Saturday, May 13, 2023

Doctor Who and The Exile From Hell.


 

 

 

Now between the Rust-red city of Ragnathlon and the Iron-black blocky towers of Banza-Xboth, there remained a pitiful creeping trade despite the sharpness of the obsidian plain, and the upwelling of lava from the lower circles. Ragnathlon exported the idolatrous to Banza-Xboth, where was practised a greater range of ironic ecclesiastical punishments, and in return swindlers, setters of unfair taxes and the drafters of small print user-contracts were transhipped to the fire-filled Moloch-pits of Ragnathlon. Despite this doubtless rewarding trade, these were third-rate citadels at best, far removed from the nighted towers of Dis, and less impressive in their way than the semi-professional, partly privatised, torturous Dukeholds of the middle-lowerarchy. This was the industrial hinterland: where dark satanic mills went to die.  At the time of my last visit: Ragnathlon was ruled by an under-fiend of the Abominations and Banza-Xboth was the tyrannised domain of a Lamia of the species Sculptorex Malgrifilant – neither of whom, it may be said, afforded me more than a martyrs’ welcome.

 

Virgil’s Visitors Guide To Dante’s World p34,711                                  Asbestos Press: Dis,

Year of Eternal Damnation:  75,304.

 

 

 

 

‘You cannae be telling me people come here for pleasure Doctor.  I mean if yon’s no

Hell, it’s surely Satan’s...’  Jamie hesitated, he’d not so long ago (subjectively speaking) suffered through an adventure with the Doctor in which he’d been subjected to everything the airport of Gatwick had had to offer in the way of comfort, and it had afforded him a view of modern torments ... ‘baggage checking area.’

            He folded his arms in Scottish dissenting disapproval of the whole Hieronymous Bosch landscape (Zoe’s description of it) that unfolded from before their eyes, from where the TARDIS stood butted against a supposedly red hot iron wall that seemed to be doing no harm to the apparent wood and blue paint of its deceptive exterior, even though the air around it rippled and distorted with every appearance of heat.

 

            Zoe though from a period far after Jamie’s origins in the Jacobite Rebellion of Ancient Scotland (as she thought of it) was no more inclined that he was to regard the scene before them, with pleasure.  It was all so unnecessary surely; hadn’t the scientific education of her own time done away with all this medieval nonsense?  To find it replicated in a giant space going cone in the 73rd Century, for the purposes of tourism, was as mindboggling as, as, well she was sure she’d think of something it was as mindboggling as in a moment.

            ‘You have to remember Zoe,’ the Doctor had said gravely, ‘that people are complicated.  They like to be scared, and they like to affirm their beliefs on a large scale.  And when there’s a lot of people, it only needs a small number to really believe something, to make it worth someone else’s while to build it.  This whole, ah, Dante’s World, is no more than a Haunted House ride in a rather rundown amusement park, compared to the great megalostructures and special constructs of this century. No one here is actually suffering. That is,’ His natural honest compelled him to qualify his statement, ‘none of the visitors, are – unless they choose to.’ 

            ‘So why have the Time Lords sent us here, then – if it’s no more than a tatty auld fairground?’ Jamie asked.  The Doctor sighed, and sat down on a hummock. It moaned slightly and distended, and he jumped back up quickly uttering a quick apology and flicking a hanky over the now pinkly flushed mound. 

 

Privately Jamie thought he was looking older, even though their picking up of Zoe – during Victoria’s absence – had done a lot to re-invigorate him.   He wasn’t at his best these days.  He hated being at his mysterious peoples’ beck and call.  His parole, into this strange errand boy’s life, in which former companions were allowed only on sufferance and by the whim of the Tribunal, might be marginally better than the exile that still hung over his head, threatening it with an enforced change of features, (the Doctor called this threat the facelift of Damacles which Zoe had explained was a classical joke although she hadn’t had time to explain the reference before that business with the Autons) but it was still profoundly disheartening for someone as anarchic as Jamie’s old friend and mentor. 

            ‘Oh just the usual, Jamie – giving someone a good talking to and explaining why they’re wrong, and should be pleased to be told so.  All without my Masters getting their lily-white tongues dirty.’

            ‘Tongues,’ aren’t white,’ Zoe said, rolling her eyes.  She could be painfully literal at times (the Doctor had a wall on the TARDIS with a Venn diagram painted on it that showed that ‘jokes’ did not have to reside full within the circle marked ‘truthful statements about nominal reality’ but it hadn’t settled the issue.  She’d merely remarked that she did expect them to fall fully within the circle marked ‘being funny’ and had written ‘facelift of Damocles’ outside it with an exclamation mark, by way of counter-demonstration.

            ‘We’re going to meet a fellow exile’.

            ‘Who?’ Jamie and Zoe both asked.

