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Borrowed Time
(Paul Finch) |
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 Name: Jane Blythe; aspects of her were known as
Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop.
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Exact species and time
of origin is unknown given her contacts in the Time Market, but she
appeared on Earth in 2007.
Appearances: "Borrowed
Time"
Doctors: Eleventh Doctor
Companions: Amy Pond and Rory
Williams
History: As an individual, Jane was a very intriguing
opponent for The Doctor, due to her command of time allowing her
to develop devices that allowed people to relive the same moment
in time without ever interacting with their past or future selves
by accident. At the same time, her knowledge of legal contracts allowing
her to trick people into signing contracts that could allow them
to ‘borrow’ time that would inevitably force humans into
a position where they had to pay back more time than they could ever
possess.
Arriving
on Earth in 2007, she found work at Lexington International Bank,
posing as the personal assistant of bank manager Vanessa Laing-Randall
while using a glass sculpture in the middle of the bank - intended
to represent the bank’s commitment to bring all strands of
a customer’s life together - to store the time she would gather.
She recruited customers with the ‘aid’ of two men who
introduced themselves to clients as Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop,
humanoids who could manifest a shark-like appearance, although The
Doctor realised that these men were actually other manifestations
of Jane herself rather than independent entities. Not only could
Symington and Blenkinsop make the necessary deals to gain time while
she remained secure in her position as assistant, but their ability
to travel freely back in time themselves allowed them to create miniature
armies by repeatedly going back in time to help their past selves
while the watches negated the usual side-effects of the Blinovitch
Limitation Effect (As explosively demonstrated by The Doctor’s
old friend The
Brigadier when his 1977 self met his 1983 self ("Mawdryn
Undead")).
However, Jane’s plans came to The Doctor’s
attention when the Eleventh Doctor visited the bank with Rory and Amy
to give them a quick ‘lesson’ on their own financial system,
a few days before Lexington Bank would collapse. Having learned about
the temporal ‘loan’ system from Sameera, one of the mid-level
analysts at the bank, after she accidentally triggered the watch to send
them both back in time fifteen minutes, shortly before she received calls
from both The Doctor and Rory, Amy was convinced by Sameera to sign a
contract for a watch so that she could attend to both problems at once,
visiting Rory and then taking advantage of the opportunity to spend the
weekend at her parents and getting a makeover before getting back to
The Doctor. However, The Doctor’s analysis of Amy’s contract
- his time senses allowing him to quickly realise what she had done despite
the effort she went to in order to look like she’d just left -
revealed that she had actually misinterpreted the fine print of the deal;
rather than the five minutes per hour of interest that she had been expecting
to pay, the interest rate was actually five minutes per hour per
hour,
causing her to pay increasingly more interest as time went on, to the
point that she now owed ten years of ‘interest’ after borrowing
only four days worth of time.
Unable
to remove the watch without causing Amy to age to death, The Doctor
was forced to distract Symington and Blenkinsop by programming her
watch to slightly malfunction, leaving a fragment of her time in
the Bank so that the two men would think that Amy was still there,
cutting them off from the TARDIS in
the bank vault while leaving them free to determine how to solve
the problem. In order to get
an inside man inside the bank, they contacted Andrew Brown, an analyst
at the bank who Rory had witnessed in at least three locations simultaneously
earlier, learning that he had started to use so much time that there
were now multiple versions of him working on various odd jobs around
his house. Revealing the amount of time that Andrew now owed as a
result of his contract - reaching up to around 55,000 years -, The
Doctor was able to ‘erase’ the future versions of Andrew
present as the earliest Andrew resolved not to use any more time
to avoid creating any more interest. While talking with Andrew, The
Doctor and Amy noted that something else was going on beyond the
temporal manipulation, as it was completely impractical to set up
this kind of contract when it would be impossible for the humans
to repay Symington and Blenkinsop’s ‘backers’ with
the time they had borrowed.
