Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [63]
The interior of the Station was a maze of living quarters, workshops, armouries, engine rooms, storage holds and all the other rooms and features one would expect to find in a space station of its size. At some point in its history, the Station could have held a million people, maybe more, but if that had ever happened that had been a long, long time ago.
Most of the time nowadays there was a skeleton crew, a handful of middle-ranking Time Lords, their servants and a small army of maintenance and service robots. It was a job that attracted the reclusive personality types.
Today the crew of the Station had swollen to three or four dozen. Most of these were Technicians, a few were members of the Watch. Half a dozen were Time Lords. They were all congregated within a couple of levels of the control deck. The Magistrate stepped from his TARDIS, out onto the main control area. Scientists and engineers in brown tabards were running tests and simulations, upgrading systems where they needed to. The Station had been built to last, though, and there was little work to be done. At the moment he alone knew the purpose of their presence here.
The other Time Lords were waiting for him by the control deck. This was a larger version of the standard TARDIS
console, and shared the same hexagonal shape. But this was the size of a house, with three distinct levels leading up the sloped sides to the vast pillar in its centre. There were three Councillors, three specialists. The Magistrate had chosen them for their scientific knowledge, but also for their decisiveness. He needed people he could rely on.
He wasted no time with ceremony.
‘The Doctor was right. The Matrix has located the source of the Effect far in the future. So far, in fact that it is difficult even for a Time Lord to comprehend!
The timezone in which the Time Lords lived was around ten billion years after Event One, the creation of the universe.
Ten with ten noughts after it. That was enough years to contain the creation of matter, the formation of stars and galaxies and planets, the rise and fall of many galactic civilisations. To all things there must come an end. The universe was no exception. All matter would eventually decay. Baryonic matter – anything with more mass than a proton – would break down into its component parts as its energy levels fell. This would be a very long process: the last proton would fizzle out in around one hundred thousand trillion, trillion, trillion years. Ten with thirty-one noughts after it.
‘We have located the Source to within a few decades of Event Two, the end of the universe. It is far beyond the limits of our knowledge.’
The assembled Time Lords nodded, clearly still seeing this as an abstract scientific or philosophical question. The Matrix could model the universe, and use that model to make projections of the future, but even it could only see a few billion years into the future. The model was constantly being refined and updated, new observations were continually being made, but even Time Lord knowledge had to end somewhere. That point was clearly defined.
From its creation, the Universe had been expanding, forced outwards by the force of the Big Bang. Eventually, when the universe was a dozen or so times older than it was now, that impetus would run out, and the universe would begin to collapse back in on itself. At that point, time ended…
at least as the Time Lords understood it. More correctly, time would be redefined in some unknowable way. Planets and stars and life would certainly still exist in the collapsing universe, but there would be no Time Lords to watch over them, and the laws of physics would have been subtly rewritten. Whatever this collapsing universe was like, it would slowly wind down, losing its energy to the forces of entropy.
Eventually, after an incomprehensible amount of time, the