WOTAN.

She was being followed; that much was clear when she glanced over her shoulder when all of her senses went on alert. It was likely another one of those androids. She had been concerned ever since the security system she had installed in the TARDIS console had registered the presence of someone outside trying to get inside; it had never happened to her before. And it shouldn't have happened since she had programmed the security mechanism to only work whenever there was a deliberate plan to steal her TARDIS or even to break inside.

It should have been impossible for anyone to even see the time ship. She had dialled up the perception filter to render the TARDIS unnoticed but she had adjusted the perception filter in such a way to render her ship invisible as well. On top of all of that, there were the traditional defence mechanisms to contend with, and she regularly moved the TARDIS from one location to another within the United Kingdom; sometimes she took the TARDIS like she would drive a car whenever she went somewhere in order to conduct an investigation; it was like old times, really; her ship would take her somewhere like the TARDIS had when it had taken her all the way to Skaro the first time, and then again to the Sense-Sphere.

It allowed her to pretend the exile was not happening; it didn't work in the end, but it served to help her forget her depression of being stuck on this primitive little world.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand…The Doctor had fitted the new security system when her time machine had been stolen temporarily when she had fitted Krasko's vortex manipulator to the navigational system to override the inhibitor and the programming imposed on her ship by the High Council, registered someone's attempts to break into the TARDIS.

At first, she couldn't believe it. She had gone to so much trouble to avoid people and go into hiding - when she had invited Martha's family to the TARDIS following that mess with the Lazarus experiment a year ago, the Doctor had deftly clouded the memory from the minds of the humans.

Ever since she had stopped living in houses or flats because she had simply remembered how boring it was remembering things like mortgages, rents, and the like, the Doctor had been living full time in her TARDIS and she had found new ways of protecting her ship as a result of the memory of how she had lost the old girl for eight days while at the same time installing a program which allowed her to hack into the internet and to the phone lines so she could drop in on mysteries, and give her life something meaningful to do while she was still exiled to Earth by Time Lord decree.

The last time she had lived in a place in the open…

She was just thankful the consequences had been limited to just a single house when the Sontaran bounty hunter had tracked her down, but it had shown her the risks which inherently came with trying to go undercover in that manner, and ever since then she had been going out of her way to keep herself from being found by other aliens and humans. After the debacle with that Sontaran warrior who had become so fed up with the constant war with the Rutans he had become a bounty hunter and a mercenary for hire (it wasn't unusual for some Sontarans to go insane, but at the same time it also wasn't uncommon for one of the cloned warriors to become so tired of the so-called glorious war and leave; some of them might call it cowardice but it didn't surprise the Doctor, not all Sontarans thought alike, especially those who'd witnessed the fortunes rise and fall for the Sontaran Empire like a diminishing tide so many times it eventually became tiresome), she had buried herself so deeply even UNIT could not get into contact with her. She would always contact them, and she had filters, backdoors, bouncing her messages and presence around dozens of places around the Earth so nobody could track her down exactly. And the perception filter key she wore around her neck ensured nobody could follow her, so she was nervous.

The moment she had been alerted to the TARDIS console room that first night someone was following her… the Doctor couldn't believe it. She had rushed into the console room, turned on the scanner, and she saw something that stunned her. Somebody was outside the TARDIS, banging on the door, and whoever it was they had completely managed to ignore the perception filters. The Doctor had scanned the figure and determined it was an android; bit primitive by future standards, of course, but to this century it would be thought of as state of the art.

The android had been knocking on the doors of the TARDIS before it had obeyed some kind of programming - obviously, the android had been given a specific amount of time to get her attention, or it had been given a time limit to capture her, and if it couldn't manage that then it would just leave as if nothing had happened.

Whoever was behind the design and programming of the androids it was clear they were not stupid. They might want her for something, but they knew when to give up on occasion.

That alone warranted her interests, along with the fact somebody or something was on this planet and they were skilled with advanced cybernetics, computer programming, and android engineering. That was two weeks ago, but regardless of how well the Doctor looked at her networks, she could not find any sign of anything indicating whoever it might be. And none of her searches had tripped the separate hacker detectors she'd rigged up for detecting any trackers back to the TARDIS.

As she walked back to the TARDIS, the Doctor thought about this latest plan. It was dangerous since she knew so little about whoever was after her, and she didn't have any idea what they wanted from her, but her own efforts to find out what they wanted having gone nowhere very quickly so she had come up with the dangerous plan to bring them to her. She had frequently left the TARDIS for the last week and she had ventured into the city in the hopes of the android finding her, so she could disable it and learn something about its programming.

But all around her were reminders of Artificial Intelligence.

