Chapter 7: Singularity
[Meow Wolf, Santa Fe / June 2016]
Through a series of strange and perplexing events, the Doctor and Donna rediscovered the house twice. Once on the first floor, after finally stumbling across the crystal caves and glowing mammoth bones Donna had seen earlier. (They soon discovered that the towering mammoths' bones made musical notes and changed colors when hit at just the right angle.) Donna pointed out the small tunnel she'd crawled through in the back of the fireplace to get to the living room, and two of them watched many new, baffled visitors crawl through it, one after another.
The next time Donna and the Doctor found the house was on the second floor. One minute they were ambling through a room full of mirrors, towering layered cakes, and maraschino cherries, and the next minute they were in a dark tunnel with small, bioluminescent creatures lining the walls. They reached a door at the end of the tunnel and pushed it open to find a child's bedroom. Or rather, the bedroom that Lex and Morgan had apparently shared, with a wooden bunk bed taking up most of the space along one wall. There was a round, colorful rug on the floor, a desk pushed against the window that was covered with crayon drawings signed by Morgan, and another small table against the wall between a bookcase and the bedroom door. The door was propped open to allow easy access from the house's second floor hallway. The Doctor and Donna turned to look back at the door they had come through, only then realizing that it was supposed to be the children's closet.
The Doctor went to the small, round table by the door where few books lay open atop a mess of papers. Some of the books were Morgan's sketchbooks, and others were notebooks with graph paper inside. Most of the pages in those books were covered in diagrams and copious notes made by Lex.
Turning a few pages of one of Lex's notebooks, Donna muttered, "Looks like someone wanted to be a scientist when he grew up."
The Doctor nodded as he shifted through the other books on the table, skimming their pages for anything related to the incident on March 17th. One of the Lex's journal entries from April 2014 detailed how much he hated when people died and left him—specifically referring to his grandmother, Jean, who had died in December of 2012. Increasingly uneasy, the Doctor flipped through the rest of the notebook, pausing to read any entry that mentioned death or Lex's hatred of it. The Time Lord couldn't fault him for such dislike, but it was concerning how the young boy seemed to obsess over it more and more as the journal entries went on.
Closing that book, the Doctor picked up another one at random, and then swiftly set it aside in favor of what he discovered underneath it. Among the various pages of schoolwork and artwork, there was a white greeting card with an black, abstract flower on the front. 'With Sympathy' was written below the flower in flowing script.
"What's a condolence letter doing here?" Donna asked, also spotting the card.
"Lex was obsessed with stopping death," the Doctor said, opening the card as he spoke, "this could be from when his grandmother— Oh."
Donna shifted closer so she could see the inside of the card better. "What? What's it say?"
"It's from the Charter, a message to one of their agents," the Doctor said hesitantly. He wasn't sure if what he was holding was even a true form of Charter communication, but it looked convincing enough.
To: Charter Agent 35
Subject: Your Assignment
35,
Effective immediately, you are the new custodian of the Selig/Pastore house. For the safety of the Multiverse, we isolated the home from its native dimension and quarantined it within an abandoned bowling alley in a small desert city. This is, of course, not ideal, but it was the best we could do on such short notice. The home had to be removed immediately for reasons you will soon witness yourself.
The house in question was initially located in Mendocino, California. It was the site of a disaster, a complete breakdown of the structures keeping the Multiverse orderly and safe that would have destroyed the house's universe of origin had we not acted quickly. The family who lived here were creatures of the Anomaly.
On March 17, 2016, their creative powers caused a Class-1 Break. The Seligs perverted the laws of Time and Space to recall a child—
"That must have been Lex," the Doctor muttered, "Lex Pastore, or Selig."
—who passed from the material realm. The house collapsed into chaos when the child returned. The memories and emotions of the family were made manifest. These pocket dimensions cling to the house like parasites and for the time being we are unable to sever them from proper reality.
You are to keep the house safe. Prevent it from collapsing further into chaos. Search the home for information about the cause of the disaster and report back to us. You will upload any information you find to your account on . We will send a team of specialists to you shortly.
You should start by familiarizing yourself with the day of the event. There is a newspaper in the kitchen.
That is all.
Donna was incredulous. "The Charter has a website? That doesn't sound very secretive. Do you think it's real?"
The Doctor also remained doubtful of the card's authenticity. "I find it hard to believe. Still, might be useful to look into it."
Donna shrugged. "If it exists. Did you see a newspaper in the kitchen? I didn't."
"Yes, the same one you found in Mendocino. It was open on the kitchen table," he said, thinking back.
"You didn't say anything earlier!"
