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The Baroness of Time, Part 2

by

At long last, this is done. I don’t know how well it’s done – judge that for yourself.

Martha sat against the wall, trying to catch her breath and calm down, while the Doctor muttered to himself. “Right, I can override the door from here, but it’s no use trying that without clearing those things out. If I – oh, of course!” He pulled himself up. “Martha! Brace yourself against that wall there!”

It was the wall leading back into the control room; she did. He scrambled into a similar position against the wall on the other side of the door.

“I hope you didn’t leave anything lying around loose in your room,” he said, then engaged the sonic.

The TARDIS began to tilt, forcing Martha against the wall, which was rapidly becoming the floor. Crashing noises could be heard behind her, and something shattered, but a series of loud thumps was also audible from the control room. The zombies had evidently quickly lost their footing, and fallen against the outside. The TARDIS continued to tilt. Shuffling noises followed, as their bodies slid down the round curve of the control room and out the door. Before the TARDIS was even fully horizontal, no more noise could be heard.

“Brilliant, Doctor!” Martha declared.

“Yes, in fact, I am,” he said, now standing on the wall. “You’ll want to do the reverse for the turn back around, brace against the floor.”

The orientation of the walls and floor was making Martha dizzy as she got ready. She noted, slightly amused, that in this old conflict between eyes and inner ear, this was the first time it had been her eyes in the wrong.

The TARDIS turned slowly back. Martha continued to lean against the floor as it became the floor again, gradually transitioning to lying on it. The Doctor sprang up with it still ten degrees from horizontal, dashed back through the door, and began slamming controls around.

“She was able to buy some time with that, let me see…”

“Time?” Martha asked, staggering through the door.

“Well, you know, I must stay in the correct place relative to her timeline or…bad things happen.”

Martha made her way back to the controls, sighing. When the Doctor didn’t explain things properly, she felt like he was calling her an idiot – but then, when he did explain things properly, she felt like she was in fact an idiot.

“Right, she sent him through some concert in the late 20th century for some reason, may or may not have actually landed there herself,” he concluded, manipulating controls. “Whatever that was about, they then went forward in time, but we’ve got a displacement of a few light years to worry about…”

“Doctor, what are we going to do when we catch up with them?”

“Weelll, we’ll figure that out when we get there, just like we always seem to do,” he said, flashing that grin of his that always gave her an estrogen spike.

“Right,” he added, returning to the display, “they’re on Picasso, otherwise known as the sixth planet of Vega. A colony of artists established in 26th century after they terraformed the planet – temperature was OK, but there was no air to speak of before humans got there. Surrealists and so forth, wanting to build a world in accordance with their own vision…” He dashed back and forth, yanking controls. “The trouble ultimately with me and art is that I’ve seen nearly all of it already, but then again, every now and then there’s a surprise. Allon-sy! Should be smoother this time, we’re not right on their tail like before.”

The TARDIS began to move through the Vortex. Martha held on tightly, but it wasn’t nearly as rough as it had been. The Doctor was scrutinizing a display, trying to come up with more information.

“Right, we’ve got the exact date. Their Festival of Play, I believe it’s called – themes of toys, dressing as them, dancing like them, and so forth.” He looked up. “Martha, you might want to change so we blend in – you’re a bit too…conventional. Put on the maddest thing you can find in your clothes.”

She nodded, then headed for the door to her room. “What about you?” she pointed out. “You could put on that old suit with the question marks, I suppose.”

“Weelll, I’ll think of something. Try to get on whatever you find quickly, we’ll be there soon.”

The Doctor locked a knob into place, then followed Martha, turning through the door into his “closet”. Martha watched him go for a moment, then entered her room and began rummaging through the stuff she had picked up. Eventually she found a yellow dress with green polka dots, and, grimacing at the ugliness of it, began changing into it. It was a bit comical, she supposed.

So what was going on here? The Doctor was right about the “touch” game, but why? Maybe she was trying to help him psychologically, somehow, let him work through his problems. They still knew almost nothing about either person they were following, she realized, and the Doctor hadn’t recognized them.

She finished changing and returned to the control room, just in time to see the Doctor run out wearing the most ridiculous coat, tie, and scarf she had ever seen. The jacket had yellow and pink lapels, red sleeves, a green collar, and she couldn’t even make sense of what else; the tie was light blue with white dots; and she wasn’t sure about the scarf, because she was too busy doubling over the console laughing hysterically.

“What?…No, really, what?…Martha!”

She finally got herself under control, still giggling. “Well, it’s your…it’s very, ah, colorful…”

“Trust me, this is how we’ll blend in.” He took a step forward, stepped on the trailing end of the scarf, and jerked to a stop. “Really though, I have no idea why I liked this thing. It’s you bloody humans, really,” he said, fixing the scarf,”you need saving constantly, so I wind up blowing through my regenerations and don’t get round to clearing out my old rubbish and getting new.”

Martha looked up sharply, concerned. She didn’t really have an answer to that…compared to the Doctor, they were fairly pathetic…

“Ah, well, don’t worry about that,” the Doctor added. “Sometimes I think we live too long in any event. Right, hold on, we’re landing.”

The TARDIS lurched to a stop suddenly. Martha and the Doctor opened the TARDIS cautiously, he looking right, she left.

