Chris Cwej
Christopher Rodonanté "Chris" Cwej was a 30th century Adjudicator who travelled for a time with the Seventh Doctor. After they parted ways, Chris was recruited by the Time Lords and given many enhancements, including the ability to regenerate. (PROSE: Dead Romance) During the War in Heaven, they used his biodata to create the Cwejen, a servant race of duplicates, while the original Chris was designated Cwej-One. (PROSE: The Book of the War) After the War, he underwent an experimental procedure to become a disembodied artificial intelligence, now called Cwej-V and capable of commandeering the bodies of other Cwejen. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack)
Biography
Early life
Chris was born on 5 September (PROSE: The Room With No Doors) 2954. (PROSE: Head Games) His surname was Polish and traditionally pronounced "Shvey", but he pronounced it "Kwedge" rather than keep correcting people. His parents, Volsted Kornbluth Cwej and Mrs Cwej, lived in the lower levels of Spaceport Five Overcity and had a long association with the Guild of Adjudicators.
As a small child Cwej had a yellow teddy bear named Mr. Buttons. (PROSE: The Ursine Brood) When he was five years old, he attended his Grandfather Cwej's funeral. At some point, he was given a pair of holo-noculars; while using them on his family's front balcony, he saw a human corpse floating in the canal below. (PROSE: The V Cwejes)
As a teenager Cwej had a reptilian pet. (PROSE: Original Sin)
Chris became interested in law enforcement, not because of any desire to take command, but because of an interest in customised vehicles, powerful weaponry and women. (PROSE: The Book of the War) He graduated in 2975 from adjudicator training alongside twenty-five other students on Ponten IV. His parents attended his graduation. (PROSE: Original Sin, Lungbarrow)
During a tour of duty, Chris visited the planet Jallafillia. Those who ran the planet, the Church of Saint Thoth, killed children just because they had red hair. Chris witnessed this, but was unable to arrest them because of a clause in the Colonies Cultural Identities Act. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet)
After graduating, Chris spent a year on traffic patrol in Spaceport Nine Overcity. He was then squired to Roz Forrester, whom he considered a legendary Adjudicator. They were working on their first case together, investigating a murder that had occurred in Spaceport Five Undertown, when they met the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield and helped them defeat Tobias Vaughn. (PROSE: Original Sin)
Travelling with the Doctor
With Benny
Missing info from Sky Pirates!, Zamper, Toy Soldiers, Head Games, The Also People, Shakedown, Just War, Warchild, Sleepy, Death and Diplomacy, Happy Endings
Chris and Roz travelled with the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield on many adventures. In this eventful period, Chris fathered two daughters: Jasmine Surprise Hutchings with Ishtar Hutchings (PROSE: Happy Endings) and iKrissi with Dep of the People. (PROSE: The Also People)
Chris spent some time pretending to be a monk. (PROSE: Warchild)
Chris was present at Benny and Jason Kane's wedding. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
Investigating psychic threats
Missing info from GodEngine, Christmas on a Rational Planet, Return of the Living Dad, The Death of Art, So Vile a Sin
After Chris accidentally deleted part of the Doctor's TARDIS, he unleashed the Carnival Queen and found himself trapped in a desert, perpetually manifesting gynoids. Faced with the choice between the Time Lords' order and structure and the Carnival Queen's chaos and uncertainty, Chris was influenced by a false memory of his childhood, implanted in him by the TARDIS, to choose order and preserve reality as he had always known it. The Carnival Queen, knowing what Cwej's future held, knew he had made the wrong decision. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet)
Chris spent a month living under the alias "Bruce Jovanka" on a cold human colony ruled by the Scientifica while the Doctor and Roz infiltrated the planet's criminal underground. At the Imperial Hotel, Chris encountered Nyssa and Tegan Jovanka. Working with Nyssa, Chris discovered a load of fusion bombs on the Skybase orbiting the planet; the two of them met up with the Fifth Doctor and travelled to the crash site of the Machine. After the Fifth and Seventh Doctors worked together to defeat the Ferutu, Chris left the planet with the Seventh Doctor and Roz. (PROSE: Cold Fusion, AUDIO: Cold Fusion)
When the TARDIS was arrested on Thrantas, Roz and Chris partnered with two local police officers to collect evidence in the case against the TARDIS. He was then arrested for interfering with evidence. (AUDIO: The Trial of a Time Machine)
