This story came out of a nightmare I once had, much like my previous story, "Fear," and I found it rather therapeutic to write about.

As you might know, I usually write for the Tenth Doctor, but as this story took shape, somehow, it was the Twelfth Doctor in my mind doing these things, saying these things, helping in the way he does. Plus, the timing fit, and anyway, I considered it "good measure" to write for the Twelfth Doctor. And as it turned out, I found it rather difficult to capture his voice. Let me know what you think.

Alice Carter is a character that I don't know how many people think about. I know that I will never be able to watch "Children of Earth" the same way again, knowing what Alice must endure at the end. I can't even think about it without a lump in my throat. Her plight goes hand-in-hand with my nightmares (every parent's nightmares really), and I wanted to explore what might have become of her after she leaves Jack behind, wordlessly promising never to speak to him again.

And so, I give you this. I believe it will be in three parts. It's not my usual sort of thing, but I hope that elements of this first installment give you a little chill. Enjoy!

BECOMING NO-ONE

I was thirty-three when I became Zoë Westhaven.

My birth name was Melissa Moretti. Walking about on this planet with my father's surname would have been exceptionally dangerous, and so, my mother gave me hers. Already I had my father's eyes - no need to push the envelope.

Still, one day, the danger caught up to me, and Melissa Moretti "died," and I went into deep cover.

And so, I was eighteen when I became Alice Sangster. The moniker was chosen for me by a government agency, the mention of whose name makes me want to curl up and die. I was now free to go off to university, and there, met a fellow student called Paul Carter.

I was twenty when I became Alice Carter. After the life I'd led, the mostly-absentee father I'd had, I was all too happy to settle down with a nice, seemingly stable man, and it didn't even matter that I wasn't going to finish my degree. My fondest hope was that my husband would be there. For me, and for any children we might have.

I was twenty-two when I became Mum. My son Steven was born just short of two years after our wedding, but by the time he arrived, Paul was already having an affair with one of the receptionists at his office. So, after the initial euphoria of new parenthood wore off, I tossed him out. Steven was three when his father stopped taking him for weekend visits, and four when he completely stopped phoning.

As for my own father, in spite of his "absenteeism," he did try. Certainly he tried a lot harder than Paul. He always knew where I was, knew how to get hold of me, and made sure I knew how to get hold of him. I did not really want him in my life, but complained whenever he wasn't, and was happy to see him whenever he was.

Sort of.

As it happens, my father is immortal, for reasons to which I have never really been privy. He has claimed that even he doesn't know why. He's not a vampire or any kind of supernatural being - he is simply unkillable. One day a long time ago, he says he was murdered... and then woke up. And, he says, he basically stopped getting older at that point. He won't say how old he was then, but these days he looks like he's about forty, if that, and has looked that way for over a century. He will probably look that way forever. This ultimate resilience was our ultimate downfall. As a man who cannot die, he has very little sense of eternity as the rest of us know it. He has no ability to fathom real, permanent death. He could not face it, could not wrap his mind around it. I hate to say that he did not value life in the same way as the rest of us, but... well, I guess that's about the size of it.

And so, I was thirty when I became no-one, a non-person, a ghost, because my father killed my son.

It was not malicious, I have come to understand. It was not murder, it was a means to an end. It saved the planet, in fact.

But my father absolutely knew that Steven would die when he made the decision oh-so calmly. Goons with guns held me back while I reached out for him, screaming, watching it happen. I became a hollowed-out husk of a human being, the way a mother does when she has her child torn from her forever. It didn't matter that the human race could actually go on existing because of my father's actions and my son's death - I did not want to go on existing. Steven had been all I'd had.

I don't need to tell you, I have not spoken to, nor will I ever speak to my father again.

I couldn't live in our home anymore. I wound up with a few meagre belongings, in a one-room flat in a smallish town in the northern reaches of Scotland, doing day labour to survive. I made a point of forming no real connections with anyone. I had run away because I couldn't stand to live in my own skin, couldn't stand to wear the mantle of Alice Carter anymore. Without Steven, there was nothing for Alice Carter to hold onto, no reason for her to be. Every day, I thought of taking my own life.

