• Released: August 2008
  ISBN: 1 40590 427 5

The Doctor offers to take Donna to the best shopping experience she can ever have, on Liater, the shopping planet. He gives her a credit card worth ‘a couple of thousand credits’ and she goes out on a spending spree. The robot guards of one shop won’t let her walk around in public because it could start a riot. She does not understand what this means. The Doctor is similarly puzzled when he sees a billboard announcing Donna’s presence, but her name is given as Krystal Diva, star of 4-D movies and the recording studio, supermodel and author. Investigations tell the Doctor some facts about Krystal: she was found ten years earlier with amnesia and no record of any parents. The Doctor wonders if it was Donna, fallen through a time anomaly. He follows a report that she was seen being taken into a run-down store, Leendlemaan’s I.T. Solutions. Leendlemaan denies seeing either Krystal or Donna, and when the Doctor notices a TV screen showing ‘Krystal’ opening a nearby store he rushes off. The store is Ryson’s Robots, but no sooner has she been introduced than Donna is attacked by one of the robots. The Doctor arrives as Donna is rushed away to safety, saying that a signal is disrupting the robots’ positronic circuits. He overrides their systems with his screwdriver and then looks into the robot brains where he finds that the microchips were designed by Mr. Leendlemaan. At that moment Ryson receives a blackmail note that is traceable to Leendlemaan. The Doctor and Donna accompany the police to Leendlemaan’s store where they find Krystal Diva tied to a chair. Examining her, the Doctor discovers that Krystal is an android, and androids are banned in the Nine Systems. Leendlemaan made her but he had to kidnap her because she too would have been susceptible to his positronic interference. Krystal is amazed to find that Leendlemaan is her ‘father’ and offers to use her money to rescue his ailing store (which was the point of the blackmail). The Doctor predicts that when a star like Krystal is found to be an android the laws banning her kind will be overturned. He returns to the TARDIS weighed down by Donna’s shopping.

The Doctor and Donna are reading some books in the TARDIS while they wait for the console to recalibrate. Donna is amazed that the Doctor seems to be able to read whole books just by flicking through them. She asks him what he has just read and he tells her it was a collection of short stories. He recommends she read one of the stories, called Variations, which is about unicorns. When Donna does read it she says that it wasn’t about unicorns at all, it is about a lottery winner. Both versions of this story start with a writer at his computer but diverge from that point. The Doctor re-reads it and finds that now it is about a boy and a model train set. The next time he reads it, the story is about the Serengo Ruination, which he finds odd because the story was published a century before Serengo was ruined. The Doctor sets the controls to find the author, David Banderson, to find some answers to this puzzle. The TARDIS lands outside the author’s house but there is no answer when they knock on the door so they use the screwdriver to gain entry. Banderson is at his computer, transfixed by the words on the screen, which are the opening paragraphs of Variations. The author is muttering about various alternative plotlines and as Donna stands beside him she too starts to come up with more and more ways that the story could develop. The Doctor quickly pulls her away. He tells her there is a creature lurking in the words on the screen which needs words to nourish it. It is using Banderson’s imagination for food until the author dies of starvation or exhaustion. The Doctor quickly types in a story of his own, to bring the creature to the surface, prints it out and then deletes the Variations file. He says that the parasite is now trapped in the printed words on the page. It is still powerful enough to stimulate the minds of the readers so that no matter what story they read they will imagine another version as they are reading it. Now recovered, Banderson makes them a cup of coffee while they ask the Doctor how his story ended. He tells them it was, ‘They all lived happily ever after’. Gazing away wistfully he adds that such endings used to be possible, once upon a time.

Following a distress signal, the TARDIS lands on a world where the time stream is worryingly wrong. Donna seems to be fast-forwarding through time, ageing years in seconds. The Doctor helps her to get to a castle. Inside, he recognizes the machinery is a Time Force Barrier, built to protect against the time winds blowing outside. He realises that they are on the planet Methuselah, part of a solar system that was put into Temporal Quarantine aeons earlier. The time blocks have started to crack, signaling that something has gone wrong. He finds that two of the three robotic sentinels have been deactivated and the third has been damaged by the time winds, sending it crazy. Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow on the time field restores Donna to her proper age just as the third sentinel attacks them. They escape but the sentinel rips the time warp barrier open. The Doctor uses a control linkage to extend the barrier round him and Donna as the pair of them race outside. The sentinel follows them and shrivels up, wasted by the time winds. The Doctor repairs the other two sentinels and then fixes the force barrier to cut the planet off from Space and Time forever, protecting the galaxy once more.

The Doctor takes Donna to Cantabulous Nine for The Concert of Most Beautiful Music, staged in the Church of the High Exalted. In a packed arena they witness an old man, the Child of Music, perform a beautiful solo on a piped instrument. Donna is overcome with the beauty of the performance. The Doctor says that they will watch the rest of the concert after the interval and if they like it they can return in ten years for the next performance. While Donna goes to get some ice creams the Doctor looks at some photographs of previous concerts. He is surprised to see that the Child of Music has been performing every ten years since he was six years old, some 320 years earlier. The second half of the concert is so full of melancholy that Donna is soon in tears. As soon as it ends the Doctor takes her to meet the star of the show. They push past a hooded monk guarding the backstage area and run up to the old musician. The Doctor says that the music was so good he wonders if they can do anything in return. The old man is surprised by this offer and replies that he wants to die... Then other monks throw the Doctor and Donna out into the cold night outside. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to break back in again, saying he needs to help ‘the poor creature’, but he does not mean the old man. He tells her there is a creature in the musical instrument. They break into the old man’s room and see that he is hugging the piped instrument in his sleep. The Doctor tells Donna that the old man is the creature’s only friend and so it has been using its energy to keep him alive because it cannot bear the thought of him dying. The old man wakes and asks for the Doctor’s help. Using the screwdriver the Doctor smashes the instrument open. A light dances to the window, accompanied by the most wonderful song, and the old man thanks them as he dies peacefully. Hooded monks burst in as the light passes through the window. They ask the Doctor what the song was and he tells them that it was the sound of freedom.

In the Cosmos Ballroom the Universal Dance/Off winners are being announced to the television audience. In the studio audience Donna is appalled that the favourites, Boris and Elsa, have been eliminated. Just then, a mirror ball drops on the winners, Durrrin and Laliaargh, causing them to vanish. The Doctor uses his screwdriver to trace them as they are beamed through hyperspace. He gives chase in the TARDIS, back to Birmingham in 2009. Emerging from the TARDIS, the Doctor and Donna find themselves on a nightclub dance floor. The music is distinctly alien, a Mexxonian quickstep, and the dance floor itself is alive. The dancers in the club are all zombies. When Durrrin and Laliaargh finally arrive the Doctor realises that a Terpsivore spaceship crashed on that spot centuries earlier, killing all the crew. The ship has been utilizing the power of dance to repair itself but it needed the greatest dancers in the universe to complete the process, and so it sent a mirror ball through space to get them. Unfortunately, the ship has gone into a self-destruct sequence and the only way to stop it is to find a Terpsivore to perform the complicated steps that will cancel the self-destruct. When the Doctor tells Donna that Terpsivores are centipedes, sixty feet in length, she forms a conga line. Amazingly, this stops the self-destruct, and the ship launches, taking the zombies on an eternal dance through the universe. Returning to the Cosmos Ballroom the Doctor sees that the losing Orthotrons have found out that the contest was fixed so that Shivashians would win, triggering Space War III, which was why he was there in the first place…to sort it all out.