Fic: Planned Obsolescence (Doctor Who)
Title: Planned Obsolescence
Author: miggy
Rating: PG-13, I suppose, for bits of naughty language.
Summary: Jack takes any means necessary to save himself. Slap him on the ass and call him a Slytherin.
Spoilers: All of 'em.
Word Count: 4441
Notes: This is an un-beta'd piece that popped into my head yesterday. No, I'm not planning to make a habit out of Who fic; this will probably be my only one. But! I adore Captain Jack, and this story was just there, so.






They left. Without any preamble but the low thrum of the TARDIS, they left. Jack felt his knees threaten to give way and leaned against the nearest wall. His thoughts swam around an aching head, fast and hot and dizzying. With one hand on the cool metal and one trying to rub away a piercing pain between his eyes, he stood there and waited for their return. Surely they would correct their mistake. It was inevitable. He'd come back for them in the middle of London horrors.

Silence filled every last crevice of the station. He could hear himself breathing the now-limited supply of oxygen; 500 floors' worth, but it would run out eventually. The engines had shut down, the broadcast mechanisms, the environmental controls. The flashing emergency lights had to be running on reserve power, he analyzed with distant curiosity, and the shields. He wondered which would go first, the air or the power. Both were worst-case scenarios. When the latter failed and took the shields with it, he wouldn't have much time before the exposure to solar radiation became fatal.

Fatal.

Of course they'd left, he realized with a sudden chill.

He remembered dying.


"You really are the Doctor, aren't you?" she asked with wonder in her voice.

He smiled at her with mingled affection and disbelief. "I show you one of the most beautiful planets in the universe, one that existed only by a temporal mistake and for only six hours, and it takes me nearly drowning in slime before that sinks in?"

"You could have left them," Rose said. "Because they would vanish anyway after those six hours. But you didn't. You gave them their time." She smiled at him, and her eyes began to glisten.

His grin turned a little cock-eyed, a little sheepish. It was new and very different, and she would most certainly have to get used to it. "Well, then," he began, "where to next?"


He found himself working on the systems with dumb detachment. Redundancies here and shorts there made him wonder just how much the Controller had been plugged into beyond television broadcasts. Trying to locate the emergency shuttles had turned up a half-dozen systems on top of his leads, and they all had to be repaired before he could work past them and gain control of his single ticket out of here. He flicked his wrist one way; half the lights died. He flicked it the other and heard gasps echo from halfway down the control room.

"Is someone there?" asked a tremulous voice. "Hello?"

"Identify yourself," Jack snapped as he rushed to the staticky monitor. He blinked. Filling the screen, some far in the background and some pressed up close, were those who had chosen to cower in the far depths of the satellite. They'd died. He was sure of it. But that was his hand reaching up to try and steady the feed, and it had seen all its blood go still. He swallowed hard and continued, "This is Captain Jack Harkness. I am going to begin sweeping the floors to find any other survivors. Stay where you are. I, and any other living humans on this satellite, will join you soon."

"Captain Jack Harkness," said one man while nodding so fervently it looked like his fool head was ready to pop off. Jack recognized him as the man who'd been so insistent upon getting his money, and had the suspicion that suddenly seemed a great deal less important to him. "Right. Ah, that is... right, sir." Behind him, the rest of the people nodded along.


Time Agent Employment Agreement
Employee Handbook
Regulation 467-A35

Should an agent find himself/herself/itself stranded, he/she/it should immediately place an approved distress beacon model at a location that will hold a prominent place in the upcoming timeline of the area. (Approved models are listed in Appendix 348. If you made your purchase based on a previous version of this guide, compare your beacon to the list of currently approved models. Agents are responsible for their own safety in the field.)


"You saved us, didn't you?" asked Lynda-with-a-Y as they pattered down the hall. "Those other two, they left us, but you saved us from those things."

"He was fighting with us at the wall," said the satellite employee whose name Jack couldn't recall. "I... I remember watching you go down," he said to the pretty woman at his side, "and then everything hurt, but then there you were. I suppose we didn't take that bad a hit after all," he theorized with some question in his voice.

Jack stopped in the middle of the hall; they nearly ran into him before they managed to do the same. "Do you remember dying?" he asked them all seriously.

There was a long, awkward silence before the female employee whispered, "Yes." At her words, the other two nodded.

