Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2008-08-18 06:13 pm
ptahrrific) wrote2008-08-18 06:13 pm
Entry tags:
Fake News/Doctor Who: A Thousand Words, part 3
Title: Truthiness And Relative Dimensions In Space: A Thousand Wørds (3/5)
Rating: PG
Series: The Colbert Report, Doctor Who
Spoilers: Anything through New Who S3 is fair game.
Summary: Young Stephen wants to see tentacle monsters, an alien civilization is in trouble, and the Doctor discovers at least one impossible thing before breakfast.
Table of contents, and footnotes, here.
A Thousand Wørds
Part Three
Earth: 2026.
"So, what did you think?" asked Jack as Stephen followed him and the Doctor back to the TARDIS, their shadows stretching high up on the stadium wall in the light of the setting sun.
"The game was really cool!" said Stephen appreciatively. "But can we go somewhere with aliens now? No offense."
"Hey now!" protested the Doctor. "I'm an alien. What, am I not good enough for you?"
Stephen jumped. "Not at all! You're incredible. You've got a time machine! But you look so—well—human. There must be aliens out there that have scales and tentacles and things, right?"
"Plenty," agreed Jack.
"Let's go see them, then!"
"Easy there! You're not going to see the whole cosmos in one day. You've gotta pace yourself."
"Do I have to?" complained Stephen.
To his great irritation, Jack laughed. The Doctor . . .
For a split second, Stephen thought he saw the ghost of a smile on the Doctor's face.
Then he nearly tripped over his own feet; Jack caught his arm, and when he had regained his balance the stoic expression had returned.
"You should get some rest," said the Captain. "If you can't fall asleep right away, there's plenty of stuff in that room to keep you busy."
"I don't want to fall asleep!" protested Stephen earnestly as they entered the TARDIS. "There's so much to do!"
All at once the Doctor looked sort of sad. "Don't worry," he said quietly. "It'll all still be here when you wake up."
⇔
The Vortex.
Their argument forgotten, both companions turned to the Doctor in utter bafflement.
"Do be serious, Doctor," began Sarah Jane.
"Oh, I am serious!" said the Doctor earnestly. "The fate of an entire species is at stake here! At least, if this is what I think it is. Which it might not be. All I have to go on is Stephen's description. Now, Stephen, think hard, because this is very, very important: What exactly was it?"
"How should I know?" demanded Stephen. "I'm not some elitist expert with a fancy degree in alienology. I go with my gut. And in this case my gut doesn't know squat."
"Well, surely you can describe it in more detail," protested the Doctor.
Stephen shrugged. "It was some alien thing, about yea big, and it was purple and scaly and it blinked. What else do you want to know?"
The Doctor, leaning over the console, pointed at the screen in front of him. "Did it look anything like this?"
Joining him, Stephen looked over his shoulder. "Yeah, that's it! Why did you keep asking questions if you already knew?"
"What is it, Doctor?" asked Sarah Jane, leaning over his other shoulder. The image on the screen looked sort of like a scaly purple chrysalis—with, sure enough, little lights blinking on and off within.
"It's impossible, that's what it is," declared the Doctor, staring off into the distance and addressing himself more than either of his companions. "Simply impossible. There's no way it could survive regeneration."
Holding very still, he clapped a hand on Stephen's shoulder. "What happened to it, exactly?"
Stephen looked a little rattled. "I—it wasn't my fault!"
⇔
The Vortex.
The Doctor is in his tenth incarnation. Stephen Col-bert is 17. Establishments that give senior discounts end up owing Jack Harkness money.
Pinching himself every few minutes to keep himself awake, Stephen spread the contents of one of his cabinets out on the bed and looked the items over, picking them up and turning them over in his hands to study them more closely.
In spite of the Doctor's reassurances, he couldn't shake the feeling that this was too good to be true. It couldn't last. If he dared to let himself fall asleep, he knew he would wake up to find that it had all been a dream, that he was back in his own bed on Earth with no escape except for the D&D sourcebooks stuffed under the mattress.