They had materialized in a magnificent room much higher than it was wide. The walls and most of the lights were green, but this was difficult to see, because it was full of thick, whirling snow. The air was cool, but not cold, the way it should have been for snow; yet when Martha caught a snowflake drifting down, it felt icy and melted on her hand. People were passing through in variously outlandish costumes, heading to or from larger, better lit rooms to the right and left where people were dancing. Trees, some real-looking, some metallic, stood twisted and barren along the walls, some coated in snow.

The Doctor caught a snowflake on his palm and tasted it. “Hydrogen bond synchronization, combined with crystal stability manipulation,” he proclaimed. “<i>Very</i> elegant, <i>brilliant</i>, really. Well, come along.” He turned, then noticed something. “Ah, excellent!”

The TARDIS had returned to the police box configuration. The Doctor ran his hand along the side. “Glad to see you back. Right! Let’s go.”

He hurried toward the room on the right, and Martha followed. She noticed that some of the people around them were completely coated in snow, and a few other oddities, but dismissed it – this place was obviously strange in any case.

Martha and the Doctor hurried into the other room, which was full of light and sound. A light, perky tune was being played, and people everywhere were dancing oddly and wearing queer things. Some women looked like dolls or windup toys, and one bloke was dressed as a Rubik’s Cube. Martha glanced at a leafy archway, then spotted their quarry near the center of the room.

“Doctor!”

The Doctor hurried towards them, but a woman tossing playing cards mechanically in time to the music stepped into his way and began launching cards at him. Martha went by her, just in time to see the original woman kiss the man she’d been dragging all over time on the lips, a soft caress. Then she let him go and briskly shoved him backward. He staggered, unable to recover, and his body somehow…locked up. Martha stood bemused, but the Doctor dashed toward them, thrusting people aside…but as he approached, they disappeared again.

“Brilliant!” he shouted angrily. “Right, back to the TARDIS, looks to be a chase again.”

“In these?” Martha exclaimed, gesturing to her clothes.

“Apparently, yes.”

They ran for the TARDIS. A man dressed like a tin soldier shouted for them to stop, but they ignored him and sped through the arch and into the snow room. The Doctor pounced on the controls as they entered, and Martha seized the console and prepared to hold on as best she could.

The TARDIS sped off. Martha lost her balance and crashed to the floor before long, where she got hold of a pipe sticking out of one of the walls and held on tight. She was going to have an impressive set of bruises when this was all through.

The TARDIS suddenly jammed to a halt, ripping the pipe from Martha’s fingers and smashing her into the console. Groaning, she got up, to hear the TARDIS straining and groaning around her, as though fighting some kind of barrier.

“Doctor?”

“Time pocket!” he yelled, banging away at the controls.

“What’s a time pocket?”

“A piece of spacetime ripped out and put somewhere else, is the easiest way to think of it – ah, we’re through!”

The groaning stopped.

The Doctor helped Martha up. She savored the contact, then told herself to <i>focus</i>. He hurried to the door, opening it cautiously and peering out.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Come along.”

She followed him out the door.

They were in a massive, dimly lit chamber. The floor was perfectly black, hard, and smooth. The walls and ceiling seemed to fade into shadow, but massive, intricately carved stone pillars rose up to support them. The Doctor swept his sonic back and forth, scanning something. Martha looked around, but couldn’t see anything through the greyness.

“Interesting,” he said.

Suddenly, bright white light seemed to spring from everywhere, and a hard female voice blasted through them.

“I am the Baroness of Time! How did you come to be here?”

“Ah. Hullo,” he said, with his usual unperturbed facade. Or was it a facade? It was always hard to tell with him. “We just were a bit curious about why you seem to be hauling people through time and drugging them.”

“You will leave now.”

As Martha’s eyes adjusted, she became able to see a woman sitting on a sort of throne at one side of the room, in front of two huge pillars. She wore a black thing somewhere between a bishop’s…was mitre the word?…and a crown, on her head, and flowing black robes. Several more people stood in positions that looked very wrong in front of her; one seemed to be holding cymbals just apart, frozen in place. The Doctor didn’t respond to her.

“Go!”

Several men who had been lying on the ground behind the throne, as far as Martha could tell, very slowly stood up. They held long guns in their hands, and wore army-type uniforms. Boots began to tap together, like a deadly metronome, as they approached, guns swinging in their arms. The Baroness rose, leading them towards Martha and the Doctor.

The Doctor suddenly turned and began scanning the ceiling.

“What is that? Is it a wall?” Martha asked.

“No, this is a time pocket, there <i>is</i> nothing beyond those pillars. Brilliant, this is – that’s where the energy comes from, the interface between entropy states!” He kept at it.

“Doctor!” Martha shouted. The Baroness was approaching, the soldiers plodding mechanically behind her, and slowly raising their weapons.

“So if we disrupt the pocket,” he said, turning to face Martha, “then -”

Suddenly the Baroness turned and stared at one of the soldiers. He burst into motion, aiming his gun at the Doctor and pulling the trigger before Martha could even yell.

It made a metallic grinding noise, but didn’t fire.

The other soldiers raised their weapons –

“then, no more power, so no more time travel.” The Doctor pressed the sonic screwdriver. A sort of shimmer shot across the empty black –

They were on a dim, flat, empty plain. Dull red light came from a weary, swollen star half cut off by the horizon. The air was dry, stale, and cold. Boulders were strewn here and there, but there was nothing artificial, except the columns reaching up around them, terminating at small crystalline machines instead of vanishing into darkness.

