Chapter Text
Perched on the jumpseat watching his friend dance around the console executing the post-flight procedure to shut down the craft, Will fiddled with the cuffs of his shirt, then smoothed his hair back with a hand. He’d been in the middle of breakfast, reading a book in his dressing gown, when David had breezed in, insisted that he either stay on board for the day or get dressed and come immediately, and whirled back out. Though the man had been polite and cheerful, an air of excitement and urgency floated about him and Will had dashed off to his room for a jacket and trousers, leaving the remnants of his toast and tea on the table.
The craft had still been in flight when Will arrived in the console chamber and he’d stayed out of its pilot’s way. Now that they had landed, he hesitated to make a sound. David had grown edgier with every minute, his fingers twitching when they were idle for more than two seconds, and the feeling was rubbing off on his passenger.
“So where are we, mate?” Will inquired when curiosity outweighed his apprehension.
“A bit out in the country. The Cotswolds, actually, a decade or so in the future of your time. Nothing too special, really.” David avoided looking at his friend as he spoke. Will knew he’d have to press to get the man to talk.
“And what is it about the English countryside that’s got you on pins and needles?”
“It’s not that. I’m not nervous. I’m… I’m excited.” Spinning in place, David leant back against the console. “I’m trying to not be, but…” He ran the tip of his tongue along his upper lip, trying to suppress the eager sparkle in his eye. “There’s a temporal anomaly. Well, not quite yet, but there will be one. This is it, Will. This is what I’m supposed to do. Protect the universe from anomalies and paradoxes. This’ll be my first one.”
“Ah.” Will smiled with a knowing glance. “Finally feeling like you have a purpose?”
“Aye. I’m going to do something good and right, with concrete benefits, and it’s what I would be doing, if I were a real Time Lord.” Glancing down, he scrubbed at the fingers of one hand with the thumb of the other. “I just hope I’m ready for this.”
Will popped off his seat and strode forward to grasp his friend’s shoulder. “You’ll do fine, mate. This is your specialty after all, isn’t it?”
David’s head bobbed a tiny acknowledgement. “It is, but I’m still a novice at this, and besides, there’s a great, yawning chasm between theoretical knowledge and practical application. Even if I do understand what’s going on, I may not be able to do anything about it. A TARDIS has only a tiny fraction of the tools Gallifrey had, and my TARDIS, the way he was built, well...” He looked up at Will. “He’s barely adequate, to their standards anyway. I’ll do what I can, of course. I think… Well, I don’t think this should be too difficult. This is your Earth and your time, after all. Humans are still taking their first steps into temporal science, so there’s not much damage they can do. Still,” he shrugged, “I’m looking forward to the opportunity to learn.”
“Actually, that’s something I’ve always wondered.” Will leant on the console as he talked. “You said that the Time Lords guarded the universe against things like this. Who’s been doing it since they’ve been gone?”
“No one.” David’s answer was simple and definite. “The Doctor, to some extent, but there’s no way a single person can police the entire universe. What their absence really means is that no one is forcing the universe to adhere to the Web of Time. That was the course that the Time Lords set out for it, but with them gone, the universe goes along as it wishes.”
Puzzled, Will cocked his head to the side. “Is that a good thing?”
David shook his head, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “I’ve no idea. I haven’t the wisdom to make that call. Come on. I’ve got work to do and it’s time to get on it.” He took a step around the console then paused, wagging a finger at Will. “Oh. Hold a tick. I’ve got to do this. Contemporary Earth and all that.” He pulled his neural inhibitor pendant from his pocket and strung it around his neck, grimacing as it took effect and shut down his psychic senses. “I’ll never get used to that. Come on.” Striding past Will to the doors, David pulled them open and stepped through, emerging from his time travel capsule which had disguised itself as a tall tree.
It was an unremarkable copse, rather dense, the afternoon sun filtering down through the leaves, adding just a hint of warmth to the late spring air. Will’s boots crackled on leaves and twigs as he surveyed the area.
