HN 05 — Manhunting

by Ryan Fogarty

Heroic Nonsense

05 :: Manhunting

“Yeah. I’m thirteen. Two years living here.”  His tongue found the chip in his tooth.

It was a complicated question, and Ceph tried his best to answer it, as he had tried to answer it for himself before.  “I was pretty messed up after the car accident and not ready to—yes, not ready to just be placed with a family.  I guess I’m ready now, but I’m older, and—yes, non-white kids get placed more slowly.”  His lip curled scornfully at the thought.

Was he ready for a family?  The better question—was a family ready for him?  Ceph didn’t just have the expected baggage; he knew there was about a 50% chance any foster family might reject him if they found out he was—

Well, that’s one thing he had in common with his alternate self.  Who thought Ceph was cute.

Ceph had discovered a way to shut the nagging voice off.  Switching to thinking in Spanish seemed to throw his ‘ghost’ for a loop.  It was still there; it just had trouble finding purchase in his thoughts.

Ya va siendo hora de que te calles.

Eventually, he relented.

Would he like a family?  “I mean—yeah, if they accepted me.”  Ceph felt a lump forming in his throat.

So do it.

That thought struck him like a freight train.  “You don’t just decide to have a family.  It takes years for agencies—”

Disagreement.  Firm.  Action, his own hand.

That was the really frightening thing here.  Not that his alternate self had these fragmented memories of other worlds, but that he had once been an adult.  To his mind, change was something you did for yourself.

Was this what it was like to be an adult?  A feeling of having permission to act for yourself?  If you don’t like something, just change it?

The idea hurt somewhere in his gut.  Like a phantom pain, knowing that there was something he could just reach out and—

No, don’t touch, take.  Make it happen.  First you make the choice.

Ceph steadied his breathing.  “And what… would that ‘choice’ look like?  If I did want to be adopted.  And not rejected.”

Simple.  Get adopted by gay parents.  Acceptance is a non-issue.

Ceph laughed bitterly.  “East Dakota doesn’t let gay couples adopt.”

The voice inside waved this off like it was a peasant problem.

“Well, how would you solve it?”

***

Back in the Home’s computer room, Ceph was doing research.

Gay professionals. California. Married within the last few years. In their 30s. It was a long list, but the gays sure did love their wedding announcements…

Then stalk them online, if he could find them. Anyone who had posted something about gay adoption got a star next to their name. That probably meant they were ‘in the market’.

Then he researched the people. Anything weird or problematic got them crossed off the list. Some had video interviews for their jobs. If they seemed nice, that was a plus. Often, he could only find good information on one of the partners and not the other.

Eventually, he narrowed his list down to three couples, all in California.

California is upmarket. Gay couples are wealthier per capita than straight ones. Professionals working in lucrative industries. Lawyers, entertainment. Writers or designers.

Not working at the same business. That arrangement was financially unstable. As long as you’re picking your target, you might as well—

Ceph hissed. He hated this.

This is how you get a job. By targeting the place you want to be. You want some gay dads with the finances to support adopting a kid.

“I’d be okay with gay mums,” he muttered, though he was more lukewarm about that.

Did he really want to share his bed with a rescue pit bull?

Ceph was utterly confused by that idea until his other half haltingly explained that it was some sort of politically grey joke; not nasty, but a stereotype.

“Well, I like dogs,” he muttered. “And what’s wrong with adopting rescue dogs? Heck, it’s practically practice for adopting a kid.”

The voice had no answer for that.

***

Ceph had a small allowance from the Home, which he normally spent on arcades and food. But now he was at a Lifetouch store at the mall, getting his portrait taken in a plaid shirt. His hair was fine, even though they fussed over it. Half an hour later, he was out $60, but had a CD with his photos.

Another stop bought him a $100 prepaid credit card.

Ceph was not good with computer graphics stuff, but here he took a back seat. His other was a bit stilted working with the free software GIMP, but soon enough his pictures were cut out and slotted into a template.

Adopt a Gay Kid!

His smiling face, with the background replaced to show the California coastline. He also replaced the plaid shirt with a designer T-shirt.

Then a stock photo of a party, with himself in formal clothes, showing off for adults with a smirk.

Be the envy of your peers!

More bullet points followed over a photo of him in the plaid shirt.

  • Thirteen years old
  • Multilingual! (English/Spanish)
  • Reasonably tidy!
  • Slightly sarcastic!
  • Machine washable! We let him write this part.

And then the same photo again, but with a QR code covering most of his shoulder. He triple-checked this—it was his case number with the East Dakota foster system and the system information.

Then he arranged all four of these into a slideshow—and finally an animated ad, keeping the file size low.

“This isn’t how it works. They don’t advertise kids for adoption like I’m a shelter puppy,” he protested.

Tell that to—

“Who the hell is Alec Brownstein?”

He binged the name and came up empty. The voice in him was quiet for a minute, then resolute. Well, I guess it never happened here. But he won a Clio Award.

“That’s… an advertising industry award?” Ceph rolled his eyes. “Whatever. So what do we do now?”

Signing up for a Bing Ads account proved to be the biggest headache. He ended up using his prepaid card to purchase an account with a third-party system that let him sign in to Bing Ads, and then set up an online campaign for his little advertisement. And then he drenched the ad in demographics, specifics and search terms, narrowing its reach so that it would likely only ever appear to two people: the couple he was targeting.

With one final click, the ad was live.

Ceph blew out a breath. “Now what?”

Wait. Three weeks. If there are no results, move on to the next couple on his list of targets.

Ceph grimaced. “This isn’t gonna work.”

***

Possibly the most annoying thing about having someone else in his head was the fact that he assigned Ceph homework. Which specifically meant reading the newspaper and other books about the superheroes of his universe.

“They’re just not that interesting,” Ceph argued. “Yes, some of them can fly and do extraordinary things, but all they ever do is maintain the status quo. They don’t fix anything in the world.”

A mishmash of stories filled his memories until he switched to Spanish to ward them off. “Sí, claro, eso es ficción. Son cuentos aleccionadores, no cómo pasarían las cosas en el mundo real.”

It was still interesting to talk about. Stories about superheroes taking over the government were unrealistic, just as they would be if a militia tried to do it. What would they have to say about farm subsidies or onion futures?

Did he think any of them were cute? Ceph’s mouth quirked. “Sí, claro, el Alférez Marvel es muy atractivo.”

Who’s that?

Ceph sketched out a brief description of Ensign Marvel, down to the flippy hair.

Ah. Freddy Freeman.

Ceph blinked. He put down his book on the history of the Liberty Front. “I’m sorry, what?”

The voice shrugged inside him. Captain Marvel Jr. in his own memories, not Ensign Marvel, but…

“You know a superhero’s secret identity,” he said flatly.

Yes. This specific one, anyway.

Ceph closed his eyes. “Any others?”

Plastic Man. Quicksilver, sort of… just the first name. Sandman.

The world seemed to spin under him. “Sandman led the Liberty Front during the War. And you know his name?”

Wesley Dodds.

Ceph blew out a breath. “What is even with you? You know advertising, and graphics, and the real names of World War II superheroes. …I think you were a nerd. Are superheroes nerd things in your world?”

It disagreed strongly. Only cool people like heroes.

Ceph narrowed his eyes. “Uh-huh. Well, keep that sort of information to yourself, nerd-me.”

No response.

***

Captain Marvel Jr. (Ensign Marvel,) was created by Ed Herron, C. C. Beck and Mac Raboy, and first appeared in Whiz Comics #25, December 1941, published by Fawcett Comics. The original character is in the public domain due to nonrenewal of copyright.

