Doctor, I Need You!

Part 9: Defending the earth and being a mother

John Smith became a regular visitor in Sarah Jane’s house, but she didn’t mind this one bit. She wasn’t a very sociable person so she didn’t have many friends; the majority of her time was spent alone with a baby and a robot dog. So Sarah Jane was glad of some adult company, and over time John became a very dear friend of hers. But there was something about him. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the way he acted around Victoria, the little things he said sometimes, they all seemed so familiar to her.

But when Victoria turned 3 all that changed. Suddenly John stopped coming round to visit them. He didn’t write, he didn’t call, nothing. He just disappeared completely. At first Sarah Jane was very worried about him. He was such a nice person; it seemed out of character for him to just disappear. Victoria kept asking,

“Where’s Joh?” Which is what the toddler called him as she couldn’t yet pronounce her ‘n’s very well. It broke Sarah Jane’s heart to see Victoria staring expectantly at the door every time the post arrived but as Victoria grew up she started to forget about the man who had once been so good to her, but Sarah Jane never forgot.

As her daughter got older Sarah Jane kept wondering about her conception. Almost everyday she would look at her daughter and try to spot aspects of her appearance that she might have inherited from her father, but Victoria looked so much like Sarah Jane that this didn’t help much. By the age of 5 Victoria had developed her mother’s inquisitive nature. Sarah Jane was often getting notes home from Victoria’s primary school teacher telling Sarah Jane that her daughter kept wandering off at lunch times and often came back with a knowing smile on her face. Every time Sarah Jane asked her daughter about this her daughter told her that she was on adventures. Sarah Jane couldn’t help but smile when her daughter told her this, but she still warned her not to do it again, not that that ever stopped the infant.

The reports from Victoria’s school were not always of this nature though, Sarah Jane was often told how bright Victoria was, the school had even suggested moving Victoria up a grade when it came to KS2 level.

Not only did Victoria look like Sarah Jane, with her thick brown hair and large chocolate eyes, but she also acted a lot like her too. This became obvious when Victoria reached the age of about 10. Like her mother, Victoria wasn’t very sociable. Her best friend was K9 and she was perfectly happy with this. Victoria showed no desire to make friends with any other children her age, she was perfectly happy to sit by herself and read at lunch times.

But Sarah Jane worried about her daughter. Before Sarah Jane had met The Doctor she had been very sociable, but since returning to a normal life she didn’t feel like she fitted into normal society, and apparently this attitude had rubbed off on her daughter.

One Friday evening Sarah Jane walked up to her attic to find Victoria curled up on the small sofa reading a textbook, K9 was sitting happily on the floor by her side.

“Would you like some tea darling?” She asked her daughter.

“No thanks mum.” Victoria replied politely, not taking her eyes away from the book she was reading. Sarah Jane was about to go downstairs again when she spotted the title of the book.

“Einstein’s theory of relativity? Is that not a bit advanced for you Victoria?” Sarah Jane asked, sitting down the sofa beside Victoria. The girl reluctantly closed the book over, marking her page.

“No, I understand it fine, Mr. Jones is teaching it to me.” Victoria said proudly.

“Your private tutor is teaching you that already?” Sarah Jane said, she knew her daughter was incredibly bright but until this moment she didn’t know the half of it.

“Yes, it’s really interesting.” Victoria said.

“Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I’ll just let you get back to your reading then.” Sarah Jane said. She ran her fingers through her daughter’s wavy hair before getting up and walking down stairs to the kitchen, thoroughly impressed.

Since finding out that she was pregnant, Sarah Jane hadn’t gone looking for trouble. She hadn’t searched the newspapers for unusual stories or anything but sometimes the unusual stories came to her.

One day while Victoria was at school Sarah Jane got a call from a geologist friend who had been studying the eruption of Krakatoa. Her friend knew that Sarah Jane was studying volcanic activity for a story she was doing.  Her friend told her that they had found that an unusual crystal had been expelled during the eruption. Sarah Jane’s friend agreed to give this crystal to Sarah Jane to aid her studies.

Later that afternoon, while Victoria was in her after school classes with her tutor, Sarah Jane went to meet up with her friend who handed over the unusual crystal. Sarah Jane was fascinated by this unusual structure because she knew that it was nothing that anyone had ever seen on earth before, which meant that it might have been alien.

When she got the crystal home to the attic and started work she became even more fascinated when she found that it could communicate with her laptop. This scared her slightly and she was glad that her daughter was still at school, just incase anything bad happened. This mysterious crystal told Sarah Jane that it could help her track alien life and help her protect the earth. Sarah Jane had had no intention of picking up her old career of fighting aliens in the hope of finding the Doctor once again but this was too good an offer to resist.

Sarah Jane decided that she could defend the earth and be a mother at the same time, as long as she didn’t get Victoria involved in anything.

The crystal created a large computer concealed behind the chimneybreast in Sarah Jane’s attic. The computer was intelligent and completely magnificent. She decided to call it Mr. Smith after her father.

As soon as Mr. Smith came into her life, Sarah Jane’s life became a lot more complicated. She spent her days fighting monsters, sending aliens back to their home planets and just generally defending the earth, but she was nearly always at the gates of Victoria’s primary school at 4pm to pick her up after her tutoring.

The good thing was that Victoria had no idea about any of this. Sarah Jane hated hiding such a huge part of her life from the one person she loved most in the world, but she told herself that it was all to keep Victoria safe, and that kept Sarah Jane’s mind at ease. Mostly.