Starkey

Starkey was a rebellious fourteen-year-old orphan who operated under the pseudonym "Stark Reality" and became the master of K9.

Biography
Starkey was an orphan and a troubled youngster. (TV: Regeneration, Oroborus, The Last Precinct) By the age of 14, he was operating as a political agitator called "Stark Reality". He also had followers who wanted to be his accomplices, like Jorjie. One night, the two escaped CCPCs and stumbled into Alistair Gryffen's house. Starkey accidentally unplugged the Space-Time Manipulator and brought through four Jixen warriors and K9. A Jixen sprayed him with its enemy-fluid whilst K9 self-destructed, killing three of the Jixen. Starkey retrieved K9's regeneration unit. Shortly thereafter, K9 rebuilt himself. Darius Pike informed the police robots and Starkey was arrested and taken to a detention facility operated by The Department. There he was put into a Virtual reality detention facility. Jorjie hacked into his detention program and communicated with him. The surviving Jixen tried to kill him, but Starkey escaped. K9 gave Starkey a dog whistle as an apology for nearly killing him and told him that "where ever you are, it will call you to my side". (TV: Regeneration)

As the Jixen was hunting him, Starkey had to stay at Gryffen's house. When K9 discovered that the Jixen was heading in the direction of Dauntless Prison, he headed there to track it. Starkey wanted to help, and asked Darius to come with him. Darius agreed but only on the condition that Starkey left when they were done. Starkey and Darius arrived in the prison, but were soon captured by CCPCs. They were thrown in their cells by Thorne, the governor of Dauntless Prison who would later become a dangerous enemy. Jorjie arrived to help, Darius gave her a keycard he swiped from Thorne. She used it to free Starkey and Darius, along with the other alien prisoners. They ran with the aliens but when Starkey looked behind them, he was confronted by a Jixen. Starkey was then saved by K9. Exploiting the Jixen's tracking ability, Starkey put his jacket, which had Jixen slime on it, in a cell. The Jixen tracked the slime to the cell and Starkey closed the door on him. Suddenly, a Department officer arrived, who revealed himself to be a Meron and attacked K9, he advanced on Starkey, but he was saved by the Jixen who used its call to scare the Meron off. Though K9 was low on power, Starkey and him managed to unite with Jorjie, Darius and the aliens. Darius opened the gate, and everyone went out, but were met by June Turner, Jorjie's mother, who demanded that they returned to their cells. The Jixen struck again and attacked K9 and June. June told Jorjie to set her locking device to self-destruct. Darius grabbed it and threw it to Starkey, who attached it to the Jixen which was destroyed. He was struck by the Jixen's energy attack, which resulted in him fainting. He awoke in Gryffen's house where, honouring his deal with Darius, decided to leave, but not before thanking K9 for saving his life. Later, Starkey was vandalising a Department message when he was met by CCPCs. Starkey was soon joined by K9, who was "ready for action". (TV: Liberation)

When Nehetka and Geb of the Anubians, a race whom K9 had liberated in his past, arrived on Earth, Gryffen was the first to fall under their hypnotic control. He banished Darius from the house when he irritated the Anubians. Jorjie and Starkey were then hypnotised and Darius tried to convince K9 something was wrong but he was too occupied with remembering his past. Darius used Mariah to knock Geb out, using the Ankh on his chest to take control of the Anubian spacecraft and, with K9, defeated the Anubians when they attempted to take over the Department and freed Starkey and the others. (TV: Curse of Anubis)

Gryffen took Starkey in soon after. During his time at the Gryffen household, Starkey tried to find out who his parents were. Following a chance encounter with an Oroborus, Gryffen discovered that Starkey was probably the son of two alien immunologists, Charles and Marie Sobol. The Sobols had experimented on him as a baby, granting him an alien immune system, and they themselves had disappeared some time afterward. (TV: Oroborus)

An accident in the STM resulted in Jorjie being sent to 23 November 1963. K9 and Starkey were sent to retrieve her. They encountered Darius' great-grandfather, William Pike and saved him from the clutches of Barker, an MI6 agent with a surprising resemblance to Thorne, preventing Darius from being erased from history. Gryffen, with June's help, was able to bring them back. (TV: The Cambridge Spy)

With the rest of the K9 Unit, Starkey witnessed the appearance of a black hole and white hole within the STM whose collision risked destroying the world. After losing contact with K9, who had left to retrieve his regeneration unit at the Millennium Dome, Starkey left with Jorjie to find him. While looking for K9 at the dome, Starkey and Jorjie almost kissed but were interrupted by CCPCs. Finding that K9 had been used by Thorne as a conduit to generate a space time portal which was opened when Gryffen was forced to use the temporal stabiliser in the STM to save the world, allowing the Korven invasion vanguard to arrive, it was there that Starkey and Jorjie learned that Lomax, the head of the Department, was infact the Supreme Leader of the Korven Pan-Dimensional Army and that Thorne was working with him, having had himself implanted with Meron DNA by the Korven. Ultimately, however, the invasion was stopped when Gryffen, entering the dome having overcame his agoraphobia, called out the STM's voice-activated termination code, destroying the machine and the Korven vanguard with it. Along with the rest of the K9 Unit, Starkey was distraught to see K9 "die" having expended his remaining energy to save them from Trojan, only to be deeply relived when the regeneration unit returned and rejuvenated K9's life. (TV: The Eclipse of the Korven)

Starkey