"Wasn't important. We'd already read it."
His companion clearly didn't agree with his assessment, but she held her tongue. At least, until new curiosity sparked in her eyes, and she said speculatively, "I wonder if there are more disguised Charter messages here."
Now there was a brilliant idea. "Only one way to find out," he said.
It was a daunting task, but it was worth the extra time it took. Once they knew to look for more notebooks, letters, and hidden Charter assignments, the Doctor and Donna began finding them all over the house, most notably in the home office at the top of the stairs.
In the office, there was a computer lacking its monitor, a few folders and binders, and a safe on the desk that would have been much easier to break into if the sonic screwdriver had been an option.
The Doctor guessed the combination partially by chance, after he glanced around the office in exasperation about the fact that he couldn't just use the sonic to disable the lock. Then he noticed the time on the small clock mounted on the wall on the other side of the room. The hands were frozen in place at 7:06, the exact moment the anomaly in the house had formed.
"If you added a zero before the seven…" He trailed off, considering the possibility. He'd tried many other numbers he and Donna had found in papers and notebooks. It couldn't hurt to try one more combination, even if it was highly unlikely it would be the correct one. (He was swiftly proven wrong about its unlikeliness when 0706 turned out to be the right code after all.)
The only thing in the safe was a small, green, leather notebook. It was quite underwhelming, at first.
"That's it?" Donna asked in disbelief.
The Doctor reached into the safe and pulled the book out, opening it to a random page. "Oh," he realized, "but this isn't any old notebook." It held the oldest evidence he had seen thus far about the Selig family's dabbling in sonic experiments, and it all started with one man: Lex and Morgan's grandfather.
"Take a look at that!" The Time Lord said excitedly, passing the notebook to Donna. "That has a lot of notes about sonic experiments, with multiple entries made in the 1970s. Whoever wrote in it—Emerson Selig is the name in the front —must have used it throughout his time in the U.S. military back then. He talks about the war in Vietnam, and his work with radios. What's strange is that Emerson clearly learned a lot about sonic energy from someone. Not just for his duties, but how to harness it and use it to do all sorts of things. He refers to the person who taught him only as Seventeen, writing it with a capital 'S' every time. And see here—" the Doctor reached over and turned to a mud-splattered page near the beginning of the journal, pointing to a messy sentence scrawled along the bottom, "Seventeen was an enemy soldier. Emerson was American."
Donna winced. "What a horrible way to meet."
"Quite."
"Seventeen isn't a Vietnamese name though. I mean, it sounds more like one of the Charter agents' codenames, like Agent 35." She looked to the Doctor for confirmation.
"Seventeen might not be his real name," he said. "It could've been an alias, plain and simple. According to Emerson, he was strongly against the Charter. Maybe he didn't want to be found by them."
"Huh." Donna carefully closed the notebook and inspected the cover. She wrinkled her nose at the sight of a large orange and black sticker that had been slapped on the back cover. "The Charter Anomaly Crimes Division," she read aloud, "case number 706-JP64.5-38, Agent 12. Description of evidence: Emerson Selig's Journal, Vietnam."
"Anomaly Crimes Division?" The Doctor repeated. "What crimes do they have to police? Most temporal anomalies aren't exactly common occurrences." As he spoke, he couldn't help but wonder what the Council would have said about this house and its missing family. Temporal anomalies were generally wrong by nature, but not all of them were things the Doctor would have termed criminal. A few examples came to mind that certainly could fall into that category, but still others remained undefinable. The very concept of a criminal investigation division of the Charter was rather disconcerting.
"If the card and this sticker are signs of Charter activity, then where are the agents? They must be monitoring this place. The only question is how…" the Doctor pondered aloud.
Donna stifled a yawn and sat down in the chair at the desk, staring at the book in her hands. "Always is," she said. The Doctor observed her for a moment before his gaze slid to the office windows. He could see the entrance to the installation from here, along with some of the visitors milling around on the front lawn.
He and Donna had been at Meow Wolf for over two hours. At least, he was pretty sure that was the amount of time that had passed outside the partial time-lock placed on the house. They might have been there closer to three hours, but it was getting harder to tell. The anomaly consuming the house was starting to affect his time sense in all sorts of interesting ways. Part of him was utterly fascinated by the house, amazed that he could actually stand inside an anomaly of such size and observe it without being destroyed along with the universe. The other part of him wanted to run and never look back.
"Where to next?" Donna asked.
The Doctor blinked, turning his attention back to her. "What do you mean?"
"Well, we have to find the Charter, or at least someone who works for it, and I'm pretty sure we haven't seen everything here yet. I heard this one boy telling his mum something about the fridge and a place called Portals Bermuda. We haven't seen anything like that yet, as far as I know," she said.