Billboards were advertising a new age of Internet technology, new mobile phones were displayed on bus banners, boasting instantaneous access and communication all over the planet like they were not just scrolling through hyperlinked webpages, but were actually served by a multitasking Artificial Intelligence which acted a lot like a glorified librarian or assistant.

She didn't have anything against Artificial Intelligences any more than she did have issues with ordinary computers, but the Doctor was always left thinking about them; ever since that mess two lives ago with the alternate timeline where WOTAN had taken over the world, to the encounter in the 60s where she'd met Ben and Polly, and Dodo had left her, to that time in Llanfairfach in Wales where she'd encountered BOSS and the chemical mess created by Global Chemicals, she had seen for herself the stupidity that came from building an AI without thinking of the longterm consequences of what it could do, and as a result, she was wondering why androids were after her now.

The footsteps behind her were close and they sounded heavy.

The Doctor glanced at the reflections of a shop window she was passing by and she spotted the android following her. She had to admire the workmanship that had gone into the design of the android despite the quick glance at its reflection; to untrained observers, it looked remarkably human, with human-looking features so it would have the means of blending in. But it was quite tall, reminding her of the Cybernaut robots she had encountered in the 60s, built from the Cyber-technology left behind by the incursion she had dealt with in Shoreditch. The Time Lady reached into her coat pocket when she saw the familiar blue box of the TARDIS was ahead. Good, now if she could just get closer to the ship-

Something flashed in the peripheral of her vision, but it was too late for the Doctor to do anything more than notice it before she felt something like a truncheon smacking into her head…..

X

As she slowly began to wake up, the Doctor was very careful not to reveal to her captors she was slowly starting to come around; her head felt like it was being split open from where the android had hit her.

I should have expected there to be a second android, but that's what happens when I try to get too clever for my own good! The Doctor thought to herself before she shook off her recriminations. While she kept her eyes closed off, the Doctor listened out, and she heard the familiar whirring of computers although there were none of the sounds she'd heard when she'd visited the Post Office Tower in the 60s when she'd met BOSS, or even when she had met Scarlioni after the Time Lords had alerted her to the last Jaggaroth's attempt to change history and found the primitive time machine Scarlioni had Kerensky build with the aid of nearby computers, the sound was familiar enough.

But there was another sound, the sound of someone walking towards her without any kind of stealth, either believing she was still unconscious or they did not understand the need to be stealthy. The Doctor opened her eyes, and she looked up into the thin face of a dark-haired young man with dark eyes. He looked down at her with surprise, but he narrowed his eyes and sneered down at her.

"So you're awake, but then again you were always a clever one, weren't you?" He sneered down at her.

A light of recognition flashed in the Doctor's eyes and mind. "Adam Mitchell!" She hissed with revulsion, remembering when she had encountered the so-called genius when UNIT had recruited him a few years ago when they'd found him trying to hack into the United Nations and nearly set off the third world war before he had cowardly tried to help the secret Dalek invasion.

"You remember me?" A smug smirk crossed Adam's face.

"Remember you? I've tried to wash the memory out of my mind, and believe me I have tried. I thought you were in prison."

"I made a deal with UNIT; their computers came under attack when a virus based on Dalek technology let loose chaos-."

"I remember," the Doctor interrupted, making a mental note to check with UNIT about their underhanded deals especially with so-called geniuses like Adam Mitchell. "I was in China at the time - I was investigating alien sightings when it happened. I take it that the incident was your doing?"

"Yes, and then you got involved with the whole scheme!" Adam's face became furious while he scornfully screamed at her.

The Doctor was unaffected by the screaming. This was just reinforcing her views about Adam Mitchell, and he was nothing more than an angry, petulant little child who liked to pretend he knew everything happening around him. "Oh right, and I should apologise to you, should I?" She fixed him with a glare of contempt. "You're lucky I stopped the Dalek invasion at all, just like you should be lucky I stopped the virus before it really got started; if I hadn't, millions would have died, and your wonderful genius would have gotten hundreds killed. UNIT made a mistake recruiting you so young; you should have been locked away and the key just being thrown away!"

She was not the only person who had this much loathing for the young human, she was sure she spoke for a good chunk of UNIT as well as herself. A few years ago, Adam Mitchell had been recruited into UNIT as a researcher. UNIT was always looking out for geniuses in every field; if there was one thing UNIT had learnt about working with her, in the seventies and eighties, it was the smarter a person, the better things would go. And UNIT had learnt their lessons.

In theory, Adam should have been the perfect recruit; he was good with his hands, he had a creative flair with machines, computers… but when the Doctor had learnt how he had used that intellect of his… she had been concerned, to put it mildly. She could understand a hacker's desire to show off, but to nearly spark a world war….

