Welcome to Operation Time Fracture (short story)

Welcome to Operation Time Fracture was the second of two original prose stories published in the Time Fracture Show Companion. Like the UNIT Field Logs, the two letters tied in with the storyline of the interactive play Time Fracture and, more widely, with the Time Lord Victorious multi-media event. It was principally an in-universe history of the titular Time Fracture, narrated by Kate Stewart.
== Summary ==
An anomaly appears in London in the 1940s: in an instant a few buildings in the radius of the anomaly disappear without a trace, "as if erased from existence," leaving a small fissure of light. "Clandestine government departments" keep the event and rift secret despite having no idea what they are dealing with, until in 1968, the newly-founded "Unified Intelligence Task Force" takes control of it and is able to determine that it is a "break in the very fabric of reality", a Time Fracture.
Over the next fifty years, a Black Site with highly select personnel monitors the Fracture and keeps it a secret. During those decades, only small increases in energy emission are noticed, but eventually true "spikes" begin to occur, coinciding with the apparance of "alien entities" across London. Some of UNIT's scientists speculate that a form of "interdimensional planetary conjunction" is the cause of this sudden increase in activity, events across realities connected to the Fracture lining up and causing the Fracture to go haywire. Sergeant Robert Dudley volunteers to enter the Fracture to discover its secrets, but fails to return.
In response to his disappearance, UNIT designs a Portal Stabilisation Gateway to allow humans to, in theory, safely enter the Time Fracture. UNIT composes a list of operatives to send through the finished Gateway, but it is vetoed by the Doctor who instead sends in their own list of trustworthy people, all of them civilians hitherto unknown to UNIT. Kate Stewart drafts a letter explaining the Fracture and its background to send to all the people whose names were on the Doctor's list, reluctantly welcoming them into Operation Time Fracture.
== Characters ==
* The Doctor
* Kate Stewart
* Robert Dudley
== Worldbuilding ==
* The public believes that the damage actually caused by the appearance of the Time Fracture was the result of a Luftwaffe bomb exploding.
== Notes ==
* The incarnation of the Doctor in this story is not identified in any way.
== Continuity ==
* It is possible, but hazardous, to enter the Time Fracture. (PROSE: What the TARDIS thought of "Time Lord Victorious", Hello And Congratulations!)
* Robert Dudley enters the Fracture and subsequently disappears. (WC: 14683 UNIT Field Log, 14684 UNIT Field Log)
* Operation Time Fracture would reappear in WC: Tia Kofi Enters the Time Fracture!, Dudley here., PROSE: Cybermen, etc.
Category:TLV short stories
Category:2021 short stories
Category:Short stories set on Earth