Quicksilver first appeared in National Comics #5, November 1940, published by Quality Comics. The original Quicksilver stories are in the United States public domain due to nonrenewal of copyright.

The Sandman Wesley Dodds first appeared in *New York World’s Fair Comics* #1, published in April 1939 by Detective Comics, Inc. The original story is in the United States public domain due to nonrenewal of copyright.

Plastic Man first appeared in Police Comics #1, August 1941, published by Quality Comics. The original character and stories are in the United States public domain due to nonrenewal of copyright.

 

HN 04 — Parallel Memories

by Ryan Fogarty

Heroic Nonsense

04 :: Parallel Memories

Ceph was on the bus to school, staring out of the window with unusual interest. It was just a normal city. Minisapa wasn’t very big.

Superheroes. “Yeah,” he grunted.

Ceph closed his eyes to hold back the almost nauseating wave of questions, nonsensical, crazy questions that were interrogating his own responses faster than he could make them. “Stop!” he hissed. His head was pounding. Slowly, he forced the words out. “The Liberty Union. Valorman, Hippolyta the Amazon, and Owlwoman.”

He hissed at the almost physical pain of the pushback, especially around Owlwoman. “She looks like… Batgirl? What’s a Batgirl?” Cowl + Hair. “I’ve never heard of her.”

Rapid-fire explanations, too quick to follow. Comparisons to other heroes. “I… ‘Justice League’? That’s a dumb name. Her daughter? We just call—stop!” he pleaded.

The school bus was pulling in to school. And his reputation as the poor orphan kid was bad enough without adding ‘talks to himself’.

“Just… shut up. We’ll talk later.”

***

‘Later’ was after gym class.

“Shut up, I’m not showering. Because I like being sweaty,” he grumbled.

Not long after, in the hall, he thought to add, “Now Brett Vilhelm, he’s cute. I’m ordinary. I am.”

Was he blushing because his internal voice thought he was good-looking? Like, not drop-dead gorgeous, but just… nice? He was plain. Gangly. Too thin. That stupid scar that wouldn’t fade was the only thing he could see, and his chipped tooth. Maybe he wasn’t unattractive, but that didn’t translate to ‘cute’. Ridiculous.

Tapping his pencil on his notebook in history class, he squashed the urge to sketch or write anything. Very quietly, he said, “Look, I think maybe you remember a different universe, with different superheroes than we have. Which is—it’s not your universe?”

Fiction. He remembered fictional superheroes. “That’s even less useful.” He buried his face in his hands.

A few minutes later, he thought firmly, without speaking aloud. I don’t pay attention to super-stuff, but I think that fiction can be truth in other universes. Like, on some parallel worlds Sherlock Holmes and Theodore Roosevelt could be real instead of fictional and—

He stopped. “Roosevelt is real in your universe? What was that like?”

No idea. It was before he was born. Ceph snorted.

“Right. I mean, what do I know about President Hanson?”

***

Staring off into space in his room back at the home, Ceph grimaced. “Your world sounds pretty messed up. The Nazis are back? And they took power in the USA?”

(That did sound like something that would happen in one of those parallel universes the superheroes encountered, though.)

Deep, deep frustration. Ceph changed tack. “How old were you?”

Nothing. J ust a void. “I mean, you… remember voting, right? So how… when…?”

Nothing, just holes. And the vague memory of a comforting shape saying ‘broken’, or ‘incomplete’.

“So I have holes in my memory, but—yes, I know.” He blew out a breath as the voice started rattling off about the superheroes he remembered. There seemed to be multiple sets, but this ‘League’ bunch were the most similar to the ones on Ceph’s world.

“No, I’ve never heard of someone called Bruce Wayne.” He tapped his leg. “Well, if that’s the secret identity of a superhero, should you really be telling me?” More details. The Amazon Hippolyta having a daughter, which he knew wasn’t true, at least here. And of course—“Yes, Valorman sounds like your ‘Superman’ (that’s a dumb name, by the way,) but I think Valorman has analogues on a lot of worlds. No, 64 universes in the local multiverse.”

That quieted the voice down. Ceph rubbed his face.

He had decided that he wasn’t going crazy. This was just too weird. It was more like being possessed by a chatty ghost with spotty memories who would just not shut up.

“Look, let’s say I believe you, and you do come from another universe with no actual heroes, just lots of stories about heroes…. What am I supposed to do with that? I mean, your knowledge doesn’t even apply here on Earth-42, so… what exactly am I supposed to do? Other than call the ECB and get you exorcised from my head.”

Nothing. A mental shrug. And again, the memory of being in other people, only to end badly.

“It sounds like all those people were about to die anyway. I think you were being given a chance to change their fate, but—” He winced at the barrage of responses. “But you couldn’t, because, yes, full of holes or… damaged or whatever. So you ended up here. I’m not in any danger of death by Nazis or the undead. So what do we do together? If I assume you’re real?”

Again, a mental shrug.

***

Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, originates in ancient Greek mythology and appears in classical literature dating to at least the fifth century BCE. The original mythological character is in the public domain.
Fleeting references to copyrighted characters, including Superman and Bruce Wayne, are made under the principles of fair dealing. Such references are incidental to the narrative and do not constitute exploitation of, or an attempt to trade upon, the characters’ identities, reputations, or commercial value.
Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. The character and the complete original canon are in the public domain, notwithstanding the Conan Doyle Estate’s longstanding assertions to the contrary.
Theodore Roosevelt first appeared in Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, published by the Macmillan Company in 1913.  The original character and his (mis)adventures are in the public domain.
Miss Owl (Owlwoman,) was created by Frank Thomas and first appeared in Crackajack Funnies #25, published by Dell Comics in July 1940. The original character is in the public domain.

HN 03 — Double Saltire

by Ryan Fogarty

Heroic Nonsense

03 :: Double Saltire

He sketched idly, letting his brain go blank. Some images came and went. A smiley face. That cool S. A hand holding on to a ladder rung. A pleated shirt, and an armband with two Xs stacked vertically in a circle.

“A double saltire,” he identified it, which caused the sketching to stop. “That’s what you call it. When an X is a symbol on a flag or shield like that, it’s a saltire. It comes from St Andrew’s Cross.”

That was the weirdest thing about this second set of… memories? Not only did it know things he didn’t, he knew things it didn’t.

“I like heraldry. Flags and shields and hero insignias,” he explained. “So I read a book.”

Nothing, just the pencil tapping on the paper.

“The Nazis never used a double saltire,” he added. “Their symbol was a fylfot. A fylfot is a swastika, you turd! That’s just another word for it.”

He started to sketch again, but stopped himself. “You’re not drawing swastikas,” he told himself firmly. “If you want, I can look it up.”

Which is how he found himself in the Home’s little computer room. There were nanny filters on the computers here, just like at school, so no fun stuff… but Quickipedia was unlocked. He Binged the Nazi flag and got an extensive article which he scrolled through. “See? No double-X version?”

Rolling his eyes, he Binged ‘Nazi flag, two Xs’ and was surprised to get a hit. Just like in the sketch, two white Xs, stacked vertically and slightly offset in a black circle.

“It’s the flag from… The Great Dictator? A film released in the year 1940. I t was a satire of the Nazis made while they were still rising to power. …starring Charlie Chaplin? Weird. Ah, he played a body double for the dictator, not Hitler himself.”

Ceph blew out a breath. “Yeah, you’re remembering a symbol that only exists in a movie. And I don’t think there were any combat scenes in that film, so… yeah. That’s some parallel universe shit.”

