Rose

When Rose Tyler switched off her alarm at 7:30 AM one sunny March morning, she had no idea that the day ahead would change her life. 

That morning, as with every morning, Rose went through the motions. She awoke to a room she hadn't redecorated since she was eight years old. She smiled halfheartedly to her mum as she made her way to the bathroom.

Rose washed her hair, noting with displeasure that the brown roots of her dyed-blonde hair were beginning to show. She put on her least-raggedy pair of jeans, a white tank top, and favorite pink sweater top, the fuzzy one with the hood and overly-long sleeves--the one that disguised her tummy and her wrists. And this morning, Rose decided to put on her hands.

Rose Tyler was born with no hands, just knobby stubs. Her mother was more distressed by this than Rose herself was, but Rose learned to do things like any other little girl, except that she used her feet, mouth, and the "nubs" of her wrists.

She had two false hands. The left one made of thick plastic and realistic enough, but wouldn't move naturally. The other one was just a pair of metal grabbing fingers, called dual hooks.

Rose hated wearing her hands. They required a lot of effort to put on, and the straps chafed against her skin. But mostly, she hated how artificial they looked. She felt that they made her look almost as robotic as she felt. But she wore them anyway; the customers at Henrik's didn't like looking at her nubs.

As usual, she grabbed her keys, kissed her mother goodbye, hopped on the tram, and spent the rest of her morning folding shirts.

During her lunch break, Rose met up with her girlfriend, Kunjal. Rose tried her best not to be irritated with Kunjal, but everything irritated her today. Rose and Kunjal had been "girlfriends" for a long time, but they remained in a nebulous place between friends and something-more-than-friends.

Kunjal Damahi was a petite, Asian girl with fawn-colored skin, short ash-brown hair, and tinted glasses. She had recently come to London from Nepal, and spent most of her time at the community college learning auto repair and fine-tuning her English. Her English was still broken in places, but she knew enough to make her interest in Rose known.

Today, as always, Kunjal was a bundle of nerves. Today she was fussing over the germs ("jīvānuharū!") that might have grown in her foil-wrapped sandwich since this morning. But when she sensed Rose's angst, she was keen on helping her feel better. Kunjal did so with an approximation of breakdancing that she saw earlier that day.

Rose and Kunjal shared a laugh, a kiss, and a hug, and Rose felt better for the rest of her afternoon.

Still, Rose felt a rush of relief when the store's intercom announced that it, "Will be closing in five minutes. Thank you." Just a few minutes to wrap up, and she could go home.

But as she was leaving, the door attendant drew her attention to a plastic bag, and a task she had forgotten to complete. Rose rolled her eyes, grabbed the bag firmly, and started into the store basement. Her annoyance could probably have filled the elevator, the shaft, the store. Hell, it probably could have filled London like a massive, gaseous cloud of "Meh."

Once in the basement, she looked left and right. "Wilson?" she called. "Wilson, I've got the lottery money!"

She knocked on the heavy steel door of H.P. Wilson, C.E.O.  Her notoriously forgetful boss had locked the door again, leaving her stranded in the dank basement with a bag full of cash that she didn't have any use for. Great, she thought. She wanted to yell at him, but she bit her tongue and called loudly, "Look, I can't hang about, cos they're closing the shop. Wilson!"

Rose muttered to herself. She didn't really have hard feelings toward Wilson. She just wanted to go home.

Rose turned as she heard an echoing clatter behind her. "Hello?" She heard an odd electronic whine, but that wasn't too unusual in the basement. "Hello, Wilson? It's Rose!"

She advanced down the dark hallway, getting more anxious with each step. "W-Wilson?" she called a few more times. She sighed in relief as she found a set of double doors that looked promising.

Cautiously, she pressed her body against the doors, opening them slowly. She used a big, industrial light switch so she could see in there. Odd shadows crisscrossed the room, but as the lights came on, Rose saw that they were only mannequins. For whatever reason, this didn't reassure her.

Acting braver than she felt, Rose crept through the army of shop mannequins, continuing to call Wilson's name. She was halfway down the hallway when she heard the double doors slam behind her.

Someone else was down here.

Rose ran back toward the doors. She pushed and pulled them with all her might, but they wouldn't budge. She felt like a terrified child, trapped in a strange room with the mannequins, of which she was still pretending not to be afraid.

Then she heard footsteps coming down a flight of stairs. It could be Wilson…

"Is that someone mucking about?" Rose shouted, trying to sound unintimidated. She pushed her straight blonde hair out of her eyes and advanced back down the hallway towards the sound. "Who is it?" she said in that same voice.

That was when she heard a sick, squeezing, crunching noise behind her, and she saw-- did she really see that? One of the mannequins was moving.

Strike that. Two or three of them were moving.

"Heh. You got me. Very funny." she said.

But that didn’t deter the pranksters. And that's what they were, what she knew they must be. Just pranksters.

"Right. I've got the joke! Whose idea was this? Is it Derek's? Is it?"

But now an army of mannequins was beginning to move, and they were closing in on her. She backed up, terrified, until she had backed into a bunch of boxes full of old holiday décor. Her back was against the cement wall. Several of the mannequins raised their hands, as if to strike her.

Rose squeezed her eyes shut, preparing for whatever happened next.

***

Then, a strange man grabbed her hand firmly.

Unfortunately, he had grabbed her left, plastic hand.

Rose turned to see an aged Black man, a man she had never seen before. His wide, copper eyes gawped at the plastic prosthesis that he was now holding. He shuffled his feet uncomfortably, as though embarrassed at his mistake.

But he didn't try to give Rose's hand back to her. Instead, he pocketed it in his worn leather jacket.

An impish grin crossed the stranger's face. He grabbed Rose's forearm and whispered, "Run!"

The old man dragged Rose through the basement with shocking speed. The plastic men were coming after them in increasing numbers, like an advancing army. From behind them, from other corridors, from all possible directions. Rose was too grateful to her apparent rescuer--and too afraid of the plastic men—to wonder who this stranger was or what he was doing here.

They reached the service elevator a split second before the mannequins.

The old man pressed and held the Door Close button. Then he turned his back to Rose, watching the floor number rise.

Finally, Rose hazarded to talk to the man. "Who were they?"

"Plastic," the man said. He turned back to watch the elevator door. He stood proudly, his arms crossed almost defiantly.

"Very clever, nice trick," Rose retorted. "Who were they, then—students? Is this a student thing or what?"

The old man turned back to her, staring into her. "Why would they be students?" he asked. It was the first time Rose got a good look at him. It wasn't just his skin that was black. All of his clothes, from his running shoes, to his leather jacket, to his taqiyah—the round skullcap Arab men tended to wear—were various shades of black. The only things that stood out were his white beard, his curly white hair, and his copper eyes.

Rose shrugged, more than a little flustered by the man.

"Well, you said it. Why students?" he said. Rose was startled. With his ethnic appearance, traditional headgear, and solemn face, she had expected him to be slow and deliberate in his words. While he did have noticeable African and Arabic tones mixed with his Northern English, his voice was youthful, fast-paced.

Rose was still shaking, but she felt the need to give this guy an answer. "'Cos… to get that many people dressed up and being silly, they got to be students."

He smiled approvingly. "That makes sense. Well done." He turned back toward the elevator door. "They're not students."

"Whoever they are," Rose said, "when Wilson finds them, he's gonna call the police."

"Who's Wilson?" the man asked, looking back at Rose once more.

"Chief electrician."

"Wilson's dead," the man said coldly.

Just then, the elevator door opened, forcing Rose to run after him again. "That not funny, that's sick!" she said.

The man took no notice. "Hold on. Mind your eyes," he said. He pulled a small, glowing instrument out of his pocket and pointed it at the elevator button.

"I've had enough of this, now—" Rose started to protest, but the button fizzed and sparked, drowning her out.

The man walked briskly away, but Rose pursued. He had one of her hands, after all!

"Who are you then?" she demanded. "Who's that lot down there? I said, who are they?"

