- 22,042
- 18,126
See here for TL;DR.
Edit: Also, see here for a some small clarifications and new info.
Since I can't post threads with more than 150,000 words, I will continue this in the comments.
I'd like to thank the people in the Doctor Who Discussion Thread for helping me with this thread, especially @Oliver_de_jesus, @Udlmaster, @Quasar002, @Doxten_, and @Lord_Farquaad69420.
Besides that, I don't really have a certain rating or full conclusion in mind. My plan is simply to wax lyrical about the cosmology and see what ratings can be achieved.
Edit: Also, see here for a some small clarifications and new info.
Since I can't post threads with more than 150,000 words, I will continue this in the comments.
I'd like to thank the people in the Doctor Who Discussion Thread for helping me with this thread, especially @Oliver_de_jesus, @Udlmaster, @Quasar002, @Doxten_, and @Lord_Farquaad69420.
Introduction
Almost all of our higher-dimensional tiering comes from a somewhat nebulous quote in Bernice Summerfield and the Infernal Nexus and Craig Hinton's novels. Doctor Who and its spin-offs have 60 years of material to cover, so we're basically treating a needle as the entire haystack. Also, higher-dimensional tiering should be presented on a case-by-case basis due to inconsistency.Besides that, I don't really have a certain rating or full conclusion in mind. My plan is simply to wax lyrical about the cosmology and see what ratings can be achieved.
Bernice Summerfield and the Infernal Nexus
The author stresses that multiverse is used in place of universe, and vice-versa.
When the Tinker's Cuss was exposed to some energy during an experiment, it was partially knocked at a right angle out of their multiverse (aka, the normal Doctor Who universe) and into a different multiverse/dimensional set.
- It’s another common misconception, held by those who hold such things, that our so-called universe - everything we know of and can ever know - is just one facet of a larger Multiverse. Which shows how much the people who hold things know, part of which is certainly not basic English, since there can by definition only be one universe, of which all putative multiverses must necessarily be a part. People who can get something so simple the wrong way round are probably the last people to ask about comparative ontology, so we’ll leave them in a handy off-term student bar between panels, discussing the minutiae of their costume-parade insignia, the finer points of conversational Klingon and the aerodynamics of fictional dragons. There may be a disco later, but you probably wouldn’t want to go.
- The differing realities of actual multiverses are nothing like as simple as, let’s say, alternate worlds produced by Nazis winning wars or presidents not getting shot - none of which have or will ever have existed save in potentia.
When the Tinker's Cuss was exposed to some energy during an experiment, it was partially knocked at a right angle out of their multiverse (aka, the normal Doctor Who universe) and into a different multiverse/dimensional set.
- ‘I think what our visitors are trying to say,’ [...] ‘is that the Tinker’s Cuss was hit by some primal, transmutational energy. [...] The force of discharge knocked the ship off its dimensional axis. Rupert, Igron and their team were saved by the force fields around the science deck, designed to protect their apparatus, so only that part of the ship remained in our own dimensional set...’
- ‘The upshot is,’ said Braxiatel, ‘that we now have an extraordinarily advanced research vessel lying derelict and in a transdimensional state [...] What we need, Bernice, is someone to retrieve it - someone, if possible, who has had direct experience with the more abstruse transdimensional states.’
- The best bet was to realign her own ship with the dimensionally-displaced bulk of the science vessel, set up the portable field generators and use them, basically, to drag the Tinker’s Cuss back from a right angle to reality.
- ‘Of course, the problem is that - as I do believe I’ve mentioned - humans from your own particular multiverse are a scarcity here. That makes you something of an unknown quantity [...]'
- ‘So which human multiverse is you from?’ [...] ‘Which ones have you got?’ [...] ‘Is you got big holes in rock with light shining in or is you got great big balls?’ [...] ‘We call them planets. They go round suns, mostly.’ [...] ‘Is you got stuff to breath everywhere or is only on big balls what are called planets?’ ‘Only around some of the planets,’ said Benny. ‘Ri-ight. Is all things expanding from humongous explosion, staying in same place or going smaller into little bitty thing?’ ‘It’s expanding from the Big Bang,’ said Benny, though apparently at some point it’s going to start to...’ ‘[...] Is the most prevalent matter in your particular metadimensional subset that of monatomic hydrogen?’
- ‘Lucien di Vasht, [...] is of course one of the most powerful men in the substrative quantum state-vector designated seven four one point three oh four, forward slash, five nine zero, slash, upsilon kappa four one nine three seven four nine six one...’
- Nor can they be properly expressed, as such, in terms of additional dimensions, molecular resonances and quantum-packet signatures, which exist only in the minds of lazy science- fiction writers. In fact, the only human mind to ever come within striking distance of accounting for them was that of Dr Rupert Gilhooly, who described them in a string of equations large enough to fill three phone books (Business and Residential), which only he could understand, and which he expressed for everyone else as: ‘Just like these other places, yeah? They’re just, like, somewhere else.’
- There were four hundred and seventeen of these multiverses at the last count, each of them existing on their own terms, in radically different states, and Station Control exists as a nexus point between them.
- The space she fell through could have been anything from precisely her size to infinite - probably both, in a technical sense, since she seemed to be the only thing in it...
- 'That would be stupid. Frankenstein was a fictional character invented by Mary Shelley. You only find him and his monster in the multiverse which picks up archetypical resonances from all the others. There’s a world of lycanthropes, I suppose, which people get mixed up with stories of werewolves, vampires and zombies...’ ‘Oh my,’ said Bernice. ‘Worlds still ruled by the dinosaurs?’ [...] ‘One or two.’ ‘Worlds where the gods really exist?’ ‘Something like that. And you wouldn’t want to take their names in vain, believe me. They have a nasty habit of turning up.’
- One of the things that annoys the inhabitants of what are called the Infernal Regions is the assumption that their multiverse looks like a molten lava bed as drawn by Ernst. The fact that their multiverse consists of bubbles in endless rock, they point out, misses the point. The point being the sheer size of said bubbles. The bubble-worlds themselves are quite big enough that the nature of them is no more evident than the planetary nature of a picture-book English landscape. The bubble worlds had land and sky just like everyone else, produced any number of different terrains.
- [...] ‘Besides, from what I’ve heard, the only actual creature that ever evolved to resemble Santa Claus was a really nasty predator called the Snata - over in a multiverse that looked like a massive orrery or something - and it became extinct when that multiverse collapsed on itself.’ [...] ‘An entire multiverse built like an orrery? That’s just stupid.’ ‘Suit yourself.’ Jason shrugged yet again. ‘I must admit, I’m not sure if the equivalent of planets were the birds themselves or being carried by them.’ Benny was about to enlighten her ex-husband as to the difference between the word ‘orrery’ and ‘aviary’ when she realised that they were approaching a large and ornate set of arched doors, which were swinging open of their own accord.
- With the rest of the Tinker’s Cuss now in some halfway congruent reality, the dimensional stresses around the bitten-out section of the science-deck -the lethal forces that Benny had noted when she had first arrived at these spatial co-ordinates - had dissipated.
- It was like a planet colliding with a world the inhabitants knew to be flat. (The analogy falls down a little, of course, since there are multiverses where the world is indeed flat, and where the stars are gemstones in the mantel of a crystal dome.)
- ‘Swamp-lobster from the Vehicular Protectorates,’ he said. ‘One of those places where the whole multiverse is just a single flat world - endless swampland and marshes covered by a network of autobahns, apparently. They’re quite a delicacy, so they say. The lobsters I mean, not the autobahns.’
- Marpies came from a multiverse where physical laws were more as they were thought to be than an immutable system of cause and effect. Birds and bees flew, quite simply, because they were too stupid to know that they couldn’t- and all a man needed to be able to fly was a form of lobotomy which quite literally turned him into a birdbrain.
- The first thing Bernice saw was the ship itself, the previously visible area of it now had a huge bite taken out of the hull. The science ship was a mess, plating sheared and sharded from the twisted frame, debris hanging in the black of a space no different, visually, from the three-dimensional space she’d left.
- In the mutable chaos of Station Control there was a place where, after a fashion, things remained constant; the foundation upon which the features of the Station were built in the first place to shift and change. In abstract terms one might think of it as the basic hardware of a computer on which the files, applications and entire operating systems can be loaded, updated and, if it’s running exactly according to the instruction manual, bring the whole lot crashing down every three and a half minutes. It was not that this base state was immutable, but any change required the equivalent of taking the back off with a screwdriver - a completely different order of effort. In reality, such as it was, it was more akin to the sewers running under a city, the decomposing mulch on a forest floor, the piles of guano that accumulate at the bottom of a cliff populated by sea birds. Direction it could be said had no meaning, hereon the Station, but this base state was commonly, if not universally known as the Underland. A place where if you fell, in any number of senses, it was where you ended up.
- Differing entropy-slopes, causal processes and the fact that something as basic as atoms might or might not exist, in a certain sense, made problems with incompatible phone sockets and the like the least of anyone’s worries. Visually, the brastifranivisor looked like a cross between a miniature steam engine and a valve-radio, although that would also have to factor in a strangely organic quality, as though the things had aspects of some quite repulsive-looking living matter that existed in dimensions other than the purely visible.
- When she came to try and describe Station Control, somewhile later, Bernice would find herself coming up against an almost insurmountable problem. How do you describe sheer chaos? If you describe it on an instant-by-instant basis, try to detail discrete images and sensations from a barrage of them, you end up with something like: Item: a small collection of multicoloured weevils, sitting on a little tarmaline plinth with ambulatory legs, bouncing around in complex patterns reminiscent of the Georgian State Dancers as seen from a great height. No particular reason for their perpetual dance is apparent. Item: sections of wall, ceiling and floor which are both sides of themselves simultaneously, rather like those wireframe representations of a cube of which one can be looking at the top or the bottom, depending upon what the mind decides, but in several additional dimensions. Item: a sudden tingling in the head and the blindingly obvious idea that is instantly gone, save for the deep knowledge that the idea itself was alive, a living memory which has passed through you on the way to somewhere else, rather like a man hurrying up a street. Item: the smell of camphor and tulips which, once again, you sensed was in some way alive - as alive as all the more prosaic giant insects, walking bears, tentacular slime monsters and all the possible variations on the basically humanoid (or at least bipedal) creatures milling in their thousands through complex spaces where down might be up or inside-out, where apparently direct routes twisted back in on themselves like a Mobius strip, where you could travel from one physical zone to another merely by thinking about it, or be barred from a section of apparently clear space by the mind registering, on some primal level, that said area was utterly inimical to life as we know it and so reacting, purely psychosomatically, as if one has walked into a diamond-hard plexiglass wall...In the end, Benny would be forced into simplification, in much the way that you can simplify the complex molecular interplay of one substance dissolving into another as a ‘swirl’. The interior of Station Control could, in the end, be described as a collection of enclosed places of various sizes -call them chambers - to which there were entrances and exits and conduits between. Forget all the infinite variety of the distinctions unless it was important. Call them that and be done with it.
- There is a common misconception, incidentally, that a different dimensional set is the same thing as another world. This simply isn’t so. Dimensions are indeed involved, but in the same way that one can point in the general direction of the United States of America from the Republic of Ireland, but it is as impossible to actually do anything with dimensions as it is to cross the North Atlantic on foot. To stretch the metaphor to breaking point, human technology in this area was on the level of a leaky coracle: it was possible to displace things transdimensionally, but the chances of being displaced into anywhere useful was of the order of one in several billion. This might seem odd in the face of all the stories of those travelling to weird and wonderful dimensions, but the fact is that those people were the one in several billion, or were taken there by some inhuman agency, or were quite frankly lying through their teeth.
- ‘And besides all that, do you know which direction our own world is in? Exactly? I certainly don’t. Twist into the general dimensional set of the Station and automatic processes cut in to take you the rest of the way; without fixed and precise co-ordinates going the other way you could end up... and here we are.’
- ‘That’s the dimensionally-mutable nature of the Station,’ Jason said. ‘Things can contain other things bigger than themselves, a bit like onion skins but in a different direction. Things can be bigger on the inside than out.’
- She would never have a clear memory of the feelings that followed -feelings that the human body was never meant to experience and with which the human mind was ever meant to cope. Intellectually, she knew that she was merely rotating through the extradimensional axis that three-dimensional beings do all the time - the three dimensions plus Time that we know being only three-plus-Time of an infinite dimensional set - without even knowing it.