A sceptical grumble made Ceph frown. “ Yes, I mean… do you not…?” He was fighting himself, and talking aloud, so he angrily Binged ‘Parallel Universes’.

A bunch of results came up, including the Quickipedia List of Known Parallel Universes, a sketchy list that included—

Earth 39. Right there in the description: ‘Distinguishing details: A single Dakota state rather than East and West.’

“Ah, that’s it! Oh yeah, their big team has a stupid name, ‘The Heroes’.”

Ceph screwed up his face. “No, not a sports team, their superhero team!”

Something inside him went cold. And try as he might, whatever he was talking to refused to respond any further.

***

HN 02 — Longitudinal Dakotas

by Ryan Fogarty

Heroic Nonsense

02 :: Longitudinal Dakotas

He spent most of the day in a daze, going through the motions around the home. Everything felt just slightly off. Like he didn’t fit in his own body. And every once in a while—

“Minisapa City,” he told himself. Then, crossly, “No, not in Minnesota. East Dakota!”

That almost made him trip, and he caught himself against the wall, his hand catching on its many layers of paint.

South Dakota? Ridiculous. East and West Dakota were divided vertically, not horizontally. Why was he even thinking this?

I didn’t even take any gummies last night.

Ceph had enough on his plate without suddenly becoming the home’s weird one. He kept his head down, not making eye contact with the other kids. That wasn’t good in itself—he had become increasingly withdrawn, and he knew the staff had noticed, but—

“Ceph, are you alright?” It was Sessily, one of the house mums. He liked Sessily, but not now.

“I’m fine, Miss Sessily. I just slept weird last night.”

She shrugged, as if to say, you know where to find me.

As she was turning away, he blurted, “Have you ever heard of South Dakota?”

She rolled her eyes at his joke, then grew thoughtful. “Well, maybe that group from… ’39? I think their Dakotas were different.”

“39?”

“Yeah, but nowhere around here.”

He forced a grin and kept going down the hallway, racking his brain to try and remember the 39th what?

***

Ceph stared at himself in the mirror. Tanned skin, dark brown hair and a little scar on his chin that had faded to a pale mark. “Okay, what’s going on?”

The dislocation was worst when he saw himself in the mirror. Too short. Too thin. Too… cute?

Ceph’s frown deepened. “I’m not cute,” he said firmly. “Now out with it, what’s going on?”

Nothing. He scrunched his face, snarling into the mirror. One chipped tooth on the bottom. He didn’t remember how—

The car accident. Of course he knew. Ceph steadied his breathing. I live in a state orphanage in East Dakota, ever since the car accident.

Something rebelled, a complex thought that left him laughing. “Yes, of course they still have state homes! Not everything is foster care these days! Some kids aren’t ready to be re-housed right away. I wasn’t. And it takes longer when—yes, Hispanic. Half, but…”

He glowered at his face in the mirror, arguing with himself. He was beginning to think something was seriously wrong. Like a ghost, or a possession. H e stared evenly at the mirror. “Get it together. Is this schizophrenia, or should we be calling the ECB?”

He blinked.

“ECB. The Extraordinary Circumstances Bureau. Ghosts, aliens, magic… weird stuff. Yes, that’s a real organisation.”

The rebellion within him quelled, at least for a moment. He stared into his own brown eyes worriedly. He was getting pushback on basic things: his state, his circumstances, the government.

“Who is the President of the United States?” he asked himself. Then he guffawed at the immediate answer. “Okay, funny, but no.”

Not funny at all.

“President Caulder Donnevan.” Total non-recognition from that separate part within him. “He’s good, mostly. A little sexist sometimes, but his people push back and make him compensate for it.”

A long breath.

“Yes, it is ordinary. Just an ordinary President. Why would that matter?”

The emotions were complex and dark and mostly non-verbal, but seemed to relate to the earlier joke answer. He waved them away and turned away from the mirror. He sat on the bed, whose springs popped as he hugged himself tightly.

“I think I’m cracking up.”

***

Staring at the ceiling at night, counting holes in the panels of his drop ceiling.

Something was wrong. It was time to admit that. “I will no longer pretend these actions are not extraordinary.” He exhaled.

A thought. “It’s a quote. From Captain Picard.” He frowned. “Insurrection. The best movie.”

That caused an internal rebellion so severe that he thrashed in his bed, arching his back and practically hissing in pain. “What do you mean…? No, the Romulans! He got—what?”

Unfolding in his mind, a completely alternate plot for the best Next Generation Star Trek movie. A bad plot. With boob jokes and… plastic surgery satire? He shook his head. “It’s a sequel to Tapestry!” he insisted.

This… this was a problem. It was one thing not to know the plot of a good movie. A ghost or something trying to possess him might not know Star Trek… but this one knew it… and it just didn’t match up. He knew another version, and the mismatch was—

He let out a breath. He licked his lips, feeling his teeth and the contours of his mouth. “I got shot, by a Nazi, I think, though his symbol was wrong. And I fell off a train while fleeing… something. And then there were eyes in the dark.” Some other impression, a vast compassionate shape floating above him, and then…

Ceph blinked. “What the hell? I think I am being possessed.”

***

 

HN 01 — Dislocation

by Ryan Fogarty

Heroic Nonsense

01 :: Dislocation

Dislocation (/dɪsləʊˈkeɪʃn̩/) n.

  1. The act or state of being moved from its usual place.
  2. (Geology) The movement of elements from their original position.

 

It felt like a hard shove, then wheeling, panicked in space until…

David fumbled with the bullets, dropping them on the dirt floor. He grabbed for them, loading them into his clip, pushing against the spring before—someone at the door. A gun. An armband.

Wheeling in space, thrashing about seeking some purchase, not knowing where…

Ian clung to the side of the locomotive with a white-knuckled grip. He had climbed on the outside, up the service ladder as it pulled out of the station, desperate for a ride out of the Dead Zone. But the locomotive radiated heat and his hands were slick with sweat. He used one hand to brush the drops from his eyes, then suddenly swung loose as his hand slipped from the rail—

Sound, overwhelming. Red, viscera, a sick feeling like I don’t belong…

Colton nearly fell off his horse, suddenly convinced he didn’t know how to ride. He regained his balance and scanned the horizon, looking for the red eyes out in the desert. He didn’t want to face the eyes, would rather they took a head of cattle… but if they started taking cattle, then men were next and—he screamed as something grabbed him from behind and yanked him off the horse.

A crunch, slack, reeling, I felt nothing but suffering. Leave me alone, I pleaded, leave me alone…

In time a shape touched me, gentle. Like a thin tendril leading up to a huge glowing form. Broken, it seemed to say, not right. A mismatch. It cradled me, like a god weighing a soul.

And then I fell!

***

Ceph sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding in his chest. “I… what? I got shot! No, I fell off a train… or…” He trailed off, because the dream had been so real. And he had been someone else every time. A cowboy, attacked by vampires at night?

“It’s just me,” he reassured himself. “I’m Ceph.”

What kind of name is Ceph?

He rolled his eyes. “Bucephalus. Dad was a classics major.” Another thought pushed. “Ceph Harper.”

He frowned. Because that was weird. Why ask his own name? He made a fist, fingers curling against the scratchy industrial sheets.

He stared at his hand on top of the scratchy sheets, then turned it over.

“This… isn’t the right skin tone.”

