The Child of Time (comic story)

The Child of Time was a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip featuring the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond. It concluded the Chiyoko arc.

Summary
The clock is ticking, as the Doctor and Amy find themselves trying to avert Chiyoko's creation and prevent a galactic war in Earth's future. The whole universe is hanging in the balance and the time vortex is close to complete collapse. Travelling between worlds that shouldn't exist and meeting long dead souls, the Doctor and Amy's toughest adventure could prove to be their last... The end of everything is approaching, at the hands of a little girl who wants to live forever.

Part 1
The Doctor and Amy follow Chiyoko through the Time Vortex. She is ensuring that her creation occurs. She sends the Vorlax drone to 2011, Eldritch Valdemar to Paris in 1858 and frees Axos from the Time loop to invade Earth.

The TARDIS lands on Earth during a battle between humans and the Galateans. The humans, led by Captain Kaido, take the Doctor and Amy to their base, where they meet Sergeant Sokkuri, another human rescued by Kaido. The Doctor and Amy discover the remaining humans worship Chiyoko as a goddess. To stop the Galateans from capturing Earth, Kaido uses a machine that only responds to her brain waves to activate a network of bombs under the Earth's crust and destroy the planet. After doing this, she is shot by Sokkuri, a Galatean in disguise. She tries to absorb Kaido's brain waves to halt the explosion, but is killed by Kaido.

Chiyoko appears to the Doctor and Amy and tells them she started the war to see whether humans or Galateans are superior; the Galateans were successful and shall continue living. Since the humans were inferior, they must 'go away', as must the Doctor and Amy. She disappears. Before the Doctor can stop the countdown, the Earth explodes.

Part 2
The Doctor and Amy wake in the country. They meet a man who introduces himself as Alan Turing. While Turing makes them tea at his house, the Doctor tells Amy he should not be here; it is mid-July, and Turing killed himself in June by eating a poisoned apple. Unfortunately, Turing overhears this conversation. The Doctor tells Amy to take a look around the surrounding area.

Turing shows the Doctor some theories he is working on. Turing has developed Chaos Theory twenty years early. Meanwhile, Amy finds a dodo wandering the streets with a scrap of parchment in its mouth. She grabs the parchment, then sees the dodo run through a portal into a seemingly-abandoned chapel. At the same time, Turing tells the Doctor he did try to end his life, but was saved at the last moment, by a girl named Chiyoko.

In the chapel, Amy finds Buddy Holly writing a musical with John Keats starring Jayne. As soon as she tries to talk to them, they are shot by spider-like robots resembling Galateans. Circuitry falls out of the three people; they are robots. Back in Wilmslow, the Doctor knows that Chiyoko couldn't change history without endangering her existence, so this isn't 1954. He opens a portal with his sonic, and shows Turing he is living in a dimensional projection. Through the portal, they can see portals to many places and eras, an abandoned museum of time.

The Doctor and Turing find themselves out of the projection, held at gunpoint by the Brontë sisters. They are robots themselves, and have rescued Amy. Turing discovers he himself is a robot, and happily claims he is the ultimate expression of the Turing test. Emily Brontë explains the robots are Galateans, ten million years on, and "the Museum of Lost Opportunities" was founded by Chiyoko as a memorial to the human race in the ruins of planet Earth. The Galateans have colonised every star in the sky, and all other races have been destroyed. The Galateans appear and kill Emily. After shooting them, the remaining Brontës claim the Galateans have been driven insane and seek to destroy all other life forms. The Brontës' programming decay and they discovered their true nature.

They take everyone to a time scoop which they used to rescue the Doctor from the dying Earth. The Brontës want to use it to wipe the Galateans from history, and know only the Doctor has knowledge to change history. The Doctor knows that if he refuses, the Galteans will kill them all. They burst through, attempting to kill everyone. As they hide, the Doctor explains that they can't escape via the time scoop without being shot at first, and Anne Brontë bids them goodbye...

Part 3
Back on Earth in the near future a falling star brings an infection that spreads rapidly, soon becoming a pandemic. Robots travel the land, identifying new victims and sterilising the derelict towns with a circle of fire each with a radius of one mile for every new case found.

The Doctor, Amy and Turing are sent back by Charlotte Bronte, arriving amidst the devastation. Turing says that this is the time of the creation of the Galateans. He says that the history books need to be rewritten or this is the end of humanity. The Doctor explains that it is not so simple: this is the time before Chiyoko's interference began. They are confronted by one of the robots. It says that contaminated life forms must be sterilised but their presence is noted by humans in an underground facility. The robot detects that they are not contaminated and takes them to the facility. The Doctor tells Amy that he is rather vague on this time period but is surprised that a cure has not been found. The trio are taken to Keltor Jacobs. He introduces himself as the last hope for the human race. He tells them that the Doomsday Plague has all but wiped out the human race and the research stations across the empire are going out one by one. His assistant, Chloe, says that they have spent five years looking for n alternative solution and have settled on the creation of Galateans: robots containing the uploaded minds of the human race. Turing tries to tell them that the Galateans are not the solution but the destruction of humanity. He says that the duplicates will come to believe that they are the originals and will wipe out the humans believing them to be imposters.

