This is my first fanfic ever to be published. I have written others but have never quite brought myself to do anything with them. I hope you enjoy it.
Massive thanks go to neverthesamegirl and JW2006 (aka JC2006) for their help with this, I am indebted to you both.
Honest reviews are greatly appreciated. I might write more or publish my older stuff if there is enough interest.
This story is mine. Characters and settings are (c) BBC.
A wounded TARDIS limped through the vortex. Its last encounter with hostile aliens had ended badly; in a hurry to get away, the Doctor had diverted power from several other systems to accelerate the dematerialisation. Sparks and explosions resulted up and down the console room. The rematerialisation circuit's power supply, not designed for that kind of punishment, was left a smouldering wreck and there was nothing for it but to spend the next few days carrying out repairs.
A rather bored Amy Pond decided to take this opportunity to explore the TARDIS's myriad chambers. It wasn't as if she had the first idea how to fix anything - actually, she had a habit of breaking things: toasters, mobile phones... Rory's doorbell...
She quietly browsed the shelves of the ancient ship's enormous library. There was plenty of classical literature. Some books came from Earth, others obviously from much further afield. There were also assorted technical manuals (including one for something called a K9 mark II). Despite being neatly stacked on their shelves, none of the books Amy passed seemed to have been indexed in any kind of logical order: by author or even subject.
The disarray grew worse as she arrived at the door at the opposite end of the room. A ramshackle bookcase in the corner contained books stacked face down, with scraps of torn paper sticking out of the ends as improvised bookmarks.
That looks more like the 'library' in my house, she mused, making for the shelves, the wooden floor creaking as she went.
Amy tilted her head in an attempt make out the upside-down titles on the spines of the stacked volumes, tucking her hair behind one ear as it fell in front of her eye. At the fifth book down the pile, she raised her eyebrows excitedly and let out an "ooh". She reached for it, steadying the others above it on the pile.
"It's just like mine." she whispered, studying the cover and flicking through the well-thumbed pages. Turning to chapter one, she swivelled on her heels and wandered out of the library, her head firmly pointed down at the print, and made her way down the draughty corridor towards the console room.
The Doctor was as she had left him some hours previously, lying on his back underneath the rickety console with his Sonic Screwdriver buzzing away, making a higher pitched noise than Amy was used to.
She descended the steps to the console level and carried on reading for a couple of minutes before speaking.
"Doctor?"
"Ye...argh!" A clunk of brass resonated round the room as the Doctor hit his head sharply on a support beam above where he was working. A brief moment later, he poked his head above the transparent platform which encircled the main console. "Yes?"
"Have you read this?" she asked.
"What is it?"
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
"Of course - bumped into Lewis Carroll once in Eastbourne, interesting fellow. Not read it recently though. Any particular reason?"
"No, but it's weird. This one from your library is just like the one my cousin gave me when I was younger. Even smells the same. Apart from Pandora's Box it was probably my favourite story, I must have read it fifty times..." Her voice trailed off, her face once again buried in the text and detailed colour illustrations.
"That's nice, Pond." The Doctor was evidently only half-listening. The other half of his brain was still wondering how he was going fix the rematerialisation circuit. He had made embarrassingly little progress since he and Amy had last spoken. "Could you just hold on to this for a mo, and pass it to me when I say? I'm going to need both hands free to reconnect... Amy?"
"Sorry, yeah, hold the thing, pass the thing." She didn't look up, just held her hand out, and the Doctor placed the Sonic Screwdriver in her palm. Realising just how absorbed Amy seemed to be by the book in her other hand, he opted to put off, for a moment at least, the thankless maintenance task ahead of him. He ascended the steps to join her at the console.
"One of your favourites, hmm?"
"Uh-huh. I loved everything about it: the characters, the crazy world they live in. I envied Alice so much when I was lonely...waiting for you... My psychologists used to tell me people and places in story books weren't real, which only made me get cross with the authors for writing the stories, for putting other people in them, as if it was their fault for making it a story, not real..." Her cheeks reddened as it dawned on her how ridiculous that sounded. "Stupid, I know." She was still looking down at the page but had stopped reading, instead reliving some upsetting childhood memories.
The Doctor patted her on the arm and gave a comforting smile.
"Oh, Amy, it's not stupid." Slowly, her head rose and her now-teary eyes met his. That crumpled shirt, dishevelled hair and broad grin, brought a smile back to her face. "In fact," he began suddenly, causing Amy to jump and nearly drop the Sonic, "it's very, very interesting indeed."
"How so?"
"Well," the Doctor continued, rushing over to bring down the small viewer to eye level and punching words into the console keyboard to bring up a picture of a humanoid, but unmistakably alien man as he spoke "There was a brilliant chap from a very advanced civilisation who devoted his life to an idea not altogether unlike that."
"His whole life? To a fantasy?"
"Not to a fantasy – to making fantasy worlds real."
A puzzled look crossed Amy's face as she glanced up at the screen where the Doctor was pointing.
"Yes, a really wise fellow, great cricket player, his people were...good friends with my people. Gone now... But he disappeared in mysterious circumstances leading some to believe his theories were true. Can't go and ask him because it happened on the edge of a time lock. Anyway, he theorised that fictional universes, people, places from the minds of authors, playwrights and the like, were no less 'real' than ours."
"Okay..."
