Chapter Text
What is happening to me crazy some would say,
Where is the life that I recognize gone away
- Ordinary World Duran Duran
Reading physics at uni disappointed Sarah Jane Smith and the lack of an astrophysics department was just wrong. But then, there was so much wrong with this universe, she didn't know where to start. The problem was that she was good at her chosen field. At memorising formulas that didn't- that couldn't- apply to the world around her.
This reality was so paper-thin that she'd known all her life that time was out of joint. So she'd set herself the task of figuring out why, whilst the people around her continued in remembered patterns that bore no relation to the world they lived in. Once, in another life, she'd built her own telescope at the age of ten, grinding lenses as the early astronomers would have, all the while encouraged by her Aunt Lavinia. Here there were no telescopes and nothing to see in the night sky.
Sarah Jane didn't understand why the world had technology based on a space program that had never happened, but she took advantage of it whenever she could.
She started with the sun. If there were no stars in the sky, then it must not be a star. Reading all that had been written, studying the work of those that had come before, then taking her own readings. If the equipment didn't exist, she invented it. She mapped its cyclical pulses, took brightness readings and tried to interpret the sounds she picked up on the rudimentary radio telescope she'd cobbled together. She tried to publish her findings and the scientific community laughed at her. She wasn't surprised - but she didn't go into scientific research either.
Instead, she became the nut that people said she was. If the world couldn't see what she saw, she would look at what the world saw, and what they saw was the Pandorica. So once she left uni, she got a grant to study it.
She spent days and nights at the museum, poking and prodding the Pandorica. Transcribing, measuring, scanning. As she had with the sun, when the equipment didn't exist, she built her own. When her prototypes could be used for other things, she patented them and sold them, giving her a modest income. For once, she wasn't afraid to alter the future. If her readings were right, this world had no future.
The Pandorica gave her purpose, especially when memories of other timelines threatened to overtake her. Sarah Jane began to give lectures at the museum, searching for faces in the crowd, faces that she never found. She wrote a book and somehow, at the age of twenty-three, became the world's foremost authority on the Pandorica. Given the world, this wasn't saying much, but she took advantage of the freedom it gave her.
Not long after, she woke from a nightmare, screaming "Doctor" and knowing what was exploding up in the sky. He wasn't up there- she was almost certain of that. But someone was, and she redoubled her efforts.
Each day brought fresh memories of her travels with the Doctor in that world now lost and she mined them for possibilities. A memory of borrowing his sonic screwdriver early on so that she could take it apart to see how it worked sent her running to an electronic parts store. She'd translated the inscription on the box once, and now she did so again more accurately. It still told the same story: a horror so great that only this box could contain it. She thought of Prometheus, and what he'd been imprisoned for, and soldiered on.
It took ten years to get the sonic screwdriver to the level of precision she needed, but aside from her lectures and occasional paper, she didn't have that much else to do. The people who could help her were still at school- or perhaps they had never been born.
The lock was simple and impossible; a biometric lock set to the DNA of the the person trapped inside. Biodata technology was decades away from being invented here, but she hadn't just seen the wonders of the universe with the Doctor, she'd seen the technology too. And she'd always been a tinkerer.