With Andrew working with them while Nadia - a bank employee
with a damaged watch that caused her to randomly age back and forth
- kept an eye on the TARDIS, they discovered an alien storage facility
at the Millennium Dome where the ‘accounts’ of peoples’ borrowed
time were kept in glass-like boxes, the boxes listing Laing-Randall
as the person they should be returned to if lost. Returning to the
bank, The Doctor was able to configure Nadia’s broken watch
to ‘cloak’ him and his companions as well - Symington
and Blenkinsop ignoring ‘Nadia’ as they knew her watch
was broken, as well as the damage rendering her partly invisible
to them -, The Doctor’s analysis of future newspaper articles
revealing that the events in the present were already changing future
history so that, for example, the invention of a battery that used
cosmic background radiation to never run down had now been invented
by a different person and suffered the occasional sudden power depletion.
Having
revealed what was happening to Sameera, Andrew attempted to confront
Vanessa about what was happening, running into Jane during a confrontation
with Symington and Blenkinsop, Jane feigning ignorance of what was
happening so that they would take her to The Doctor after realising
that they were on to her. Using a visit the Chancellor of the Exchequer
was making to the Bank, Amy, Nadia and Sameera attempted to reveal
the truth over the live broadcast - Sameera paying back the time
she owed live on camera so that she aged thirty-five years in a matter
of seconds -, only for them all to be cornered by the Symingtons
and Blenkinsops. Realising that Jane was the person responsible,
The Doctor was able to draw Jane’s attention to him after she
had killed Vanessa - concluding that her ‘boss’ had outlived
her usefulness - by revealing his knowledge of the Time Market before
agreeing to take on Amy’s debt, now worth over twenty-five
years, and paying it back without any noticeable effect on his physical
age.
Now
aware of his true identity as a Time Lord - and having averted the
broadcast by travelling back in time to stop it after realising what
they were trying to do -, Jane decided to take The Doctor to the
time auction to sell him to other representatives of the Market,
The Doctor agreeing to allow himself to be ‘captured’ in
exchange for Jane negating the debt owed by the human race. While
Jane took The Doctor to the auction, Amy, Rory, Andrew and Sameera
decided to track down the location where Jane had stored her already-repaid
time in the hopes that disrupting it would affect her current ability
to manipulate time. While the auction escalated to the point where
people were willing to bid five inhabited galaxies for The Doctor,
one of the Old Members of the market - old enough to remember the
days when the Time Market had sold regenerations and dirty time to
renegade Time Lords - suggested that The Doctor be allowed to speak.
Although
Jane naturally ‘edited’ The Doctor’s answers to
the questions she allowed him to answer, he was able to avoid saying
anything that would definitively establish himself as a Time Lord
until his friends managed to break the sculpture containing the stored
time, simultaneously tricking Jane into revealing that she had actually
borrowed heavily from the Market to carry out her scheme in the first
place, with promises of repaying them with the time from the contracts.
With Jane lacking the temporal resources to stop him saying anything
she didn’t want him saying, The Doctor revealed her deception
to the Market; the bidders apparently believed that 100,000 years
was less than a tenth of the average human life span, and therefore
Jane would never be able to repay the debts she had incurred. With
the truth revealed, every member of the Market agreed to sell the
human contracts to The Doctor so that he could cancel them all, the
loss of the temporal energy she’d used in the first place apparently
negating Jane’s existence before the Market itself collapsed
due to the loss of faith in the system (Particularly since The Doctor
was able to keep his identity as a Time Lord a secret). Having returned
to the present via the slow path - the auction having taken place
only a few years in the past, although it was broadcast further into
the past as well -, The Doctor was able to deal with Nadia and Sameera’s
temporal problems by giving their boxes to the other, resulting in
the now ten-year-old Nadia ‘losing’ ten years of her
life while Sameera received the thirty years she was owed, restoring
Sameera to her proper age while leaving the originally forty-year-old
Nadia in her twenties, the rest of the contracts having been cancelled
before anyone could repay them. |
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