Rooting about in his pocket again, David produced a length of red ribbon and tied it to one of the branches of the TARDIS, as high as he could reach so that it was easily visible. “There. Now you can tell which one he is. Hate for you to have to test every tree in the forest.” At Will’s snort, he smiled and beckoned with a hand. “This way.”
After a short walk, the two men came to the edge of a clearing in which sat a small stone cottage, enlarged by a wooden extension on one side. Much of the clear land around it was planted with rows of vegetables, the young plants enjoying the fine weather. A gravel path led out into the trees across the clearing from the two travellers, with a small car parked just a bit from the house. Pulling out another length of ribbon, David tied it to the tree next to them. “The door to the cottage is on the other side,” he explained as he worked. “So, when you come out, turn left and come around the side and you should see this. From here, run radially out from the cottage and you’ll find the TARDIS directly.” He pointed in the indicated direction.
Will goggled at his friend, his eyes wide and worried. “An escape plan? You’re afraid this will go pear-shaped.”
David puffed out a breath. “I’m planning for the worst. The anomaly is serious enough to get the TARDIS’ attention and I might not be able to stop it. If I were a real Time Lord…” He shook his head. “I don’t have the knowledge and the tools, so it’s common sense to have a contingency plan.”
Will nodded his understanding. “All right, mate. Red ribbon, then run straight out. Got it.”
Setting off across the garden, the two men walked side by side. Will tried to follow David’s gaze as the man studied the environment. “What will it look like?” he asked.
“What will what look like?” David asked as he eyed the young plants around them.
“The anomaly.”
David shrugged. “I don’t know. That word is imprecise. You might not even be able to see it. I should be able to sense it, though.” He stopped and looked at the row of bean plants next to them, reaching out to tap the trellis that the vines hadn’t quite reached yet. “There’s definitely something odd here, but I can’t figure out what.” Kneeling down, he fingered the soft new leaves of a bean plant in a pot that had obviously sprouted only a few days earlier, nestled among beds that had been planted weeks before. “There’s been some alterations in time here, very small but nothing like I’ve studied before. I just can’t pinpoint what they are.” He stood back up, dusting off his hands.
“Then we inquire within, I expect?”
David shrugged. “I don’t see that we have any choice.”
As they approached the house, they passed a small shed into which Will poked his nose for a quick look. He saw nothing unusual there, just rows of gardening tools on hooks and bags of supplies. Turning the corner around the house, they walked up to the door, the gravel crunching under their soles, and David tapped a friendly rhythm on the wood. Sounds of movement and then low muttering drifted to them, then all was silent. David smirked at Will. “That was a bit of panic and then a ‘maybe they’ll go away’.” He tapped again. And then a third time after a pause. He eyed Will for one more moment, then nodded. “They’re coming,” he whispered.
When the door opened, a young woman in her late twenties peeped out. She might have been pretty if she wasn’t disheveled and clearly rather harried, strands of dark hair pulled out of her bun and her light glasses askew on her face. She wore a light blue t-shirt and blue jeans, and stood looking over both men in detail, waiting for them to break the silence.
“Er, hello. My name is David, and this is Will. We were hoping for a bit of help.” As she took a breath to obviously deny any request, he barrelled on. “You see, our car broke down in that direction,” and he waved in the general direction of the TARDIS, “and the sat nav led us into the trees. We’re really quite lost and we were hoping you might have a computer we could use to find our way.”
The woman frowned, her irritation evaporating as the strangeness of his story intrigued her. “Your sat nav led you here?”
“Well, not here exactly,” David replied. “It said to come in this direction to get to the nearest village. We’ve been walking for an hour now, and when we saw your cottage, well, that was a breath of fresh air.”
“That’s odd. It should have sent you down the road, not into the trees.” She beckoned imperiously with a hand. “Let me see it.”