She had a point. "Shall we go back through the closet, check more of the rooms around that dance floor? We didn't go in all of them," he suggested.
With Emerson's notebook still clutched in her hand, Donna nodded and got to her feet, gesturing down the hall to the doorway of the twin's bedroom. "Might as well. If we ever find them again," she answered wryly.
The Doctor quickly waved off her uncertainty. "Not a problem, we just have to retrace our steps. Oh, and bring the book, will you? I want to look at it more once we get back to the TARDIS."
The last room the Doctor and Donna wandered into was empty when they arrived, and quite dark inside. They stepped tentatively across the threshold, letting their eyes adjust to the dim lighting.
The walls were pitch black, the wall directly opposite them covered by an intricate wooden lattice. The lattice stood in front of a large triangle sitting atop a pedestal, both also made out of wood. An open circle in the middle of the triangle was inset with gears that were reminiscent of the inner workings of a clock. The gears themselves were illuminated by a white spotlight in the shape of…. Well, the Doctor wasn't quite sure what the circular shape with a trapezoidal bottom was supposed to be, exactly.
The floor was made of polished black and white marble fragments arranged into interlocking hexagons. A black desk sat in the middle of the room with a wooden chair behind it, facing the lattice wall. The sound of a ticking clock echoed through the room.
The Doctor approached the desk, his eyes flickering between it and the triangle behind the lattice. There was something odd about this room; something that pulled at his senses in all the wrong ways.
"I've lost my son. I must get him back."
The Doctor jerked his head up, he and Donna both searching for the source of the female voice that had spoken.
"Where's it coming from, do you think? Speakers?" Donna asked.
"Shhh!" The Doctor quickly held up a hand, gesturing for silence. That voice sounded like it had belonged to Lex's mother, and he desperately wanted to know if she would say anything more.
A viola began to play a haunting, resonant melody, and it was soon accompanied by a piano.
A new, gravelly voice began to rasp from the darkness. "In the beginning we were One. One entity, one kingdom. We were all. It was order, it was…Perfection. But even in perfection, our heart longed. Curiosity made us want. We no longer felt content with perfection. We needed the unknown, we needed to explore. We needed to create. An Anomaly emerged. Fragmentation happened fast. Something overtook everything, and it needed to be contained. We created Time, we created Space, we created law…and we created the Charter."
Donna gasped.
"Whereas, the Anomaly may express its right to create as long as the following stipulations are met…"
The music faded away, leaving behind the echoes of a ticking clock.
"The Anomaly's creations shall be governed by orderly laws of physics that stabilize form and maintain controlled fragmentation. The Anomaly shall create within the linear sequencing called Time that will allow for its creations to be experienced in fragmented moments. The Anomaly shall be instigated to create until it rapidly and inevitably destroys the same structures that maintain these fragmentations. From its creation, the Anomaly agrees to return to Oneness."
The Doctor could only listen to the voice of the Charter representative with growing dread. What the voice was saying didn't match the Laws of Time set by the Time Lords, but the wording was somewhat similar, almost too similar. How could the Time Lords have not realized what the Charter was doing before their demise, when the organization had clearly based their purpose around some of the same principles? The Charter likely interfered with certain events, possibly more than they passively observed or worked to prevent them, but the idea of maintaining proper universal structure was something the Doctor was all too familiar with.
The spotlight slowly unfurled into streaks of white, swirling and twisting across the lattice in a mesmerizing dance. The haunting music began again, and a different, older woman's voice spoke.
"I always knew my family was special. I knew we came from a bloodline that was radically different than most…But after I died, I found out that we were…"
"Did she just say 'after I died'?" Donna whispered.
"Yes," the Doctor answered, wishing he could answer otherwise.
Two children's voices took over next. He suspected they belonged to Lex and Morgan.
"Where did Grandma go when she died?"
"She…became…us."
"Lex? Lex! Wake up! I can't lose you, Lex!" The twins' mother's voice returned, sounding pleading and frantic.
Lex's voice responded, "I wanna come back. Bring me back to life…"
The Doctor's eyebrows rose. Just how many people had died and been brought back to life in the Selig family?
The voice he assumed belonged to Morgan spoke up again. "There's a song I know…"
Lex's voice interrupted her quite petulantly. "Well, songs don't know everything."
"They do," she insisted, "they're spells."
"…Mom! Tell mom she can bring me back!"
"I will do anything to bring you back," their mother promised.
