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The Taking Of Planet 5
(Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham) |
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 Name: The Memeovore
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Planet Five - the fifth
planet in Earth’s solar system, between Mars and Jupiter -,
approximately twelve million years ago.
Appearances: "The
Taking of Planet 5"
Doctors: Eighth
Doctor
Companions: Fitz Kreiner and Compassion
History: After facing the wrath of The Fendahl ("Image
of the Fendahl"), it is hard to believe that there
is a creature out there more powerful than it, but, as The Doctor
was to discover four incarnations after his terrible battle with
the thing that eats death, nothing can remain top of the food chain
forever. Even as the Time Lords locked Planet Five - the fifth planet
in Earth’s solar system, located between Mars and Jupiter in
the area which is now the asteroid belt - away from the rest of the
universe in a time loop, members of the Celestial Intervention Agency
recognised the potential of Planet Five as a world where evolution
hit a blind alley to create a creature powerful enough to devour
the universe. With this in mind, instead of trigging a time loop,
members of the Agency instead trapped Planet Five in an accelerated
spiral, time inside the ‘loop’ moving at an accelerated
rate as billions of years of evolution passed by in seconds while
appearing from the outside to be locked in the same few seconds.
As
a result of this accelerated evolution, by the time the Fendahl had
eaten all but the last form of life on the planet, the last form
of life had evolved into something that could kill the Fendahl. Described
as a Memeovore, the resulting creature was capable of devouring meaning
itself, ‘feeding’ on the subatomic interaction of events
caused by observing events as they took place, draining the energy
that could result from the multiple outcomes of any event while retaining
only its own observation of what was taking place, thus causing the
normal-scale cosmos to break down and disrupting the brains of the
observers - the most complex structures present -, essentially ‘feeding’ on
the channels of comprehension that existed between every form of
life in the universe.
This creature remained contained on Planet
Five for centuries by its relative time frame - how long it remained
imprisoned there in the ‘real’ universe is unclear - until
it was freed by the actions of a Time Lord platoon currently engaged
in the War with the Enemy - a war with an unspecified enemy that the
Time Lords would only begin in The Doctor’s personal future (Later
revealed to be Faction
Paradox led by The Doctor’s corrupted future
self ("The
Ancestor Cell"), the Faction being apparently ‘replaced’ by
the Daleks ("Dalek") after The Doctor averted the timeline
where he became their leader) -, seeking to release the Fendahl in the
hope of using samples from it to create weapons to be used against the
Enemy. However, their mission was complicated by the presence of the
Eighth
Doctor, who suspected that something else was happening given
that the Time Lords were launching their mission from the home of the
Elder Things... a race created by H.P. Lovecraft that The Doctor knew
for a fact had not existed.
Correctly
deducing that the Celestis - former members of the Celestial Intervention
Agency who literally cut themselves out of Time to escape the War
and became mere concepts operating outside of reality in the pocket
dimension of Mictlan - were behind the creation of the Elder Things,
The Doctor took his companions Fitz Kreiner and Compassion to investigate
the situation. Encountering a group of Time Lord soldiers from the
Future War, The Doctor escaped execution by claiming to be a general
in the war while trying to avoid learning any specific information
about the Enemy to limit the knowledge he might gain about his future.
During their investigation, The Doctor learned that the mission had
been infiltrated by a Celestis agent - known to his masters only
as One -, and, horrified at their arrogance in trying to control
the Fendahl, vowed to stop their plans.
Despite The Doctor’s efforts, he was unable to
prevent the Time Lords from destroying the time loop around Planet
Five by causing a newly-birthed WarTARDIS to crash into the loop
around the planet (Another TARDIS created the temporal rift that
had powered the time scanner The Doctor had encountered in his previous
encounter with the Fendahl when it was shot with a demat gun while
trying to escape). As a result, the Memeovore was released into the
universe, devouring meaning across the universe before homing in
on Mictlan, a manifestation of pure concept that served as its richest
feast. As the Memeovore moved to devour Mictlan, The Doctor was able
to appeal to the remaining WarTARDISes to help him defeat the Memeovore
by forming themselves into trans-dimensional blades, essentially
cutting Mictlan out of the universe and expelling it into the outer
voids.
Although The Doctor guessed that this plan had been implanted
by One, he concluded that the plan’s origin was unimportant
so long as the universe was safe, and thus never learned why what
he had done had been necessary. As One later explained to a member
of the assault team, while meditating outside Mictlan with an old
hermit who became his mentor - it was never specified if there was
any connection between One’s hermit and the hermit who taught
The Doctor the secret of life ("Planet
of the Spiders")
-, he had become aware of the Swimmers, powerful beings larger than
universes who existed in the void between universes, crushing universes
as they swam, and had learned that Mictlan might attract the Swimmers
to this universe. To this end, he had developed the plan to destroy
Mictlan, preventing this universe from attracting the attention of
the Swimmers and leaving him and his mentor the last of their people.
One’s final fate after the Time War is unknown (Particularly
since The Doctor’s destruction of Gallifrey ("The Ancestor
Cell") would have technically erased these events from history). |
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