“I don’t know why you bothered with early model M16s, they’re rubbish. Anyway, can’t say I’ve been here,” the Doctor added, looking around. The soldiers were moving slowly again, but their weapons were still coming up, and they wouldn’t all jam…

“Well, actually, I might have been here a billion or so years ago. That star’s well past its expiry date, at least as concerns any place you could live while it was main sequence. Awful term, really, it’s not a sequence at all…”

“WHAT DID YOU DO?!” the Baroness shrieked. “HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!”

“Weeelll, time doesn’t really like being bent like that, it’s just a matter of releasing it and it goes right back where it ought to be.”

“Doctor!” Martha shouted. The guns, as slowly as they were moving, were now pointing at his midsection.

“Who are you?” the Baroness gasped.

“I’m the Doctor.”

A moment passed.

Then the guns all crashed to the ground, and the Baroness raised her hands to shoulder height.

“It’s no use, then,” she said. She lowered her head, resigned.

“Observe, Martha, the benefits of a reputation,” the Doctor noted. “Right, you, are going to undo whatever you’ve done to all those people, and we, are going to take them back where they belong.”

“But…but what about me?”

“Oh, well, I suppose we could drop you somewhere as well. Shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“You’re rather calm about all this,” the Baroness quavered as she and the Doctor walked toward the other people.

“Well, you haven’t really caused that much trouble. If I got angry over things like this, I’d be doing nothing but. I am slightly curious, though…why? What’s the point of this?”

“It is – it was – a collection.”

“I’d suggest you try…what are those called…stamps. Or, say, less sentient life forms.” He examined the man in the box. “Martha, would you come here? I wouldn’t mind your opinion on this.” He then muttered something about hoping the box man wasn’t named Jack.

She followed them across the plain, shoes crunching in the sand.

“Why are you living here?” she shouted to the…”What’s your name, anyway?” she added.

“I have no idea about either,” the ‘Baroness’ answered as Martha approached. Martha locked eyes with her, seeing truth in them. “I woke up here one day, in that blank abyss, a bubble in time, a few hundred meters wide. The pillars were already there then, but I added the stonework along their outsides later. I don’t remember anything before that.” The Doctor nodded to Martha, who began examining the first man. “I was thirsty and hungry before long, I wanted to go somewhere with food and water…and I did. I looked all over the cosmos once I figured out how to go wherever I wanted, but I couldn’t find anything about my past. No matter what tools I brought back, I couldn’t move or even scratch the pillars or floor in there, and I couldn’t change the air – I tried blowing an A-bomb in there once, not a thing changed.”

“So you started taking people, and doing – Martha, what’s happened to them?”

“It seems to be just…selective paralysis,” she said, experimenting. “The eyes move, I get a definite response to pressure on the body, everything seems to be still here and working…just no voluntary nervous control except along a few of the cranial nerves.”

“But what’s the – point?” the Doctor demanded.

“It’s funny,” she said, smirking.

“What’s funny about it?”

“What, don’t you think it’s funny?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Can you reverse it?”

She sighed regretfully. “Yes, yes, I can. Stand back.”

A sort of flux and flicker swept across the prisoners. They all collapsed, as did the soldiers. Martha dropped to her knees by one, who was groaning as he tried to sit up.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

The man, wearing an 18th-century army uniform, groaned again, and looked at her.

“Blimey, I thought Negroes could not get into Paradise,” he muttered.

“You’re not dead,” Martha responded, “and based on the uniform you’re wearing, you’re from quite a while ago, so I’ll let that pass. What’s your name?”

“Jeremy Cook, I am,” he said, enunciating, as though he thought she wouldn’t understand him. “A private soldier in the (a loud sneeze) Regiment.”

“Doctor, what do we do with these people?” Martha asked, standing. He had been examining another one, but stood as well. “If we take them back, couldn’t they muck up the timeline, or something like that?”

“Something of that sort could happen…I’ll have to talk to each of them. Let’s get them into the TARDIS. Baroness, help me with them, and don’t try to start the TARDIS and take off in it, you don’t know how to do it and you’d probably kill yourself.” He winked at Martha.

They were back aboard the TARDIS some time later. Beds had been prepared for everyone – the Doctor said it would take a day or so to get all the people back where they belonged, and they might as well all get some rest first. The Baroness had been locked in a room, over her objections – the Doctor wasn’t concerned about her taking over the TARDIS, but he was concerned about her learning things she shouldn’t necessarily learn. They still hadn’t decided where to take her. Martha and the Doctor were leaning against one of the panels of the control room, sleepy but not yet ready for bed.

“Doctor?”

“Hmm?”

“Should we really take the American soldiers back? That is, they were fighting in Vietnam with weapons that barely worked, and if history says they were, what is it, MIA -”

“I’ll talk with them about it tomorrow,” he told her. “We might make alternate arrangements.”

He turned to face her. She gazed at him, and finally just couldn’t bear it any more. It had to be now. She stepped forward, grasped his shoulder, and leaned toward him –

“Hey, could I get some water?”

The hallway door was open, and one of the American soldiers was standing in it.

“I’m thirsty, and I don’t know how to get any water.”

“Of course, let me show you,” the Doctor said, and headed off. Martha waited until they were out of sight, then banged her fist on the console and let out a long sigh.

The Baroness of Time, Part 1

by
The Doctor and Martha

I thought that this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c5XkGbEQiE) music video would make a good Doctor Who episode, so I decided to make it happen.

