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

away from her, hurled back by focused time distortion. She was alone with Heidt’s twin. She waited for the end.
    And felt, instead, a connection. Psychic notepaper pressed to the flesh of the monster and bound at the same time into her skin. Contact. She felt howling, rageful things pour into her mind in a great torrent. Years of war, of concealment, of planning and tactics and ambushes and programming, of victories at great cost and sacrifices and last stands, all of it buffeted her. She hated and feared and cheered and celebrated, and was suddenly cut off in a cold, dark place, cast aside, seeing fellow prisoners slip mockingly away into the night, pursuing. Finding one. Attacking. She would win this time. She would crush, rend. She felt herself fading away.
    Jonestown rose up inside her, narrow streets and old women buying fish, barrow boys and taxis and markets giving way to skyscrapers and schools. Women and men went to work, went shopping, went out on the town, went home early for a good night’s sleep, went out for a pint of milk and fell in love. Thousands of minds touched her own, calm and reassuring and vastly ordinary. What was all this fuss? That little thing? It was loud and silly and a bit childish. No cause for such a ruckus. There was a place for that kind of behaviour.
    
She dropped the tiny, squalling awareness of the monster into the black lake in her mind, the place where she put everything which unsettled her, and watched it sink. The oily water swallowed it down. At her back, Jonestown nodded, brushed the dust from its hands, and good riddance.
    After a moment, Heidt surfaced and swam awkwardly to the shore.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said.
    ‘You’re welcome.’ She waited. He didn’t do anything evil. And, she realised, she could have stopped him, anyway. She began to take note of herself, and of her home and what it had become in the meantime.
    ‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘That’s… brilliant!’ And she laughed.
    *
    The Doctor stood in the main street of Jonestown and watched it fold itself up and away, saw the houses unravel and whirl into motes of light, saw the people wave cheerfully and then vanish as if stepping through a door. Arwen Jones the fire chief smiled a dimpled smile and faded, and he thought she blew him a kiss as she went. The skyscrapers disappeared and the road itself shifted and shrugged and became the deck of the TARDIS, plain and clean, and he was in one of the starboard passenger compartments, the one he’d been using as a dry ski slope.
    There were three people standing by the door.
    ‘Christina,’ he said. ‘Mr Heidt.’
    Heidt nodded gravely. ‘I see you worked it out,’ he murmured.
    ‘What? Oh, that. Yes. Well, not so hard, in the end. You made it easy.’
    ‘I certainly tried.’
    The Doctor paused. ‘I don’t think I know this gentleman, though.’
    ‘This is Simon,’ Christina said.
    ‘I thought…’
    ‘Yes, he was. But he always continued to exist as part of the town. While one of us exists, we all do. It’s a bit complicated.’
    He grinned. ‘Always is.’
    ‘Mr Heidt is coming with us now, so you don’t have to worry about the mine going off or anything like that. You could come too, if you want.’
    ‘But then I can’t come back.’
    ‘Well, no. Probably not. But you probably wouldn’t want to, either. It’s going to be remarkable. It has to do with the trapdoor universe and the—’ She stopped. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
    ‘Try me.’
    ‘It’s been seven thousand years since we last spoke, Doctor. We’ve come rather a long way. And we fixed the TARDIS for you. She’s all shiny and healthy, good as new.’
    ‘Oh. Thank you.’
    ‘A universe where every atom is a universe unto itself. And that’s just the beginning. You only travel forwards and backwards through time – don’t you ever wonder about left and right? Up and down?’
    He smiled. ‘Sounds great.’
    ‘It will be.’
    ‘But I’d miss the little things. Earth,