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of her boxed, featureless cell. She stared at the angles of the walls, followed the lines where they met the low ceiling, looked down to where they met the hard, metallic floor. Not for the first time, she felt the rising panic within her that this would be all she would see for the rest of her life. Seized by the fear of this unending blankness, she found herself cherishing the dim hope that a Dalek might come again to feed her. Just one Dalek with some food. Just something to break through the nothingness.
    But there was nothing. Just the low, muffled heartbeat of the Dalek ship’s power and the vibration of its engines.
    Time flowed past, but she had no way of knowing how fast or slow. Was this just a minute? Or days? Was she a grown-up now? Had she spent her whole life here?
    One of the walls suddenly slid to one side, revealing a Dalek behind it. Her heart leapt with anticipation. It was carrying a small tray in its sucker arm. Extending the sucker downwards, it dropped the tray onto the floor. A bowl of something disgusting-looking jumped violently on impact, spilling some of its grey, foul-smelling contents.
    In that moment, she caught sight of her distorted reflection in the burnished bronze of the Dalek’s armour. The image was dull and warped, but she could see … she was still a little girl. She still had a lifetime of captivity ahead of her.
    She started to sob, uncontrollably. Perhaps, she hoped, she would cry her life out and fade away from this horrible ordeal right now. She could almost feel the relief of it all being over.
    ‘Eat!’ shrieked the piercing electronic voice of the Dalek. ‘Eat!’
    It was like a hard slap to her face. The tears dried up and she looked into the bowl. How could she eat
that
? And then she remembered …
    Her favourite thing in the whole wide world …
    Jelly blobs. Sweet, sweet jelly blobs. So bad for her teeth. But so utterly delicious. If she pretended this food was jelly blobs, she could eat it and the Dalek would stop shrieking.
    She reached into the bowl and fished out the imaginary jelly blobs, believing with every bitter,gritty, slimy mouthful that their sweetness was filling her mouth. And, for a moment, she could see how she might live through all this. If she could always find this one place in her mind, this one memory of her favourite thing, then she could see how she could carry on living.
    ‘Eat! Faster!’ shrieked the Dalek.

Chapter Two
Distress Call
    Having only recently set the TARDIS to dematerialise from the surface of Gethria, the Doctor was still pondering the mystery of his visit to the lonely funeral on that barren world. He was swinging in a hammock beneath the glass platform upon which the console sat. More and more these days, he found himself gently swinging here, mulling over things as the TARDIS drifted through the Vortex. Was he just becoming a brooding old Doctor in his old age? Or was he finally getting a real sense of perspective?
    Launching himself out of the hammock and landing on the pockmarked coral of the control room’s lower floor, he tapped his impressive chin … pondering unabated.
    So, he was thinking, the cube was definitely from the future, unless he’d somehow mysteriously forgotten something … which was always possible. But how could that’ve happened?
    ‘Hmmm,’ he found himself saying aloud.
    He pondered further … Why was the cube so small? Made in a hurry? Possibly, yes. But still … Aha! Yes, the contents. The contents! Nothing too complicated. It was merely filled with an impression of something. And which species was mostly capable of mere telepathic impressions rather than complex telepathic messages? Humans! Of course!
    He reached his conclusion … At some point in the future, he was going to make this simplified telepathic cube for a human to use.
    Of course! Clever Doctor.
    But then, he realised, he still had no idea why he was going to do this.
    ‘That’s the future for you,’ he