***

A serious theological question about leap seconds

by Ryan Fogarty

Dear Father Purcaro,

I was sorry to hear of your friend Leo’s cancer diagnosis, but happy to hear that his surgery was successful!  I wish him a full and uneventful recovery.  This has brought to mind a long-simmering (and much lighter) theological question I have had for decades, but which has recently become much more urgent.

As Pontifex Maximus, Pope Leo inherits the office which administers the addition of days to the calendar. This function is largely obsolete, but we (meaning humans) are still occasionally adding leap seconds to the year to compensate for Earth’s variable rotation.

Does it fall under Pope Leo’s purview as Pontifex Maximus to bless these leap seconds as they occur?  And if so, does he have a position on  this week’s upcoming vote by the General Conference on Weights and Measures that proposes abolishing leap seconds entirely beginning in May 2027? (And crucially, this cut-off would be before the next possible leap second would be added, making 2016 the last human leap second, potentially forever.)

One additional wrinkle: a big push for this ‘reform’ (that in fact deforms time’s adherence to Earth’s rotation) seems to come from financial institutions objecting that leap seconds cause problems with continuously compounding interest, and the very real possibility (estimated at 30%) that we would be required to add a negative leap second by 2035 due to a variation in Earth’s rotation. It seems that these institutions find the prospect of negative interest to be a cross too great for them to bear. To these institutions, the implications of a negative leap second are like moving a certain stepladder in Jerusalem.

(Also because computer programmers often treat GMT and UTC as if they are the same thing, adding seconds can make our satnavs malfunction.)

Would Pope Leo bless a hypothetical negative leap second? That is very akin to blessing a harvest of negative one apples. The Pontifex Maximus concerns itself with additions to timekeeping, not changes to it, so such a blessing may need to be jammed in under a sideways justification. For context, the year 1900 not being a leap year was directly caused by Pope Gregory XIII, so remaining neutral may not be an option here.

There is, I’m sure, existing Church theological doctrine and boilerplate for the sacredness of days and time… does that factor into your judgement? And what about simply allowing the clock to fall more than 0.9 seconds out of sync with Earth’s rotation until the next leap second a few years later would offset the negative second… basically letting things ride until the rare temporal recession passes on its own. Would simply waiting on the negative leap seconds be halal?

I appreciate your attention on this matter. This is genuinely a theological question that has bothered me since I was a young boy and learned the Pope’s offices included authority over extra time. A superpower which I’m sure we can both agree is under-utilised.

I mean… ‘Double Christmas’ has to be a constant temptation, right?

—Ryan Fogarty
Catholic, sci-fi writer who works on Doctor Who spin-offs

P.S. Sorry for troubling you with this, but the pending ruling on possibly abolishing leap seconds made this a matter of some urgency. It was down to either asking you or Father Guido Sarducci, and I question his qualifications.

P.P.S. Speaking of qualifications, the post-nominal ‘STD’ is very unfortunate. You might want to get that taken care of.

P.P.P.S. I am aware that time is not actually being ‘added’ or ‘deleted’; we are simply changing which bucket of time the ontological seconds go into by human referent, and in that sense, leap seconds may be theologically null.

P.P.P.P.S. …but what about the Angels of the Hours? As angels are divine emanations, these angels uniquely do derive from the human time-referent! Does altering the buckets into which time is sorted alter the angels as immutable embodiments, or are they instantiations of the concept as it is understood at the time of their creation, with Angels of an Hour created before and after a leap second possessing a subtly different nature? Are there more senior Angels of the Hour whose nature is still dictated by dividing daylight into 12 hours regardless of actual length? Do they still resent how the Gregorian reforms left their nature out of step with their offices? Are human timekeepers ruffling their feathers?

Final Postscript — On a (slightly) more serious question, I genuinely am curious… is there a theological aspect to the general goal of keeping the human UTC clock within 0.9 seconds of the Earth’s variable rotation? Is this synchronisation a virtue in itself, or an elevation of alignment over the objective nature of reality where no seconds are added or subtracted, but simply numbered in a continuous stack since January 1, 1970 and stored in a warehouse in Greenwich?

And should I be addressing this inquiry to the Pontifex Maximus, or to this ‘Green Witch’ people keep mentioning who seems to have authority? That sounds like temporal paganism.

Saṃsāra 1621

by Ryan Fogarty

Multiversal Compaction: Saṃsāra 1621
by Ryan Fogarty

Deep in the Cold Wastes of the dying universe, time itself begins to groan and creak, and Masters of Elements find each other once again.

An icy chunk of rock, persisting amid the gravitational eddies in the Final Dark, is a firmament dead of even potential energy.  But as quantum motion slows and time slides into meaninglessness, a puff of steam jolts into existence, and then an outpouring fountain of steaming moisture that fills out into a humanoid figure.  An old woman with horns, hunched painfully over.

Shissaku, an Oni.  Steam fades away, sucked into the cold.  A slight swirling of Brownian molecular motion insulates her from the ice of the universe, but even so, almost immediately the cold begins to set into her aching bones.  She hisses unpleasantly and looks around.

“Elemental Master of Tea—but ah, it hurts!  What use is a chaimancer in the entropic maximum? My powers require boiling water, and the energy level of the universe approaches nil. I, who once boiled oceans, can now barely—”

She stopped and whipped around.  She was not alone!

A minute or two searching revealed a skeleton wrapped in scraps of pink cloth.  The bones stared accusingly up at the black heavens.  Not even enough energy for light to travel.

“Ah, Trifle!  Master of the Element of Surprise!  Fancy meeting you here!”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

Shissaku laughed.  “A surprise, you say?  To run across you in the vastness of this lifeless universe?  Oh, you got me, Trifle!  What jape!”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

Shissaku settled down next to the corpse of her old comrade.  Her breath puffed like steam as she settled.  The old Oni woman chortled to herself.

“You thought I was dead?  Oh, chaimancers don’t go easily.  You can always gather our ashes and brew up a fresh pot of tea, albeit weaker than the original.”

She winced and rubbed her wrists where the cold was seeping in too fast.  “You are the reason Zero and I appeared here, eh?  Calling out to the remaining Elemental Masters.”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

“You never met Zero?  Elemental Master of Vacuum.  He’s everywhere now, as the final seconds tick away, the stuff of the universe crackles with potential for vacuum energy!  It’s what reinvigorated me—a burst of heat from quantum fluctuations!  Fortunate are we that you can still deliver such surprises.  Zero has moved on already, but we two are here.”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

She traced a symbol in steam, but it fell to the ground like flowering frost, multi-dimensional structures of fine detail that then began to almost instantly vacuum-ablade into lumpy, meaningless stumps of their fleeting glory.  The old woman laughed.

“Look at us!  Me, an echo of an echo of an echo, and you, a corpse!  Such bleak circumstances—the Ethereal Recursive has not seen since the days of Old Kirk himself in the First Realm!  You’ve never heard the tale?”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

“It’s the first story, about the end of the universe!  The Nahua creation record tells of four previous iterations.  Every time the universe failed and died in elemental terror: first in cats, then wind, then fire, then flood.  Yes, ‘cats’ is an Element—that’s just how they roll.”

Shissaku scattered a tiny fragment of her own essence onto the frozen ground and sacrificed a shred of her remaining heat to liquefy a depression in the ground, and then slowly the water began to boil, brewing a primordial tea out of her own essence.