- ‘When the rift sealed itself up,’ said Jason, ‘there was this period of flux, with the world transforming around me over and over again. I have no idea how long it lasted. It was like I’d pop into these whole different worlds and do stuff and then they’d change around me again. At the time it felt like I was spending weeks or months in those worlds, and I’d come out with the memories of it, but I’d come out no older and physically unchanged...’‘The Gilhooly Theory of Transdimensional Contrivance,’ said Bernice. ‘Do what?’ said Jason. ‘You wouldn’t know about it,’ Benny said. ‘It was after you went away. Dr Rupert Gilhooly was trying to explain it on some holovid chats how or other, the interviewer said something like, “oh come on, that sounds like the sort of contrivance you get in crappy old adventure stories to explain why the heroes always seem to stay the same age”, and the name just sort of stuck. It just means that if you end up dislocated in time or in some other dimension, the physical processes of ageing go on hold because you’re not on your own timeline.’
Higher Dimensions
Examples
Barring the omniverse and the After-Universe, the highest individual domains in the multiverse and N-Space alike are currently 11-D (I think the problem there should go without saying, ngl). My aim is to show the examples of either multiversal or universal caps below 11-D, examples of 11-D, and instances of said cosmologies exceeding 11-D.
10-dimensions
Tomb of Valdemar
Moon Graffiti (at least)
The Death of Art
11-dimensions
Millennial Rites (there was a >30-D database, but it was a special case because it took place in an alter-time realm with 3 different laws of physics)
Lucifer Rising
The Crystal Bucephalus
Parasite
Autumn Mist
Unnatural History
The Quantum Archangel
First Frontier
>11 dimensions
Logopolis
Infinity Doctors
At Childhood's End
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
Thirteen Doctors, Thirteen Stories: Spore
Meanwhile In The TARDIS
End of the Line
Short Trips: Time Signature: The Hunting of the Slook
11th Doctor Year 1 #2
The Brakespeare Voyage
So, in terms of dimensional tiering, an 11-D cosmology is the mode, but a similar number of sources as a whole give a different number (whether it's 3 or infinity). This probably isn't all of the sources out there, though.
10-dimensions
Tomb of Valdemar
Moon Graffiti (at least)
The Death of Art
11-dimensions
Millennial Rites (there was a >30-D database, but it was a special case because it took place in an alter-time realm with 3 different laws of physics)
Lucifer Rising
The Crystal Bucephalus
Parasite
Autumn Mist
Unnatural History
The Quantum Archangel
First Frontier
>11 dimensions
Logopolis
Infinity Doctors
At Childhood's End
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
Thirteen Doctors, Thirteen Stories: Spore
Meanwhile In The TARDIS
End of the Line
Short Trips: Time Signature: The Hunting of the Slook
11th Doctor Year 1 #2
The Brakespeare Voyage
So, in terms of dimensional tiering, an 11-D cosmology is the mode, but a similar number of sources as a whole give a different number (whether it's 3 or infinity). This probably isn't all of the sources out there, though.
Inconsistency
In fiction, spatial dimensions are often presented as planes of existence (such as universes, in and of themselves) rather than quantities. Doctor Who is no stranger to this.
In Tales of Terror: Living Image, the 4/5th dimensions are much larger than 3, and 4th dimensional beings (let alone 5-D) effectively see humans as spatially flat. This is also true for the higher dimensions/entities in Lucifer Rising and Autumn Mist.
In Tales of Terror: Living Image, the 4/5th dimensions are much larger than 3, and 4th dimensional beings (let alone 5-D) effectively see humans as spatially flat. This is also true for the higher dimensions/entities in Lucifer Rising and Autumn Mist.
- ‘There are all manner of abstract creatures we don’t even know about yet. Entities that stalk the gulfs of the Space–Time Vortex, beings unlike anything you’ll have ever known here on Earth. They exist in five dimensions all at once; they’re here and yet they’re not here.’ [...] ‘But how can that be?’ asked Nathan. ‘How can we not see them?’ ‘Because they exist in a different dimension,’ explained the Doctor. ‘Think of it this way: we’re three-dimensional beings, yes? We exist. The pictures you paint are only two-dimensional. They also exist. And yet, the subjects you depict in your paintings couldn’t even begin to conceive of a third dimension, never mind a fourth or even a fifth!’ ‘So you’re saying we’re basically stickmen?’ Ace suggested, not very helpfully. ‘But no, those phantoms …’ Nathan was struggling to process what the Doctor was saying. ‘They came for me. They know me!’ ‘Not at all. Just insubstantial glimpses of a dimension beyond our own. But the fact we can see them means they’re getting closer. They’re growing stronger, minute by minute, and I think it’s thanks to you, Mr Gough.’
- ‘I’m allowing you the chance to walk away,’ the Doctor said. ‘You don’t need Earth. You don’t even need our dimension. You have the entire Vortex at your disposal: the fourth and fifth dimensions of space and time!’ ‘THESE DIMENSIONS ARE INSUBSTANTIAL!’ raged the creature. ‘WE SEEK PHYSICAL FORM!’
- ‘There aren’t seven dimensions,’ Ace exclaimed, and then added, ‘are there?’ ‘The space-time continuum has eleven dimensions,’ Legion replied, ‘although four of them are inaccessible.’ ‘So, what’s it like then, living in seven dimensions?’ [...] ‘But imagine, if you are able, watching small creatures floating on the surface of a pond. Imagine that these creatures cannot look up or down, but only across the water itself. They are not aware of the air, or the depths. Their world is flat.’ As it talked, Legion’s voice changed. The various elements combined until it seemed to Ace that a choir was whispering to her. ‘You reach down from your exalted position, beyond their understanding, and put your – the things on the ends of your forelimbs...’ ‘Fingers.’ ‘...fingers into the water. What do these creatures see?’ After a few seconds, Ace realized that this was not a rhetorical question. ‘Er... My fingers?’ ‘No, because your fingers exist in three dimensions, and they can only perceive two. They see...’ It paused. ‘How many fingers do you possess?’ [...] ‘Then these creatures see five discs suddenly appear in the water. As far as they are concerned, these discs are five separate entities. Why should they associate them with each other? But if you plunge your hand deeper into the water, up to the – the hinge section...’ ‘The wrist.’ ‘Up to the wrist, then the creatures who inhabit the surface of the water will see the five discs suddenly merge into one large ellipse. Do you understand?’ [...] ‘And if you pick one of these creatures up and place it a little distance away on the surface of the water, all its fellows will see is that it vanished, and reappeared elsewhere. Neither they, nor it, can see the air through which it moved. Do you understand?’ ‘Uh-huh.’ ‘What you see of me,’ and the hairy, three-legged blob standing at the front of the table stretched like hot toffee and broke apart into fifteen warty blue spheres which bounced, very slowly, between the floor and the ceiling, ‘is merely a three-dimensional cross-section of a seven-dimensional shape. As my body moves in and out of your perception, you see different aspects of it. Your three-dimensional brain is not capable of appreciating the beauty of my true body.’ [...] The spheres coalesced into a black and vaguely hairy shape that threatened to develop three thin and multi-jointed legs.
- ‘I’m afraid the higher dimensions aren’t very wide in three-space terms,’ said the unnaturalist. ‘We’re going to use fractal dimensional compression techniques on you. The effect is disorientating, I’m told.’
- The unnaturalist paid him no mind. ‘And it is only one specimen among the many which have been drawn here by the anomaly. Creatures from outside my people’s limited reach into the higher dimensions.’
- Only someone who comprehended the higher dimensions could have removed those tags. Griffin had a fair idea of how it might be accomplished, using the biodata strands themselves.
- ‘There’s much more to Griffin than meets the eye, quite literally,’ the Doctor explained. ‘He comes from our three-dimensional universe, but he’s also at home in the higher dimensions. Four, five, six. . . He’s like a sphere visiting a world full of circles. We can perceive part of him – to us, he looks like another circle – but he also sticks out above and below our sheet of paper.’ So that was why he seemed to have too many hands, Sam thought. How he could move stuff around inside them. ‘So our current understanding is wrong?’ Kyra was saying. ‘Normal space isn’t three-dimensional?’ The Doctor waved his hand, the wires in the device rattling about. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, the basic maths will be worked out in a century or two.’ Kyra nodded, as though that was that taken care of. ‘Ordinary walls wouldn’t be able to hold him – he’d find a way, the right angle to just slide out of any cage, any cell.’
- ‘Time travel occurs in relative dimensions. Weren’t you listening before? A TARDIS can travel into the past and future, but not its own past and future. That would be a theoretical absurdity.’
- ‘Warning, master. Alien species identified. It is the Vore. By Supreme Council order, date index 309456/4756.7RE/1213GRT/100447TL, no Time Lord is to engage the Vore, all time ships are to observe an exclusion zone no less than one parsec and one century, in all five directions from any Vore moon.
- The Time Lords were losing. This was a war fought in five dimensions, across the whole of time and space. - The Gallifrey Chronicles
- ‘When the universe was created, dimensions started to solidify out of the primal chaos. But five got there first –the three spatial dimensions and two of time.’
- ‘At the risk of sounding like a high-and-mighty Time Lord, I am a high-and-mighty Time Lord. And to quote one of my elementary texts in the matter: “And in the aftermath of Event Zero, eleven dimensions did fight for existence. Five were triumphant – together they did become the three dimensions of space, and the two dimensions of time through which we travel. But the remaining six dimensions did still exist: although beaten, although denied their dominance, they curled and curdled amongst themselves to become a six-fold universe, separate yet conjoined.
- The knots of Calabi-Yau Space, existing at every point in the four familiar dimensions of space-time as well as throughout the time vortex, were inaccessible to the majority of races in the cosmos. Even the most advanced of them treated it as an abstract set of solutions to some esoteric quantum equations.
- ‘The time vortex is the second temporal dimension – it’s the region through which TARDISes travel, the region that TOMTIT creates a gap through to enable matter transmission. When the dimensions froze out of the void it became inexorably linked to Calabi-Yau Space. - The Quantum Archangel
- „The higher dimensions are undetectable. Even for the TARDIS. There‟s no instrumentation built to perceive them. ‟The Doctor keeps grinning. „Has anyone told the higher dimensions that?‟
- „A release of trans-dimensional energy,‟ she mutters to herself. „The result of a rift between the lower and higher dimensions of matter. A rift in the kinetic dance. In theory.‟
- „The higher dimensions,‟ whispers the Doctor. „How could they... affect a machine?‟ „Almost nothing is known of the higher dimensions,‟ says Romana. „Except that they exist... co-exist with this universe. A part of reality...‟„A part!‟ The Doctor finally releases her. „They are reality! Total reality! More reality than even pompous Time Lords can perceive. Somehow, it‟s made itself apparent here.‟
- „Reality would begin to change,‟ he muses, looking up at the data cylinders lining the walls. „Or more strictly, appear to change. The higher dimensions are reality, just a greater reality than we can perceive. Even Time Lords, with their occasional insights into the fourth and fifth dimensions, aren‟t immune to their effects. You recall that poor man inside the tomb?‟
- The Doctor‟s face is in shadow, but she could swear the lines on his face had deepened. He seems older, old as his years. „To breach the higher dimensions,‟ he says. Romana is shocked. Really shocked. „But... but that‟s impossible. The whole idea, that‟s ludicrous.‟ The Doctor laughs, but without humour. „Why are you so upset? Because the Old Ones did it? Or that they achieved an engineering miracle not even the Time Lords could manage?‟ „The experiment was closed down. The Dimensional Ethics Committee...‟
- „The mind and body adapt to exposure to the higher dimensions. Organs in the brain, dormant for centuries, begin to grow. The eyes...‟ [...] That certain individual forms of life are more adapted to perceive the higher dimensions? It‟s a childish conceit. Like the idea that certain privileged families could control and master some universal force...‟
- „Too dangerous, you see. Three-dimensional life...‟ He sits up and looks at her, thinking something through, „... even four-and five-dimensional life, is unable to perceive the higher dimensions. We lack the necessary sensory apparatus. I mean, there are theories that suggest that these organs lie dormant in the brain but... ah!‟ [...] Telepathy! Perhaps that explains telepathy and why only certain people are rumoured to have the gift. Perhaps the sensory organs in some individuals are better developed. I suppose it‟s possible that telepathy, in fact all psychic phenomena, are utilisation of the forces of the higher dimensions.‟
- The Doctor regards Neville and his guards. With the vaccine or whatever it is running through him, he has penetrated the illusions created by the higher dimensions.