Chris went with the Doctor to the Quadrant in London in 1987 for a narcotics investigation. When he looked at Gabriel Tyler, he saw a reflection of himself. The Doctor told him to get some cocaine for the investigation, and went on the local pub scene to find it with David Daniels. When the N-Form was activated, the Doctor told Chris to get close to it and stop it with one of his gadgets. (PROSE: Damaged Goods)
Recovering from loss
Missing info from Bad Therapy, Eternity Weeps, The Room With No Doors
After Roz's death in battle, Chris continued to travel with the Doctor for a short time. (PROSE: Bad Therapy)
The Doctor and Chris travelled to the Doctor's home planet, where the Doctor faced members of his House and many dark secrets were revealed. After this, Chris decided to leave the Doctor and travel alone using a Time Ring given to him by Romana II. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
Work for Gallifrey
First body
After leaving the Doctor, Chris became an agent for the Time Lords. (PROSE: Dead Romance) Shortly after regenerating, the Eighth Doctor told Bernice Summerfield that Chris was on Gallifrey, but might come to Smithwood Manor to see her. Cwej evidently visited the house at least once, as Alexander Christian found a T-shirt in his bedroom saying "My Friend Went to San Francisco and All He Got Me Was This Lousy T-Shirt". (PROSE: The Dying Days)
After Benny destroyed the Spire, she worried that without its effects of "locking the future into reality" the future she knew would never occur, meaning that she had "signed the death sentence for Chris and the others, for a future of skycities and Empire". However, this situation was managed by David Foreman and Clarence, and Benny was informed that the future history of Chris still existed. (PROSE: Ghost Devices)
Chris was found unconscious on one of humanitiy's outer colony planets in 2593 by a Knights of Jeneve post-battle clean-up expedition. He was frozen in cryogenic suspension and placed on a planet in the Ardethe system. His memories were affected by the cryogenic process, but he was able to recall most of them in time. He had a small symbol tattooed on his back. (PROSE: Deadfall)
Subsequently, Cwej travelled with Benny to defeat Deed and the Godhead (PROSE: Oblivion) and to take down the Project on Megerra in 2594. (PROSE: Mean Streets)
Cwej continued to be an operative of the Time Lords (PROSE: Dead Romance) as they entered their War in Heaven. They altered his biochemistry to give him various abilities, including telepathy, time travel, and the potential to regenerate from fatal injury into an adaptive cybernetic form - a regen-inf soldier. (PROSE: The Book of the War) They also altered Chris' memories of his time with the Seventh Doctor, making him remember the Doctor as the "Evil Renegade" who abducted him from Earth and killed Roz Forrester. Chris came to think of the Great Houses, rather than humanity, as "his people". (PROSE: Dead Romance)
Chris worked for the Time Lords in securing the bottle universe which contained a version of 1970 Earth. There, he became friends with Christine Summerfield and showed her the real universe outside the bottle. During this time, he also negotiated alliances with the Daleks on Skaro, the People in the Worldsphere and the Sphinxes on Simia KK98.
Cwej was exposed to fatal levels of radiation in the final stage of the Great Houses' invasion of the bottle universe. (PROSE: Dead Romance) His masters initially opted to let him to die, but after Irving Braxiatel requested that they send Chris to help with an investigation on Paracletes, a Great Houses monk helped Cwej regenerate. (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle)
Second body
Though Cwej had ingested mutagens that he expected would turn him into a heavily armoured war machine, House Military strategists arranged an intervention to disable them, causing him to regenerate instead into a short, fat, middle-aged man. Sources speculate that the intention was to make Cwej appear innocuous and human for strategic reasons, to test the depth of his loyalty, or to psychically prepare him to battle Faction Hollywood and the parasitic entity the Fat. Whatever the case, Cwej reacted badly to his new form. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Cwej's first mission in this body was to go to Paracletes in 2596 to recover data from Edward Watkinson's expedition to the planet. (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle) He continued performing "cultural sterilisations" of Remote colonies for the Homeworld, but in response to his new physical form, he became profoundly sulky, if not actually mutinous. Some members of House Mirraflex advocated his termination, but instead it was deemed acceptable for Cwej to enrol in the Gauntlet for training.