“New Tea.  This particular type, I think, is the first time it has been made in the history of the universe, which is very nearly over.  Time for unused ideas is now.  Would you like some?”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

“Old Kirk, whose true name means ‘descended from originating principles,’ was an Elemental Master of the fundamental building blocks of creation.  They say he sleeps, and only awakens when it has been wiped away, to usher in a new wave of master Rebuilding—”

She choked, the cold catching in her throat.  “Ah.  The elements vary.  In one of our neighbouring universes, the Bellbreaker’s Cradle, their last age was destroyed and remade by the Element of Time.  Can you imagine?”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

She wafted her Last Tea.  “I met Death on the way to Samarra, the other day.  Looked straight at me, but I got away.  They say—well, I got away.  So shall we re-create the universe?  We need a quorum of Elemental Masters.  You can be a… silent partner.”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

“Trifle, you were more fun when you were alive.  Always with the ‘boo,’ and I was genuinely surprised every time!  I am old, Trifle.  I have no strength—or worse, Will—for the task ahead.”

The tea seeped; it would be ready soon.  The ring of a distant bell echoed across the frozen landscape.

Shissaku looked around in confusion.  The bell sounded again, and a figure in a wide straw hat and purple robes appeared.  He carried a bag over his shoulder and a pair of small spectacles that instantly frosted over in the cold.

“…the Postman?  You survived to the end of the universe?”  Shissaku shook her head; something wasn’t right.  Trifle’s jaw was screaming.  “Do you bring word from my people?  The Oni escaped, evacuating en masse into the Bellbreaker’s Cradle, I think.”  She winced, the crackling in her hands was now stinging in her thumbs.  “Wait, how long has it been since…?”

The Postman took a letter from his bag and handed it to her.  His smile was not unkind.

“Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night shall stay you from your rounds, eh?  End of the universe.  Not enough energy to do anything but think—nothing flourishes here but ideas.  I heard from the refugees once… they say the Cradle sustained itself in the face of a disaster like this by vampiring the energy from limpet vacuole-universes… other, lesser universes die so that the more important one can flourish.”

The Postman spoke in the cold.  His words cast no echo across the frozen landscape.

“Some ideas should not be.  Not even in the cold and the dark and when facing the Final Night.”

He nodded to the letter.

Shissaku opened the envelope with numb fingers.

“Yes, it’s ethically unacceptable.  But I was thinking—even if only one universe survives, there might be a way to—”

She squinted, seeing the contents of the letter.

“It is my sad duty to inform you that Miss Shissaku has passed…”

She looked up at him.  “I saw you.  On the road to Samarra…!  Ah, the Postman always rings twice when delivering bad—”

Wǣpned, the Elemental Master of the Post, smiled kindly as Shissaku trailed off.  As her breath ceased to stir steam.  As she leaned back and fell away into dust.

Nearby, the skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

The Postman looked at it.  “Ah, Trifle… no more surprises.”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into—

“No.  More.  Surprises.” the Postman said firmly.  “We are at the end of the timeline of a dying universe.  Even as the key events unfurl in parallel in the past, our doom is writ.  The Ethereal Recursive must face death with dignity, don’t you agree, Elemental Master of Surprise?”

The skeleton stared lifelessly—

“Say it.  No more surprises.” The Postman’s voice was ice-cold.  His hand cast a shadow that crept across the frozen landscape to rest upon the skeleton’s ribcage like a spider.

The skeleton agreed lifelessly.  No more surprises.  Nothing new in this universe, ever again.  Only those things already in motion, playing out their final moments.

The Postman nodded, and vanished.

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.  Finally, furtively…

The depression where Shissaku’s final batch of tea was still aboil, though rapidly cooling.  She had brewed New Tea on the universe’s last day, introducing something New into the universe.  The very last New Thing before the embodiment of death forbade it.

However things were to play out now, it was here—in this last pocket of bubbling heat.  A New idea in a universe where the only thing that could flourish were ideas… flitting among neurons like gods, and building a nest…

Gray.  Rustling cloth, like wings settling in.  A figure crouched by the boiling bowl of New Tea.

Nídào grinned in the cold.  “Did I surprise you?”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

Nídào, the Elemental Master of the Imagination, wafted the steam to his own face.  “Tea smells like… carrots and… justice?  Can that be right?  Well, it’s an idea—the germ of one, anyway.”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

A faint shadow congealed across from him, a mason perhaps, with the First Brick in his hand.

“Come on then, let’s re-create the universe.  I have this idea… how to save everyone—without sacrificing another universe to do it!  See, when entropy is at maximum and there isn’t enough energy to go around to sustain all the universes independently…”

Nídào dipped his hand into the water, heedless of the heat, and brought it to his lips to drink.

“…then we all come together.”

The skeleton stared lifelessly into the ink-black heavens.

In the far distance, a point of light.

And then another…

[fin]

[Short] Bribery and an Awful Lot of Death

by Ryan Fogarty

This was originally an opening for something larger which will never be finished, but it reads perfectly well on its own.

Oskar had meant for the rock to kill Hans when he threw it.  He had not wanted the other boy dead — not consciously — but they had been arguing, and Hans had insulted Oskar’s father, saying he had raised Oskar as a delinquent.  A flush of anger had taken over him, and Oskar had flung the chunk of flint as hard as he could.  It had missed his classmate’s head by a scant three inches… and sailed over the low wall to strike the Schoolmaster’s greenhouse, where he cultivated his prize orchids.  The glass broke and fell, and Oskar knew that he was in a great deal of trouble.

What was worse, two other boys from school had witnessed the incident and they were sure to tell on him. Oskar had almost run away back to Sieben Eichen, but he clung — illogically — to the hope that he might somehow wriggle out of the punishment.

(In his mind, the destruction of the orchids was a much more serious crime than the maybe-attempted murder of Hans.  And anyway, he had missed, so maybe he had not meant to hit him.  Oskar was very good at throwing rocks, after all.)

By lunchtime Oskar had made himself so sick with worry that he was unable to eat, even though the lunchlady had made his favorite Kartoffeltaschen.  Oskar approached Hans, who was sitting with a few other boys, including Fritz, Oskar’s older cousin.

“Grüß Gott, Verdammter.” Fritz said to him.  Greetings, reprobate.

Oskar sneered at his God-fearing cousin. “I am speaking to Hans.”

He put his tray down upon the table across from the boy he had most definitely not attempted to kill this morning.

“Would you like one of my potato cakes?”

Hans eyed him skeptically.  “What is wrong with you?”

Oskar shrugged.  “What is wrong with you, Barbräfelden?”  He bit back his temper.  “I would like to… not hear you speak.”

Oskar tried to communicate his meaning with his eyes, not wishing to discuss the matter in front of the others — to say nothing of his goody-good cousin.  “Perhaps I could… fill your mouth?”

His cousin was taking a bite as he said this, and Fritz began to cough violently, a wild smile on his face and his eyes sparkling as he waved his friend Heinrich off.

“Oskar —” he coughed, “I did not think —”

“Schnauze, du Hund!” Oskar snapped.

His cousin’s wit was not appreciated, and Oskar felt his face reddening.

Hans asked, “Did you lick this cake?”

“Nein.”

Julius spoke up from the end of the table.  “Did you touch it with your penis?”

“No!” Oskar shouted, nearly grabbing the cake and hurling it at the insulting boy.  But he grabbed the edge of the table instead and held himself in place.  Julius was one of the two boys who had witnessed him throwing the rock at the greenhouse.

Hans licked his lips as he considered Oskar’s offer — a potato cake for his silence.

These Kartoffeltaschen were a sought-after commodity in the lunchroom.  The cakes were the specialty of Madame Göre, the new lunchlady.  All of her food was superior to that of the old bat she had replaced, but the Kartoffeltaschen were transcendent.  Savory cakes stuffed with cheese and vegetables and lightly fried, they were an instant favorite of all the boys at school, including thirteen-year-olds Oskar and Hans.

