Chapter 4: Antipathy
The Doctor could not ignore Domina’s
question about her brother. Antipathy, as he had been called had waged a war
across the stars and his story was not one to be told gently, for he would have
to warn Domina that her fate may very well end up like his and whilst he wasn’t
there to stop her brother, to help him, he could help her, he would need to
help her as it was his duty to do so. He sat down and gestured an irritable
Fritz to sit as well and he cast his mind back hundreds and hundreds of years
to recall the memories of Domina’s mother.
“When I first met your mother, she was on her
5th cycle, that’s to say that she had been remembered five times by then. It
was a way of preserving someone by using a biomass inside a remembrance tank,
so that not everything about them died. Laura kept her memories for a long time
but she became warped and unstable after a while. I guess the human mind can
only cope with so much. She travelled with myself and Fritz in my TARDIS, which
I am sorry to say corrupted the ear piece she wore to protect her from harmful
signals as all humans wore back in those times but my TARDIS was nearly
destroyed in a dimensional rift and as I had interfaced her ear piece with the
TARDIS, I inadvertently rewrote her biodata to make her the first and only Type
102 time ship.
It didn’t take long for the Time Lords to find out what I had done and they came for her, wanting to breed her for their own gain, so we took her, Fritz and I, and we went on the run to hide her. She was a mistake; she was lucky to survive and I couldn’t have guaranteed the survival of every being put through that process so we did what we could to keep her safe. The problem was, she was uncontrollable, she would disappear at a moment’s notice and without my TARDIS fully intact it was impossible to track her down. She only really felt safe when Gallifrey and the Time Lords were destroyed. She came back then, helped me rebuild my TARDIS and created the ancestor cell, a memory format that contained the whole of the time vortex and she installed it into my brain. It worked for a fashion, it suppressed a lot of my memories and jumbled them around a bit which is why I tend to get things muddled up. I kind of think this is why my TARDIS has trouble locking on to exact timelines, she interfaces with me you see and goes where I tell her to, unfortunately it’s not always where we end up.”
The Doctor laughed a little and was met
by two blank faces and a slight shake of the head by Fritz who had spent many
an adventure trying to help the Doctor unscramble his brain enough so he could
come up with a plan to save them. His laughter was false as it hid a truth he
was only just coming to realise. Clearing his throat by way of a distraction he
continued his story, trying desperately how to figure out a way that would make
sense.
“Sorry, I go off on a tangent sometimes. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes,
memory cell. I and I alone contain the knowledge needed to resurrect the Time
Lords so that makes me very exclusively important, and very dangerous. It’s why
I continue to run and why those I chase continue to run from me. Kind of a suit
of armour in a way although there are some that would hunt me down and try to
drain that knowledge out of me. Imagine having the whole of time and space in
your head, I can’t imagine how to even start telling you what that feels like,
but you already know don’t you Domina? You have the same memories as I do for
some reason, that’s why you grew up knowing all about me, oh not from stories
or whispers that you might have heard, but from memories, my memories and the
ones of your mother. The dimensional rift caused more than an interface with my
TARDIS, it caused one with me too because I am imprinted to it, so your mother
took everything I had, every memory, every regeneration, every event in the past
present and future and every detail contained in the memory cell and it
corrupted her further, to the point where she wanted to recreate herself, to
become the mothership of all type 102 TARDIS’, a god like idea to make herself
immortal and she succeeded.
I left her on Earth in 2012, so as I said, not long ago. I was hoping she would reintegrate herself back into the human race and become more like them again, maybe even help them with her vast knowledge of technology to advance them beyond their own imaginations to become energy sufficient so that when the time came in the very distant future to fight galactic wars and expand across the universe, they would know how and for a time, I was convinced she would do so, but she had played a trick on me, fooled me with my own tactics because she knew how I worked and what I would believe. By the time your brother, Antipathy was born, it was too late, she had fled earth and hidden herself from me on the home world, backwards in time in violation of the Protocols of Linearity, so that he would be born before she even existed. It was her intention to trap him there, to keep him hidden and safe because even she knew what he would become”
“The first type 101-form, as unique as his mother, but so deadly that his cries of as a baby could set heavens on fire. I don’t know what happened to him. I heard rumours he escaped the Homeworld and went on a rampage throughout the Spiral Politic, before disappearing to another continuum. Or that he had been destroyed immediately after his birth, some even say he is comatose in the City of the Saved and is preserved for the sake of all humanity and creation.”
The doctor stood up and scanned Domina and her TARDIS console once more and looked at the readings with a furrowed brow of resignation before continuing his story.
“Time travel is fickle. It’s so fragile and uncertain that you never really know how any one journey or step in time will affect the rest of the universe. This was one reason the Time Lords existed, to prevent disasters and control time itself but they became far too engrossed in their own importance and the rest is history, for you as well as me but if these readings are right and I’m sure they are, it means that when your mother left the home world, she was forced back into a mainstream timeline and then it would seem, she was sent backwards further to the very moment she was last human, all human without the influence of the faction paradox and my TARDIS, and then somehow, she became pregnant with you and was flung further through time to land on the shores of Gallifrey to give birth to you before finally collapsing on the shores to die.
Somehow Domina, she died before she was
born and you came before your brother which explains why you’re both so messed
up. Time has fractured you both and I was right before, you’re not Gallifreyan
nor a Time Lord, not in the conventional sense anyway and I did honestly think
that what brought you here was your connection to Earth, but that was before I
saw your TARDIS, before I really saw you and I’m sorry Domina, I really am but
I think somehow, something to do with how you and your mother can interface
with your ships and with me, that you might be my daughter, or to be exact, a
child of my TARDIS!"
(Author notes)
Before his birth, Antipathy lived within
the internal architecture of his mother — an infinite womb. He was Compassion's
first child, an imperfect prototype never meant to live. He was psychologically
damaged and defiantly hated being forced to leave her. The Great Houses tried
to get rid of him by sending him on a suicide mission, but he escaped. He
screamed across the universe, consumed with hate for his mother for giving
birth to him.
(ref: https://factionparadox.fandom.com/wiki/Antipathy )
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