A young woman of around 25 was in her apartment, having a very enthusiastic conversation on her phone. She was jumping up and down and yelling in the manner that was sure to have angry neighbors pounding brooms on their ceiling, but she seemed entirely untroubled by this. She had shoulder length brown hair and was wearing a short navy blue dress with tights, and the whole outfit, although cute, was not exactly warm enough for fall in north of England, and made her look like she was dressed by a 50 year old male TV writer who did not realize that women need to preserve body heat just as much as men do.
"YES! Oh my god, yes I know! NO! I have no idea! RIGHT? That's what I said! It's like, WHY would –" A gentle vworp-ing sound started coming from her living room. "OH MY GOD KAREN I've got to go! Call you back later BYE!" She peeked her head around the corner slowly, and then ran in and started pounding on the door of the large, blue telephone box that had appeared on top of her coffee table (which was now in pieces). "DOCTOR! DOCTOR DOCTOR DOCTOR! Guess what?" The blue box opened and a man who was a full 12 inches taller than the girl pounding on his door stepped out. His bowtie was askew and his tweed suit looked like it had caught fire in some places, but carried himself as if this was exactly how people were supposed to look like. He put on a little upset puppy face.
"Claraaaa, I think you've upset her!" The man called the Doctor whined.
"Wh-? Doctor, it's a being of pure energy that contains the universe inside of it. I promise you that it doesn't care that I punched it a couple of times. That's what doors are for. Anyway, upsetting a celestial being is NOTHING compared to what just happened to me. GUESS! Come on!"
The man had been switching between caressing the box lovingly and glaring at Clara as she spoke. "I don't know! Uh, discovered missiles in Russia aimed towards America?"
"What? No."
"Oh, what year is this? I guess that was in the 1950's and 2020's."
Clara sighed. "I got the job! Okay! You know the job I was telling you about when we were at Akhaten – the position at the college?"
The Doctor released the box and clapped. "Ohhh! Brilliant! What's your job? Tell me it's something cool." He seemed very genuinely pleased.
"Haha! I don't have any idea!" She shook her head happily. "Something about space life? I just applied because, you know, space life and all?" She pointed at him and smiled goofily.
The doctor raised an eyebrow. "Shouldn't you have degree in 'space life' to have a job teaching 'space life' to college kids?"
"Well, yeah…" Clara mumbled.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you had a major in education and a minor in English?
"Noooo! I had a double major in education and English. My minor was 'space life'."
"What? Really? That's incredible! I'm glad Earth universities are finally offering useful fields of study like 'space life'." Clara was holding back laughter. "What? What? Seriously. Stop making fun of me!" The Doctor crossed his arms like a child throwing a tantrum.
"Oh, come on. Space life isn't a real subject. It's called… I dunno, something about biology? It's studying how life formed on earth or whatever. I just called it 'space life' because the only thing I remember from the biology course I took in high school was that one of the theories of how life formed on earth was that it came from outer space. And no, you're totally right, I don't have a degree in it. The college doesn't know that though." She smiled at him once again.
"Claaraaaaaaaaaa," he moaned. "You can't dooooo thaaaaaat!"
"Hey, shut up! It was the best paying job I could find! Not all of us have free housing! Do you know what the cost of living is like in Birmingham? Do you?"
"You don't even know the name of the subject you're teaching! They'll find out and you'll be fired, and it'll be even harder to find a job!"
"Stop judging me!" she wailed. "If you're so worried, instead of yelling at me, help me! Get me a degree in 'space life'."
"Okay, then." The Time Lord took Clara by her arm and tried to drag her into the TARDIS. Clara stood staunchly and wiggled out of his grip.
"I don't mean literally. I'm not enrolling in a university. Also, as I already told you, 'space life' isn't a real degree. I said that for comedic effect."
"I'm not taking you to a university! Why do that when I have the entire universe at my disposal? The entirety of the Earth's history at my beck and call?"
"Ooookaaaay…." She hesitated. "So where are you taking me?
"Not where. When. You want to be qualified to teach how life began, so that's when I'm going to take you." He looked pleased with himself.
"Oh. Neat." Clara grabbed the Doctor's arm and walked him into the TARDIS. "So, anyway, what's up with your suit and tie?"
"Oh, well, you know that one science-y bloke they burned at the stake?"
"Totally."
"I mean Copernicus. Well, I thought that was unfair, so I tried to help him by appealing to the Pope for his release, but then the Pope thought I was a witch because for some reason I thought using the TARDIS to get inside his room would be a good idea, but I only did that because the guards wouldn't let me in – "appointment only", they said – so anyway, he tried to set me on fire, but I escaped, and here I am. Also, I stole his hat, so if you ever need a Pope hat for any reason, you know where to find me."
The doors of the TARDIS closed behind them.
Unknown to scientists, 4 billion years ago, when life began on Earth, a small blue box hovered roughly100 feet above Earth's atmosphere containing a single, lone human.