"They're made of plastic," he said impatiently. "Living plastic creatures. They're being controlled by a relay device on the roof, which would be a great big problem if I didn't have this!"

To Rose's shock, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a small bomb, a maniacal grin crossing his face.

"So!" he continued, faster than Rose could process what he was saying, "I'm gonna go upstairs and blow them up, and I might well die in the process."

Then the old man said, in the tone of someone shooing a stray dog from his front step, "But don't worry about me. No. You go home, go on. Go and have your lovely beans on toast."

Rose stared. It was a second before she realized that this man had led her outside the building, through the fire escape.

The old man ducked back inside, but not before saying, "Don't tell anyone about this, cos if you do, you'll get them killed." Then he slammed the door.

Rose turned to leave, dazed.

Then the door opened again. "I'm the Doctor, by the way," he said. "What's your name?"

"Rose," she said absently.

"Nice to meet you, Rose," he said almost cheerfully. "Run for your life!"

***

Rose chose to take the man's advice. As she jogged away from Henrik's, she was hyper-aware of the dummies in the shop windows. So hyper-aware, in fact, that she almost became a hood ornament for a black taxicab as she crossed the street.

About a block from Henrik's, Rose heard an earth-shattering BOOM from the department store. Looking back, she saw fires erupting out of the top floors and roof.

Now, she was determined to run. It didn't matter anymore if this was a prank, or who that man was, or where he had come from. She was in danger. As she ran down the main road, she took no notice of the panicking passers-by who were now filling the streets of central London.

She also didn't notice that she had run straight past an old blue box, marked POLICE.

***

By quarter till midnight, Rose had made it safely back to her apartment. She slumped on the couch, holding a magazine limply as she listened to the droning news reporter on the BBC News 24.

"The whole of Central London has been closed off as police investigate the fire. Early reports indicate…"

Her mother brought her some tea as she jabbered on the phone. "I know, it's on the telly! It's everywhere! She's lucky to be alive."

Rose accepted the tea, holding it steady with her right metal hand and her left nub.

"Honestly, it's aged her. Skin like an old Bible!" Rose's mum continued.

Rose scowled. It was bad enough having her job blown up and her hand taken by a lunatic, and having her mother and the news informing the rest of London of her recent unemployment wasn't helping matters.

"Walking in now, you'd think I was her daughter! Oh, and here's herself…"

Kunjal had burst into the apartment, shouting in a combination of Nepali and English. "Ma āphnō sēla phōna bōlā'unu bha'ēkō chu! You could have died! Yō samācāra cha, yeah? Ma yō viśvāsa garna sakdaina!"

Then Kunjal swooped into Rose for what became a sudden and painful hug. Rose had to brace herself to avoid spilling and being burned by her tea.

"I'm alright! Honestly, I'm fine," she said, leaning slightly away from Kunjal. "Don't make a fuss."

"But what happened?" Kunjal asked.

"I dunno…" Rose said. She was massaging her forehead with her wrist, trying to stave off the headache she was developing.

"But," Kunjal enunciated. "What was it?"

"I wasn’t in the shop," Rose lied. "I was outside. I didn't see anything."

Mrs. Tyler scuttled back into the sitting room, phone in hand. "It's Debbie on the end," she said. "She knows a man on the Mirror. Five hundred quid for an interview!"

"Oh that's brilliant!" said Rose, trying to sound sincere. "Give it here."

As soon as Rose had hold of the phone, she slammed it on the receiver.

Rose's mum crossed her arms angrily. "Well, you've got to find some way of making money. Your job's kaput, one of your hands is gone, and I'm not bailing you out!"

Rose gestured helplessly at Kunjal, who was simply staring at the both of them.

The phone rang again, and Mrs. Tyler pounced on it like a cat on its favorite mouse toy.

"Bev? She's alive!" Mrs. Tyler began right away. "I've told her, sue for compensation! She was within seconds of death…"

Now that Mrs. Tyler had the chance to weave her (increasingly embellished) story again, she was content to hang around in the kitchen for a little while.

It was then that Kunjal took notice of Rose's drink. "What's that, tea? No, no! No good. You need a real drink."

"I'm alright," Rose insisted.

"Come on, now, you need a real drink. Let's go down the pub. You and me. My treat, yeah?"

Rose chuckled. "Is there a match on?"

Kunjal shook her head. "No, I'm just thinking of you, nanu!"

Rose smiled genuinely. "There's a match on, ain't there."

"That's not the point!" Kunjal looked a little bit guilty. "Last five minutes?"

Rose laughed. "Go on, then. I'm fine, really."

They shared a kiss. Kunjal playfully pushed Rose away from her, and Rose playfully tripped Kunjal in return. Soon, Kunjal had left to go to the pub and watch football with her college buddies.

Rose's face fell as soon as Kunjal was out of sight. She was left with her memories of the night, her magazine, her grating mother, and the droning news anchor.

"...Fire then spread throughout the store. Fifteen fire crews are in attendance, though it's thought there is very little chance of saving the infrastructure…"

***

Rose Tyler's alarm blared at 7:30 the next morning. She sat up, awakening to a room she hadn't redecorated since she was eight years old. She sat up as if to get ready for work. For a few moments, she had just the boredom and routine that were so familiar to her.

Then she remembered. The basement, the people dressed as mannequins, the crazy old man, the fire, her mother's nagging…

"There's no point in getting up, sweetheart! You've got no job to go to." So that wasn't Rose's imagination. She really was hearing her mother's voice.

Rose groaned and flopped down onto her bed. She knew that her mother meant well, but everything out of her mum's mouth seemed to rub salt into her wound. Rose lay in bed for a while that morning, only getting up when she got tired of the taste of her own breath.

Eventually, she got up, dressed, and sat down at the small table. She rolled an apple dully from wrist to wrist. She thought about eating it, but she wasn't hungry that morning.

"There's Finch's," her mother suggested. "You could try them. They've always got jobs."

Rose rolled her eyes, "Oh, great. The butcher’s."

"Well, it might do you good!" her mum said. "That shop was giving you airs and graces."

Rose gaped at her. Airs and graces? In what universe did having a decent job give you airs and graces?

Her mother took no notice. She left the table to clean herself up, chatting as she walked. "And I'm not joking about compensation. You've had genuine shock and trauma!"

Her mother paused. "Arianna got two thousand quid off the council just because the old man behind the desk said she looked Greek!"

Rose puzzled over this. Wasn't Arianna actually…?

"I know she is Greek, but that's not the point! It was a valid claim!"

Rose's mother retreated into her bedroom, the room closest to the door. Rose smiled for the first time that day. Her mum was sometimes very funny without ever intending to be.

Something rattled at the door.

"Mum, you are such a liar!" Rose said, getting up to investigate. "I told you to nail that cat flap down. We're going to get strays…"

"I did it weeks back!" her mum protested.

"Nah, you thought about it…"

Rose kneeled down to investigate the old cat flap, and she noticed four small nails lying on the ground.

Weird, Rose thought. Her mum was scattered sometimes, but not so scattered that she would get distracted as soon as she set about fixing the cat flap. And it wasn’t like her to leave sharp things lying around like this. Besides, Rose reasoned, she would have noticed at some…

Then, the cat flap twitched. Something alive was behind it!

Maybe it's a stray, Rose thought. She tapped against the door and pulled her hand back quickly, so as not to be bitten or scratched by the animal. There was no more sign of movement on the other side of the door, so Rose dared to open the cat flap all the way.

Staring back at her were two wide copper eyes.

She leapt to her feet, unlatched the door, and found the old man from Henrik's staring at her, as though surprised to see her there.

The old man looked her up and down and said, "What are you doing here?" in a tone of disbelief.

"I live here!"

"Well, what do you do that for?"

"Because I do," Rose said. "And I'm only at home because someone blew up my job!"

The man looked thoughtful. He pulled a small, blue instrument, the same he had used to blow up the elevator, and eyed it with confusion. "I must have got the wrong signal," he said finally. Then he knocked on Rose's forehead, as though trying to awaken an elf that lived in her brain. "You're not plastic, are you?"

