DOCTOR WHO:
A PUNCTURE IN THE CONCRETE THREAD
WRITTEN BY ZARIUS
The sky was made of concrete.
People could literally step out of their space ships and peer down at the splendor of the Earth, on top of that, the concrete wasn't even wet yet, and you could make small prints in the star fields.
And atop a sleek mound of rock and stone towering above the wisps of saltwater, someone was out to ruin all the fun.
The Doctor, the Eleventh of many faces, was scrambling to keep his mind open, talking to a panicked voice as well as a boastful voice. One close to him, another within another dimension. A disembodied stream of alien consciousness who inhabited a realm where the skies were made of literal diamonds, a successful feat of the creature. Many of the conscious prior experiments The Doctor knew it had become folklore amongst the people of Earth in another time and space, and he was eager to ensure the legend did not grow beyond myth and become part of established history.
Within his mind, he could hear the screams echoed beyond the walls of the asylum, beginning to churn agonizingly sharp and ludicrously SYNCHRONISED monkey noises timed perfectly to shatter The Doctor's meditative state…this angered him.
The Doctor closed his mind to the tragedy of his charge, the mind behind the machine he was feverishly trying to operate, and how he could so easily control his plight if he would just LISTEN. Listen to genuine ever taken for granted human reason
His charge, an inventor called Giver Penny, had been delighting him the past couple of days during his vacation in this quaint seaside town, he had harnessed the course work of an interstellar dimensional rift and from there had made contact with the consciousness, and had been convinced to adjust his old dimensional drifter equipment, themselves the product of prior generations of his family, with specific readings generated by the entity that would allow for it to visit this dimension and take notes of its vast differences in comparison to the dimension inhabited by the entity.
Only once this happened, it enabled the entity to use the drifter and it's unique readings to solidify the sky above the Earth. It made the world a ceiling and the space above and between it and the moon a pathway. Aliens, humanoid looking and otherwise, were quick to catch on and were flocking to the magnificent site.
Giver had been used, he tried to reason with the entity, but it would have none of it.
It didn't raise its voice, it didn't lecture him on why he was wrong, it simply invited him into its stream of pure knowledge, gave him a little information, then just as quickly closed itself off. The result was far more embarrassing for Giver, and it drove him mad. He found himself committed to the local asylum and out of The Doctor's reach
But he left The Doctor a note in his workshop, taken from an ages old desk.
A series of instructions, and a location.
The Doctor took one step over the edge of the cliff face, and gently tapped the rim of it, a hatch in the center opened, and a large platform, a disco tech of lights, emerged atop a platform of high-tech machinery, a few clockwork gears sticking out, it had the hue and texture of a well tested contraption, a small furnace at the back of it burned a bright radiance of emerald green, fused all over the disco tech were large strobe lights
"Ah of course" said The Doctor, "Great human ingenuity, still full of original ideas, I must go back in time to warn Giver's ancestors that the concrete is coming, and they built this weapon beneath this cliff face, a weapon to destabilize the solidification emissions, a needle to puncture the concrete sky"
The generators took a while to kick in, this was some major churn of machinery, but bit by bit, the gears that remained intact began to spin into motion, gaining faster momentum, accelerating at tremendous speeds, as it did, the strobe lights blazed brighter and brighter, before being projected forth as a bright cavalcade of many, MANY colors shot across the ridges of the cliff, pouring out of carefully placed searchlight, the lightshow scanned across the blackened skies, holding still in the calm, looking for openings, looking for signs
But above and beyond all else, it was looking for THOUGHTS, thoughts of the entity that hung in the distant reaches of space and beyond the great conventional edges, to the realms of science, sorcery, and splendor, for within those thoughts, lay the foundations that needed to be shattered.
The Doctor closed his eyes, channeling the signals embedded into him by the lights, the shimmering brightness of them careering across the stillness of night like a rainbow bright blanket.
The sharp energy ribbons tore patches in the sky, it began to serve its purpose, The Doctor smiled, the thoughts were so warm, so…enterprising.
