Time Warp III

Rose

"I'm just worried you won't be able to understand-"

"Understand? Shut it, mate," Rose ordered, "I'll understand your time-stuff just fine, thanks very much." Charlie the scientist did not look convinced. Probably because she called it 'time-stuff.' She had asked him for an explanation to attempt to fill the time while the Doctor had a little Reaper-induced meltdown next to her. She kept looking at him worriedly.

"Okay, I was the lead scientist," said Charlie, "The project was thought of by this guy, Todd Myers, some egotist who wants to 'make his mark' on history. He's got real money smarts you know? I met him when we were at school together, I thought he was a genius. He thought the same about me, but I spent all my time in labs doing quantum engineering – it's nothing too astonishing, my old research, just to do with a particle-suspension based levitation system. He thought he saw potential in it, tried to monetise it, we were business partners. That was ten years ago. The industry is under his name, Myers is a corporate beast – he can get any funding he wants from anywhere, nobody ever says no to him. It was just in the last few weeks I found out the truth about him, he's been blackmailing people for years to get money for these projects of his. But I didn't know any of that, I swear it."

"Yeah, alright," Rose said, "Enough about how you fancy this bloke and he betrayed you." Charlie seemed outrage by that comment. "But I'm asking about this, this, specifically, the universe-ending thing. Not your particle-thingy."

"Sorry. I get side-tracked," he said darkly. He was running about the room, too. Locking the doors. Doors wouldn't really help them, not against Reapers. The Doctor was still thinking. "It's called Project Negation. That was how he swung it to the people working on it, and kept it a secret to anyone not in the need-to-know; I sometimes think that was nearly everyone except for me and Nadine. It was called 'Negation' to assure me that it had noble reasons behind it, I never had any reason to expect otherwise, until… that's not important."

"Negation?" she asked.

"As in, negating the effects of the past. Of history. Of going and saving the people in Pompeii, or killing Hitler; rescuing Franz Ferdinand or JFK," he said, "Negating the… negatives."

"They're fixed points in time, though," said Rose after a brief pause to see if Ten wanted to give his own input and say the exact same thing. That was right, though; his little talent for telling which points were fixed and which were fluctuating had been inherited through her, via the Bad Wolf. That and she more or less just assumed that any major historical event was fixed, or if it wasn't fixed then nobody had done anything about it for good reason. Maybe killing JFK stopped something even worse happening further down the line? His assassin might have ultimately averted causing a nuclear war, or something. She didn't know the facts, though she rested easy with the knowledge she could find out in a heartbeat. If she wanted to.

"They're what?" Charlie asked.

"Time – it's not…" she frowned and tried to remember how it was the Doctor, completely zoning out, explained time, "It's not a straight line, okay? It's like… a ball of wool. Or something. Or a rubber-band ball, I don't… it's lots and lots of different threads, alright? Interweaving. Just looking at it you can't tell which events connect to each other because it's all knotted up. No, wait, I know – it's like Jenga. Do you have Jenga in the future?"

"Uh… with the wooden blocks and the tower…?"

"Yeah! Well, some of the little wooden blocks you can pull out easily. That's a point in flux. But some of them, if you pull them out, the whole thing will crash down. That's a fixed point; can't move it or the effects are devastating. That'll be what your mate Myers has done, he'll be messing with fixed points in time, that's why the Reapers have shown up," she said. She reminded herself of when she had been travelling between dimensions to help Donna when she had been in her alternate timeline, the one where the Doctor had died and the Titanic had crashed into Buckingham Palace.

"Reapers?"

"What you heard on the comms. Big sort of, dragon-things. Eat people with their stomachs, they have wings," she said, "They come out like the immune system of the time vortex, they'll devour everything here to disinfect the, y'know, 'wound.'"

"And you can't stop them," Ten said finally.

"But we don't know that they'll come after us," Rose said to him, "We haven't done anything."

"Just by being here we're changing things from whatever it was they were meant to be originally. If his time machine didn't do anything, we wouldn't be here. But we are here," the Doctor said, "They'll hunt us down. Maybe not now, but soon. We won't be able to get away. They'll be able to mitigate you."

"Mitigate me? Is that possible?" she frowned. He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. He was stressed, understandably. Then he looked back at Charlie, who had been listening and possibly not comprehending Rose's string of weird, mixed metaphors. But she thought the Jenga one made perfect sense.

"Sorry, did you say you were…? Using particles to levitate things?"

"It's a suspended particle, keeps things… it stops them from falling," he said. Ten crossed his arms and looked at Charlie.

"What else were you talking about?"

"Project Negation, Doctor," Rose said.

"Right. Stopping bad things from happening. It is a noble goal, for anyone who doesn't know how timelines work… but the Time Agency do. Then again, this isn't the Time Agency. I suppose somebody shows the Time Agency the right way to do things, though they're always very reckless," Ten mused. He was talking a lot just to fill the air, that was the feeling she got.

"Well he doesn't really want to use it for that," Charlie said, "He wants to use it as a weapon, threaten to erase people if they don't do what he wants."

"Erase people? That's not how it works," Ten scoffed, "If you went back in time and erased somebody for not agreeing with you, there would be somebody else there right away to not-agree with you. Besides, the logistics of erasing somebody from existence… what does that involve? Stopping conception? That's not the sort of job I'd want."

"Sounds grim," Rose cringed, "Stopping people from copping off."

"I think he was just planning on killing their parents before they're born," Charlie muttered.

"Oh yeah that'd probably be a bit easier…"

"So, he's been building a time machine? To get power?" Ten asked, "And lying about it to the people working for him, like you? A bunch of mugs not asking questions?"

