“Doctor, what does this experiment do?”
“Oh it’s just some testing to see I’ve put the TARDIS back together again. I need to be sure before I switch her back on.”
Jo was bored. The Doctor had been tinkering for days and after the excitement of the previous week there wasn’t much going on at UNIT headquarters. Even the Brigadier was on leave. To make matters worse the Doctor had been acting quiet, even pensive. Jo had a feeling she knew why.
“Doctor, I have a question. A personal question. I know you don’t talk much about your past but…”
The Doctor stopped adjusting a circuit and gave Jo his full attention. “How can I help you Jo?”
She took a deep breath. “Well, I was wondering. That man we met during the Omega thing. Was it really… you?”
To her relief the Doctor smiled broadly. “Josephine Grant! I was wondering exactly when you would ask.”
He momentarily returned to his work, but she knew him well enough to recognize that he was debating how to answer. Although she’d only met the ‘other Doctor’ briefly, she remembered just how different he had looked and acted. For one, he didn’t think as much before speaking, that was sure!
“Yes Jo. He was me, or rather I am him. And he’s not the only one. There are many of us. Many of me.”
Jo knew the Doctor wasn’t human. In a job that frequently meant fighting alien threats that wasn’t any harder to believe than what she may discover any other afternoon. And yet she didn’t think about it much because in so many ways he was human. “How many of you are there?”
“A dozen. Maybe more.”
“Have you met them all?”
“Some. It’s difficult and dangerous, but occasionally we… co-operate.”
The doctor put down his work and headed toward the TARDIS. “Come with me Jo. I want to show you something.”
After the Omega incident, the Doctor had been rewarded by his people with the knowledge of how to operate his TARDIS again. Jo had never seen him so excited, and he had barely slept since that day, spending all of his time putting all the TARDIS equipment back inside and testing all the circuits. This experiment was apparently the last, and the craft would function once again. She followed the Doctor inside and found him standing by the console waiting for her.
“Jo, as you know I’m not human. My race is called the Time Lords, and we come from a planet called Gallifrey. This is my craft, called the TARDIS. It has the ability to travel anywhere in space or time.”
“I know that Doctor. You’ve told me many times before.”
“Hush Jo, let me finish.” The Doctor grabbed the back of his neck and sighed.
“What I haven’t told you is that my people have developed a technology that allows us, when we die, to regenerate our bodies. This allows us to live many lives. When it happens, while we remain the same person, we are also different. That man you met last week was a previous me.”
Jo was amazed. And he said there were a dozen or more of him? “The others you mentioned? Are they from your past or future?”
“Two are from my past. Most are from my future.”
“And you’ve met them?”
“Yes Jo, some of them.”
“What are they like?”
The Doctor laughed again. “They are different Jo. Some are younger, some are older. None are cleverer though.” He winked.
“Can I meet them?”
“Perhaps, one day. As I said, it’s difficult. Even I don’t know when it may happen and couldn’t control it if I tried.”
She considered what he had said. The Doctor was rarely this personal, and before last week had never mentioned this aspect of his life. She wondered what else she didn’t know about him.
“So if some are from your future, that means you will regenerate one day?” As often happened Jo immediately regretted the question.
“Yes Jo, I expect one day I will.”
The Doctor grew quiet. Jo knew she had stirred a thought that she perhaps should not have, since he had said that regeneration followed death. She approached him,
“Doctor, I just want to say something. We have a very dangerous job, and many times we – you – have been in great danger. If I think about this too much I get scared, and many times I’ve thought about quitting. But what keeps me here is you, because you are the bravest and most caring and most heroic man I have ever met. It makes me very happy to think that there are many other Doctors out there being brave and caring and heroic for other people like me. Even so, I’m so happy that you are my Doctor and I never want to swap you for any of the others!”
The Doctor gave her a long look, stroked his chin and, after a few moments, smiled once again.
“Thank you Jo. I sincerely appreciate that.”
He looked around the control room. While he had been fitting the circuits Jo had been cleaning, and the console shone under the bright lights. Only a few days ago his knowledge of how to operate the TARDIS had remained clouded, but now it been restored, and he sensed that adventures in time and space were only a few button presses away.
“I think it’s time we finished this final experiment. I want to get the old girl working again, and I think it’s about time we took a vacation, don’t you?”
This was music to her ears. The Doctor was offering to take her somewhere in the TARDIS. This, she hoped, would be something to remember.
“Oh yes Doctor! Can we go somewhere sunny? Oh, oh, can we go to the ocean?”
Any place, at any time, and she wants to go to the beach! This was why he loved humans, and why he was going to miss these days of exile. Even with his TARDIS working again, he supposed he may return to this planet every once in a while…
The Doctor smiled once again, a twinkle in his eye.
“Ok Jo, I’ll take you to an ocean.”
