Author's Notes
Episode 4 in the Twelfth Doctor Adventures, featuring the Doctor and Charlie Drake.
WARNINGS: As with some of the previous adventures, some of the chapters may be quite dark. And if you're afraid of bugs, proceed with caution…
The story so far…
Ignoring advice from Kate Stewart, head of UNIT, the Doctor has decided to show his new friend Charlie the wonders of time and space. They've faced difficult decisions in the past and the future, and Charlie has the suspicion that the Doctor's been testing him – but what is he preparing him for?
It's time to find out.
"What's that?"
Charlie pointed at the framed square on the wall of the TARDIS.
It was very unusual, hanging in a spot between two ornate bookcases. It seemed to resemble a barcode, with strips in an array of mind-boggling colours, perhaps no more than eight inches tall.
The Doctor, reclined in an old leather chair with a book in his hand, looked over. His features seemed to light up, with the advent of a new series of questions.
"What do you think it is?"
Charlie looked back at the square, and shrugged.
"I don't know. It reminds me of one of those codes you scan with your phone."
He stared at it a while, without looking back for the Doctor's reaction. There was a churning in his stomach, and his neck tingled. It was a feeling Charlie always got when he thought that someone might be judging him. And right now, he had a feeling that it should be obvious what this pixelated square was, and the Doctor was silently condemning his ignorance.
"Just try looking at it," the Doctor suggested.
Charlie frowned, glancing over at the Doctor in confusion.
"I am looking at it."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows, his expression radiating an opinion that suggested otherwise.
He pointed him back to the square.
"I mean, really look at it. Look deep into it, look beyond what you see. Look around it. Look behind it! What does it make you think? What does it make you feel?"
Charlie stared at the square for a while longer, his tired eyes playing tricks on him. Like an optical illusion, the coloured bars seemed to shift. But when he blinked, the bars had not moved at all.
It reminded him of an old computer screen; an eighties' display distorted by several millimetres of glass. And for some reason, that made him feel nostalgic. Nostalgic for technologies he had grown up with. Things that had once been loved, now replaced with something new.
Charlie became aware that he was starting to feel sad. Not the upset kind of sad, but a deep sadness; a jolt of desolation that accompanies the feeling when you realise you've lost something.
But it wasn't just that. It went further.
Even though it made him feel sad, there was hope. Hope that things might get better. That there was happiness buried beneath the other emotion, not quite extinguished.
He couldn't quite explain why he had suddenly felt this array of emotion. If it was because of the square he'd been regarding, it was certainly a very strange square.
The Doctor turned a page loudly, and Charlie's attention snapped back to him.
"I'm still not sure? It's like there's something there, but I can't quite describe it. Like there's something missing, or… or I just can't see it."
"Perhaps," the Doctor mused. "Maybe you see something different to what I see. Maybe your brain can't actually comprehend what it is you see."
"So what exactly is it?"
The Doctor rubbed the bridge of his nose absent-mindedly.
"Computer generated art. Something the TARDIS has done herself."
Charlie looked back at it.
"Oh," he said, now completely unsure what to make of it.
"Do you like it?" the Doctor asked.
"Uh, yeah, it's… nice?" Charlie nodded, hoping the TARDIS wouldn't be able to detect that he really had no opinion on it either way.
The Doctor smiled wryly. "Good response. She'll thank you for that."
There was a beep from the TARDIS console, like an alarm, accompanied by a flashing warning sign on one of the screens.
Charlie looked over at the Doctor, with a sense of uneasiness. His nose had returned to the pages of the book, and his attention seemed to be lost in it.
"What was that?" he asked after a minute.
The Doctor slowly dragged himself away from the yellowing pages, and seemed to return to reality.
He looked around, quickly following Charlie's expression, and locating the flashing warning lights on the console. He peered over at it and frowned, his eyebrows scything deep into his features.
He waved a hand in the air indifferently, and returned to his book.
"Nothing important."
Charlie frowned, and felt an intangible tug pulling him towards the console. He looked back at the Doctor, whose hand was splayed out across a page, gazing intently upon it.
Why the Doctor was acting so strangely all of a sudden? Normally, the Doctor would be at that console in a flash, already setting the controls for their next adventure.
"Are you sure?" Charlie ventured. "It literally says 'warning!'. The TARDIS might be in danger!"
"Actually, it's a distress signal. Get them all the time. I usually just ignore them."
"Ignore them?" Charlie uttered, exasperated. "You can't do that! Someone could be… I don't know, trapped, or – or dying. And you might be the only person who could save them."
"Probably. But you're forgetting we're in a time machine. We can go whenever we like. Or maybe," the Doctor gestured, with a thoughtful twist of his hand, "I've already answered it. I'm already there, in the TARDIS, and a different coat."
The Doctor offered him a wistful smile. "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if I were to turn up twice?"
The Doctor stopped abruptly, and peered into the TARDIS' central column; his eyes reflected the fiery glow of the Time Rotor, his thoughts catapulting him far away.
"And besides, whenever I answer a distress signal, something bad happens…"
The enigmatic stare broke away, and dived back into the book.
Charlie hesitated. In a moment of doubt, it occurred to him that the Doctor always took it upon himself to save people, for no other reason than he seemed to want to. What if the Doctor stopped wanting to save people? What would happen then?
