CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

THE DIFFERENCE

‘Ah, here he comes,’ Red’s female double said happily as an eerie noise grated through
the room.
VROOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOK!
VROOOOOOOOOOK!
‘What?!’ Freaka-chu said, his eyes wide as a large blue, wooden Police Box with a
flashing light on top materialized out of thin air.
‘WHAT?!!’
The blue box gave a whoomph as it settled completely and lay still for a few
moments. The small windows around the top of the panels on each side emitting a warm
glow from within.
‘Wonder how annoyed he’s going to be this time,’ Elion’s double mused.
One of the doors on the front of the box flew open and a man’s head with very
short brown hair, a large nose and huge ears popped out, scanning the area with beady
eyes that were suddenly locked into a frown.
‘What is the problem?!’ He cried, disappearing back inside the box and firmly slamming
the door behind him. The light atop the box flared into life once more as the machine’s
engines roared.
VROOOOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOK!
The blue box ebbed in and out of existence in waves as the sound of its motors
reverberated around the room.
VROOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOOK! VROOOOOOOOOK!
VROOOOOOOOOOK!
‘He didn’t even shout all that much that time,’ Jazz’s double observed.
‘No swearing,’ Red’s female double added.
‘I miss the swearing,’ Elion’s double said sadly. ‘It was so inventive.’
Freaka-chu rubbed his face and got to his feet as steadily as he could. He could
feel a feint static crackling over him that could only have come from time-travel without
the aid of a machine to ride in. He wished he had some 3D glasses so he could see the
effect fully. It always amused him to see it. But now was not the time for petty
amusements. Now was the time for action. Of some kind. He wasn’t sure which. The blue
post box was quite obviously a RETARDIS. It made the same noise, obviously had the
same volition by-way of its internal capacity and … well … it was disguised as a police
box. That was disturbing. Exciting, yes, but disturbing. This information meant that he
might not be the last Video Lord afterall. He hadn’t recognized the face that had emerged
and promptly disappeared, but only Video Lords could operate RETARDIS machines.
Fact.
Anybody else who tried to use one would not be able to make it work. Even if they
did manage to work out the overly complex controls the machine simply wouldn’t listen
to them. So to speak. It was keyed in to only register the movement of its dials, nobs and
switches when it was Video Lord DNA manipulating them. It was a mechanism built in
after a large number of thefts due to the more elderly Video Lords leaving them unlocked
in dangerous neighbourhoods because in the olden days you could always leave your
door unlocked. Or so they said. The only problem with that ideology was that back in the
good old days that they were talking about, nobody had anything worth stealing. A full-
fledged time machine was another matter.
But that was all in the past and far beyond the point he needed to address.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, trying to walk towards the trio of onlookers. His legs didn’t seem to
want to work properly and he ended up doing a drunkard’s stumble rather than the
elongated, confident strides he had become used to taking. He decided to give up on
trying to walk and instead, he leaned against a wall. ‘Where exactly are we?’ He asked,
wiping his brow with his scarf, and then regretting doing so because of the hundreds of
tiny cotton hairs he left stuck to his forehead.
‘Doesn’t listen very well, does he?’ Jazz’s double commented openly. ‘Greg thinks this
guy’s a dick if you ask Greg, which you should … Greg is awesome.’
‘Like we said,’ Elion’s double replied. ‘There are the Lithium Rooms … or at least, they
were.
Freaka-chu looked about. The place did bear a large resemblance to The Mercury
Rooms, but these were devastated, destroyed beyond any kind of manageable repair.
Walls had crumbled from the buildings, structures had been ripped apart and there was
a giant hole in the floor that could be seen through a section of destroyed wall where
undoubtedly, a Black Hole Operating System used to be.
‘What happened here?’ Freaka-chu asked in open awe at the level of destruction.
‘You mean you don’t know?’ Red’s female double barked. ‘Where have you been? Under a
rock with your fingers in your ears and your head up your arse?’
‘In Greg’s opinion, it is still up there … if you ask Greg … which you should … Greg is
awesome,’ Greg commented dryly.
‘Now, now … Greg, Lucy,’ Elion’s double wagged his finger and sighed as he turned to
Freaka-chu. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘Apparently I’ve got time,’ Freaka-chu replied.

