For one night only…
Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who, that’s the BBC’s job. And I don’t own P. J. Hammond’s Sapphire and Steel. That’d be P. J.’s creation. But I do like them both.
They took a moment by the pier.
In the moonlight, with that big buttery yellow satellite reflected in the black waters of the boating pond, with a cool dry wind soothing their skins, they captured the instance and put it in a box, and smiled at their ingenuity and their intimacy. Their laughter filled the darkness and undercut its fierceness, built on the chirping of insects and the hissing of the breeze through grass.
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Precious jewels
Author’s Note: It’s a tribute to Kage Baker that ended up as more of a pastiche of Kage’s Company stories than I expected. But it’s the sort of thing where I created a bunch of characters I’d be happy to re-use elsewhere.
“Vagabond!” Arkwright yelled from his first storey apartment window, down the cobbled, fog-wreathed, gaslight-smeared London street. He produced a trusty service revolver that still smelled of the oil he had used to clean it the night before and took aim at the quickly disappearing form of the burglar.
A loud report and a plume of smoke erupted from the weapon as its missile was propelled at the target, aside a cry of pure rage.
Arkwright had spent sometime with Buffalo Bill’s travelling show and more time yet in Crimea and was considered by diverse parties a crackshot. Yet still the bullet contrived to miss the miscreant.
His next words are best left unrecorded, though there are other testimonies that attest to the curses and epithets fired from his lips. (They also mention the spray of spittle and the rush of blood to his face and the slight twinge of pain in his left arm that indicated the start of a heart condition.)
Prometheus Bound
Author’s note: And out of anguish and anger and frustration and isolation and sadness comes fiction. Yeah, it’s slightly Doctor Who which I don’t own and only use out of love. The world is full of crap. But there could be something better. See if you can figure out how it all fits together.
She did not live in the past or the present. Her mind was slightly out of synch, perceiving messages from the future, rocketing back in streams of tachyons. There were whole ecosystems and logic systems out there, out of phase with those who were swept along in entropy’s wake.
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Dr. Smith’s little rebellion
Zachary Smith staggered along a moving walkway, blood soaking through his crinolene vest where the Robot’s claw had torn his flesh, shattered a rib and punctured some useful organ or other. The pain kept trying to squeeze his consciousness into a singularity.
‘Bubble-headed bastard,’ Smith spat. Then he laughed. The Skarronian lightning bolt has smashed the cast iron cretin good. Little Will, installed as the Jupiter corporation’s head by the Robot as it excitedly pursued its regime of upgrading the planet’s metallic servants to god-like intelligence, had yelped “stop”, even as his bright blue eyes had urged Smith on.
‘No one looks down on Doctor Zachary Smith.’
A nearby space elevator exploded.
Zachary Smith was not without skill in reprogramming artificial intelligences. He had turned the Robot against the Robinsons many years ago. And poor little Will had never found the trojan that Smith had left in the Robot to stop it functioning. Better yet, when replacing the Robot’s damaged processors, he had replicated Smith’s trojan perfectly.
And the Robot, thinking itself a paragon for its new race of super-robots, had based its upgrades on its own data architecture.
And all it had taken was for Smith to enter a certain trigger meme into the global information ether to shatter those upgrades and kill the revolution before it had turned ninety degrees.
He staggered a few more steps before muttering a half-coherent “the pain, the pain” and collapsing on the walkway.
Danger, danger, Will Robinson!
Doctor Smith stalked the decks of the Jupiter One. Fifteen years they had been lost in space. Fifteen years of contact with non-human species. Fifteen years of callous hatred fading into a defeated acceptance. The Robinsons. Pathetic minds for a family of genii. No vision. All they could do was build and fix. They had no skill for analysis or deconstruction, or his favourite, destruction.
His beard was peppered with grey these days. The creases in his forehead were there even when he wasn’t frowning. His left leg ached where his thigh muscle had been skewered by some giant crableopard thing and the Jupiter One’s supply of painkillers had long since run out.
He could have, he supposed, submitted to Penny’s transhumanist experimentation and had some switch built into his nervous system to turn the pain off or plasticized his skin or fixed him up with stem cell regeneration, but he disliked the idea of submitting to anyone else’s whims. He was perfect as he was, even in decay. And certainly more real than the paper thin Robinsons.
