Proposal 
This
is the original outline for the short story “Moving On” that I submitted to the
editors at Virgin.
YESTERDAY: “She hated Scott Wojzek.
She hated his mean self interest, his Lotus Esprit, his easy familiarity with
the secretarial staff. She hated his phoney sincerity and long lunches. She
hated his male pattern baldness. And she had no guilt when she felt the same
after he’d died in a traffic accident. So when she saw him walking towards her
across Kensington High Street, she knew at once what had been happening to her
for the past eight weeks.”
TWO
MONTHS AGO: Sarah Jane Smith is sitting in her study at home,
staring gloomily into a drawer which contains her unfinished novel. She has
been features editor on Metropolitan now for a few years, having re-established
herself on the magazine Metropolitan since she left the TARDIS. (She tells her
colleagues that she went away to research her novel - she is always evasive
about what she was actually doing over the missing time, though she jokes that
returning to work has “brought her down to Earth with a bump”. )
Sarah’s
day doesn’t start well. She sees that she’s getting grey hairs, and remembers
some things her Aunt Lavinia said about middle-aged women. She discusses some
of these on the phone with her oldest girlfriend, college contemporary Katy
Pickering, as they are planning a lunch date. Talking to Katy always makes her
feel guilty that her house is such a mess, so afterwards she tidies up -
finding a toy dinosaur left by her editor’s toddler son the previous day. She
puts it in her handbag, so that she can return it.
K-9’s
has become increasingly erratic lately. Never very adept technically, Sarah
feels even more lost than before she went away - electronic gadgets seem to
have sprung up for everything, and she has barely mastered the microwave, let
alone robot diagnostics. She struggles to replace K-9’s tickertape, and doesn’t
understand the “on-line documentation” that K-9 displays on his monitor, and is
starting to realise that K-9 is slowly falling to pieces. (Brendan is no help -
he’s at University.)
Meantime
at work, her editor has asked her to write an article on new technologies, and
their effect on traditional working life. Rather than struggle with concepts
like e-mail, desktop publishing, and office software suites, Sarah has turned
the idea around and is going to write about the work and family lives of new
technologists in Britain. She has identified three people: a typesetter, coming
to terms with changes in his industry; the international sales manager of a
plush toy company, who talks to her clients and her family with a
videoconferencing system; and Scott Wojzek, the young director of an IT company
called Tonska, which is developing new communications technologies.
After
only one brief telephone conversation with Wojzek, Sarah decides she dislikes
him. She arranges an interview with him in his London offices, and suffers
several indignities with video cameras and badge-locked doors before getting to
Wojzek’s office. There, he doesn’t endear himself to her any further: “Inside
every thin woman journalist, there’s a fat book struggling to get out” he
declares at one stage. “Invariably, that’s where it should stay.” Does he enjoy
his position of control and autonomy in the business? “Do bears shit in the
woods?” he retorts.
However,
he gives her a demonstration of some of Tonska’s technology, including desktop
conferencing, video telephony, three-dimensional imaging, and remote control of
robots with virtual reality technology. Sarah tries the robot controller, and
is impressed technically - but she can’t help feeling that everything is
designed to eliminate human contact rather than facilitate real communication.
She declines Wojzek’s lunch invitation, but he insists on showing her out of
the offices and to her car in the company car park (also deserted). He helps
her into her car, guiding the back of her head patronisingly so that she
doesn’t bump it on the door. Sarah reacts as though stung. Wojzek meanders off
at once, Sarah assuming he can’t believe that his clumsy pass failed.
Sarah gets into her car, and drives around the block. Everywhere seems
deserted. She drives around the city for a while, and sees no traffic, no
people... Eventually, she drives back towards Tonska’s offices, and parks on a
double yellow line in Tottenham Court Road, looking around in disbelief. A
shattering roar from above one of the buildings makes her look up - it’s a
tyrannosaurus rex. She freezes as it sniffs the air. A voice behind Sarah says:
“Oi lady, you can’t leave it there.” She turns her head and sees a traffic
warden pointing at her car. Tottenham Court Road is full of people and noise
again.
Sarah
promises to move her car at once. There is a commotion at the end of the
street, and she sees that someone has been run over by a bus. She investigates,
and sees it is Wojzek, who is plainly dead. It seems that he just threw himself
out of an office window into the street.
Sarah
takes her keys from her handbag to get back into her untidy car - and finds the
toy dinosaur she put there earlier. She sits there, shaken, for a long time.
Back to top
LAST MONTH: Sarah is struggling with the fuse box in her house. She also
worries about her cordless kettle, pre-fitted plugs, her grotty old toaster.
