Disclaimer: Doctor Who is the property of the BBC. Please don't sue me Mr BBC.

Outside the window, the Spirit rover rolled slowly across the Martian landscape, illuminated by scant beams of ringlight, reflected sunlight from the ring system surrounding Mars. Of all the moments and places in history, this was one of the Doctor's favourites: The period when humanity began to reach out to the stars. Life, still so fragile on that one planet but already, people were dreaming of the security a species gained by colonising other planets. The doctor smiled.

This was the place he'd chosen to come to die his final death.

In the end, it had been old age that had finished him off, old age and maybe the fact that he had no enemies left. He could never have left the universe to the Daleks or the Cybermen but they were long since gone. He lived in a universe that no longer needed him. In fact, that had been true for some time. Humanity had developed the ability to modify themselves with computer brain interfaces of subtlety and beauty - nothing like the heartless suits of metal used by the Cybermen. And those modifications increased their intelligence which gave them the capacity to create better modifications. The cycle continued until the empire of man equaled, or even exceeded, the power that the time lords had once held.

The Doctor closed the door of the TARDIS. Once humanity had killed off the greatest threats to their survival - once they'd finally rid the universe of the Daleks - they had closed off the ability to time travel. They had modified the structure of space-time itself so that all of the closed timelike curves, structures in space-time that allowed backward time travel, had been eradicated. But the TARDIS followed its own space-time curve - generated at the moment of its birth - and the humans had been unable to close it. With the Doctor's death, the TARDIS would deactivate and the last means of time travel in the universe would become static and useless. It would be the end of an amazing but very dangerous era.

The Doctor closed his eyes.

Raymond sat and composed a resignation letter he knew he would never send. When he had finished, it sat on his computer desktop for a moment before he deleted it. He stared out of the window. When he'd gone to a class reunion a year back, he'd seen the surprise in people's eyes when he said that he still worked for a telemarketing company. At school, he'd always come top of the class. He went on to university, slept during most of the classes and still graduated with a high first class degree. People had presumed he was going somewhere. Then, when he started to work he realised that something was broken inside of him. The harder he worked, the more stressed he became until the only way he could be happy in life was to be a failure.

And he was a failure.

He even failed to notice that some practical jokers had gone overboard and place a giant blue box in his backyard. It hasn't been there when he got home this afternoon and now it was which meant that it must have appeared while he was staring out of the window. They'd done it just in front of his eyes. He sighed and stood. He would need to find out where they'd stolen it from and get the owner to come and collect it.

He turned on the back light and stepped outside. The box had a sign on it declaring it to be a "Police Box". A fake, old fashioned telephone was attached to the side. Raymond frowned and decided it must be a prop from a TV show or something. There didn't seem to be any identifying labels on it so he tried the door. It swung open. Sometimes in life, personal changes are subtle and you can't quite pinpoint when your perspective on the universe changed. In this case, Raymond could have told you the exact moment - it was the instant that he realised the box was a lot bigger on the inside than the outside.

As he stumbled in, wild eyed, an image of a man appeared in midair in front of him. He backpedelled and ended up tripping over. He watched from the ground as the man in the recording spoke.

"If you're seeing this then I'm dead. As in very dead and not coming back. Furthermore, instead of shutting down when the psychic link with me was extinguished, the TARDIS has instead forged a new psychic link, with you. My guess is that you're from Earth in either the 20th or 21st century. The TARDIS always kept taking me back there and it definitely had some sort of reason. Maybe you'll discover the why. Maybe you're the reason why."

The man paused and then said, "Now I'm going to have to trust that the TARDIS had good reasons for creating its link with you but, even so, I'm not going to let you bash up the most beautiful time travel device in history because you try and fly it without learning how to do so first. So before you do anything else, read the book that should be on the table in front of you."

The projection disappeared. Raymond wasn't thinking straight now. The old stress was pressing in on him. He stumbled backward out of the box. The doors swung closed as he ran up to his room, muttering to himself. He lay down on the bed. If he slept, he decided, this would all go away.

Raymond closed his eyes.