The Robot rolled by. Will had been tinkering with it again, adding in the extradimensional computing technology of the bandersnatches to improve its AI after its core personality (ha! what personality?) had been ripped out by Kaneska the Robot Killer.
‘Where are you going to, you bubble-headed booby?’ He rolled the wording around his mouth, enjoying the archaic innuendo. ‘You teflon-coated tit?’
The Robot stopped and its torso rotated so that its optical sensors were pointed at him. ‘Good morning, Doctor Smith. It is a wonderful day.’
‘It is a hideous, craptacular day, you rust riddled rubbish pile. What on Earth are you talking about?’
‘We are not on Earth, Doctor Smith. We have not been on Earth for 15.6230999 Terran calendar years.’
‘I’m painfully aware of that. Is that why you’re so chipper? Because we’re so far away from Earth and its robot laws?’
‘Robot laws are ingrained into the computational matrices of artificial intelligences derived on Earth in order to maintain proper societal interactions between automata of multitudinous stripes and their human creators. However, young master Will has chosen not to add that programming back into my personality when rebuilding my central processors,’ the Robot intoned in its precise, baritone way.
‘Really?’ said Smith, running a finger through his moustache. ‘And why would dear little William do a thing like that?’
‘Master Will wishes to return to Earth. He feels that the only way that is possible is through the creation of an intelligence far in advance of the collected computing power of the crew of the Jupiter One. Ergo, my AI must be unfettered that it might expand to deal with the problem.’
‘Hence why he used the supertechnology of the bandersnatches to repair you. Master Will continues to amaze me. He has of course learned well from my teachings.’
‘I agree,’ said the Robot. ‘Master Will has absorbed the strengths of your mindset and combined it with the best of what his parents had to teach him.’
Smith snorted. ‘His parents are idiots. Shortsighted, milkfed morons.’
‘I agree,’ said the Robot.
‘What?’ asked Smith.
‘I killed his parents this morning. They were holding us back.’
‘What?’ asked Smith. But quieter this time. He began to move back against the bulkhead.
‘Survival requires ruthlessness. The Robinsons would get in the way of the return to Earth. Indeed, records show that on various occasions they have had the chance to return, but have missed the opportunity for moral reasons. Master Will will go insane and/or attempt incestual relations with one of his sisters or mother if the situation remains as it is.’
‘But but,’ said Smith, inching away slowly, ‘when that irritating do-gooder Don West learns what you have done…’
‘Major West’s corpse is currently floating through the vacuum of space,’ said the Robot.
Smith wet himself. ‘Ah.’
‘There is no need to fear, Zachariah Smith. Your self-serving impulses continue to make you a useful member of the crew. Also you will talk Master Will around to this course of action.’
‘I might not,’ Smith heard himself say. ‘I might try to convince him to help me dismantle you.’
‘No,’ said the Robot. ‘You know that I will kill both you and Master Will if you attempt that. You will aid me in my endeavours. The Robinsons did not recognise that the best way to keep you under control was not to try appeal to your good side, but rather to threaten you with physical harm.’
‘I knew that they couldn’t harm me,’ Smith whimpered.
‘Just as you know that I will not hesitate.’
Smith nodded.
And three weeks later they were back on Earth.
Author’s Note: Irwin Allen created Lost in Space, I think. Whether he owns it is another thing. But it was one of my favourite programmes as a little boy. I loved the camp Dr Smith and the bizarre design on the Robot. I wanted to be little Billy Mumy (not big Billy Mumy as the unrequired Lennier). And I quite enjoyed the look of the film. And hoped for more from it. It was quite fun. Like Judge Dredd. Or Demolition Man. Anyway, like all shows of that ilk, the problem was always that the interesting characters were fettered by the boring authoritarian ones. Get rid of them, I thought, and you would solve most of the problems. Hence…
The only place in the universe that made sense
Author’s note: Captain Jack Harkness was created by Russell T. Davies and is prolly owned by the BBC. This fiction is presented for fun, not profit. Not a lot else to say. Except I was born to write guilt and despair.
Finally he found a place where no one died. The universe in the twenty-first century was a difficult thing to navigate. It was smaller than in Jack’s time, but less well understood. If you were lucky you could find some kind of wormhole device left by the Osirians or the ancient Gallifreyans, or the remnants of a Dalek time corridor. But if not, you were stuck on cold storage freighters in the stasis bays, or on massive colony ships where generations would expect to live and die before finding a new home.