While in the Gauntlet in the 29th year of the War in Heaven, Cwej was unwittingly used by the Great Houses for their Army of One project (PROSE: The Book of the War) and the Cwejen were created by diffracting Chris' timeline. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel) They consisted of the Cwej-Primes, who resembled his original blond, handsome body; the Cwej-Pluses, who resembled the short, fat, dark-haired incarnation; and the Cwej-Magnuses, who resembled the armoured, cybernetic form he never regenerated into. Cwej was considered for leadership of the Cwejen army, but during his time in the Gauntlet, he exhibited significant socialisation problems, at one point having a duel with another cadet, Robert Scarratt, which left him with significant facial scars. As a result, he was considered unfit for command. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
In an attempt to improve the Cwejen's utility as agents, Cwej was sent to alter his own past by taking his younger self as a travelling companion, supplanting the Defector's influence with his own. Dressed in a blue kimono decorated with gold question marks, Cwej introduced himself as the Adjudicator, and took his younger self on many adventures in the spaceship Vicinity II. However, complications in the process caused a psychedelic experience which led Cwej to reconsider his actions, and he ultimately returned his past self to the Defector. (PROSE: The V Cwejes)
Cwej returned to 2596 to help his friends defeat an All-High God which merged with Absolam Sleed. (PROSE: Return to the Fractured Planet) He then travelled by himself in another star system before he was called back to Dellah to fight the Ferutu and travelled with Clarence on the way back. In the encounter with the Ferutu, Chris was reverted down his personal timeline to age thirteen, regaining his original body. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods) The Book of the War described this as "his own sense of self-worth overriding his sense of duty", as he had not yet finished the mission against the Fat for which his previous body had been designed. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Third body
Along with returning him to his original form, the encounter with the Ferutu also removed the blocks the Time Lords had placed on Chris' memory, and he said he didn't trust them anymore and wouldn't want to risk dealing with them further. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods) He remained in the service of the Great Houses, but he became a "loner by nature", nothing like the brash, over-eager agent he had been when he joined.
Cwej's only notable mission in the fourth and fifth decades of the War was his takedown of Faction Hollywood in 1999 Los Angeles. Using his experience with the Cwejen, he manipulated the House of the Seven Gables into betraying information about Michael Brookhaven by framing the oldest member for the Black Dahlia murders. Using the information he learnt from another member, he invaded the set of Brookhaven's film Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom during the Hollywood Bowl shooting, initiating a cinematic Samurai duel with Brookhaven. Despite Cwej's advantage, he was left completely at Brookhaven's mercy before they were interrupted by the Gods of the Ainu. After trying to save Brookhaven, Cwej fled. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Chris was present at the birth of Benny's son, Peter. He "looked rather older than the kid [she'd] last seen," but Benny knew to expect the unexpected with Chris. (PROSE: The Glass Prison)
As Cwej-V
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After the War, Chris was summoned to undergo the V-Time experiment, a procedure in which his body was unravelled and his consciousness transferred to a slab of the silicate lagh. This slab was divided and placed in microchips on the necks of several million Cwejen, any of whom Chris could now enter and control. Now designated Cwej-V, he continued to work for his Superiors, spending his downtime in a virtual reality called the Vicinity. (PROSE: The V Cwejes)