Rose was surprised that the old man's lunacy could still surprise her. She was so surprised that she almost didn't hear him say, "Nope, bonehead. Bye then!"

Rose grabbed onto the old man's arm, pulling him inside the flat with surprising force. "You! Inside. Now!"

The man seemed a little taken aback at having such a young, handicapped, blonde girl give him orders like that. Still, he made no effort to leave the apartment. Instead, he glanced around to get more familiar with his surroundings, and placed the little blue instrument back inside his jacket.

From her bedroom, Rose's mum cried, "Who is it?"

Rose stood in her mother's doorway and placated her, "It's about last night. He's part of the inquiry. Just give us ten minutes."

Rose resolved to make this man at home. If she was to have any chance of getting a job, an explanation, or her hand, she was going to have to give this guy two things: tea, and the benefit of the doubt.

"She deserves compensation!" Rose's mum shouted at the man she had just met.

"Oh, we're talking millions!" said the old man, who had evidently decided to play along.

As soon as Rose had left, her mother stood up and approached the stranger. Clutching her silky pink robe closer to her, she cleared her throat and said in a syrupy voice, "I'm in my dressing gown…"

"Yes, you are," said the old man, in the tone of someone observing that it might rain later.

Mrs. Tyler said more insistently, "There's a strange man in my bedroom."

The old man stared her down. "Yes," he said, "there is."

Mrs. Tyler clutched the tie of her dressing gown and assumed a position that she believed was coy, girlish, sexy. "Well, anything could happen."

The old man blushed, as though he had just now understood her drift. With an apologetic smile, he simply said, "No."

Mrs. Tyler grimaced at the man as he left for the sitting room.

"Don't mind the mess," said Rose, hastily stacking some old magazines in an effort to tidy the sitting room. She hurried into the kitchen, while the stranger investigated the magazines on the coffee table. "Do you want a coffee?"

"Might as well, thanks," said the old man as he strode into the sitting room. "Just milk."

Rose sorted through unwashed dishes and disused appliances to find the instant coffee. "We should go to the police," she began. "Seriously, both of us..."

The old man didn't hear her over the roar of Mrs. Tyler’s hair dryer. While he waited for his coffee, he flipped through an old copy of Heat entertainment magazine. He furrowed his brow at a couple featured in the tabloid and said, "Hmm… That won't last. He's gay and she's an alien."

"… Now, I'm not blaming you," Rose continued obliviously, "even if it was just some sort of joke that went wrong…"

Quickly tiring of the magazine, the old man picked up a paperback novel. Flipping through its 300 pages in less than a second, he mused, "Hmph. Sad ending."

"… They said on the news they found a body…"

The old man then picked up an envelope addressed to Rose Tyler, and thereby learned the name of his hostess.

Then the old man caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror. He surveyed his own face with amusement. He seemed childlike, almost curious, as though he had never seen himself before. He examined his deep brown skin, bright eyes, curly white hair, slightly hooked nose, and protruding ears. He seemed happy with himself, but wiggled his ears with a look of displeasure.

"… All the same, he was nice." Rose continued, unheard. "Nice bloke…"

The stranger hummed "Luck Be a Lady" to himself for a bit. Finding a deck of playing cards, he tried an old card trick.

"Anyway, if we are gonna go to the police…"

The cards went flying all about the room, and the old man smiled sheepishly. "Maybe not," he mumbled to himself.

"… I want you to explain everything…"

The man winced as something wriggled against his chest. The movement was coming from his jacket pocket, as though there was a bird or a rat inside it. He reached inside and out came…

Rose's hand.

Quick as a flash, the hand had thrown itself out of the pocket and was clutching the old man's throat. He grasped wildly at the plastic hand, but couldn't get a grip around its fingers. He twisted and turned as he tried to pry its fingers off his throat. Soon he stumbled, catching himself on a chair. He sat up and tried again to force the hand off.

That was when Rose finally emerged with two mugs of instant coffee. What she should have seen was the old man's reddened face, bugged eyes, and thrusting tongue. However, what she did see was a man clasping her plastic hand to his throat, making a face and an absurd gagging noise.

"Oh, good, you’ve still got that!" Rose said. She rolled her eyes. "Honestly! You're all the same. Give a man a plastic hand… Anyway, I don't even know your name. Doctor… what was it?"

The man thrashed back and forth until, finally, he forced the hand away from his throat, throwing it into the air. It halted midair, reoriented itself, and clasped itself onto Rose's face.

The old man have the hand several hard pulls. But the hand was gripping Rose's face so tightly that before he could pull the hand off, the old man managed to pull Rose down on top of him.

They fell to the ground, or at least they would have, if they hadn't landed on the coffee table first. The table shattered and collapsed beneath their combined weight, as the old man still tried vainly to pull the hand off of Rose's face.

Trying again to free Rose from her hand, the old man instead managed to push Rose away, nearly throwing her across the room. Rose landed safely on the chair. The man, now purple in the face, quickly pulled the little blue instrument out of his pocket. Pointing it at the hand, he finally was able to pull it away from Rose.

Rose watched as the tube-like machine whined and pulsed, while her plastic hand continued to twitch grotesquely. Finally the old man jammed the instrument into the palm of the plastic hand, putting the movement to a stop.

He finally took a deep breath. "It's all right, I've stopped it." He tossed the hand to Rose and said, "There you go, you see? 'Armless."

Rose caught the hand deftly between her wrists as the old man laughed at his own joke. "Do you think?" she said angrily, and used her hand to strike him on the arm.

***

The old man rushed down the spiraling flights of stairs outside Rose Tyler's flat, with Rose in quick pursuit.

"Hold on a minute, you can't just go swanning off!" she said.

"Yes I can. Here I am. This is me, swanning off. See ya!" he said.

"But that hand was moving; it tried to kill me!"

"Ten out of ten for observation."

"You can't just walk away! That's not fair! You've got to tell me what's going on. "

"No, I don't."

Catching up with the old man at the front doors, Rose said, "All right, then. I'll go to the police. I'll tell everyone."

The man smirked.

"You said, if I did that, I'd get people killed." Rose shrugged. "So, your choice. Tell me or... I'll start talking. "

"Is that supposed to sound tough?"

Rose blushed. "Sort of."

"Doesn't work."

Realizing she had reached a dead end in the conversation, Rose kept walking with him. "Who are you?" she asked.

"Told you. The Doctor."

"Yeah, but Doctor What?"

"Just the Doctor."

"The Doctor?"

"Hello!"

Rose chuckled despite herself. "Is that supposed to sound impressive?"

"Sort of," he said, smiling at her broadly.

"Come on, then," Rose said. She touched his shoulder gently and put on her most sensitive-sounding voice. Rose was good at getting people to open up to her, and she had decided to use her gift on the Doctor. "You can tell me. I've seen enough. Are you the police?"

"Nooo!" said the Doctor, a little surprised at her. "I was just passing through. I'm a long way from home."

"But what have I done wrong? How comes those plastic things keep coming after me?"

"Oh, suddenly the entire world revolves around you! You were just an accident. You got in the way, that's all. "

"It tried to kill me!" Rose reminded him.

"It was after me, not you. Last night, in the shop, I was there, you blundered in, almost ruined the whole thing. This morning, I was tracking it down, it was tracking me down. The only reason it fixed on you is 'cos you've met me."

"So what you're saying is," Rose rephrased. "The entire world revolves around you?"

"Sort of, yeah," he said, flashing another smile.

"You're full of it!" she laughed

"Sort of, yeah," he replied.

"But, all this plastic stuff. Who else knows about it?"

"No one," he said, more seriously.

Rose knew this Doctor guy was probably delusional but, still, she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. "What, you're on your own?"

"Well, who else is there?" he said a little accusingly. "I mean, you lot, all you do is eat chips, go to bed, and watch telly, while all the time, underneath you, there's a war going on."