David pulled out his mobile and began tapping on the screen. “I’ll bring it up.” From his vantage point, Will could see the Gallifreyan rolling across the screen in response to the touches, then a map came up and the man turned the device so that the woman could see it. She jerked back in surprise at the sight of the unfamiliar chart, then leant in to get a better look.
“Well, that’s not right,” she murmured “That’s not a map of this area at all. What direction did you say you came from?”
David pointed about sixty degrees off of his original indication. “Over there, I think.”
Though he wasn’t quite sure what David intended with his ruse, Will picked up his tactic and doubled down on it, shaking his head. “No, mate, we came from that direction.” He pointed in a third direction. “Remember? We came almost all the way around the garden.”
Running a hand through his hair, David looked back and forth between the two indicated directions. “No, I thought we… I’m sorry,” he said to the woman, bowing a little, “I’ve no sense of direction. Can you help us?”
The woman bit her lip, debating with herself about what to do, then sighed. “Yeah, I’ve got a computer you can use. But only for a moment. We’re really very busy.” She pulled the door wide open. “Come in.”
Leading them through a room sparsely furnished with two chairs and two cheap tables, one piled with papers and books and the other with plates with abandoned meals, she announced as she stepped into the add-on room, “Dr Barrens, we’ve visitors, just for a moment. They’ve gotten lost and need the computer to get their bearings.”
The only other person in the room was an older man, perhaps in his early fifties, wearing trousers and a plain white shirt with sleeves he’d rolled up past his elbows. Standing in the center of the room over a large cylindrical steel device with thick metal piping snaking in and out of what looked like translucent glass chambers, he studied the tables of data displayed on its computer screen. The walls of the room were lined with shelves packed with components, tools, and books, except for one clear stretch which was covered with blueprints and diagrams. Behind the man stood a desk with the computer the woman had promised. At the interruption, he glanced up, spearing the two newcomers with an angry stare. “Now? Of all the times! Certainly not!” He flicked a hand at them. “Ellen, get rid of them.”
David pushed past her and trotted up to the device. “A temporal manipulator!” he announced with an excited grin as he looked it over.
Barrens was dumbfounded. He stared first at his visitor and then at the device. “You know what this is?”
“Well, the general category, yes.” David pulled his glasses out of a pocket under his jumper as he continued to peer at the device, then snapped them on and ducked down to look into a glass chamber. “It’s very good for a primitive attempt, though I have to say I haven’t seen a design quite like this before. What exactly are you trying to do?”
Offended by David’s demeanour and the obvious insult, Barrens had jerked back with a scowl. He sputtered, “H-how dare you?” at his visitor. “This is state-of-the-art time technology.”
“Yes, of course it is,” David replied absentmindedly, absorbed by inspecting the machine. The scientist huffed at the patronising dismissal.
“Mate,” Will murmured as he slipped past Ellen and came up behind his friend. “Sugar, not vinegar.”
As David acknowledged the advice with a nod, Barrens clapped his hands and strode forward, grasping both visitors by their arms none too gently and pushing them toward the door. “Get out of my laboratory, now! Ellen, you’re supposed to keep people out of here. We are going to have words.”
Both David and Will twisted out of his grasp, and while the former spun back around to look at the machine, the latter stepped in front of the woman like a shield. “Don’t take her to task for being a decent human being,” Will warned. “Our fault for making up a story to get in here. She was only trying to help.”
The scientist bristled, setting his fists on his hips. “So you are here to interrupt my work.”
“Evaluate it first,” David replied. He pulled off an access panel from the device and peered inside whilst digging in his pocket for his mobile. “Maybe even help you, if it’s safe. Interrupt it only if it proves to be a danger.”
Barrens started to shake with suppressed anger, though he forced his voice to stay calm and tightly civil. “You’re from the university then? Or UKRI?”
“Neither,” David murmured. “I’m quite independent.”
The scientist finally lost his temper. “Then you have no right to be here!” he thundered at the man poking in his machine.