During an excursion to the parallel universe Dawn 1027, Chris encountered Larles and Kwol, a pair of alien criminals from the planet Grigori who had destroyed their version of Earth. Taking pity on them, Chris compelled them to rescue the survivors, then smuggled the two aliens and their spaceship, La Kraw el Sol, back to his own universe. (PROSE: A Bright White Crack)
During a holiday to Deptford County, Washington, Chris's interest was piqued by an upcoming expedition planned by the marine biologist Roger Daly to a supposed Fountain of Youth on the ocean floor. Chris posed as a sea captain to infiltrate the expedition. While piloting a submersible to inspect the trench, he witnessed hundreds of spectral human figures rising toward the surface; he later speculated that they were people lost at sea, moving towards reincarnation. (PROSE: Flickering Flame)
The Superiors sent Chris and Iris Wildthyme to investigate a rift in the spacetime fabric in Plymouth, in the year 2020. The corpses of several humans, apparently victims of spontaneous combustion, were discovered nearby. Chris and Iris eventually tracked down the killer: a spindly, faceless alien creature with a rod-like instrument that could incinerate organisms at a distance. After they sealed the rift, Iris speculated that the creature was a scientific explorer from another plane of existence. (PROSE: Flickering Flame)
Back in the Vicinity, Chris installed the dating app UniLove, and began an online relationship with Aiden Torres. He eventually learned that Torres was dead, and that he was interacting with an AI simulation created by the Cyberons. (PROSE: Flickering Flame)
Chris brought Larles and Kwol along on mission to investigate a temporal distortion on a train. With the help of tour guide Donacho Munchausen and his companion Kleio, they saved the passengers and broke them out of a time loop. (PROSE: Infinity)
Chris was sent to the planet of Hellman's World to eliminate the space bandit Judy Collins. He decided to spare her life. (PROSE: Judy Collins vs Christopher Cwej)
Agent Giashnel sent Chris to investigate a temporal disturbance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968. He met Kirstine, Yanna, and George Cwej, who ran KYG Solace, a company which allowed people to revisit traumatic events via time loops. Chris used a bomb to destroy their time machine. PROSE: In the Loop)
Chris, Larles and Kwol investigate a crashed spaceship, and find themselves trapped in its labyrinthine interior for months. They encounter Kady, a woman who cohabits her own body with the Gestalt, a spirit entity with a multitude of voices. They learn that the ship is controlled by the Gentleman, a powerful renegade Cwej. He tells Chris that the Superiors will betray him, and tells Kwol that Chris will cause Kwol's death. (PROSE: Ring Theory)
Chris was sent to Golgalith, a planet ravaged by the War, and where the Superiors fear a resurgence of their Eternal Adversary. They meet an old man, Harlan, and use an aetha-drive to visit his childhood so they can stabilise the timeline. (PROSE: Crushing Reality)
Chris met with Valerie Pascal, a professor acquaintance who had an unusual problem: she had lost her ability to speak the name of her town. He brings her to La Kraw el Sol and connects her to the Vicinity, which investigates her brain patterns and identifies her as a native of Auvergne. The place seems not to exist, though Averoigne and Aveyron do. The computer reveals that a fluctuation in the timeline is to blame, centring on the writer Clark Ashton Smith, who coined the name Averoigne in one of his stories and after whose work the real region was renamed. The group travelled in time to meet Smith, who was on an expedition to find the Zothiquas, creatures he has seen in visions. They encountered an undead parody of Smith's friend, H. P. Lovecraft, created by the Zothiquas, but they fled when Smith recognised them as alien parasites, and Valerie recovered her memories. (PROSE: When I Remember __________)
Chris was sent to investigate a disturbance on the planet Nibo. He encountered a sprawling mushroom entity which had grown from abandoned Time Engines, and which had time-distorting effects. After expending hundreds of Cwejen bodies fighting the Shadow-Mantises it generated, Chris defeated the entity.
