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...

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)