"Hey," she said gently, again catching him off guard. "Start from the beginning.

He shrugged acceptingly.

"I mean, if we're going to go with the living plastic—and I don't even believe that, but if we do—how did you kill it?"

"The thing controlling it projects life into the arm," the Doctor explained. "I cut off the signal—dead."

"So that's radio control?" Rose said slowly.

"Thought control," said the Doctor.

His smile faded when he glanced at Rose's puzzled expression. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, determined to understand. "So, who's controlling it, then?"

"Loooong story," said the Doctor.

"But what's it all for?" Rose asked as they turned the corner. "I mean, shop window dummies… what's that about?" Then she suggested jokingly, "Is someone trying to take over Britain's shops?"

"No," the Doctor giggled. "It’s not a price war!"

Rose laughed with him.

"They want to overthrow the human race and destroy you," he said, his face falling. "Do you believe me?"

"No..."

"But you're still listening," he said knowingly.

Rose paused. She watched the Doctor as he continued to walk purposefully ahead of her. She was turning it all over in her head. Living plastic? What an absurd idea! Or, at least, it would have been if she hadn't nearly been strangled by her own hand. A mysterious man calling himself only "The Doctor," a bombed department store, and claims of a war… a war for control of the human race. She didn't know what to believe.

"Really, though, Doctor!" she called out. "Tell me—who are you?"

He turned around to face her. He smiled for a moment, but his smile quickly gave way to a pensive, almost haunted expression. It was the face of someone who had decided to divulge a great secret. "Do you know like we were saying… about the Earth revolving?"

Rose stared. She didn’t know where the Doctor was going with this, but she sensed that it was important to him.

He plodded back to Rose with a faraway look. "It's like when you're a kid. The first time they tell you the world's turning, and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's standing still."

Finally the Doctor looked into her eyes. He said with sincerity, "I can feel it." He wrapped his strong hand delicately around the nub of her wrist. "The turn of the Earth."

Rose watched him. The Doctor seemed to be fixed on something else—something far away or deep in the past. "The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space—you and me—clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go…"

He let go of her nub, snapped back to the present, and met her eyes again. "That's who I am. Now, forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home."

Then the Doctor turned tail, and sauntered away.

Rose watched him for a minute, before wandering off in the opposite direction. She had nothing left to say, and a million more questions to ask. She still didn't know what she would do to earn a living, who this Doctor person really was, what she would tell her mother and Kunjal, or what she would do with the plastic hand that once again lay on a side table in her flat. She was certain of only one thing: She would not forget the Doctor.

About a block away from where she had left the Doctor, Rose heard a bizarre sound. It was like someone wheezing, but metallic and about a thousand times louder. She turned round and looked for a source of the noise, but there was nothing in sight.

Rose knew what was behind it. She knew what was behind every odd thing that had happened to her in the last couple of days.

She jogged back to the corner where she had left the Doctor…

And saw an old blue box, marked POLICE, vanishing into thin air.

***

Kunjal Damahi answered the door to her flat with, "Hey, hey, here's my woman!"

Rose smiled and entered the flat, and Kunjal slapped her rear.

"Knock it off!" Rose laughed.

"Coffee?"

"Yeah, only if you wash the mug. And I don't mean rinse, I mean wash. Can I use your computer?" Rose said, patting her girlfriend on the back.

Kunjal rolled her eyes and started to get Rose a coffee. "Any excuse to go to the bedroom, yeah?" Kunjal paused as a horrible thought seemed to cross her mind. "Don’t read my e-mails!"

Rose made her way to Kunjal's messy, pale pink bedroom and took a seat in front of Kunjal's old desktop computer. With bated breath, she logged on to Search-Wise.net. After a moment of consideration, she did a search for "Doctor."

This yielded results like "AMA Online Doctor Finder" and "Doctor's Guide - Global Edition". About 17,700,000 such results.

With a scoff, Rose instead searched for "Doctor Living Plastic," and the computer returned 55,300 results with titles like "The Living Plastic Creations of Dr. Rhenborg." Maybe if I can narrow it down a little further, Rose thought…

She searched for "Doctor Blue Box." The computer still returned almost 500 results, but the very first result showed promise.

It was a website titled "Doctor Who? -" It had only one page, and on that page was a blurry picture of a man who was, unmistakably, the Doctor. Beneath that were only two lines of text, saying,

"HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

CONTACT CLIVE."

***

Rose drove Kunjal's lime-green Ford fiesta to visit Clive at his home. She had dropped Kunjal off at her caretaking job at the local retirement home, agreeing to pick her up in a few hours' time and take her out for pizza. Kunjal allowed Rose to borrow her car, but was vehemently against Rose meeting Clive.

"Won't you relax?" Rose had said to Kunjal. "He's safe. He's got a wife and kids!"

"And who told you that? He did! That's exactly what an internet lunatic murderer would say!" Kunjal ranted.

Clive's house was on a row of elegant, middle-class homes. Rose parked the car, jogged to Clive's front door, knocked, and tucked her wrists into her pockets.

The door was answered by a boy of about ten, who eyed Rose suspiciously.

"Hello, I've come to see Clive?" Rose said. "We've been emailing."

"Dad!" the boy called through the house. "It's one of your nutters!" He gave Rose one final side-eyed glance before leaving the doorway.

Clive approached the door. He was a couch potato with curly brown hair and a pleasant smile. "Oh, sorry, hello." he said. "You must be Rose. I'm Clive, obviously," he chuckled.

He reached out to shake Rose's hand, but Rose simply pulled her arm out of her pocket and gave a small wave.

"Oh, right!" he blushed. "I'm on autopilot a bit. Sorry about that."

Rose smiled. "Don’t worry about it."

From upstairs, a woman called, "Who is it?"

"Oh, it's something to do with the Doctor," Clive called back. "She's been reading the website." He ushered Rose into the house, "Please, come through. I'm in the shed."

A smiling woman, whom Rose assumed to be Clive’s wife, descended the stairs with a basket of laundry under her arm. She said with a bemused voice, "She? She's read a website about the Doctor? She's a she?"

Clive's back yard was surprisingly normal. He had a small, nicely kept lawn and the beginnings of a small garden. Some of his son's old toys—a small plastic seesaw, a skateboard, and a beach ball among them—were scattered around the yard.

Clive led Rose into a small, repurposed garden shed. The inside of the shed was quite different from the rest of Clive's home. Grated windows let some dim blue light from the outside, and a bare lightbulb only slightly brightened the inside room.

"A lot of this stuff's quite sensitive," Clive said, "I couldn't just send it to you. People might intercept it… er… if you know what I mean…"

Rose looked around the shed. File cabinets and shelves lined the walls. There were several counters and tables, and every surface was covered in files, books, stacks of paper held together by rubber bands, folders, notebooks, and binders. It was a veritable library of arcane and frightening information. There were still, however, indications of Clive's outwardly typical life; his son's old bicycle hung from the ceiling, and the shelves were punctuated by old boxes of household supplies.

"If you dig deep enough, and keep a lively mind," Clive said, taking a binder down from one of the shelves, "this Doctor keeps cropping up all over the place. Political diaries, conspiracy theories, even ghost stories. Heh. No first name, no last name, just 'the Doctor.' Always 'the Doctor.'" Clive was obviously very troubled by this mystery. "And the title seems to have been passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. It appears to be an inheritance. That's your Doctor there, isn't it?" He pointed to a laptop, which was opened to his website's blurry image of the Doctor.

Rose nodded.

"I tracked it down to the Washington public archive just last year," Clive said. He opened the binder and flipped through the documents inside until he reached a series of old photographs. "The online photo's enhanced, but, er, if we look at the original…"

Clive pointed at the first photograph in the series. The Doctor's face, circled in red, was one of many in a crowd. The second picture zoomed out a little. He seemed to be one of a group of people watching some kind of procession. Rose had a nasty feeling that she knew where this was going…

The final picture confirmed her fears. The original picture was if John F. Kennedy's cortege going through Dallas, with the Doctor just one of many people looking on.