When damage from a war between the Hytherians and Geldex over the Psychosphere began affecting the dreams of 21st century Earth, Chris' mind was uploaded to the Psychosphere to find a way to shut it down. While there, he met Jen Ashfield and Sara Willox, who both remembered their encounters with Cwej as nightmares. (PROSE: Collective Unconscious)
When Chris was staying at the Yakushima Tower with an old girlfriend, Kizzi Abriela, the building's AI, HANS, seemingly malfunctioned and took over the bodies of the lizard bankers who were there for a conference. Chris defeated them and got to safety. (PROSE: Soft Target)
Chris arrived on the isolated colony world Marsogohso, where he met Colette, a woman who had experienced being killed constantly throughout her life by a time-travelling monster. Chris managed to lure and kill it, freeing her. Colette borrowed Chris's time ring in order to become Kaetannan, a legendary knight from her culture's past. (PROSE: The Eternal)
While the Vicinity prepared Chris's mind for a routine mission, a malfunction instead sent him into another Cwej body on an uncharted blue desert planet. He found it to be inhabited by thousands of Cwejen, who lived in mud huts and spent their days idling, barely communicative and with no apparent concept of the outside universe. The Cwej-Primes subsisted entirely on meat delivered by cybernetic Cwej-Magnuses. Although initially confused and distressed, Chris eventually relaxed, and ultimately remained trapped here so long he began to forget his previous life. One day, he saw a priest-like Cwej-Plus sermonizing about the world beyond, and begged him for information. The priest took Chris to a crystalline crater, at the centre of which was a damaged timeship. He entered and activated it, then emerged with several newly created Cwejen of all three types, demonstrating that this was how the population replenished itself. Horrified, Chris attempted to destroy the timeship, but the priest witnessed him and summoned a Cwejen mob to bring him to a subterranean cavern. Seeing Cwejen being butchered in the catacombs, he realised the meat he had been eating all along was Cwej flesh. Chris was brought to a subterranean colosseum, where Cwejen performing as Adjudicators and criminals had gladiator battles. The winner was devoured by Cwej-Ursa, a colossal cybernetic monstrosity resembling a blond teddy bear: a Cwej who had crash-landed on this planet aeons ago and regenerated hundreds of times, subsisting on the flesh of his clones. The cavern caved in as the sabotaged timeship exploded, and Chris saw the injured Ursa begin to regenerate into an ethereal winged creature with many eyes. The blast incinerated Chris's body, and he woke up in La Kraw el Sol to find that only a few seconds had passed. (PROSE: The Ursine Brood)
Larles and Kwol noticed that Chris had seemed disturbed lately. Suala of Temporal Team X offered to remove the pain of Chris's memories, something to which Chris eventually agreed. He finally confided in his friends about the things he had seen on Ursa's planet, though Suala told Cwejen 178 that they had not actually remove the pain from his memory, and that the treatment had been a placebo. (PROSE: The Trauma Deception)
Chris, Larles and Kwol went to PsyCon, a tech convention where the Superiors have identified unusual activity. An attending magician, Dylaxu, stole a new piece of equipment, the Futura Visor. Dylaxu revealed that he was Donacho Munchausen, who revealed that he was the one who murdered the Superior High President, as well as arranging for Chris to meet Larles and Kwol. This was an elaborate scheme to steal the visor and make money. Kwol grabbed the visor and used it to look into the future, where they saw humanity presiding over the destruction of the universe. Kwol attacked Chris, who was forced to kill them. (PROSE: The PsyCon Prediction)
Chris was tried on the Base of Operations for harbouring the alien fugitives, and sentenced to execution. The Superiors destroyed the Vicinity, the hardware of which was a small glass cube. Chris woke in another reality with Vicky, a woman who revealed herself to be the embodiment of the Vicinity. Having used the last of her energy to send him here, she told him to move on, but Chris contacted George Cwej and asked to be sent back to the Base. Chris shot the High President, then went on the run. Months later, he was accosted by Larles, now an agent of the Superiors. Chris's actions had inspired an Uprising of the Cwejen, led by a rebel Cwej named Thomas Mackeray. Larles showed Chris the devastation the Uprising had caused, but abandoned him when he made a glib comment about Kwol. Chris attempted to rebuild the Vicinity, then sealed himself in a cave on a moon of Svelter V, and retreated into the virtual reality with a simulation of Kwol. (PROSE: The Aftermath)
