Chapter Text
“2674! I love the 27th century. Really enjoy it. One of my faves. Come on, Yaz,” said the Doctor as she bounded out of the TARDIS ahead of me. It would have been easy to be irritated by the Doctor’s tendency to run off, but I found it endearing. She wasn’t just going ahead because she liked to lead, although that was part of it. She was going off to make sure I was safe. I mean, not necessarily me, just whoever she was with. Since Graham and Ryan left, the Doctor was with me. I mean, not with me with me, but… oh, you know what I mean, right? Not that I wouldn’t want to be with the Doctor, but that was impossible. Erm. Where was I?
I stepped through the TARDIS doors and emerged into blazing sunlight. My first thought was that the Doctor had landed us in the Eden Project, where Mum and Dad had taken us when we were holidaying in Cornwall. 2674 was hot and humid and covered with green. Gigantic leaves filled most of my field of vision. But then my eyes adjusted, and I realised most of the plants were growing up the sides of buildings. We weren’t in a rainforest, we were in the middle of a city centre, full of green skycrapers and buildings of sparkling stone.
“Where are we, Doctor?” I asked. I had heard that Singapore had lots of “green walls”, which would match the climate and the architecture too. Or maybe it was somewhere like Kuala Lumpur, or Rio, or Mexico City.
“Aberdeen!” the Doctor said. Not what I was expecting.
“What? But it’s so hot!” I said, mopping my brow. I took my jacket off and threw it into the TARDIS.
“Global warming, Yaz,” said the Doctor. “It’s under control now, but Aberdeen gets much hotter in the summer than it did in your time.”
“I thought global warming was going to make Britain cold? Something about the jet stream.”
“Melting the Greenland ice sheet would have disrupted the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, but the universe is probabilistic and that’s not how things turned out in this timeline,” the Doctor said. She often threw out scientific jargon without explaining what it meant. “We’ve landed in a future where Greenland didn’t melt and there’s Arctic ice all year round, but where summer in Aberdeen requires air conditioning. Right, quick survival guide: don’t ask anyone how old they are, and keep your water bottle topped up. Do you have your water bottle?”
“I… don’t think you’ve given me a water bottle.”
“Yaz! Yaz Yaz Yaz Yaz Yaz. A water bottle is the second most important thing for a time traveller to carry.”
“What’s first? A sonic screwdriver?”
“A towel, Yasmin, a towel.”
“I never see you carrying a water bottle or a towel.”
The Doctor reached into her coat, and pulled out a two-litre water bottle and an oversized rainbow bath sheet. “Coat pockets. Bigger on the inside.”
“Don’t they get heavy?”
“They’re also lighter on the outside. Like the TARDIS. If the TARDIS was as massive on the outside as it is in the inside then the Sun would orbit it.”
“So isn’t the most important thing for a time traveller to carry your coat?”
“Honestly, no. It’s alright if there’s a nip in the air, but right now I’m sweating like a lamb at the butcher’s. I’ll have to rig up an aircon system while you find your water bottle.”
I spent a long time rooting through one of the cupboards in the TARDIS before I found an acceptable water bottle. Not acceptable to me, mind – I’m not too fussed – but acceptable to the Doctor. A surprising number of her ordinary-looking water bottles turned out to be booby trapped, dimensionally unstable, designed for a different species, on loan from museums, sentient, porous, or other objects merely disguised as water bottles. The first one I pulled out that didn’t get her all up-in-arms had an obscenity written on it, which I didn’t think I could legally walk around carrying. The second one startling whistling when I filled it at the tap, which the Doctor thought was cute but I knew would get on my nerves. Eventually I found a suitable bottle: one litre, translucent, colourless. The Doctor gave me a utility belt which had a clip on a retractable reel for the bottle. Apparently it was all the rage in Aberdeen.
“But your one is special,” the Doctor said. “Drop the bottle.”
“If that thing slams into me then it’s gonna leave a bruise,” I said.
“Trust me, just drop the bottle.”
I did. Like I predicted, it reeled into my waist. Fortunately, it stopped just before it would have hit me.
“Inertial dampeners. Really nifty,” the Doctor said. “And if you put something carbonated in there then they stop it getting all shaken up.”
We headed back out onto the leafy streets of 2674 Aberdeen. The Doctor had rigged a system between her coat pockets that blew a constant stream of cool air onto her face, as if she was walking into a summer breeze.
“So what are we doing here, Doctor?” I asked.
“Sightseeing, Yaz, just sightseeing. Green Aberdeen. Green Aberdeen of your dreams.”
“No, really, what are we doing here?”
“Is it that unbelievable that I would take you somewhere for a nice day out? Don’t answer. Fine. The TARDIS comes to Aberdeen all the time and I can’t work out why.”
“Maybe it’s developed a fault?”
“Yeah, maybe, except it has been doing it for thousands of years at this point. It does mean I’ve become well acquainted with Aberdeen at various possible futures, possible pasts, and possible… well, I don’t really have a present, but at least from your perspective…”
“Excuse me,” said a woman. I tried not to do a visible double-take. She was an alien standing in the open on the streets of Aberdeen, dressed in a baggy tracksuit just like a human. She was about the right height, particularly when you accounted for her stoop, and her voice was just like a human’s, right down to the gentle Aberdeen accent. But her skin was bright green and scaly, like a gecko. “Excuse me,” she said again. “Can you help me? My son needs medical treatment and I can’t afford it.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve got any money on me. Definitely not enough for that.”
