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First published 2016
Written by Trevor Baxendale
Copyright © BBC Worldwide Limited, 2016
BBC, DOCTOR WHO (word marks, logos and devices), TARDIS, DALEKS, CYBERMAN and K-9 (word marks and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.
BBC logo © BBC, 1996. Doctor Who logo © BBC, 2009
The moral right of the author and copyright holders has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-93065-9
All correspondence to:
BBC Children’s Books
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
How to Use this Book
With this Choose the Future book, YOU are in control of the Doctor’s story from the very first page to the very last. Every decision you make affects his future – the fate of the universe he protects is in your hands!
Read the first entry, choose what the Doctor should do next, then turn to the number of the entry of your choice. The adventure will unfold as you make new decisions and pick new numbers all the way through the story.
If you think you’re ready to embark on a dangerous escapade alongside the Doctor – likely to involve the odd alien nemesis, several perilous encounters, plus an awful lot of running – then turn the page to begin …
Far out in deep space, beyond the Silver Devastation, an orphan moon drifts through the endless night.
Clinging to the rocky surface of the moon is a series of life-support modules connected by airlocks and transit tubes. This was once a small human outpost, but it now appears abandoned. The base portholes are all dark. A spaceship stands unused on a launch pad. A deathly quiet seeps through the shadowy interior of the outpost, and the air is thick and cold.
Inside one of the modules, the silence is abruptly broken by a loud, raucous wheezing. An old blue police box materialises out of nowhere, landing with a solid thump in the middle of a darkened room. The door bangs suddenly open and a tall, gaunt figure wearing a frock coat over a hoodie leaps out. It is the Doctor, that mysterious wanderer through time and space, and he is not happy.
He is, in fact, furious.
The cause of his bad temper is the police box – his TARDIS – which is malfunctioning yet again.
It seems to have a mind of its own these days, the Doctor thinks sourly. The time machine never takes him where he wants to go: he’d been aiming for the Eye of Orion, a galactic beauty spot famed for its relaxing negative ions, but somehow he’d ended up here … wherever here is.
The Doctor’s boots scrape loudly on a hard floor and the noise echoes around metallic walls. He can’t really see anything. It’s too dark to be sure, but it feels like a laboratory of some kind. He is about to ask his companion to fetch a torch from the TARDIS when he remembers that he is, for once, travelling alone. Another reason why he is feeling so bad-tempered. He likes company. He doesn’t much like this cold, ominous place.
The Doctor stands and scowls into the darkness for a minute, debating his next course of action.
If you think the Doctor should return to the TARDIS, tap here to go to Entry 2.
If you think he should stay and explore, tap here to go to Entry 3.
The Doctor turns back to the TARDIS. The Eye of Orion is so beautiful in this era that it would be a shame not to try again. Perhaps a drop of oil on the helmic regulator would help? The TARDIS couldn’t get it wrong twice in a row, surely.
The Doctor takes a last look at the gloomy room. It has all the markings of a laboratory of some kind. The urge to stop and explore is very strong – but it’s not much fun without someone to explore with. Plus, the light from inside the TARDIS is warm and welcoming.
But, just before he reaches it, the TARDIS door slowly closes.
The Doctor straightens, his nerves bristling. That shouldn’t happen. He reaches out and pushes the door back open. It swings slowly inward with a creak. The hinges clearly need oiling as well, just like the helmic regulator.
The Doctor steps cautiously into his time-and-space machine. This isn’t the usual way he walks into his TARDIS. Normally he barges straight in, brimming with enthusiasm for the next trip, or rushing back to the controls in a frantic race against time, or …
He stops inside and closes the door behind him. Everything looks normal. The control console is humming, lights flashing across its hexagonal surface. The central column is pulsing with a soft orange light, rising up to meet the huge, concentric time rotors above.
Yes, everything looks normal, the Doctor reflects. But what if someone – or something – crept into the TARDIS while his back was turned? The Doctor’s brow furrows with annoyance as he remembers bursting out of the TARDIS and leaving the door wide open behind him.