***

Noile exited the portal into a shabby café that he had begun to frequent and threw
himself down at his usual table. It was a dismal affair that hadn’t been cleaned for some
time. Dirty cups of coffee were piled up on and around it, and the ash tray was
overflowing. He tried to order a drink, but the waiters weren’t really paying attention and
seemed only to be killing time until their shift ended by ignoring the customers. Noile
glowered and took out an e-book he had almost finished reading.
He had been planning to spend his afternoon watching a good movie or two, but
that seemed to be out of the question now. Having all of the hosting sites at user disposal
was perfectly dandy but the fact that the process was still new and in the development
stages was obvious.
Videos appeared seemingly at random intervals with no warning. If you happened
to stumble across one, it would be by chance and chance alone. The odds of the Video
still being active by the time you got there were astronomical to boot. The system was in
desperate need of a revamp.
Though the odds were low, Noile had a knack for getting to Videos before they
disappeared. He just seemed to be in the right place at the right time. He’d worked out
the integral mechanisms of the system itself and had taught himself to follow it.
He sort-of knew who uploaded regularly, he kinda-knew where they uploaded too,
and more or less how fast he needed to get there before whatever it was that was deleting
the Videos did its work.
It was for these reasons that, when Noile looked over his book to pick up his
coffee, he noticed a dark grey cube on the table next to the sugar packets.
‘Huh,’ Noile said to himself as he picked up the object and examined it more closely.
‘Weird pepper pot,’ he concluded before a bright green momentary flash all around him
brought him to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t a pepper pot.
He looked around and discovered that he wasn’t in the café anymore. He wasn’t
quite sure where he was anymore. A long, wide open-air corridor the same dark grey
colour as the cube had materialized out of thin air around him. There were several
buildings of differing shades of grey trimmed with a bright green colour at regular
intervals down the walls around him.
‘I guess I’m not in Aruba anymore,’ Noile mused.
‘YOU WERE NOT IN ARUBA TO BEGIN WITH,’ an other-worldly voice echoed from
everywhere and nowhere all at once.
‘Who’s there?’ Noile demanded at his empty surroundings. ‘Where am I?’
‘YOU ARE SAFE,’ the voice replied.
‘That’s not what I asked,’ Noile frowned. ‘Where am I?’
The green trim around the walls began to glow brightly as the Internet sky above
them shone brilliantly. ‘NOILE … I WELCOME YOU TO MY VISION … I WELCOME YOU
TO THE WORLD OF PEEKVID … I GUNDULACH, WELCOME YOU TO, THE LITHIUM
ROOMS …’

‘… and you want me to go to the main Video Hosting sites to bring back links for you?’
she asked quizzically.
‘NOT FOR ME,’ ToPuke’s voice replied casually. ‘PEEKVID KINDA-LIKA-SORTA HERE IS
SO ANYONE CAN, LIKE GET AT THE LINKS AND VIDS THEY WANT, Y’GET ME? LIKE
I SAID, WE’RE PUTTIN’ A TEAM OF LINK HUNTERS TOGETHER, AND YOU’RE ON
OUR STAR-PICK LIST, LASS.’
‘Alright,’ she nodded, adjusting the settings on her camera. ‘Sounds super-fantastical!
I’m in.’
‘NICE ONE,’ ToPuke said happily. ‘I’VE CALLED AHEAD. WE’LL BE SENDIN’ YOUR
TEAM MATE TO MEET YOU WHEN YOU GET WHERE YOU’RE GOING..’
‘Team mate?’ she gasped. ‘That’s super! I love meeting new people!’
‘RIGHT, BEST OF LUCK THEN… LUCY,’ To Puke said as the Exit Portal closed around
her.