- „The infiltration and transformation of your mind. Without this fluid, your brain won‟t be able to cope with the shock of regrowing receptors for the higher dimensions. Already your physical forms are changing. Very soon you‟ll either die or go mad. In your case, madder.‟
- The Doctor tries for the last time. „Neville. I‟m trying to help you. All I‟ve wanted to do since I got here is help you. You‟re making a terrible mistake. The higher dimensions are inimical to all life. All. Including yours and all your followers.‟
- This is no time for rumination. He must be active; he must concentrate fully on the task in hand. Forget the Key to Time. If the higher dimensions are released, time will cease to exist.
- The children – twisted, deformed and full of bullets. And others in amongst them. Neville‟s guards, their wounds and the effects of the higher dimensions reshaping their faces and bodies into new, unrecognisable forms. But no Neville or Romana.
- „I believe the effects of the higher dimensions stored in the palace are altering our beings.‟
- „I don‟t understand.‟ She lifts her head and opens her eyes again for the first time in what seems like ages. The world around her is not the world she remembers. Like a badly tuned picture on a viewing screen, the solid world is being consumed in a blur of static. Only the Doctor remains whole, corporeal, a brightly coloured fly crawling across the screen. Of course – the vaccine, the vaccine. „Is it possible that the higher dimensions is a place in its own right after all? No, not a place – a realm. Impossible, of course, but we haven‟t had breakfast...‟
- Two heads, two bodies, fused into one by some odd process known only to the mocking higher dimensions. It climbs back into our universe and howls with the pain of birth.
- 'I have no expectations, therefore nothing that occurs in the world is a surprise. But, if it makes you feel better, the mathematics of folding higher dimensions are relatively simply. I am currently writing a paper on the subject. Perhaps I could send you a copy?'
The first example of intermediary dimensions is The Space Museum. The TARDIS accidentally jumps a time track, and ends up in a fourth dimension. They have to escape by travelling to a very specific point in space-time.
- VICKI: Time, like space, although a dimension in itself also has dimensions of its own. [...] Yes, you see, we really are in those cases, but we're also standing here looking at ourselves from this dimension.
- BARBARA: Well, it's horrible. Those faces, our faces, just staring.
- IAN: Well, at least it explains what's been happening to us.
- DOCTOR: Yes, it does, my boy. And if we're not there, we can't leave footprints, and break glasses, or touch things.
- IAN: And nobody can see us. I see.
- DOCTOR: Oh yes, they can. Oh yes, they can see us where we really are. There. [...] You know, I don't mind admitting, I've always found it extremely difficult to solve the fourth dimension. And here we are. Face to face with the fourth dimension. You know, I think the Tardis jumped a time track and ended up here in this fourth dimension. [...] All we have to do is to wait here until we arrive. [...] You see, my dear, before they actually put us in those glass cases, we must have arrived here sometime in the Tardis. These people saw us and thought we were worthy people to be put in their Space Museum. [...] But nothing has happened to us yet. What we are doing now is taking a glimpse into the future, or what might be or could be the future. All that leads up to it, is still yet to come.
- VICKI: Doctor, look. Why don't we go and find the Tardis, the real one I mean, and get into it and get out of here now?
- DOCTOR: And end up one day, my dear, like that? No, we must not. We've got to stop it happening.
- IAN: Doctor, when will we arrive?
- DOCTOR: I don't know, my boy, I can't be certain. You see, I'm quite unable to measure the time dimension that the Tardis jumped. But you'll notice we're all wearing the same clothes. So, it could be in a few moments, or a few seconds.
- PERI: What anomalies, Doctor?
- DOCTOR: Absolutely nothing to worry about. Few degrees of epsilon inversion in the secondary dimension seven. Call it a gravity hiccup.
- PERI: Doctor, you're not making any sense.
- DOCTOR: Sorry. I'm going to need to sit down and explain this. Oh, a throne. How very appropriate. There we are. You see, what happens is, you get a prolapse inside one of the supporting dimensions that sustain the space-time continuum. Well, if you imagine a four dimensional sphere
- PERI: Frankly, I can't.
- DOCTOR: It's a little complicated. Start with a three dimensional object like er, that thing over there.
- PERI: Oh, that's Simon's. His papier mâché head.
- DOCTOR: Pass it over. Thanks. Now, imagine this object with its time line extended. Oh. What exactly is this?
- PERI: It's meant to be a sand creature. But you're wandering again.
- DOCTOR: Wondering where this came from. Exhibit B. So this would be the same small boy who gave you Exhibit A?
- PERI: The shell thing in the tea caddy? Yes. Simon.
- DOCTOR: So, Simon creates Exhibit B after finding Exhibit A. Hmm. Now wait a minute, I should have an elastic band here somewhere. Ah, yeah, here it is. Now, we just secure this caddy to make sure the lid doesn't come off. Now, I'll take the head, you take the caddy. Guard this with your life, and follow me. Catch! [...]
- DOCTOR: Ah, the rose garden. So, you see, Peri, the whole thing is probably a transient natural freak. Except, of course, for Exhibits A and B. This sand creature head and your shell thing in the caddy.
- STREAM: Stop, I command you. This machine taps the seven concealed dimensions. You'll rupture the very strands of space.
- STREAM: Now that I command the intermediate dimensions, nothing can stop me taking complete control over all space and time. Becoming all space and time. Thanks to the power of the Tardis, the circle is mine! - The Hollows of Time
Time and space are relative dimensions. Everything has a dimension of meaning. For example, mimetics are a dimension in addition to the 'basic four' (later confirmed to be the spatial dimensions), and damaging them can remove physical individuality and self-awareness.
- In addition to the mundane dimensions, there are others. The most important of these is the mimetic. Everything has a dimension of meaning. The damage that the Cancer Empire had wrought to this world was to its mimetic underpinnings.
- The results could be seen visually but could not help but cause the kind of physical distress I suffered on first exposure. Switching my optics allowed me to see it in terms that would not cook my sense of self.
- A looming figure stepped into the entrance of the alleyway, taller and wider than any ordinary Jonah. It was a press-gang. Five or six ordinary men and women, mimetically reduced to a point where they could not function as individuals, melded into a single entity. Its appearance changed continuously as it moved. Every shift in angle brought a new face to light as others slid out of view, its appearance depending on which aspect was in sight. As it strode towards me in the alley, I tried to dart past its side to the street behind it. It had the aggregate speed of its original constituents though and easily snatched me as I passed. I struggled, but it had the combined strength of many men as well.
- They had followed me and stood before me, side by side. The first one had taken the opportunity of my distraction to remove his helmet. I now saw just how ill he was, and not in any biological fashion. The dimensions, the basic four, the dimension of meaning, together they form the structures with which we are familiar, buildings, people, cultures, the Ship itself, but they can be separated. There can be meaning without matter, like a shadow weapon. There can also be matter without meaning. That is what these men were, material husks, robbed of the significance of their true biodata and reduced to crude animations.
- The teaching cell operated on a combination of dimensional and mimetic principles. It pulled in a portion of the world and changed its relationship to the rest of reality. It cut off those inside from any outside influence and vice versa. While you were in the teaching cell, as far as the universe was concerned, you did not exist.
- Think of the universe for a moment as having three additional directions (alterward, paraward, and otherward) all at right angles to the ones you know (length, breadth, width and time). - The Brakespeare Voyage
- THE DOCTOR: Something disrupting the interface between the relative dimensions. - Blood of the Daleks
- HAYTER: That pillar?
- DOCTOR: Of course. That's where he's hidden the other passengers.
- HAYTER: But it's not big enough.
- DOCTOR: Something else for me to explain later.
- HAYTER: This revolutionises the whole concept of relative dimension. Oh Doctor, if only I were a younger man and had the time to make use of your knowledge. - Time Flight
- DOCTOR 2: Yes, it's quite cozy, isn't it? Oh, you'll soon get used to it, old chap. Relative dimensions and all that. - The Three Doctors
- SUSAN: Well, I made up the name Tardis from the initials, Time And Relative Dimension In Space. I thought you'd both understand when you saw the different dimensions inside from those outside. - An Unearthly Child
- SARAH: Just how big is the Tardis?
- DOCTOR: Well, how big's big? Relative dimensions, you see. No constant.
- SARAH: That's not an answer.
- DOCTOR: How big are you at the moment?
- SARAH: Five four, just, and that's still not an answer.
- DOCTOR: Listen, listen. There are no measurements in infinity. You humans have got such limited little minds. I don't know why I like you so much. - Masque of Mandragora
- Cosmic blasphemy. Such a move had an inevitable consequence: the complete and utter destruction of both TARDISes. The outer plasmic shells ruptured, the conditional pathways were aborted, the relative dimensions evaporated. - The Quantum Archangel
- DOCTOR: Well, my dear, I'm a doctor of science, and this machine is for travelling through time and relative dimensions in space. - The Massacre
- DOCTOR: Well, yes. There's some malfunctioning of the Relative Dimensional Computer.
SARAH: In English. - DOCTOR: It means the steering's gone haywire.
- SARAH: Oh - so, we're off course, lost in space.
- DOCTOR: Well, yes ... up to a point.
- SARAH: And at this speed we're getting loster and loster, thousands and thousands more miles every second.
- DOCTOR: Yes. We're sliding with enormous speed in retrograde time. Let's look at the chronometric astrometer. - Exploration Earth
- He was manipulating just three dimensions at present. How many others were available? He was tempted to seize the Temporal dimension, rolling it back to crush the invaders of his ship that way. He could manipulate the relative dimensions of Imagination and Inner Space-Time to create whatever he liked.
- Traversing time as he did, back and forth across centuries of space, rendered the dimension almost meaningless. The Doctor had only occasionally remembered that things needed replacing or servicing, or they wore out completely. Even within the TARDIS, time still took its toll. - Cat's Cradle Time's Crucible
- SUSAN: I can't, Mister Chesterton. You can't simply work on three of the dimensions.
IAN: Three of them? Oh, time being the fourth dimension, I suppose? Then what do you need E for? What do you make the fifth dimension?
SUSAN: Space.
- ‘What’s all this about the fourth and fifth dimension?’ Rachel asked. She’d brought a couple of his novels with her to the dining room. If they really contained the secrets of the universe they might be worth struggling through. She’d started on The Beautiful People. So far, though, it was just The Da Vinci Code all over again. ‘Time and space,’ Marnal said. ‘Relative dimensions, you see.’ ‘Oh,’ Rachel said again. Marnal slapped his head. ‘Wait! That’s it! There will be a trail in the fifth dimension.’
- ‘If they’re time machines, could it be from a time before your planet was – ’Marnal gave her a withering look. ‘Time travel occurs in relative dimensions. Weren’t you listening before? A TARDIS can travel into the past and future, but not its own past and future. That would be a theoretical absurdity.’ Rachel glowered at him, but he was completely oblivious. - The Gallifrey Chronicles
- ‘Time travel occurs in relative dimensions. Weren’t you listening before? A TARDIS can travel into the past and future, but not its own past and future. That would be a theoretical absurdity.’
- ‘Warning, master. Alien species identified. It is the Vore. By Supreme Council order, date index 309456/4756.7RE/1213GRT/100447TL, no Time Lord is to engage the Vore, all time ships are to observe an exclusion zone no less than one parsec and one century, in all five directions from any Vore moon.
- The Time Lords were losing. This was a war fought in five dimensions, across the whole of time and space.
- ‘They can move through the fifth dimension.’ ‘I’m not even sure what that means.’ ‘They can manipulate hyperspace corridors. They travel down them like a spider down a thread of silk.’ The Vore pushed them both onwards. - The Gallifrey Chronicles
The Pre-Universe
Christmas on a Rational Planet and Millennial Rites are obviously intended to be the same version of the Pre-Universe, as The Great Intelligence was born there.
In particular, Rassilon removed magick, barring a trace of psionics. And returning real magick to a planet will eventually erase it from history.
