…And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow
In 2346, 337 years after a gang of alien drug dealers did not decimate the Earth, did not steal away a tithe of children to turn their bodies into narcotics, the government of the West Eurasian Fusion announced Earth's first interplanetary peace treaty – military allegiance and open trade between Earth and eight of her nearest sentient alien neighbours. The celebrations lasted two weeks; the speeches about a New Dawn for Humanity, much longer. Everyone (said the politicians) looked forward to the advances in travel, technology, and culture the treaty would eventually bring – Earth (they said) might look very different in fifty or sixty years.
It took less than ten.
Space ports and trading channels sprang up in every city, barely ahead of the bureaucracies created to get in their way. And with so many new horizons opening up for interspecies socialization and sex and black markets and fugitives, new agencies of course arose to police them in above-board ways that, it was assured, were on-message with Our New Dawn Vision (or Awakening or whatever it was today). Forces like Torchwood, who dealt in conspiracy and brutal improvisation, could hear the axe being sharpened.
It took a few decades, but the axe finally fell.
Four hundred ninety-seven years after Queen Victoria of England ordered a team of special agents to protect Earth from a rogue Time Lord (not so much rogue, in the end, as simply stray), the Torchwood Institute formally incinerated its royal charter (263 years after the end of the actual monarchy). The ceremony was well-publicized, the sound bites well-marketed – declaring an end of shadowy secret agencies in the light of Our Great Enlightenment (or Re-Renaissance or whatever it was today). Four hundred ninety-seven years of kinky and clandestine alien liaisons; 497 years of arrogance and desperation and improvisation and hope.
One small camp of sentimentalists wanted to hold out for the 500-year anniversary, but the cry of 'sentiment' was drowned beneath the cry of 'operating cost,' and in 2376, Torchwood went up on the chopping block.
Artifacts disappeared to vaults and labs and museums (and private collections, and black markets, and bunkers and armories and graves). Personnel disappeared to much the same places. God alone knew what happened to the contents of the cryostorage.
In October, 2376, the Torchwood Institute shut down forever, and a man who was older than he looked locked the doors behind him and walked off into the gathering dusk until his ancient greatcoat merged with the pooling shadows of a new city.