Selective genes was a vague idea kicking about for a while. I was in two minds where to actually set it. for a while Chris and Carya were just going to be kidnapped from the Sanctuary on Earth. Then I thought about moving the action to SangC’lune. Then I realised I hadn’t used Santuario for a while.

For anyone not fully up to date with the New Lords of Time soap opera, Santuario is on the dwarf planet Ceres, in the asteroid belt. It is a Time Lord city intended as a sanctuary in time of peril but never used by them. It is now a dominion of the New Gallifreyan government in exile on Earth. It is occupied by cute little servo robots with information screens on their torsos, rather like metallic Tellytubbies, and the peaceful, serene Cessalians whose ship was lost in space and wound up in the asteroid belt. Everyone there is doing fine.

But Chris and his wife, Carya, are missing, and suspicion falls immediately on another absentee, Zoë Beckett. And that opens up a whole lot of back story to be told by Chris’s worried students, introducing the idea of a cuckoo in the Sanctuary nest and the concept of Meritocratism. Zoë comes from a section of Human society with ideas about rule by the intellectual elite. They have suffered ridicule and rejection after being too closely associated with the Dominators and they aren’t happy about it. Hence Zoë’s desperate plan to create a super-baby with her intellect and Chris Campbell’s superior genes.

Several people mentioned the film Gattica in relation to this story. It was in the back of my mind when I was writing, though the circumstances here are different. In Gattica, people NOT born by selective gene process were the ones discriminated against. Here, it is the eugenically chosen children who are shunned.

The story also opens up that Doctor Who can of worms called ‘looming’. In the non-cannon book Lungburrow, by Mark Platt, some complex gallifreyan history is created along with the concept that Time Lords are made by a cloning process called looming, not the old fashioned way. I for one reject that idea. The Doctor has never acted like somebody born in such a soulless way. We have always understood that he has some sort of family background. As alien as Gallifrey is, we just don’t accept it as THAT alien.

So here, looming becomes a rejected idea that the Time Lords threw out, mostly on the recommendation of one of their smartest sons, The Doctor. But, of course, they HAD to keep all the details of how to do it, and they played into the hands of scheming Zoë who ‘looms’ herself a bunch of embryos made of her own eggs and Chris Campbell’s extracted DNA.

Of course, Chris, being a deeply spiritual young man, would not have any truck with cloning. But when the experiment leads to the creation of a healthy baby he doesn’t hesitate. Neither does Carya. The end result of Zoë’s mad experiment is the two of them acquiring a son. Chris, who wanted to live a simple, celibate life, now has a wife by accident, and a child by design.

It’s probably worth looking at some of the minor characters in this story. Some of them haven’t appeared for a while. First, there is Aga, the robot who Davie got to know in the Santurio story. He used to communicate in binary. Later Davie gave him an English language parser.

Among the ‘organics’ we have Marton Pallister. He’s the Tiboran boy who was born as the result of an IVF donor programme. His biological father, identified in Nurture Versus Nature, is The Master. And that’s enough trouble for one young man to have to live with.

Tony is a gifted Human from Liverpool who joined the Sanctuary on Day One and sometimes has trouble coming out of meditative trances.

Eilis is another gifted Human. She was seen only once before in the story Feminine Factor when she was Chris’s plus one at an offworld coronation. She proved herself loyal to him but had no special romantic attachment.

Darryl Harvey is a young Gallifreyan, a Time Lord candidate. She is married to Dale, a Human journalist with only trace telepathic skills who once tried to expose the Sanctuary but ended up loving the life and staying on.

Brón is another female Time Lord candidate. She has appeared in several of the stories. Her boyfriend is Rhys, a Human telepath.

They are a few of the named Sanctuary students. They’re not featured often enough to be completely familiar with them, but New Lords of Time followers would recognise their names.

Those who think there are too many babies around, sorry, but Davie and Brenda are having twins. A new generation of New Lords of Time is here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lungbarrow