Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses by Nick Harkaway

at herself hastily. Yes, her clothes were torn, but no, they were not indecent. Good. He tried to walk her away, then, but she looked back into the car.
    And stopped.
    ‘Oh,’ she said, eventually. She thought about it. And then she slapped him.
    ‘What?’ he said, and when she hit him again he ducked away. ‘What? What? How is this my fault? You’re alive, that’s got to be a good thing!’
    She slapped him again.
    ‘What?’
    But he must know what. The world was upside down. She wasn’t Christina de Souza. A huge piece of the wrecked engine had passed entirely through the driver’s seat, along with the axel. There was nowhere she could have been sitting, no position she could have been in, which would have preserved her. She should be dead. She looked down at her stomach. Her clothes were whole again.
    ‘I blame you entirely,’ she said crossly. ‘Everything was ordinary until you came. And now this!’
    She wasn’t Christina de Souza. She wasn’t even human. And that meant, probably, that everything she had ever known was a lie, and that everyone she knew was also an alien who didn’t know they were an alien, and she would either have to tell them, which would be extremely awkward and probably mean they thought she was mad, or not tell them and keep secret from them something they had every right to know.
    She tried to hit him again, but this time he ducked.
    A short while later, they were standing in a room which was either a hotel room or a distant part of the TARDIS and he seemed unable to say for certain which. Surely he should know? But apparently the TARDIS was big and he didn’t always keep track, and obviously the whole of Jonestown was inside the TARDIS anyway. When she asked, he said something about how the temporal crystal was expanding and the phase differential between coterminous realities was diminishing in line with the stasis paradigm, and then refused to explain. She still thought he should be able to tell where they were, and she thought he thought so too. She worried that while they were away – if they were – Jonestown would change again, and the monster would change too.
    She was worried that the Doctor was losing control of his machine.
    More immediately, he was wiggling the sonic thing at her. Again. Again and again and for the thousandth time. And now he was peering at it and peering at her and making thoughtful noises and she was really wishing she had some sort of appalling destructive power, so that she could zap him into behaving like a human being.
    ‘I thought you might be a multiform,’ he said, ‘one of the nice ones. A Prestolian Shift-sailor, or an Adumbrated Boon. But you aren’t.’
    She scowled. ‘As soon as I figure out how to turn them on, I am going to zap you with my laser eye beams.’
    ‘Hm. Maybe don’t say things like that, just in case your weapons systems are voice activated.’
    She hadn’t considered that. ‘I won’t, really,’ she said hastily. No gun-sight appeared in her vision, so if she was a walking munition she was either broken or that wasn’t how she worked. She told him so.
    ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Laser eye beams? Did they talk a lot about laser eye beams in your day?’
    ‘In comic books.’ Not really her scene.
    ‘And you knew what a mobile phone was. Come to think of it, when did you learn to do a handbrake turn?’
    ‘I can’t drive,’ she said automatically.
    ‘But you can. And you know everything about Jonestown, even though you haven’t been here for decades. You’re a psychic not-really-a-human-person person. A Pnarap.’ He raised his eyebrows for her approval. She shook her head. ‘Well, suit yourself. Anyway… Where are the police? Eh? Shouldn’t we be surrounded by Jonestown’s finest demanding to know what’s going on? But we’re not, are we? Because you know what’s going on, and they know because you know. They may not know that they know because you know, but they do. It’s not like they’re