BIG BANG

Part V

Spacetime

And now The Doctor was left with deciding what it was they should do next. He'd an idea, of course. He didn't like it very much but it was the only path he could see. Outside of the TARDIS, spacetime was different. Inside, the timescape was stable, for now; but he didn't know how long that would last. He could feel, in a part of his brain that he was sure Jack didn't have, that the TARDIS, as quiet as she was, was struggling against mighty forces that perhaps even she herself didn't fully understand. He stroked the bit of console in front of him, lending support. She had almost infinite energy, but considering where they were both "infinite" and "energy" were relative terms. With time gone, there was no "infinite" because there was no "finite". And with "energy" being nothing like the concept with which he or the TARDIS was familiar, it was clear she was continuing to exist only by the most tenuous of threads.

He studied Jack's face. He needed to find some way to protect him, not that Jack really needed protecting, of course. But, still, he needed to look after him -- although he wasn't sure what good shielding Jack would do if they were stuck here permanently. There were fates worse than death… and Jack's particular super-power exposed him to living and reliving all sorts of dreadful existences. The 'Seven Circles of Hell' would be like paradise compared to what could happen to Jack if the wrong choice was made.

Still… there was nothing to be done but carry on.

"Jack," he said, "there's something I can do… Something Time Lords can do… That the TARDIS helps with." He took a breath and consciously slowed his pace; wanting to make sure he explained it right. "But it means that I'll change."

Jack looked at him with alarm.

"No, no, no, no… not that," The Doctor corrected himself, slowing down again. "It is a trick, a very old trick of the Time Lords'. We extract ourselves from spacetime in order to perceive events outside of it. And when we do this, we are no longer ourselves, because we no longer exist. Time Lords can't exist outside of spacetime."

The Doctor went on, despite himself falling into his lecturer role again. "Let me explain. You know the Time Lords invented black holes, don't you?"

Jack responded with a small sound signifying that he was impressed. He wasn't sure he'd known it, but it didn't surprise him. That confirmation was all The Doctor needed in a way of encouragement.

"Well… we really didn't invent them; not strictly speaking. We tweaked them – we modified them, and we made sure that there were super-massive black holes at the center of every large galaxy.

"We did it because we use the event horizons of those ginormous black holes when we travel. You see, the event horizons of super-massive black holes are impossibly powerful; we utilize the event horizons and manipulate the spacetime tidal forces they generate in order to expand and strengthen our time vortices. The vortices allow us to pass through huge distances in Time and Space by literally bending spacetime." This was said brightly, almost happily, but then The Doctor's face darkened, "And they allow us to circumvent or even leave spacetime, on occasion, when necessary."

The lecture ended abruptly as The Doctor started fussing with the TARDIS console. It was time for action.

"The only way for us to see what is happening is for me to place myself entirely outside of spacetime, and I've never done that before, in any of my existences, although the TARDIS has within her the collective memory of all Time Lords, so she can guide me. With her help, it's possible…" The Doctor's voice faded away, but Jack's picked up where he left off.

"It's possible that you have no idea what you're doing!"

Jack stood up and confronted The Doctor: "Or where you're going!"

"Of course I don't! But I won't really be leaving… I'll still be here, but I'll be elsewhere, too. The TARDIS should protect me."

"The operative word being 'should'!"

"There's no need to shout!"

"I'm not shouting. I'm simply animated!"

The Doctor grinned. "Indeed you are. And I intend to keep you that way. The TARDIS should protect you as well, but I want to give this back to you." He handed Jack the worn, leather teleport. It felt cold in Jack's hand, its usual pulsing warmth quieted, although he wasn't sure why. "I've always known it was more powerful than you let on," The Doctor added, with not a little bit of accusatory tone thrown in for good measure. Jack made as if to disagree but The Doctor held up a hand. "I don't want to hear about it. But, along with the TARDIS it may at least give you a fighting chance if something impossible happens."

Best Intentions

"Are you going to tell me or what?" Jack asked.

"What, what?"

"What you're about to do?"

"Well… either I'm going to be leaving spacetime or spacetime is going to be leaving me. I think it's probably the former, but it might be the latter, or it might be a combination thereof, or neither!" The Doctor chuckled, but it sounded nervous. "I'm not sure it really matters. In the end, I will be here but I won't. I'll be somewhere and, I think, something else. And I should be able to see what is happening and perhaps figure out a way we might fix it."

While he spoke, a device dropped leisurely down on a cable from the ceiling of the TARDIS. It looked a bit like a small model of a solar system. A large, almost painfully bright round body, attached to the slim cable, was gracefully orbited freely by smaller round bodies that glowed like semi-transparent opals. Jack thought it beautiful and stood transfixed for a moment as The Doctor walked around the apparatus, closely examining it, and then stopped and looked at him.