Depression wasn't something I was used to. In spite of my weird existence, I had never felt that kind of despair. And so, when it came, I handled it badly - I ran away and drank a lot of whisky because I didn't know how else to do it. But alas, it cycled through, because it was not chronic, it was grief-based. I guess I was lucky. In the end, I suppose, I was fundamentally more pissed off than sad.

And so, after three years of wanting to gouge out my own eyes, it did begin to lift. I could think straight again. Though I had never been raised with nor really exposed to religion, I realised that I truly did believe that Steven's consciousness lived on somewhere, and that he was probably horrified at the skinny, drunken, bitter bat that I had become. I realised it was a disgrace to his memory. I found that I didn't want or need to drink as much. I wanted to start eating again, I wanted to smile again. I wanted to find a place in my heart for Steven, and let him live there forever, rather than nurture the big hole he had left in my body and soul. I wanted to get the hell out of that town, and live in a place where the sun came up on a consistent basis.

I got back in touch with a friend in London, borrowed some money from him, and used it to relocate to the States. I chose a suburb of Chicago because my friend had a connection there, who knew how to get me an apartment without too much hassle. I'd had some experience with starting over, so it wasn't much for me to get myself established as Zoë Westhaven. I chose the name because I'd spent my entire adult life with an "A" name - the first letter of the alphabet. I wanted nothing to do with that, so I chose the opposite - "Z." And, the surname... I'd gone west to find a haven.

I got a job. I went to the market when I needed food. I joined a book club. I occasionally had dinner with people I worked with. I had a normal life for a while. As far as anyone knew, I was just Zoë - single woman with a funny accent, no family to speak of, rather shy. Actually, all of that was true, now. There was no discussion of my past, and if anyone tried, I evaded it expertly, as I had manoeuvred away from my background for my entire life.

After two years in Chicago, I met a man named Gregory Sands. Reasonably intelligent, diabolically charming with a smile that could melt the polar ice caps. He reminded me a lot of my father, actually. Our romance did not last long - no more than five months, but that was long enough to drum up some trouble.

In his defence, Greg decided to move to San Francisco, and broke up with me before either one of us knew I was pregnant. But once I did know, I felt it was just part and parcel of the lessons of my life: fathers cannot be trusted. I chose not to get in touch with him again, and he has never known about his daughter.

And so, I was thirty-five when I became Mum again. Except, I was "Mom," because my baby would be raised in America. My co-workers threw me a baby shower, and my neighbour, Anna, actually came with me to choose a crib and drove me to the hospital when I went into labour.

I named my daughter Renee, which means "reborn." And she was a new start for me...

At least, that's how it was supposed to be.

I saw her father in her eyes when she looked at me, which didn't bother me much. What did bother me was that I also saw Steven.

It's inevitable, isn't it, that a second-time mother would compare the experience to the first? I couldn't not think about how she laughed at the same baby jokes as Steven had (mostly, me sneezing and saying 'boo'), how she felt lighter in my arms than he had, how many things in the world of baby technology had advanced, just in the thirteen years since Steven had been an infant.

And when I thought of Steven, I went back to that place, for a time, at least. And I thought of my father - I couldn't help it. Against my will, I remembered how my son had trusted him (trusted the man he'd known as "Uncle Jack"), and the total lack of emotion shown by my father as he drained the life out of an eight-year-old boy who carried his DNA.

As I had learned the first time, motherhood brings with it unwanted thoughts and fears. I never wanted to identify with every parent on the news, but I did, because we're all of a tribe. I never wanted to even contemplate my father again, but with a new, tiny life totally dependent upon me, and my life inextricably linked with Captain Jack Harkness, there was no way around it.

Parents and children are connected, literally, at the gut level, and that never, ever goes away. Not even when we want it to.

One of the things that was readily available in 2014 when Renee was born, that hadn't been in 2001 when Steven was born, was the baby video monitor. Back then, most people just had audio monitors for when the baby cried, and that was enough. But these days there is the Smartphone, and you can buy a little camera for your baby's room and download an app called "Snoozy," that will connect the camera to you, whenever it's turned on. When the baby cries, the phone dings, and when you "answer" the phone, you can see and hear a live feed of your little bundle of joy.

It was a brilliant invention, and it turned me into a total maniac.

I was checking the thing ten seconds after putting her down at night, and every 2 minutes thereafter. In the middle of the night, something would wake me and I'd check my phone to make sure that it had not also disturbed Renee. Most of the time, that "something" was probably all in my head.