"I was kept in the dark!" Charlie argued, "And what was I meant to do? He's a lunatic, he's got a hitman working for him, I'd've been killed."

"And now the universe is going to be killed!"

"But we can stop it," Rose said assuredly, then glanced at the Doctor, "We can stop it, can't we?"

"I… by my best guess, your man's machine has gone kaboom," he said to Charlie, "Or it's gone into meltdown and will, very soon, go kaboom. And it's affecting everything around it, time itself, not just in the freezes. Just wait until we start seeing future echoes. Or past echoes, more likely, since I doubt there's going to be all that much of a future. What made you have your change of heart about Project Negation, then?"

"It was Nadine," said Charlie, "The other lead scientist. She vanished, months ago. Without a trace. I started asking questions… I guess that was Myers' best attempt at erasing somebody from existence without literally doing it. That was when he got too excited about the machine, he started saying how it would definitely work, and I said there hadn't been any tests run. But there was something about the way he said that… and I couldn't find anything about Nadine. She'd been wiped, from everywhere, nobody spoke about her – I thought, maybe, maybe I was losing my mind. You know? But then I saw her, she showed up."

"Showed up?" Ten and Rose both asked.

"Walked into my office, looking way older than she did the last time I saw her – his machine didn't work as well as he thought. He tried to send her to the future, in it, the distant future, but she didn't go far enough. Three months after vanishing, two weeks ago, and she warned me about it."

"Wait, time ends, but she's still…? And how did she get back?"

"Rifts? Portals? If the time vortex fractured that much there could be any number of cracks and leaks in it for people to just slip through. A whole lot of them probably leading right back to here, when it happened – haven't we heard something about this before? From the Ponds?"

"Yeah, because the TARDIS blew up and destroyed everything," Rose said.

"It was erasing things, though. Something must have happened to her in the machine, to make her like Rose – like me, even. Able to walk through the freezes. I suppose that's what it must have been, one last freeze, right? This 'end of time'? Probably full of Reapers, trying to devour everything… they'd have to devour the whole universe to get rid of something like that, and themselves," he mused, "This is different to that. The TARDIS is the time vortex, whatever's been built here isn't. It isn't organic. It won't work properly. The principles will all be wrong."

"What do you mean? Time's just going to… stop?" Rose asked, perplexed. He nodded. "How does that work? Time isn't even real."

"Well it's not so much time as rather a linear progression of our reality that will cease, a pure stagnation. Of course for anyone inside the freeze, the notion of time will still 'exist' in the sense of their own memories and the chronology of their existence leading up to their present moment, but the 'present moment' will stretch on forever. There won't be any more births, any more deaths, probably for only a handful. A handful that won't include either of us," Ten said, "Not you and not I, not if the time vortex collapses. The alterations to your genetic structure would be too severe for you to survive detached from it, and mine too."

"Whatever way you look at it it's the end of all things, alright?" Charlie interrupted, "This debating is useless. We've got to shut down the machine, that's what. And you two are just standing around! Every second is precious. By my count there can't even be more than half an hour before everything is over, that's what Nadine said. We could at least do some damage control."

"Damage control!?" Ten exclaimed. Now Charlie opened a drawer and pulled out his gun again, which he fumbled with a bit, not being used to the weight. For half a moment Rose thought she might ask him if he actually knew how to shoot so that she could show him – but she didn't think the Doctor would take very kindly to her displaying her knowledge of firearms. "There isn't any 'damage control', it's all or nothing, you can't destroy time 'only a little bit.' I'm sorry. It's started. In a way, since Nadine saw it, it's already over."

"What? What about your points in time? The Jenga?" he asked, "Which is this?"

"This is, erm…" Ten paused. He furrowed his brow. Rose, next to him, did a similar thing. Was this fixed or in flux? For the life of her, she could not tell. But that, most likely, hailed the end of her connection to the time vortex which was looming steadily towards them. What need she be more frightened of? The collapse of reality? The lunatic Todd Myers? The well-armed soldiers on their way to die? The Reapers? "Tricky to… see."

"It doesn't matter, what can we do?" Rose asked him.

"Do?"

"Yes! To stop this!"

"Well, I'd…" he trailed off. Then he cleared his throat. "Maybe Charlie's idea is best. About stopping the machine."

"But you just said there was no point trying to stop the machine."

"No point trying to stop the machine! Me?"

"You said 'It's started, it's already over,'" Rose repeated back to him. It had been not thirty seconds ago that he had said that, those exact words. And now he was lying. And she thought she knew why, especially when he did not defend himself, "But you're the Doctor."

"Yes. I am."

"And?"

"And what?"

"And you've just given up, haven't you! Just like that! Oh my god!"

"I haven't!" he protested, "There's… always a way. Time vortex can't be destroyed. Don't be ridiculous. Couple of Reapers, what's the worry? We'll just fight our way through; Charlie's got a gun. Pull out the plug. Fix the universe. Simple enough. Don't even need Mickey and his technopathy here to help us. Don't you think? It's open and shut," he said. He was lying. She could tell. He knew she could tell. It didn't make a difference. Was he really so hopeless? The Doctor – the Doctor?

She knew what this was like. This was like when he had regenerated, when he had been building his machine to beat the Daleks, building it all on his own in Satellite 5 even though he knew it could never be finished on time; when Jack died and he sent Rose away. And he had been right, there had not been any way for him, the Doctor, to save them that day. She had done it. The Bad Wolf had done it. And by god, she would do it again if she had to.

Somehow…