The halls of Gallifrey hummed with tension long before the Matrix ever screamed its warning.
It began quietly enough. Lady Chronotis drifted into the chamber with a warm wave toward Lady Thursday, while Lord Darkfyre arrived dressed in sharp black attire, already prepared, as he claimed, for “all eventualities and mortality rendering requests.” Lord President Chronotis greeted him with weary humor, remarking that perhaps what they truly needed was someone skilled at pressing “Control Alt Delete” on the Matrix itself.
Soon the room filled with familiar faces. Lord Conundrum admired Lord Darkfyre’s dark clothing while Lady Thursday swept into the chamber in dramatic fashion, wings folding behind her with obvious irritation. Whatever transformation she had undergone, she clearly had no intention of explaining it. Lady Chronotis and Rain lingered nearby, listening closely as the discussion turned toward the damaged Matrix and the corrupted files spreading chaos across Gallifrey.
Even before the work truly began, the mood was strange.
Lord Winters arrived singing theatrical melodies through the lift shaft like some wandering phantom from an old opera house. Lord Serpentine, equal parts curious and reckless, immediately suggested entering the unstable Matrix directly. That idea was dismissed with horror by Lady Thursday, who reminded everyone that the Matrix was not merely damaged. It was unstable.
Theories poured across the chamber like sparks.
Could dormant TARDISes contain preserved Matrix backups? Could old repair bay systems still hold archived data? Was Mortimus’ TARDIS hidden somewhere nearby? Lord President Chronotis, Lord Conundrum, Lady Thursday, Lord Darkfyre, and the others circled possibility after possibility, each one sounding more dangerous than the last.
Lord Winters proposed wild temporal solutions involving memory storage, suspended animation, and compressed Matrix data hidden within someone’s mind. He volunteered himself almost casually, revealing pieces of his old CIA past and the many times his memory had already been tampered with. Lady Thursday, meanwhile, began piecing together something far more unsettling.
The Matrix was not merely malfunctioning.
It was distracted.
As terminal screens flickered and commands were entered, the chamber suddenly froze beneath glowing words that appeared across the systems:
THIS TIMELINE IS COLLAPSING.
The room fell silent.
Even Lord Darkfyre, usually composed beneath his dry humor, muttered a grim curse beneath his breath. Lady Thursday’s sharp mind immediately raced toward the implications. If the Matrix was correctly observing a collapsing timeline rather than malfunctioning, then Gallifrey itself could be spiraling toward paradox.
More phrases followed.
“The Monk was never the danger.”
“Who taught you to fear me?”
“The Fourth Revision failed.”
No one understood what they meant, though everyone immediately felt their weight.
Lady Chronotis quietly revealed something even more disturbing. During her visit to the prison cells, Mortimus had appeared mentally broken. He muttered nonsense to himself, spoke in riddles, and seemed detached from reality itself. Lord President Chronotis immediately suspected a connection between Mortimus’ deteriorating mind and the Matrix corruption.
As the theories spiraled deeper, Lady Thursday began forming one of her own. Perhaps Mortimus was not the source of the corruption at all. Perhaps he was connected to it.
That realization shifted everything.
Soon the decision was made to bring Mortimus near the Matrix chamber itself. Royal Guard Winchester escorted the prisoner under heavy guard while Lady Thursday volunteered to stand at the doorway and act as intermediary between Mortimus and the Matrix systems.
The moment Mortimus arrived, the atmosphere changed.
He looked pale, weak, and distant, his eyes glazed as though part of him was somewhere far away. Lady Thursday approached carefully, speaking to him almost gently at first, asking about his condition and probing his fractured thoughts.
Then came the first response.
“You should have let me finish.”
The room stiffened.
Lord Darkfyre immediately recognized the phrase from the Matrix warnings. Slowly, methodically, Lady Thursday began feeding Mortimus the same fragmented phrases appearing within the systems. Each time she did, Mortimus answered like a broken recording struggling to remember itself.