"Just checking," Jack said. His mind raced as he tried to pin down something, anything, that could explain all this. God knows he'd be the only one on the satellite who'd have a hope of doing so.

"What's your plan, then?" asked Lynda, her voice tight. The other two relaxed somewhat at the change in topic.

"We find survivors. We get down to level zero. We get off this hunk of metal."

"Are you coming with us?" asked the man.

"What's your name?" Jack demanded.

"Ste... Stephen."

"Well, Stephen, considering I don't have any ship besides what we can find on this satellite and nothing for carryon except a few guns... I think I'm coming with you."


Time Agent Employment Agreement
Employee Handbook
Regulation 467-A35-A

ADDENDUM, 05015049: Should an agent not possess an approved distress beacon and finds himself/herself/itself stranded, primary focus should fall on extraditing himself/herself/itself from that time and returning to his/her/its year of origin. Effects of this travel on the local timeline will be dealt with by the Custodial Division. Corrective action may be taken against the agent.


Roderick, he discovered, was the name of the man who was so very concerned about his money. Roderick was far more cooperative now.

"Roddy," Jack said as he threw one arm around the man's shoulders.

"Yeah?" he asked hesitantly.

"You're good with the trivia, right? Lots of useless knowledge rattling around in your brain?" He didn't wait for a response. "What's the status on time travel devices?" He got a blank look in return and coughed sharply to steady his voice. "How hard would it be for me to get my hands on something that can travel through time?"

"Time travel... no one's studied that for a hundred centuries." Roderick's voice fell into a pedantic rhythm that sounded like the voiceover to some particularly dull documentary. "Time travel was discovered to be a dead-end technology. Scientists determined it was more efficient to work on improving the status of modern inventions rather than trying to affect the past or future." He brightened before he said, "I saw a really great show on all this a couple of years ago. The contestants would have to watch a clip on some bit of ancient science or history, and then they'd be quizzed on what they saw..."

"And being unobservant meant you wouldn't be going home," Jack said in frustration. "So, a hundred centuries, huh?"

Roderick nodded.

"It hasn't been a hundred centuries. I know the history of time travel, and it'd be six centuries at the max. But that's not what the TV told you." Jack laughed bitterly. "Great. So I'm guessing it wouldn't be a matter of calling some scientists down below and asking them to fire up the old research." A thought struck him and he paused. "What about technology dealing with... uh, brains? Memory?"

Roderick nibbled at his lower lip as his eyes rolled up to the ceiling. "That... well... oh!" He looked back down and seemed quite proud of himself. "Back when this satellite ran news, they used to have this things where you could have information beamed right into your brain. You wouldn't remember any of it, but I heard you could turn it back around and take information right out of a person's head."

"But..."

"But they haven't used that for a hundred years," Roderick said with a snort. "Destroyed all the technology for it, too, after it lead to all the news stations collapsing. It was much more efficient to just have the one Controller."

"Who could be locked in place and only see a few tiny flashes of free will," Jack muttered.

Around them, the station remained silent.


Time Agent Employment Agreement
Employee Handbook
Regulation 467-A35-B

ADDENDUM, 06075063: If an agent does not possess an approved distress signal and cannot find other means of returning to his/her/its year of origin, he/she/it must be prepared to remain within the current timeline. Do not alter the timeline unnecessarily.


"Daleks," Stephen insisted.

"Don't be absurd," snapped one of the many former residents of the Houses. Jack had gone to them one by one and blasted the doors open. Only when he also destroyed the mechanics of the exit hallway had they dared to leave. "They're not real."

"Not anymore," Lynda said to the woman.

"You're talking madness," said someone from deep in the crowd.

"Wait, if they're making all this up... does that mean we should still be in the Houses?"

Panic began to build by the time Jack tapped a final button on one of the keypads and saw the larger monitors flash to life, matching the personal screens. "It happened," he said loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. They looked at him dubiously, and so he tapped "play."

The internal video feed of Satellite 5 began to play for its audience. They watched the ships pop up in the expanse of space, watched the Daleks invade the station, watched people — themselves — die. The video feed cut off while the dead were still cold and motionless. They still stood there, staring at the empty screen with glazed expressions.

"Oh," someone at the back of the group finally said. "It was real."