‘Lucifuge Rofocale – Ex Prime Minister of Hell, now Dante’s World’s technical advisor.’  The Doctor beamed at Jamie and Zoe.  ‘He’s not an exile from my lot, he’s a disgraced Daemon.  I’ve always wanted to meet him.   (The Doctor explained quickly that the Daemons were an ancient space travelling species, and not at all actual Demons, at which Zoe felt somewhat reassured, but Jamie looked unconvinced. He also explained that they should on no account take any gift from the Daemon, especially of knowledge without agreed payment.  They understood this for it was only a week or so ago, they had encountered the sinister ox-bow train, in its own temporal backwater, and the rules of Fae and Hell are cut from similar cloth.) 

            ‘Why was he exiled?  Did he wander off like someone we know,’ Zoe teased.

The Doctor considered.  ‘It was a little more serious than that, Zoe. He was banished from the Daemons’ dark homeworld, a construct many times larger than this structure, because he discovered, rediscovered perhaps, a concept so strange, so outre that it was impossible for most of his species to contemplate it without a fatal brain seizure.  Before the pamphlet he wrote explaining it was suppressed he caused the deaths of roughly twenty thousand Daemons.’

            Zoe and Jamie were flabbergasted by this (possibly for different reasons) and the Doctor hastened to explain.  ‘He was very sorry afterwards – sorry as any of his people can be anyway - he really didn’t mean to do it.  He only proposed it as a theoretical construct too unlikely to be real, but even the hypothesis was functionally lethal to many of his less flexibly minded kin.’ 

            ‘What concept?’  Zoe asked nervously.  Her time was one in which rogue meme’s interrupted the telepress with fake-news on a daily basis and she knew how dangerous ill-expressed or chaotic thought could be. 

            ‘Altruism,’ the Doctor said. ‘Don’t drop it into the conversation he’s still deeply ashamed of it.  Come on, I can see his tabernacle on the plain.’

            ‘Oh, aye, yes one of those,’ Jamie said, in the hope of cheering the Doctor up. He could see full well that the tabernacle was a floating gold structure, like a light framework with banners depending from it, that was spinning lazily above the blood-red meadow.  Inside it a shadowy figure was spread-eagled, a limb pinned in each of the yellow cube’s corners.  Jamie blinked, as if through an invisible telescope, he could see the figure had four arms and four legs, as if two copies of a man had been run together in the middle.  It also had horns, its legs were those of goats and a pointed tail draped around the yellow latticework like a vine across a trellis.  He’d heard the Doctor say their contact was a ‘Damon’ not a ‘Demon’, but surely now the look of the thing was against him.  And twenty thousand of his kin dead.

            While they were taking in the sight of the construct the Doctor called a tabernacle, they were suddenly next to it as if it had suddenly zoomed into focus or the world had fast-forwarded through their walk across the blood-meadows.  Looking back at the vampire-poppies feeding on the pink hummocks between them and the TARDIS, Zoe shuddered.

            Jamie set his face in mulish disapproval. ‘I’ll just be sitting out here, Doctor – you go and convey your

 people’s message to the auld a’ill thing. I’ll nae stop yer, but I’ll no help yer.   An’ Zoe if your nay af yer heid,

you’ll hold yer wheesht  and wait with me.  Yon Clooties, nay a fair friend for any man, Time Lord nor  mortal.’ 

He always got more Scottish when he felt his goodwill was being put-upon or if the Doctor was walking into

trouble unnecessarily.

 

            ‘Well, I’m not a man,’ Zoe said teasingly, ‘and I’m not going to miss up the chance to meet a devil.’ 

  She linked arms with the Doctor, ‘come on then’.  And they entered into the tabernacle.  From a distance 

Jamie had seen into it clearly, but from up close, the air between the golden bars seemed to whirl as if the 

Daemon within was constantly revolving, but so quickly as to seem still until the supersonic whistle-lash

of the air around it was close enough to feel, like a prickling in his thumbs.

 

    Suddenly, a horrified cry - Zoe’s voice raised in terror, sounded from inside the yellow lattice.  Drawing his sgian-dubh, and muttering a quick prayer against all the imaginary devils and the single real demon of this place, Jamie plunged after her.

 

It was dark inside the yellow cage (and inside it was clear that a cage was what it amounted to), and it smelt of goat.  There was a glint of white in the dark and a clatter of bone on bone.  Jamie saw, in the shadows, the Doctor and Zoe tea cups and saucers in their hands.

 

‘Och, yer wee baggage, I should have known. Ye’ll cry wolf once too often one of these days my lass.’ 

‘He can’t do any harm, he’s all tied up look’.

The former Prime Minister, was indeed fastened to the interior vertices of the cube, and although it wasn’t clear how he was spinning while the Doctor, Zoe, and now Jamie weren’t – his bisectional symmetry seemed to be a product of persistence of vision. He was there at 180 degrees, and at 90 degrees, but between He wasn’t.  It made Jamies’ head hurt.

The Doctor finished the bite of blood-red muffin, that was in his mouth.