Chiyoko materialises among them and makes it that the three newcomers were never there. Like phantoms, they have to watch as Chloe activates the Galateans just three hours before Research Station Minerva reports that it has found a cure for the plague. Jacobs tries to recall the Galateans but they have already started killing the humans. They tell Jacobs that humanity is weak and vulnerable and that now is the time of the Galateans. Jacobs tries to abort the Galateans with an EM pulse but Chiyoko kills him.

The Doctor says that she is diverting the course of history to ensure her own creation. She turns to him and agrees that playing with time is fun. She takes them to the planet Kepler IV, one thousand years later, to witness the glories of war. The Doctor asks her how she can enjoy standing on a battlefield, watching two armies annihilate each other just so that she can come into being. She turns to him and tells him that he made it happen by creating her.

The Doctor tells her that the Galateans wipe out all other life in the galaxy and begs her to put things back the way they were. She tells him that such an action would mean giving up her own life and that she has as much right to exist as anyone else. He tries to argue that if her existence depends on the obliteration of everybody else then she should give up her life. When she says she has no pity for the dead he tells her that he can have no pity for her. He asks her to remember that he gave her a chance.

She tells him that he is funny and that it is time for him to go away. She puts the Doctor, Amy and Turing back in London on the day that Earth was blown up. The Doctor says that they have been brought here to die and comments on how tidy it is to end this way. Amy screams as a ship hovers towards them, blasting at them.

Part 4
It turns out that the ship is actually shooting at the earlier versions of the Doctor and Amy as they scramble across the rubble. The Doctor decides that this time they can escape the same way that they did the last. He, Amy and Turing follow the same route into the ruins of St Paul's. The Doctor adjusts a rifle to nerve paralysis setting and shoots two guards. They then find their way into the bomb control room and hide. This time, the Doctor shoots his and Amy's earlier versions, knocking them out, so that when the time scoop picks them up he can greet the Bronte sisters and readjust the time scoop to bring Turing along, too. He then puts their past selves into the Wilmslow time bubble to meet the earlier Turing.

Chiyoko materialises among them and threatens to wipe them from history. The Doctor says that this isn't a safe option for her and scoops up Cosette, Margaret and Konami from before they were absorbed into the TARDIS. He then wipes the coordinates so that Chiyoko won't know where they came from, or when. That way, he says, her own existence will be under threat if she takes any drastic action. Amy whispers to Turing that she doesn't follow any of this. He replies that it is a bit beyond him, too.

Chiyoko is overcome by pain and regret as she feels empathy for the first time. The Doctor asks her to unwrite her own existence. She admits she is scared and, sobbing, sends her component lives back to the places they were last in before they were absorbed.

Amy notices that the universe is growing dark; the Doctor says that it is being erased as it ceases to exist. He time scoops the TARDIS to them and sets the controls for Keltor Jacobs' laboratory just after the Galateans are awoken. He tells them that the cure for the Doomsday Plague is about to be announced. Turing calls the Galateans as they awake on Moonbase and tells them that he is the last of the Galatean race. He sends them his memory files so that they can see a future that must never exist, thus averting the war. He hopes that the organic and artificial humans can live together in harmony.

Amy calls the Doctor into the TARDIS where Chiyoko is dying. The Doctor takes her to Moonbase where she is remade as a Galatean. The Doctor takes Amy to an observation platform to look down on the planet Earth below.

Characters

 * The Doctor
 * Amy Pond
 * Chiyoko
 * Eldritch Valdemar
 * Alan Turing (Robot duplicate)
 * Emily Brontë (Robot duplicate)
 * Charlotte Brontë (Robot duplicate)
 * Anne Brontë (Robot duplicate)
 * Buddy Holly (Robot duplicate)
 * Jayne Mansfield (Robot duplicate)
 * John Keats (Robot duplicate)
 * Keltor Jacobs

Story notes
to be added

Continuity

 * The Doctor says "The TARDIS doesn't like being buried under rubble". (COMIC: Flushed Away)
 * The Doctor once again calls Amy "Pond". (TV: The Eleventh Hour etc)
 * The Doctor calls the TARDIS "Old Girl". (TV: The Invasion of Time)
 * Lord Rassilon is mentioned. (TV: The Five Doctors, The End of Time)
 * The end scene, with the Doctor describing the history of Earth to Chiyoko, is similar to his description of Time and Space shortly before setting off on his travels with Amy Pond. (TV: The Eleventh Hour)