#varnax

“What are you calling yourselves now? UNIT, Torchwood, Countermeasures? Forge? UNISYC? Ahh, Forge it is. I saw it in your eyes.” She sat back in her chair with a smug little smile on her face. Her hands were cuffed to the table, which was empty except for a strange little box that she supposed was a tape recorder. In dimension and look, it was the perfect interrogation room, the exact average of all those she’d ever visited, except for the burly man sitting across from her. His professional-looking suit was belied by his scruffy beard and hunched demeanor.

He slapped a manilla folder onto the table. How stereotypical. “Please state your name for the record.”

She said, “They call me the Doctor.” Or maybe it was “They called me the Doctor.”

He made a note. “Yes, I’ve heard. Is that your only name?”

“It’s what I go by,” she said with a fierce pout.

“Have you had any other aliases?”

“Too many to mention.”

“Okay.” He sighed and shuffled his papers. “What were you doing in Kara—”

“I plead the fifth!” she spouted.

“Ma’am, this isn't the United States. Start talking or my partner will have to get involved.” He glanced at the little box significantly.

“Ooh, big Mr Bad Cop with the big stick? Nice trope.” Her eyes bugged out in a disconcerting fashion, then she seemed to deflate. “Fine. I was searching for remnants of an alien invasion. In the universe I came from, a group called the Mal’akh escaped their ‘Ghost Wars’ against the Uvodni Alliance by starting a colony on Earth. And in the … in one of the centuries, some soldiers in Karachi summoned one.

“But these Ghost Wars were just one front of a much larger cosmic conflict; the Mal’akh had all sorts of nastiness in their history involving Great Vampires and such. So when I heard the same legend about a sacrificed boy in Karachi, I had to investigate.”

“By pickaxing a church wall?” The man looked understandably incredulous.

“Oh yes. The angel supposedly appeared there; it would have left artron residue, but there was none. Just a rumor after all.” The Doctor smiled happily.

“Tell me more about this ‘cosmic conflict’,” the man said. It was more a command than a suggestion.

“The Time War. But no need to worry about that,” she said, the corners of her mouth twisting. “It’s over; it’s been over for decades. I’ve fixed it.”

“How’d you do that?”

She leaned back as far as she could in her chair – not far, given the handcuffs. “Very complicated. I should think it’d go quite over your head.”

He knew that, despite her words, she was eager for a chance to brag. “Try me.”

“Well, if you insist,” she said happily. “To start, I had to get my hands on the Skasis Paradigm. I was the first one to crack it, ever. A talking bat had given me the idea eons ago, but it still took me a while. Then I patched the laws of physics with block transfer computations and launched the new code backwards to just before the beginning of time. Rebooted the universe, so to speak, but with a few changes.”

“What changes?”

“Oh, the usual. No more time travel. No more inserting yourself in the past, no more changing history. There were a ton of loopholes, but I went though and closed them all: got rid of teleportation and telepathy and hiding limbs in extra dimensions. Had to ditch my second heart and all my regeneration energy, but it was well worth it.”

“That sounds like a big change to your lifestyle.” He absentmindedly flipped open her medical file and confirmed that she only had one heart. “Do you ever regret it?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, living life in the right order is terribly boring. The most boring thing I’ve ever tried to do, actually. Absolutely terrible. But it's much better than what was happening before.”

“The Time War, that is?” He didn't wait for confirmation. “What was so bad about it?”

“Well, I lived through it a few hundred times, and eventually it just got tiring,” she quipped. “My people, the Time Lords, were under attack because the rest of the universe wanted our spot. Center of the universe and all that. The war would rage across all time and space, ruining everyone's day, until eventually our planet would be destroyed – like, I saved it from a Dalek invasion any number of times, but every once and a while I failed, and then I had to destroy the planet with the Moment.”

“And you fought for these Time Lords?”

“Well, no. Mostly I was on their side, but at a certain point I decided they’d slighted me one too many times and I joined the Faction Paradox in revenge. Their voodoo ornaments weren’t quite to my taste, but their utter and total disregard for the Laws of Time definitely was. I didn’t stick with them for long – they had a nasty habit of devolving into parodies of themselves; the Sycori cult was really convinced I was their mythical founder – but it made for a few very fun regenerations.”

“And with the Faction Paradox, you tried to destroy your own planet?”