‘We were just, explaining to Lucifuge, that the Time Lords would be willing to negotiate for his release with the Powers of Damos, from what must be an inconvenient, if not a somewhat belittling imprisonment in return for His willingness to contribute a portion of His knowledge to their records.  He would surely find the position of Ambassador to the Homeworld, less trying than this feeble pastiche of his origins, which some might find extremely vulgar.  However’…the Doctor paused…’He seems to doubt my bona fides as far as being able to make promises for my people. Zoe of course vouched for me, but He seems to put great store by rules of three, and trinities.’

What we have observed three times, we take as true, Doctor – have you never heard that saying of us?  You have said you are to be trusted, and she has said it.  But what does this young man fingering his knife say?’

 

Jamie looked up into the incarnadine eyes of the creature that could never understand what it was to do something selflessly, without fear of consequences, because it was simply right.

            ‘She doesn’t know,’ he said, ‘she joined us again only recently. She’s never had any reason to doubt him’.

            ‘Jamie!’  Zoe was shocked, was this his response to the ruse that had persuaded him to enter the tabernacle? Surely he wouldn’t jeopardise the diplomatic negotiations of the higher powers in a fit of Scottish pique! 

            ‘Yon’s not the Doctor, not really.’

            ‘What are you saying, you hairy highlander,’ the Doctor’s voice was aggrieved, but his eyes gleamed in the darkness.

            ‘The Tribunal changed his face and sent him into exile on Earth, and they sent Zoe and me back to our own time and made us forget everything but our first adventure with him.  So for me I was back in the Highlands, I suppose, and Zoe there was back on her Space Wheel, and so it was for the Real Doctor, and the Real Jamie, and the Real Zoe too for all I know.’

 

            ‘And yet are you not real? I observe the three of you: most clearly?’

 

‘Well how they explained it to me: it’s like they took a cutting in time as a man might take a cutting from a tree.  And that cutting was this Doctor, aging in their service, and they took cuttings of me and Victoria (reaching into our own times to do it) and of Zoe. Maybe Ben and Polly too, with a Doctor all their own. But my father had orchards, and apple trees.  You can take a cutting and graft it into another stock and it’ll bear fair apples: and too all intents and taste they will be true apples of the first tree. But if you plant them in the earth, their seeds will not grow true.  The man with us looks like the Doctor, and mostly sounds like him, and so do we resemble ourselves.  But deep inside how can we know we’ve been made true to ourselves, and will not turn deceitful.  They might have made us to lie:  how would we know?  Given us other memories or thoughts, how would we know?

He’s done good since, and we have.  We’ve saved people, still. But is it their good we do, rather than our own?

 

‘What torment it is to live a pastiche of one’s own history.’

 

‘I kenned you’d see that.  If this world is really a fairground copy of your own, your people must have been cruel to pen you here.’

 

‘They are cruel, and theirs is a pitiless empire.  And thus it must be – for what is Goodness but an incomprehensible puzzle.  Why, for instance, did you tell me the truth?  The Lords who made you, will they not punish this transgression?

Where is the gain for which you risk this?  It cannot be your friends’ comfort, for behold they are shocked and troubled, nor your own for I see the guilt you feel at their self-doubt.  Incomprehensible.’

(A great and gusty sigh)

 

It is as well, that my mind is the strongest of my kinds’ :  and yet despite the thoughts I nearly grasp – what a vast wall stands between us.   You little things, in your false prison, and I in mine.

 

‘False or not, fake or not’, the Doctor said, ‘the offer still stands.  Say the word and you can leave this place.’

 

‘Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.  Thinks thou, that I who saw the Face of Satan, and tasted the Eternal Joys of Freedom, and not tormented with Ten Thousand Hells by being separate from all Things Real.  No realer yet than This your Master’s World.  I intuit it now: but one of Nine, soon to be lost to War.   Better a known illusion than a deeper falseness.’

 

The Doctor looked very old, and more pitiful than Jamie had ever seen him.  It took him and Zoe together to bundle him out of the yellow cage.  He patted Jamie on the shoulder.  ‘You did right.  Tell the truth…and shame the Devil’.

 

‘WAIT - ’ the voice of Lucifuge.  ‘Jamie you have risked the wrath of powers that might yet wipe you from existence – to tell me the truth.  We value truth, my kind – pursuing it with every kind of experiment and question.  I must repay my debt to you err you depart.   Know this.  Very shortly as you judge time, you will be sent to another Prison where people who also serve truth after their kind will be awaiting death.  Your task will be to free them, but if you are wise, they may yet free you, all of you.  Go, my little creatures, and when you are real again think of me with your perverse minds, in that strange mode you have - what is the word you use?  Think of me "kindly", when you are real.

 

           

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Table of the Seven Sinners

 From 2004....



  THE TABLE OF THE SEVEN SINNERS

 
‘It was built,’ the smallest man said, ‘originally for the encouragement of  public virtue. To sit in it was to be subjected to the residuum of all your worst memories, keyed to the one of the core psychological weaknesses. Eventually after the Revolution had run its course and the time of the Intuitive Terror was over, it was locked away with all the other unhistorical artifacts; all the things we didn't like to admit we'd done.’

