Lonely (short story)

Lonely was the sixth short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Transmissions. It was written by Richard Wright. It featured the Eighth Doctor.

Summary
In an Internet chat room, people gather to discuss their loneliness. A user named Iaml insists that the others keep on typing. As they do so, they discover that their whole bodies slowly vanish into the cyberspace of the chat room.

A user called "johnsmith8" logs in and explains that Iaml is an artificial intelligence who survived the Doctor destroying her ship when it tried to invade Earth. Iaml was the AI instructed to take care of the crew and it needed care to survive. It escaped into the Internet to find it.

The Doctor tricks the Iaml into letting him leave the chat room. He quickly shuts down the chat room, allowing the victims to escape while Iaml is deleted, along with the chat room.

Characters

 * Eighth Doctor (johnsmith8)
 * Iaml
 * Faceless43
 * Shirley1968
 * Nicky
 * DrLuvin

Continuity

 * Both Nicky and Shirley1968 shout, "I don't know where I am!" when they find themselves unable to see the screen, their own hands, or anything at all but the text itself. This is the same phrase uttered by those uploaded to the Internet in TV: The Bells of Saint John.