 

The TARDIS whirled through the vortex, the Doctor carefully adjusting the controls. Martha let her gaze rest on him, smiling fondly. Then she turned away. It would never work, she thought. He was an alien, he might not even be attracted to human females, subtle pheromone differences might make it impossible.

“Oh, that’s odd,” the Doctor noted, scrutinizing a display.

“What?” Martha asked, curious as ever.

“Well, I’ve never seen a time machine like that!” he exclaimed, fiddling with controls. Gallifreyan symbols flashed across the display. “That’s a very fluid approach, efficient in some ways, very crude in others…virtually no unequal displacement problems, but energy loss is far too high, now if you had the technology to sort out the displacement, why would you perform the basic operation so inefficiently?” He finally looked up. “Well, Martha, this may be your specialty, it almost looks organic to me.”

“That’s possible?”

“It’s evolved naturally, four – no! – five times in the entire history of the universe. It’s very hard inherently, and besides that, there’s a bit of an irreducible complexity problem, since the time travel has to be tied to the local gravity well or the organism ends up lost in deep space, that mutation has to happen at precisely the same time or the trait is immediately removed from the gene pool. So insanely rare…but not impossible. Never sentient, though, as once you can time-jump away from threats, you don’t need higher intelligence.”

“And you think this might be case number six?”

“It’s certainly possible,” the Doctor said, flashing his yes-this-is-in-fact-awesome grin. “Shall we investigate?”

“Why not?”

“Hang on.” Levers were yanked, buttons pushed, and the TARDIS slewed around sharply, decelerated, and settled to a stop.

The Doctor ran to the door and thrust it open.

A babble of talk filtered through. Martha followed him, and saw behind the Doctor a large room, filled with people drinking, eating, talking, and laughing. The clothes were hardly current, but she couldn’t place the date exactly.

“No no no!” the Doctor exclaimed, looking at the outside of the TARDIS. “What happened?” He ran his hand along the outside of the TARDIS, which had turned red, with panels of glass interspersed. “No, old girl, I liked you that way!”

“What happened?” demanded Martha, staring at the glass. Funnily enough, they couldn’t see anything from inside, and it looked like a perfectly ordinary empty telephone booth from out here.

“Well, the chameleon system originally cut out because its power failed, so unless…oh, of course! The energy wasted from the biologic time travel, it’s feeding into the system, causing it to engage again, I’ll have to set it right later, but how could that be unless the organism is in physical contact – ”

Martha slapped his arm and pointed. There was a young woman with black hair leaning against the corner of the box to their right, apparently hiding herself behind it, but peeking out, with an eerie, playful, certainly not fearful expression on her face. Martha followed her gaze to a short, black-haired, confused-looking young man frantically scanning the crowd, a book, presumably his, abandoned on a bench behind him. The same moment, the Doctor whipped out his sonic and raised it, but before he could do anything, she snapped her fingers sharply, and without any flashes, bangs, whizzes, or any fuss whatsoever, the woman simply vanished. At the same instant, Martha saw the man do exactly the same thing.

“Doctor! That man, the one she was looking at, he vanished!”

“So did she,” the Doctor responded, looking concerned. He dashed back into the TARDIS, punched a few controls, and examined the display.

“Twice as much power,” he noted. “That boy – man – wasn’t with her before.”

“I doubt he had any idea what was going on. The way he looked, he was just looking for a shag, not a time traveler.”

“Well, they’ll be easy to follow,” explained the Doctor. “They’re now throwing off about fourteen times the energy this entire TARDIS does, and I don’t even think they have an internal space warp, but how could any organism possibly do that, I don’t think even uranium eaters would have the power, but I suppose – ” he threw a last lever as Martha hastily shut the door, “we’re about to find out, and hopefully return this old girl to normal.”

The TARDIS, squealing against its perpetually engaged brakes, took off. Martha got a firm grip on the console and held on for dear life – the TARDIS was lurching wildly back and forth.

“It’s their bloody energy, it keeps pushing us yonkward and longward, Martha, the knob at the top of the console, three-quarters of the way clockwise, then blue button on lower left, one long press and one short!”

The TARDIS slammed hard into the ground, throwing the Doctor and Martha flat on their backs. The Doctor immediately sprang up and charged out the door, followed by Martha, swearing and rubbing her back.

Not only was the TARDIS not back to a police box, it was a different kind of telephone booth, outside a brightly lit diner that seemed to be full of people dancing. Martha scanned her surroundings: it was early evening, the cars looked like the fifties, and music could be heard coming from the jukebox in the diner.

“Notice anything strange, Martha?” the Doctor asked, looking through the window into the diner.

She suddenly saw it – the men were dancing across the diner, back and forth, snapping their fingers, in perfect unison. This wasn’t dancing to a beat – this was mechanical, utterly uniform, like the Borg in the Star Trek episode an American friend had insisted she watch. Likewise, the women were lined up along the counter and some stairs at the back of the place, dancing in a way that would have got you arrested twenty years ago, let alone fifty. Bums were shaken, skirts lifted, all with mechanical precision.

The Doctor yanked loose his sonic screwdriver, nodded to Martha, and they rushed into the diner. Their arrival seemed to snap the spell – the dancing broke up into a flurry of shouting, screaming, and frantic restoration of clothing to proper positions.

