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HEAD GAMES.
by Steve Lyons.
With thanks to Peter Ling, for creating the Land of Fiction in the first place.
Head Start.
When the wind blew outside, the dim light bulb flickered. Cold air sneaked around the rotting window frame and curtains flapped against peeling plaster with a sound like leathern wings.
It didn"t matter any more.
He would be out of this bedsit soon enough; Jason knew that, embraced it as a certainty. He was going to the stars, to sail the solar winds. To visit planets, right wrongs and fight monsters.
Everything a s.p.a.ce-age superhero should do.
First, he had to get the story right.
Jason stared at the four words he had written. Once upon a Once upon a time time. He screwed up his face as if, by willing it, he could make the battered manual typewriter complete the tale of its own volition. Finally, frustrated, he ripped the paper from its roller, crushed it into a ball and hurled it savagely across the room. It bounced of the tattered Def Leppard poster, knocked the chipped plaster figurine of Frank Sidebottom from its shelf and came to rest on the threadbare carpet amidst a veritable sea of its predecessors.
With increasing urgency, Jason wound a fresh sheet into position. He didn"t have long. The opportunity would soon be gone and he might not get another like it.
He stabbed at a few letters tentatively. This time, he was pleased with the result. He began to allow himself hope - and as the work progressed, his two-finger typing became faster and more frenzied. It was as though the energy was guiding him, bleeding from his fingertips and into the keyboard and, through that, to the printed characters on the page; to the story he had been waiting to write.
1.
He could almost see it. It was going to work.
Jason knew he couldn"t stop then, even when a gust of stale air blasted through the tiny room. He kept his eyes on the unfolding text as a raucous trumpeting sound struck up; as it grew in volume and reverberated from the four walls of his squalid existence. He was writing the prologue to the rest of his life and he couldn"t let anything stop him. Not until it was complete.
When at last it was, Jason turned round and looked - and saw what he had been waiting almost seven years for.
There was a box in the corner. A blue one, six feet high, with a door on the front and an inscription above it. Police Public Police Public Call Box Call Box. Jason smiled as the door opened and a good-humoured, almost impish, face peered through the orifice.
"And where might the TARDIS have brought me this time?"
He was so excited that a full five seconds pa.s.sed before his vocal chords could respond. "Earth. 2001."
The man emerged from the box fully, and Jason inspected his attire curiously. Baggy, checked trousers, paisley scarf, chocolate brown jacket and an odd, question-mark patterned pullover. "Any monsters here? Any rogue androids, despicable villains, megalomaniacs attempting to take over the universe?"
A Scottish burr coloured the words which rolled from the stranger"s tongue. His eyes gleamed blue - or was that green?
It was hard to tell in the poor light. "Any heartless despots attempting to deprive the world of tea and biscuits?"
Jason shook his head.
"No danger and excitement, then? No nefarious wrongdoings to warrant my attention?"
"No. "Sboring."
"Then we shall have to find somewhere that does have those things, shan"t we?"
Jason nodded vigorously, his face alight. The stranger smiled and beckoned the young man into his craft. The door closed softly behind them and the noise of trumpets bellowed out again as the unearthly container slowly vanished.
In the seconds which immediately followed its departure, 2
someone banged on the dividing wall and yelled for silence; the bulb blinked out and plunged the room into darkness; and the typewriter chattered, playing out a staccato rhythm of its own.
Jason and the stranger left then, to begin a new life .filled with adventure adventure.
Almost as an afterthought, it wrote: And they all lived happily And they all lived happily ever after. ever after.
3.
1.Bad Dreams (1)
The Doctor tried to hold on to the good times.
He forced himself to think about Terra Alpha: the planet where happiness was mandatory, where death squads had punished those who had dared to feel blue. Five hundred thousand murders. He had saved its people from more, taught them a valuable lesson and defeated their leader, the monstrous Helen A, without having to destroy her. His new companion, the girl Ace, had practically idolized him. "I want to be like you," she had said. Or some such words to that effect.
Remember the good times.
"So how do you do it?" she had asked in the TARDIS later.
He had mumbled something non-commital, hidden blushes, pretending not to know what she meant. "I mean, this is a regular thing for you, right?"
"It does consume a proportion of my time," he had admitted, with an embarra.s.sed smile. But it"s really only a matter of being able to distinguish right from wrong."
"I suppose so. So you stroll into a place, find out what"s up, confront what"s causing the badness and, if they won"t listen, band the victims together and force the rulers to see sense.
Wicked!"
That was when the control room"s central column had come to rest, a sign that the Doctor"s extra-dimensional vessel had materialized elsewhere. Ace had bounded up to the console exuberantly. "So what next? Daleks on Skaro? Mercenaries on Mars"? Giant fleas on Pluto?" She hadn"t seen the Doctor"s face fall as she operated the scanner control - as he realized where they"d landed. "Ace! There"s plenty of injustice here, right? Just pick a grievance! Where do we start, Professor?"
4.It had never been the same after that. Ace had always liked things simple, had wanted to believe she was doing good in a dangerous, exciting and, above all, clear-cut way. She had had her suspicions before, during that business with the Hand of Omega - but this was the first time she had really questioned the Doctor"s motives openly. The first time she had ever doubted him.
Looking back on it, he might have tried to explain more.
Perhaps he could have saved them both considerable heartache further down the line. Instead, he had withdrawn into himself, tried to fob her off with plat.i.tudes about the Universal Good and the Great Scheme of Things. They had visited other planets and they"d gone through the formula again: they confronted monsters, battled cruel dictators, inspired brave men and women to overthrow corrupt regimes. But Ace never understood why it always had to be different on Earth.