‘A sort of seige perilous,’ the curly haired man boomed, shucking his multicoloured coat. I'm game, no ordeal can shake my resolve.’ He hesitated for a moment even so, between a blood red upholstered throne of a chair with a carved ruby eye set in its dark mahogany back, and a black spindly chair of iron with edges like razors.  ‘I've always been tempted by anger and pride, but I doubt the Seige Prideful would stand up to me.’ His voice was mock ruthful. He drew back his foot to give it a hearty kick, but
seemed to think better of it.

 ‘There's always the Seige Sloathful’ the man in the cricket togs said, pointing to a deck-chair incongruously drawn up against the vast circular table. In the table's centre, a great twining gold seal ate itself, the uroborus of the Time Lords - the Omniscrate Emblem.

 The old man who was already seating, snorted. ‘Hurry up can't you, what's a table for if not sitting at’.

‘We're just considering’

‘Only a moment’
            

‘We haven't agreed yet why we are here,’ the  untidy  little man said,  ‘being plonked down like skittles, and frankly if  I'd wanted to be at everyone's beck  and harry, I'd never have run away from home in the first  place.’

The old man glared, ‘Run away from home? You make me sound like an errant schoolboy!’

‘Weren't we?’ the man in the smoking jacket asked, ‘if you face up to it.  Didn't we want it all?  Everything outside the iron prison yard. Everything that wasn't exile?’

‘Why!’ The tallest man exclaimed, ‘this is Gallifrey, nor am I out of it! Think you not I,  who saw the ends of time and worlds beyond the scope of all our dusty years, am not tormented  with ten thousand devils by being thus deprived of eternal bliss’

                The eighth man held up a tentative hand, ‘Excuse me, would one of you mind explaining  who you guys are?’ Hey, only kidding, I had this problem with amnesia, but it’s all fixed now.’

                They gaped at him.

                ‘Yes, I know you all.’  He numbered them round the table starting with the old man. ‘One for sorrow..’ the little scruffy man, ‘Two for joy’. 

                The man in the smoking jacket leaned over, ‘Well he doesn’t remember you.’

                ‘He’s referring to my rendition of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, for the Recorder,” Number Two hissed.

                It was the Smoking Jacket’s turn. ‘Three for a girl’

                Number Two beamed, ‘Fancy Pants!’

The tall bohemian took it on the chin, booming out ‘Four for a boy, ah I was a lad once’.

                ‘Five for silver,’ the fair hair of the cricketeer gleamed.

                ‘Six for gold,’ the curls of the man who until recently had worn the multicoloured coat, nodded as he smiled.

                ‘Seven for a secret never to be told.’

                ‘That,’ Number Seven said, ‘Is what we’re here to discuss.’

‘One to Seven,’ the forgetful man shouted, ‘I know you all now.  You,’ he pointed at the old man who had levered himself up ramrod straight behind the table, ‘you were my old army sergeant.  And you,’ he beamed at the scruffy little man, ‘you met me at the station with a magic box, or was that a dream. An evil wizard had stolen all the clergy and the Christmas Bells wouldn’t ring.‘  He ran up to the man in the velvet smoking jacket, and stopped puzzled.  ‘But I remember you all raggedy’ He was almost pouting.

                The man he’d accused of having a magic box sniggered, ‘Scarecrow,’ under his breath, and the third man scowled. 

                But the eighth man was after the bohemian now, only to be withered at a glance, as the fourth man lurched forward.  ‘I?  Oh yes, I was a dread sorceror, whether on the steps of Russia or the great oceans of the gulf of Arabia, I gave of myself to animate the inanimate, to heal the Czarina.’  He took a step towards the now scared, man – his eyes large and dark, ‘and in the end, I died and became a mentor in white in a House that Moved.’

                ‘Stop it,’ the fifth man said, ‘I thought we were here to help him.’

                ‘Let's hope its not the way he’ll remember you helping cows,’ the fourth man shouted eyes wild, ‘I’m the one he’ll remember if he remembers anyone.’

                ‘The one who was too stuck on himself to come out of a time eddy,’ Number Six said.  ‘We’ve all had our chances, some here some there.’

                ‘We make the chances,’ the Seventh man said, ‘and what happens next here is up to us and to the Table.’ 

When Children Play.

  

Part of an attempt at a play, from 2003...back when even distopias could be optimistic....


When Children Play.

 

A Play.

 

 

Setting, a suburban home of the year 2025.


Cast

 

Peter                (son of John and Mary, born 1964, age 61

Mary                (mother of Peter, born 1944 – treated for senile dementia with

Human Transgene Therapy (HTT) in 2005 when the technique was untried (age 61), apparent age in 2025 : 21.  A net gain of one year for each six months of therapy.

John                 (father of Peter, born 1941 – treated in first “War on Age” push

                        2015 (age 74), apparent age in 2025 : 48.  He has gained a little on her

                        with later improved therapy but he has not yet regained his youth.

Doctor Life      NHS consultant, born 2000, age stabilised at 20. 

Trainee Nurse  Claire, born 1990, age 35 unstabilised.

