8:15 A.M.
February 15th, 2008
Banc Français Building
Duchy of Los Angeles, California Province
Imperial States of America
Sarah couldn’t breathe. The image of Chuck Bartowski, dressed in a jet black suit, speaking to the masses from before City Hall – it had stunned her.
She tried to breathe. She sucked in quick gulps of oxygen, but before she realized it, she had caused herself to start hyper-ventilating.
The Doctor’s eyes went wide with alarm. “Sarah!” he said, concerned. “Sarah! Maybe you should sit down!”
And so she did. After a moment, she regained her breath, as Chuck –
NO! she thought to herself. HE is NOT Chuck!
As the version of Charles Bartowski in this reality droned on in the background, her breath returned. However, when she looked back up at the screen, she was in for another shock.
“Oh God,” she moaned, recognizing John Casey standing behind Chuck and to his right. “Not Casey, too.”
“You recognize him?” the Doctor asked, his voice slightly incredulous.
Sarah sighed. “He’s my partner, assigned to me from the NSA.”
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. “REA-lly,” he said. “You see, here, he’s Chuck Bartowski’s right-hand man.”
Sarah’s eyebrows arched as well. “How the hell did that happen?”
“Well,” the Doctor replied, “about a year ago, he uncovered a leak in the OSS. Turns out, there was a renegade agent inside who was trying to destroy a super-computer that contained all of the ISA’s intelligence secrets. It was called –“
“- the Intersect,” Sarah completed, shaking her head. “And the agent’s name, it was Bryce Larkin, wasn’t it?”
The Doctor nodded slowly. “How exactly do you know all this?”
Sarah sighed. “In my timeline – OUR timeline – Bryce Larkin broke into the Intersect in September of 2007, trying to stay one step head of a rebel group called Fulcrum. He downloaded the entire thing and e-mailed it to Chuck Bartowski, just before being shot by John Casey.
“When Chuck opened the e-mail, his propensity for subliminal image absorption caused the entire database to be downloaded into his brain. As a result, he was now the human Intersect, and Casey and I were sent to protect him.”
“Bryce Larkin was shot by John Casey in both universes,” the Doctor mused.
“Yeah, except Casey didn’t kill him, like he thought,” Sarah replied. “Bryce is still alive, hunting down Fulcrum.”
“Well…”
Sarah gave him a piercing stare. “Well what?”
“Bryce may be alive in your timeline, but he’s dead here. You see, Emperor Chuck ordered him executed, a spectacle which John Casey carried out personally, on national television.
“That was what caused him to be promoted.”
Sarah sat down heavily. The rage and frustration built inside her, and as she thought about the situation, they began to boil.
“Son of a BITCH!” she shouted, slamming her hands down on the table.
Immediately, the ground shook. Other people on the underground complex screamed. “EARTHQUAKE!” one shouted.
Sarah immediately dove under the table, the Doctor joining her. The tremor passed quickly, though.
The Doctor looked at her curiously. “That was strange,” he said. “There were no harmonic foreshocks, nothing in the sound spectrum to indicate an earthquake was coming.”
“What are you talking about?” Sarah asked, as she stood up.
“I think you caused it,” the Doctor replied. “It seems to me like you’re the missing piece of this puzzle, the primary link between these two realities. I think your presence here is causing time and space to finally correct itself and merge the two realities.”
“That can’t possibly be good,” Sarah said.
“Oh, no. If it’s not corrected fairly quickly, it could destroy both realities.”
“Oh, great,” Sarah snarked. “Here I am, responsible for destruction.”
She shook her head. “How do we stop it?”
The Doctor shrugged. “No idea. I need to talk to the TARDIS.”
“I thought the TARDIS was offline,” Sarah objected.
“Time rotor’s down, but the computer should still be working,” the Doctor corrected her.
They exited the building, heading back up to retrieve Sarah’s Honda. As they came up to street level, Sarah suddenly felt like the weight of the universe was on her shoulders. She leaned against the building for a moment, and the Doctor’s eyes went wide.
“What?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything, just pointed up. Sarah followed his finger upward, to the top of the building –
The Banc Français sign was disappearing and reappearing. Every time it disappeared, though, it was replaced with the Citibank logo.