"November the 22nd, 1963." said Clive. "The assassination of JFK. You see?"

"It must be his father…" Rose surmised. But the man in this photograph was the same age as the man she knew as the Doctor. In fact, they looked quite the same.

"Going further back," Clive said, pulling out a notebook also full of photographs. "April 1912. This is a photo of the Daniels family of Southampton, 'and friend.'"

This photograph was in black and white. A typical Victorian family and its four children stood in a line. The proud father with his handlebar mustache, the mother in her corset and fancy hat, their children in their sunhats… and on the far right, a tall black man with gray whiskers. This man, too, was older. He stood stiffly and was wearing typical period dress, except for the black skullcap on his head. The old man's hooked nose and big ears were unmistakable.

"This was taken the day before they were due to sail off for the New World on the Titanic," Clive explained. "But for some unknown reason, they cancelled the trip and survived. And here we are--" he plucked a printed copy of an old painting off one of the bulletin boards. Clive seemed to have a very complex archival system, known only to him. "A.D. 79, another Doctor."

This picture seemed to be of a wall mural in typical, first-century Roman style. But this man, too, was wearing the black taqiyah! This mural depicted a single figure in an outdoor garden. He stood with his hands behind his back, his expression somber. Behind him, a huge cloud of smoke billowed from the top of a mountain.

"And look, the same lineage," Clive said. "It's identical!"

Indeed he was. This man was dressed in traditional Roman clothes, had dark skin, pale copper eyes, and a short white beard…

"This one washed up on the coast of Italy, on the very day that Mount Vesuvius exploded."

Rose looked up at Clive. His expression was dark and foreboding. He said, "The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history. When disaster comes, he's there. He brings the storm in his wake, and he has one constant companion."

"Who's that?" Rose asked.

"Death," Clive said grimly.

***

Kunjal was almost finished mopping the floor of the laundry room on the first floor. All that was left was to remove the soapy bucket and mop the doorway, giving the floor some time to dry while she worked on other areas of the home. She straightened her back and wiped her brow. She was starting to be able to smell her own breath through the mesh surgical mask she was wearing. Kunjal prepared to leave the laundry room when she saw…

Did she really see that?

In the corner of her eye, Kunjal thought she saw the mop bucket move.

***

Clive leaned in and continued ominously. "If the Doctor's back—if you've seen him Rose—one thing's for certain. We're all in danger."

***

Kunjal stared and squinted at the bucket. She gasped when she saw it scoot a few inches closer to her. It had definitely moved! Kunjal stood on tiptoe and crept to the bucket. Maybe some kind of animal was under there? A resident's cat, perhaps? It was a stretch, but Kunjal resolved to remove the animal from her clean floors. She circled the bucket, looking for signs of life beneath it. Nothing.

Kunjal bit her lip, bent over, picked up the bucket by one edge, and shouted, " Ā'ū!"

Dirty water and soap suds poured from the bucket, creating a sizeable puddle on the floor. But there was nothing underneath the bucket.

***

Clive circled his desk, deep in thought. "If he's singled you out, if the Doctor's making house calls…" Clive sighed. "Then God help you."

***

Odd. Kunjal set the bucket down, and started to go back to work.

Or at least, she would have, if her fingers hadn't been stuck to the plastic of the bucket.

She pulled her hands sharply away, but rather than her weight pulling the bucket, the plastic stretched like a gigantic piece of silly putty, only it was about a thousand times stickier and a thousand times more elastic. The plastic created taut strings between her fingers and the mop bucket. Terrified and confused, Kunjal continued to pull at the plastic until she was a good five paces away. But she still couldn't free herself.

The bizarre material had glued her fingers to the bucket, so that some of the skin from her fingertips gave way before the bucket even moved.

The mop bucket seemed to flex backward, as if in protest of her trying to move away, like a stiff-necked donkey. It snapped her back with such force that she fell to her knees next to the bucket.

She struggled to stand up and tried once again to move, angling her body so that she faced away from the bucket, hoping that would give her some leverage. All she succeeded in doing was getting her arms stuck beside her head, her fingertips still attached to the putty, which seemed to be gurgling or growling like some wild animal.

She was flung backward, the bucket pulling her into itself.

It swallowed her whole.

***

"But who is he?!" Rose demanded. "Who do you think he is?"

Now Clive had gotten to the heart of the matter. He stared at Rose wild-eyed. Any trace of the jovial couch potato she had met at the door was gone from his eyes. "I think he's the same man," said Clive in a dreadful whisper. "I think he's immortal. I think he's an alien from another world."

Rose closed her mouth, which she realized had been hanging open for a while now. She nodded and cast her eyes down at the table. So this Clive guy was a dead end after all. Just another nutter, just like the Doctor probably was.

***

Rose couldn't look Kunjal in the eye when she swung by the retirement home. "Alright, he's a nutter," she confessed as soon as Kunjal entered the car. "Off his head. Complete online conspiracy freak. You win!"

Rose drove a couple more blocks in silence. Kunjal was being uncharacteristically quiet. Quiet and Stiff.

When they reached the pizza parlor, Rose found them a table and scanned the menu. She bit her lip, embarrassed at having to admit that Kunjal was right, feeling embarrassed about the whole situation over the last couple of days. Trying to break the awkward silence, she said, "Do you think I should try the hospital? Suki said they had jobs going in the canteen. Is that it, then, dishing out chips?"

Still no response from Kunjal. Rose tried again. "I could do A-levels," she mused. "I dunno. It's all Jimmy Stone's fault. I only left school cos of him. And looked where he ended up!" Frustrated, Rose decided to ask Kunjal a question. "What do you think?"

"So, where did you meet this Doctor?" Kunjal said, by way of an answer.

"I'm sorry, wasn't I talking about me for a second?"

"Because I reckon it started back at the shop, am I right?" said Kunjal. "Was it something to do with that?"

"No," Rose lied again.

"Come on," Kunjal coaxed. Rose finally looked at her. Kunjal's skin shimmered under the pizza parlor's harsh lights, and she had a smile that seemed unnaturally fixed to her face. Maybe it was her imagination, Rose thought, but Kunjal's voice was different too. Her voice was usually delicate and modulated, with a pronounced South Asian accent. But now, she sounded throaty and deeper, as though she were doing a poor imitation of Rose's cockney accent.

"Sort of," Rose answered after a moment.

"What was he doing there?" Kunjal asked insistently.

"I'm not going on about it, Kunjal. Really, I'm not, because, I know it sounds daft, but I don't think it's safe. I think he's dangerous!"

"But you can trust me, sweetheart," said Kunjal. "You can tell me anything."

Rose was once again taken aback. Kunjal never called her "sweetheart." Kunjal only ever called her "nanu," Nepali for "little girl." It was sweet.

"Tell me about the Doctor and what he's planning, and I can help you Rose," Kunjal fixed her eyes on Rose. "Cos that's all I really want to do, sweetheart.”

"What are you saying that for?" Rose asked.

"Your champagne," Rose heard a waiter say.

"We didn't order any champagne," Kunjal answered him. She gripped Rose's forearm tightly. "Where's the Doctor?"

"Madam, your champagne," said the waiter again.

"It's not ours," Rose brushed him off. "Kunjal, what is it? What's wrong?"

"I need to find out how much you know, so where is he?" Kunjal said through gritted teeth, her grip on Rose's arm painfully tight.

Rose was genuinely frightened now. Kunjal's skin, her voice, the way she treated Rose. Something was seriously wrong!

"Doesn't anybody want this champagne?" asked the waiter again.

Kunjal tore her eyes away from Rose and growled, "Look, we didn't order—"

Rose and Kunjal both looked up to see a familiar face looking back at them. It was the Doctor!

"Ah, gotcha!" said Kunjal triumphantly.

"Don't mind me," the Doctor said, shaking the champagne bottle vigorously. "I'm just toasting the happy couple." He pointed the bottle at Kunjal. "On the house!"

