An Eighth Doctor novel with Fitz and Anji. In France, 1819, two English tourists are befriended and murdered by a mysterious individual. The dead men are identified as Charles Babbage and John Hershel. Together they would have developed ideas for a steam engine that could execute calculations. Babbage would have spent twelve year trying to build the first ancestor of the computer, which he called the Difference Engine... In America, 1890, a judge is bribed at a competition to chose a new scheme to speed up tabulation of the census. A patent binary system involving punch cards is passed over in favour of a less effective manual process. As a result, the patent is never developed into a working business, which would have been called the tabulation machine company. In 1924, that company would have become IBM... In England, 1937, Alan Turing tries to have a revolutionary paper publishing postulating ideas for a universal machine. He is arrested by intelligence agents... The Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrive in a 2003 unlike any they expected. The British Empire is flourishing, terrorism is rife, and, strangest of all, the computer hasn't been invented. This is no accident of time - but what