Backing out of the compartment, David drew himself up to his full height and turned to Barrens. “I have every right,” he declared, his voice cold. “You don’t get to go mucking about with time without someone checking up on you to make sure you’re being responsible. One tiny mistake could bring disaster.”
“Which is why I’m doing this in the country.” Barrens swept his arm to indicate the wilderness around his cottage. “Do you think I like working out here, away from my lab and colleagues?”
“I’m talking widespread disaster. Planet-sized or more.”
“Nonsense,” he huffed with a proud shake of his head. “My work is quite safe. It’s constrained by its very nature to a defined area.”
David stepped back from the device and leant against the desk, folding his arms across his chest. “Why don’t you tell me what it is you think you’ve built here.”
“Why should I tell you anything?” Barrens snapped. “I don’t even know who you are. I’m not going to reveal the work of the last ten years of my life to two hipsters who barged into my house.”
David frowned and glanced at Will. “We look like hipsters?”
Will shrugged. “I’m more of a geek than anything else. That jumper of yours is pretty neutral, but usually your dress sense is a little, well, eccentric, with your jackets over t-shirts, and those colourful socks you favour.”
“Oh, lord. Well, stop me if I start wearing pinstripes.” David turned back to Barrens. “I can see that your device generates a variable artron field controlled by a temporal phase modulator. You see, Will?” he asked as he beckoned his friend forward. “This right here. The field generator is pretty standard, but the modulator is nifty. Graviton disperser right here is genius.” He tapped a structure that looked like a metallic scallop shell. “But they’re not set up in the right configuration to make what you’d usually make with them, which is a temporal curtain, or a time shield in the common vernacular. You’ve also got a chronon lens here, and is this a compressive inverter? But I can’t make out what the ultimate purpose is.”
Ellen stepped past Will and peered up at David. “You can tell all that from thirty seconds’ look?”
“Impossible!” thundered Barrens. “He’s spewing phrases from one of the grant proposals.”
“No.” Ellen looked from David’s placid curiosity to Barrens’ fury and set her fists on her hips. “I don’t think he is. He knows what he’s talking about, and this is exactly what I said we needed, someone to look over your theory and designs and my calculations one last time.”
Barrens stabbed a finger toward the computer that David had pretended to want to use. “We’ve gone over this countless times and we’ve done all the tests. We were about to start the countdown when these men appeared. This changes nothing. We are going ahead with the activation, now!”
As Barrens stepped toward the device, Will hopped forward to place himself in front of the control panel, blocking his access. “Dr Barrens. I’m confident that you’re correct and your machine works exactly as you designed it to. What would be the harm in spending a minute to explain what that is, and take a bit of pride in what you’ve accomplished? We’d like to know what we’re watching for.”
Barrens glowered at him. “Oh, you’re good. Is that what he hired you for, to be the diplomat?” He didn’t give Will a moment to answer. “All right. And maybe when I’m finished, you’ll leave us alone!” He paced off a bit to collect his thoughts, then turned back to explain.
“All of the current research into time focuses on three areas.” He ticked off on his fingers as he spoke. “One is how time fits into unified field theory. The second is how to harness and manipulate tachyons and artron energy. The third is figuring out time travel. That third one’s the Holy Grail. Everyone wants to go into the past to meet Shakespeare or go into the future and bring back technology that could help us now, but really, unless we can make it cheap and easy, only a very few people will benefit from it directly.
“I figured, there must be a way to make time technology more accessible, more useful. Then I thought, what is it that people fight against their whole life?” He shook a finger at Will. “Decay. Over time, everything fades. A beautiful house crumbles to dust, a field becomes fallow, metal rusts, unless you take special precautions and spend a lot of effort simply fighting against time.”
He twiddled the forefingers of each hand around each other, but backwards. “So what if you could rewind time, just in that one place? You’ve got a field with soil that’s leached of its nutrients? Rewind it back to when it was newly fertilised. Renew a house back twenty years, to when it was newly built. That’s what this machine does. I can target an area within about thirty metres and rewind time just in that spot.”