And if this was inevitable, then he wanted to memorize every detail before he lost it.
"Sorry, Professor Tolkien," he said out loud as he lifted the man's new novel reverently with both hands. "I wish I'd had time to read this. I'm sure it's fantastic."
His vision blurred a little, and he blinked rapidly. Shake it off, Col-bert. Don't fall apart now.
Setting the book quickly aside, he reached for one of the objects he hadn't been able to identify. It was a lump of some unfamiliar material, lightly textured like the skin of a snake and colored in a medley of shades of purple, just the right size to nestle comfortably in Stephen's palm. He turned it slightly, watching the way the colors changed as they reflected the light . . . .
No, he realized suddenly, it wasn't just reflection. There were tiny lights winking on and off just beneath the object's surface.
he's lonely
Was it electric? It didn't feel like any appliance Stephen had ever known. It felt . . . soft. And warm.
"Are you alive?" he whispered.
sleep
Stephen's eyes slid closed. This time, he let himself drift off.
⇔
The Vortex.
The Doctor is in his fourth incarnation. Stephen Colbert is 44. Sarah Jane Smith is 29.
"What wasn't your fault?" pressed the Doctor.
"It . . . it broke," Stephen stammered. "One day I picked it up and found a big rip in the side, and it was empty and the lights were all gone. And after that it sort of flaked away.
"But you can't blame me!" he added, raising his voice to drown out the sudden feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath his feet. (An entire species is at stake and it might be ruined and it might be all my fault and . . . .) "It was in my room! You didn't tell me not to touch it! What did you expect?"
"I do wish you'd stop being mysterious and just tell us what this thing is," complained Sarah Jane.
"What? Oh, yes, of course," replied the Doctor. "It's the chrysalis of a papilløn, from the planet Mot. It's a long-lived kind of symbiotic parapsychic lexophile. In the transitional stage, of course."
Sarah Jane rolled her eyes. "Well, that explains everything."
Thunderstruck, Stephen gaped at her. "No, it doesn't!"
Normally Sarah Jane would have explained the joke, but she was getting a little fed up with Stephen. "And what are you going to do about it?" she replied. "Ask questions? Look for facts? Question my authority?"
"You're not an authority figure. You're a lady."
"Well, excuse me! I—"
"You're excused," said Stephen quickly.
Sarah Jane resisted the urge to smack him.
⇔
Mot: 4692 AE (Ailurean Era).
"Your Majesty? I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."
Her Royal Majesty Queen Calembour IV of Mot didn't need to hear it. The waves of grief radiating from the doctor's papilløn told her all she needed to know. Still, out of politeness, she addressed Racine directly. "What is it, Doctor?"
"The clutch, Majesty . . . they didn't make it."
"None survived?"
Racine sounded frustrated. "Your Majesty, if even one papilløn had been able to form a chrysalis, don't you think I would have announced it with cheering and trumpets? There are none."
It Is As Expected, observed Calembour's papilløn. The Mother Is Simply Too Old.
"Nevertheless," said Calembour, "you must find some way to make this work. The people are restless, on the edge of revolt. If no new papilløn larvae are born, there will be an uprising within the next hundred years."
"Surely not, Majesty! The papilløn population has been on the decline for centuries now. The population can hardly blame you!"
"They can, and they will," said the Queen. "Futile though the gesture will be, I will be the first one they excute—and you, my dear Court Scientist, will be next."
⇔
The Vortex.
"The papilløn are one of two species on their planet, along with the mots," the Doctor explained as he rifled through a compartment behind one of the roundels on the console room wall. "Symbiotes. Absolutely fascinating case. Here, hold this."
Sarah Jane took the basketball-sized mass of green crystal and held it awkwardly, trying to balance it with the overflowing manila folder, antique fob watch, and unopened bag of jelly babies he had already handed to her. "Don't you ever clean out your cupboards, Doctor?"