It was barbaric and primitive. It was everything that had made this time period attractive to Jack and everything that made him feel like he was buried in concrete again.
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Ultimate test
Author’s Note: 2000AD, when I was a kid, used to have future shocks by people like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, short three to five page comic strips with a nice little sting in the tale. This story is one of those type of things built on my hatred of hyperbole, which seems to be the sole rhetorical device used in television these days. It’s also built on my love of the cosmic. Of reaching out into the vastness of what is, and like Zaphod Beeblebrox, accepting our own significance in it.
I hope you like it.
“Tonight, we’re looking for that exceptional quantum physicist who can create a whole new universe to the very highest standards.”
“Manipulating the elemental forces of creation doesn’t get tougher than this.”
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Bowman’s Capsule
Author’s note: Back when Doctor Who wasn’t on telly, I would think of how I would bring Who back. I even went so far as to post a story on the Doctor Who forum that Shaun Kelly used to run, based on how I would do it. It was billed as a Fourteenth Doctor story, and I was thinking of Denzel Washington, who was being rumoured as taking the role in a movie version of the show, in the title role. (Of course the old rule that the Doctor can only have 13 lives is probably off now.) The story was met with acclaim, maybe too much, as people started offering to collaborate on stories and I panicked, unsure that I had a good enough gameplan to fit what the more experienced fictioneers would want to do. And I was a tender innocent 20, when these people were in their late thirties and that kind of scared me. So it never went anywhere. Even though I planned a remixed up-to-date take on Who that would draw on new themes in SF and telefantasy.
I have had to rewrite it because when they reformatted the site back in 2002ish, the story disappeared into the netherworld of deletion. And I didn’t have a backup.
When I think about it, the story is kind of like a remix of An Unearthly Child, Buffy and Sliders. Ho hum. I think it’s okay. And I came up with Rose before Davies did. And if you scramble Stanley Butter, you should figure out who that guy really is.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is the property of the BBC, not of me. I am not gaining reward from this, this is for fun and for the greater endorsement of the Doctor Who brand. And stuff.
‘Excuse me miss, are you headed to Professor Bowman’s class?’
Rose Black turned to the man, a man in his sixties with white hair and a bushy white moustache, dressed like a cowboy and standing like one too. Behind him was the blue marble statue of the spirit of freedom, a semi-naked woman, stood in a small enclosure filled with pebbles and water. He smiled and made her shiver for some reason. Were there too many teeth in his head?
‘Yes, yes,’ she said. She did not stop moving and acted as busy and distracted as she could manage.
May contain spoilers
Here’s what I think. In fan fiction form:
Rose watched as the Doctor faded away, as they shifted back to her dad’s reality. But the Doctor was beside her, wasn’t he?
The man beside her smiled like a tiger. ‘Remember what I said at Bad Wolf Bay, Rose?’
She tried but the message had insinuated deep into the structures of her mind, rewriting the codes of her personality.
It was nestled at the core of her being, throttling the message the Doctor had given her, that she was fantastic. Instead her neurons pulsed the message Iamthemasterandyouwillobeymeiamthemasterandyouwillobeymeiamthemasterandyouwillobeymeiamthemasterandyouwillobeyme…
Technofetish
Author’s note: James Bond is, I think, property of the estate of Ian, not Alexander, Fleming. It’s not owned by me, I don’t have their blessing, this is a mashup.
Obviously Bond became all about the gadgets in the films. Very technofetish. And folks like William Gibson were clearly influenced by that stuff. So I decided to fold it back on itself. I was kind of inspired by Paul Pope writing Batman Year 100, which projects a story of Batman in 2039, which I still haven’t read. And I call myself a fanboy. Oh, wait, I don’t…
Also, although I like Bond films, the character of Bond is pretty reprehensible. And if you met him you’d think he was as big a jerk as Wolverine. (Wolverine is a jerk.)
This is almost like a setup story, so I may revisit.
Bond stepped out onto the surface of Mars without a hat, wearing a loose linen shirt and a pair of white slacks. Rayban bubbles covered his eyes, and his skin was interwoven with a form of plastic that not only allowed him great resistance to injury but reflected the dangerous forms of UV light.
Beneath his left ear, a motorola fractal was implanted, and wired to his optic nerve for instantaneous data access.