"You're just leaving?"

"I'm just leaving," Jack said as he slung a duffel bag over one shoulder.

"But... but you can't!" protested one of his fellow agents. No. Protested an agent. There was no fellowship to be had, not any more.

"Just... watch yourself, Mitch," Jack said as he arrived at the door. "Check to see if things make sense. If you can remember what happened after each day."

"But... but..." Mitch looked at him helplessly. "Are you still planning to travel? Then how are you going to get the new updates of the handbook?"

"I'm throwing out the handbook. Look where it got me."

"It got you a medal, Jack. You were just where you should be, just what!"

He considered that for a moment, then shrugged. "Not any more."


The woman — from House 87, the Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada — let her gaze slide up his form and smiled lasciviously. "You're a hero," she said. "You'll be on every station." She paused, nibbled on her lips. "You know, we're all popular. I'm the most popular... they kept me in that house for a whole year and I was never evicted. No one could match up to me." Her hand crept up his chest, then went flat above his heart. Her fingertips were cold. "I bet my endorsement could be very, very useful."

Jack's jaw twitched. It took a few deep breaths before he could control himself. "I heard what's been going on with this planet. With my planet. One century of mind-numbing news, then another one of these stupid shows that are worse than those could ever hope to be... you should be getting rid of those damn televisions, not thinking on what will go on the air next."

Her eyes opened wide. "You can't mean that. What... what would we do?"

Develop. Thrive. Think. Jack opened his mouth to bark out these suggestions, or a hundred possible others, then stopped short. Horrible realization was dawning.

"What should we do?" she asked with sudden desperation.

Feeling sick down to the pit of his stomach, Jack plastered on his best smile and purred, "Maybe you're right." He tilted his head just so and watched her panic thaw. "Maybe," he continued while reaching out to stroke her cheek, "I should be on every station."

She gave him a half-lidded, dazed smile.

Jack grinned even more brilliantly and tried to ignore the familiar voice at the back of his head that screamed "coward."


It was a con. He was a con man. The ambulance was empty. He didn't mean for all this to happen.

But the Doctor saved them, somehow.

He was a coward, but he met the two of them and just... stopped. He did the right thing in the end. It wasn't the end, though, and now they'd gone and left him. Left just him to look into what kind of person he was when there was no one else to turn to.

He hoped the Doctor could save them again, somehow, from him.


The people of Earth were no longer cowering under the twisted effects of the news, or under the threat of being plucked from their homes and never returning all for the sake of entertainment. They were heroes of time and space, each one with stories more grand than what their neighbors could claim. They sat slack-jawed in front of television screens and traveled the universe. They saw the footage of the Daleks and screamed, then heard tales from their game show obsessions and worshipped along with them.

The human race had their false idol, Jack thought with a scowl as he stared at the city below. He'd been able to choose where to settle, where to base his operations, who would earn the right to undergo a surgeon's laser and come out with one of the seventy authorized copies of his face. They couldn't stop the growing fires or feed their people or make the world a place worth living in, but the human race had absolutely mastered plastic surgery.

A city was growing into the great metropolis of Earth based on the sales of one man's televised serials, action figures, and erotic aids.

As he continued to stare out the window at a numbed populace, Jack had the sudden urge to apologize to Rome.


"So that was the timeline we're seeing right now."

"No, you're thinking of the second to last loop. You forgot that after he jumped back the ninth time, they all started wearing pink shoes."

Rose rubbed her temples. "If we ever encounter another criminal who keeps trying to overwrite every attempt to stop him? Remind me to take some headache medicine first." She looked at the Doctor oddly. "Why did they start wearing pink shoes, anyway?

"Fashion," the Doctor said with mock gravitas, "is a fundamentally mercurial and unknowable thing."

Rose rolled her eyes. "Oh, you're a great help." She paused. "So, what was the first run-through like? Since we only ever heard about this fellow after he'd changed things."

"That snippet of reality got overwritten, Rose. It's gone."

"'Gone' meaning..."

"Meaning we'd have to go back to before he made the first jump, and if we didn't grab him in time, we'd have to worry about running into eight different versions of ourselves, each with about an hour's more knowledge than the last." He shrugged. "But I'll guess it was pretty close to what we wound up with, except without the pink shoes."