"Never. Now, a papilløn is born with a physical form, but soon afterward it imprints on a young mot and forms itself a chrysalis. A scant few hundred years later, it crawls out, having completely transitioned into a form made of pure psychic energy."
"A 'scant' few hundred years?"
"Well, scant for mots. They're one of the longest-lived species in the galaxy. We tried letting a couple of papilløn imprint on Time Lords once, but as soon as a Time Lord regenerates, the papilløn can't recognize him or her as the person on which it imprinted. They need a species that can stay the same for a long time. Oh, it's my field gravity detector! I thought I'd lost this. Hang on to that, Stephen."
Stephen, who was already holding, among other things, a large straw hat and what could have been a remote control designed by M. C. Escher, took the new object gingerly. "Wow. The technology in this must be incredible. And to think, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was an ordinary yo-yo."
"It is an ordinary yo-yo!" replied the Doctor. "The best device ever constructed for determining the presence, magnitude, and direction of gravity in a given area, and humans invented it two millennia before you even realized you were on a round planet. Incredible. Completely useless if you want to tell whether someone is lugging around a papilløn, of course. For that, you need . . . this!"
With a triumphant flourish, he held up a dark blue bus pass holder, flipping it open to reveal a small piece of white paper.
"It's blank," said Stephen, sounding unimpressed.
"It's blank now. No input yet. Take it!"
Stephen looked helplessly from the paper to the heap of junk in his arms. With a sigh, Sarah Jane dumped her own armload back in the compartment and started to toss Stephen's baggage after them. I guess we're going to put off the cleaning for another time.
"Go on, then," said the Doctor encouragingly when Stephen finally had a free hand to take the paper.
"Um, okay. Go on and do what?"
"Just hold it up so we can see, and start talking. I know you can handle that bit."
Stephen grinned. "It's a gift. Give me any topic and I can riff on it, from the gut, for as long as the cameras are on. And most of the time when they're off, too, so I don't get out of practice. Anything in particular I should talk about?"
"How about yourself?" suggested Sarah Jane.
She wasn't surprised when Stephen missed the joke entirely. "Excellent choice! That's actually what I was planning to talk about no matter what you said." He cleared his throat. "My name is Stephen T. Colbert, and I have a dream. A dream that, one day, everyone in the world, be they black, white, or Mexican, will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, turn on the TV, and watch my show."
Sarah Jane gasped.
The paper, which she had clearly seen to be unmarked only a few moments ago, was blank no longer. A handful of words had simply popped into being on its surface. In a readable, no-nonsense sans serif font, no less.
They said: From Every Mountainside, Let Freem Ring!
Seemingly oblivious, Stephen kept talking. "You see, I believe in the value of ideas. Specifically, my ideas. I figure my two cents is worth at least a dollar."
The paper changed again. The font was still simple, but the words this time were gibberish, at least as far as Sarah Jane could tell:
Still €0.02.
"But I value other people's views, too. Even when I completely disagree with someone, I have no problem inviting them on my show, so they can have an open forum in which to have me tell them exactly how they're wrong."
Wrong = Don't Shout Loudly Enough.
"Sure, I have my critics, but I'm never going to change. People who watch my show, they know what they're getting. If they wanted calm, reasonable debate, they would watch Jon Stewart. Personally, I never do."
Except When He Does.
"Well, maybe sometimes. Like when I feel sorry for him. Or when he has a guest that I like. Or when I need a quick dose of rage. Stewart's liberal agenda is a surefire way to help me get up a good head of anger. Along with CNN, gay porn, and bowtie pasta. It's pasta! It has no business being shaped like articles of clothing! Someone might mix the two up!"
"Someone" = Stephen, clarified the paper.
"Anyway, the point is, I'm Stephen Colbert. And if you don't like it, I'll shout at you until you change your mind or agree just to shut me up."
Nothing Will Ever Shut Him Up.
"How was that?"
"What was that?" added Sarah Jane, still staring at the paper in astonishment.