 

Act 1 Scene 1.  (5-10) minutes duration

 

Mary:    [a young woman]  shouting from upstairs:

 

John, are you coming up to bed?

 

John:     [clearly an older man]

 

Soon I’m just watching the news.  The War’s almost won they say.  No one over sixty alive by ’25.   They’d got Angela Rippon reading it, you know that dancer off Morcambe and Wise. 

 

Mary   [voice approaching, and aurally should be by John by end of sentence]: 

 

Oh, well they say, I’ve no doubt.  I’ve no doubt they won’t be happy ‘til we’re all the same.  It’s a good job Peter doesn’t look his age.

 

John: 

 

Well, if he stays quiet.  Doesn’t go out much – does his work on the networks, he might last another dozen years before they pick on him.  I wonder he thinks it’s worth it.  It doesn’t hurt.  They wouldn’t let it hurt.

 

Mary: 

 

He’s got his reasons, Dad  [note Mary uses the word Dad for her husband unself-consciously, as a woman born in 1941 might, but we will see in the latter part of the play that John has begun to find this disturbing.]

[Banging as of something falling upstairs.]

 

John:   Hell,  Peter are you okay lad?   [Runs up stairs]

 

Peter:   I had a bad dream,  I couldn’t remember Sarah’s eyes.   I can’t sleep.

 

Mary:   Well you have to.  We need some time to ourselves.  You can look at the photo-albums in the morning, play her records back: but you’ve got to sleep.  You’re not getting any younger.

 

John:     Mary!

 

Peter:     No she’s right.  I don’t want to be a burden, you know that.  But I can’t do it.  I just can’t.  It wouldn’t be right.

 

Mary:    It was right for other people.  You don’t mind living off our earnings.  How would we make a living if we felt like you.

 

John:     He can’t help how he feels, he does his bit.  You’re just overwrought with the party coming up, but that’s not his doing.

 

Mary:    Oh no, I just have to have him hiding from the guests I suppose.  This is supposed to me my big occasion. My coming of age.  The rest of my life a level playing field laid out before me.  [She is almost in tears]  Twenty one years old, and I’m going to know that upstairs he’s lying there dying slowly because he can’t face the needle.

           

Peter:     Mother!

 

Mary:     Don’t mother me, you’re sixty fucking one.  You’ve made your bed and can die in it for all I care.  I’m young, the treatments working on me.  It’s made me young.  It’s given me back myself.  I was out of my mind when they gave it me, a guinea-pig for an untried cure, and it put my mind back together.  A year younger every six months, and I have to spend my twenty first birthday with a pair of geriatrics.  Get your father to pity you, I going out.  [door slams].

 

John:      You have to understand, Pete – her body’s full of hormones and things, I told her she should stop at 35, keep the perspectives she’d learned, but she always had an excuse to run on for another set of treatments.

 

Peter:      She’s only got bad memories to run from, Dad  - imagine the slow climb back from senility.  I’ll top myself before that.  And she’s still got you, even if you started later you can catch her up in time.  She’s got you always before her to prompt her.  Whatever horrors she forgets you’ll be there to remind her of the good times, and to have new good times when you’re settled.

 

John:      Sarah wouldn’t have wanted you to die.  If she were here…

 

Peter:      Things would be different, yes I grant that.  But she isn’t, she’s dead.  Dead before a Lifeguard could reach her with the needle. Dead before her life could be unravelled.  Dead and gone on, and I don’t intend to live apart from her a moment longer than I have too.  And I won’t forget her.

 

John:       You’re forgetting her already.  Time does that.  Just because your brain isn’t being rebuilt from inside and your muscles growing strong again doesn’t make your recollections sacrosanct.  Age can wreck your mind as surely as the needle.  Is it so wrong that Age should pass away?  What did it ever bring but suffering and pain, and humiliation.  Tomorrow your mother will dance like she danced when rationing stopped.  Like a young girl.  And whether they take you or not, I want you in public – applauding.  A proper family occasion

 

Peter:       I’ll be there, but I can’t reject age.  Age is wisdom, and acceptance, and experience – and the treatment eats away experience with memory.  Mum’s going to spend her whole long immortal life making the accidents a twenty year old makes.  I hope you’ll have the stamina to keep up with her.  As for me, I’ll die before I choose to lose Sarah.

 

John:        Leave Mary to me,  I’ll take a frivolous youngster over a corpse or a memory.  You think you’ve got the wisdom of age, well as the clock ticks I’m still your elder even after fifteen years of renewal, and you’re still green.  In the end we’d claw our way back from the grave for another glimpse of light.  Serenity is for the middle ages of man, the oldest know only desperation.  You think you could cheerfully follow Sarah into the dark because you haven’t felt it cold on your cheek.  But its not an easy step, and those who say it is – are only the ones who came back wimpering.

 

[A latchkey is heard turning]

 

Mary:       Oh Pete, I’m so sorry – come here.  You’re not too old to give your mum a hug are you?   John, you’re right I’m worrying about the seating plans and my dress.  Do you really like it? 