“The Fourth Revision failed.”
“Who taught you to fear me?”
“I was never the danger.”
Each sentence sent ripples across the Matrix screens.
Lord President Chronotis, Lord Darkfyre, Lord Conundrum, Lady Chronotis, Rain, Lord Winters, Lord Serpentine all watched the horrifying realization unfold in real time. Mortimus was somehow linked directly to the Matrix corruption.
Yet it was Lady Thursday who finally cracked the code.
In a sudden flash of intuition, she secretly instructed Lord President Chronotis to input one absurd phrase into the Matrix systems:
“Number 4 is yellow.”
Moments later, Mortimus repeated the phrase aloud.
And then the impossible happened. A yellow number four appeared across the Matrix displays. The room erupted with stunned confusion.
Lady Thursday calmly pressed onward, now certain she was communicating not only with Mortimus, but with whatever hidden system had been trapped inside him. When she requested an “authorial signature,” Mortimus responded with a strange numerical sequence:
5…7…2…16…1…1…0…2…7…3…4.
Lord Darkfyre immediately entered the code into the Matrix.
The screens went dark. For one terrifying heartbeat, nobody moved. Then the systems rebooted.
The corruption vanished.
Files previously hidden or redacted returned to normal. Communications systems came back online. The oppressive psychic pressure inside the chamber finally lifted. Even Mortimus himself collapsed weakly to the floor as though a terrible weight had finally been removed from his mind.
Relief swept through the room like a fresh breath after drowning.
Lady Chronotis praised Lady Thursday warmly for her brilliance. Lord President Chronotis confirmed the Matrix data had stabilized. Lord Conundrum happily announced that communications were operational again. Even Lord Winters regained enough clarity to explain that he believed he had been suffering from some kind of telepathic assault throughout the ordeal.
Mortimus, however, remembered almost nothing. The last thing he clearly recalled was being brought to his prison cell beneath painfully bright lights. That detail lingered heavily in the room.
As the adrenaline faded, the conversation turned darker once more. Lady Thursday quietly theorized that someone with security access may have implanted hypnotic programming into Mortimus using the lighting systems within his cell. Disturbingly, many clues pointed toward Lord Winters, though Lady Thursday herself admitted the evidence felt almost too obvious to be trustworthy.
Lord Darkfyre suggested that several others could also be involved, including members of the Chancellery Guard. Lady Chronotis promised to quietly gather more information from the guards through her usual offerings of tea, cakes, and careful conversation.
One by one, the exhausted group began to leave.
Rain departed first in search of tacos after surviving the chaos. Lord Darkfyre headed toward the bar in desperate need of “liquid food.” Lord Conundrum returned to his office to begin restoring damaged systems. Lord Winters promised updates to security protocols before vanishing into the corridors. Lord Serpentine slipped away after one final bout of confusion.
At the center of it all remained Lord President Chronotis, Lady Chronotis, and Lady Thursday, each carrying more questions than answers.
Throughout the ordeal, Lord Winters appeared increasingly unstable beneath the pressure radiating from the Matrix chamber. What began as his usual odd humor and scattered theatrical remarks slowly spiraled into confusion, nonsensical interruptions, and disjointed rambling that left several in the room visibly concerned. His repeated outbursts grew stranger as the Matrix warnings intensified, to the point that Lady Chronotis quietly instructed Alistair Winchester to summon a guard escort him to the infirmary, fearing the Matrix itself may have been affecting his mind. Though Lord Winters later insisted he had merely suffered a mild telepathic assault and claimed his strange behavior was an old defense mechanism from his years within the CIA, the unsettling nature of his condition lingered heavily in the minds of everyone present.
The Matrix had been restored. But the mystery had only deepened. Who truly taught Gallifrey to fear Mortimus? Who engineered the revisions?
And if Mortimus was never the danger… then who was?