An elderly man's voice spoke up for the first time. "This is…the Singularity. This is the moment when all moments collide…"
The gears within the triangle began turning ever so slowly. The light illuminating them had long since expanded into hundreds of interwoven geometric designs that spiraled across the lattice. For one moment, the Doctor was sure the designs rippled like the surface of a pond.
"Did you see that? The light…" Donna muttered.
The Doctor narrowed his eyes at it. "I did."
"I don't think the gears were moving before."
"They weren't." And the Doctor didn't like it in the slightest. Nor did he like the distortions in space-time that were visibly growing in magnitude around the gears. He made a split-second decision.
"Time to go!" he said, grabbing Donna's hand and pulling her toward the door.
The air began to churn around them, a sudden rush of tingling cold washing over the room like a rising tide. The Doctor shoved Donna through the doorway just as something exploded into existence behind them in a storm of darkness and light.
He threw a glance over his shoulder, slowing his pace as he became transfixed by the dark, gaping maw of the portal that was slowly spinning itself into being in front of the lattice wall. Flashes of rippling silver light raced around the edges of it, spiraling inwards to its centre.
Donna shouted, "Doctor, come on!"
The portal burst open with a thunderous boom, and he was drawn into its magnetic pull before he could respond. He tumbled through the dizzying whirlpool of fragmented Time and Space until he was abruptly tossed out of the portal onto slick, muddy ground.
The Doctor scrambled to his feet, head spinning with disjointed timelines as he jerked around to face the portal.
It was gone.
In its place, and all around him, were ancient, gnarled trees shrouded in frigid mist. The ground was a patchwork of vibrant green moss and mud, interspersed with a few rocks and bushes. "Donna!" The Doctor shouted, twisting around to look for his companion, or any sign of another portal forming. Nothing happened. Nothing moved.
He was alone.
He ran his hands through his hair, tugging on it in frustration as his eyes roved over his new surroundings. He was in a clearing, in a silent wood. He could only hope he was still in his original universe. His first priority was to get back to Donna. She was out of her own time in 2016. He couldn't abandon her there.
With tendrils of mist beginning to cling to his skin and clothes, the Doctor took off running through the forest, searching for signs of civilization. As far as he could tell, he was still somewhere on Earth. Which Earth, and when, remained unclear. He pried a sharp, grey stone out of the mud and moss and used it to mark trees along his path. He marked one every 20 feet, just in case he needed to find his way back to the clearing he'd first appeared in. The forest looked so similar in every direction, he didn't want to take any chances and end up even more lost than he already was. Not with the fate of multiple universes hanging in the balance.
The Doctor had just entered a vast clearing and paused to consider which direction to go next when a flash of gold caught his eye. There was a massive tree growing along the edge of the clearing, almost directly across from him. It towered above the rest of the forest with most of its upper branches disappearing entirely into the fog. Something on its trunk was glowing gold in the dim light. Though he still had his glasses on, the Doctor couldn't quite make out what the golden object was. He approached it cautiously, white trainers squelching through waterlogged undergrowth.
The golden object turned out to not be an object at all. It was two words carved into the tree's trunk, burning with residual energy like coals glowing long after a fire had been put out. The energy sparked and flared, yet somehow never set the tree alight. The Doctor's hearts stuttered and sank as he read the fiery words.
BAD WOLF.
"It can't be," he whispered. It wasn't possible, it couldn't be possible. She was gone, and Bad Wolf a thing of the past. (He steadfastly ignored the quiet voice of doubt in his mind that whispered, "But what if…") He shook his head in denial. This couldn't be real. Maybe it was a distraction, or maybe it was simply a construct of his own memories manifesting via the Selig House anomaly. He had to find a way back to Meow Wolf. He could figure it out then.
Leaves rustled on the ground behind him. The back of his neck prickled. There was the sound of a quiet breath being drawn. No, two breaths.
He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and whirled around. He came face to face with two bipedal beings dressed in all black uniforms that were partially visible beneath their pristine, white lab coats. One of them had coppery-red scales for skin and reptilian wings protruding from their back. The other figure was more humanoid, with olive skin and black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Neither looked particularly friendly.
The Doctor squared his shoulders. "I was wondering when I'd finally meet someone from the Charter," he ground out.
The scaled Charter agent opened their mouth to speak, hesitating for a moment when the Doctor turned the sonic screwdriver on. It was only set to read the atmospheric composition, because he didn't dare use it for more than that yet, but the agents didn't need to know that. Their wary reactions were also quite telling; the Charter clearly didn't know as much about him as he'd thought.
"We warned you, Doctor. You and your…companion," the scaled agent said. They had a quiet, lilting voice that sounded feminine, though the Doctor couldn't be entirely sure of the being's gender. He'd never encountered their species before.