 

Peter:        Maybe you could put it on Mum, now and give us a twirl?

 

John:        Yes, that would be grand.  Peter’s going to come to the do tomorrow, aren’t you, Pete.  He said he wouldn’t miss it for the world.

 

 Mary:      Oh, if only Sandra could have been here – we’d have looked like sisters.

 

Peter:         Yes, you would.  Let me kiss you goodnight Mum,  I’m afraid I need my sleep.  [His voice is cold, he has registered that Mary can not remember his wife’s name.]

 

Mary:        Sleep well,  I want to show John some dance steps.  He’s going to have to get livelier if he wants to keep up with me tomorrow.  I’ll be dancing with all the young men, and women.

 

John:        I have to call in for a shot tomorrow morning.  I hope you’ll keep your pants on while I’m gone.

 

 

Act 1 Scene 2

 

The Lifeguard Hospital, Doctor Life is on his rounds.

 

Doctor Life:    Inductees and trainees, graduants and graduates – we are the first generation of genuine Doctors the world has ever known for we are the first to be provided with the genuine nostrum, the true cure, the fix for death itself.

Nurse Claire, can you describe the history of the drug?

 

Claire:             It was an experimental anti-senility drug, intended to knock out prions from the old food plagues, make dendritic structures renew themselves within the cortex.

 

Doctor Life:    Quite right, it was a complete accident that it proved to be the one thing every alchemist and quack had dreamt of.  Just when it was critically needed.  We faced a top-heavy society: more and more old people kept alive by medicine and yet unable to productively continue to make a contribution, a living burden of taxation.  Now they not only pay for their treatments, but as they youthen they can earn more and more.  It is a genuine [Doctor Life’s favourite word] win, win situation.

 

Claire:     But there were side-effects….

 

Doctor Life:   At first, yes. Horrible side-effects. Drooling madness and extra-potent cancers, and yet, and yet, in the first year 40 percent of the patients treated, patients on the very edges of death, shuffled nervously back into the world of work and responsibility, and life.  We are the first post-death generation.  Many of us will be not only immortal ourselves, but have the benefit of never having to see a parent die.  Worth the initial risks surely – and the people taking the drug thought so themselves, after all they were dying.

 

John:            He’s right miss, my wife was one of the first treated.  All her hair fell out and she felt like death warmed over, and her temperature was so high it bust the thermometer, but a month later her hair began to grow again, and it was blonde at the roots.  It was like magic, like watching flowers come up in spring.

 

Doctor Life:  Indeed, and I can see that you, yourself have benefitted from the treatment, would you mind coming up and letting Claire here handle your shot.

Mr, er….

 

John:            John Weber, Doctor Life  [pronounced Leefe] we met last time I was in for a booster shot.

 

Doctor Life:    Indeed, indeed.  You must excuse me, we have a large through-put. The War you know.  Always pushing us.  You have a son I think you said, yes? I remember he had some concerns about commencing treatment with us.  How old would he be now?

 

John:               He was born in 1970, so he’d be…oh….I can never do maths in my head since we got a computer. 

 

Claire:              He’d be 55, Mr Weber.

 

Doctor Life:     Quite old enough to get over a silly phobia, and put the community first, eh, nurse. 

 

John:                He does his bit, design work and that, he pays his way.

 

Doctor Life:    Of course, he does, don’t mind me – it’s taking a genuine interest that keeps me going.  That and my little purple pills.  Nurse Claire will see you alright, I have to run.  I’d forgotten an appointment, chaio.

 

Claire:              Sorry about that, he is a little scatty.

 

John:                Has he got an appointment, really?

 

Claire:              We think he’s got a sweetheart.  Keep catching him on the phone, blushing.  He probably levelled off a bit soon.  He’s never been older you see, just dug his heels in at 20, and lord knows we still need young enthusiatic Doctors.

 

John:                Why?  I’d have thought immortality would made demand drop.

I only ever come in for the shots.  Not that the company isn’t fine. 

 

Claire:              Theres still medicine to do, more than you might think.  The needle rebuilds slowly, it’s no help to a man bleeding to death, or a woman aborting.  We’re mainly accident and emergency full-time, but even so demands up if anything.  Leefe says immortality has made people feel invincible, stepped up risk taking, made accidents inevitable.

 

John:                Still it must make it worthwhile to have people walk again, to watch the blind see, the old grow young.

 

Claire:              Age has its beauties, but I don’t want them to be anything but rareties.  You know they’ll make your son take the needle, don’t you.  It’ll be fifties and fifty five year olds next.

 

John:               How old are you, Claire?  If you don’t mind me asking.

 

Claire:              35 this year.  Not locked yet, I’m hoping to have children first, age with them.  Then maybe work my way back to the mid thirties again after a decent interval.

 

 

 

 

Part of a draft audio, that never gelled...