‘People of Greg QC’s Barrister Extravaganza!’ Greg said proudly, putting away his
Leprosy Ray. ‘You have witnessed a momentous occasion here today. The first live
broadcast of Greg QC’s Barrister Extravaganza, here at Bebo!’ Applause. ‘Now! Many
have heard that Greg QC was going to travel to a place named The Lithium Rooms this
weekend, to observe its opening!’
There were murmurings of agreement through the audience.
‘WELL!’ Greg continued. ‘Things have changed! The site will be opening today! And Greg
invites you; the followers of Greg to come with Greg to this new place and see it! … With
Greg!’

***

‘It’s amazing,’ Freaka-chu commented, rubbing his chin as he wandered around,

seemingly without aim through the wreckage of the Lithium Rooms. ‘It’s just like The
Mercury rooms, well … not exactly the same, I mean, there’s bound to be differences
when you cross dimensional barriers, and even before you start doing that you’ve got to
reckon with universal improbability factors … and they’re so big that even I need a
calculator to sort through them.’
‘What the hell are you going on about?’ Noile asked testily.
‘Well you try defining recurring sequences through twenty-nine digit numbers with an
infinite number of decimal places and then we’ll see who can be smug about it,’ Freaka-
chu huffed. ‘If you haven’t started rounding up by the time you get to the second million
then … you’re lying.’
‘No, seriously,’ Lucy clucked. ‘What the fuck are you talking about … actually, no … just
… shut up would you?’
‘Rude, but alright,’ Freaka-chu shrugged his scarf around him. ‘I do go on a bit
sometimes I know … but still … the level of rudeness around here!’
‘We should kill him and eat him if you ask Greg,’ Greg commented. ‘… Greg is awesome,’
he added.
‘The point is that to get a Universe so very much the same as the one I’ve come from is
astronomical. Seriously, the improbability of it is so large its an offence to recurring
numbers … so, anyway,’ he rounded on Noile. ‘You were saying. You got together as
Moderators of … Peekvid?’
 Noile nodded.
‘Alright, so, Peekvid, like ALLUC, made the point of bringing Videos to the masses.’
‘Yes,’ Lucy nodded. ‘We had a Spyware invasion that knocked our White Hole System
Unit’s couplings out. So, we went to find somebody who could fix it.’
‘And you had to go all around the houses until you found him. Finding an immortal to
get you in touch with a Sorceress, then using the Sorceress to lead you to an Oracle
before you were able to find him.’
‘Noile frowned. ‘Erm, no, not really.’

***

‘It’s no use,’ Dr. Math said irritably, throwing a wrench back into his toolbox. ‘It’s worse
than I feared. The Spyware virus has completely destroyed the couplings of the White
Hole Unit.’
‘Something tells me this is something I really should be paying attention to,’ Noile said,
scratching the back of his neck. ‘Is it?’
‘ONLY A LOT,’ Gundulach replied testily. ‘DR MATH, IS THERE ANY WAY THAT YOU
CAN REPAIR THE MACHINE?’
Dr. Math puffed and grunted a few times, inspecting the charred wiring, some of
which was still on fire. He lit a spliff on one and leaned back against the side of an access
panel. ‘Not a chance,’ he shook his head. ‘I can probably keep it stable for a few days, but
when this baby blows, it’ll take out the entire Universe.’
‘That sounds like a bad thing,’ Lucy mused.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ One of the Lithium Room’s new Moderators, The
Doctor said airily, stepping through the crowd to examine the machine, taking out a
small metal device that looked like a pen torch. ‘Mind out then,’ he said, brushing past
Lucy to get to the access terminal. ‘Now, stand aside while I have a look at it.’

***

‘Interesting,’ Freaka-chu mused, drumming his fingers on his chin.