“What the hell…”
“It’s you,” the Doctor breathed. “Not only are you causing temporal disruptions, you’re causing spatial disruptions. This building keeps turning into what it is in your reality. Take your hands off it!”
Sarah did. She backed away from the building, and it slowly faded back into being the Banc Français building. “So what?” she asked as she and the Doctor walked toward the street. “Everything I touch, it’s going to do that?”
“Worse,” the Doctor replied. “Everything you come even close to.”
He pointed again, this time at a bus. It was flashing back and forth between the blue and grey color scheme used here, and the orange L.A. County Metro scheme that Sarah was used to. Passengers waiting to board the bus screamed and ran. One woman dropped to her knees and crossed herself.
“We’ve got to get out of here, and get you back inside the TARDIS,” the Doctor said worriedly. “Something very bad is going to happen if we don’t.”
8:30 A.M.
Los Angeles City Hall
“Okay, John, what the hell is going on?”
Chuck Bartowski, Emperor of the Imperial States of America, Conqueror of North America, Defeater of the French Empire steepled his fingers and glared at his most trusted advisor.
“I really don’t know, sir,” Colonel John Casey replied. “It’s nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
Chuck leaned forward. “Listen to me very carefully, John,” he said quietly. “I have hundreds of other advisors to tell me, ‘I don’t know’. When I ask you a question, I want answers.”
Casey turned to him, and cocked an eyebrow. “Well, zip-a-dee-doo-dah for you, Bartowski,” he snarled. “People in hell want ice water, but they ain’t gettin’ it.”
Chuck’s eyes went wide and his face turned beet red. “WHAT?!” he bellowed. “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?!”
Casey’s head snapped back to the left, and his face took on a look of horror. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “No, sir, that wasn’t me speaking. I don’t know what that was, but I would never say anything like that to you.”
Chuck leaned in and looked into Casey’s eyes. “Then exactly what was it, Colonel?”
“If I may, sir…”
A small, mousy scientific advisor spoke. “What?” Chuck asked, as if noticing him for the first time. “Dr… Grimes, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” Dr. Morgan Grimes replied. “I think… I think that whatever phenomenon is affecting the buildings in downtown Los Angeles may also be affecting the people, Colonel Casey included.”
“Then what do we do to stop it, Dr. Grimes?”
Dr. Grimes swallowed hard. “Uh… sir, I really don’t know.”
The drive from downtown Los Angeles back to Laurel Canyon and Mulholland had been a nightmare. People, buildings, cars all around Sarah and the Doctor were flashing back and forth between what they were here and what they were in Sarah’s reality.
The worst, though, had been when Sarah was going through the intersection at Cahuenga and Barham and the Civic momentarily turned into her Boxster. The sudden burst of power that hadn’t been there almost caused her to run into the back of a pickup, and the unexpected change had caused the car behind her to run into a wall.
Finally, they reached the TARDIS. The Doctor unlocked it quickly, and ushered Sarah inside. “You have to stay in here,” he said. “You saw it out there – you’re causing chaos.”
He waited a few minutes, and then stuck his head outside. “Well,” he called, “it seems to have stopped.”
“But it’ll start again if I go back outside?” Sarah asked.
“Ah, yep,” the Doctor replied. “So… do me a favor, and don’t.”
“Great,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t you say this place has a guest room?”
2:30 P.M.
The TARDIS
Sarah awoke to hear a great whooping and hollering. Following the noise, she found her way back to the control room, to find the Doctor dancing around like an idiot.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ve figured out how to end the paradox!” he hollered. A rumbling noise passed through the TARDIS. “Well, the TARDIS figured it out,” he said, hastily. “But it couldn’t have done it without me!”
Sarah nodded approvingly. “Great!” she replied, excitement evident in her voice. “How do we do it?”
“Really quite simple,” the Doctor said. “Somebody from the original timeline just has to terminate the discrepancy in the timeline, and it should snap back to just how it was!”
“Somebody from the original timeline,” Sarah replied. “So one of us?”
“Oh, no, I can’t,” the Doctor corrected her. “I’m a Timelord, it wouldn’t work. It has to be you.”
“Okay,” she said. “So I have to terminate the discrepancy. What exactly does that mean?”
“Quite simple, really,” the Doctor replied, almost flippantly. “You just have to kill Chuck Bartowski.”