 

DOCTOR WHO: THE NIGHTSHAPES OF RA

 

by Simon Bucher-Jones

 

First Draft, May 2002

 


PART ONE

 

TITLE MUSIC

 

SCENE 1   THE FORTRESS OF RA: RECEPTION ROOM

 

[SFX: ARMOUR CLAD FEET MARCHING ON STONE FLOOR]

 

SERGEANT VAL:   TROOPS HALT. POSITIONS FOR THE CEREMONY ADOPT!

I WANT YOU STILL AS STATUES, I WANT THE IMPERATOR TO SEE HIS FACE IN THOSE BREAST-PLATES. [PAUSE] I WANT YOUR WEAPONS CHARGED AND READY.

 

[SFX: SF WEAPONRY CHARGES UP, SIX WEAPONS]

 

[SFX: TARDIS MATERIALISES, TARDIS DOOR OPENS]

 

DOCTOR: I SAY, YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO PUT ON ENTERTAINMENT. WHAT’S THIS SOLDIER? A CHARGED BLASTER RUNNING NEAR OVERLOAD. I THINK WE’LL JUST TURN THAT DOWN A TAD. [SFX SWITCH CLICK POWER RUN-DOWN]. [PAUSE, DOCTOR, PENSIVELY ASIDE] I DON’T KNOW. YOU’LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT.

 

ACE:   [COMING OUT OF THE TARDIS]  OI PROFESSOR, WHAT’S WITH THE

SPACE KNIGHTS?

 

SEARGEANT VAL:  HENTHRITH, JAVRON GET THESE INTRUDERS OUT OF HERE! AT ANY MOMENT THE IMPERATOR OF RA WILL BE TRANSDUCTED HERE TO BE ESCOURTED TO THE BRIDAL SUITE. HE’LL BE ACCOMPANIED BY THE PRESS-EYES OF A DOZEN WORLDS. IF THEY FIND US SCUFFLING WITH SPACE RIFFRAFF AND THEIR UNLICENSED TRANSDUCTION BOOTH, WE’LL BE SCRUBBING LATRINES WITH DENTAL BRUSHES WITH THE NIGHTSHAPES AT OUR HEELS!

 

HENTHRITH: [HE IS SURPRISINGLY POLITE, THINK SERGEANT WILSON TO CAPTAIN VAL’S MAINWEARING] COME ALONG WITH ME SIR, MADAM. YOU CAN WATCH THE IMPERATOR’S ARRIVAL FROM THIS NICE SAFE OBSERVATION ROOM. JAVRON, GET A GRAV-BEAM ON THAT BOOTH, AND HOIST IT UP OUT OF SIGHT IF YOU WOULDN’T MIND – THANKS AWFULLY.

 

[SFX HUMMING, FADES INTO]

 

[SFX TRUMPET FANFARE. CRACKLE OF LOUDSPEAKERS]

 

ANNOUNCER: PEOPLE OF RA. THE IMPERATOR PETRAN IS RETURNING TO US, BEARING THE GOOD-WISHES OF THE COLONIES, AND THE MANY SYMBOLIC GIFTS HE WILL PRESENT TO HIS BRIDE. HE CARRIES THE STAFF OF WISDOM, THE CORNUCOPIA OF HAPPINESS, THE PROPHYLACTICS OF…

 

[SFX SOUND FROM OUTSIDE OBSERVATION ROOM SHOULD CONTINUE IN BACKGROUND BUT SLIGHTLY MUFFLED WITH SECOND FANFARE AS D & A SPEAK].

 

ACE: GOT HIS HANDS FULL HASN’T HE? THINK HE’LL BE ABLE TO GET TO GRIPS WITH HIS HONEYMOONING?

 

DOCTOR: SHUSH THIS IS A SOLOMN OCCASION, I KNOW WE MISSED THE WEDDING BUT AT LEAST WE’VE GOT A GOOD VIEW OF THE HOMECOMING.

 

ACE: NO THANKS TO YOUR NAVIGATING. IT’S LUCKY WE AREN’T IN THE MARRIAGE BED, THE WAY YOU FLY THAT THING.

 

[SFX BACKGROUND SOUND UP AGAIN TO SHOW WE ARE BACK OUTSIDE THE OBS-ROOM. SOUND LIKE BUT NOT IDENTICAL TO TARDIS MATERIALISATION. RECORDED APPLAUSE AND CHEERING STARTS UP AS THIS FADES ONLY TO BE SWAMPED BY HIDEOUS ALIEN HISSING.]

 

VAL: NIGHTSHAPE BREACH. READY WEAPONS. LET ‘EM HAVE IT MEN.

 

ACE: [REMEMBER TO MUFFLE OUTSIDE SOUND, WHICH IS NOW LASERS FIRING AND ROARING] DOC WE’VE GOT TO HELP THEM.

 

DOCTOR: NO ACE, IT’S TOO LATE. BY THE TIME WE GET TO THEM….

 

ACE: [STRUGGLING WITH DOOR] THOSE TOERAGS THEY’RE LOCKED US IN………

 

 

Indefinable Magic

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The 9th Iteration of Youth

Part of a story that went nowhere (circa 2002)


 The Ninth Iteration of Youth.