On one of those midnight peeks, when Renee was four weeks old, I saw a wisp of something on the monitor, hovering in the air, just outside of her crib. At first, I thought it was my eyes. I rubbed out the sleep and threw on my glasses and looked again. It started out as an "S" shape, but then began to take shape. It was a ball, then it was a face.

I screamed, and ran down the hall, heart pounding, calling my daughter's name. I burst into her room, but nothing was there. Renee was crying, but I couldn't say whether it was because she had seen what I had seen, or because I woke her when I practically kicked the door open. Like a crazy person, I searched under the crib, the closet, I opened all of the drawers, but of course I found nothing. On the monitor, when I returned to my own room, I saw nothing. After a few days, I dismissed it as a dream or an hallucination.

But as you might have guessed, it didn't stop there. I saw robots, creatures, ghosts, statues, people, things that were people-like. I spied all manner of nasty things on the monitor, and it became impossible to believe that they were just the fevered dreams of a traumatised mother. Having lived my entire life as the daughter of a man who fought (and occasionally shagged) otherworldly beings as a matter of his identity, I knew what was out there. I knew the universe was teeming with good, but also evil - the same kind of evil that had invaded the planet and had forced my father to kill Steven. It was terrifying. Each time, I raced down the hall, only to find nothing there. It was my worst nightmare coming true every few nights: my child in danger and me unable to do anything about it. Again.

But, Renee was never the worse for wear. She seemed oblivious to all of it. Her paediatrician said she was fine. She ate, she slept, she pooed. She cooed and smiled and kicked her little feet in the air, chewed on her rattles... she did baby things.

I, however, got to the point where I was only sleeping 45 minutes per night. Briefly, I began drinking whisky again, just to get some rest. But I became afraid that I'd sleep too deeply and not wake up if something actually did go wrong, so I stopped, and did what I should have done when the whole thing began: moved Renee into my bedroom with me.

I bought a special co-sleeping mat from a baby supply store, to lay in my bed beside me. It was made so as not to allow her to roll out of bed, nor me to roll over on her. For the first time in a month, I got some sleep. Renee was a lovely baby and slept through the night, so there was nothing to interrupt my slumber.

Until there was.

One night, my phone rang. It didn't just ring, it went bing as though the Snoozy monitor were alerting me. I sat up with a start, and verified that Renee was still breathing. Then I looked at my phone with suspicion knowing full well that I had turned off the camera two weeks earlier, and had put it back into its original box and stowed it in the linen closet.

I crept out of bed and examined the apartment. I even looked in the linen closet, inside that box to make sure the camera was in it.

There was nothing amiss. All the while, Snoozy's notification went bing every 15 seconds or so on my Smartphone.

And so, I turned off my phone, and gently set it back down upon the night stand. I stared at it for a while, as though it might come to life and murder me. My heart pounded, my breath was short... I just didn't want to know what the bloody thing had in store for me. And somehow, now that it seemingly couldn't make any more noise, it was even more threatening.

After about five minutes, I decided to lie down again. I shut my eyes, but I did not sleep.

And surely enough, my Smartphone shook to life again, going through the whole boot-up process, making all of the "hello, I'm your Smartphone" noises the manufacturer and service carrier had installed. I watched it with my eyes wide and horrified, wondering if I would reach out for it once it was finished mysteriously restarting.

And I did reach out for it, because the Snoozy bing began again immediately, as soon as the startup sequence had finished.

I cursed, grabbed the phone and ran out the front door.

My apartment was on the fifth floor. Outside my door, there was a long balcony that led to more apartments in either direction. For about ten seconds I held my phone over the balcony's rail while the bing sounded, ready to drop it onto the concrete walkway below.

But I had this deep, horrible feeling that if I did that, then went back to my bedroom, I'd find it lying on the night stand again intact and still binging at me. The only way to find out what the hell was going on was to - damn it - answer it.

I stepped back inside and shut the door, took a deep breath and a gulp, reminded myself, for some reason, that there was a baseball bat in the coat closet five feet away from me, and swiped the screen.

The face of a man appeared in the video display. I gasped with a start.

"Good, good," he said. "'Bout time you answered. Hello Melissa."