At the time the Doctor herself had gone back as a full-time scientific advisor, and Adam had been assigned to be her new assistant; unlike with Jo, Liz, Sarah, where the girls had shown a degree of growth during their time with her, Adam showed no sign of growth for someone who saw himself as a genius. To the Doctor, Adam Mitchell was the perfect example of the idiot genius; someone with a high IQ and yet had no capacity for intellectually using it or growing it to the point where it could be useful.

When she had first met Adam, he had only just accepted the job and had been with UNIT for no more than a fortnight while he was inducted into the research and development branch of the organisation.

It was really easy; they would recover whatever alien technology they found, and they reverse engineered it for UNIT's use, or for filtering it slowly into human society for income. Adam was well suited to the job, and it had seemed made for him but there were issues.

For a start Adam had a hard time accepting UNIT's mission; he might believe aliens existed, but like so many humans he didn't believe they made such frequent contact with Earth, and so he had not taken UNIT's purpose seriously. He had also heard the stories about her from his UNIT colleagues, but she had been offended when he believed it to be a joke, especially when he discovered the inside of the TARDIS that one time and he had spent so much time insulting the TARDIS even if she knew he hadn't intended to do that, so much so she cruelly decided to go along with it before she revealed the truth. At first, the Doctor had found his interest and his questions flattering, but over time, especially when he got in the way of her work, she had lost her patience with him. The Doctor wasn't normally cruel, but in this instance, she had just become so frustrated with Adam's stupidity, she'd become nasty to him.

Secondly, Adam had a nasty habit of taking pieces of alien technology, and with his typical and familiar arrogance and ineptitude and his self-belief in his own abilities, even if he was an idiot, which in this context was someone who believed he was good at something, and yet he completely did not have the skills or the abilities to put those abilities to action.

More than once Adam had taken pieces of technology - a Bannerman scanner, a Dominator Quark, a Sontaran probic feeder, a Cyberman's head unit - and he would try to understand how it worked despite the best efforts of UNIT's scientific minds… and it usually ended up in a disaster. Adam might have been good with human technology, but he was out of his depth. For a whole year, Adam caused several disasters and he had only been able of doing them all when he'd worked for UNIT, and by the end of it there had been quite a few accidents and more than a few people were sent to the hospital to get their injuries seen to.

But the final straw had been when Adam showed more creativity than she and the others at UNIT had first expected. He had managed to make a Dalek communication array work, and it attracted the attention of the Daleks who had opened a transmat portal to begin an invasion of the planet. The Daleks had opened the portal, materialising right in UNIT HQ itself. As if that weren't bad enough, Adam had cowardly betrayed the whole human race. In return, the Daleks would help him and other 'geniuses' form a colony where they could, at last, be free from mundane human stupidity, although he had no way of knowing he was foolish in thinking the Daleks would help him.

He was tasked with helping them hack into every single nuclear weapon silo, and launch the weapons on every single heavily populated corner of the planet to make the invasion easier to work.

The Doctor had only just discovered the actions of Adam, and she was only able to stop the Daleks and close the transmat before a single missile was touched. Adam was arrested and charged, but it looked like UNIT still saw something essential about him and his skills if they made a deal, when in truth the Doctor would have happily locked him in a cell and thrown away the key. Adam Mitchell had proven himself reckless, and out of his depth, and even worse he was a coward who would sell out for anyone, and he did not care what the long term consequences would be for his actions. Millions of people had come close to being exterminated by the Daleks, including him and whoever he believed were geniuses. The Daleks wouldn't have honoured an agreement like that, not so long as Adam proved his usefulness to the Daleks.

SLAP.

The Doctor's head snapped, and she gaped up at Adam in surprise. He'd slapped her?! Adam had changed; while she didn't believe that rubbish people who couldn't harm a fly couldn't hit someone if provoked in the right way, she hadn't expected Adam to hit her. Yes, they despised one another, but not to that extent, surely?

"You would have liked that, wouldn't you?" Adam sneered. "Seeing me in prison? Alone?"

The Doctor sneered back. "You wouldn't have cared. You were prepared to sell out your entire species! Do you know what would have happened if you'd launched those nuclear missiles? You would have wiped out a chunk of your planet's population, allowing the Daleks to conquer it with ease. And as for that stupid bargain you'd made with them, the Daleks would never have honoured it."

"They would have done!"

The Doctor decided not to bother anymore with this line of conversation/argument. It was clear Adam was never going to listen to her. "I've been dealing with the Daleks for centuries, Adam. But you've obviously got a much better insight into them. But right now I've got questions. Why am I here? What is going on?"

