Chapter VI:
"They can't get us in here." the Doctor said as he locked the TARDIS door. Rick and the Doctor turned around to face the interior control room of the TARDIS. "Holy shit! This thing is bigger on the inside, how did you do that?" Rick marveled. "They all say that. This is what the TARDIS really is; the cloaking device simply makes it appear to be a police box on the outside." the Doctor explained. The two of them walked into the control room and the Doctor fiddled around with the controls and pulled down a large lever that initiated a loud whooshing sound. "What is that noise?" asked Rick. "That is us getting away from that maniac outside." the Doctor informed him. Outside, Negan and his henchmen were startled and taken off guard when the TARDIS started to fade in and out of existence. "Dafuq is that shit!" Negan exclaimed as he backed away from the blue box disappearing into the wind.
Within the TARDIS Rick was still awestruck until his thoughts snapped back to the events outside. "As much as I am impressed with this place you really fucked us good Doctor." Rick grumbled. "Daryl's dead, Glenn and Maggie might be too and if they escaped they very well could have led those goons straight back to Alexandria." he bemoaned the cost they had suffered in order to learn the TARDIS's secret. "No need to look so glum all the sudden. We can still save them." said the Doctor. "How?" asked Rick. "I told you this box is a time machine. We go back, change the timeline, and prevent all this zombie business from ever happening. . ." the Doctor explained. "Zombie business?" interrupted Rick. "Oh sorry, excuse me, I meant "walker" business." the doctor quipped. "Anyways we stop the outbreak that changes the timeline, society keeps chugging along as it always has and none of the awful things today would have ever happened." the Doctor explained. "Wait a minute; doesn't that violate some Back to the Future rule or something?" Rick inquired. "What the devil is a back to the future rule?" the Doctor laughed. "You can't change the past, isn't that why time travel supposedly can't work?" Rick elaborated. "Balderdash, as you can see here time travel actually does work. You see, most humans have a misunderstanding of how time really works; they assume that it's something of a straight line proceeding from cause to effect ad infinitem while in reality it is not linear at all. In fact there are as many temporal dimensions as there are spatial dimensions so you can't think only of forwards or backwards but also laterally, vertically and inversely as well. Even within a single space-time ribbon floating within an 11 dimensional hypersphere within the 13 dimensional bulk it branches and merges and loops and falls back onto itself, collapses and expands into quantum bubbles and so on. There are always variables and one of those variables just happens to be me." the Doctor rambled on explaining the physics of space-time in what he thought to be layman's terms. "English please?" Rick asked for clarification. "It's a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, ummm, stuff." the Doctor informed him. "Better." Rick said. "So where exactly did the outbreak begin or should I say when?" Rick asked. "I won't know until I go through the data I gathered from those corpses we saw in the woods. I'm also going to need a blood test." the Doctor replied. "A spaceman asking to do experiments on a human, how cliché." Rick said sarcastically. "You're more clever than I took you for, most fellows assume that I'm completely human at first glance." the Doctor praised Rick. "It's all the. . .weird, that clued me in. With all this wibbly wobbly gobbledeguk and the spaceship in a box you had to be a space alien, or mentally deranged." Rick explained. "I'm glad you chose the former." the Doctor applauded. "Well so the TARDIS computer doesn't have any information on the walker outbreak so we're going to have to work this backwards using good old forensics." the Doctor explained. "Like a crime scene huh? Now you're speaking my language. Let's get this blood test over with Doctor so we can save my friends and you can get back to your lady." Rick said. He had to hope all the fantastic, nonsensical claims the Doctor made concerning time travel were true. He knew the situation outside could only get worse and there was nothing he alone could do to stop it. The Doctor claimed to have a plan, a plan Rick would have to depend on now. It was his only chance to protect his group from imminent destruction.
So the Doctor drew Rick's blood and placed a sample into the TARDIS' analyzer. Meanwhile he flipped up his sonic and began staring at it as it whirred and buzzed as if he could see something infinitesimally small that Rick could not. Within minutes the TARDIS analyzer dinged and displayed the results of its analysis on a laptop sized screen. Rick peered over the Doctor's shoulder to see what he was looking at when he started to peruse through the results but he couldn't make heads or tails of it. Half of it was in symbols or some strange foreign language and there was a flood of numbers racing across the screen along with a few visuals and diagrams that were gone before Rick could blink. The Doctor was like a machine compiling and deciphering all the data that flashed across the screen. Then when the last of the results were displayed the Doctor immediately had a diagnosis to give. "Fascinating, this organism isn't only not from Earth it's not even from the same galaxy." The Doctor commented upon a detailed examination of the infectious agent in Rick's blood. "What makes you say that?" Rick asked. "The organism that is responsible for turning people into walkers. It's not a virus, nor bacteria, nor fungus; it's a single celled eukaryotic organism possibly skin to a protozoan but incredibly more complex than all Earth species. The organism has a two stage life cycle spending most of its time in a chrysalis and only entering into its mature form when it reactivates the host body's motor cortex. While the organism is in the chrysalis it seems to be resistant to most forms of ionizing radiation, heat and chemical agents and can be spread through both the air and water. The mature form of the organism however can only be transmitted by the transfer of bodily fluids, such as sweat, semen, blood and saliva. When outside of a host body for too long the mature form either dies or reverts back to the chrysalis state. It's either the pinnacle of microbiotic evolution or was created using something on the level of Time Lord science which is absolutely preposterous." the Doctor explained. "That's nice but why do you say it's from another planet and how the fuck did it get here?" Rick inquired. "Rotoform double barred triple helix DNA structure with six distinct base pairs that are found nowhere in the Milky Way and surrounding satellite galaxies. The structure itself is a rare occurrence and is almost never found in single celled organisms. As for how it arrived on Earth there are many means by which microbes can make the leap from one planet to another, they could be free floating spaceborne creatures, or carried by meteors, comets, interstellar dust or an infected member of a spacefaring civilization might have accidentally or intentionally brought it with them on a visit to Earth." the Doctor explained. "Alright that makes sense, I suppose. So where did it start and how do we stop it?" asked Rick cutting to the important question. "I have never seen anything like it and have no means of tracking down exactly where in the cosmos it came from." replied the Doctor. "So when did it begin on Earth? Can you tell me that much?" asked Rick. The Doctor typed in a few more variables into the TARDIS computer and extrapolated the mutations and concentrations of the infectious agent throughout the Earth at various points along the new timeline which the TARDIS was constructing as it moved through the time vortex and scanned various zones throughout. "Oh, oh Brilliant! I've got it!" the Doctor exclaimed. "1113 AM and 53.522201 seconds local time, March 4th 2008, San Diego International Airport, Terminal 2 East, Gate 20. That is where we will find our walker zero!" the Doctor enthusiastically informed Rick. "From there we can stop this person from infecting any others, backtrack the source of the infection, remove it and bammo!" the Doctor said, clapping his hands with glee at the end of the sentence. "We fix the timeline and you and your buddies go on with your happy lives and the word "walker" goes back to being something old people use to get around." the Doctor merrily informed Rick of their plan. The Doctor then gripped the actuator levers on the TARDIS' main control panel. "Alons-Y!" he exclaimed as he yanked them downwards. The familiar whooshing of the TARDIS engines followed; Rick and the Doctor were on their way back to where it all began.