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 the Internet chat room #areyoulonely, people gather to discuss their loneliness. A user named IamI 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 "Jsmith8" logs in and explains that IamI is an artificial intelligence who survived the Doctor destroying her ship when it tried to invade Earth. IamI 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 IamI into giving him admin powers. He quickly takes away IamI's powers, and takes control, returning IamI's victims to their bodies, and deleting IamI itself, before closing the chat room.

Characters

 * Eighth Doctor (Jsmith8)
 * IamI
 * Faceless43
 * Shirley1968
 * Nicky
 * DrLuvin

Technology

 * Shirley1968 found the chat room by searching on Google.
 * The Doctor asks if they're on Web 2.0 or Web 3.0, saying it went downhill after that. Web 3.6 liked to call itself Barry, and had an inferiority complex.

The TARDIS

 * The Doctor mentions that his TARDIS could hold Iaml, but that there's already more intelligences in there than he's comfortable with.

The Doctor

 * The Doctor says that "A death ago, I used to fantasise about changing reality with a well-turned phrase."
 * The Doctor says he rarely travels alone. He's surrounded by voices.
 * The Doctor corrects IamI, saying he has two hearts.

Culture

 * The Doctor quotes Spock: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." He says he's met him—Nimoy, that is, not Spock.

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.
 * The Doctor says he's met Leonard Nimoy. He later meets Spock himself in his eleventh incarnation in COMIC: Assimilation².