Free Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses by Nick Harkaway Page A

wake up with one foot ten thousand years older than the rest of me, the sheer doesn’t stress her buttressing. Right? Right!’
    He was nodding, and that infuriating charisma was pulling her in again and she was nodding along with him.
    ‘Ohh, but there’s a side effect. Floating around the TARDIS are lots of little spores of psychic slime mould, because the water here’s been dripping onto the paper. And inside the sheer zone, those tiny weenie microscopicy psychic boojums start to evolve! Because they would! I mean, it’s billions of years all concentrated in a single instant. BANG! Zap! And in the TARDIS there are echoes of people. People I know, people I meet. Bits of genetic material from everyone I’ve touched, memories and recollections, psychic impressions, sensor readings. And all those go into the mixture so that all that evolution is directed, pushing towards a perfect functioning dream of humanity. WHAMMO! Jonestown.’
    He was holding his arms out to the vaulted ceiling, exultant. This was what he loved, she thought, more than anything. Wonder. Strangeness.
    ‘And you! Most of all, you! Christina de Souza 2.0! Brilliant! Evolved psychic slime mould in human form. So fast you’re starting to see your own thoughts reflected through time, getting just that little but quicker than it’s physically possible to be! And you’re all part of the same thing! “Weavers, webs or woven”! You’re one vast network of interconnected psychic mould! Different personalities sharing a single subconscious, which is why you never get lost, even when you’re in a city which was built while you were away, why nothing new surprises you, why you know how to drive even though you’ve never learned! Ooooh, brilliant! You gorgeous mushroom!’
    She punched him smartly in the nose. ‘Oi!’
    ‘OW! Yes, all right, fair point, not the best way to put it. No, look! You’re still connected to the town! You’ve got acres and acres of space in there. You’re evolving all the time. They are. In there, right now, time’s passing again, passing so very fast!’
    He was staring into her face, holding her eyes by sheer force of self. It was appalling how much self he had. She could feel it now, the edges of him, the record in his diary.
    ‘No, don’t look away, look at me. Think. Think, and write it down. Right. Yes. Here…’ He drew her hand to the blotter, and the layer of mould reached for her again. ‘Write! Write what you want.’
    She wrote. She wanted so much. She wanted calm, and quiet, and Simon back again, and she wanted the Doctor on his way with his ankle better and his aquarium back again. She wanted Heidt’s story to end well, even – well, why not? And the monster. Well, not much of a monster, in the end. A scared thing, a fragment of a mind in control of a huge machine. Thought of like that, it wasn’t so awful, was it? A rescue cat trying to drive a car. She laughed.
    She heard the door open, but she didn’t pay attention. There was too much, and she had to get it all down. Music, she wanted music, and art, and drama, and children, and she wanted to go skiing because Simon had always said they would. She wanted life. There was so much inside her she had kept all bottled up, in that vast, quiet place where she put everything she didn’t want, the lake.
    ‘Christina,’ the Doctor said, ‘are you ready?’
    ‘Oh,’ she said, a little embarrassed. ‘Yes.’
    ‘Good,’ he said, a bit muted, and she turned around.
    The monster stood directly behind her. It towered over her. Opened its mouth.
    She stared at it and realised she had no idea what to do.
    And felt the Doctor’s hand latch onto hers, grip the paper on which she had been writing and thrust it upwards into the descending maw, so that both of them were engulfed at the same time, swallowed to the shoulder in the vast, vile jaws.
    
She expected the thing to bite down, wondered if it would hurt very much to be eaten. She felt the Doctor pushed