"That isn't life," she said. The Doctor and Clara were sitting next to each other on the doorstep of the TARDIS, looking down at a swirling mass of acid and molten stone where all life began. "Nothing can live there."
"No, Clara. You need to broaden your view of what life is. Yes, I'm alive, and yes, you're alive. But so is the planet you see before you. There are no humans, animals, insects, plants…" He trailed off. "But it is still very, very alive."
"Okay, so then what's living down there?"
"Single-celled life forms. At this point, exclusively."
"So, like, bacteria and stuff?"
"Mm-hmm." He nodded. "Nothing you'd recognize, I'm afraid. Right now, they may not be more than a mass of amino acids. If they're fully-formed self-replicating cells by now, the only places you could find life-forms similar to them in your time period is deep, deep underground – think near the earth's molten center – because that's similar to what the environment is like down there." He pointed towards Earth. "That's what those cells were built for." They sat in silence for a minute or two.
"So, how did it get there? Life, I mean. Or the amino acids or whatever's down there."
"Well, like you said, one theory is angiosperma, or as it's known in the scientific community, 'space life'. The theory says that the cells originated on another planet where life had already formed, and was carried to Earth by an asteroid or something of the sort. I've always liked to think that an already-developed species like the Time Lords came to explore and accidentally infected the place with their bacteria."
Clara stopped him. "Hold up! Earth life isn't the first life in the universe? Time Lords were already developed at this point?"
"Of course! Look at how much more advanced I am than you!" Clara punched his shoulder. "Ow, hey, I was kidding." The Doctor replied angrily as he pretended to tend to his severely wounded shoulder. "Fine. So, obviously, life did not get there from an extraterrestrial life source, because we've been watching it this whole time. This means a complex chemical reaction formed amino acids and other organic molecules. These molecules swam together in a sort of "primordial soup" until they combined into polymers and other macromolecules. They then became encapsulated inside a membrane, so that they had an internal environment different from the Earth's external one."
"Oh, cool." Clara had no idea what the Doctor just said.
"Do you have any idea what I just said?"
"Not really. Can we go down there?"
The Doctor looked affronted. "What! No! Never. There's not an ozone layer yet. It's, like, filled with carbon monoxide and poison and stuff. Photosynthesis hasn't begun, so there's no oxygen. There's life forms less evolved than prokaryotes down there, and the prokaryotes that are down there evolving into eukaryotes is so far off that you can't even process it." The Doctors hands were over his head as Clara leaned back and rested on her arms.
"Oh, cool. Please can we go down there?"
The Time Lord brought his hands back down and rested his face in it. Clara knew he could never resist messing with a planets timeline. He looked back up at her sternly and said, "Okay, but just this once. Y'know, messing with a planet this early in its history is a very, very dangerous thing."
Clara smiled and sat up. "Mmm, you know you want to."
"Oh, I so do." Clara and the Doctor stood up and closed the TARDIS doors. They teleported down to the surface of the infantile Earth, not 100% sure what to expect, but they were very excited nonetheless.
Once the box materialized down onto the surface, the door slowly creaked open, and two vaguely Clara-and-Doctor-shaped orange blobs walked out.
"Couldn't your space-suits come a in a better color, Doctor? Or be better tailored?"
"We're standing on Earth in its first days and you're worried about the design of the suit that's keeping you from being killed by the environment and the environment from being killed by you?"
"Yep. So, where's the life, and how does it survive in this hellscape?"
The Doctor began to look around. "Well, uh, obviously it's not visible yet, and, uh, it's still an anaerobic heterotroph, so it eats whatever left-over organic molecules are found in that primordial soup."
"I don't see and primordial soup."
"Yes, yes, that's, uh, exactly what I was worrying about." He snapped to attention. "Clara, I think you need to leave."
"What! This is MY planet. I think YOU need to leave." Clara appreciated the fact that the planet was currently uninhabited by any higher life-forms because that meant that she truly was the funniest thing on the planet right now.
"No, Clara. We both need to leave. You're right. I can't seem to find the primordial soup, or any signs of life whatsoever. I think that when I transported us down here, I accidentally sent us back in time. Maybe half an hour to an hour. Do you know what this means?"
"I don't get to meet my great great grandparents?"
"That's the best possible situation right now. Just come into the TARDIS."
Clara rolled her eyes. "Jeez, okay, Mr. No-Fun. You should take me back here some time."
The TARDIS doors closed on the two of them once again. The blue box faded into nothing, re-appearing thousands of miles away and millions of years into the future. On the planet they left behind, a few strands of hair Clara had accidentally left on the surface of her biohazard suit lay behind. As the Doctor tried to forget what events he may have just caused, the bacteria on the hair reacted with the environment, and a few polymers from them came off and slowly combined, forming a great mass of organic molecules, commonly known as primordial soup.