“I have money,” said the Doctor. “I keep bits floating around for emergencies. I might need to get in touch with my broker but I can pay for your son’s care.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you so much, you have no idea what this means to me,” the woman said. I got the impression she was seconds away from prostrating herself at our feet. She seemed grateful, but also afraid, and keen to please.
“What’s your name?” the Doctor asked.
“Juniper, madam,” she said.
“No need for the madam, Juniper. We’re friends. Call me the Doctor. This is Yaz.”
“My deepest apologies, the Doctor, I will address you as you wish.” Juniper’s voice quivered.
“Relax, Juniper,” said the Doctor. “We’re going to make this alright. Could you take us to the bank?”
“Of course!” said Juniper. “Please follow me.”
Juniper turned and walked off. I caught hold of the Doctor’s sleeve and whispered to her as we walked. “What’s going on here?”
“We’re going to the bank so I can pay for this woman’s son to get medical care.”
“I know, I mean… what happened to the NHS?”
“Same thing that’s happening to it in your time, but further along. Death by a million cuts. It still technically exists, but if you want treatment within a decade or for anything unusual, you’re out of luck.”
That figured. Just like the police force, the NHS suffered from constant cutbacks, leaving staff stressed and overworked. In the police, we had to prioritise which crimes we responded to. In hospitals, they had to prioritise which patients to treat. The public would kick up a fuss if anyone ever suggested new ways of funding the NHS or the police, but generally seemed happy for funds to carry on being squeezed forever.
“Right, next question: why is she…” I dropped my voice to barely above a whisper. “… a lizard?”
“Yasmin Khan, I thought your generation didn’t see colour!”
“I can’t not see colour, it’s all around me, every day!”
“I’m only teasing. Juniper is a Gaean. They’re a sapient species that have been hibernating beneath the Earth for millions of years, since before mammals were manipulating tools. A few attempts at peace accords with humans failed before one finally got off the ground in 2118.”
“Gaean?”
“It means ‘one who lives on the land’. It contrasts with Thalassans, who are a closely related amphibious species who mostly live in the sea. Both of them get called all sorts of silly names like ‘Silurians’ and ‘Sea Devils’, load of nonsense really…”
“These wouldn’t be names you coined, would they?”
“No! No. Not all of them. I used to be much worse at palaeontology. And I didn’t have any Gaean friends to put me right. Or any palaeontologists. In those days I was scientific advisor to UNIT. I thought I could do it all myself, but that’s not how science works.”
I let the Doctor’s words wash over me. As we walked, I paid attention to the buildings surrounding us. It was the middle of the day, but they all seemed to have their lights on, a strange mixture of red and purple lights which gave the rooms a tinge of magenta. Plenty of plants grew in the buildings, as well as on windowsills and balconies and hanging baskets. The few cars on the roads were driverless, although most people were walking or riding bikes.
And then the buildings and plants all gave way, and we were by the river. I could see right to the mouth. The sea was dotted with giant wind turbines, solar panels, and various other structures I didn’t recognise. Some people find wind turbines unsightly. I thought they were awesome. There must have been thousands of the thing, and I could only imagine what they were powering.
“Wow,” said the Doctor. Clearly she felt the same. “Look at that, just look at it.”
“I hope neither of you mind me saying this, but you’re not from around here, are you?” said Juniper.
“How could you tell?” I asked.
“Well, first things first, you’re staring at everything like it’s new to you. Nobody from Aberdeen would be surprised by our wind farm. But more pertinently, it explains why a couple of humans like you would be out on the streets.”
That was a strange thing to say. It wasn’t a threat, just an observation that we were out of place. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen any humans in Aberdeen, only Gaeans and robots. Was this a Gaean city, then? Perhaps it had been relinquished under a peace treaty. Humanity kept Edinburgh, Gaeanity took Aberdeen, Dundee and Inverness, and they shared Glasgow? Gosh, that would be depressing. We’d seen the lengths Rosa Parks and her fellow activists had gone to in order to abolish segregation in America. I hoped the arrival of the Gaeans hadn’t seen a new form of segregation spring up all over the world, this time based on species rather than skin colour.
“We’re here,” said Juniper. “What do you require next?”
“We need to get to… oh, I see. The river bank,” said the Doctor. “I was meaning bank as in a financial institution where one can store and withdraw liquid financial assets.”
“I… I’m not sure I understand you. I trust such an institution exists, but I am afraid I have never had reason to visit it.”
“Where do you store your wages when you are paid?” the Doctor asked.
Juniper patted the pockets of her tracksuit. “The big notes go in a jar at home until somebody needs a bill paid, but it empties by the end of the month.”
“Oh, no, no, this is no good. Access to capital is essential for fighting poverty. How are you supposed to progress in life without the ability to save or invest or take a loan?”
“I’m afraid I still don’t entirely understand you. We progress through our children. We hope they are able to earn enough between them to pay some of our expenses in old age.”
The 26th century, it turned out, was a lot like the 19th century. I mean, the plants were nice, and so were the wind turbines, but otherwise it seemed the world had gone backwards. Why did the Doctor say she loved this century so much? It seemed so nasty and bleak.
“OK, so, no bank. Do you have internet access?” Juniper looked back at the Doctor blankly. “Is there any way to get information from other computers?”
“Maybe the humans have something like that, but I don’t,” said Juniper. “My second daughter works for…”
Thump! A deep bass sound deafened me, and I was blasted back off my feet. I clattered into the barriers by the river bank and fell limply, blacking out.