The whole situation was just so appalling. The camera was disconnected, in a box in a closet, and yet the notifications sounded. The phone had been turned off, and had come back on by itself. There was now a man on my baby monitor talking directly to me. And he knew my birth name. No one knew my birth name, except my father... and this was not my father.

And with this myriad of terrifying bizarreness, all I could think to say was, "M-my name is Zoë Westhaven."

He laughed. "Please. You don't believe that any more than I do. Any more than you believe your name is Alice Sangster. Or Alice Carter."

He gave me an indulgent little smile, and as it turned out, he had quite a warm one. The man was, I would guess, about sixty, with a long face. Truth be told, he looked a lot like John Frobisher, the former Permanent Secretary to the Home Office in Britain. But according to unofficial channels, Mr. Frobisher had committed a triple murder/suicide during the same intergalactic debacle that had led to Steven's death.

Except, Frobisher had always seemed frightened to me, always looked as though his head might explode at any moment. This man was calm, a right sight more in-control - and more Scottish - than Frobisher. And his hair was more unruly.

But when our eyes see things we can't make sense of, we will grasp at anything in order to make any kind of sense. Basic human nature. So I couldn't help but ask, "Mr. Frobisher?"

"What? No, Melissa, I'm a friend of your father's."

"So was Frobisher."

"No, he wasn't. That man was never on your father's side. Besides, he's dead. Very dead."

"I heard."

"Listen, I'm sorry if I've frightened you," he said. "Frankly, you look like you've been put through the wringer."

"Yeah, well, having my..."

"...phone come to life unbidden and notifications from a camera that's been turned off... make one a bit jumpy, does it?"

"Yes. To say the least. Is my father behind all of this?"

"No. He's nothing to do with any of it." He sounded certain, steady.

"So it was all you? Mr. Not-Frobisher?"

"Just this part. Just tonight."

"What about all that other rubbish that was appearing on the monitor?"

"You won't have to worry about it anymore. I've sorted it."

"Sorted it how?"

"It doesn't matter."

"The hell it doesn't!"

"Listen, Melissa. All you need to know is that for now, Renee is not in any danger."

"Don't call me Melissa. And how do you know my daughter's name?"

"The same way I know yours. I'm a friend of your father's, remember?"

"He's been keeping tabs on me?" I spoke timidly, afraid he would say yes, but also that he might say no.

"Come on now, you know better than that."

I sighed. I knew what he meant. The fact that he was a friend of my father's meant that he had access to information and technology that would turn me pale if I knew the full extent. He had ways of finding things out, and for me to ask questions wouldn't do any good. I had heard this same sort of song and dance from Dad, dozens of times.

"Fine," I said. "So you've sorted it. What does that mean for me and my daughter?"

"Nothing," he told me. "Except that you can go back to life the way it was before. The fact that you've turned off the monitor tells me that you've probably started sleeping in the same room with her. You don't have to do that anymore, unless you want to. She's fine. Turn the monitor back on, put the baby back in her crib, get some sleep. You won't see the phantoms on the screen ever again."

"Okay. What was all of that?"

"Best that you not know."

I tutted in exasperation. "You definitely must be a friend of my father's."

"Melissa, if he's ever told you that he's withholding information to protect you, he was telling you the truth. All that rubbish he couldn't say, you were better off not knowing."

"Not condescending at all."

"Well, as you like. But it's the truth. Just go live your life, love."

"Fine, whatever. Thanks, I think." I pouted like a child. I pouted like a woman in the dark, with no reason to trust the man on what should be a dead screen.

"You're welcome," he said earnestly.

"Who are you? Can I get in touch with you?"

He sighed. "Who I am doesn't matter. And if you need to find me, contact UNIT."

"Those bastards? I don't trust them as far as I could throw them!"

"Well... that's probably good. But they know how to find me. Sort of. They know how to find other people who know how to find me. Tell them you have security clearance Blue Sky."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you know the code word that will make them hop-to, and find me."

"Is that the truth?"

"Everything I've told you has been the truth. I don't lie to people. Unless it will save their lives."

"Just omit the truth?"

"Oh, yeah, I do that plenty."

"Fantastic."

"But I don't want you to go invoking Blue Sky unless it's an emergency. If those things on the screen come back, if..."

"Yeah, yeah," I said with tedium. "Captain Jack Harkness is my father. I know what sorts of things go bump in the night."

"I'll just bet you do."