserves the extra intelligence. After all he’ll be faced with a Universe of nasties and would need more than a Terran’s databank to fall back on. I guess this is where this particular adventure began.

“Galhadian….4^th planet in the Philistian solar system known for spices, silks…”

“And home to the best hoofball team in the galaxy, in its prime, eh K-9?”

“Affirmative, master”

“I’ve been meaning to pop back there…best zuber-ale I’ve ever had…next to Uylesis of course…or was it Geleisius?”

“Master…”

“Right you are, K-9. Focus. Are you ready for more from my mind?”

“Affirmative, master”

I concentrated, and with the probes on my temples, the information traveled through the cable into the TARDIS console and suddenly there was tremendous turbulence.

“What? The console’s frozen. K-9?”

“TARDIS is experiencing a problem, master.”

“I can see that! Can you determine the source?”

“Internal fault caused by rapid shifting in co-ordinates.”

Change in co-ordinates? But how…?

“Insufficient data.”

“Ssshhh…the TARDIS was linked to my mind. What was the last bit of data you absorbed?”

“It has been erased, master.”

“What? How could it have been erased? Unless….ahhh….of course.”

I had been linked to the Matrix, the Time Lords greatest network of information. Through it much (if not all) can be seen and known. But that information can only be kept for a short time before it disappears from one’s mind, a precaution against this power being absolute. Something must have been lingering in my mind, and being connected directly to the TARDIS, it gave the old girl instructions to change course.

“That solves that but where are we going?”

“Correction…we’ve arrived, master.”

I flick on the scanner and saw the ruins of some sort of capsule. We had materialized too close to it for me to identify it. I walked to the coat rack and put on my coat and trusty scarf. I opened the door

“Master?”

“Sorry K-9…you’re not fully functioning for wa--constitutionals. I promise I’ll have you ready after I’ve sorted this lot out.”

With that I departed from the TARDIS and began my inspection of the capsule. As I feared it was a Time Lord prison capsule. Whoever was imprisoned had found a way out by crashing on the planet. I had neglected to look at my instruments to tell me where I was but I could tell by the purple sky that we were still in the Kasterbolis constellation. I decided to follow the tracks in the sandy ground. The prints in the sand around the capsule were humanoid. This was valuable to know as I was beginning to remember that people in these parts tended to be amphibious. I walked gingerly along. As I got closer to a what humans would call medieval town, I decided to call upon my superior first contact skills.

“I say, would you like a jelly baby?”

They would invariably run but this did not deter me. In fact it gave me an invaluable insight. By the way they ran rather than rally in an angry mob suggested that an encounter with a humanoid was something so awe-inspiringly terrifying that there was no recourse but to run away. No recourse, perhaps because the person in charge could not be appealed to, but why? Coupled with the fact of a Time Lord prisoner at large, I surmised that the person in charge must also be humanoid, the humanoid that I was tracking. This conclusion I drew by virtue of knowing the kind of people that Time Lords generally imprison: dangerous, and power-hungry. My guess was that this person came and took over, and pretty recently by the fact that the tracks were relatively fresh

People in positions of command tend to gravitate towards grand homes so I moved closer to a large tower in the centre of town. It is a handy skill to move with stealth, but every now and again you come upon a barrier. The barrier I came upon was two large amphibious guards. Offering them a jelly baby wasn’t likely going to get me anywhere. Fortunately I always have something up my sleeve.

“I suppose you chaps would like to see my pass…you know some form of identification, you know something to show you that your leader and I have a prior arrangement. Ahh yes here it is.”

I had there attention as I pulled out my mother’s watch. Ordinarily I might have hypnotized them but I reckoned I’d need my mental strength for what lay ahead. Fortunately they provided me with the opportunity I needed. They were looking in amazement at the watch and did not realize how close together their heads were getting as they stared at the watch as I brought it towards them. So close that I almost felt ashamed of myself as I slammed them together knocking them out.

I entered the tower and climbed to the top. In a room at the top was a young woman but I surmised she was not Repunzal. Indeed she looked very much like a Sister of the Flame from Karn. This would explain a lot. I steeled myself and entered the room.

I tested a hypothesis:

“I say, would you like a jelly baby?”

She vaporized my precious bag of jelly babies with a telekinetic blast. “Ahhh, definitely from Karn.” I said aloud.

“Be silent,” she tried to strike me again, this time with a mind blast, but I closed my eyes and allowed a mental barrier to surround my mind thus shielding me from this or any further attack. I open my eyes and stared her down.

“Now then. Let’s try some calm thinking.”

“You must be a Time Lord.”

“Indeed.”

“You’ve come to stop me, haven’t you?”

“That depends. Tell me, why were you imprisoned?”

“I rebelled…I didn’t want to blindly follow Marin…and those others. I wanted freedom, but more importantly power. What is the point of having gifts if you can’t use them?”

“I feel the same way.”

“You do?”

“Certainly. I left Gallifrey for the same reason. Mind you I was never one for dominating people. I help people instead and I can see you’re in desperate need.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I can either report you to the Time Lords or show you how to use your powers for good. On the one hand, certain capture…centuries of sustained imprisonment. On the other, freedom and the satisfaction that you are not wasting your gifts. Which will it be?”

It was clear that this was the first time anyone had ever spoken to her with compassion or ever offered her a decision of her own. This took her by surprise. Evidently she was expecting me to take her by force, not offer her freedom. I was pleased with the results.

“I…I’d like to learn.”

“Good. Come with me. I know a few places that could use your skills.”

“Why should I trust you?” She said, suddenly resuming her defensive stance.

“Because I know what it is like to have all you’re decisions made for you. Believe me, I don’t represent the Time Lords in any sense of the word. Truth be told I tend to bend their little rules myself a tad...but all for a good cause.” This seemed to satisfy her.

I elected to remove her from her present position in Space-Time to avoid detection of the Time Lords. What I was doing was bending the Law of Gallifrey but I saw this as a remedial action that required compassion, something the Time Lords and the Sisterhood both seemed to lack.

I took her to a world where her powers would be needed. But I cannot recount it here, lest the Time Lords get a hold of this log. Suffice it to say that she lives happily helping others rather than subjugating them.