“No, you can’t,” David murmured. “Not with that machine.”
Throwing his hands up in the air, Barrens shook his head and turned to his assistant. “And there, see? He’s telling me I can’t do something I’ve already done!”
David shook his head. “This machine doesn’t have that capability. It does something, I’m sure, but not that.” Knowing that the scientist would require more evidence to be convinced, he launched into an explanation. “Every place, every set of spatial coordinates, at each microinstant of time, is anchored to its own point in the time vortex. If you want to move a location in space backwards in time, you’d have to change its anchor point in the vortex. This thing can’t do that. All it can do is manipulate artron energy and project it. It cannot change the time vortex.”
“Time vortex? You’re just spouting nonsense now.” Barrens jabbed an angry finger at Ellen. “I told you this was a waste of time! I’m done with these two.”
Stepping forward, David pushed his point, using his height advantage to attempt to cow the scientist. “I’m telling you, Dr Barrens, this is a mistake. This thing is not doing what you think it’s doing.”
Barrens didn’t back down, staring up at the man with defiance. “And I’ve already proven you wrong. It’s worked, multiple times, in focused tests.”
David frowned. He glanced at the two computer screens, then at the diagrams on the wall. “Tests? What tests have you done?”
Ellen answered him, her calm, measured voice injecting some rationality into the heated argument. “We selected very small plots of land, no more than twenty centimetres in diameter, to affect with the field. Each time, we were successfully able to change the current time of the area by a few weeks.”
Gazing off as he thought, his eyes unfocused, David absently tugged at an ear. “And how did you determine that it worked? The change in chemical composition of a small piece of land over that short a time would be miniscule.”
“By the plants growing on it, of course,” Barrens declared as if any child would have figured it out.
Will clicked his fingers. “That bean plant, in the pot outside. You de-aged it.”
“Yes,” Ellen confirmed. “We’d been using the plants in the garden, but that one, we needed to have inside the lab so I repotted it.”
“No,” David murmured, shaking his head, moving over to look at the computer readout, “that’s not adequate evidence. Just because you’re changing the plant doesn’t mean you’re affecting the location. In fact, that’s all you’re doing. You’re using artron energy to affect the timeline of the plant, of the living organism, because that’s all you can do with this. Though,” he murmured, staring back at the device, “there’s something else. Something else this configuration’s doing, but I don’t understand what.”
Dr Barrens drew himself up, shaking an angry fist at him. “I should think that is a scientific breakthrough in and of itself. To be able to make a man younger, or mature a field of crops in an instant! Think of the possibilities!”
“It doesn’t work like that. Ah, you hu-” David broke off, swallowing the rest of his words, and coughed into the back of his hand to clear his throat. “You’ve so little vision, you can’t see the damage you could cause by making one little change like that.” With a sudden frown, David whirled to stare at the monitor, then tapped the screen. “Look at this, Will.” As his friend stepped forward to peer at the software, David rounded on the scientist. “You don’t have a procedure to process the feedback from constructive interference of the chronon waves. How are you controlling the spatio-temporal fluctuations?”
“We have -” Barrens began, but Ellen stepped forward, talking over him.
“We aren’t,” the woman stated, direct and clear.
“Ellen!” Barrens roared. “Hold your tongue!”
“No, I won’t!” she snapped. “I keep telling you that that’s going to be a problem, but you just won’t listen. Well, he saw it right off, and it’s time to face it.” She turned back to David. “We saw fluctuations that the theory didn’t predict. We ran the test five times, trying to send the bean plants back two weeks, and each time, they aged or de-aged a different amount.”
“But we’ve solved it,” Barrens insisted. “I adjusted the artron quanta and that stabilised the output. That bean plant in the pot out there. Two weeks back, exactly, as predicted!”
“No,” David stated, “that was a lucky shot. Changing the quanta wouldn’t affect the fluctuations at all.”