But she only gave each student three tiny cakes, served with parsimonious portions of sour cream and spicy sauce, so barter for them was common practice.  One cake might buy you a copy of someone’s homework.  Two, a volume of scandalous manga. And for three…?

Well, Cousin Fritz’s lewd comment was not without precedent among the older boys.  But one did not discuss this.

Oskar waited for Hans’s reply, aching amid the sounds of the lunchroom — murmured conversations spiked by adolescent expletives and the clank of metal silverware on trays.

With a sigh, Hans relented and accepted his bribe.  He slid one of the Kartoffeltaschen off Oskar’s tray and onto his own. Oskar breathed a sigh of relief, and his stomach unknotted.

Julius, several seats down, cleared his throat.

Of course.  Oskar walked over to Julius, and the older boy gleefully took the second Kartoffeltasche from his tray.

Cousin Fritz eyed the exchange. “ Oskar, what have you done?”

Dulya.  Oskar left his cousin and his friends and went to seek out Franz.

There was one more witness to be bribed.

—

Oskar was feeling better after lunch (if still a bit hungry) and by the time of their Maths class he was becoming convinced that he had indeed Gotten Away With the accidental vandalism of the greenhouse.  His mood further improved when their maths test was canceled because Dolph Kleitzen, a boy with notoriously low marks in Maths, vomited shortly after entering the classroom.  There was an awful ruckus and when the custodian sprinkled Vo-Ban on the mess several of the other boys claimed the smell was making them ill as well until the flustered teacher, resigned to the fact that her test would not be completed this period, simply let her students go.

So now Oskar had a partial free period!  His feet fairly flew out of the school building where he would finally be able to remove the smartphone from his bag (their use was strictly prohibited in school, punishable by suspension) and play games as he wandered over to the playground equipment.  He was too old for the equipment of course, but there were students at the school as young as ten years old, and what else was Oskar to do during his free time, homework?  Absurd.

Oskar twirled on the roundabout while playing games on his phone until another boy, Sebastian, came out to join him.  Sebastian was twelve, a year younger than Oskar, and this actually was a free period for him.  He wanted them to push one another on the playground toy, but Oskar refused, even though he had been quite happily pushing himself before.  Instead they both moved to the slide, an old open-top slide with gravel at its bottom and deliciously low sides.  They took turns going up and down it, enjoying a solitary amusement together.

Oskar did not have any friends at his cousin’s school.  His unpleasant personality drove away any who came too close.  Not like he cared.  In a pause between his games he had a vivid fantasy of returning to California and reclaiming his original governess, whom his pious aunt and uncle had sent away.  He thought often of how to win her back, aching with the need to see her again.

Sebastian was hesitating at the top of the slide for far too long and Oskar was about to reprimand him when the younger boy heaved forward and vomited down the slide.

Oskar shrieked in mock-horror.  “You’re disgusting, Sebs!”  The boy looked frightened as Oskar rounded the front of the slide to see him better — and he soon discovered why.

The vomit dripping down the slide was a vivid scarlet.  And not beets or cranberry juice, the oily red of blood.  Sebastian was vomiting blood.

His cruelty forgotten, Oskar shouted, “You stay here, I will fetch someone!” and then rapidly turned and ran towards the schoolhouse, his heart pounding.  A look back showed that Sebastian had fallen off the side of the slide and was now heaving his guts out — bright and red like fast-flowing honey.  Surely he could not have that much blood inside him.  Or if he did, it must remain inside.

He reached the schoolhouse with a cry, not bothering to put his mobile phone away.  And when he got there he discovered Julius, his cousin’s friend.   He was slumped against the lockers and vomiting.  The nasty slurry was coming out orange, like the yellow of vomit mixed with some blood, less than Seb’s.  There was a growing slick of vomit around the fifteen-year-old’s feet and —

Oskar knew that the orange bits in vomit that looked like carrots were not carrots.  They were chunks of your stomach lining.  When you sicked, some bits broke off and came up with the sick. But those were little chunks, like a piece of macaroni or a slice of carrot.  There were three chunks in the vomit slick the size of playing cards.  Julius coughed and gagged and another section, easily 8 centimeters on a side, fell from his lips.  The boy’s stomach was coming apart and he was literally choking on it.  Julius stared at Oskar with pleading eyes.  “Help.”

Oskar ran.  There was another slick of the stuff down the hall which he ignored, and more seen in the classrooms where, falscher Gott, two students were slumped over their desks, not moving!

He skidded around the corner and discovered the schoolmaster, the very one he had been so afraid of earlier, crumpled in the hallway amid his own bloody sick.  The schoolmaster was not breathing.

Oskar took out his phone and dialed 112 Emergency.

Later, after a breathless conversation with a shaken-sounding Emergency Operator, Oskar was just wandering the halls while the man on the phone wittered, surveying the carnage that had once been his school.  There were a few other students who had survived, crying and not knowing what to do.  He handed the phone to one of them numbly and continued to wander until he found what he knew he inevitably must.

His cousin Fritz’s eyes fluttered, fixing blearily upon him.  There was blood and stomach parts all down the front of his school shirt and he could not speak.  He reached out an imploring hand to him.

Oskar watched his cousin die until the flashing police lights came.

—

A Quadrangular Duel in Nebraska

by Ryan Fogarty

Below is an excerpt from James William Buel’s 1880 book Life and Marvelous Adventures of Wild Bill, the Scout: Being a True and Exact History of All the Sanguinary Combats and Hair-Breadth Escapes of the Most Famous Scout and Spy America Ever Produced.  Emphasis has been added for clarity.

UPON THE RETURN of the Peace Commission, Bill made a trip into the eastern part of Nebraska, and in the spring of 1867, fought a remarkable duel in Jefferson county, with four men as his antagonists. The particulars of this fight were obtained from a gentleman now living in St. Louis, who, at the time, lived within a few miles of where the fight occurred, and heard the details from eye-witnesses.

The origin of the difficulty was in bad whisky and ruffian nature. Bill went into a saloon—which was well filled with cattle drivers, who were half drunk and anxious for a fight—and called for a drink without inviting anyone to join him. While raising the glass to his mouth one of the ruffians gave him a push in the back which caused him to drop the glass. Without saying a word, Bill turned and struck the rowdy a desperate blow, felling him outside the door. Four of the rowdy’s friends jumped up from their chairs and drew their pistols. Bill appreciated his situation at once, and with wonderful coolness, said: “Gentlemen, let us have some respect for the proprietor. You are anxious for a fight, and I will accommodate you if you will consent to step outside. I will fight all four of you at fifteen paces with pistols.”Illustration of a Duel in Nebraska

There was a general consent, and the crowd filed out of the saloon. The distance was stepped off, and the four men stood five feet apart, facing Bill. The saloon-keeper was to give the word “fire,” and the arrangements were conducted in as fair a manner as four men can fight one. Bill stood as calmly as though he were in church. Not a flush nor tremor. All parties were to allow their pistols to remain in their belts until the word “fire” was given, when each was then to draw and fire at will, and as often as circumstances permitted.

The saloon-keeper asked if all were ready, and receiving an affirmative reply, began to count slowly, pausing at least ten seconds between each count: “one, two, three—fire!”  Bill had fired almost before the call had died from the saloon-keeper’s lips. He killed the man on the left, but a shot also struck Bill in the right shoulder, and his right arm fell helpless.