This was what the Doctor had been trying to avoid. The bad times had corrupted the dream, washing over the good ones so that only the misery and guilt remained.
He had to lose them. Before they did more damage.
"Oncoming," chirped the high-pitched voice of the onboard computer. The warning was unnecessary. Bernice had already thrust the steering into full left tilt, although not quite in time to avoid a hit. The speeding, fat airbus clipped her anti-gray unit and she fought for control as the sky-bike"s underside sparked against the edge of one of Metro City"s grey monoliths. With a string of expletives, she gunned the rockets and shot up twelve storeys to where the traffic wasn"t quite so heavy.
"Close call," the computer baited her. "You need to brush up your flying skills."
"Is that a professional judgement or are you just looking to get an axe in your processors?"
"We are touchy today. Want to talk about it?"
"Great. Navigation, running commentary, aeronautical tutorials and now elementary psychoa.n.a.lysis."
"Not to leave out criminal detection," the computer added.
"Two o"clock, three storeys down."
5.He was on the rooftop of a smaller building, across the airway. The silver costume was unmistakable; Bernice couldn"t help but think of baked potatoes. She could even make out the tell-tale question mark, in lurid crimson on the figure"s chest.
The computer yelled in mock terror as Benny kicked in the rockets and sent the sky-bike screaming towards her masked adversary. No way was she losing him again. She could feel her teeth rattling in the sudden turbulence and her stomach rose into her ribcage.
Then the blaring of a horn alerted her to a more immediate concern. By the time the computer shouted its warning, she had already slammed on the airbrakes. The car shot across her path, two fingers waving from the pilot"s window. The distraction was enough for her quarry to disappear. She searched the skies and saw him as the computer did.
"He"s under the airbus!"
Another of the grey blimps, a short way above and ahead. He was dangling from the undercarriage, seemingly unconcerned about the tremendous drop. Bernice grinned. She had him.
Then, to her astonishment, he let go of the vehicle, performed a triple somersault and made an impossibly perfect landing on the back of a hovercar. By the time she had changed her own course, he was three blocks east and a dozen storeys below, leaping from car to flagpole to rooftop to car as if negotiating stepping stones in a river. She twisted the bars this way and that, lost sight of him, locked on again and finally lost him altogether.
Then suddenly she was coughing and the sky was filled with red and blue smoke. She sent the bike on a vertical plummet beneath the cloud and almost went straight through another vehicle in the process. Traffic had come to a standstill, gridlocked by the disruption of the complex air pa.s.sages and rights of way that Benny had been cheerfully ignoring for the past half-hour. It"s a message," the computer observed, rather superfluously. It would have been hard to miss the twelve foot high, multi-coloured letters which hovered in the sky.
WHAT"S BIG AND RED AND EATS ROCKS?
6.-?Q.
"I don"t believe it."
"The Quiz"s stock-in-trade: a bad pun."
"Yes, thank you Sherlock."
"To which the answer is: "A big red rock eater." "
"Pathetic!"
"Don"t blame me, I only solved it. By the way, there"s a cafe on the corner of forty-nine and third called the "Red Rock Eatery"."
"I don"t believe you."
"Want me to overlay a course on your street guide?"
Bernice sighed and slid the bike back into gear. "What I want is for you to wake me up. I"ve got to be dreaming!"
"I hope not. You"re driving."
In real life," she considered, "I would not put up with this. I would not be in the most over-populated, over-developed, labyrinthine city in the galaxy chasing a lunatic with a puzzle fetish on an antiquated sky-bike with the dubious a.s.sistance of the smart-mouthed, sarcastic computerized equivalent of . . . of .
"Of you?"
"d.a.m.n, yes!"
"If you"ve time to steer around that penthouse extension whilst you"re soliloquizing . . ."
Bernice performed the necessary course adjustment and a frown creased her forehead. "Come to think of it," she said, "I don"t know what I am am doing here." doing here."
The Doctor was dreaming. And hurting. And struggling to remember good things: laughing, joking, the victories and the celebrations.
He remembered the camaraderie. His elite group of handpicked agents: the Doctor, Ace and Benny, standing united and invincible against a procession of loathsome foes. Good versus evil, with no shades of grey. But something in his mind forced him to recall the bad times too. Ace, older and bitter, sick of his betrayals and secrets, infuriated by his complicity in 7 parting her from Robin and letting Jan die. Bernice, so angered by the destruction of the Seven Planets in the Althosian System and never understanding why he"d had to let it happen.
They had both forgiven him, at last, and things had been good again. Ace had left, but she had done so on friendly terms, like so many others. Bernice was still by his side, one of the Doctor"s most devoted and longest serving partners. But there were so many things on his conscience, so much human misery to atone for.
At times like this, when he was lying to his companions and manipulating them again, he felt the pain of that intensely.
Only as the bike plummeted five hundred storeys did Benny fully appreciate how high she had been. The thought alone made her dizzy.
At ground level, Metro City was as decrepit and congested as it had been above. However, as she threaded through the ground-crawling traffic, Benny"s eye was attracted to more than one extraordinary feature. "It"s an archaeologist"s nightmare,"
she complained at length. "These beautiful Victorian buildings with ugly twentieth-century frontages and post-Modernist tower blocks sticking out of them."
"Metro City was a.s.sembled over many years," the computer said.
"Thrown together, more like. If I"d been on that planning committee, I"d"ve -"
"Bomb warning."
"- had the city architects hung, drawn and - what did you say?"
The explosion caught her side on; it was all she could do to keep the buffeted sky-bike from flattening her against the wall.
Gla.s.s rained on her coveralls and she shot upwards to avoid it.