“I tell you, this device works perfectly!” Barrens insisted.
David clapped a hand to his forehead, then tore at his hair. “Dr. Barrens, you’re a scientist! You know better than this. You can’t base your conclusion on only your last data point, because if it was so reliable, you’d have another point further along. You have to reproduce the results multiple times before you can claim success. That’s the basic tenet of science, to be able to predict behaviour and get repeatable results.” He shook his head in sympathy for the scientist. “But you haven’t repeated the tests, because you don’t want to be proven wrong. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s enough. Get out.” Barrens pushed past David to start fiddling with the device’s computer. “We are going through with the final test, now.”
“What is this final test?” asked Will. He’d watched the argument with little comprehension of the details, his eyes ping-ponging back and forth between each debater, but he was certain that the scientist distrusted his friend enough that the question had to come from elsewhere to elicit an answer.
“The house and the garden, two weeks back.” Barrens waved a finger in circles in the air to indicate the immediate environs, then returned to his work.
“With you in it?” David’s voice broke with incredulity.
“Oh yes. I know this works, and I’m not afraid to prove it.” Looking up at his colleague, he pointed at the controls of the device. “Ellen, begin the arming procedure.”
David spun to her. “Ellen, if you value your life, you’ll leave right now. Get as far away from this house as you can.” He turned to his friend. “Will, you should leave as well.”
Will hesitated. The situation was getting out of hand. The scientist’s anger and obstinacy were mounting, and frankly, this wasn’t the kind of thing that David was good at handling, not that he himself was any better. He decided he would be more helpful staying back to try to defuse the situation. “Come on, now. Everyone take a step back and breathe. Let’s think of what we can do to ensure the safety of this experiment.”
Ellen, on the other hand, had heard enough. The woman looked from her colleague to the stranger and back again. “I’m sorry, Joe. I’ve said this before, and this just reinforces it. I don’t think this is ready.” Without another word, she pushed past Will and ran off. A moment later, the front door opened and slammed shut.
“Look what you’ve done!” Barrens yelled as the car outside started and roared off. “She’s a brilliant scientist and you’ve just robbed her of the greatest achievement of her career.”
“Dr Barrens,” Will called to try to calm him down, “there’s no rush on your experiment -” but David stepped forward and edged him out.
“This stops now, Barrens,” he declared, grabbing the man’s wrists to stop his work. “Earth isn’t ready for this technology, and the knowledge you need to make this safe for the planet and the universe won’t exist here for another millennium. I cannot allow you to operate this device again.”
Barrens snatched his hands out of David’s grasp and shoved him away. “I don’t know who you think you are, coming in here like this and making demands, You’re not from the university, or from any governing body at all, are you? You do not have the expertise to make that decision or the authority to shut down my research. Get out of my cottage!”
Will spun and pressed a hand to David’s chest in an attempt to push him back a step. “Mate, don’t -” he warned, but his friend ignored him, his brow furrowing over eyes dark and dangerous. Stepping past Will, David tore off his glasses and stuffed them back in their pocket as he drew himself to his full height, every inch bristling with condescension and hot pride.
“My name is David,” he sneered, gazing down his nose at the man. “I am a Time Lord and it is my job to prevent lesser races from meddling with time and causing catastrophes with their inexperience.”
Barrens snorted with a disbelieving smirk. “Pfah! ‘Time Lord’? What is that?” Spinning to the computer screen, he resumed typing. “That is simply nonsense. I can do this myself.”
Springing to the scientist to wrest him away from the controls again, David called over his shoulder to his friend. “Will, run!”
Will turned as the scientist snarled, “Oh, it’s already started!” then, as he sprinted for the door, he caught one last glimpse of his friend stepping back and pulling his mobile out of his pocket to thrust it at the machine. Dashing through the main room, he clipped a table, sending papers flying and books crashing to the floor. The world heaved and rolled and turned inside-out, and he collapsed in a heap against the front door.