- Ohh, yes, there were those of the old time who escaped. A handful of baby godlings and ‘great intelligences’... but they were such weak, unimaginative creatures.
- '[...] This Great Kingdom is based on three very different laws of physics: those indigenous to this universe; those of Saraquazel who hails from the universe that follows this one, and those of Yog Sothoth – the Great Intelligence – who is a survivor of the cosmos that existed before the Big Bang. Thanks to Chapel and Anne's meddlings in forces beyond their comprehension, all three sets of laws are fused into an unstable equilibrium. I've got to unbalance that equilibrium, but, at the same time, ensure that all the pieces fall back into the same place that they were to begin with.'
- 'Before this universe was created, there was another one. A totally different universe, with alien physical laws. The heavens were green, and the stars looked like –' He chuckled. 'Giant doughnuts, to be brutally frank. Very, very different. [...]'
- 'As their universe reached the point of collapse, a group of these "Time Lords" shunted themselves into a parallel dimension which collapsed seconds after ours. Moments later, they erupted into our universe, and soon discovered that they were in possession of undreamt of powers.' [...] 'And I'm afraid that the power went to their heads – or what passed for heads given their new bodies. [...]'
- The Doctor brushed the feelings aside and carried on reading what he now realized was the syllabic nucleus of a language that had no place in this universe. The words were derived from a tongue that had been both ancient and arcane before the first stars had ignited in the cosmic firmament, before the first protons and electrons had combined in the genesis of the first atom of hydrogen. [...] Words of power and majesty that could pluck a quark from the heart of a neutron or rend a quasar asunder. They were words written in a different universe: the cosmos that had existed before the present one, the universe whose death knell had been the birth screams of the here and now. The universe that the Doctor had spoken of to Anne Travers when he had described the origins of the Great Intelligence.
- The most powerful tool developed by the Time Lords was block transfer computation, the ultimate expression of mathematics. With it, one could manipulate matter and energy, time and space, and fold dimensions like so much origami. [...] Quantum mnemonics, the dark science of an earlier race of Time Lords, made block transfer computation seem like a conjuring trick. With just a few words, a practitioner of their great art could grasp the basic nature of reality around the throat and shake it into a new configuration. A bon mot of quantum mnemonics could bring about a premature death, or a run of good luck. A sentence could transform a planet's history and destiny, changing a world of barbaric war into an elysium. And a carefully constructed paragraph could rewrite the entire universe. Or destroy it utterly.
- No, lord. Lords, like yourself, did great things on this rock but they are now gone to dust. Such is our destiny. Oh, lord, it is wonderful to touch the clean purity of your DNA. These human creatures smell. Their flesh stinks. They are not like us. [...] I structure. I rationalise. I find weaknesses in the fabric and bind them tight. And they confound me. They use us to pursue crusades of superstition. We did not do that.
- Yes, there's no need to shout. This 'White God' is of your creation? We were made to draw it from the structure. It is a living thing, a white hole, from the old times, when such things were allowed. We can barely control it. It stands on the threshold of the event horizon and will become too real soon. Give us orders and we will push it back into the shadowlands, where it will not exist.
- “Doesn't surprise me,” said Chris. “It's a pretty obscure legend based on a few, disparate facts. The story goes that just before the Great Houses tamed the chaos of the 'old times' with their laws, they had last minute doubts. What if they'd missed something? What if, once they introduced their checks and balances, that causality didn't behave in the way they had predicted? - Weapons Grade Snake Oil
- There was a city, buildings carved into gigantic tusks of ivory that sprouted from the ground and formed arches a mile high, great arcs laced with crystalline clouds. The streets were made of cobweb, glittering pathways spun by mechanical spiders, and between them hung enchanted gardens tended by men of stone. Down on the ground walked the skeletons of mammoths, their ribcages stuffed with steam-powered engines, scholars and philosophers riding on their backs. Chris had seen enough in his travels to know that a great many unlikely things were possible. Aliens could look like pixies, bio-machines could be made to resemble dragons, cities could be built out of sound... but there were things in this place he couldn’t even name, things he had no experience of, that seemed at odds with even the most exotic of alien technologies. Things that were impossible. Yeah. Impossible. Things even the Doctor couldn’t have shown him. He was seeing it all in the face of the Carnival Queen. – Once upon a time, she said, this was your universe. Long before your time, before any time that you could measure. A place of endless miracles, non? No harsh sciences here, no mundane little laws of physics, no guiding principles. There was just possibility. An infinity of possibility. Now. Look. Chris wasn’t watching the city any more. There was a different world etched into the Carnival Queen’s expression now, a world inhabited by people; people he could recognize as people, not monsters or automatons. The cities were just as large, but there were less of the impossible things. The planet looked... well, reasonable. Sort of. – This was the world of the Watchmakers, Christopher. One of the first Great Races. Things of extraordinary power. Perhaps more power than they ever realized. See?
- And were there monsters here, crawling out of the blackness? No, perhaps not; there were only possibilities, and you could see anything amongst the possibilities, if you looked hard enough. Sometimes, the things she saw (or thought she saw) broke the laws of nature, or the laws of physics, or the laws of time, or laws there weren’t even names for. Whenever she caught a glimpse of something impossible, her spine would burn and she’d spasm like a dying animal. ‘But there are infinite worlds in this realm, Marielle. Why choose one at all? Why tie yourself down to a single flavour of reality? Why not live with the possibility of all of them?’ Duquesne shook her head. ‘We all need something to hold onto, Horloge. We cannot live our lives in the dark.’
- ‘No,’ said Christopher Cwej. The Carnival Queen looked surprised, and the look revealed entire lifetimes of experience. ‘No,’ Chris said again. ‘I don’t swallow it. What you told me doesn’t make sense. How could anyone just reach into themselves and pull out their irrational bits? I mean, let alone a whole species...’ – Is there a problem, Christopher? ‘It doesn’t make sense! Magic and everything. It’s not real. It’s just superstition.’ That’s what the Doctor said, anyway, he thought. But he didn’t say it. – Superstition. The Carnival Queen laughed. – Haven’t you ever wished that someone would call you, and believed that it was your doing when they did? Haven’t you ever crossed your fingers for good luck? Or believed, just for a moment, that when you cheered on your favourite sub-quantum-para-football team, your wish was what made them score the winning goal?
- – I’m the one who starts the carnivals, Christopher Cwej. The one who makes the music that plays when civilizations fall. Sister to superstitions, grandmother of gynoids. The spirit imprisoned in every piece of clockwork. Matheson Catcher would call me the enemy of all humanity, which seems funny, when you consider how long he’s been under my spell. There was a moment’s pause, and in that moment a billion possible new universes were born. – Call me Cacophony. Call me the Carnival Queen. And I’m very, very happy that Marielle has let me back into the rational universe.
- The Watchmakers. Logical, masculine creatures. They rejected the possibility, and denied the world of wonders. Perhaps it scared them. They wanted existence to be precise, to be mechanical, so that they could live their lives to a solemn timetable. They wanted to understand the universe in the same way you might understand a piece of clockwork. As a cold machine. No room for cities of brass or dragonfly-gods. They invented rules, and tied creation down to those rules.
- – Nobody is entirely rational, Christopher. Not even the Watchmakers. They wanted a universe of Reason, but to get it, they had to give something up. Those little irrational parts of themselves. Those small corners of their souls that believed in the superstitions, that wanted the world of wonders back. The mutable parts. The changeable parts. Across the Watchmaker world, the people were grasping their irrational shadows and hurling them away. The shadows shrieked into the sky, screaming, crying. Forsaken. They congregated in the upper atmosphere, becoming one great cloud of unreason. 'Go,' said the King. And the cloud went. It shrieked across the skies, exiled from its homeworld. It screamed through galaxies, unwanted and alone, until the rational universe opened up and it vanished into the darkness on the other side of existence. 'There,' said the Watchmaker King. 'Now We Are Things of Reason Absolute. Our... Demons... Are Safely Confined, Beyond The Reach Of Man Or Machine. We Are Perfect. We Are Whole.'
- The early universe was effectively structureless, but the Great Houses seem to have known that this state of affairs wouldn’t last. Given enough time it would inevitably begin to develop a definite framework, as new cultures emerged across the span of the continuum and new species began to impose their own versions of meaning on the continuual strata. The ever-nervous academicians of the Homeworld knew they wouldn’t be alone much longer, and most likely feared how other intelligences might influence the shape of the future: in theory the coming generations of species could be so different that a collision between them and the Houses would be as catastrophic as a collision of different forms of matter.
- But the Houses’ grand solution was to create the structure of the future for themselves.
- The first attack came as a primal manifestation, destroying the site of the machinery and most probably everyone involved in the process, leaving an enormous crater – the caldera – at the centre of the new born version of history. - The Book of the War
In particular, Rassilon removed magick, barring a trace of psionics. And returning real magick to a planet will eventually erase it from history.
- ‘The first to evolve in this universe, yes,’ said the Doctor. [...] ‘Back then we were the Shadow people, caught between the warm dark of magick and the cold light of science. Magick predominated for a long, long time. And then Rassilon made his decision.’ [...] ‘The world solidified around us, like water turning to ice. Squeezing out the magick. But, like an ice cube, there were little cracks and bubbles. Psi was the last magick to survive, perhaps because it was the least impossible, the closest to science. The residue of psi became a network of ley lines, stretching through the universe in improbable directions.' ‘It’s still there.’ Roz said, ‘And Iphigenia is… on one of the ley lines?’ The Doctor nodded. ‘The Time Lords were aware of the leylines before the Wars began. We’d chosen to make the universe rational. Its irrational citizens objected. So we turned the psi lines into weapons. A Distant Early Warning line that stretched through the galaxy, studded with receivers the size of mountains or even small moons, parabolic dishes disguised as craters. Listening for eruptions of psi power beyond Gallifrey.’ - So Vile a Sin
- Anhedra, a tiny ballet dancer with glorious limbs and a nasty smile, has spread her arms to weave gleefully through a vast craton of slow–cooking diamonds. She shrugs. ‘Then we will turn him from science to magic and Tagonique will be saved from the Enemy.’
- Granted power by the Observer Effect of Mesquividas's fall, they invade the minds of the Tagoniqui, draw out their magical worldview, infect the substrata with it, punch backwards through time to link with the moment in which the universe became one thing or another, and with a concussion which blazes, at temporal frequencies, like a quasar, they smash the probability wave in the wrong direction and funnel the consequences forward through time to Tagonique. Real magic comes to Tagonique. The Tagoniqui are liberated from the Enemy. In seventy–three years and four days they will all cease to exist. Night falls. In Mesquividas's tower, all is quiet. The wheels of the machine are still. But outside, the stars turn in their ancient round towards dawn. The moon is setting. Tagonique revolves towards spring. The hidden sun moves in stately spirals about the galactic centre and the great wheel of the galaxy rolls on. Beyond it all, congruent with all other circles, the War encompasses all. Wheels within wheels within wheels, turning towards eternity. - A Romance In Twelve Parts: Alchemy
The characters speculate that astrology is basically a remnant of the laws of physics from the universe predating the Big Bang.
- MR SMITH: The origins of astrology are lost in the mists of time.
- LUKE: It says in here that the earliest record of astrology was in Babylon, in the sixteenth century BC.
- MR SMITH: It is older than that, not just here on Earth. Primitive cultures across the universe charted the patterns of the stars. This is the zodiac of the planet Ventiplex, for example. And this is the zodiac of Draconia.
- LUKE: There's astrology in the cultures of other planets?
- MR SMITH: Yes, Luke. A similar system operates in the culture of almost every inhabited planet.
- LUKE: So it's everywhere.
- RANI: Like Clyde said, how can we detect something we don't believe in? The power of the Ancient Lights. What if it is astrology? What if astrology is true?
SARAH JANE: It can't be true.
LUKE: It's completely contrary to the laws of physics.
- RANI: Hang on. Astrology breaks the laws of physics.
LUKE: What are you getting at?
RANI: Well, what if the Ancient Lights come from somewhere else? A place where the laws of physics are different, so they can break ours?
LUKE: That's like saying you could break the law of gravity.
RANI: But maybe that's why Mister Smith said nothing burnt my jacket. What if this energy the Ancient Lights use is a different kind of energy to anything we know?