‘He arrived a few days before all that,’ Lucy explained. ‘He tried to leave lots of times, but
he’s always back a few minutes later.’
‘Seventeen minutes later,’ Noile corrected. ‘And thirty-nine seconds.’
‘He said that he arrived here because he was needed. His own presence here alerted
himself in the past … or something like that.’
‘He tried to explain it to one of our other Moderators, King.’ Noile continued. ‘Poor little
guy, his head exploded.’
‘Urgh!’ Elion grimaced, sitting up and holding his head. ‘Did anybody get the number of
that Black Hole?’
‘Elion!’ Freaka-chu said brightly, standing over Elion, hands thrust deep into his
pockets. ‘Not to shock you now, and it may be wise to brace yourself Mister Hempher.
But we’ve crossed over into an alternative dimension after falling through The Black Hole
Operating System and we’re in the ruins of a place called the Lithium Rooms which
shares a parallel history with ALLUC for the most part and comes complete with
duplicates of our party members. Okay?’
Elion tried to stammer a response to this but couldn’t quite manage it. ‘What
happened to giving me time to brace myself?’
‘I didn’t say I was going to give you time,’ Freaka-chu replied haughtily. ‘I said it would be
wise to brace yourself. Good grief, Mister Hempher this is hardly the time to be arguing
over semantics and the relevance of time keeping within conversational methodology.’
Elion stared hard at Freaka-chu. ‘There’s … something … really … wrong … with
you.’
Freaka-chu waved away the comment and went about checking Red and Jazz,
who were also beginning to stir.
‘Jazz does not like what Jazz is seeing,’ Jazz commented, glaring at Greg maliciously.
‘Perhaps Greg is also unpleased with the disgrace representing Greg in other
dimensions,’ Greg replied loftily, taking a bag of cookies from his pocket and munching
on a handful pointedly. ‘Gweg ifv orvum!’ he added through a mouthful of mulched
biscuit.
‘Hang on,’ Red said, perplexed, looking at everyone present. ‘HANG ON!’ His eyes settled
on Lucy. ‘NO!’ He scowled.
‘Ha-ha!’ Jazz chortled. ‘You’re a girl in this universe … not much of a difference if you ask
Jazz.’
‘Greg was about to say something similar,’ Greg shrugged. ‘Greg prefers to take his time
with these things … Greg is awesome.’
‘Look!’ Freaka-chu blurted, running a hand down his face. ‘Can we focus for a moment
please, people? Something, terrible, something catastrophic happened to this place,’ he
bit his bottom lip, almost devouring it as he turned slowly to Noile. ‘What happened to
The Lithium Rooms? What happened to all the Members? To the other Moderators? To
your Administrators? What happened here?’
Noile lowered his eyes to the floor and moved uneasily before he looked up again,
cupping his face in his hands.

***

Screams. Terrible cries of panic filled the air as the first wave of destruction came.
Chaos descended as the internet sky above The Lithium Rooms grew dark and fire began
to fall.
Noile stumbled through the retreating crowd, the other Moderators in pursuit,
each of them brandishing their Volt-Pistols. All except for The Doctor who had once again
refused to even pick one up. He marched onwards through the destruction, through the
madness, that determined look on his face, refusing to give in to worry. Even though he
himself had resigned to the horrific reality of the situation.
The roars came again, the roars of the beasts. The impossible creatures that
loomed down, colossal and unfathomable in their dimensions. The Exit Portals were
thrown open, members ushered away to safety, but there was no time. No time at all,
there wasn’t enough portals to remove everybody as the creatures descended, bringing
destruction in their wake.
‘WE COULD ESCAPE IN YOUR MACHINE!’ Lucy shouted at The Doctor over the noise of
devastation. ‘TAKE US AWAY FROM HERE!’
‘What, for seventeen minutes?’ The Doctor retorted darkly. ‘No, there has to be a way to
stop them! There has to be some way! I can’t stand by and let it happen again! Not this
time, not here, not now!’
‘Then what do we do?’ Noile asked, panicking.
The Doctor looked up sharply. ‘Get the people out of here, any means necessary.
Use the Links if you have to … just get them out.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Lucy gasped.
‘I’m going to do what I have to,’ The Doctor said. ‘I’m going to stop the Titans.’