Her vacuum cleaner is so old, they’ve stopped making parts for it. She realises
that the problem with K-9, however, is that they haven’t started making parts
for him. Her laptop seem to be on the blink - she thinks it may be a computer
virus, though it could also be that she accidentally trashed her system files
last week (she leaves all the system stuff to the tech boys in the office).
When she switches on her TV, though, the same pattern of interference appears
there too.
She
feels absolutely exhausted, despite a week of early nights. Nevertheless, she
goes to lunch with Katy Pickering, who has started working for breakfast
television and now has a fund of irreverent stories about her more famous
colleagues. Katy’s life has changed around - she has put off having children,
she has broken up with her trade press boyfriend, and is starting to question
whether she’s given up too much for her career. The two women rate the men in
the restaurant, as they used to when they were cub reporters. “What a dire
bunch,” says Katy, just a bit too loudly for Sarah’s comfort. “Not one of them
above a 7.” They discuss their ideal men, and Katy teases her that Sarah’s
dream man - intelligent, mature, someone she could learn from and talk with -
might as well be her father. Or her college tutor.
Katy
is still as obsessive about tidiness as ever, to Sarah’s amusement. Sarah goes
round to her flat, and threatens to rearrange everything in her cupboards while
she is out of the room. “I know you’re joking, Sarah. And I’d laugh myself if I
didn’t know that, this evening, I won’t be able to stop myself checking every
cupboard - just in case...” Sarah realises that she’s obsessive about some
things, as Katy points out - “you never talk much about your time away, Sarah.”
Sarah
talks instead about the article she has just published about IT, and the
mystery of Wojzek’s sudden death. Through press contacts, she has spoken with
the dead man’s brother and widowed mother. They explain that Wojzek’s business
partner, Kendrick, died in similarly bizarre circumstances, and that Wojzek
hadn’t been the same person some months after that. The business partner was
the one who had brought him some of his leading technological innovations -
including the robotics and imaging technology. Wojzek had, unexpectedly, cut
off all contact with his family and friends a year ago; they had only learned
about the death of this once-popular and gregarious young man through the
police or the press. “Work changes you,” Katy suggests.
Back
at home, Sarah walks into her living room and sees Brendan opening a box - it
is the box that K-9 was delivered in. Sarah relives the experience of seeing
K-9 for the first time again, and also the mixed emotions - the Doctor did
remember, but this is a parting gift with all that such a present entails. She
asks Brendan a question, but only K-9 answers - and she realises that she has
been daydreaming.
LAST
WEEK: Sarah has just returned from a business trip
abroad, feeling greatly refreshed . Things have changed almost imperceptibly
since she went away - the temperature, the latest silly season story in the
papers, the Top Ten. Her editor, Jane Highsmith, has dropped in to see her at
home in the evening. Sarah is fascinated by her editor’s flexible working
pattern - working from the office, or from her car, or from home. Sarah ponders
how people’s attitudes and behaviours changed while she was away - whether it’s
their work patterns, or their dress sense, or their personal aspirations, or
their views on the weather. How did she change? Other people had moved on, but
had she? She had tried to slot back into her old life, but her old life no
longer existed. Others had changed slowly, even if they hadn’t wanted too - or
even realising that they didn’t want to.
Jane
and Sarah discuss personnel changes at Metropolitan. Sarah says that she has
been thinking about her own future. Jane asks her about her novel - telling
Sarah the sort of bonkbuster she should be writing, and how Metropolitan could
serialise it.
Jane
connects her laptop to her mobile phone, and tries to link through to the
office. She and Sarah see the sort of interference that Sarah saw previously.
Sarah also remembers that her neighbours were complaining about their TV
reception. Sarah asks K-9 whether he can account for the problem, but he is
strangely evasive. The interference seems to have cleared, however, so Jane
connects to the office, and has a video conference with Scott Wojzek. Sarah
doesn’t want to be involved, so she goes out into the garden...
...but
instead of stepping onto her back lawn, she is on a suburban high street. She
turns to look at her back door, and sees instead the TARDIS fading away. The
Doctor has just left her on Earth before returning to Gallifrey - and has not
even got her back to South Croydon. All the old feelings of abandonment and
loss well up in her. It starts to rain, and she is completely lost. She meets a
stranger in the street, who guides her to a bus stop where she can catch the
right bus home. She hasn’t got the money, but he gives her some change.
Sarah goes upstairs on the bus, but realises that it isn’t raining on the top
deck - even though it is raining on the bottom deck. She rushes downstairs to
check - yes, water is pouring down the windows. She goes to the driver - it is
the same person who guided her to the bus. A woman behind her says “Hello?” as
though she wants to step past. Sarah turns to see Jane Highsmith looking at her
strangely from her own back doorstep. She is back in her own garden.