SARAH JANE: No, Rani. The laws of physics, they're are the same across the universe.
LUKE: Our universe. But what if the Ancient Lights are from another one?
- LUKE: Mister Smith said every galaxy has its own form of astrology, not just Earth. What if astrology is a kind of memory of a time before? [...] Thirteen billion years ago, the universe was created. A massive explosion, the Big Bang. But what was there before?
- SARAH JANE: Nobody knows.
- LUKE: What if there was another universe?
- RANI: Where the physics were different. Where astrology worked.
- SARAH JANE: And this energy somehow survived the Big Bang.
- RANI: The Ancient Lights. So they're very ancient. What have they done the last thirteen billion years?
- SARAH JANE: And why have they picked Trueman?
- MR SMITH: May I make a suggestion?
- SARAH JANE: Go ahead, Mister Smith.
- MR SMITH: If Luke's theory is correct, the energy form has been waiting for exactly the right astrological conditions across the universe. Trueman's birth chart is a vital part of that equation. He is the channel the energy needs.
- TRUEMAN: I have a message for the world. Don't be afraid. Something wonderful is happening. Very soon, every star in the entire universe will be aligned in a perfect conjunction for the first time in thirteen billion years. The way is clear. The Ancient Lights will shine again.
- LUKE: I wasn't born. I have no birthday, no star sign, so astrology doesn't work on me. The circle was like an electrical circuit. I broke it.
For context, Dharmayuddha was written by Aditya Bidikar, an Indian writer. It's a kind of contextualisation of Mahabharata (a mythologised account of the semi-apocryphal Kurukshetra War) in the Faction Paradox/Doctor Who universe.
Kaliyuga, the age of darkness, ignorance and sin, is the current state of the war-torn great kingdoms. It 'proceeded' comparatively prosperous Dvapara Yuga.
Kaliyuga, the age of darkness, ignorance and sin, is the current state of the war-torn great kingdoms. It 'proceeded' comparatively prosperous Dvapara Yuga.
- Magadha – which is one of what they call Mahajanapadas, or ‘great countries’ – is among the bigger kingdoms in what will one day become India. In the Kaliyuga, which is where you’re sitting, it will be ruled by the conqueror Bimbisara and his supposedly indomitable son Ajatashatru. Then there will be this one time when King Alexander’s armies will mutiny at its borders and demand to return home. And later, Chandragupta Maurya will pass Magadha on through the generations to King Ashoka, who will gain the nickname ‘Ashoka the Cruel’ for his less peachy qualities, and who will then convert to Buddhism and be instrumental in its spread throughout Asia. But in the time we’re talking about – in the Dvapara Yuga – Magadha is ruled by the legendary Jarasandha. And it has enjoyed a long run of peace and serenity while Jarasandha’s armies march around Bharata cowing other kings into submission. Today, however, marks a lull in Magadha’s battle-mongering, as religious occasions tend to do.
- And then, nine months later, each of them bore half a son, dead. What had happened was that the fruit contained an aatma – the essence of everything you are, have been and will be – and the aatma had been split into two. The two half-sons, horrific to look upon, dead, but still shifting and fragmenting along their broken timelines, were thrown out into the forest near Magadha. And there… Hang on. Let’s take a moment here. You know about aatmas and fractured timelines, right? Well, perhaps an explanation is in order. See, you live in the Kaliyuga, the Dark Age. You think of time in a linear fashion – in terms of before and after as though that actually refers to time itself. You can’t help it. You think your yuga follows the previous yuga, when it actually replaces it. Your minds, which can only bend so much and not a whit more, have simplified the entire story of the yuga before yours to fit in with your little linear outlook. You think of devas and asuras as gods and monsters, and of the divine human as fantasy. But the truth is stranger than your mythology. Dvapara Yuga falls to Kaliyuga, and gives rise to your puny race, but before this occurs, there’s a great war in time, called the Kurukshetra war. The Kurukshetra – ‘the land of Kuru’ – is a piece of the Bharata continuum, the continuum that you live in, but before history is rewritten to suit the gods.
- She travelled the fractured timeline of the Dvapara Yuga, and one fine day, she found a peculiar delight – a grotesque dead baby with its existence split neatly down the middle. She was about to eat it, of course, but then she noticed that each of the halves was reaching out to non-existent timelines to complete themselves. To fatten the meat, she helped them, joining the two halves together into a whole child with two biodatas with bits borrowed from two non-existent universes. The child came alive. Jara, enchanted by the child, couldn’t bring herself to kill it. So she took it to the closest kingdom – Magadha – and gave it to the king. Brihadratha recognised his son, so he took him back and named him Jarasandha in honour of the creature that had brought him back to life. So that’s the truth behind the story that you might know. But even this story had a problem. It skipped the happily-ever-after – although we might presume Brihadratha got one – and had far-ranging consequences. Jarasandha lived one life, but he also remembered two others. As he grew up, he started to get flashes of events as they might have transpired if his choices had been different. With penance and meditation, he expanded his view from himself to the entire world; and from the past to the present and the future. The memories of the two alien timelines he was torn from coalesced into a picture of futures that had already happened, but which could perhaps be averted. He saw the entire story of the Dharmayuddha from on high, and he saw that in each of the impossible universes – no more impossible than his own – a child was born, supposedly the seventh incarnation of the god Vishnu.
- Cousin will turn against cousin, five Pandavas waging war on one hundred Kauravas. Arjuna, currently sitting in a tent in Jarasandha’s garden – thousand armed Arjuna, compressing time to move faster than you can think possible, looses fiery arrows of possibility at his enemies. Wherever the arrows hit, time loops trap enemy soldiers in unending moments of futility. Infinite timelines crash into men’s heads, weapons age Arjuna’s enemies into dust. Some let potential timelines loose, causing chain reactions that infect soldiers and fracture their souls. Arjuna’s brother Bhima the simple-minded, now gorging on laddoos, his favourite sweetmeat, will carry his mace and destroy timelines, creating widows that were never married, children born to fathers who didn’t exist. Their elder brother, Yudhisthira the truth-teller, whose very words can collapse impossibilities into truth, concocts stories about how the brave but naïve Pandavas were cheated out of their kingdom, making this into immutable fact. His youngest brothers Nakula and Sahadeva, two iterations of the same person, lead their twin armies of imaginary animals on towards the Kauravas. Strange hybrid creatures made of broken time tear into the Kauravas; the skies themselves go black for the fall of Jayadratha. The Kauravas operate the chakravyuha – a whirlpool created of holding patterns of soldiers – which sucks people in and leaves them stranded in the void between worlds. Arjuna, his son Abhimanyu lost in the vortex, kills his teacher Dronacharya and the immortal Bheeshma. Jarasandha sees that the Pandavas and Kauravas will be fighting a war already lost by both. He knows that the gods are watching, waiting for the Dvapara timeline to weaken, so they can deploy their weapon.
- The arrow piercing Krishna, and Krishna exploding – a universe within a bomb, contained by a god inside a man – and Kaliyuga unleashed, wiping out the Dvapara Yuga and installing itself in its wake, like a new operating system. Binding the universe with a new thread, one wherein humans were no longer as gods, where the gods made humanity in an abortion of their image. He knew that for the Dvapara Yuga to endure, the scene on the battlefield had to be prevented.
In The Infinity Doctor, an old Gallifreyan proverb is that time runs in circles.
- ‘Time moves in circles,’ the President noted. It was an old Gallifreyan proverb, one that was literally and metaphorically true.
- ‘As he fell, he tore a hole in time, like a fingernail down a blackboard. It was as if a hole had been ripped from the page of a book. I saw the pages behind ours, other times and spaces. Not parallel universes, but palimpsest universes. Reality is a slate, and history and memory and matter and time are just patterns of chalk on that reality. There is so much left unwritten, or just sketched in. A casual word, a glance down the wrong alleyway and… and everything could change. The Time Lords hold such power, the power to destroy a planet or change a young girl’s past. We devour time as a beetle chews up leaves or bacteria rots a corpse. That power scares me. Nothing is safe, nothing is sacred.'
- The Doctor hesitated. He’d not said ‘thirty‐five’, he’d said a different word, and then before that, they’d said it, so he’d said a different number, so they’d said it. It was an endless sequence, like trying to name the biggest number, or working out whether the chicken came before the egg. He could understand what was happening, but the answer remained just one step out of reach. It was a simple question with an infinite answer. 'The past is as malleable as the future. We see the future, we do not affect it. It might seem paradoxical to you, but as a time traveller you must understand something of the complex nature of the universe. There have been occasions on your travels when you have seen the past unfurling around you, just as you remember reading would happen. Time is relative.’ ‘The observed past does not change,’ the Doctor objected. ‘That is one of the fundamentals of time theory.’ ‘You have free will,’ Willhuff assured him, ‘in the past, the present and future. Nothing is fixed, nothing that can be remembered can’t be forgotten.’ ‘But how can you say that I’ve got free will when you know what my actions will be?’ ‘We will stop you.’
- The Doctor sighed. ‘That’s what we’ve created – a universe where everything is nothing. A universe where nothing matters. Of course you can rewrite history, but you shouldn’t. As long as you have these great powers, nothing is real.’
- The Doctor took another step up, looked Omega in the eye. ‘You’re a Gallifreyan, Omega. You’re more than that. You must have been hit by the time energies when Qqaba went nova. You must have taken the full force of the explosion. My bet is that you understand Time a great deal better than your average Time Lord.’ Omega laughed, the sound originating all around the room. ‘You may be right.’ ‘And existing outside your native universe must also have given you – what was your phrase? – a “unique perspective”.’ The red eyes narrowed. ‘I have seen the past and future change. I have seen a universe where there was no Rassilon, and the Time Lords were gods thanks to me. I have seen a universe where Rassilon still rules Gallifrey from deep within the Matrix. Another where he was a woman, and my lover.’ ‘Parallel universes?’ ‘Such places exist, but this was our universe, riddled with paradox and contradiction likes weevils in a biscuit.’ The Doctor drew back a little. ‘I know a number of seafarers who prefer their biscuits with weevils. It adds to the taste, and weevils are a very good source of protein, or so I’m told.’ Omega was ignoring him. ‘In all of those realities, in every version of history I am trapped here. Sometimes by treachery, sometimes by design, once even through choice. There are an infinity of choices, an infinite number of Doctors. Yet I am all the Omegas, I am the only one.’ ‘So you’ve searched all those different realities looking for a way to escape, and never found the answer?’
- The original idea was very, very simple. You had a timeline. Year three followed year two, followed year one. If you could count, you could understand time. Seconds ticked by, one after the other, everything travelling in the same direction, nothing going faster than the speed of light.
- Once upon a time. Unlike small children, the elder laces were in no rush. They were, on the whole, immortal — living a long time being, of course, being one of the prerequisites for being an elder race in the first place. And, time being a very simple concept to grasp, most of them could see the future, in the same way that if you can count to ten you can count to a trillion, if you have the inclination. The universe was an elegant, beautiful, place back then. A single, harmonious note. It has a golden age. Really it was. For the first few billion years, nothing was wrong and nothing ever went wrong. Even the bad things that happened were good — that's to say they happened for a good reason, and lessons were learned. It wasn't stagnant, either. Nothing was ever dull. It was an age of heroism, of exploration, of discovery. Above all else, it was a time ol progress. That's what time did, then. Progressed. Everything progressed, everything got better with age. Giants walked the earth, standing on the shoulders of giants. Literally, sometimes, if the mood took them. It was the golden age that all the legends describe, that all the politicians hark back to, the one that you vaguely remember yourself, back when things were simple and sunny.
- Very early on, mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, fantasists and who knows who else all realised that, theoretically, it was possible to travel in time. The physicists even jokingly pointed out that if you managed to — hee hee — find (or create) a very specific type of supermassive black hole — snicker — one that had a singularity that was exactly the right shape, and — hoho — somehow managed to get it spinning in a certain way and a— fnarr fnarr — bent a couple of spare dimensions around a bit until they faced the other way, then somehow — oh, you're killing me — developed a forcefield that would stop you from instantly being annihilated by all the anti-matter, radiation and raw temporal forces, then — it's a cracker — managed to find a way to both access the singularity and keep the event horizon, then finally — stop me if you've heard this one — you could harness the resultant energy to create a working time machine.