Martha caught the words “control” and “witchcraft”. It was utter chaos, and neither of them had any hope of seeing anything useful; Martha continued to scan, and was knocked over by a man in khakis and a button-up shirt leading a panicked rush for the exit. Feet slammed down all around her body, narrowly missing her arms and head, as she shouted for help. After a few terrifying moments, the Doctor seized her arm and yanked her to her feet, guiding her into and along with the mob struggling through the door.

“They’re gone!” the Doctor shouted over the din of human voices and crashing furniture. “Back to the TARDIS, we need to
follow! Whatever she is, she’s dangerous!”

They managed to get through the exit, and dashed back into the unassuming telephone booth.

“What I don’t understand,” the Doctor exclaimed as he dashed from one place to another, “is how she could do that, not once, but twice, in such a short meta-interval, she has to be getting power from somewhere. If I could catch her and get a reading, I might be able to find the power conduit, shut the thing down.” Martha, who was busy trying to brace herself against the console, didn’t respond. “Martha, switches at the top of that panel, put them all up except the second one from left – no! – no, the third one!” She did, he threw a lever, and the TARDIS was off again.

“Doctor, can’t you control this thing?” Martha shouted, as she was hurled from her grip on the console. She stayed down, trying to cling to the floor and wait for it to be over. Somehow he kept his feet, lurching from one place to another, slamming controls around faster than she’d ever seen him do it.

“Their energy feeds into our system, the results are unpredictable, I suggest you try controlling a TARDIS translating in eleven dimensions and spinning in six!”

The TARDIS began to slowly stop accelerating, and Martha started to get up. As she stood, the floor lurched violently again, there was a huge crash like breaking wood, and then everything was still. After a few moments, she walked carefully to the Doctor, who was staring at one of the many readouts, which flickered across his face.

“Doctor?”

“Right!” he shouted, dashed to the door, and flung it open. She followed, only to be hit in the ankles by a wave of cold, salty-smelling water that poured into the control room through the bottom of the door. She yelped and backpedaled, but the room’s bottom was rapidly filling up. Confused why the water wasn’t rising, she looked at the door again, and saw that there was a wooden deck about ten centimeters above the TARDIS floor, splintered where the wall had crashed through, then stuck.

“Doctor?”

“Martha,” he answered, “this is a fixed point in time. We are on a ship, the HMS Redwing, which set out from Sierra Leone in June 1827 and was never seen again. Whatever else happens, we cannot fix the hole. This ship was meant to and must sink, and take everyone on board with it. The only thing we can do is to try to catch the time traveler, who for whatever reason, brought herself and that man here.”

Martha looked at the floor, where water from the TARDIS was already starting to flow back out onto the deck. Once the TARDIS was no longer corking the hole, the hold would flood in minutes at most. Cold water would close in, and the lucky ones would drown, the unlucky make it to the lifeboats, only to slowly waste away from thirst and hunger.

“Doctor, can’t we…”

“No. In any case, I suspect the crew is all already dead.” He pointed.

A body lay on the deck, saltwater lapping at a splayed hand. It – he – wore a blue uniform coat, with a white patch on the collar. Martha rushed to him, dropped to her knees, and checked the neck for a pulse, but the coolness of the body – dead recently, but clearly dead – told her what she needed to know. The officer – the boy, in his late teens – had multiple lacerations and puncture wounds to the torso, and seemed to have died from organ failure or loss of blood.

Shouting from the decks above filtered down to them. The Doctor glanced at Martha; she nodded, and they hurried toward the narrow, steep wooden stairs leading upward. They climbed perhaps four meters and reached the deck. Brilliant sunlight hit their faces, and the noise from the pirates increased. The pair made their way across the deck toward the carousing pirates, following the Doctor’s sonic. There were no more bodies; perhaps the pirates had disposed of them, or the crew had previously grouped together for a last stand in the cabin.

The pirates – curiously, nearly as many women as men – were in a loose semicircle around the mast. The Union Jack had been hauled down and unceremoniously thrown across the, what did you call it, rigging, behind the pirates. A woman, possibly the one hiding behind the TARDIS, was tied to the mast, but as they approached, they saw a single man in a blue Royal Navy coat concealed on their side of a different mast, holding a sword and preparing to charge.

“Doctor!”

“Don’t move.”

“But Doctor, he’ll be killed – ”

“No,” the Doctor answered, frowning at the sonic, “he’s the man from earlier. If she wanted to kill him, she could have easily done so already. The question is, what does she want, and why all the games?”

“So what do we do?”

“Wait and watch,” he answered. A pirate leaped around the group at the mast, waving his sword in triumph. The officer – or time
traveler, or whoever he was – swung his arms back and forth, readying his body for action. He leaped out, and the Doctor jumped up and followed him, sonic at the ready. He was part of the way there when the woman saw him. She immediately twisted her hand above her head, and both seemingly captive woman and blue-coated man poofed.

The pirates all yelled, with a very different tone. One of them spotted the Doctor, then they all turned and looked at him. The scene was frozen like that for a moment, Doctor planted on the deck, sonic dangling from his hand, pirates loosely gripping weapons and staring at him. Then someone – presumably their leader – bellowed “AFTER HIM!”

“Run!”

The Doctor and Martha turned and dashed back toward the stairwell and the TARDIS, pirates in hot pursuit. Martha’s back was tensing uselessly, expecting any moment to be shot, but to her surprise no one was willing or able to shoot – perhaps the pirates had quite reasonably concluded they were cornered. Feet slamming down on the deck, the pair reached the stairs, dropping down them two at a time, and sped into the TARDIS; Martha slammed the door behind them.

