London, 2789. The city’s crawling with time anomalies, alien artifacts, and one very confused dinosaur. Just another Tuesday for the Doctor.
Short Synopsis
When a time-sensitive artifact turns up in future London, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory find themselves caught in a paradox that stretches from Victorian England to the 28th century—complete with sinister aliens, secret societies, and a healthy disregard for causality.
Extended Storyline
It starts, as these things often do, with a mysterious object and someone doing something very stupid with it. In the year 2789, an archaeologist named Professor Angelchrist (yes, really) uncovers a strange alien artifact buried beneath London. Before anyone can say “don’t touch that,” it emits a pulse of temporal energy that warps the city’s timeline like a pretzel.
Cue the arrival of the TARDIS—and one particularly bemused Eleventh Doctor, trailed by Amy, Rory, and a trail of biscuit crumbs. The Doctor immediately recognizes the artifact as a piece of Chronos technology—something that should absolutely not exist anymore, mostly because he remembers blowing it up several lifetimes ago.
Meanwhile, back in Victorian London, Inspector Charles Brimley is investigating a series of bizarre disappearances involving people who simply wink out of existence mid-step, leaving behind scorch marks and an uneasy sense that reality’s taken a sick day. The Doctor and company soon realize the two time periods are connected by the artifact, which has opened a temporal rift between the 19th and 28th centuries.
The rift’s side effects? The usual: collapsing cause-and-effect, paradox shadows, and dinosaurs wandering around future London. (Because no Doctor Who story is complete without prehistoric wildlife in a place it shouldn’t be.)
The Doctor, splitting his attention like an over-caffeinated chess player, jumps between the two eras to trace the root cause. In the future, Amy and Rory team up with Professor Angelchrist to study the artifact’s strange energy readings—only to discover that it’s attracting something. Something that feeds on time itself.
In the past, the Doctor investigates the disappearances and meets Archibald Angelchrist, the professor’s ancestor, who’s been dabbling in “temporal sciences” decades before the phrase should exist. Turns out the Angelchrist family has been guarding the artifact for centuries, convinced it’s a divine relic. Unfortunately, tampering with it has been slowly tearing holes in time.
Enter the Squall—time-parasitic entities that live in the spaces between seconds. They’re invisible unless they want to be seen, terrifyingly fast, and treat linear time like a snack buffet. The Doctor realizes they’ve been using the artifact as a beacon to breach into our reality, feeding on temporal energy and rewriting history in their wake.
When the rift finally tears open, the two Londons—Victorian and future—start overlapping. Steam trains appear on skyways, holographic billboards flicker over cobblestone streets, and the laws of physics politely give up. The Doctor, in full manic genius mode, rigs a temporal feedback loop using his sonic screwdriver, a teacup, and an unreasonably optimistic plan to trap the Squall between time zones.
Amy and Rory, racing through future London to shut down the artifact’s power grid, face off against a swarm of Squall trying to anchor themselves to human hosts. Rory, ever the reluctant hero, gets one of the novel’s best moments: “Why do I always end up in the bit of the plan where things are chasing me?”
In the end, the Doctor turns the Squall’s hunger against them, forcing them into a paradox collapse—essentially feeding on their own time-energy until they wink out of existence. He then seals the rift, returns the artifact to the void it came from, and gently scolds the remaining Angelchrists for their centuries of well-intentioned meddling.
As London settles back into something approximating normality, the Doctor gazes at the skyline—half steampunk, half starship—and smiles. “Paradoxes,” he muses. “They’re like soufflés. Complicated, unstable, and liable to explode if you get the timing wrong.”