"He's got a papilløn, all right," the Doctor replied. "What's more, it's sarcastic."
Rating: PG
Series: The Colbert Report, Doctor Who
Spoilers: Anything through New Who S3 is fair game.
Summary: Young Stephen wants to see tentacle monsters, an alien civilization is in trouble, and the Doctor discovers at least one impossible thing before breakfast.
Table of contents, and footnotes, here.
A Thousand Wørds
Part Three
Earth: 2026.
"So, what did you think?" asked Jack as Stephen followed him and the Doctor back to the TARDIS, their shadows stretching high up on the stadium wall in the light of the setting sun.
"The game was really cool!" said Stephen appreciatively. "But can we go somewhere with aliens now? No offense."
"Hey now!" protested the Doctor. "I'm an alien. What, am I not good enough for you?"
Stephen jumped. "Not at all! You're incredible. You've got a time machine! But you look so—well—human. There must be aliens out there that have scales and tentacles and things, right?"
"Plenty," agreed Jack.
"Let's go see them, then!"
"Easy there! You're not going to see the whole cosmos in one day. You've gotta pace yourself."
"Do I have to?" complained Stephen.
To his great irritation, Jack laughed. The Doctor . . .
For a split second, Stephen thought he saw the ghost of a smile on the Doctor's face.
Then he nearly tripped over his own feet; Jack caught his arm, and when he had regained his balance the stoic expression had returned.
"You should get some rest," said the Captain. "If you can't fall asleep right away, there's plenty of stuff in that room to keep you busy."
"I don't want to fall asleep!" protested Stephen earnestly as they entered the TARDIS. "There's so much to do!"
All at once the Doctor looked sort of sad. "Don't worry," he said quietly. "It'll all still be here when you wake up."
The Vortex.
Their argument forgotten, both companions turned to the Doctor in utter bafflement.
"Do be serious, Doctor," began Sarah Jane.
"Oh, I am serious!" said the Doctor earnestly. "The fate of an entire species is at stake here! At least, if this is what I think it is. Which it might not be. All I have to go on is Stephen's description. Now, Stephen, think hard, because this is very, very important: What exactly was it?"
"How should I know?" demanded Stephen. "I'm not some elitist expert with a fancy degree in alienology. I go with my gut. And in this case my gut doesn't know squat."
"Well, surely you can describe it in more detail," protested the Doctor.
Stephen shrugged. "It was some alien thing, about yea big, and it was purple and scaly and it blinked. What else do you want to know?"
The Doctor, leaning over the console, pointed at the screen in front of him. "Did it look anything like this?"
Joining him, Stephen looked over his shoulder. "Yeah, that's it! Why did you keep asking questions if you already knew?"
"What is it, Doctor?" asked Sarah Jane, leaning over his other shoulder. The image on the screen looked sort of like a scaly purple chrysalis—with, sure enough, little lights blinking on and off within.
"It's impossible, that's what it is," declared the Doctor, staring off into the distance and addressing himself more than either of his companions. "Simply impossible. There's no way it could survive regeneration."
Holding very still, he clapped a hand on Stephen's shoulder. "What happened to it, exactly?"
Stephen looked a little rattled. "I—it wasn't my fault!"
The Vortex.
The Doctor is in his tenth incarnation. Stephen Col-bert is 17. Establishments that give senior discounts end up owing Jack Harkness money.
Pinching himself every few minutes to keep himself awake, Stephen spread the contents of one of his cabinets out on the bed and looked the items over, picking them up and turning them over in his hands to study them more closely.
In spite of the Doctor's reassurances, he couldn't shake the feeling that this was too good to be true. It couldn't last. If he dared to let himself fall asleep, he knew he would wake up to find that it had all been a dream, that he was back in his own bed on Earth with no escape except for the D&D sourcebooks stuffed under the mattress.
And if this was inevitable, then he wanted to memorize every detail before he lost it.