In another instant he had transferred his pistol to his left hand, and three more successive shots dropped his antagonists. Three of the men were shot in the head and instantly killed. The other was shot in the right cheek, the ball carrying away a large portion of the cheek bone. He afterwards recovered, and may be living yet. The names of the four were: Jack Harkness, the one who recovered; Jim Slater, Frank Dowder and Seth Beeber.*

* Yes, I assure you that this is really happened.

[ESSAY] The Length of Gallifreyan History

by Ryan Fogarty

It starts with Pandora. Once I opened that can of worms—
Wait. No. It starts with Pengallia.  Her history is—
No. It starts with Morbius.

…But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Sooner or later, any hardcore Doctor Who fan starts asking questions like, “When did that happen, relative to something else?” And then, if they’re lucky, they get distracted by whatever just started beeping.

What follows is not an attempt to clean up Gallifreyan history; it’s an attempt to wade into the contradiction far enough that a shape starts to emerge.

How long is Gallifreyan history?

You can argue about when history begins. Does human history start with Homo sapiens (≈300,000 years ago)? With the first sapient beings (≈2.4–1.4 million years ago, if we use flaked tools as a proxy)? Does it start with the earliest cave paintings (≈45,000–65,000 years ago), or only with the first preserved writings (≈3200 BCE)?

Let’s simplify: Rassilon.

Rassilon
Rassilon, as he appeared in Gallifrey’s early days

Let’s simplify further: The Eye of Harmony.

How much time passed between the Eye of Harmony being seated on Gallifrey and the Doctor fleeing the planet, just before the series begins?

(History is not a rabbit hole; it’s a warren—full of turnbacks, multiple entrances and exits, and whole sections that have been sealed off but still exist.)

100,000 years. Or, to be more precise: 101,107 years.  That’s the official FASA timeline.

Rassilon hangs around for about 1,500 years… then a whole lot of fuck-all happens, including roughly 400 Lord Presidents, then Morbius, the “crazy president”, happens while the Doctor is a kid… and things start to pop off from there.

“Ten million years of absolute power — that’s what it takes to be really corrupt!”
— The Sixth Doctor, at his trial

…Uh oh. Well, maybe he was—

“I will not die! Do you hear me? A billion years of Time Lord history riding on our backs. I will not let this perish. I will not!”
— Rassilon, The End of Time

That’s, um… more, isn’t it.

Well, at least we can agree that 100,000 years is the minimum, right?  Heck, there was a definitive Doctor Who chronology called The Legacy of Gallifrey, published in 1985, and it’s been used as a reference by Big Finish as recently as 2025. It’s the cornerstone most of these other timelines are based on.

There are no explicit dates in The Legacy of Gallifrey, but if we map the known dates onto it, the span between Rassilon anchoring the Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey and the Doctor’s first departure comes out to—

*calculates*

~2,078 years. Oh dear.

Meet the Short Gallifreyan Timeline.  It’s the bane of every serious Doctor Who fan’s existence, usually without them realizing it.  And despite being objectively ridiculous, it’s been quietly used as a foundational source for official fiction for nearly forty years.

What Caused This?

The legacy of Gallifrey
           And so it begins…

Garry Russell.  Morbius.  Auteur.  All three, in about that order.

Because the biggest problem with this timeline isn’t that it’s short — it’s that it’s unquestionably real.
…and so are the others.

So what causes such a huge divergence?

The key point is that the events themselves, and their relative ordering, are largely fixed.  Roughly 1,500 years after anchoring the Eye of Harmony, Rassilon goes into his tomb.  The Doctor leaves Gallifrey 459 years after Morbius’s disastrous presidency.

The only place the timelines truly disagree is how much time they insert between Rassilon’s entombment and Morbius’s presidency.  Some place about 19 years between those two events. Others stretch it to tens of millions — or even a billion — years.  (Ten million is a popular compromise.)

Rassilon was the first President of Gallifrey.  Pundat III was President the year before the Doctor left Gallifrey — and he was the 403ʳᵈ Gallifreyan President.

So we can just divide the time span by the number of Presidents, right?

  • 100,000 years → ~250-year presidencies (average)
  • 10,000,000 years → ~25,000-year presidencies (average)
  • 1,000,000,000 years → ~2,500,000-year presidencies (average)

Is that helpful?

Two hundred and fifty years is less than a single Gallifreyan lifespan, and we know Presidents frequently serve across multiple incarnations. Conversely, 25,000 years per presidency starts to look wildly excessive.

We also know that Presidents after Morbius tended to have much shorter terms — he left a lot of chaos behind. Borusa was the 408ᵗʰ President, and counting forward from the Doctor’s departure, Gallifrey went through five Presidents in just thirty-one years.

Now, yes — the Doctor might technically count as one of those, and he never actually *served* — but even so, that’s a furious rate of turnover!

If only we had some context for—

Time lords dressing
“I remember the inaugural of Pandek the Third….”

TIME LORD 1: You know, I remember the inaugural of Pandek the Third.
TIME LORD 2: Really?
TIME LORD 1: Yeah. Nine hundred years, he lasted. Now there was a President with some staying power, what?
(He puts his gown on a coat hook, and a hand takes it away.)
TIME LORD 2: What?
TIME LORD 1: Staying power. Where the dickens is my gown?
TIME LORD 2: Nine hundred years, eh?
TIME LORD 1: I could have sworn it was here a second ago.
DOCTOR: Here you are, sir.
(The Doctor, in a plain T-shirt, helps him into the gold robes.)
TIME LORD 1: Ah, thank you. Most kind. Yes — very different from the fellows nowadays, what? They’re chopping and changing every couple of centuries.
— The Deadly Assassin, 1976

Well, at least by modern standards, when Presidents are dropping left and right, Pandek III (not to be confused with Pundat III) serving 900 years was considered a good long stretch. They’re explicitly referring to a presidency before Morbius, back when things were more politically stable.

(The Legacy of Gallifrey timeline is right out — it would imply Presidents serving an average of about seventeen days.)

Does this mean FASA’s 100,000-year timeline reigns?

It certainly seems to rule out the oft-quoted ten-million-year timeline. In a universe where 25,000-year presidencies are the norm, 900 years doesn’t sound like staying power, even if terms have shortened in more recent centuries.

Actually — wait.

25,000 years ÷ 13 lifetimes ≈ 1,923 years per incarnation.
And that’s assuming those Presidents were elected in their first incarnation.

How long do Time Lords live, anyway?

An elderly Eleventh Doctor
After 1,200 years in this incarnation, the Eleventh Doctor could barely walk

Accounts vary about the First Doctor’s age when he regenerated into the Second Doctor. Some peg it at around 450 years; others put it closer to 900.

The longest-lived incarnation of the Doctor on television is the Eleventh, who lived for roughly 1,100–1,200 years before regenerating into the Twelfth. It’s possible that, with proper medical support and a less punishing lifestyle, he might have shuffled into decrepitude around 1,900 years.

Still, if we take 1,200 years per incarnation as a working upper limit, that gives us a total lifespan (without extra regeneration cycles) of roughly 16,000 years for a Time Lord. Does that hold up?

Are there any other long-lived Time Lords to compare against?

Well — there’s Lady Rowellanuraven, a senior figure in the Chronal Intervention Agency. She’s in her eleventh incarnation and approximately 10,000 years old, which puts her at about 900 years per incarnation. You *could* argue that she burned through lives quickly because she’s CIA — but she’s an academic analyst, not a field operative.

(Evidence here is admittedly scant.)