The Doctor released the cage around the cork, and the cork flew into Kunjal's forehead. It didn't fly at Kunjal's forehead; it flew into her forehead. It warped her smooth skin and sunk into her cranium, like a stone sinking into a pond. After a few moments, Kunjal chewed and spat the cork out.

Kunjal's plastic clone fixed its cold eyes on the Doctor, unfazed by the Doctor's champagne attack. It got up, stood over the table, and molded its plastic hand into a large flesh-colored ax. Rose jumped and ran away, screaming, while the Plastic Kunjal drove its hand through the table.

The Doctor attacked Plastic Kunjal and pulled off her head with a few sharp yanks. The duplicate stumbled backward and the Doctor stumbled forward, carrying the severed head under his arm.

The head opened its eyes and glared at the Doctor. "Don't think that's going to stop me!" it whispered sharply.

By this time, the dozen or so other customers were screaming or staring at the duplicate's headless body, which was flailing around blindly.

Rose pulled the fire alarm and shouted, "Everyone out! Out, now!"

While customers streamed out of the store, Rose and the Doctor ran towards the fire exit. The headless mannequin was throwing its gigantic arms around randomly, wrecking anything in its path. But it was following a definite path towards the Doctor and Rose.

Outside the restaurant, the Doctor took out the shining blue instrument and sealed shut the heavy steel exit door.

Rose ran down the alley, straight for another set of doors. Finding that they were sealed with a chain and padlock, she shouted, "Open the gate! Use that tube thing, come on!"

"Sonic screwdriver," The Doctor corrected her. He sauntered down the alleyway, carrying the instrument in one hand and Kunjal's head in the other.

"Use it!"

"Nah!" said the old man. "Tell you what, let's go in here."

Rose whipped around, and realized that she had run straight past the blue POLICE box she had seen earlier that day. The Doctor took his time unlocking the door and walking inside the small, wooden box. The Plastic Kunjal was still banging against the door with such force that she threatened to punch a hole through it.

"We can't hide inside a wooden box!" said Rose, looking back at the door fearfully. "It's going to get us! Doctor!"

But when the Plastic Kunjal finally smashed through the metal door, Rose made up her mind and followed the Doctor inside the wooden box.

***

"It's gonna follow us!" Rose said, and stopped cold when she saw what was inside that box.

"The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, and believe me, they've tried," the Doctor said impatiently. "Now, shut up a minute…"

She froze in place, trembled, and shrank. Instead of the four wooden walls she had expected, Rose saw a vast room. Her heart pounded. The room was impossibly big, bigger than her entire flat. There was simply no way that the cramped, decaying box she saw could contain something of this size.

And it wasn't just huge. It was unlike any place Rose had been before. Rose realized that she was standing on a ramp with a metal railing, which led to a raised platform. In the center of the platform was a large, glowing console. The console itself surrounded some kind of column. The walls and floors of the room were made up of hexagonal tiles of pure, smooth white. Intricate amber fretwork pervaded the tiling, with strange patterns and alien symbols. When Rose looked up, she saw countless arches reaching up to a high ceiling and supporting countless doorways, which all seemed to lead to similarly massive rooms. When she looked up, she realized that there were multiple levels—wooden terraces with fine carvings of the same kind as the walls and floor.

And everything, from the floors to the console, seemed to be emitting a pale blue light.

"You see, the hand was too simple, but the head's perfect," the Doctor chattered away, ignoring Rose. "I can use it to trace the signal back to the original source." Rose could see him plugging Kunjal's severed head into several cables, which he then connected to the console.

"Right," he said, turning his attention back to Rose. "Where do you want to start?"

"Er…" Rose trembled. "The inside's… bigger than the outside?"

The Doctor nodded.

"It's alien," she said. It was a question wrapped inside a statement.

"Yeah," he said, trying to be conscious of Rose's fear and confusion.

"Are you alien?" Rose recalled what Clive had said about the Doctor.

"Yes," he said, after a moment. "Is that alright?"

"Yeah," Rose said, reflexively, but she was having trouble swallowing, and her eyes were becoming very red.

"It's called the TARDIS, this thing. T-A-R-D-I-S. That's Time And Relative Dimension In Space.

Rose couldn't hold it back anymore. She burst into tears.

"That's OK," said the old man. "Culture shock. Happens to the best of us."

"Did they kill her?" Rose blurted out. "Kunjal? Did they kill Kunjal? Is she dead?"

The Doctor raised his eyebrows, in casual surprise. "Oh," he said. "I didn't think of that."

"She's my girlfriend!" Rose shouted through her tears. "You pulled off her head—They copied her and you didn't even think? And now you're just going to let her melt?"

"Melt?" the Doctor turned to the console.

The plastic head was melting, its face flattening and its skull appearing to cave in. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no!" The Doctor scrambled to the console, pressing buttons and turning knobs randomly.

"What're you doing?" Rose demanded.

The floor lurched horribly as the TARDIS quaked.

"Following the signal," said the Doctor. "It's fading. Wait a minute, I've got it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Almost there, almost there. Here we go!"

The ground shuddered to a halt, and the Doctor ran for the door.

"You can't go out there! It's not safe!" Rose shouted, running after him.

But when Rose reached the door, she realized that the TARDIS was no longer behind the restaurant. Instead, she saw that they were in Westminster, on the bridge over the north bank of the Thames. After their encounter with the plastic menace, the moonlight sparkling on the water seemed wildly out of place.

But the Doctor was continuing to pace and talk to himself, as if nothing unusual had happened. "I lost the signal," he moaned. "I got so close!" He leaned over the railing of the bridge, overlooking the shimmering black water.

"We've moved," Rose said, looking the TARDIS up and down. "Does it fly?"

"Disappears there and reappears here," said the old man impatiently. "You wouldn't understand."

"If we're somewhere else, what about that headless thing? It's still on the loose."

"It melted with the head," he said as he paced back to the TARDIS. "Are you going to witter on all night?"

Rose's heart sank. She massaged her forehead. "I don't know where her mother is…"

The Doctor gave her a genuinely quizzical look.

"Kunjal," Rose reminded him. "I'll have to find her mother, and tell her Kunjal’s dead, and you just went and forgot her, again! You were right, you are alien!"

The Doctor scowled at her. "Look, if I did forget some kid called Kunjal—"

"Yeah, she's not a kid!"

"—It’s because I'm trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering on top of this planet, alright?" he spat.

"Alright?!"

"Yes, it is!"

Aghast at him, Rose said, "If you are alien, how comes you look like you're Black?"

"Lots of species are black!" he said, sounding a bit wounded. He turned away and crossed his arms, fuming.

Rose didn't have an answer to this. She silently wondered what she would have expected him to look like. Realizing she had reached a dead end, she decided to change the subject. She read the lettering above the TARDIS's door frame. "What's a police public call box?"

To her relief, the Doctor was quickly distracted. "It's a telephone box from the 1950's." He leaned proudly against his box. "It's a disguise!"

Rose shook her head and chuckled softly. "And this… this living plastic. What's it got against us?"

"Nothing," the Doctor said. "It loves you. You've got such a good planet. Lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air—perfect. Just what the Nestene Consciousness needs."

Rose listened and nodded, her insides squirming.

"Its food stock was destroyed in the war, all of its protein plants rotted, so Earth…" he imitated eating. "Dinner!"

"Any way of stopping it?"

The Doctor pulled a tube of blue liquid out of his pockets. "Anti-plastic!" he said with a toothy grin.

"Anti-plastic…?"

"Anti-plastic! But first I've got to find it. How can you hide something that big in a city this small?" He began pacing again.

"Hold on. Hide what?"

"The transmitter," he explained, more patiently. "The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal."

"What's it look like?" Rose asked, hopeful of proving that she could be helpful.

"Like a transmitter… Round and massive, slap-bang in the middle of London." He began to walk along the bridge, and Rose followed. "A huge metal circular structure," he stopped walking, but continued to talk, gesturing enthusiastically. "Like a dish, like a wheel—radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible."