"I operate comfortably within spacetime. I know that what humans think of as the fourth dimension, time, is actually three different temporal dimensions, and that there are many, many more dimensions than the four humans postulated back in the early twenty-first century on earth… But, blimey, you were getting closer with 'M-theory!'…." The Doctor realized he was lecturing again and, really they had absolutely no time for it. "Ha!" He thought. "I've made a pun!"

He laughed at himself and added: "I'm firmly anchored to the multiple dimensions of our universe and I manipulate them, and spacetime, at will, with the help of the TARDIS. I'm going to be leaving that comfortable place, and I don't know where or what I'll be when I go. Does that answer your question?"

Without waiting for an answer The Doctor turned back to the device that had descended from the ceiling. "It is beautiful, isn't it?

"At its heart it holds a micro black hole. We didn't invent those, either, but we learned to manage them, in part for the good of life in the galaxies. You can't have micro black holes wandering aimlessly through inhabited solar systems! The Time Lords also learned to harness and use them, and that's in part what you see here; there is an impossibly small singularity at the center of this device. The bright light you see is its event horizon; the objects orbiting it have the ideal mass, relative to the larger central object, to sustain the proper amounts of attraction and gravitation required to support perfectly stable circular orbits."

The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver, pointed it at the mechanism for a moment and then brought his hand down and placed the screwdriver back into his pocket. Jack noticed the device had changed its location slightly in order to be exactly at The Doctor's eye-level. Or maybe The Doctor had altered his location. Jack was starting to feel like he was hallucinating; he wrapped his hand tightly around his teleport. It was ice cold.

Then the mechanism started to sing. It was beautiful music, but rather than the kind of music you hear, it was the kind of music you felt. Jack knew that it was unlike anything he'd ever heard before, and he was "hearing" it not with his ears but his… it felt like he was hearing it with his chest. Was he hearing it with heart? Was he hearing it with his soul? The music was speaking to him in ways that were impossible, and yet in ways he'd always wanted to be spoken to. It spoke to him in ways of harmonics, in ways of temperature, in ways of energy, in ways of movement, and of gravity and light, but the words, the song, were inside of him, not outside.

He looked in wonder at The Doctor. The Doctor's eyes were open but unseeing. As Jack watched, the color of The Doctor's eyes began to change from deep, dark brown to something translucent; their color matching the smaller orbiting objects in the device that had drifted from the TARDIS ceiling.

In fact, Jack realized, he was having trouble distinguishing The Doctor's eyes from the small objects in the device. No, wait… he was having trouble distinguishing The Doctor from The Device.

And then, despite all the best intentions of everyone involved, Something Very Bad Happened.

A Life in Film

The music wasn't music any more. It clutched at Jack's heart and it pummeled at his soul. He fell against the railing and then down onto the floor, shutting his eyes and closing his ears but to no effect.

He felt himself being stretched and being pulled and being compressed all at the same time. He felt his skin crawling and tingling and his heart racing and quieting simultaneously. He'd been dead before… many times… but nothing had ever felt like this. He felt parts of himself disappearing, completely and permanently. He felt his memories being torn from him violently, removed forever from his consciousness. His hand, which a minute before had been closed tightly on his teleport suddenly was gone, and the wristband with it. His face, his eyes, his ears were vanishing. He was having trouble even being cognizant of the changes that he was experiencing. Jack painfully realized that he was losing the ability to remember what he was and what was being taken from him. His sight… his hearing… his sense of touch…

"No!" he screamed and wasn't sure he'd actually made a sound, but he continued with what ever it was he'd been left with: "I refuse to let this happen! This must not be allowed! It must stop!"

It was no good. He wasn't breathing. He wasn't communicating. And even if he could, who would listen? Who could hear him?

In his mind, what was left of it, there was a film being shown. It was his life, in bits and pieces. He saw his childhood and his brother, and the years of his later youth when he wandered the galaxy. He watched things he'd done as a Time Agent, many of them not to be so proud of. The Doctor appeared – the first Doctor that he'd met, and then the second. Rose was there, and Ianto, and the rest of his team. He wanted to hang on to them, hold them close; he knew once they passed that they were gone for good. There'd be nothing left of him, nothing recognizable.

"Is this death?" he mused, using the last of himself to wonder. "Finally? What I'd wanted all those years? Now? Like this?"

He envisioned pulling himself up and standing, even though there was nothing left to rise. "Noooooo!" he screamed one last time, and disappeared.