Starkey Starkey was a rebellious fourteen - year - old orphan who operated under the pseudonym " Stark Reality " and became the master of K9 . Biography . Starkey was an orphan and a troubled youngster . ( TV : " Regeneration " , " Oroborus " , " The Last Precinct " ) By the age of 14 , he was operating as a political agitator called " Stark Reality " . He also had followers who wanted to be his accomplices , like Jorjie . One night , Jorjie and he escaped CCPC s and stumbled into Alistair Gryffen ' s house . He accidentally unplugged the Space - Time Manipulator and brought through three Jixen warriors and K9 . A Jixen sprayed him with its enemy - fluid whilst K9 self - destructed , killing three Jixen . Starkey retrieved K9 ' s regeneration unit . Shortly thereafter , K9 rebuilt himself . Darius Pike informed the police robots and Starkey was arrested and taken to a detention facility operated by The Department . There he was put into a Virtual reality detention facility . Jorjie hacked into his detention program and communicated with him . The surviving Jixen tried to kill him , but Starkey escaped . K9 gives Starkey a dog whistle as an apology for nearly killing him and tells him that " where ever you are , it will call you to my side " . ( TV : " Regeneration " ) As the Jixen was hunting him , Starkey had to stay at Gryffen ' s house . When K9 discovered that the Jixen was heading in the direction of Dauntless Prison , he headed there to track it . Starkey wanted to help , and asked Darius to come with him . Darius agreed but only on the condition that Starkey left when they were done . Starkey and Darius arrived in the prison , but were soon captured by CCPC s . They were thrown in their cells by Thorne , the governor of Dauntless Prison who would later become a dangerous enemy . Jorjie arrived to help , Darius gave her a keycard he swiped from Thorne . She used it to free Starkey and Darius , along with the other alien prisoners . They ran with the aliens but when Starkey looked behind them , he was confronted by a Jixen . Starkey was then saved by K9 . Exploiting the Jixen ' s tracking ability , Starkey put his jacket , which had Jixen slime on it , in a cell . The Jixen tracked the slime to the cell and Starkey closed the door on him . Suddenly , a Department officer arrived , who revealed himself to be a Meron and attacked K9 , he advanced on Starkey , but he was saved by the Jixen who used its call to scare the Meron off . Though K9 was low on power , Starkey and him managed to unite with Jorjie , Darius , and the aliens . Darius opened the gate , and everyone went out , but were met by June Turner , Jorjie ' s mother , who demanded that they returned to their cells . The Jixen struck again and attacked K9 and June . June told Jorjie to set her locking device to self - destruct . Darius grabbed it and threw it to Starkey , who attached it to the Jixen which was destroyed . He was struck by the Jixen ' s energy attack , which resulted in him fainting . He awoke in Gryffen ' s house where , honouring his deal with Darius , decided to leave , but not before thanking K9 for saving his life . Later , Starkey was vandalising a Department message when he was met by CCPCs . Starkey was soon joined by K9 , who was " ready for action " . ( TV : " Liberation " ) When Nehetka and Geb of the Anubian s , a race whom K9 had liberated in his past , arrived on Earth , Gryffen was the first to fall under their hypnotic control . He banished Darius from the house when he irritated the Anubians . Jorjie and Starkey were then hypnotised and Darius tried to convince K9 something was wrong but he was too occupied with remembering his past . Darius used Mariah to knock Geb out , using the Ankh on his chest to take control of the Anubian spacecraft and , with K9 , defeated the Anubians when they attempted to take over the Department and freed Starkey and the others . ( TV : " Curse of Anubis " ) Gryffen took Starkey in soon after . During his time at the Gryffen household , Starkey tried to find out who his parents were . Following a chance encounter with an Oroborus , Gryffen discovered that Starkey was probably the son of two alien immunologists , Charles and Marie Sobol . The Sobols had experimented on him as a baby , granting him an alien immune system , and they themselves had disappeared some time afterward . ( TV : " Oroborus " ) An accident in the STM resulted in Jorjie being sent to 23 November 1963 . K9 and Starkey were sent to retrieve her . They encountered Darius ' great - grandfather , William Pike and saved him from the clutches of Barker , a MI6 agent with a surprising resemblance to Thorne , preventing Darius from being erased from history . Gryffen , with June ' s help , was able to bring them back . ( TV : " The Cambridge Spy " ) With the rest of the K9 Unit , Starkey witnessed the appearance of a black hole and white hole within the STM whose collision risked destroying the world . After losing contact with K9 , who had left to retrieve his regeneration unit at the Millennium Dome , Starkey left with Jorjie to find him . While looking for K9 at the dome , Starkey and Jorjie almost kissed but were interrupted by CCPC s . Finding that K9 had been used by Thorne as a conduit to generate a space time portal which was opened when Gryffen was forced to use the temporal stabiliser in the STM to save the world , allowing the Korven invasion vanguard to arrive , it was there that Starkey and Jorjie learned that Lomax , the head of the Department , was infact the Supreme Leader of the Korven Pan - Dimensional Army and that Thorne was working with him , having had himself implanted with Meron DNA by the Korven . Ultimately , however , the invasion was stopped when Gryffen , entering the dome having overcame his agoraphobia , called out the STM ' s voice - activated termination code , destroying the machine and the Korven vanguard with it . Along with the rest of the K9 Unit , Starkey was distraught to see K9 " die " having expended his remaining energy to save them from Trojan , only to be deeply relived when the regeneration unit returned and rejuvenated K9 ' s life . ( TV : " The Eclipse of the Korven " )