"Headache medicine. I'm serious."


Lynda was, as these people went, quite tolerable.

"You'll be needing a touchup soon," she said when she walked into Jack's room. He'd had plenty of women and men, and she'd been married twice. Still, they just... hovered around each other, sometimes moving apart but always coming back. It didn't feel quite right unless she was there, telling him the truth when his handlers always tried to protect him from it.

"I just had my skin redone," Jack said, poking at it in the mirror.

"Not your skin, your hair. It's gone a bit light there, do you see?"

"Oh," Jack said as he inspected the gullwing of grey appearing over either ear. "I know. I told them to let it come in."

"But why?"

He swallowed hard. The lies came easily, now, even to her. He couldn't say that every last bit of him was starting to ache. "I thought it might be time for an image change. I thought I might try to move people into... you know, a little more intellectual programming. Move away from all the fireworks of the early stuff. Get them thinking."

"Jack," Lynda said very seriously, "you know that won't fly. People don't want to think when they watch television. You'll lose your audience."

He placed one hand against the window and looked out it far, far below. "I know," he said dully. He eventually looked up and asked, "Say I'm trying to show empathy for my older viewers. Will that work?"

Lynda broke into a huge smile. She wasn't able to pay for the same level of care he could, and there were tiny little lines that appeared everywhere when her face lit up so brightly. "Now that sounds brilliant. But you'll still have all your guns? They're what make you an icon, you know. All the market reports say so."

"I'll still have all my guns," Jack confirmed.

She nodded and moved to strip off her shirt, but paused mid-button. Her head cocked to one side. "It's funny. It feels like there's a whole world that hasn't known life without Captain Jack, but I always still thought you were as young as ever. I guess neither of us are, are we?"

"No," he said, trying to match her smile. "But there's still a long ways to go."


The Global Emergency Broadcast System apologizes for interrupting this repeat of 'Captain Jack and the Amazons of Venus.' Your program will return shortly. Please be advised that the water across Southeastern Asia will be unsafe to drink for the next five days. That is: the triangle ranging approximately from Hong Kong to Port Moresby to Colombo is currently experiencing a period of unsafe drinking water.

Enjoy your show.


"I'm sorry," Jack said.

"What was that?" Lynda asked. Her hearing had started to go at about the same time Jack had run up against the limits of surgical youth. The decline went quickly.

"I know what the plan was," he said to himself. Rheumy eyes filled with tears. "I knew I would have to wait through all of this. I just... it never processed that you all would have to, too. I never let it process. Not entirely."

She looked at him curiously. Her hair had thinned. She said that was the worst part of growing old, and thought it terribly unfair that he had kept most of his.

"It was better before," he choked to himself. His voice wheezed. "When Satellite 5 was a tool of the Daleks, not Jack Harkness. They stopped some development, destroyed some, but it still happened. People could still be on the news themselves, or in those idiot games. They left their houses."

"Jack," Lynda said with obvious confusion, "they'll be airing your shows for centuries to come. You're an idol, you're immortal. You're popular. You've given this whole world hope."

And she's the best of the lot, Jack thought. It was difficult not to weep openly. "Lynda? What did you want to be when you were little?"

She shook her head. "I don't remember. On television, I suppose."

"No. What did you want to do?"

"I don't know..."

"If the stations had all gone dark after the Daleks left, and the world was left with nothing to do but come blinking out of their living rooms and face the open air... what would you have done?"

"I don't know, Jack!" she said, sounding suddenly upset. "It doesn't matter now! You're talking nonsense!" She took his withered hand in hers and squeezed it gently. "Please stop."

He turned and regarded her. It was difficult to make out the particulars of her face through clouded vision. The wrinkles of her own extreme age had vanished with his. "I'm so sorry," he said quietly.

"For what?" she asked.

"Everything."


"The Fourth Great and... no." The Doctor stared helplessly at the sight below them. "No, we fixed this."

"It looks worse than before," Rose whispered. The great fires had spread. Continents were blazing with light or had gone dark entirely in huge, random patches.

"London," the Doctor said dully, "London should be a great and shining beacon across the universe right now. London, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Cairo, St. Louis. The five great cities, each one a vital spoke in an enormous wheel."