“She saw us, didn’t she?” Martha asked. “You, at any rate.”

“Yes, I’m afraid she did, and I couldn’t get close enough to fix on her energy source, but we’ve no choice but to pursue, the fact that she vanished as soon as she saw me would definitely indicate she’s up to no good. Have you any ideas?” He had been dashing back and forth manipulating controls through all this, of course.

Martha shook her head.

The Doctor seemed to be having trouble getting the TARDIS going. He examined a display, but didn’t find anything satisfactory in it, and slapped it. When that produced no results, he mashed several buttons, again with no apparent useful result. Frowning, he examined another display, and slapped his forehead.

“Of course, of course, I should have thought of that,” he exclaimed, followed by something about polarization and pyramids that Martha didn’t quite catch. “We can’t materialize there,” the Doctor explained, looking up, “but we’ll hold position…over…it in the Vortex, like stopping on a road instead of parking, then we’ll be right on their tail when they leave, I should have thought of this before,” he leaped to the controls, “but the isochronic spectra would have been unstable due to excessive transition Hawking radiation in the former two cases, so I rejected it out of hand,” he slammed the lever, and the TARDIS was off, with not nearly as much lurching, “which I shouldn’t have done.”

The Doctor fiddled with the display a little more, and a picture appeared. It had an annoying amount of flicker and interference, but it clearly showed an opulent, apparently Egyptian room. The woman, inexplicably already dressed in clothing of the period, including a gold headpiece, sat on a throne. Various others lounged about, or stood in front of the throne. The man from earlier, being white rather than bronzed (although the woman did have an Egyptian’s skin – just what were they dealing with here?), stood out: he was being restrained by several guards in front of the throne. As the TARDIS slowed, Martha saw him and the woman talking.

“That’s English from their lips,” the Doctor noted. “Not Egyptian, the others must think it’s the language of the gods or some such rubbish. Unfortunately I can’t detect anything with a frequency so low as sound.”

The TARDIS stopped. Martha and the Doctor stood there, watching the display intently. The woman gestured, and the guards dragged the man away from the throne, thrust him into a cage – alarms! The two vanished, which did not seem to surprise most of the people there – she must have a base there.

“Ha! There they go!” the Doctor shouted. “Now we have them!” He slammed the TARDIS ahead, having the effect on Martha you should know by now. “We’re right on top of them, so they can’t ditch us somewhere deadly, which I thought they might try. If I can get a good landing, we’ll materialize within a few meters, I can sonic her power source and leave her stuck, and then we’ll see what’s what.”

The TARDIS slowed and stopped. The Doctor thrust the door open and ran out without looking at the display. Martha followed him, only to collide with him staggering backwards into the TARDIS, struggling with someone – or something, what the – ?!

“Martha, SHUT THE DOOR!” the Doctor bellowed, trying to keep the thing away from him. Even as Martha tried to do so, several more of them came lurching in. They were, or had been, human, but their bodies were pale, their eyes blank, and they released a terrible stench of blood and rotting flesh. Martha tried to call on her medical training, but all she could think: zombies, zombies!

It was no use trying to shut the door; they continued to enter the TARDIS. The Doctor thrust the one attacking him away for a moment, took one look at the situation, and yelled at Martha to fall back into the corridor to their rooms. Needless to say, she did. They were faster than the zombies; they were able to get into the corridor, slam, and lock the door before any of them got that far. The Doctor sonic-ed the door shut for good measure.

“You have advanced alien technology,” Martha demanded, “a sonic screwdriver, a time machine, but you don’t have AUTOMATIC DOORS?!”

The Doctor ignored this, speaking about something else. “Very psychologically methodical,” he noted. “First the game of touch, as it were, playfully running and bringing him after her. Satisfy his desire to demonstrate courage, then make him think they’ve formed a bond over her rescue of him from the Egyptians and the…whatever those things are. Come to think of it, I ought to investigate that later, I don’t think that’s supposed to happen. In any event, she’s trying to seduce him, to draw him in, the question is, why?”

“The question is, how do we get those bloody zombies out of the TARDIS!?” Martha responded. She took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself.

“I don’t know,” the Doctor answered. “I’ll think of something.”

The Case for Proportionate Use of the Death Penalty

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The main purpose of the death penalty is to deter murderers, by creating a rational incentive not to commit murder. Given that many murders are acts of mentally unstable people and/or “crimes of passion” the effectiveness of this is limited, which is one reason for the relatively rare use of the death penalty in recent years.

However, there are crimes that do far more utilitarian harm to society than murder, and can be reduced more effectively by deterrence. Two examples that spring to mind are white-collar thefts of millions of dollars, and stealing elections.

The first thing worth noting is that most government departments have a concept called “value of a statistical life” (VSL). This is used to evaluate policies; if the cost of the policy per life saved is less than the VSL value, then they recommend that the policy be implemented. Essentially, the VSL is what they say a human life is worth. It has ranged from $2 million to $6 million among different times and agencies. This is not generally known, mainly because it’s an unpopular concept. But it is done, and it’s hard to see what else can be done: if a human life is said to have an infinite value, there is no way to weigh various policies for which there are limited funds against one another. It is also true that substantially higher taxes for a million people to save one life may create more disutility than it prevents.