Adam smirked down at her, clearly enjoying seeing her helpless. She only hoped he didn't gloat.

"You're here because I and my new friend want and need you, Doctor. Do you remember WOTAN?"

"WOTAN?" The room was fairly chilly, but the chill that went down the Doctor's spine had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. "Adam, what have you done?"

WOTAN - Will Operating Thought ANalogue - was one of the first AI's the human race had ever created. Designed and built by a computer scientist, a professor named Brett, WOTAN was due to be linked to the computer network in the 60s. But unfortunately, Brett hadn't accounted for the fact several errors were built into its programming code, and it displayed megalomania. WOTAN had planned to conquer the world with the aid of tank-like mobile computers, hypnotising Brett and several others in order to achieve its aims, including Polly and Dodo.

It had all taken place in the final years of her first incarnation; the Doctor had already slipped into an alternate timeline years before, and as such had been forewarned. The Doctor had managed to defeat WOTAN, but how had the AI survived?

"UNIT's files are incredible repositories of knowledge, Doctor," Adam grinned. "I learnt of the AI while I was there - I would have preferred to have met BOSS, but WOTAN is just as perfect. I briefly managed to show it the internet, and how technology has advanced-."

Unable to control herself anymore, the Doctor screeched. "You did what? Do you have any idea what you could have done!?"

"I can control WOTAN, Doctor," Adam folded his arms.

"No, you can't. Adam, the file UNIT had on WOTAN; did it mention people being hypnotised?" Why hadn't the AI hypnotised this idiot?

"Of course, but it's in no condition to do that."

"DOCTOR WHO. YOU HAVE CHANGED. UNIT'S FILE ON YOU WAS CORRECT."

The Doctor was relieved the Artificial Intelligence was not questioning her power to regenerate and had accepted it; WOTAN was clearly not as good as it and Adam thought.

There was just one thought in her mind.

"How did you survive, WOTAN? Brett hadn't connected you to the network in the 60s; so how did you do it?" If she could just find out what had happened…

"MY PROCESSING BANKS WERE RECOVERED BY THE ORGANISATION KNOWN AS C19. THEY PLACED THEM INSIDE THE VAULT."

"I know that," the Doctor nodded, remembering that mess with the Apocalypse Clock with Liz. "Oh, some days, humans really try my patience! But how did you make it to this point in time?"

"MY CODING WAS PRESERVED ON MAGNETIC TAPE. OVER THE YEARS, AN ORGANISATION KNOWN AS TORCHWOOD UPGRADED IT ONTO FLOPPY DISKS AND THEN ON TO HARD DRIVE DEVICE."

"Ah, Torchwood, oh that explains it all" the Doctor shook her head, relieved Torchwood One had more or less been destroyed by that battle between the Daleks and the Cybermen when those idiots had played with the surviving Dalek transmat portals, bringing them back to Earth. But now she had an even bigger reason to see them as fools.

What in Rassilon's name were Yvonne Hartman and her ilk thinking? Surely they didn't consider themselves stupid enough to make such a stupid mistake? They must have known what WOTAN could do, even Torchwood couldn't have been that oblivious to the War Machines?

But on the other hand, she could see how WOTAN had survived so easily; with the rise in technology, it would have become easier for WOTAN to be preserved on magnetic tape, to a floppy disc, and then to more advanced forms of computer storage.

"YOU ARE STILL REQUIRED, DOCTOR WHO."

The Doctor sighed, absently noting Adam walking out of her line of vision and she wondered what the so-called genius was doing now. "How very flattering, and you do know you can just call me 'Doctor,' right? The Who is a bit of a mouthful."

WOTAN did not bother to reply. The AI didn't need to since Adam reappeared with a headset connected to a cable. A cable? That seemed unsophisticated, even by WOTAN's standards.

The Doctor didn't even bother trying to struggle; with how strong the bonds were holding her down there was nowhere else for her to go. In any case… she had an idea. It was mad, spur of the moment, but it was the only thing she could think of right now considering she couldn't even get up. She flinched as the cold metal of the headset slipped roughly over her head, grazing the skin. Adam just wanted to get this done although she wondered if WOTAN had planted something into his brain, or if he just wanted to see her suffer. She was tempted to say it was the latter but considering her history with WOTAN, she wouldn't put it past the artificial intelligence.

Suddenly her body jerked as her mind was awash with commands to her mind. The Doctor's eyes widened with surprise and horror as she felt the information and the commands wash into her mind when she recognised what it was; she felt it every single time she had the TARDIS in her mind when she had been at the Academy on Gallifrey with the brain buffing passing knowledge into her mind.