"You're familiar with the concept of the parallel universe I suppose, that science fiction favourite on Earth and elsewhere?"
"Y-yes" Amy hesitated, unsure quite where this was heading.
"Well, they do exist – infinite possibilities in infinite combinations and all that. Some are friendlier than others, but-" he paused, recalling the Inferno project and those terrifying final moments on 'the other side'.
Before he could go on, Amy interjected, "I get all that, Doctor, but 'Alice' has got talking rabbits and Cheshire cats in it, surely they're not possible - physically I mean." While pleased with the apparent strength of her argument, Amy knew there was no way it could be that straight forward.
"Ah, you see, what Dr Neptrim posited was that these universes didn't have to be governed by the same physical or temporal laws or whatever, depending on when in time they diverged from each other."
"Sorry, you've lost me." Amy ruffled her vibrant red hair, scratching her head in a manner even the Doctor found amusingly cliché.
"Right, well, let's start simple – on your Earth, Eastenders is a television programme-"
"I only watch Coronation Street."
"Well, all right then: Coronation Street is a television programme. Now, think about the world the characters live in: the only thing that's different for them is that there's no such programme on telly as Coronation Street. You'd only have to go back a few hundred years to find the point where two universes diverged to produce your world, where it's just fiction, and another reality which, given exactly the required quantum events since then, has produced those characters and events for real."
"Wow, I see, yeah, I always wondered what people on TV watched on TV."
"Like I said, not stupid at all. Now do you see where I'm going with this?" He was now pacing slowly round and round the console. Amy stayed more or less in the same place but stood back every time the Doctor completed another lap of the console, his arms folded like a school teacher prompting a child to reproduce a memorised poem or chapter from a textbook.
"Hey, so, in Star Trek and stuff, the people and humans and aliens are plausible enough to us I suppose, but when they do that warp speed thingy the physics is a bit iffy?" She made a 'whizzing' gesture with the Sonic for emphasis.
"Precisely. You have to go pretty close to the Big Bang for the divergence point there, so the laws of physics are different."
"Aha, and you'd go even closer for a universe where the laws of physics are so different that there could be talking white rabbits and Cheshire cats ." Amy finished triumphantly.
"Absolutely! Mind you it does tend to break down a bit when things are that different. Never mind though, good work, Pond, you're getting the hang of the conceptual side of this space-time travelling business." Amy smirked, unsure if that had been meant patronisingly or not. "Part of Dr Neptrim's genius was his concept for a device which could intelligently probe other universes for information on their contents, physics, life forms- that sort of thing -and pinpoint exactly the right one to match your story book and filter out the rest."
As the implications of what the Doctor was saying dawned, Amy began to jump up and down. "Do you mean we could go to Wonderland? Or that I could meet Gene Hunt for real?"
"Ah, alas not that simple; never is, unfortunately." Amy's face fell. "Actual, proper, controlled travel between universes is impossible. Or at least it's meant to be... But yes, if someone found a way, it could be done."
Amy sat down on one of the soft chairs behind her and fell silent, her mind still processing what the Doctor had been saying. The Doctor remained silent for a minute or two, making vital 'adjustments' to the console or, more likely- procrastinating. Amy spun the Sonic between her fingers for a while before being struck by a thought.
"There's just one thing, Doctor."
"Oh yes?"
"If it's so easy for them to be on TV or the pages in a book in our universe, what's to say we're not part of something like that in someone else's?"
The Doctor, humbled at not having considered it from that perspective before, paused before remarking, "Mmm, of course it's conceivable, but not very likely - I think ours is the primary universe."
Amy, realising she'd struck a nerve, giggled and teased him in a way he'd come to love. "I see, Doctor." She swung playfully on the handrails as she approached him. "You just don't like the idea of not being at the centre of the universe! Face it Doctor, a TV series about you would be perfect: 'The Mysterious Doctor With No Name', a time travelling adventurer saving the universe with the help of his glamorous sidekick."
"No, no, no, I can't be someone's creation, I'm far too imp- er - interesting," he replied hesitantly. Amy could barely contain her glee at flummoxing the Doctor for once. He went on, "And besides, like you just said, that would make you someone else's creation as well, which I doubt you'd be happy about."
She put on her best film star pose, flicked her hair over her shoulder and swaggered back over to the console. "Oh, I don't know: it wouldn't be all that bad, being played by some glamorous ginger actress of the age, the best in Inverness in fact. Maybe even Scotland..." They both chuckled and Amy suddenly appreciated how much this little chat had lightened the somewhat sombre mood in the TARDIS. "You'd have to be played by an older man though, I don't think the audience would be convinced by someone who looks about... nine going around in braces and a bow tie."
"Don't start." The Doctor rolled his eyes.
"Sorry." She stopped to clear her throat and began broadcasting to no-one in particular. "To anybody, watching or reading or whatever, we hope this week's episode of 'Raggedy Doctor' is as much fun to watch as it is for us to, er, be in."
"Steady on Amy, we'll be in all sorts of trouble if our 'audience' starts to think it's just a figment of our imagination." He paused and tilted his head slightly. "Bah, don't like thought experiments. Let's get this rematerialisation circuit dealt with." said the Doctor, descending the steps to the lower level. Amy followed, sat down on a horizontal beam and absently handed him the Sonic Screwdriver, deep in thought.
I wonder who really is listening.