The Doctor crosses quietly to the console, allowing his long fingers to trail across the buttons and levers as he thinks about what to do next. Perhaps he is just imagining things. Perhaps he has been alone for too long. Surely nothing could have entered the TARDIS without his knowledge?
If you think the Doctor should check the TARDIS for an intruder, tap here to go to Entry 4.
If you think he should dematerialise the TARDIS, tap here to go to Entry 5.
‘Lights,’ says the Doctor.
Voice-activated photonic projectors raise the light level. The Doctor is standing in the middle of an extensive laboratory littered with advanced scientific equipment.
Behind the ducting, something scuttles into the shadows. The Doctor peers under the edge of the ducting, but he can’t see anything unusual.
Apart from a dead body, that is.
A human being in white overalls is sprawled across the floor, hidden from immediate view by a workbench. The Doctor has seen many corpses – both human and alien, in countless times and places – but seldom anything as strange as this.
At first the Doctor thinks the poor man has been skinned alive; the face is just a contortion of exposed muscle and bone. But, as the Doctor watches, the raw sinew disappears, stripped away to reveal the naked skull beneath. The overalls sag, relieved of their shape as the flesh disintegrates, and settle on skeletal remains.
The Doctor’s eyes grow dark and angry. This is not the work of anything natural.
If you think the Doctor should examine the body further, tap here to go to Entry 19.
If you think he should take another look for the thing in the ducting, tap here to go to Entry 21.
The Doctor glances quickly around the console room. His eyes narrow. His brows bristle. He can’t shake the feeling that there is something in here with him. Something alien.
But then, he is an alien too. Everyone is. It’s all a matter of perspective.
The Doctor circles the control console, his gaze darting around the room. Something on the walkway that circles the chamber holds his attention. Was it a movement? Something creeping into the shadow of a bookcase?
The Doctor bounds up the steps that lead to the walkway. There are many bookcases standing innocently against the TARDIS walls. Nothing could get behind them. In fact, very little could hide up here. Apart from books.
‘Hello?’ he says eventually. ‘Is there anybody or anything in here? Besides me, I mean. And the books, of course.’
Silence is the only reply.
The Doctor snatches one of the books at random from a shelf. ‘The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells,’ he reads aloud. ‘Hmm.’
There is a soft noise from downstairs and the Doctor turns sharply. He feels the hairs rise on the back of his neck: he’s been looking in the wrong place.
Tap here to go to Entry 6.
The Doctor pushes the dematerialisation lever forward with abrupt purpose.
The time rotors begin to turn, the engines grind, the glass column at the centre of the console glows with an intense orange light. With a loud wheezing and groaning noise, the TARDIS leaves the moonbase and transfers itself into the mysterious time–space Vortex.
The Doctor’s long fingers flicker over the controls, setting coordinates, adjusting for all the various factors that affect the passage of his time machine through the Vortex, not least of which is the ship’s great age.
‘Come on,’ he urges the TARDIS. ‘The Eye of Orion! Negative ions and wonderful ice cream!’ He twists the helmic regulator with a flourish and the great cogs counter-rotate above his head. ‘No more gloomy space stations!’
The TARDIS flits through light years and across the centuries … and, just as the Doctor begins to relax and smile, something climbs on to his back and digs sharp pincers deep into his neck.
There was something else aboard the TARDIS!
The talons bite deep, and the Doctor feels something invading his mind. He tries to fight it but the thing has him in an iron grip!
If you think the Doctor should pull the lever again and materialise the TARDIS, tap here to go to Entry 8.
If you think he should use the telepathic circuits instead, tap here to go to Entry 49.
The Doctor walks slowly down to the console level. His boots echo on the steps. He feels nervous, something he is not accustomed to in his own TARDIS. He doesn’t like it. It makes him feel cross.
There’s only one place an intruder could be hiding now: below the console, down where the TARDIS power core and control circuits are located.
As he heads towards the stairs that lead down from the console level, the Doctor pauses. On the edge of the console is a pair of stylish sunglasses. These are the Doctor’s sonic sunglasses, highly advanced wearable tech that he developed, almost on a whim, to replace his old, broken sonic screwdriver. They are incredibly useful and rather cool.