So since this is the value we assign to human life, and we consider it worth the death penalty to deter the deliberate taking of human life, the logical conclusion is that we should consider the theft (by whatever means) of an amount of money or wealth greater than 6 million USD, morally equivalent to murder, and make it punishable by the death penalty.

This would actually be much more effective at deterring white-collar crime than it is for murder, because fraud and embezzlement are not crimes of passion: people trained and practiced in weighing costs and benefits rationally conclude the expectation value of their schemes is positive. A death sentence for such crimes would drastically decrease the expectation value to the people involved, of such schemes. This would create a great deal of utility for society, as the costs associated with these thefts can destroy lives (a further way it is nearly morally equivalent to murder, or at least arson). Consider all the people who lost their homes in the housing bubble: if the bankers had gone to the houses with gasoline and set them on fire, they would have gone to prison for decades. As it was, hardly anyone was punished. Yet the results for the buyers of the houses were the same.

Likewise, stealing elections subvert the will of millions of people and bring the people most prepared to violate the rules into office. Those are not the people who should be running the country, and they tend to make bad decisions that create far more disutility than an individual act of murder.

For these reasons, it is extremely inefficient and morally inconsistent to punish murder with death, but not massive embezzlement or stealing an election.

What Phil Connor Should Have Done

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You’re living the same day over, and over, and over, and over. And over. As far as you know, you’ll never break out of the loop until you pull something off. Make it a great day, an amazing one.

The problem is, he thought too small.

Here’s what he should have done: studied physics, then figured out some way to get out of the town and to a real library (helicopters can fly in that weather, and there would undoubtedly have been some way to persuade someone to send a chopper for him). He reads everything there, then starts calculating. Sure, notes wouldn’t carry over, and he’d forget things. But he’d have an infinite number of chances; he could afford to forget things numerous times. Where necessary, he would arrange helicopter flights to labs and experimental facilities, and find ways to persuade people to cooperate.

Remember, he doesn’t have to succeed in any portion of this the first time, the second time, the tenth time, the hundredth time, or the thousandth time.

Eventually, inevitably, he would have developed a working commercial fusion reactor. An infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of typewriters…or make it medicine and cured cancer, or chemistry and found an incredibly cheap way to make fuel, or whatever. Anything. Anything but only trying to make a few people in a little town a bit happier for one day in their lives that was already supposed to be happy. Phil squandered his chance to greatly benefit, perhaps to save, the entire world.

Although, it’s possible that that’s not allowed, that whatever makes the decisions about who’s forced to relive days indefinitely prevents it from affecting anything but the individual and the people he knows. But if not…

Sauron’s Vision

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Here’s something that might have been bothering you about the Lord of the Rings movies, and possibly the books as well, because I think the principle was similar there. Saruman says that the Eye of Sauron pierces “cloud, shadow, earth, and flesh”. Basically, he can see anything, anywhere. So why doesn’t he know exactly where the Ring is and what they’re trying to do with it the first time he spots them? Granted, they could have been heading for Gondor, planning to use the Ring against Sauron, but he would have known exactly where they were and been able to send forces after them a bunch of times. And, towards the end of the third movie the hobbits are in Mordor and Sauron looks right at them. It would not be difficult to deduce that they were trying to destroy the Ring in Orodruin.

So why can’t Sauron figure it out?

Because, he has no depth perception. Not “Eyes” of Sauron. “Eye” of Sauron.

Compared to the height of the Dark Tower, Middle-Earth, even Mordor, is a very big place. Except for locations within a very short range of Barad-Dur, he would be looking essentially horizontally. Theoretically, he could work it out with trigonometry, but (based on what happened when the Ring was destroyed) he seems to have substituted powerful magic for any knowledge of proper architecture or basic math. With the angle no help, and no depth perception, Sauron would have had no way of determining distance with any precision past somewhere between ten and fifty miles.

If you trace a line between where the hobbits were when they were spotted and the Dark Tower, it continues through Gondor. So when Sauron spotted them crossing Mordor, carrying the Ring, he had no way to tell how far away they were. He would have assumed that the hobbits, and the Ring, were somewhere in Gondor or the lands between them. Given how hard it was to get into Mordor, and the fact that it would never have been accomplished had the orcs in the guard tower not started killing each other at a convenient time, this was a reasonable assumption.

From this, Sauron would have been able to tell that Aragorn and co. didnothave the Ring, so he immediately turned his attention to surrounding and destroying them. Given the degree to which Aragorn was outnumbered, Sauron would have strongly suspected a trap of some kind, but would have thought it would involve Aragorn’s force or some other army, never imagining that the entire attack was a diversion for the activities of only two hobbits.

I could discuss this further, but I have some actual work to do. I need to find a way to get people to actually read this stuff, as that’s kind of the whole point of a blog. I’ll probably copy all this to somewhere else sometime in the future, but I’m still working on that.

Why Democrats Should Support Congressional Attempts to Increase Iranian Sanctions

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Peace is generally a good thing. Reducing the chance of starting a global thermonuclear war, that would send the planet back to the Dark Ages or worse, is even better.