LAST
WEDNESDAY: Sarah has been taking a few days off work, at
Jane’s suggestion. She has started to file tired and wretched again. She tries
to write some of her novel, scanning through it. Then she throws it in the bin
- it’s the kind of book her editor wants her to write, not the kind of book she
wants to write herself.
She starts to delete files on her computer, but it switches off. A house fuse
has blown, so she takes a torch and goes down into the cellar with a torch to
fix it. She gets to the bottom of the cellar steps and hears a hoarse breathing
sound behind her. She whirls around, but drops the torch which switches off. In
the darkness, she realises that...
...she is blind, and back on Karn. Sarah is terrified and alone in her worst
memory. She stumbles across her nightmare landscape to the Sisterhood, where
she asks them where the Doctor is. They tell her that the Doctor has already
left the planet. She realises something is amiss when one of the sisterhood
uses an Earth colloquialism: “Does the Pope wear a pointy hat?”. At this point,
whatever Sarah has been holding in her hands turns out to be a torch, which
snaps on to reveal she is back in her cellar.
YESTERDAY:
Sarah recognises the electrical interference is coming from K-9 intermittently.
She discusses problems with him - he confesses that he is suffering irreparable
damage. She challenges K-9 about the problems. And the signal he’s emitting.
K-9 won’t tell her, and only says that off-world technology can save him.
She meets Wojzek in the street (as at the start of the story), and she
recognises his involvement in her recent dreams. Is this a dream? She
reluctantly goes with him to a coffee shop. She notices that the same people
appear to be wandering past the shop window, as though on a loop of film.
The
creature talking to her now is an alien from a race called the Tonska. He knows
that she is a friend of the Doctor, whose technological intervention in the
previous Decalog story caused the Wojzek creature to be trapped on Earth.
Wojzek has been trying to escape, using what little technology was available on
Earth today. By adapting leading edge technology, he was able to attract the brightest
and best minds to come to him. He scanned their minds with the virtual reality
machinery, and then used their knowledge to develop further technologies. When
by chance Sarah came to him, he discovered to his great surprise that she knew
the Doctor, and owned some advanced technology in the form of K-9. The computer
could help him escape from Earth.
The
alien wants Sarah to get K-9 to help him, but Sarah is suspicious. Wojzek is
dead - and what happened to the real Wojzek that his family described to her?
What happened to his former partner, Kendrick? At which point, Sarah gets up
and leaves the restaurant.
Wojzek
trails behind Sarah, taunting her. He says that she needs his help, just as she
needed the Doctor’s help. She has never escaped the Doctor, and never will. He
used her, as he uses all his companions, because he knows no better. She is
still waiting for him to return, and she knows that he never will. Out of
sight, out of mind. Frustratingly, every time Sarah turns a corner in the
street, it seems that she has turned back onto the street with the coffee shop
(which is impossible).
Wojzek
says: “Come on, you know that K-9 will deteriorate until he’s a write-off. And
he’s already told you that no human technology can repair him...” Sarah
realises with a jolt that there’s no way Wojzek could know what K-9 told her
earlier, unless Wojzek is somehow in her mind - like a virus that can spring up
at any time. Sarah awakes at home with a shriek.
Out
of sight, out of mind, she ponders.
TODAY:
Sarah has been considering Wojzek’s words all night, aware that there is no-one
she can discuss this with without going back to a life she has tried to leave behind
- Harry, UNIT, etc. She challenges K-9 again, pointing out that she is acting
in loco parentis. K-9 is happy to explain that she herself forbade him to tell
her what was happening, which puzzles Sarah. K-9 explains that the Doctor
programmed into him a sub-space transmission for when he couldn’t self-repair,
or when replacement parts were unavailable. (“Lucky that didn’t break down
first then, eh?”) Sarah gets K-9 to play her the transmission - it is a
hologram of her, stooped over as though talking to the robot. “Terrific,”
snorts Sarah. “Help us Obi Wan, you are our only hope. Well not this time,
Doctor. Stop transmitting, K-9.”
Sarah
asks when this was recorded. K-9 gives her a date and a time - the middle of
the night several weeks ago. She asks more, and K-9 explains that she has been
trying to repair him throughout several nights, without success, finally
stumbling upon the Doctor’s communications program. Repairs in her sleep - no
wonder she has been so tired. But how did she manage when she can barely
program her video. K-9 is explaining about alien symbiosis, that Sarah is
currently the host for the Tonska’s physical form, when the TARDIS arrives in
her home.
The
Doctor has returned for her after all, having received K-9’s emergency signal.