- And, then, that evening, suddenly the timeline stopped being an elegant parabola. Now it was a squiggle. With branches off and crossing out and gaps and hits which repeated each other, or cancelled each other out. Suddenly nothing made sense, except on a very, very local level. You'd think, what with being able to see the future, that the elder races or the universe would have seen it coming. They did, of course, they'd just got the order wrong. They'd assumed that five o'clock would follow four o'clock, that six o'clock would show up soon after five, and that — crucially — this would hold true for everyone.
- Within a generation, it had all settled down again. The golden age was over, what with the hordes of ancient evils trying to drain the life from whole planets and all, but it was clear that an uncertain future and a squiggling, subjective timeline was “it” from now on.
- The next six days were, it's fair to say, pretty traumatic for all concerned. The elder races tended to do four things. 1. Go mad. 2. Leave. 3. Get killed. 4. Regress. Some did all four. Some only managed one of the above. It was one of those times where people tried new ideas. One chap dressed as a Chinese mandarin and became obsessed with toys and games. Some went into hiding, or left the universe altogether. A couple of groups decided to swarm across the universe destroying all life. Because, suddenly, anything went and everything was up for grabs. Within a generation, it had all settled down again. The golden age was over, what with the hordes of ancient evils trying to drain the life from whole planets and all, but it was clear that an uncertain future and a squiggling, subjective timeline was “it” from now on. What was also clear was that Time had been invalided out, and needed someone to look after it.
N-Space
The Ocean of Time
The first law of time forbids anything from traversing along its own subjective time stream (meaning the string of events that it personally experienced), and it's actually very difficult to perform outside of disruptions to time or certain points in the flow of history.
- First and foremost, he established the Laws of Time. Perhaps ‘established’ is too strong – he was largely just describing a set of scientific principles akin to the Laws of Physics. The unintended consequence of laying down the law in this way, of course, was that it tempted so many others to break it. He said ‘must not’ when he meant ‘cannot’, although a deeper understanding than he then had might have led him to ‘can, but Time will (usually) reassert itself’. Anyway, he laid down the five great principles that have been taught to every Time Lord from childhood ever since. - A Brief History of the Time Lords
- PROTOCOLS OF LINEARITY [Great Houses: Culture] Of all the Protocols whichdefine the limits of the Great Houses, the most widely-discussed are theProtocols of Linearity. Though the Houses have almost complete freedom ofmovement in the Spiral Politic, the one major exception is the Homeworlditself. Not only is it impossible/illegal to travel into the Houses’ own past, but it’s built into the very nature of the Homeworld’s time technology that whenever Homeworld-time meets outside-time, the two should become analogous.
- In effectwhat this Protocol suggests is that whenever an agent enters an area oftime outside the Homeworld, the area becomes in some way “linked” to theHomeworld. Even though the two worlds may be aeons apart, events on thoseworlds appear to take place simultaneously.
- NAPOLEONIC ERA [Lesser Species: Event (Earth, C18-19)] The Protocols of Linearity state that whenever one of the time-active powers makes contact with one of the lesser species, a temporary link will be forged between their relative histories so that the “present” of the power and the “present” of the species will be briefly indistinguishable even though their cultures may be separated by billions of years. - The Book of the War
- CHANCELLOR: You can't allow him to cross his own time stream. Apart from the enormous energy it would need, the First Law of Time expressly forbids him to meet his other selves.
- DOCTOR: What about the First Law of Time?
- DOCTOR 2: Perhaps I could explain?
- DOCTOR: Perhaps you could.
- DOCTOR 2: Well, our fellow Time Lords out there are just as much under siege as we are.
- DOCTOR: What?
- DOCTOR 2: And they couldn't send anyone to help you. But they did summon up enough temporal energy to lift me out of my bit of our time stream and pop me down here, into my own future, so to speak.
- TEGAN: Oh, great. You make it sound like a shopping list, ticking off things as you go. Aren't you forgetting something rather important? Adric is dead.
- NYSSA: Tegan, please.
- DOCTOR: We feel his loss as well.
- TEGAN: Well, you could do more than grieve. You could go back.
- NYSSA: Could you?
- DOCTOR: No.
- NYSSA: But surely the Tardis is quite capable of-
- TEGAN: We can change what happened if we materialise before Adric was killed.
- DOCTOR: And change your own history?
- TEGAN: Look, the freighter could still crash into Earth. That doesn't have to be changed. Only Adric doesn't have to be on board.
- DOCTOR: Now listen to me, both of you. There are some rules that cannot be broken even with the Tardis. Don't ever ask me to do anything like that again. You must accept that Adric is dead. His life wasn't wasted. He died trying to save others, just like his brother, Varsh. You know, Adric had a choice. This is the way he wanted it. - Time-Flight
- When distance is achieved, the patterns run and straighten. It becomes possible to see, linked by lines of deeper or lighter probability, the tracks of the immediate past and future: the mainlines of eternity, the central thoroughfares of history, the abandoned and boarded-up stopping places of the soul. - The Brakespeare Voyage
- DOCTOR: Sent a message through the timelines into the Vortex, cos I know they're in there, like sharks in water. Always scoping, always ready. - Revolution of the Daleks
- MASTER: Weird, how you don't remember any of this.
- MISSY: The two of us together puts the timelines out of sync. You can't retain your memories, so I don't have them. - The Doctor Falls
- ‘Oh, it’s not space I’m worried about,’ said the Doctor, lost in thought. ‘The TARDIS seems to have slipped a time track… I’ve travelled back in the Daleks’ own timeline to way back when.’
- ‘Well, nothing really. It’s just a bit of a coincidence, when you think about it. Coming here, looking for some sort of temporal disturbance – and when I’ve already jumped a time track to a period in history when…’ - Prisoners of the Daleks
- The timeline of the planet was bent now, wrapped around the Attractor, so that from twelve million AD to sixty billion there was no normal history, not even that of humanity’s long stays on Mars, and Pluto, and finally as bio-formed living light within the solar photosphere itself. Instead, everyday was bent at an angle to time from which the point of no-return, the dreadful black and yawning maw of the attractor could be seen as if it were no more than ten light years away. [...] Frantic, Compassion accelerated back. Her personal time was caught up in this event, bound to its linearity, if she merely followed her own track back, the dissolution would keep pace with her day by day, second by second – she would never find the intact human world on which she could make her stand. She would never learn who was responsible for they would always be finishing just as she arrived. That thought was intolerable. She drove herself harder still. It was not impossible - although it was in many senses forbidden - for her to outstrip the wave of change working back along the history of man. She might – if she strained every energy - leap from one turn of the skein and whorl of time to another earlier strand. A process the first pioneers among the time-ships had termed ‘skipping a time track’ as if creation were a gramophone record, and a time-ship a silver needle. Doing so, she might find an age which had not ‘yet’ been pulled in to the process – even though if she waited and reached it in its due course she would find it devoured at her moment of arrival as all the rest had been. - The Brakespeare Voyage
- DOCTOR: They teleported. You saw them. As long as the ship and the ballroom are linked, their short range teleports will do the trick.
- ROSE: Well, we'll go in the Tardis!
- DOCTOR: We can't use the Tardis. We're part of events now.
- MICKEY: Well, can't we just smash through?
- DOCTOR: Hyperplex this side, plate glass the other. We need a truck.
An event that is immutable, unchangeable, etc in the established history of the universe is referred to as a fixed point in time.
This means that fixed events can be sabotaged before they exist under the right circumstances, or even manipulated to achieve a certain outcome (i.e, The Doctor survived his apparent death at Lake Silencio by making it appear that he died, thus keeping the flow of established history intact).
I'll elaborate on the effects of actually breaking an established fixed event below, but, as an example of how dangerous it is, breaking the established history of Captain Jack (a fixed point, in and of himself) in The Death of Captain Jack created an entire version of the universe that was negated upon his death.
- FIXED POINT: Historical documents make the claim that, during the strike on the displaced Earth in the 21st century, the Daleks spared the life of space pioneer Adelaide Brooke (fig 11.06). Despite the fact that they were engaged in a campaign that would, if successful, destroy the entire universe, the Daleks understood that Brooke was a pivotal figure in the established history of the universe. It has been speculated that the Daleks did not kill her as it may have had a follow-on effect that would have derailed their own doomsday plans. - Dalek Combat Training Manual
- DOCTOR: Not this time. Pompeii is a fixed point in history. What happens, happens. There is no stopping it.
- DOCTOR: Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed. - The Fires of Pompeii
This means that fixed events can be sabotaged before they exist under the right circumstances, or even manipulated to achieve a certain outcome (i.e, The Doctor survived his apparent death at Lake Silencio by making it appear that he died, thus keeping the flow of established history intact).
I'll elaborate on the effects of actually breaking an established fixed event below, but, as an example of how dangerous it is, breaking the established history of Captain Jack (a fixed point, in and of himself) in The Death of Captain Jack created an entire version of the universe that was negated upon his death.
In Vortex Butterflies, it's explained that N-Space is a space-time continuum that appears as one enormous moment to time-sensitives. Most of this 'ocean' is composed of flux potentialities that orbit fixed events.
I will expand on this point later (see N-Space's Vortex - Size).
Since history is in flux, humanity could be destroyed by an event in its past that also involves its future.
- DOCTOR: Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed.
- DONNA: How do you know which is which?
- DOCTOR: Because that's how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That's the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. And I'm the only one left. - The Fires of Pompeii
- ROSE: I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be.
- DOCTOR: That's what I see. All the time. And doesn't it drive you mad? - The Parting of the Ways
- REXX: The deal is that someone engineered this. That black hole up there shouldn't exist at all, not in this sector of space and certainly not at this point in time. Even as a potential aspect of established history its presence here is more than a little... disruptive. As you can hear reality is wearing thin, timelines are crashing into one another.
- ACE: Those voices...
- REXX: It must be so hard for you, not being a Time Lord. We're so used to these phenomena, we experience every second every moment every alternative of every instance all at once, but you... you've never had that. Sometimes we forget that you're still learning. - Intervention Earth
I will expand on this point later (see N-Space's Vortex - Size).
Since history is in flux, humanity could be destroyed by an event in its past that also involves its future.
- MARTHA: The thing is, though am I missing something here? The world didn't end in 1599. It just didn't. Look at me. I'm living proof.
- DOCTOR: Oh, how to explain the mechanics of the infinite temporal flux? I know. Back to the Future. It's like Back to the Future.
- MARTHA: The film?
- DOCTOR: No, the novelisation. Yes, the film. Marty McFly goes back and changes history.
- MARTHA: And he starts fading away. Oh my God, am I going to fade?
- DOCTOR: You and the entire future of the human race. It ends right now in 1599 if we don't stop it. But which house? - The Shakespeare Code
- DOCTOR: No. That's the world as Sutekh would leave it. A desolate planet circling a dead sun.
- SARAH: It can't be! I'm from 1980.
- DOCTOR: Every point in time has its alternative, Sarah. You've looked into alternative time.
- LAURENCE: Fascinating. Do you mean the future can be chosen, Doctor?
- DOCTOR: Not chosen, shaped. The actions of the present fashion the future.
- LAURENCE: So a man can change the course of history?
- DOCTOR: To a small extent. It takes a being of Sutekh's almost limitless power to destroy the future. Well? - Pyramids of Mars
- DOCTOR: Just before you did. Look, I know what you're thinking, but it's one possible future. It's one timeline. You want me to tell you that Earth's going to be okay? Cos I can't. In your time, humanity is busy arguing over the washing-up while the house burns down. Unless people face facts and change, catastrophe is coming. But it's not decided. You know that. The future is not fixed. It depends on billions of decisions, and actions, and people stepping up. Humans. I think you forget how powerful you are. Lives change worlds. People can save planets, or wreck them. That's the choice. Be the best of humanity. Or... - Orphan 55
- ‘Have I seen them? Yes, I’ve seen them. Or heard of them. Englands with a third, fourth, or fifth Civil War. A resurgent monarch who ruthlessly oppresses all democracy. Or a triumphalist, hereditary Puritan Protectorate that rules the country until the twentieth century. Or an invading Catholic army which takes advantage of England’s crisis to take over most of the known world. Oh yes, they’re all out there. All kinds of futures. Some great, some truly terrible.’ - The Roundheads
To explain what established history is, we'll first need to go over the Anchoring of the Thread (just the basics, though).
