Chapter 1: Look behind you

It was April 1st, 2014. A teenager by the name Mark Miller sat on his computer. He lived in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was just browsing Youtube until a window popped up. Now this was strange. He had a pop-up blocker as well as Google Chrome's ad-block. So how did this pop-up get through those defenses? The window displayed a simple message: "Look behind you."

"Ok, so one of my friends is trying to pull an April Fools joke on me. Somehow, they managed to get this window to pop up on my computer. NOT FUNNY!" he remarked.

But then he heard a creaking. He quickly turned around. His entire bookshelf was ready to fall over. He ran and pushed his body against it, and with a lot of effort from his muscles, he managed to set it straight.

He said out loud, "Thank you computer! You saved my life!"

(This is where the Doctor Who opening credits come in…)

The Doctor is in the Tardis, which is parked a kilometer from Mark's house. He steps outside to see a computer in a trash can. Surprisingly, it boots up by itself. The Doctor notices that it is not plugged into anything, but it is still able to run DOS mode. Now DOS mode is a command-line interface, so it is just a system where the user can type in their input with a keyboard, and they receive an output in the form of text. No pictures, no GUI. The Doctor commented, "Now that is lovely. It may not be able to boot up GUI, but it booted up nonetheless." Much to the Doctor's surprise, the screen already showed text forming, as if somebody invisible was typing. The Doctor noticed the letters appear one by one, until they showed a clear message. It looked like this:

C: LOVE THE BOWTIE

Suddenly, more lines formed by themselves

C: LOVE THE STETSON TOO

C: AND THAT SONIC SCREWDRIVER IS FANTASTIC

The Doctor spoke to the computer as if it was living, "I am glad you love this stuff. So what do you do, just lie in this trash can and talk via text?"

A strange man, in his fifties, walked up to the Doctor. He just arrived at the scene, so the only thing he saw was the Doctor respond to the computer. The computer immediately shut itself off when the man was about to look at it. From the man's perspective, that computer was and would always be broken. So he looked at the Doctor, but from behind, so he could not see the Doctor's face. He remarked, "Having fun talking to trash? Oh, I know that they call it, they call it trash-talking!" He then chuckled.

The Doctor turned around. He responded to the strange man, "That thing turned itself on and talked to me through CLI." The Doctor was expecting the man to just laugh at the Doctor's "insanity", but instead, the strange man suddenly changed his expression. He replied, "In that case, we have something interesting in here. My name is User 507. You're the Doctor, aren't you? The man who saves us from Cybermen, Daleks, and more."

The Doctor realized that this man knew about him, and he felt both pleased and worried at the same time. He then asked, "User 507? Why won't you tell me your real name?" User 507 responded, "And you? Don't act like you have been telling your name to everyone!" The Doctor remarked, "Good point. I guess we can begin by taking this computer back into my Tardis." User 507 then helped the Doctor lift it and move it in the Tardis.

The person who tossed that computer away in the first place was living in the building whose garden had the Tardis parked in. He had a new computer, a Mac, which he claimed to be better than Windows. His computer popped up a message: "There is somebody behind you."

"Ok, I know it is April 1st, but this is just ridiculous! All my friends, starting with Mark, have had this happen! I bet it is just coincidence, there could not be anything behind me!" shouted the user.

This was quite a mistake, because all of his friends have had messages like "Look behind you" or "Look to your left" or even "There is something on your arm"

So the user chose to ignore that warning. "I don't have anything that could fall on me from behind, and I doubt a spider is sneaking up on me, since no spiders ever come to my room. I bet the person who sent Mark the message also tried to make the bookshelf collapse just to scare him. News flash, prankster! There is a difference between April Fools and Halloween!"

And with that, he failed to spot the danger behind him. In a sudden flash, he found himself caught in the grasp of a burglar. The message changed: "I told you. You could have began running, but you thought I was just a joke." Luckily for the user, the burglar saw both messages and got scared, thinking that the computer was an artificial intelligence construct.

The basic idea was that there were messages popping up on computers, and they spoke of the physical world around the user. Some were convinced, while others thought that it was a joke. But the Doctor had plugged the "broken" computer into the Tardis. It finally ran in GUI mode. It suddenly started loading a Visual Basic file. User 507 remarked, "Oh, that is the Visual Basic programming language. I can take a look at that. Oh boy, what do we have here? This seems like an unreleased version of VB! Are you thinking what I am thinking?"

The Doctor responded, "You are saying that it came from the future?" User 507 smiled. For a moment, the Doctor felt like he was talking to his older self. And with that, the Tardis took off and headed for a time period 4 years in the past. "Past?" asked the Doctor. User 507 replied, "I don't know why, but the program seems to indicate that it originated from the future, but the answer lies in the past."

When the Tardis landed, it was April 4, 2010. Easter Day! The Tardis landed in Allentown, Pennsylvania. User 507 quickly shouted, "Oh no no, I might accidentally cross my own timestream! Find another city! Why did the Tardis even choose this city? Forget why it choose this city, how about Los Angeles?" The Doctor did exactly that, and when the Tardis landed, the Doctor stepped outside, ready for a new adventure with a new companion!