He noticed that Rose was staring intently at something just behind him, squinting and pursing her lips in disbelief.

"What?" he asked. The Doctor turned around and looked, but he didn't see anything interesting behind him. "What?" he asked her again.

Rose assumed he was kidding, so she raised her eyebrows and nodded again at the structure behind him.

"What is it? What?" His face was open and genuinely confused.

Rose stared in silence at the London Eye, the biggest Ferris wheel in the world, standing directly across them on the South Bank of the Thames. He wheeled around again to take a fresh look. Realization dawned on his face when he looked back at Rose. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed with joy, "Ru'yah! Fantastic!"

And he sped away like a bullet.

Rose ran alongside him. She had crossed the Westminster bridge more times than she could count, but never before had it felt so vibrant and exciting. Her heart raced. She forgot all about the danger she was in, how she must look running across the pavement with a strange man, and even the distance from the north bank to the south.

The Doctor wrapped his dark hand delicately around her outstretched white wrist, and they ran across the bridge side by side.

Rose wasn't even out of breath when they reached the London Eye. If anything, her heart was beating faster and her mind was racing harder. She was beyond excited to help the Doctor defeat the alien threat.

"Think of it," the Doctor said. "Plastic all over the world, every artificial thing waiting to come alive. The shop window dummies, prosthetics, the phones, the wires, the cables…"

"The breast implants…" said Rose, only half joking.

"Still, we've found the transmitter. The Consciousness must be somewhere underneath."

While the Doctor pondered this, Rose spied a set of stairs that seemed to lead to a kind of chamber. "What about down here?" she called to the Doctor.

"Looks good to me," he said gladly.

***

The Doctor and Rose ran down the stairs. The Doctor knelt down and unsealed the chamber. It was just wide enough for the Doctor to slip inside, and the inside was glowing red and emitting steam, like some kind of inferno. But without hesitation, the Doctor hopped in and made his way down a stepladder.

Reassured by the Doctor's confidence, Rose made her way into the chamber as well, taking care to link her arms around the upper rungs for support.

The inside of the chamber was an industrial room of smoke-stained brick and metal. Long heavy chains hung from the ceiling, and various tools lay abandoned on the floor, making the whole place look more like a medieval interpretation of hell.

They stood in a metal stairwell that clacked and rattled beneath them. At the bottom of the chamber was a deep pit. And inside the pit was a mass of gelatinous matter which was glowing an angry red and appeared to be moving.

The Doctor leaned against the thin metal railing and pointed. "The Nestene Consciousness," he said. "That's it, inside the vat. A living plastic creature."

"Well, then tip in your anti-plastic and let's go."

"I'm not here to kill it," he chided her. "I've got to give it a chance."

The Doctor and Rose descended one flight of metal stairs. The Doctor leaned against the railing and said boldly, "I seek audience with the Nestene Consciousness under peaceful contract according to convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation."

The Consciousness pulsated and rumbled inside the vat.

"Thank you," the Doctor said. He seemed to understand what the goo was saying. "If I might have permission to approach?"

The Consciousness gurgled in reply.

Just then, Rose spotted Kunjal several flights down, still wearing her work uniform, crouched in a fetal position with her back turned to the Consciousness.

"Oh, God! Kunjal, it's me!" Rose ran down the stairs until she reached Kunjal.

The Doctor rolled his eyes at them.

"It's okay, it's all right!"

Kunjal was dripping with soapy water. Her skin was blotchy, and she smelled of sweat and cleaning fluid. She pulled Rose closer to her and hushed her. "That thing down there," she said. "The liquid, Rose, it can talk!"

"Ugh, you're stinking!" Rose said. "Doctor, they kept her alive!"

"Yeah, that was always a possibility," the Doctor said as he passed them by. "Keep her alive to maintain the copy."

"You knew that and you never said?" Rose scolded him.

"Can we keep the domestics outside, thank you?"

He continued to descend the stairs, until he was close enough to stand right next to the vat. "Am I addressing the Consciousness?"

The liquid rumbled and hissed.

"Thank you," said the Doctor. "If I might observe, you infiltrated this civilization by means of warp shunt technology. So, may I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you shunt off?"

The liquid bubbled. It twisted itself into what looked like a crude approximation of a face, and continued to grunt and growl.

"Oh, don't give me that! It's an invasion, plain and simple. Don't talk about constitutional rights!"

The liquid squelched angrily, warping itself into a bulbous form, which began to rise from the vat like so much sticky tapioca.

"I am talking!" The Doctor's voice was bold and authoritative. "This planet is just starting. These… these stupid little people have only just learnt how to walk, but they're capable of so much more! I'm asking you, on their behalf. Please, just go."

"Doctor!" Rose shouted. She saw two dummies approach the Doctor from behind and grab him. They held his hands behind his back, forced open his jacket pocket, and pulled out the tube of anti-plastic.

"That was just insurance. I wasn't going to use it!" the Doctor said.

The blob's noise reached a crescendo, and it sounded like a gurgling scream.

"I was not attacking you!" the Doctor said, sounding afraid. "I'm here to help. I'm not your enemy. I swear, I'm not!"

But the blob twisted and shrieked once again, accusingly.

"What do you mean?" said the Doctor.

A light from the high ceiling turned, seemingly by itself, and shone a spotlight on the TARDIS.

"Oh… oh, no! Honestly, no!" the Doctor was sounding really desperate now.

The blob formed two protrusions, which moved like a grotesque mouth.

"Yes, that's my ship," the Doctor replied to the Consciousness.

The blob shrieked and growled.

"That's not true! I should know, I was there. I fought in the war! It wasn't my fault!" But the Doctor’s protests were to no avail. The blob continued to talk over him. "I couldn't save your world! I couldn't save any of them!" If Rose hadn't known better, she might have thought the Doctor was going to cry.

The blob writhed and screeched, refusing to calm down.

"What's it doing?!" Rose yelled.

"It's the TARDIS! The Nestene's identified its superior technology. It's terrified. It's going to the final phase. It's starting the invasion! Get out, Rose! Just leg it now!"

While the blob continued to roar, Rose pulled her mobile out of her jeans pocket and phoned her mother. She held the phone with her shoulder while she tried to use her wrists to block out the blob's screaming.

"Oh, there you are," Rose's mum prattled as soon as she answered. "I was just going to phone. You can get compensation. I said so. I've got this document thing off the police. Don't thank me."

Back in the Nestene Chamber, Rose shouted, "Where are you, mum?!"

"I'm in town!" her mother whined.

"No, go home!" Rose panicked. "Just go home right now!"

"Darling, you're breaking up. Listen, I'm just going to do a bit of late night shopping. I'll see you later. Ta-ra!"

"Mum? Mum!"

But it was no use. Her mother had already hung up.

Kunjal clung to Rose's leg as something like lightning erupted from the Consciousness, shooting itself upward, towards the London Eye.

"It's the activation signal," said the Doctor. "It's transmitting!"

The vat continued to throw bolts of energy upward, the Consciousness writhed and growled, and something above them was making a crackling electric sound. The London Eye had lit up with energy.

It was the end of the world.

***

In Queen's Arcade, Clive and his wife argued about finances. As they passed a menswear shop, Clive's wife gave a start; she saw one of the shop window dummies move! "Oh, my God!" she said. "I thought they were dummies. I nearly had a heart attack!"

All over the mall, the shoppers stopped and stared. All of the shop window dummies seemed to be doing a kind of robot dance. Clive watched with suspicion, his wife with delight, and his young son with indifference… Until one of the dummies lunged forward and shattered the glass. The shoppers screamed as dummies from all over the store sprang to life.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Tyler descended an escalator, carrying a plastic shopping bag, and ignorant of any danger. She tilted her head in puzzlement when she saw a procession of children, dressed as mannequins, walking stiffly from the children's toy store. Her confusion increased when she saw similar lines of dummies staggering from all of the other stores.

Clive stood defensively in front of his wife and child, his lips curled in a defiant sneer. "It's true," he said to no one in particular. "Everything I read, all the stories—it’s all true!"