He asks her to join him again back in the TARDIS. She goes into the TARDIS with
him, and is puzzled by his attitude - he doesn’t start the TARDIS, he asks her
questions - does she remember how it felt to be in the TARDIS, to experience
the Space-Time Vortex, etc. Then Sarah recognises that one of the Doctor’s
gestures is familiar, but not for the Doctor - pushing invisible glasses up his
nose with his middle finger. She realises that this is also a dream, and “the
Doctor” is really the Wojzek-alien. Through controlling Sarah’s mind, strongest
when she is sleeping, he introduced the virus into K-9 which has been
destroying the robot dog. His intention is to get the Doctor to return to
Earth, but now Sarah has stopped the emergency transmission which would make
this happen.
The
alien has been growing within her since the day she first met him - it left the
husk of its parent form in Wojzek’s body which, suddenly released from any
higher-brain control, had blundered to its death - like Kendrick’s before it.
The alien’s struggle to establish control over Sarah means she has been
experiencing very vivid flashback dreams. Although these flashbacks of her most
vivid memories are a side effect of the Tomska’s parasitic invasion, the alien
has been able to begin manipulating her dreams as it has grown in size and
strength. Sarah recognises that the alien has not been able to disguise all its
involvement in her dreams, and that she must have some control of the dreams
herself. So she concentrates, trying to make the TARDIS vanish; suddenly, she
is back in her own kitchen with K-9 and the alien (still looking like the
Doctor).
The
Doctor-alien tells her that she can achieve so much more with her life if she
allows it to develop this symbiotic relationship - it knows what she thinks of
herself, because it’s been living in her mind for long enough. She doesn’t fit
into her old life - having experienced other worlds and times, she knows that
she needs more. And she deserves better than the Doctor gave her: “The Doctor
dumped you when he tired of you. You could expect no better. What had you hoped
for, what could you really expect? What can any companion of the Doctor expect?
The nagging knowledge that you led a second-hand life, that’s what. Shadowing
someone else’s needs and desires. Just another time groupie with a hole in your
life, looking for an easy escape from the trap you yourself created. And after
all that, no thank yous. No rewards. Except maybe an unheroic farewell, or a
grave too far from home.”
Sarah
retorts that it is an unequal relationship, not a symbiotic one; power and
control, not a partnership. The alien cannot survive without controlling her
completely, and when it has no further need for her it will drop her without
caring what happens. She realises that this sounds familiar... She takes her
pent-up feelings of dependence and betrayal by the Doctor, and focuses it on
“the Doctor”. She blasts him into nothingness, and the real alien appears at
the last minute as a starfish-shaped parasite, surrounded by a series of
electrical flashes - like a spoon left in a microwaved coffee. This is her
visualisation of the creature inside her. Sarah feels a searing pain at the
back of her neck, where Wojzek implanted the alien’s spoor months ago. The
image of the starfish-creature sparkles into nothingness. Sarah looks round her
boring old kitchen - it’s like seeing somewhere you know really well but
haven’t been for ages.
Can
she be sure the alien is gone? Only by taking control of her own mind. She asks
K-9 to show her the message again. K-9 skips through several hologrammatic
projections, a mixture of Sarah’s recorded plea and a variety of events he has
scanned from commercial and private satellite communications traffic. Sarah
tells K-9 to erase the recordings, and to delete the program which broadcasts
the signal. She also asks K-9 whether she is free of the Tonska; he explains
that the creature inside her is dead, and that her body will eventually break
down the remains (ugh!). Then K-9 says: “Program erased, mistress.”
Sarah
starts to plan ways of repairing K-9: she caused the problem in the first
place, so she should be able to fix it.
TEN
YEARS FROM NOW: Sarah is on television, reading from a novel. The
lines are the same as this short story begins with: “She hated Scott Wojzek.
She hated his mean self interest, his Lotus Esprit, his easy familiarity with
the secretarial staff...” She is reading from her final “Doctor” novel. The
programme’s interviewer asks her about the character who has made her an
international bestseller over the past decade. Sarah talks about “the Doctor”,
and how she has used his unspecified alien background to allow her to explore
what it means for other characters to be human. Aren’t some of the Doctor’s assistants
rather feeble caricatures of helpless women, asks the interviewer. Sarah
explains that they can allow themselves to be led, or choose to use the
Doctor’s strengths and weaknesses with their own initiative - and offers a few
examples from her books and short stories.
So
why bring the series to a close now, when it has been such a great success -
and with Amblin expressing interest in developing a TV series? Sarah explains
that, while it’s good to allow your characters a life of their own in your writing,
it’s also important to retain some control over them. It’s like a job, or a
house, or a hobby, Sarah says: no matter how fond you are of them, you should
make your own choice when you realise that it’s time to move on.
Last
page: publisher’s list of novels and short stories by
Sarah Jane Smith.
The
End
©
Peter Anghelides 1996
Last revised: 17 March 2002