But then so was his electric guitar, propped up on its stand by the Magpie Electricals amplifier. The Doctor played the guitar to help himself think, or so he liked people to believe. Actually, he just liked playing it. It was a loud and beautiful instrument. Very loud!
If you think the Doctor should pick up his sonic sunglasses, tap here to go to Entry 9.
If you think he should play his electric guitar instead, tap here to go to Entry 22.
This time the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS more cautiously, picking up his sonic sunglasses on the way.
Pausing on the threshold between dimensions, he allows his eyes to adjust to the dark. The sunglasses’ night-vision setting would help, but he doesn’t need them just yet. The light from the TARDIS interior is enough, stretching his shadow out ahead of him.
The laboratory is silent – save for an incongruous ticking from somewhere in the shadows. On a workbench in the corner of the room, a test-tube rolls gently back and forth. Something must have passed it by; something moving quickly and furtively enough to set it rocking. The glass clinks quietly, like a crystal clock ticking away brittle seconds.
The Doctor stops the clock by placing one long finger on the glass. He listens intently to the silence that remains.
It is the silence of a crypt, he thinks. Thick with death.
His gaze follows the route he imagines an un-imaginary being might take and settles on the plastic ducting that runs along the lower edge of one of the lab walls.
There are open vents with dark spaces inside.
The perfect hiding place for the creature from the TARDIS.
Tap here to go to Entry 21.
The Doctor’s fingers play quickly across the controls and the giant cogs above the console grind into motion. The central column fills with an amber brilliance, the ancient machinery groans and wheezes, and the TARDIS slowly dematerialises.
The Doctor isn’t sure if he has set the correct coordinates – or even, really, what they are. He seems to be working in a trance. The time spent in the Vortex is relative and unknowable; the Doctor barely registers it.
Eventually the time rotor slows to a halt and the TARDIS lands. The hum of its powerful instruments fills the room. The destination monitor flickers into life:
EARTH. HUMANIAN ERA. CENTURY 21.
As if in a dream, the Doctor heads for the exit.
Outside it’s an overcast day, with the threat of rain heavy in the air. The Doctor inhales deeply, closes his eyes. It’s not quite home, but …
There’s someone walking towards him. A woman. The Doctor frowns, trying to focus. She’s wearing a raincoat and a scarf. Blonde hair, serious expression.
Does he know that face?
Tap here to go to Entry 14.
The Doctor picks up the sunglasses and slips them into the breast pocket of his velvet jacket. After all, whatever is waiting for him below decks might not be a music lover.
Taking a deep breath, the Doctor makes his way down the stairs to the power core. He looks around the chamber, eyes large as saucers beneath bristling brows, not knowing what to expect. He isn’t used to intruders in his TARDIS.
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ he murmurs.
He can’t see anything untoward, apart from the cables and calibration equipment left over from a previous attempt to fix the temporal dilation circuit.
He puts on his sonic sunglasses and scans the shadowy area behind the glowing artron cache that lies beneath the control console. Something is hiding behind the tangle of pulsating cables.
The deep hum of the TARDIS power core reverberates around the room, vibrating through the soles of the Doctor’s boots as he creeps slowly across the floor. He can see a distinct shape forming in the shadows – something that might almost be human … or might not.
If you think the shape is human, tap here to go to Entry 10.
If you think it isn’t human, tap here to go to Entry 11.
The Doctor gently pulls aside the heavy cable and sees a young woman curled up in a foetal position and clearly terrified.
‘There are many things to be scared of in this universe,’ the Doctor tells her, ‘but I am not one of them.’
Her eyes are still full of fear, but behind the fear the Doctor can detect a sharp intelligence. He takes in the white overalls favoured by scientists in the thirty-third century, and scans her name tag: EVA. So, a scientist – presumably with a rational, sensible mind. What could have affected such a person so badly?
‘Please,’ she says, in barely more than a whisper. ‘Please don’t send me back out there.’
He regards her coolly for a long moment. She stands up slowly, but she’s still trembling, and there is a sheen of perspiration on her skin.