The first introduction to the Anchoring of the Thread was actually a somewhat mythologised (but accurate) account from The Deadly Assassin, which states that the Eye of Harmony balances all things so that they may neither flux nor wither, nor change state.
The first introduction to the Anchoring of the Thread was actually a somewhat mythologised (but accurate) account from The Deadly Assassin, which states that the Eye of Harmony balances all things so that they may neither flux nor wither, nor change state.
- WOMAN: Now Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony, which balances all things, that they may neither flux nor wither nor change their state in any measure. And he caused the Eye to be brought to the world of Gallifrey wherein he sealed this beneficence with the Great Key.
- RASSILON: A long time past, I helped end centuries of tyranny and bloodshed on my own planet. Helped to usher in a great age of enlightenment, with faithful counsel from the wisest of my Technomagi. I locked the space time continuum with the great Eye of Harmony. But, in my declining years, I grew fearful that by constructing the one true Time, I might have brought into being its very opposite. The menace of what I termed anti-time. A vile poison which might yet spill out to contaminate and undo all I had sought to achieve filled me with horror and dread. I resolved to journey into the strange, uncharted fringes of space time in search of my nemesis. And here, in this weird unreality, I found the Neverworld of Zagreus, the corpus of chaos and nowhen. I have battled this entity. It is dormant, docile now. My Tardis shattered, my exit hole shut. I am trapped in this place. But I leave this message in the hope that one day my Time Lords will find a way to rescue me. My body I have placed in a Zero Cabinet nearby, my last breath suspended. If I live, my children, I should like you to revive me and take me to Gallifrey. Take me home.
- DOCTOR: Now, how does it go? The Web of Time could not exist until the great Rassilon built the Eye of Harmony, the hitching post of chronology, that which does not flux nor wither nor change its state.
- ROMANA: The Eye of Harmony created a universe of positive time, finite time. Gallifrey anchored the continuity of the universe. But just as matter has its counterpart in anti-matter, just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then, by all the immutable laws of the universe, positive time, the Web of Time, must have its shadow.
- VANSELL: An undertaking which my Agency has been happy to assist. But imagine if the great Rassilon were to be returned to us, he who began the intuitive revelation, who established the Eye of Harmony and anchored the space time vortex. How much could we achieve? How much further could the Time Lords go? Madam President, the proof lies inside a Zero Cabinet somewhere within the bounds of this planet. Or Tardis. Whatever.
- DOCTOR: The Web of Time is already stretched at the seams. Gallifrey is the last bastion of positive Time. All that maintains the constance of the universe is Eye of Harmony, and if that is contaminated
- It’s long been established that although the universe pre-dates the Houses by several billion years, they were arguably the first to imprint their will on existence, and many of the “natural” laws of creation – the all-pervading Protocols of the Great Houses – were laid down at the start of the bloodlines’ ten-million-year reign during the anchoring of the thread. In effect the Houses built history, engineering it as a complex memetic structure running through the entire length of observed time (though certain parts of the far future seem to be beyond their reach, oddly).
- MEME [Terminology] An idea which “evolves” as it passes from one individual to another, and in doing so runs the same risks as any other evolving thing, in that the idea may mutate in order to suit a new cultural environment or become extinct altogether. First coined by western Earth culture in the late twentieth century, the word has become an accepted part of standard English even though many now consider the term to be utterly unnecessary: the argument is that all ideas are by definition memes, and that it’s impossible to conceive of an idea which doesn’t evolve as it’s passed from consciousness to consciousness. (It’s perhaps significant that the word first became popular in the scientific community. In one of his last works R. B. Nevitz pointed out that ‘all artists, visionaries and politicians have an innate understanding that ideas are evolutionary’ and suggested that ‘only someone trained exclusively in the hard sciences, but who had no understanding of the subtleties of culture, could genuinely believe that a special word might be needed for [a] thought which mutates’.) Nevertheless, when War terms are translated into English the word “meme” is often used instead of “idea”, and this is hardly surprising considering the arsenals used in the War. In a conflict where weapons are frequently designed to attack identity rather than solid matter, where tools (and even soldiers) can be manufactured using pen option as a medium… in such a conflict, those involved will inevitably use words which underline the organic, visceral nature of ideas. Quite often the ideas are the enemy, and in many cases will literally have lives of their own, some even possessing the ability to exist outside the context of a living mind. This is certainly true of, say, the anarchitects, and it could be said that the Celestis’ realm of Mictlan is the first major world to be composed of nothing but memes. - The Book of the War
- There was structure, the universe was a web made not of spider’s silk but of space and time. But in such a cosmos, one of fluxing quad-dimensionality, who was to say what was cause and what was effect? Even the newly woven children of his world understood the solution to that solemn inquiry: there was no history, don’t you see, only established history. Time was an ocean of broth, rich in elements and possibilities. Observations could be made to spot trends and to predict, for the oceans of time were subject to the laws of temporal mechanics. - The Gallifrey Chronicles
- The machinery required for the operation ended up comprising the largest structure ever built on the Homeworld. Later accounts describe it as a whole, as one “device”, though it’s doubtful it was designed or constructed that way. The first exploratory vessels, the Houses’ prototimeships, had already begun attaching themselves to strategic points in the formative future. They’d become anchors, holding the structure of history in place, and the machineries erected on the Homeworld could only have been centralised versions of the same technology. But there was a ceremony, without doubt, one great symbolic moment when the mechanisms locked into place and all the fragments of history were connected. Lore holds that elite representatives gathered in the centre of the machineheart to perform the bonding for all their Houses, while field agents in their vessels took their places at the other ends of the “threads”.
- The metastructure of history was held together at certain (vulnerable) node points across the Spiral Politic, and it seems reasonable to assume that at these points the foamstructures of the continuum were significantly weakened.
- GENERAL: She's been dead for half the lifetime of the universe. If you tried to change that, you could fracture Time itself. Doctor, Lord President, are you really going to take that risk?
- CLARA: They said, your lot, that if you saved me, Time would fracture. What does that mean?
- GENERAL: All Matrix prophecies concur that this creature will one day stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. It will unravel the Web of Time and destroy a billion billion hearts to heal its own.
- CLARA: Time isn't healing. I am still frozen.
- ASHILDR: You know what that means?
- CLARA: It means my death is a fixed event. The universe depends on it happening.
- VANSELL: In itself, the Earth girl's survival is not the problem. She was nothing. She would amount to nothing. Her descendants would be nobodies. She's nothing special, Doctor. She wouldn't go on to cure a disease or start a war or discover a planet. By rights, her survival would be but the tiniest hiccup, easily made and easily mended. But her living was a rift. Her very being a breach. Charlotte Pollard is a rip in the fabric of space time, a breach with presence and physicality. - Neverland
- LUCIE MILLER: No, listen. She has to be alive, doesn't she? Or else I couldn't have met her in the future, like.
- THE DOCTOR: Not necessarily.
- LUCIE MILLER: Not necessarily? But I knew her. I know her. She's still knocking around, you know, in Two Thousand and Seven. Good old Aunty Pat. Well, what about that thing you're always going on about? You know, the Web of Time, all that malarkey?
- THE DOCTOR: Lucie, the thing is ... the Web is resilient. Events can be reshaped, can reflow. If your Aunty Pat lived a quiet unobtrusive life, never got married, never had children, never did very much of anything, then ... well...
- LUCIE MILLER: Oh my God. I said it herself, didn't I? She didn't do much with her life. She was never a big noise.
- THE DOCTOR: Well then ... history could ... blink and miss her. - The Zygon Who Fell To Earth
- THE SPIRAL POLITIC [Terminology] [...] the best (colloquial) definition might be, the parts of history that matter. The Spiral Politic can be thought of as a map of the time-aware cultures of the universe, those cultures which have either begun developing time technology for themselves or been introduced to major time-active powers like the Great Houses, the Celestis and Faction Paradox, and also includes all those areas of the universe comprehended by those powers. However, the map is hardly a geographical one. Physical space is rarely in issue for the major powers – the timeships of the Great Houses have great difficulty with the concept of “distance” – so whenever the Spiral Politic is charted, the purely physical locations of things are largely unimportant. Naturally, those worlds, species and organisations which make up the Spiral are spread throughout the span of recordable time, and it might therefore be useful to think of it as a chart of occupied history…but even so, there are distinct relationships between worlds. Undoubtedly, any map of the Spiral Politic would have the Homeworld of the Great Houses at its core. The lodestone around which history revolves, cut off from normal-time and (theoretically) impervious to outside forces, it’s the one part of the map supposedly guaranteed never to change. In fact many time-active cultures argue that the Houses created established history, not in the sense that they plotted out every future event in advance but in the sense that they created the framework of history within which sentient species could understand their relationship to the past, the present and the future. If so, then it could be said that the Spiral Politic came into existence on the very day the Houses locked the framework together.
- If an observer were to scale the map down into two dimensions, then he or she would see the worlds on the outer edge of the Spiral (i.e. those less intimately linked to the Homeworld) constantly moving, shifting into new positions as their roles in history change and new Wartime alliances are made. Indeed, the defensive strategy of the Great Houses can probably best be understood as an attempt to keeps everything as still as possible. On 2D map, the worlds immediately surrounding the Homeworld (i.e. those over which it has most influence) would appear to be rock-solid, bulkheads against the uncertainty in the further reaches of the Spiral. Any movement among these worlds would be ominous indeed. More ominous still are “shooting star” worlds. Nothing creates more panic on the Homeworld than the sight of a previously static world suddenly and unexpectedly shooting across the chart, often in the direction of the Homeworld itself. Again, this doesn’t mean the world is actually, physically moving: it means that its relationship with history, its own timeline, is being drastically altered. Those with a reasonable understanding of Spiral mapping have speculated that if a significant enough world were to “collide” with the Homeworld itself, then that planet would immediately take the Homeworld’s palace; the chain reaction would re-form the continuum so that the planet had always been the centre of history; the Great Houses’ influence would be utterly wiped from the timeline; and the War would end in a victory for the enemy. But today, fifty years after the start of the War, both sides in the War have become well-entrenched across history and the days of such lightning strikes are long gone.
- The posthumans, whose most powerful cliques exist over two-million years after the fall of Earth, are one of the few species-groups to have become time-active by their own will rather than be cause of interference from the major powers. This makes it difficult for the Homeworld to chart their worlds in the Spiral Politic, and many maps of occupied history feature great black swathes beyond the posthuman age which might as well be marked “here be tygers”, and which alarm the Houses as enemy forces could easily be concealed there. Earth itself remains surprisingly stable, the bridgehead between those parts of causality controlled by the Homeworld and the posthuman worlds themselves. Posthuman cultures include Siloportem, the capital city of the posthumans’ “decadent” faction, of such importance that on the map it’s larger than many complete star-systems. Frontier Worlds. Even the knowledge of the Homeworld has its limits. The Great Houses have particular difficulty analysing those cultures which exist at the far-forward end of time, not because these worlds are in the distant future (the term is meaningless to the Houses)but because there are so many other time-aware cultures in the later universe that all sorts of factions are able to muddy the waters. On the map of the Spiral Politic there’s quite clearly a “frontier in time”, beyond which the Houses have difficulty speculating, and as a result the world of Zo la Domini – situated right on the cusp of that frontier – has been the subject of much scrutiny.
- Destroying worlds is easy: making sure they stay destroyed, in a War where temporal confusion often leads to battles being replayed to the point of insanity, is harder. It’s a measure of the Second Wave’s zeal that the method they chose to eradicate Ordifica has since been officially condemned even by the War-time ruling Houses. The strategy didn’t simply destroy the world but punched a world-sized hole in the framework of the Spiral Politic itself, a gap in history, a breach in the continuum which neatly ensured that there was no way of re-writing this final, terminal version of events. Time-travel can change the history books, but at the site of Ordifica there’s no longer any “paper” on which history can be written.
- Qixotl had good reasons for asking the humans to the auction. Earth was a low-interest world, according to the techno-pundits, but it had a kind of political value. The place was a nexus world, just like Dronid, or Solos, or Tyler’s Folly; insignificant on first sight, but when you looked at the bigger picture, you realised it was linked to the destinies of a whole host of intergalactic powers.