“Oh no, just conquer it. But earlier in the War I’d apparently stopped the Faction from succeeding – not that I remembered, of course; the memories had been replaced with a girl named Charley and a creature called Zagreus. My past self just couldn’t let the Faction seize control, oh no, that’d be too easy, wouldn’t it? So past me destroyed the whole bloody world with my ship’s weapons systems. Do you know how frustrating that was! I’ve no idea why I didn’t just –”

“Wait,” the man said, flipping back a page in his notes. “You earlier said you destroyed Gallifrey using the Moment, during a war against the Daleks. Was this Faction Paradox a group of Daleks, or …?”

“No, no,” said the woman. “Those were two separate incidents. Or more accurately, two distinct manifestations of the same event. Every time I lived through it, it was different. Very wibbly wobbly. Faction, Daleks, the time with the Dogma virus – that was fun – and, let's see, what were the other ones from my early days? Back when I could count my regenerations, heh. The Black Sun – silly cultists, in way over their head – and before that the Yssgaroth, I mentioned them earlier as the Great Vampires, then Melanicus and Catavolcus, Abaddon and the Chronovores and Tannis and Varnax …”

“… how many Gallifreys were there?”

“Some said there were nine copies. I believed them, until I saw ten destroyed.” The woman shrugged. “I figure there were infinitely many. Or maybe just one. What’s the difference in the end? Sometimes I’d bring it back just to watch it burn again.”

“And every time you live through it, it’s a different story?”

“Exactly right, though it was all the same event. But I'm not even sure how many times I fought in the War, because I forget every time. I think it's the nature of the conflict. Once, I ran into myself, playing a recorder right in the thick of battle against the Mad Mind of Bofawhatsit. Yet I remember doing no such thing! And I never figured out the details of what I did that time I was Time’s Champion. Something to do with quantum collapse, I suspect. I remember dropping my friend off, but sometimes it was on Gallifrey and sometimes I remember somewhere … somewhere much stranger.” She thought for a second, then chuckled in a manly way. “That’s how it goes with the memories – they’re always replaced with something much more interesting, something that's somehow simultaneously true.”

He was properly interested now. “But you said you destroyed Gallifrey? Multiple times?”

“Oh yes. Had to, to protect the universe from the consequences of the enemy's victory, whoever they were. Always a regret, but it got easier each time. Earning myself a short reprieve, I suppose! I usually found some way to bring it back in the end, or it would just pop back up by itself in a regeneration or two. I say, I remember the first few times I thought I'd escaped the War. Even went into retirement, once. Started teaching, got married to the President’s –”

“That’s enough,” he interrupted. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

“Oh?” She looked a little indignant. “I was just getting to the good part!”

But the man had already pressed a button on the strange little box. “The Doctor’s confession has been obtained.”

In response, the entire room rumbled as if a titanic voice was screaming. The Doctor’s lips began moving wordlessly, a horrible frown growing across her face.

The man stood and announced, “Doctor, you have confessed to your crimes against the Lords of Time. As such, we are seizing you as an war criminal to be used as an asset in our war against the enemy.”

“No,” she finally vocalized. “That’s not possible.”

“Physical time travel might not be, but you underestimate our ingenuity!” the man said with a rather scary grin. “We have invaded your universe through your memory. This entire conversation has been in your mind!”

“But I closed every loophole!” The Doctor strained against her cuffs, but they didn’t yield: the room was built by her own mind; of course she couldn't escape it.

“Not tightly enough! Do not worry; you will not have a chance to fix your error. We will pull your understanding of the Skasis Paradigm from your mind and rewrite the cosmos to give us the tools to obliterate our enemy once and for all.”

“You can’t,” breathed the Doctor. “The universe would undergo quantum collapse, a nightmare of overlapping possibilities.”

“And we will emerge with powers never before seen! You will awake in a moment on Gallifrey for your trial. Goodnight Doctor.”

“No!” she screamed, then all went dark.

At Headquarters, the women displayed thorough confusion, and after moments of violence the doctors restrained her to a padded room at 0200. There, she began talking to herself, and recordings indicate she was potentially hallucinating. At 0234, the woman’s body went limp on the floor; when the doctors entered, they found her pulse to be erratic. Shortly after being attached to life support, the woman died of a seizure, cause unknown.