‘Well, you used the magic word twice, so that’s a good start,’ he says. ‘Let’s do the introductions. You’re Eva, and I’m the Doctor –’
Eva’s eyes roll up into her head, and she slumps unconscious into the Doctor’s arms.
Tap here to go to Entry 12.
It’s something very dark, and very inhuman.
The Doctor can just make out an oily mass atop a forest of spidery legs. A variety of eyes – some the size of marbles, others like tangerines – surround a central, spherical head that looks like a giant black cyst.
‘Hello,’ the Doctor says, a little more warily than he intends.
The creature chitters back, and the Doctor is reminded, uncomfortably, of the noise a rattlesnake makes just before it strikes.
‘I’m the Doctor,’ he says, as unthreateningly as he can manage. Sometimes not even that is easy. ‘I mean you no harm.’
The dark eyes glisten. A hole opens stickily in the centre of the cyst-head, emitting a gust of foul-smelling breath.
‘Well, that’s the problem with non-anthropoid types,’ the Doctor mutters. ‘It’s almost impossible to tell what you’re thinking just by looking at you. Is that a frown? Because you’re looking at the universe’s greatest expert in frowning.’
The Doctor attempts a friendly smile, but he knows this can be something of a double-edged sword for him; in the past, his smile has been known to trigger fear, loathing, deep suspicion, and on one memorably unfortunate occasion an interplanetary war.
The creature is unimpressed.
‘Yes, I always thought smiling was overrated too,’ says the Doctor.
The creature flexes its long legs. Is it preparing to leap? The Doctor eyes it carefully, looking for any sign of increased tension in those curling, multijointed limbs. The eyes remain unreadable.
The Doctor wants to examine the creature more closely, but the thing moves before he can adjust his sonic sunglasses.
It is unbelievably quick; one moment it’s cowering behind some cables, and the next it’s gone, scuttling behind the Time Lord and leaping on to his back.
The Doctor whirls, thrashing his arms in an effort to shake off the creature, but it grips hard with its many finger-like legs.
Then he feels the sting. Something has penetrated his neck and shoulders, sending a piercing pain through his skull.
With a sharp, despairing cry he staggers back towards the stairs.
Tap here to go to Entry 20.
‘Well,’ says the Doctor, surprised. ‘I know meeting me is a privilege, but there’s no need to go weak at the knees.’
Eva takes a shuddering breath as the Doctor helps her up the steps to the console level. He eases her into a chair and examines her quickly.
‘You’re really not very well,’ the Doctor mutters. ‘Why is there never a doctor around when you need one?’
‘Plague,’ says Eva, recovering slightly. Her eyes are hooded. ‘The base is under quarantine.’
‘What?’ The Doctor looks aghast. ‘What kind of plague? Is there anyone else on the base? Any other survivors?’
‘We’re all dead,’ she replies. ‘Every one of us.’
‘You’re very much alive. Unwell, but alive.’
‘It’s only a matter of time … it gets everyone in the end.’
‘What does? What kind of plague are we talking about?’ The Doctor turns to the control console and runs a series of checks. A picture of Eva appears on the monitor screen as the TARDIS scans her.
The Doctor frowns deeply. ‘That’s very odd. Very odd indeed. In fact, it’s quite extraordinary.’
Tap here to go to Entry 15.
The rat looks up at the Doctor with dark, bead-like eyes.
‘Hello, rat,’ says the Doctor sadly. He hates it when animals are used for scientific research.
The rat squeaks.
‘I’m afraid there’s no one left alive,’ replies the Doctor. ‘You’re the only survivor.’
The rat squeaks again.
‘Well, there’s the rub.’ The Doctor sighs heavily. ‘There’s a good chance you’re already infected, like all your mates here.’
The rat squeaks again.
‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor says. ‘All the humans are dead. It may not be possible to save you.’
The rat squeaks some more, and the Doctor raises an eyebrow. ‘No, I’m not human. Kind of you to notice.’
The rat squeaks and shuffles around its glass cell.
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ The Doctor unseals the module
If you think Skid is infected with malignocites, tap here to go to Entry 27.
If you don’t think he’s infected, tap here to go to Entry 39.