- DOCTOR: And that would please you. Look, don't worry. Earth survived with minimal damage. It's an historical fact.
- LYTTON: Yes, it's now become part of the Web of Time in the same way that the Cryons were destroyed.
- PERI: Earth's safe. So is history and the Web of Time.
- DOCTOR 6: Imagine this king now governed time itself, governed its use, its roadways. His was the past and the present. The future, too.
- DOCTOR 7: And that's the interesting bit. What would have happened if this king had not woven his Web of Time?
- DOCTOR 5: Why, his empire would have fallen. They always do. A matter of simple evolution, you know. Made extinct by the next dominant species. Happens all the time.
- CHARLEY: It's all right, Doctor. I'm not afraid. It's like I said in the Tardis. My time is up. There is no alternative. Oh, Doctor, you rescued me from the R101. You gave me these last few wonderful months. The things that I've seen, the places I've been. I've lived more than I ever could dream of, and all thanks to you. And you're the sweetest, the kindest, most wonderful man I've ever met. And I'm sorry it's come to this, and I'm sorry it has to end like this, but if the Web of Time is destroyed then all the time I've had, everywhere I've been, all those fabulous, fantastic things we've done, they won't ever have happened at all. Don't let those times be taken away. Don't let it all go to waste. I know it's an awful, terrible thing, but I want you to do it. Oh, Doctor, please do it before it's too late
- The truth is that although it was never recognised by House doctrine, the Yssgaroth atrocity was never entirely scrubbed from the continuum. The Yssgaroth entered history as history came into existence, so there was no real chance of completely removing the taint without ripping history apart and starting again from scratch.
- Meanwhile, Faction Paradox is unique among the Houses in that it has no written Protocols of its own, but the truth is that the unwritten Protocols affect the Faction just as much as they affect the other Houses. In this respect, it might be said that the Faction’s chief aim has always been to break the covenant and no longer be subject to the rules of the House founders, yet in order to do this the Faction would have to remove all traces of Homeworld culture and technology from its ranks… either that or re-write the continuum from scratch.
Here's a very silly diagram of what a few striations of the Web of Time could look like. For reference, certain paradoxes or events/things that never truly happened/shouldn't have existed (never-weres) can still affect the primary timelines due to time travel, i.e Daleks from Day of the Daleks were from an alternate timeline where they took advantage of a Third World War caused by a paradox of their own making to successfully occupy Earth in the 22nd century, and this timeline interacted with/affected UNIT's own history.
The star used to create the Eye of Harmony underwent a forced supernova to fuel early time travel experiments.
- DOCTOR: It was Omega who created the supernova that was the initial power source for Gallifreyan time travel experiments. He left behind him the basis on which Rassilon founded Time Lord society, and he left behind the Hand of Omega. - Remembrance of the Daleks
- WOMAN: And Rassilon journeyed into the black void with a great fleet. Within the void, no light would shine and nothing of that outer nature continue in being, except that which existed within the Sash of Rassilon. - The Deadly Assassin
Rassilon designed the Web of Time to coalesce all alternatives into the Web of Time, creating no alternatives within.
- RECORDER: File Ras/delta gamma. Seventy spans have passed since Cardinal Rassilon began investigating alternative realities. Alternative pasts, alternative presents, alternative futures. He discovered that all futures coalesce into one Web of Time alone. Free will is not a possibility. Alternative realities are not a possibility. When this universe was created, it brought into existence a race of creatures.
- Paraward, we find a sheath of histories which are either eternally separate from our own anchored time or which diverge and return to it so far in the past, or so far in the future, as to be – functionally – eternally separate from it in terms of the noospheres of the Great Houses. The physical laws of these universes are identical to ours, but all else is different. We call these paraward space-time entities ‘parallel worlds’. - The Brakespeare Voyage
- LEELA: What is temporal divergence?
DOCTOR: Did I ever tell you how important it is not to temper with history?
LEELA: Several times.
DOCTOR: Well, if you ignore me, temporal divergence results. And the prime timeline, the established course of history, will split, and a new timeline form. Leela, the universe cannot contain two timelines, so the one has to cancel the other out. If the changes are small, the differences iron themselves out, time getting back on the established track as quickly and simply as possible.
LEELA: If the changes are not small?
DOCTOR: Ah then we have two possibilities. Either the alternate timeline pushes forward and creates a new universe sealed away in its own little bubble of reality. Or...
LEELA: Or?
DOCTOR: Or the entire fabric of reality falls apart and we are all erased from existence.
- ‘On second thought, that’s not right either. Only one universe can exist, the laws of matter and energy dictate that inescapably. I have travelled into the future of the universe, crystallized moments of it, from a point in my personal timeline before I was apparently killed. If that happened then Ace’s universe, the universe in which I am alive is the real one, ergo this one cannot be, therefore I was not meant to die, and... hmm. Suddenly I’m very confused.’ - Blood Heat
- ROMANA: The Eye of Harmony created a universe of positive time, finite time. Gallifrey anchored the continuity of the universe. But just as matter has its counterpart in anti-matter, just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then, by all the immutable laws of the universe, positive time, the Web of Time, must have its shadow.
- DOCTOR: Anti-time, as intractable and destructive a force to causality as anti-matter is to space. Something with no past, no present, no future. A perpetuity of meaningless chaos. A now, with no beginning or end. Elegant. Brilliant. Thoroughly logical. And utter gibberish. I've been trolling about the space time vortex for a lot longer than any of you. If there really was another plane of cause and effect, don't you think that maybe, just maybe, after all these centuries, I might have noticed? - Neverland
- DOCTOR: Yes, yes. And between them they bore witness to a billion alternatives. I can see things in my mind's eye. I can see me, thousands of mes doing difference things in different places, but all at once. Alternative realities. Or maybe this is an alternative, and one of those others is real. You're part of me. Can't you see what I'm seeing?
- ZAGREUS: Always.
- DOCTOR: Look there. I see myself on the planet Oblivion, facing a race called the Horde. And there, look. A tiny reality where Gallifrey isn't a planet but a timeless diamond, drifting through the stars. I can see a universe where the Time Lords have terrible mind powers, and another where they have ceased to exist. Time wound backwards to eliminate their every trace. A planet, Earth, where the Nestenes very nearly destroyed everything. And another Earth, upon which I have plucked out one of my own hearts. But which is real, and which are the alternatives?
- ZAGREUS: There is no alternative.
- DOCTOR: You mean no one knows which reality is the real one?
- ZAGREUS: They are all real, and primary to their inhabitants. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter. Who is there to care? They all exist, occasionally sharing moments, eras. The rest of the time self-contained and unaware. But all are destined to end together, and very soon. - Zagreus
- Someone in this novel-world is planning to rewrite history. Whoever it was already has the power to do that in minor ways, like writing me out of the world, but give somebody the caldera and…well, put it this way…the caldera can rewrite the history of more than just one universe. And influences can travel from books to their readers quite easily. If I was reading this book, I’d be really hoping the goodies win. - Head of State
- DOCTOR: Engin, that Sash is a technological masterpiece. It protects its wearer from being sucked into a parallel universe. All he needs now is the Great Key and he can regenerate himself and release a force that'll obliterate this entire stellar system. - The Deadly Assassin
Platonic Forms
I was told the description of Platonic forms in The Book of the Enemy could get some high results. For reference, the author of the story is a fan of Plato's works.
The Enemy and the Time Lords (due to their relationship with history and ability to literally manipulate concepts) are described as living ideas and impingements on the 'reality of the eternal forms' that Plato wrote about, implying Plato's description of form is accurate, and the wartime powers are an exception.
The Enemy and the Time Lords (due to their relationship with history and ability to literally manipulate concepts) are described as living ideas and impingements on the 'reality of the eternal forms' that Plato wrote about, implying Plato's description of form is accurate, and the wartime powers are an exception.
- ‘An idea can…wait. You’re talking about magic. You’re talking about people’s minds changing the world. That’s magic. Are you saying magic exists?’ ‘Well, yes and no. Yes, magic exists, but no, ‘people’ have nothing to do with it. The beings we are talking about are not people in any sense we would use the term. They are much more than that. One might call them living ideas, and wherever and whenever they go, they reshape reality around themselves. The very currents of history are shaped to their whims, and a mere thought from them can cause a civilisation to rise or fall. One might think of them as impingements on reality of the eternal forms your Earth philosopher Plato wrote so eloquently about. They are eternal, and exist in all times and all places at their whim.’
- ‘Yes, I believe so. The ambassador talked of a war between powerful factions of gods – a war between ideas, Platonic forms.’ ‘That appears to be the size of things, yes.’
- ‘But how can Platonic forms be at war, Holmes? They’re eternal and unchanging – that’s what it means to be one. A triangle can’t go to war with the concept of justice!’ ‘Ah, but it can. And indeed that is precisely what is happening. Have you ever heard of non-Euclidean geometry?’ ‘I confess I have not.’ ‘It is a branch of the pure mathematics originally conceived by Herr Gauss, but taken to its most refined form by my old adversary Professor Moriarty, whose observations of asteroidal dynamics led him to create his famous theory of relativity, which is only now, some thirty years later, gaining widespread acceptance. It is a mathematics in which a triangle may have angles which add up to more than – or less than – one hundred and eighty degrees. A mathematics, in short, in which a triangle is not a triangle. And Moriarty showed, with his astronomical observations, that this is the mathematics which actually applies to our own universe. Triangles as we understand them now exist only in men’s heads – the real world now only has triangles which are not triangles at all. A fact about the Platonic Forms which we all know to be true – and to this day one can still prove with ruler and compasses that a triangle must indeed only have one hundred and eighty degrees of angles – is false as it applies to their extrusion into the real world. The triangle – and the square and the circle – are now merely fictions, and we live in a world of non-triangles, non-squares, and non-circles, even though our minds tell us otherwise.’ ‘Holmes, this sounds like a nonsense!’ ‘The modern mathematics does, indeed, sound like nonsense, and many men when confronted with the facts simply refuse to acknowledge them. But they remain the facts. And once one has read Moriarty’s On the Dynamics of the Asteroid, one knows the truth – we are living in the world described in Moriarty’s book, not Euclid’s.’
- ‘But Holmes, you can’t be arguing that Moriarty’s book changed the nature of reality?’ ‘I do not rule out the possibility, though I confess that my own understanding of celestial mechanics was never such that I could have described, prior to Moriarty’s work, the current state of affairs. I cannot be sure that the nature of space was ever other than it is. But whether or not he did, one can see from my example how a book can change the nature of reality’s relationship with the Platonic forms, yes?’ ‘I’m not entirely sure I follow, but carry on…’ ‘Now look at this.’ Holmes handed me a book, and I examined it. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. I opened it and noted its indicia, stating it was first published in 1897, and then started to read the opening paragraphs – which I have since committed to memory: No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. ‘Holmes!’ I exclaimed after reading a page or two, ‘surely this is a history of the late war? Some evidence that our senses were not mistaken, and our memories not incorrect?’ ‘Alas, I fear not,’ he replied. ‘That book did not exist last night. I found it on my bookshelf this morning, in the small section I have devoted to romances. While this book accords with my memories in all its particulars, it nonetheless purports to be a work of fiction, and has been taken as such by the general public, in much the same way as you view Ruritania as an imaginary land rather than the very real place it remains in my own memory.’ ‘So when you talk about books…are you saying that people are writing books and somehow…capturing reality and making it fictional?’ ‘Ah!’ he laughed, ‘so close and yet so far! No, how could writing a book make reality into a fiction? No, my contention is that people are reading a book, and that book is changing their ideas, and thus the nature of reality. In fact, I believe they are reading a very specific book.’
- They are not themselves the Enemy, but they have been at times useful idiots capering in its shadow. However ignore the full range of sources the good theorist does not. We cannot know at this time, the truth or falsity of the following narrative in its ultimate details, although the majority of it is plainly and simply factual. This may be part of its danger. In my time there was a fiction of an evil man, Doctor Mabuse, who – though he died – still left a testament, an embodiment of his will, by which others were made over into his image. In such stories as these from the legends or propaganda of third parties we see the fingerprints (if fingers they may be said to have) of The Enemy’s Testaments.
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