A small, oblong antenna rose above the left side of the discotech, and synthesizer music began playing an added bonus, and somewhat of a marvelously selfless perseverance on The Professor's side, he knew from Close Encounters just how much affinity grays had for the sound of the 1980s.
The beautiful sight was now a beautiful dawn, and the beautiful dawn became a beautiful encore, a cheesy, naff little encore, but for anyone with a care for the craft, it outdid Ride of the Valkaries any day.
"Why do you shatter my foundations?" a clear and crassly busy voice suddenly interrupted, navigating it's way through the channel of thoughts The Doctor was receiving. Perturbed by the intervention, the Time Lord snapped his eyes open.
"Ah, come to see how I've managed to burst your balloon have you?" he said, straining to be as polite as possible
"What is it you want?" the entity replied.
"I challenge you to allow this race to navigate through the current…to further test what they have within themselves" The Doctor replied, "Enclosing them within a world with a roof that puts the genuine roof of the world to shame and lesser station is not worth the kind of cricket my fifth test used to play"
The lights before him started flickering, the brightness receding, the batteries at the center of the vast disco tech were running short, the ancient gears began to crack open.
Finally, the machinery gave away from it's hinges, falling into the ocean. The Professor stared at the crumbling wreck as it broke apart both en route to and after it's collision with the waters.
"Everything crumbles" The Doctor spoke.
High above him, the sky ceased resembling a haze of orange and red, indeed heavy chunks of the colors began pouring down on the time lord
"The sky is dust, it is thin and clear and so many can and will slip through, so many will fall. If your aim was to break my heart traveler, you have succeeded"
"Oh I'll just take the TARDIS up and open the doors to the swimming pool, anyone who was idiotic enough to be taking a stroll up there will end up in the literal deep end...unless it's the kids then it'll be the shallow side, complete with a rubber matte on the floor so they don't bang their heads, as for you, you better make yourself scarce, go back to your diamond realm, you cause the human race enough sleepless nights, that and a loss of skin. In the meantime, I'm off to warn everyone a few years back of you, as vaguely as I can to preserve history on this end...shows what some genuine human ingenuity can do, standing up to you like that"
From a distance, The Doctor could hear sirens, the collapse of his apparatus had caused a smoldering black pillar of smoke and flame, the houses perched on the mountains to the left of the steep cliff face he was standing on had now almost completely emptied with frenzied onlookers, angry neighbors, and panicked parents. People were stepping out of their cars on the small circulatory road that began at the bottom of the mountain and led all the way to the top.
The Doctor shook his head.
"This certainly isn't one of those towns is it?" he thought to himself
As usual, he'd become dangerous without ever intending to be.
He reached out to speak to the voice of the entity again, but it had long retreated back to its home dimension, it's period of experimentation forcibly ended.
The Doctor tapped into the mind of Giver once again, the TARDIS telepathic circuits still keeping him tapped in.
Giver's madness, to The Doctor's dismay, had not quite subsided. Perhaps this was the curse of the diamond realm, and why it's vast intelligence rarely trespassed into this one...whenever it did, the human mind realized just how small in scale and ambition it was compared to that, and perhaps thought of its own universe as, whilst a perfect portrait, was quite limited in its scope and shape. You can't walk across the sky normally, you can't hold a star physically etc, etc.
The Doctor looked at the set of instructions left behind, the instructions that would save the world. Devised by brave, courageous and insightful human scientists.
And realizing the instructions were all written in his precise handwriting.
He would give them the instructions, and they in turn would pass down the instructions to their descendents who would pass on the instructions to him to pass on to the ancestors.
"Perhaps THIS is what drove poor Giver mad" though a deflated Doctor, "Not that the universe was simple and boring at the end of the day, but because not one thought or deed amongst the human race was ever really that original"
He sulked and boarded the TARDIS to catch some falling fools and begin mop-up operations across the various times and places.
A Doctor on call, a puncture in the concrete thread of time.