It’s also worth noting that, per The Legacy of Gallifrey, back when Gallifrey was pre-industrial, pre-scientific, and pre-regeneration, a typical Gallifreyan lifespan was around 300 years. If we compare that to humans — whose average life expectancy rose from roughly 37 in the pre-industrial era to 80+ today, with some regions reaching 100 — then tripling the Gallifreyan single-lifespan through industrialization and advanced medicine feels… right.

Which still gives us an average Time Lord 13×lifespan of around 12,000 years.

Even with extraordinary medical support, that makes an average presidency of 25,000 years very hard to sustain — especially since figures like Morbius and Morbius were exceptions, ascending to the Presidency in their first incarnation.

…Did I say Morbius twice?

Well — Morbius the Imperator was President #400-ish… but he was also President #3.

Not Morbius and Morbius II.  The same person.

Morbius the Imperator
Morbius the Imperator has an interesting relationship with Time Lord history

He didn’t time-travel into the past or the future.  Morbius’s mad presidency happened twice: once at the end of Gallifreyan history, when the Doctor was a child, and once at the beginning, shortly after Rassilon entered his tomb.

This all stems from the fact that Morbius’s placement in the timeline wasn’t clearly established when The Brain of Morbius aired in 1976.  Some sources treated him as a very early President; others framed him as recent history from the Doctor’s perspective. That ambiguity makes sense — the story is simultaneously a riff on Frankenstein and They Saved Hitler’s Brain, written barely thirty years after Hitler’s death.

The problem is that both placements make sense, and both are supported by foundational works of subsequent media that don’t merely reference them — they depend on them.

The Legacy of Gallifrey‘s short 2,000-year timeline tried to resolve this by compressing the two into a single Morbius. The cost was enormous: it effectively deletes most of Gallifreyan history, creates a world where Rassilon died only a few years before the Doctor was born, implies average presidential terms measured in days, and leaves no room at all for the 900-year presidency mentioned in The Deadly Assassin.

Modern Doctor Who has increasingly taken the position that both Morbius presidencies happened, and that they were not merely the same man, but effectively the same event with two distinct temporal placements — and then largely tried to avoid grappling with the contradiction that implies.

(With a few odd exceptions, like Dark Gallifrey: Morbius, which appears to use the short timeline… except that its TARDIS development history only makes sense if you quietly assume the Long Gallifreyan timeline instead.)

Are there any other options?

Yes — in fact, there are.

Big Finish’s Gallifrey audio series (starring Romana, Leela, and the Doctor’s brother Irving, set on Gallifrey in the years prior to the Time War) includes a passing but remarkable detail: a Time Lady called the Watchmaker, whose husband was one of Rassilon’s generals one million years ago.

Approximately 1,000,000 years.

That yields an average presidency of about 2,500 years — entirely achievable within the known bounds of Gallifreyan livespans.  And by the standards implied in The Deadly Assassin, a 900-year presidency under Pandek III, short by the sweep of history, suddenly feels enormous when every President in the post-Morbius chaotic era is barely lasting a century.

This same Gallifrey series also addressed Morbius — or rather, if we split him for the sake of discussion into “Ancient Morbius” and “Recent Morbius,” it addressed the former.

Because it turns out that the third Lord President of Gallifrey was not Morbius at all.

The third Lord President was Pandora, who took the title Imperatrix.

President Pandora
Imperatrix Pandora, a direct (if distant) ancestor of Romana

Like Morbius, she seized power in a coup. She was an aggressive interventionist. She led an army of offworlders. But unlike Morbius — who was ultimately sentenced to death by disintegration — Pandora was sentenced to be Erased from History.

And this being Gallifrey… that sentence is literal.

Gallifreyan history therefore contains a genuine void where its third President ought to be — followed, almost a million years later, by a rogue presidency that looks uncannily similar.

Time heals over wounds in the Doctor Who universe. But the wound left by Pandora’s removal healed… wrong.

If you travel back to that early period in Gallifreyan history now, you don’t encounter Pandora. You encounter Morbius.  Not a copy of him, and not a second version — but not quite the same thing, either.

Those two rogue presidencies are simultaneously the same presidency, and entirely separate events, unfolding under different circumstances in different eras.  The Dark Gallifrey: Morbius audios pick up after the execution of the third President Morbius.

So yes — it’s a huge mess. But there is an actual explanation here. We know what happened, even if we don’t know the precise mechanism. There is a paradox at the heart of Gallifreyan history.

So whose fault is this?

The Legacy of Gallifrey, published in 1985, was effectively patient zero for the chronology becoming so broken — and it was written by Garry Russell.  Russell was commissioned to produce a piece for Doctor Who Magazine’s 100th issue, and was handed the thankless task of making the existing references to Gallifrey’s history make sense.

(They don’t. They are literally incompatible in the specifics.)

The most serious problem with the roughly 2,000-year LoG timeline isn’t just compression; it’s that, given what we now know, it would place Rassilon within living memory for most residents of Gallifrey.  That implication simply wasn’t there in 1985; how long Time Lords lived was still unclear, there were no official timelines of any kind, and key lifespan data — including Lady Rowellanuraven in the FASA sourcebooks — would not appear until five months later.

The VNAs — the novel range that later fleshed out a more coherent Gallifreyan timeline — didn’t exist yet. Russell knew this, and he left himself an out: The Legacy of Gallifrey is, in-universe, based on recovered scrolls by Postar the Perfidious, a Gallifreyan historian.  And there are enough odd asides and strange elements in the text to make it clear that this account is meant to be read as the work of an unreliable narrator.

The problem is that, in the absence of any other official history (and presented in a major anniversary publication) that unreliable account nonetheless became the foundation for a great deal of subsequent fiction. When there is no alternative source, the unreliable one becomes the primary source.

Auteur is a living skeleton in a scribe's robe
Auteur (likely Postar the Perfidious) treats history like a wiki to be edited

And Postar the Perfidious is almost certainly an earlier incarnation of a (former) Time Lord later known as Auteur — also sometimes called the Perfidious — who served as an archivist on Gallifrey in his past.  Auteur, like his fellow Time Lord The Chronicler, is able to alter history as he writes the record of it.

So who broke Gallifreyan history?

A careless hand with a feathered quill, green ink, and a marginal note that reads:

« 𝓘𝓶𝓹𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓸𝓻 𝓮𝓽 𝓘𝓶𝓹𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓻𝓲𝔁 ? 𝓒𝓮 𝓼𝓸𝓷𝓽 𝓼𝓾̂𝓻𝓮𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓵𝓪 𝓶𝓮̂𝓶𝓮 𝓹𝓮𝓻𝓼𝓸𝓷𝓷𝓮, 𝓷𝓸𝓷 ? »

The damage is done. And we have mostly unraveled it.

But if Gallifreyan history really spans one million years, how do we explain the Sixth Doctor’s claim that it encompasses *“ten million years of absolute power”?

Well…

Maybe their history is bigger on the inside.

𝓟𝓸𝓼𝓽𝓼𝓬𝓻𝓲𝓹𝓽:

𝓐𝓾𝓽𝓮𝓾𝓻 𝓱𝓪𝓼 𝓪𝓷 𝓪𝓷𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓵𝓸𝓰𝔂 𝓬𝓸𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔. 𝓑𝓾𝓽 𝓲𝓯 𝓱𝓮 𝓫𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝓼 𝓱𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓻𝔂 𝓪𝓰𝓪𝓲𝓷, 𝓘’𝓶 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓫𝓾𝔂𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓲𝓽.