NOTES:
The concept behind this story isn't new; I first had the idea whilst still at high school. I toyed with various titles, like "Clause 43" or "The somethingsomething Clause", but the concept was essentially the same: in the distant future, artificial intelligence has got to the stage whereby advanced robots have a pretty good claim to sentience. Thereby they are granted 'human' rights, so can no longer be dismantled or destroyed when their owners get a better model. However, there was a get-out-clause, so the robots could just be dumped on a distant planet. The story started with a search team of marines attempting to land to find a missing politician (I can't remember why he was supposed to be there), and their craft crashing, thus stranding them there. They quickly discover the more advanced robots have been cannibalising the lesser ones to build armies to fight each other in a massive robot-versus-robot war.

Obviously, it was more of an epic than this version. The main character (which, seeing as I never got round to writing this the first time, I didn't name) was the sergeant of the marine platoon, who survives to this version, but now plays second fiddle to the ninth Doctor and his companion, Rose Tyler. The Cybermen's inclusion also brings focus to the plot; now the robots aren't warring each other, they are being cannibalised by the alien cyborg Cybermen to help rebuild their forces for yet another attempt to take on mankind. In fact, the Doctor-less version of this story only constitutes the first half of this version; a certain major plot development in the middle was the final scene in the original.

This is my first "Doctor Who" fan-fiction since the Paul McGann TV movie in 1996. I never actually got round to completing any stories starring his Doctor, but I did start one in which he faces the Daleks. All I can remember of it is that it featured recurring Eighties guest character Sabalom Glitz, and that in a key scene, the Doctor escapes from nautical Daleks that can whiz around like motorboats, and he does so on a stolen jet-ski (a la the stolen motorbike in the TV movie).

As far as "Doctor Who" stories go, this adheres more to the old-fashioned format, but featuring the new characters. In the old series, where stories were twice as long, but divided into four 25-minute parts, the 'formula' (I hate that word, it suggests there's a scientific way of Getting It Right) was for the story to be up and running before the TARDIS actually materialised, so that the Doctor gets embroiled in the escapades of the guest characters, rather than the plot revolving around him. This is where the TV movie got it wrong. Another key plot device of the old series I have used is the Doctor never knowing where the TARDIS is going to end up. In the new series he manages to get it to go right where he wants it to several times an episode, but in the old series (and this story), it was very much luck of the draw. I actually address this issue right at the end of the final chapter.

Those who have been keeping up with Christopher Ecclestone's tenure as the Doctor should assume this story takes place somewhere between "The Unquiet Dead" and "Dalek".