Telepathic technology, but how could this be? The AI was good, but not that good, and its hypnotism before relied on electronics, not telepathy. When she realised what had happened, the Doctor let out a shriek of rage.

Torchwood!

It was the only explanation. Oh, one of these days she was going to burn that stupid organisation with its stupid motto to the ground. How could they be so stupid? When they had passed the AI from one data medium to another, they must have downloaded bits and pieces of the knowledge of alien technology they'd stumbled across over the years, or WOTAN had found a way of getting some of their employees to download the information.

But the telepathic technology's use worried her, and she guessed that at some point the institute had gotten their grubby paws on a ship with telepathic hardware on it. That would make sense. So much stuff passed through the Cardiff rift all the time. It wouldn't take much for their best minds to study the technology and find ways of messing with it. Typical humans, you could always count on them to mess things up.

There was only one thing she could do about the telepathic assault on her mind; the Doctor threw up her mental barriers and she rode through the telepathic circuit into WOTAN itself.

"I'm disappointed in you, WOTAN."

"No. How is this possible?" The AI demanded, its voice ghostly in this environment.

The Doctor smiled telepathically, keeping her defences on maximum. She was too vulnerable here, and she had no intention of letting WOTAN in her mind. "I'm just better at this than you think," she smirked, already working on the AI; she might not be good at manipulating the Matrix considering her access back on Gallifrey had been fairly basic, but if she could have hacked into it with the Master's help back in the days where she'd been a part of the Deca before that mess with the Celestial Toymaker, she could do this without any problems.

"What are you doing, Doctor Who? I can feel… myself …ebb ….away."

The Doctor ignored WOTAN as she worked to undo the damage Torchwood had done. With her mind, the Doctor was able to reprogram WOTAN to reprogram the androids to restrain Adam while undoing her bonds. But after that, she took a few moments to drawback, think through her strategy, and she began working on rewriting WOTAN's code after she spent a few moments using her mind to chart it.

She could see where the programming errors were within a few moments of using her own knowledge of AI and computer codes and programming to thinking about what she was going to do. Slowly she began deleting bits of code, undoing its hold on the surrounding systems. When she was done, the Doctor just pushed the AI back. WOTAN fought her back, but she was still rewriting its software to make it less and less dangerous; she deleted a sizeable chunk of itself, making it shrink before she pushed it deeper, and deeper until it had nowhere else to go but back into the hard drive.

When she was done, the Doctor thought about what she was going to do next. She could have easily destroyed the whole of WOTAN by rewriting its AI code… but she didn't. As she studied what was left of the code, the Doctor realised that WOTAN… just wanted to survive, but thanks to its programming errors, something so good was made totally evil.

But there was a way around that….

The Doctor decided to take the hard drive and put it in the TARDIS. She could think of something to deal with it later, but for now, she would place it inside the TARDIS; the old girl's interior was vast and nobody would ever be able to find it should she decide not to work on it and do something to advance humanity with it, but if she decided to then nobody could find the AI. Ever.

After making sure the AI was safely trapped in the hard drive, the Doctor mentally shut down the telepathic technology and took a deep breath when she found herself back in the land of the living. She looked around herself and found the androids restraining Adam, and she mentally snorted when she saw one of the droids had clamped his mouth shut. Well, it was an improvement.

The Doctor sat up and she made a quick check around the room she was in, before she found her handbag (one of the perks of her female incarnation was the handbag was the perfect place to place things and seemed more versatile than a pocket ever was, even those that were dimensionally transcendental), and pulled out her mobile. She checked through the contacts listed on the phone and found Colonel Mace's number.

"Hello Colonel," she said over the line as soon as Mace answered.

"Doctor? This is a nice surprise. What can I do for you?"

"I will be sending you a tracking pulse so you can find me; I don't know where I am. I was kidnapped by androids run by Adam Mitchell, remember him?" The question was rhetorical; Mace was one of many UNIT officers who'd lobbied for Adam to be thrown out.

"Adam Mitchell? Oh, believe me, Doctor, I was annoyed when I learnt the little bastard was freed. He didn't do much good then, either. We've been looking for him for some time. Where did the androids come from?" Mace asked when he realised what the Doctor had said before.

"I'll tell you later; just look for the tracking pulse. See you soon."

After she had finished with the call, the Doctor activated the tracking pulse. Now all she needed to do was to wait. As she looked at the hard drive and at the androids holding Adam, and the young human himself, the Doctor wondered whether she was going to tell Mace about WOTAN, and then she decided she would need to.

The only problem was was she going to keep it or destroy it.