"Sorry, Professor Tolkien," he said out loud as he lifted the man's new novel reverently with both hands. "I wish I'd had time to read this. I'm sure it's fantastic."
His vision blurred a little, and he blinked rapidly. Shake it off, Col-bert. Don't fall apart now.
Setting the book quickly aside, he reached for one of the objects he hadn't been able to identify. It was a lump of some unfamiliar material, lightly textured like the skin of a snake and colored in a medley of shades of purple, just the right size to nestle comfortably in Stephen's palm. He turned it slightly, watching the way the colors changed as they reflected the light . . . .
No, he realized suddenly, it wasn't just reflection. There were tiny lights winking on and off just beneath the object's surface.
he's lonely
Was it electric? It didn't feel like any appliance Stephen had ever known. It felt . . . soft. And warm.
"Are you alive?" he whispered.
sleep
Stephen's eyes slid closed. This time, he let himself drift off.
The Vortex.
The Doctor is in his fourth incarnation. Stephen Colbert is 44. Sarah Jane Smith is 29.
"What wasn't your fault?" pressed the Doctor.
"It . . . it broke," Stephen stammered. "One day I picked it up and found a big rip in the side, and it was empty and the lights were all gone. And after that it sort of flaked away.
"But you can't blame me!" he added, raising his voice to drown out the sudden feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath his feet. (An entire species is at stake and it might be ruined and it might be all my fault and . . . .) "It was in my room! You didn't tell me not to touch it! What did you expect?"
"I do wish you'd stop being mysterious and just tell us what this thing is," complained Sarah Jane.
"What? Oh, yes, of course," replied the Doctor. "It's the chrysalis of a papilløn, from the planet Mot. It's a long-lived kind of symbiotic parapsychic lexophile. In the transitional stage, of course."
Sarah Jane rolled her eyes. "Well, that explains everything."
Thunderstruck, Stephen gaped at her. "No, it doesn't!"
Normally Sarah Jane would have explained the joke, but she was getting a little fed up with Stephen. "And what are you going to do about it?" she replied. "Ask questions? Look for facts? Question my authority?"
"You're not an authority figure. You're a lady."
"Well, excuse me! I—"
"You're excused," said Stephen quickly.
Sarah Jane resisted the urge to smack him.
Mot: 4692 AE (Ailurean Era).
"Your Majesty? I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."
Her Royal Majesty Queen Calembour IV of Mot didn't need to hear it. The waves of grief radiating from the doctor's papilløn told her all she needed to know. Still, out of politeness, she addressed Racine directly. "What is it, Doctor?"
"The clutch, Majesty . . . they didn't make it."
"None survived?"
Racine sounded frustrated. "Your Majesty, if even one papilløn had been able to form a chrysalis, don't you think I would have announced it with cheering and trumpets? There are none."
It Is As Expected, observed Calembour's papilløn. The Mother Is Simply Too Old.
"Nevertheless," said Calembour, "you must find some way to make this work. The people are restless, on the edge of revolt. If no new papilløn larvae are born, there will be an uprising within the next hundred years."
"Surely not, Majesty! The papilløn population has been on the decline for centuries now. The population can hardly blame you!"
"They can, and they will," said the Queen. "Futile though the gesture will be, I will be the first one they excute—and you, my dear Court Scientist, will be next."
The Vortex.
"The papilløn are one of two species on their planet, along with the mots," the Doctor explained as he rifled through a compartment behind one of the roundels on the console room wall. "Symbiotes. Absolutely fascinating case. Here, hold this."
Sarah Jane took the basketball-sized mass of green crystal and held it awkwardly, trying to balance it with the overflowing manila folder, antique fob watch, and unopened bag of jelly babies he had already handed to her. "Don't you ever clean out your cupboards, Doctor?"
"Never. Now, a papilløn is born with a physical form, but soon afterward it imprints on a young mot and forms itself a chrysalis. A scant few hundred years later, it crawls out, having completely transitioned into a form made of pure psychic energy."