No. He couldn't let that happen. Charlie glared at him.
"And what if you're not there? What if people are in danger? What if you can help them?"
The Doctor looked up, his piercing grey eyes scanning him.
The book snapped shut, making Charlie flinch.
Finally, the Doctor released a flurry of an explanation:
"The moon. Several months into your future. A UNIT code five alarm was raised, which sends out an automatic distress call. Point of origin: the Sea of Serenity. Urgent help requested. No additional dialogue. No black box recordings."
The Doctor leapt out of his chair, and bounded towards the central console.
"Which means only one thing," he declared, punching in a series of co-ordinates.
"What?" Charlie asked, hovering behind the Doctor as he raced around the console.
"The moon is under attack," the Doctor asserted, with a hint of excitement.
"So, hold on. What changed your mind?"
The Doctor fixed him with a stare, and managed to communicate without actually saying anything. He hadn't.
Charlie wondered why he'd been so thick. Why hadn't he worked it out before?
"You were always going to go, weren't you?" Charlie guessed.
"Of course I was," the Doctor replied. "I could never not answer a distress signal. Someone might need our help."
"You were just testing me," Charlie realised. "Why? And why didn't you go sooner? People's lives might be at risk."
The Doctor acknowledged Charlie's thought with a shrug.
"I wasn't lying about the time machine thing. I can go to the moment the signal's sent, or maybe even before."
The Doctor slammed a lever, and the noise of the TARDIS' engines subsided.
"I wanted to know that I can trust you. My 'superiors' at UNIT say that I shouldn't," the Doctor admitted.
"But why would they say that?" Charlie asked, a little estranged.
"I don't know. Would you help someone if you knew you could?"
"Yeah!" Charlie replied without a moment's thought.
"Good. Just as long as I know I can trust you."
Charlie nodded. "Yes. Of course."
The Doctor smiled, and headed for the door. He threw the wooden doors open, and stepped outside.
It took Charlie a second to twig that the Doctor had landed on the moon – where there was no atmosphere, and almost certain death waiting outside with no a spacesuit.
Despite having just had the thought that he might die if he went outside, Charlie raced after the Doctor.
"Hold on, aren't we on the… moon?"
They were on the moon.
The view outside the window before them was… spectacular. The Earth shone brightly in the sky above the dusty surface of the satellite.
Charlie stared, open-mouthed. The moon. He was standing on the moon!
Admittedly, he was standing in some kind of Moonbase – which, fortunately, had a plentiful supply of breathable oxygen.
The TARDIS had landed in a featureless metal room, with grey crates stacked up around the walls. They were all regular sizes, neatly identified by printed labels, describing tools and equipment Charlie had never heard of.
The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver, and it emitted a low-pitched warble as the he fiddled with an access panel to one side of a heavy bulkhead door. Some kind of high-grade steel, almost certainly engineered to withstand explosives.
The door was embossed with a military emblem: a globe sprouting a pair of wings, which curled around the Earth, as if to protect it. Beneath the image, the letters: 'UNIT'.
"UNIT. You've mentioned that a few times?" Charlie enquired.
The Doctor altered the frequency of the screwdriver, breaking down several layers of security.
"Yes, I used to work for them."
He paused, and shrugged. "Technically, I still do."
"But aren't they a…? You work for a military organisation based on the moon?" reaffirmed Charlie.
"No!" ridiculed the Doctor. "Not on the moon. This is just one of their bases. They have loads of them across the world. London, Wales, Germany, New York, Shanghai, Sydney Harbour…"
The Doctor rubbed his neck distractedly. "I think there's one in Paris, too. Lovely views from the Tower. You can see right up the Champs-Élysées from the recreation room."
As the Doctor grumbled about access codes, Charlie took the opportunity to look around at the storage room they were standing in. There really wasn't that much to see, apart from the lunar vista outside. It was still taking his breath away, distracting him from the Doctor's curses as he argued with the door controls.
With a final flourish, the Doctor waved the sonic across the keypad, and the bulkhead door hissed open.
The Doctor leapt through, into a small geodesic dome, and gestured around at the web of corridors shooting away in all directions.
"Welcome to the Moonbase. The Earth's first line of defence against space invaders."
Charlie ventured through, his heart pumping a little quicker than usual.
"Is there a need for that, then?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Well, yeah, I suppose so."
A klaxon sounded, and Charlie jumped in surprise. A beacon projecting from the wall panels flared red.
"What's happening?" asked Charlie, clutching his arm in embarrassment.
The Doctor led him down a corridor, into a communications hub. Computer screens plastered the walls. Dozens of workstations, almost like a call centre, were lined up facing a rotating diagram of the Earth, stretched across one wall. Lights flashed, and alerts pinged all over the continents.
"Just announcing my presence," the Doctor replied. "Otherwise they won't know I'm here. They're not terribly observant, hence the need for a lookout station in orbit."
Charlie frowned, a little concerned by the Doctor's apparent lack of confidence in in Earth's 'first line of defence'.
A pair of armed soldiers approached them.
"Code nine. It's him," one of the guards spoke into a radio communicator.
"Yep, they've noticed," the Doctor muttered brightly.