 

Day 1.

 

I am writing this on a piece of paper taken from a notebook I hope my Doctors will not miss, and the stub of a pencil that one discarded.   I intend to hide it.

                Today they showed me the cake.  I should be well enough to have some, they said by my birthday.   The cake has a number twelve on it in blue icing and red candles (twelve of them) around the edge.  It is a whitish orange with a layer of thick dark red dividing it from left to right.   It will come out of its plastic cover in four days' time.  Until then the preservatives will keep it fresh, until then I am alive.

 I wonder if this is the first cake I have ever seen.  I know it might be the ninth.   For although I am twelve years old, I believe I have been so nine times.  The last cake I remember rested on a white china plate on a gingham-clothed table that stands on a floor of wooden boards under a roof of white plaster and off-white cornices.   I had a party streamer, a balloon, and a book of fighting ships, and – although then I did not know it - seven hours left to live. 

Hail Caesar, in four days, this time, we die.   Yes, I know all about Caesars and Kaisers and Cabbages, and shoes and ships and screaming wax and long sad stories of the death of Kings.   My memory in respect of facts is excellent.   I suspect the history I know is a lie because it explains so little.   Why is it all people dying?  Why is it all people who only live once?

 

Day 2.

 

If you were created a second ago with memories of a full life behind you, would there be any difference to you?  Maybe not, but I have remembered that my memories are false, and I have remembered why.  I was (and will be – for eternity? -) born at the age of twelve months and three hundred and sixty days and I will die when I am thirteen years old.   In between, I live for five days and then death comes.   I am, I think, the first of me to have fully remembered that.  If I am right it is certain.   I have marked the days on the brightly coloured calendar.  Only the method is undetermined – or if not that (for it might already be percolating in the mind of my adversary) – at least unknown to me, unlooked for, surprising, a lethal glimmering novelty. 

Last time (I think I remember) it was a razor blade embedded in a bar of soap, ready for my evening wash.  The edge coated with some poison sliced my cheek open to the bone as I washed, I had long lean cheeks then – not my present chubby articles.  I think.  I think I’m sure of that. They won't let me have mirrors you see.  Another me broke one once and slashed her wrists, little rabbity cuts, quite useless – they should have been made lengthways along the vein.  I was a she then.   That was on her day four – trying to circumvent the inevitable, to duck under the barbed wire of mortality and dive across a different no-man’s land.   I don’t think she knew but she had a vision of it nevertheless; she knew she had to go before they took her.

She died on the next day of a combination of tetanus, loss of blood, and I think a calculated decision not to bother with any more breathing.   I can’t do that.  I can’t even imagine it.

Well not with me. Not with this body.

 

Day 3.

 

In my first me (in the first me I remember) I thought security was a game we all played, and I suppose (memories of that life are faint, now) I disbelieved in everything but my own obvious superior grasp of the games.  Now it seems to me that, then, I walked through a fog of ignorance smelling only a faint jasmine scent of it and ignoring the fact that it clogged my vision.  The idiot.  The fool.  A person being hunted can not afford to smell the flowers, and I am as hunted as a small animal in a minefield under a hail of buckshot.  It may not be the wilful violence that kills me (although it has been, oh yes my masters) but rather that impersonal violence that the small acts drive me towards. 

                I assume I have an adversary.  My physicians do not. They talk about the problems of memory-duplication, of biological synthesis, of the whole black clone technology  - thinking I neither hear, nor hearing understand - they conceal – perhaps deliberately, perhaps they themselves are changed on-mass when I die (their faces are not especially memorable) – the violence of my endings.    I hate them more than him.  (I think he is a he.)  He, the despoiler the lurker, the one who is laughing at me as I lurch through my clown-like lives.   They expect the process to take, one of us to survive, they did not think (I believe) that there would be this effect, this sequence, this enfolding of memory; they believed they had eight  (many be more?) separate children, twelve clones of their leader all viable.  They also did not expect our shared intelligence.  Oh, the great one is bright enough, powerful enough, he has these people running despite their flabby chins and weak knees.  He comes sometimes  (I think once a week, I have not seen him with these eyes yet).  I remember only a huge beard, and a roaring laugh, a manly burly figure.  I imagine him with a cigar in his hand, or slapping other men on the back roguishly.   My father, if you want to put it that way.

                There is a lot of gossip (between me and my memories) some frankly woven out of old scare stories that seem ancient even to me who has lived at most forty-two days, and at least two of my own allotted five depending on how you look at it.  I do not for instance believe that the deaths are faked and that we are simply being groomed for some nassissistic sexual indulgence.   I’ve considered that we might be organ parts, harvested at thirteen – the period of real-world growth some kind of stabilizing or checking time in which any hideous flaws in our genetic codes might run rampant, that eventually, our dying father might pull on any one of us as a coat to shield him from the death sun, to keep night’s long immortal cold from out of his bones.  Even so, I am not a self-killer.  I will wait, take time trust nothing, prepare.