However, the chance of Iran actually being stupid enough to use an atomic bomb it might obtain is negligible. We had similar fears of the Soviet Union’s atomic bombs for 40 years, and this was used to justify a tremendous waste of resources for “defense” infrastructure and preparations for the seemingly inevitable World War Three. The Russians had bad ideas, but they weren’t truly insane. They understood mutually assured destruction as well as we did; they of course, as we did, thought that their system was superior to ours, and that our system was doomed to fail. It therefore made no sense for them, just as it made no sense for us, to launch a first strike: to do so would have destroyed both systems, while they believed that all that they had to do to win the Cold War was wait. Of course, it was the other way around–and so it is with Iran.

Stalinist Communism and radical Islam have similar fanaticism, a similar willingness to sacrifice good in the here and now for good supposedly to come, and the same effects on human freedom and dignity. Iranian religious leaders believe that God is on their side, just as the Soviets believed history was on theirs, and that we are doomed to fall and them to triumph. With such a mindset, it would be utterly insane for them to launch a nuclear attack; just as with the Soviets, there are some, but very few, so determined to hurt us as to be willing to destroy themselves to do it.

But what benefits do the sanctions have, if not to deter Iran from obtaining an atomic bomb? The answer lies in the economics of negative externalities.

We have a gas tax in this country, but it comes nowhere near paying for the cost to society of gasoline, as much as twice as the price one actually pays for a gallon of gasoline. This cost is paid through income and other taxes, which greatly reduces the incentive to cut back fuel use. But the point is that the price that we should be paying for gas is much higher than the price we are paying, and that a day of reckoning will come.

The closer the price of gas is to what it should be, the more market forces will encourage what we ultimately must do: adopt efficient equipment, renewable energy, and sustainable resource extraction. The more the price of gas falls, the more burden falls on the taxpayers, in the form of money the government needs to pay for hurricane relief and rebuilding, the results of more extreme and violent weather, and the costs of medical treatment for those affected by refinery pollution, among many other costs. Low gas prices only give the appearance of a savings, because you see them every time you fill a gas tank, but see your tax bill only once a year and do not make the connection between it and the negative externalities of gasoline.

And that is the crucial point. A United States refusal to purchase Iranian oil drives up the price of gas in this country, bringing it closer to what we should be paying for gas, and rewarding cleverness in finding ways to save gas and thereby benefit society. The longer the sanctions go on, the more the market will drive renewable energy, and the less need we will have for Iranian oil when sanctions are lifted.

This was what happened with the 1970s OPEC embargo. Reagan was a contributing factor to the end of the embargo, but the real cause was OPEC’s realization that they were making the market favor sustainable energy. President Carter was responding in the best possible way: encouraging conservation, efficiency, and alternative energy. If OPEC had continued the embargo, breakthroughs would have bred breakthroughs, economies of scale would have been attained with wind and solar, and we might all be driving electric cars right now. OPEC realized that if they kept up the embargo, it would be only a matter of time till we no longer needed them.

We failed then; Reagan and the Republican resurgence of the 1980s turned their backs on sustainable energy. Reagan went so far as to, at some expense, wantonly remove a solar heater already in place and functioning, from the White House. We should not fail now.

We do not want Iranian oil, and anything that drives up the price of gas, and hastens the day when “gasoline” is only a word in a history textbook, benefits the environment, the country, and ultimately the entirety of human civilization.

My thoughts on changing the dorm model

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Maybe this wouldn’t work: maybe the costs of all those different structures would be prohibitive. But I think a great improvement on the current dormitory model would be individual rooms of a much smaller size. The walls between them would be designed not for structural integrity (that is, they would not be structurally significant as part of the building) but would consist essentially of sound padding. Each such room would have its own small sink, toilet, and shower, although those could be combined without greatly weakening the validity of the scheme.

Such a scheme would have the following advantages:

  1. Socialization would be more awkward and thus more difficult. This would decrease time wasted with social activities, and encourage productive activities such as studying, reading, or student organization involvement. Members of such organizations are much more likely to have things in common(such as the purpose of the organizations), and will be better able to befriend each other without the difficulties of living together.
  2. This would not only increase the incentive to study, but make it easier to do so. With individual rooms insulated from each other, people would be spared the visual and auditory distractions of roommates’ activities, music, and entry/exit. This would greatly reduce the need to go to libraries and study rooms to study, which would reduce the need for them and therefore possibly result in more, not less, efficient use of building space. This would increase the knowledge/skills and hence the productivity of our future workforce, making technical, political, and social innovations capable of solving society’s current pressing social, political, and environmental problems, more likely.
  3. Likewise, sleeping would be easier and more beneficial to the sleepers (as noise, light variations, and odd hours reduce the quality and benefits of one’s sleep). One could sleep at any time without regard to the needs of roommates.
  4. With every student given his or her own room, the environment could be set according to one’s personal preferences, which would reduce distractions and improve happiness. This includes such variables as light level, temperature, and cleanliness.
  5. Sex would be greatly facilitated due to the lack of the need to coordinate with roommates’ activities. Although this might seem to increase distractions, the fundamental purpose of most “partying” and some other types of activity is to find desirable partners for sexual activity. Eliminating the need for caution, subterfuge, or relocation would increase efficiency and decrease the need for secondary distractions which are far more harmful to one’s health and concentration, such as drug abuse and listening to modern dance music. It should be noted that our bodies have been evolving to enjoy having sex but not be harmed by it for billions of years, but have been evolving to be unharmed by drug abuse for only some hundreds or thousands.
  6. Such a system would facilitate transfer of people in and out of the dorms by reducing ultimately useless greetings and farewells.