"A 'scant' few hundred years?"
"Well, scant for mots. They're one of the longest-lived species in the galaxy. We tried letting a couple of papilløn imprint on Time Lords once, but as soon as a Time Lord regenerates, the papilløn can't recognize him or her as the person on which it imprinted. They need a species that can stay the same for a long time. Oh, it's my field gravity detector! I thought I'd lost this. Hang on to that, Stephen."
Stephen, who was already holding, among other things, a large straw hat and what could have been a remote control designed by M. C. Escher, took the new object gingerly. "Wow. The technology in this must be incredible. And to think, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was an ordinary yo-yo."
"It is an ordinary yo-yo!" replied the Doctor. "The best device ever constructed for determining the presence, magnitude, and direction of gravity in a given area, and humans invented it two millennia before you even realized you were on a round planet. Incredible. Completely useless if you want to tell whether someone is lugging around a papilløn, of course. For that, you need . . . this!"
With a triumphant flourish, he held up a dark blue bus pass holder, flipping it open to reveal a small piece of white paper.
"It's blank," said Stephen, sounding unimpressed.
"It's blank now. No input yet. Take it!"
Stephen looked helplessly from the paper to the heap of junk in his arms. With a sigh, Sarah Jane dumped her own armload back in the compartment and started to toss Stephen's baggage after them. I guess we're going to put off the cleaning for another time.
"Go on, then," said the Doctor encouragingly when Stephen finally had a free hand to take the paper.
"Um, okay. Go on and do what?"
"Just hold it up so we can see, and start talking. I know you can handle that bit."
Stephen grinned. "It's a gift. Give me any topic and I can riff on it, from the gut, for as long as the cameras are on. And most of the time when they're off, too, so I don't get out of practice. Anything in particular I should talk about?"
"How about yourself?" suggested Sarah Jane.
She wasn't surprised when Stephen missed the joke entirely. "Excellent choice! That's actually what I was planning to talk about no matter what you said." He cleared his throat. "My name is Stephen T. Colbert, and I have a dream. A dream that, one day, everyone in the world, be they black, white, or Mexican, will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, turn on the TV, and watch my show."
Sarah Jane gasped.
The paper, which she had clearly seen to be unmarked only a few moments ago, was blank no longer. A handful of words had simply popped into being on its surface. In a readable, no-nonsense sans serif font, no less.
They said: From Every Mountainside, Let Freem Ring!
Seemingly oblivious, Stephen kept talking. "You see, I believe in the value of ideas. Specifically, my ideas. I figure my two cents is worth at least a dollar."
The paper changed again. The font was still simple, but the words this time were gibberish, at least as far as Sarah Jane could tell:
Still €0.02.
"But I value other people's views, too. Even when I completely disagree with someone, I have no problem inviting them on my show, so they can have an open forum in which to have me tell them exactly how they're wrong."
Wrong = Don't Shout Loudly Enough.
"Sure, I have my critics, but I'm never going to change. People who watch my show, they know what they're getting. If they wanted calm, reasonable debate, they would watch Jon Stewart. Personally, I never do."
Except When He Does.
"Well, maybe sometimes. Like when I feel sorry for him. Or when he has a guest that I like. Or when I need a quick dose of rage. Stewart's liberal agenda is a surefire way to help me get up a good head of anger. Along with CNN, gay porn, and bowtie pasta. It's pasta! It has no business being shaped like articles of clothing! Someone might mix the two up!"
"Someone" = Stephen, clarified the paper.
"Anyway, the point is, I'm Stephen Colbert. And if you don't like it, I'll shout at you until you change your mind or agree just to shut me up."
Nothing Will Ever Shut Him Up.
"How was that?"
"What was that?" added Sarah Jane, still staring at the paper in astonishment.
"He's got a papilløn, all right," the Doctor replied. "What's more, it's sarcastic."
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Oh, I'll find various ways of shutting Stephen up in the course of this fic, never fear.
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