One of the shop dummies pointed its hand at him. The very fronts of its fingers seemed to fall away, as a door on a hinge, revealing two clean round holes. Clive eyed the mannequin dubiously.

His wife screamed as the dummy's hand fired two rounds directly into Clive's chest.

***

The Nestene was extremely agitating, standing almost erect inside the vat.

The Doctor struggled against his plastic attackers. "Get out, Rose!" he cried. "Just get out, now! Run!"

Rose thought about escaping the way she and the Doctor came, but one of the energy bolts hit a sensitive part of the ceiling, causing the cement to crumble and the stairs to fall away. She dragged Kunjal across the catwalk to the TARDIS. Kunjal threw herself against the shining blue box. Rose struggled against the door for a moment before she realized, she didn’t have the key!

***

By the time Mrs. Tyler had descended the escalator, the dummies were swarming around the store, shooting randomly. Shoppers fled in all directions, Clive's family screamed and tried to run for shelter, and Mrs. Tyler abandoned her shopping bag and ran.

Rose trembled as she silently took stock of her situation. She was going to die down here, probably never to be found, along with Kunjal and the Doctor. Her mother, too, was going to be killed in some unknown, horrifying way. Rose saw the Doctor struggling against the plastic man, the other plastic henchman holding the tube of anti-plastic in its stiff hands, the chains dangling from the ceiling, and the bubbling, gurgling pit of Consciousness. Then she had a crazy idea.

***

Mrs. Tyler ran from the arcade, clutching her short denim jacket against the cold. She saw that the streets were no safer. Cars and buses were running out of control, windows were being shattered, small fires were erupting as vehicles crashed or electric lamps exploded, shop displays and street signs alike had fallen over. Human forms littered the streets, some plastic, some flesh, some alive and cowering, some apparently dead.

Mrs. Tyler clasped her hands over her face as she saw plastic men, women, and children chasing her from inside Queen's Arcade.

She zigzagged through the crowded streets and took shelter behind a crashed taxi, but failed to notice that she was crouching outside a bridal wear shop. That is, until three plastic brides shattered the window glass and advanced on her.

***

Rose met the Doctor's eyes. The man who just minutes before had been confident, even cocky, was now unrecognizable. His expression of dismay and terror mirrored the way Rose felt when she tried and failed to save her mother. Rose shook even harder. The Doctor did not have the situation in hand. She saw the Doctor reaching for the tube of anti-plastic, trying in vain to clasp onto it in his teeth. So that's what it had come down to…

"Just leave him!" Kunjal shouted.

Rose pulled her leg from Kunjal's grasp. "There's nothing you can do!" Kunjal yelled.

But something had snapped inside of Rose. She ran back across the catwalk, and untied one of the chains that was dangling from the ceiling. Rose had no A-levels, no job. And even if she did manage to survive this, she had no future to look forward to.

***

Rose's mother ran across the street, hoping to find some kind of shelter behind a flaming bus. She whimpered and screamed as the three brides advanced on her, pointing their hands in her direction. One by one, their fingers fell away, as though on a hinge.

***

Rose smirked as she remembered the one thing she did have.

Jericho Street Junior School under-7s gymnastics team. She had the bronze.

Rose deftly tied a large loop in the chain. She tucked in her shirt, nimbly lifted herself into the loop, hanging onto it with her knees, and pushed off with her arms.

With a grunt, she took off, upside down, through the Nestene Chamber!

With her upper body, she threw off the plastic man that was threatening to strangle the Doctor, knocked the anti-plastic out of the dummy's hand and into the angry red vat. Her stomach gave a lurch as she started to swing backwards, threatening to hit the opposing wall.

"Rose!" the Doctor cried.

To Rose's great relief, the Doctor caught her—embraced her like a father might embrace his baby daughter. He beamed as he looked into the vat. The Nestene Consciousness was producing blood-curdling screams as it thrashed about, discolored from the tube of anti-plastic.

"Now we're in trouble!" said the Doctor happily.

Several small explosions burst from the ceiling, and the Eye stopped emitting energy.

Together, Rose and the Doctor jogged up the stairs and ran to the TARDIS, where Kunjal was clinging for dear life. The Doctor reached around her to unlock the door, and ushered the frightened girl inside before she had a chance to protest. Rose took one last, triumphant look at the Consciousness before running inside, too.

The TARDIS vanished from the Nestene Chamber just moments before the whole thing collapsed.

***

Back in Queen's Arcade, Mrs. Tyler finally pried her hands away from her eyes. The three brides were not shooting her. Instead, they were stumbling around spastically. Hesitantly, she looked around. The other dummies were stumbling and staggering in a way that would have been funny if it hadn't been so horrifying.

The brides fell to the ground, inert. One bride's head fell off, rolling around helplessly while its blonde wig lay on the ground.

Mrs. Tyler crept away from the scene. The streets were still damaged, but the dummies no longer posed any threat.

***

Somewhere on the embankment of the Thames, a small blue box appeared. The door swung open, and out stumbled a very soapy, very sweaty, very scared 22-year-old woman wearing a work uniform. The adrenaline in Kunjal's body seemed to physically propel her along until she fell to her knees, attempting to hide behind some plywood that had been abandoned on a street corner.

After her came Rose Tyler, who was nonchalantly dialing her mobile. As usual, her mother began talking as soon as she answered the phone. "Rose! Rose! Don't go out of the house. It's not safe! There's all of these things, and they were shooting, and they—Hello? Hello?"

Rose hung up. She laughed with relief and a bit of dark amusement.

Rose caught up with Kunjal, who was continuing to whimper and point speechlessly at the TARDIS.

"Fat lot of good you were!" said Rose with a scoff.

"Nestene Consciousness?" the Doctor snapped his fingers. "Easy!"

"You were useless in there! You'd be dead if it wasn't for me," Rose pointed to herself proudly.

"Yes, I would," said the Doctor. He bowed his head humbly. "Thank you. Right, then. I'll be off… unless, er, I dunno…" he shrugged. "You could come with me? This box isn't just a London hopper, you know. It goes anywhere in the universe, free of charge."

The Doctor's voice was unconcerned, but his face was strained, and he was biting his lip. Rose thought that his casual request sounded very forced. The Doctor broke into a wide smile that actually looked very sad.

"Don't!" Kunjal spoke up, pointing accusingly. "He's an alien, he's ēka rākṣasa!"

"She's not invited," said the Doctor plainly. "What d'you think?"

Rose was considering all of this when the Doctor started to push all her right buttons. "You could stay here," he said. "Fill your life with work and food and sleep, or you could go, er… anywhere."

"Is it always this dangerous?"

The Doctor nodded mischievously.

Kunjal flung herself around Rose's legs.

"Yeah, I can't," Rose said. "I've… I've got to go and find my mum, and… someone's got to look after this stupid lump, so…"

Something tragically sad crossed over the old man's eyes. "OK," he said. "See you round."

He retreated back inside his box, quietly closed the door, and vanished. The TARDIS wheezed as it vanished from the embankment. Rose's heart dropped into her stomach as she thought of what opportunity she might have just passed up. She stared at where the TARDIS had stood for what seemed like hours, thinking that she would give anything to change her answer.

But what was done was done. "C'mon," Rose whispered to Kunjal, who was almost catatonic at this point. Rose began to lead her away as one would lead a small child.

Just then, the same metallic wheezing picked up again. The TARDIS reappeared in the exact same spot. By that time, Kunjal was standing by herself and watching the blue box quizzically.

The door creaked open and the Doctor peered out, wearing the same forced smile as he had worn a few minutes ago.

"By the way, did I mention? It also travels in time," he said.

Rose couldn't believe her luck. She turned to Kunjal and said, "Thanks."

"Thanks for what?" Kunjal asked, confused.

"Exactly." Rose kissed Kunjal on the cheek.

And Rose ran with abandon, headlong towards the Doctor, the TARDIS, and adventure.

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