Rose peered at the smoke and made a soft noise. "But there's bright light right... there... no, wait, that's on the wrong side." The Doctor looked at her, so she explained, "That really bright light, the biggest one on the planet. At first I thought it was London, but then I squinted a little more and saw it was too far over."

"Ah," the Doctor said as they stared at the bright light. In sudden unison, they said, "That's Cardiff."

They shared a confused glance. "What kind of shows are on the telly now, then?" Rose asked. "Bad soaps?"

The Doctor was already tapping at a monitor. His face was suddenly illuminated with a video feed; his mouth dropped open as soon as the images began to play. "That's..." He shook his head and began tapping again as Rose inched over and looked over his shoulder.

"Oh," she breathed. Her heart began to ache. "Oh, look at him." He'd been perfect.

"Rose," the Doctor said as the channels flashed before their eyes, "there's nothing of us. This wasn't just... taken from the satellite video and turned into a computer model, or whatever it is they do down there now." He stopped on one of the channels and said to her, more urgently, "This is a rerun from decades back. Look."

She did. Realization struck and she gasped. The close-up, the dramatically-lit close-up, had silver along the temples. "Looks like someone took a page out of my book," she said in a daze as she stared at the rise of Cardiff — Cardiff! — and ten thousand channels of Jack Harkness.

The Doctor was already lunging for the TARDIS controls. "Oh my god," Rose laughed as the room started to hum and her brain caught up with events. "He's not... he didn't..." She snaked her arms around the Doctor's back and began bouncing up and down with delight, forcing him along with her. Suddenly, she pulled away and put one hand up to her mouth. "Oh. He's down there right now, then?" In what form, she didn't want to ponder.

"Doesn't matter," the Doctor assured her as the year 200,200 began to slip away like sand. "Doesn't matter at all. He won't remember a moment of it. Nor will they." His voice was oddly tight. "No one will know what he did to get our attention, because it will never happen."

Rose gripped onto the edge of the control panel and tried to control her excitement. The Doctor said nothing more.


Grave markers were an unimaginable luxury for most of humanity. Markers meant graves, and graves meant land had been given over to the silent dead instead of the teeming, frantic masses. But there was a quiet garden on Earth — no one had gardens any more, but yet there was one — with a small grave marker under a spreading oak. Rain and wind hadn't touched the surface, but soft velvet moss had crept well up one side. In another forty years, the name beneath might be obscured entirely.

The soft grass ended abruptly, replaced by a metal and glass framework that extended over the small slice of what Earth used to be. Beyond that was the sheer drop of the tallest building on the planet.

Cardiff claimed the greatest skyscraper known to the human race, and it was crowned with the tiny spot of nature that counted as Earth's greatest garden. It had been decided amongst everyone that the grave couldn't go anywhere but there, high up in the sky. It wouldn't do to have the great Captain Jack covered by the same yellow mire that held them captive in their homes and made babies choke on the air.


He found himself working on the systems with dumb detachment. Redundancies here and shorts there made him wonder just how much the Controller had been plugged into beyond television broadcasts. Trying to locate the emergency shuttles had turned up a half-dozen systems on top of his leads, and they all had to be repaired before he could work past them and gain control of his single ticket out of here.

A familiar low thrum echoed through Floor 500, and Jack bumped his head hard in his rush to get out from under the controls. The TARDIS materialized in the same spot where it had vanished fifteen minutes earlier. Jack folded his arms, put on his most offended expression, and leaned rakishly against one wall. "You took your sweet time," he said when Rose hopped out of the doors.

She ran across the room and caught him in a tight embrace. The horrors of the past few hours seemed to vanish entirely, and he hugged her back.

"Sorry," Rose said before she got up on her toes and planted a friendly but quite firm kiss. "Long story."

He grinned. "Was that payback for earlier?"

She shoved him away, laughing. "Don't you go getting any ideas. That was a one-shot deal on both ends, I'll have you know."

He reached out and took her hand; she gladly interlaced her fingers with his. "So, do I get the same welcome from the Doctor?" She got an odd expression on her face, but Jack was already looking around and wondering, "Where is he, anyway?"

Rose scrunched up her nose — adorable — and said, "That's... another long story. He'll be waiting inside for us, then. Come on. We're going to go see how the planet looks when it's finally set right."

Jack let himself be lead. "Another long story, huh? Sounds like you're full of them."