A/N - I don't own Doctor Who. I'm a fan of the Peter Cushing movies, and I couldn't help but write a one-shot about them.
Dr Who stood in the garden of the house he shared with his granddaughters, Susan and Barbara, gazing at the tall blue police box shape. He had spent so long trying to think of the best shape, wondering if he should use a car given that the automobile would have the means of moving thanks to its wheels, but he had opted to go for a police box as there was something simpler about it compared to the car.
With a careless shrug, Dr Who walked to the doors and opened them. Instantly the automatic lights switched on and he gazed inside. Once more he marvelled at the near-impossible wonder that was transdimensional engineering. Very tricky, that; in theory, space expanded to accommodate the time given to it. But it was a wonder.
Dr Who knew if he had given the secret of that technology, it would be possible to build railway carriages which were bigger on the inside than on the outside, meaning it would mean the end of overcrowding; for now, however, it would be put to the test for time travel use only. Dr Who smiled and rubbed his hands like a little boy let loose in a toy shop only to discover it also had a pick-n-mix section.
His latest invention.
A time and space machine, TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimension In Space - and it was nearly ready.
There were only a few more components needed to finish the time machine, and they would be arriving soon enough.
The interior of TARDIS was a hodgepodge at the moment with components connected to one another with brightly coloured wires, but that would soon be rectified; TARDIS had to be proven to work, and while Dr Who was positive the time machine would be successful given the tests he and his granddaughters had conducted over the years had brought about many failures and successes which they'd built on and made possible, he wanted to spend some time understanding his new invention before he rebuilt the control system.
For a moment, Dr Who thought about how he and his family had come up with the plan to design and build a working time and space machine.
He had always been fascinated by time travel, ever since he had read HG Wells' time travel novel, The Time Machine and his short story, the Chronic Argonauts, Dr Who had wanted to travel in time.
He wished to see the future. He wanted to see if humanity ever ventured out into space, beyond the solar system.
He wanted to witness events in the past; the Battle of Hastings, he wanted to watch the Shakespeare plays for real, he wanted to shake Newton's hand, and he wished to meet Winston Churchill during the Second World War; he had seen the last war, and he had many terrible memories of it, but it would be great to meet one of the men who had brought an end to it.
So many years, so much work. Nights and days spent on equations, bringing down rainforests using reams and reams of notes, asking friends for insights and speculations of different components of the equations to get a second opinion here and there before he began with small, controlled experiments; rewinding and fast forwarding time in small contained areas, before he began opening time portals and eventually combined time travel and teleportation by devising a means of moving objects through space by using time travel.
The work had taken him years. Indeed, ever since his work on the Manhattan project where he had learnt many things about nuclear physics, he had learnt a great deal about the field, which had been proven ultimately beneficial to his work before he had finally made the important breakthroughs and he had leapfrogged with his experiments before he had been fascinated with the possibilities of fitting something large into something small. He was inspired when he had first seen a film on his television; the television was tiny and yet it depicted scenes that were so extraordinarily large it should have been impossible physically for them to be on the television in the first place.
But it was there.
It was real, and it was happening in real life, so it had to be physically possible.
But creating a multidimensional environment was not easy; he had needed to take a long look at the ideas, from compressing space-time to simply finding a way to shrink the contents of the time machine down. But then he realised the simpler the solution, the better. Dr Who had decided to use his time travel technology to conduct the experiments, and after some work, he discovered he could do it.
But where to install the equipment?
If you wanted to build a time machine, Dr Who believed, why not make it memorable and original? Hence the police box's outer shape. Granted it had some impracticalities, but he was sure it was customisable.
As he sat down in his chair, looking around with a smile despite the machine's unfinished condition, Dr Who felt at home inside TARDIS.