He stared them down. "Yes, and I tend not to like threats made against me or my friends, so I thought I'd pop in, ask a few questions. What are you doing with that house from Mendocino?" He asked.
"That is none of your concern, Time Lord. The Charter does not give second warnings."
"Oh?" The Doctor cocked his head slightly. "Now that, we can agree on. What is the Charter, exactly? I'm quite curious about that."
"Further questions will not be permitted!" The dark-haired agent snapped. Their right hand shifted to grasp their left wrist.
The Time Lord took note of the movement as he scoffed, "And you plan to stop me from asking them? Ha! If you really know about me, you should know that that'll never happen."
The winged agent's pale green eyes shifted to the tree trunk behind him. "We know you are connected to the creation of the Bad Wolf," they said.
The Doctor went stock still. "What?"
The dark-haired agent continued. "We warned you to not interfere with Charter business, but then, we did not realize the full extent of your crimes. The Bad Wolf was recently declared an enemy of the Charter, and she will be dealt with accordingly, as will all beings associated with her."
The Time Lord paled. Shock quickly turned to anger. "What do you know about Bad Wolf? Tell me!" He snarled.
The dark-haired agent's right fingers pressed down on something through their left sleeve. The Doctor only had time to register the feeling of a transmat locking onto his body before it took him away.
He was deposited unceremoniously into a prison cell. The moment his feet touched solid ground, he stumbled back against the wall, fingers gripping the rough stone, and anger coursing through him. (That was it, he was officially done with being transported places against his will.)
The Charter agents had vanished.
The gray, stone walls, floor, and ceiling of his cell were dark and damp. An obsidian slab of rock sat in the middle of the room, illuminated by one of many lights set into the ceiling above it. Six thick, gleaming restraints were bolted to the slab's surface.
The Doctor forced his gaze past them, ignoring their implications as he searched for a way out. There was a metal door to his right that had been polished to a spotless shine. There was no window to see out, no door handle. Nothing to suggest anything had ever entered or exited this cell before.
The Time Lord strode determinedly to the door. He raised his hand, intending to scan it with the sonic, when he realized his hand was empty. The sonic screwdriver must have fallen from his grasp when the transmat activated. He allowed himself a moment to feel the regret that came with that realization before forcing it away. He could build a new sonic screwdriver when he got out of here, maybe even before. After he found out what the Charter knew about Bad Wolf, and why they thought she still existed.
He gritted his teeth and rapped once on the door, just to test its thickness. Electricity shot through his fingers and he jerked back with a stifled gasp. An electrified door, that was something he didn't encounter every day. The current that had shocked him had been small, nowhere near fatal, but he had no doubt its power could be increased. Fine. So the door wasn't going to be his best escape option unless he could disable it. He moved on to studying the walls.
A faint whirring sound from the ceiling eventually made him look up. It took him a moment to spot the miniscule cameras swiveling into position out of concealed compartments in all four corners of the room. Two of them immediately trained their all-seeing gaze on their prisoner. A third along the back wall of the cell moved to point at the door, while the last camera, located diagonally across the room from the third, focused on the stone slab.
The Doctor glared up at the closest one, positioned in the corner above the door. The Charter really thought they could jail him, the last Time Lord, the sole survivor of his race? They thought they could use Bad Wolf's name against him? He would not yield to their wishes. He could only hope Donna had escaped the same fate, and that the two words that had once literally changed his life did not mean what he feared they meant. Rose was safe in the parallel universe. Forever lost to him, but safe. He had to believe that if nothing else, because she was safe in the parallel universe and that meant she was out of the Charter's reach. She had to be.
He was not prepared for a heavy weight to slam into his mind without warning, cracking apart mental defenses he'd thought were as strong as he could make them. He cried out, falling to his knees, hands flying to his throbbing temples. He tried to counter the attack, but it was too late. The stone slab in the middle of his cell began to hum, not at the same frequency as the house in Mendocino had, but in a deeper tenor.
Something tore at the edges of his mind, splintering apart the only remaining telepathic connection he had (these days). He was too far away from the TARDIS to feel the full extent of her distress. He only felt her distant shudder before their telepathic connection cut off in a white-hot flash of pain.
A nauseating, choked feeling rose in his throat. This wasn't just a telepathic block, this was a severing. A conquest.
The humming grew louder, reverberating through the cell in tones both shrill and bass all at once. The Doctor could barely think past the sound. He clamped his mouth shut, refusing to let another pained noise escape him. He would not give whoever was watching him through the cameras that satisfaction.