Inside the new Vicinity, Chris had a psychedelic vision where he re-experienced his initial transformation into an AI, witnessed many past and future versions of himself, and realised that he had never been an ordinary Cwej, but was in fact the original, Cwej-One. (PROSE: The V Cwejes)
Chris was woken by Christina, a female Cwej, and her girlfriend Frey, an Ephem who was a member of the Friend. Chris was now a legendary figure known as the First Rebel. The women brought him to the Tower to meet Thomas Mackeray, who welcomed him in the hopes that he would aid the Uprising. When Chris refused, Mackeray threw them into a pit. While lost in the lower levels, Chris encountered Koschei, a Superior criminal imprisoned here when the Superiors controlled the Tower. Since Frey is dying from a lack of Superior biodata, Koschei offered to donate some on the condition that Chris agreed to obey him on a future occasion. Chris discovered the Tree of Life, a structure in the Tower which produced the drug Praxis and could be used to manipulate time. He attempted to undo the Uprising, but Koschei spoke through Frey, distracting him at a critical moment and causing the Uprising to be only half reversed, leading to an unstable new status quo. A high-ranking Superior contacted Chris, who told her he refused to work for the Superiors any longer. (PROSE: Rebel Rebel)
Other realities
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Other versions of Cwej existed in different histories. (PROSE: So Vile a Sin, Oblivion)
Legacy
While researching the history of the Forrester family for his book, Tranlis Difarallio read that Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester were declared traitors to the Earth Empire after their disappearance. (PROSE: Dependence Day)
When Bernice Summerfield first encountered the Cwej Septimus, she mistook him for Chris. Seeing this, Straxus was amused that Bernice was familiar with the Cwejen's progenitor. (AUDIO: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel)
When Alexander Christian broke into Smithwood Manor in 1997, he hid in Chris Cwej's empty bedroom. (PROSE: The Dying Days)
When the Eighth Doctor was interrogated by a Klade operative, the interrogator expected him to remember an instance on Falkus when the Doctor was accompanied by "a tall man and a dark-skinned woman". As the Doctor did not, this event was either in his pre-amnesic past with Cwej and Forrester or in his future with Fitz Kreiner and Anji Kapoor. (PROSE: Father Time)
Appearance
As an adult, Chris was tall, blond and muscular. (PROSE: Original Sin) He gave an air of being Canadian. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
When he first met the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield, he had undergone a "body bepple" to make him look like a bear with golden fur and pointed triangular ears. Bernice thought he looked like a teddy bear. (PROSE: Original Sin)
After his regeneration, he was shorter than his original body and quite stocky, with dark hair and a mellow voice; (PROSE: Tears of the Oracle) an acquaintance of Cwej described it as "Friar Tuck without the haircut." (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Personality
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Cwej was enthusiastic and, although he was intelligent, he usually acted before thinking things through. While travelling with Roz, she usually did the thinking for him. (PROSE: Shakedown)
Behind the scenes
- The book which depicts Chris's sexual encounter with a gay man, Damaged Goods, was written by future executive producer of the series, Russell T Davies, whose works often include gay themes. Much like Jack Harkness, an LGBT companion introduced to the TV series in Steven Moffat's The Empty Child, Cwej opines that sexuality is not an issue where he comes from. This same-sex encounter was released just before the debut of Izzy Sinclair, the oft-cited first LGBT companion, in October 1996. In the same year, Jason Kane would casually introduce himself as someone who has slept with 9 women, 5 men, and various humanoid aliens. (PROSE: Death and Diplomacy)
- The covers for the Big Finish Productions audio adaptations Damaged Goods, Original Sin, and Cold Fusion all use voice actor Travis Oliver to represent Cwej on their covers. While it could be said that Oliver generally resembles Cwej, his dark hair conflicts with descriptions of Cwej's blond hair in the books.
- Cwej's appearance in Original Sin, where he has been modified by a body bepple to look something like a teddy bear, was inspired by Chewbacca.[1]
Footnotes
External links
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