Project Yellow Brick

Project Yellow Brick was a Drake Interplanetary project to create a transmat.

History

Origins

In the early 23rd century, it was costly to transport supplies and personnel to the Outer Space Defence Halo by shuttle. Whilst a contract was unexpectedly given to Raxle Technologies to find a way of reducing costs by way of building Starship Ilium 1, Magnus Drake of Drake Interplanetary planned to build a transmat, making such spacecraft obsolete.

After Leapfrog resulted in the death of a student volunteer at the University of Cambridge and particule recombination technology was made illegal, Drake protected Dr Lila Kreeg from legal repercussions for her role and hired her. She was tasked with finding a way to convey solid matter across the solar system without the aid of particle recombination technology, an inherently dangerous and difficult task. (AUDIO: Faustian)

At Drake Interplanetary

As Director of R&E, Lila worked on Project Yellow Brick with the assistance of Dr Edward Bhole and supercomputer ARIEL. On 23 April 2223, Lila ran an unsuccessful test to transmat a cargo pack 10.2 metres across the laboratory. It was an expensive failure, but it caused temporal distortion which made Lila see visions from her past and one of Cathrin Travers' corpse in the future, as well as creating a connection to the Bruce Master, (AUDIO: Faustian) trapped in the Time Vortex. (AUDIO: Day of the Master)

This test run led Drake to appoint Cathrin Travers as project supervisor, meaning that her approval was required for any further tests. Additionally, Drake ordered Lila not to pursue the temporal distortion aspect as she had been tasked with creating a transmat and not a time machine. Nonetheless, Lila overrode ARIEL's need for Cathrin's approval and ran another rest run with minor changes intended to increase the distortion. This time, the Master made contact and showed her eternity, promising to give her Time Lord knowledge of time travel, among other areas of science, in return for his release.

In her dreams, Lila received information on how to make the machine work, namely an understanding of Gallifreyan equations which she input into ARIEL, allowing her to better understand time and relative dimensions in space. However, Drake was aware of the unauthorised test run and told Cathrin to deal with it; she chose to fire Lila and have the Yellow Brick equipment confiscated. (AUDIO: Faustian)

Theft and success

Lila and Eddi stole the equipment from the equipment depot and transported it to a warehouse in Limehouse East. There, Lila set ARIEL back up and Eddie realised that she planned to use particle recombination technology after all, which she had to do in order to free the Master. To this end, she had ARIEL read the Leapfrog files and ran a test during which she told the Master that she was going to free him.

Cathrin made an order for the equipment's return and later received a call from Eddi, who offered to tell her where it was for a price. When Cathrin arrived at the warehouse, she promised Lila not to hand her over to Drake in return for a 70% share in Yellow Brick and a working prototype within twenty-four hours, an offer which Lila accepted. During the final test run, positrons and electrons coalesced to form the Master, who proceeded to drain Eddi's life energy in order to fully restore himself. He later killed Cathrin and Drake, unaware that he was a clone. (AUDIO: Faustian)

Drake's work

His consciousness transferred into another clone, Drake kept an eye on Drake Interplanetary's work and improved on Project Yellow Brick. He offered all data on it to the Dalek Litigator when his usefulness to the Daleks ran out and held Lila and Vienna Salvatori at gunpoint when they tried to take the machine from his bunker. A Dalek Commander entered and killed him before being killed by Vienna.

Vienna and Lila took Project Yellow Brick's equipment to Trafalgar Plaza using hovercarts and set it up around the Dalek flying saucer, planning on sending it, as well as the Master and all of the Daleks aboard, into the Time Vortex. Lila had Vienna activate it whilst the Master had hold of her own hand and, after the saucer and the Daleks had all been pulled away into the Vortex, she gave him one final push and he was stranded once more. Vienna took Lila's hand and saved her. (AUDIO: Vengeance)

Behind the scenes

"Project Yellow Brick" is likely a reference to the yellow brick road of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which leads Dorothy Gale to Emerald City.