***

‘Unfortunately … turns out that they’re not big on being stopped.’

The group had pretty much ignored the repeated roar of the blue box’s engines as
it reappeared in the centre of what hat been The White Hole Room. The Doctor was
leaning against the door way, arms folded, his leather jacked shining in the dim green
light. ‘I tried everything I could … they were unstoppable, completely … they destroyed
everything … but everybody got out okay. Everybody aside from us. My TARDIS is still
trapped in the loop that brought me here in the first place, and all of the portals are
gone. Nobody gets out. Everyone’s stuck.’ The Doctor had paced forwards as he spoke
and now stood eye-to-eye with Freaka-chu. ‘It seems that everybody here’s got a double.’
‘It certainly does seem that way,’ Freaka-chu raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m The Doctor,’ The Doctor said dryly.
‘What a coincidence,’ Freaka-chu said in a clipped tone. ‘I’m The Dr.’
The pair were silent for what seemed like an eternity. Their eyes fighting a
wordless battle in the air between them.
‘I thought I was the only one left,’ Freaka-chu said, his face breaking into a smile.
‘Everybody died,’ The Doctor replied. ‘I’ve been on my own for so long, I couldn’t sense
any others. There was nobody.’
‘You know what this means?’ Freaka-chu grinned.
‘Oh yeah,’ The Doctor nodded, smiling brightly. ‘I’m not the last Time Lord afterall.’
‘And neither am I,’ Freaka-chu laughed before his face dropped and his smile faded.
‘Wait … what?’
‘This is fantastic,’ The Doctor continued to smile. ‘I know we’re from different Universes
and technically we’re connected entities occupying the same space but all the same-’
‘Hold on,’ Freaka-chu held up his hands. ‘Hold-on-hold-on-hold-on-hold-on … did you
say Time Lord?’
‘Of course I did,’ The Doctor replied, blinking rapidly. ‘Problem?’
‘Oh, just a little bit of one, yeah,’ Freaka-chu clucked.
‘There’s a point to all of this,’ Noile said, taking one of Greg’s cookies and popping it into
his mouth. ‘I’m sure they’ll get to it some time in the next millennium.’
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Elion said, reaching for the bag of cookies to take one himself.
‘HOW DARE YOU!’ Greg screamed angrily, snatching the bag away. ‘IF YOU EVER TRY
TO TAKE ONE OF GREG’S COOKIES AGAIN, GREG WILL RIP YOUR NIPPLES OFF!’
‘NOBODY SHOUTS AT PEOPLE FROM JAZZ’S UNIVERSE!’ Jazz cut across him furiously.
‘Oh, shut yourself up dick head,’ Noile scowled.
‘Why would anybody need a Lord of Time?’ Freaka-chu scoffed at The Doctor.
‘Why would anybody need to be a Lord of recorded TV material?’ The Doctor retorted.
‘The Video Lords have been around since the dawn of time!’ Freaka-chu persisted. ‘You’re
a mockery of everything they stand for!’
‘Hmmm,’ Red said, leaning against a wall next to Lucy. ‘Its interesting isn’t it?’
‘Watching people argue with themselves?’ Lucy smirked.
‘Very Freudian,’ Red observed.
‘Very,’ Lucy nodded. ‘How long do you think it’ll take them to get over it?’
Red checked his watch. ‘Give them about five minutes.’
‘Only five minutes until they stop fighting?’ Lucy asked unsurely.
‘No,’ Red shook his head. ‘About five minutes ‘til the punch-up.’