Memoirs of a Timelord (20 page)

       Okay, here's the thing about opening dimensional portals; there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way.  What Rastin did in Alpha sector was definitely the wrong way.  They were trying to open up fifth dimensional portals, or doorways to the multiverse, but what they were really doing is punching holes into the neighboring sixth dimensional neighborhoods.

       Okay, a quick explanation for anyone without cybernetic math processors installed in their head.  Remember how Bara told me that our universe was like a clutch of eggs, each destined to be a baby god?  Well here's a spoiler alert; we ain't the only clutch of eggs.  There are other multiverse out there besides our own.  See, if you poke a hole in your own universe then anything that spills out through that hole will be recycled back into the multiverse.  This is how black holes work.  There really isn't anything at the center of most singularities because the thing is really just a hole, like a duct that runs through the multiverse.  Y'see, black holes are not a bad thing, they are a good thing.  A very good thing.  Think about it; a star is born, a star dies, collapses into a singularity.  In the process, its matter is compressed down into protomatter, which is basically like stem cells for all atomic matter.  You can make anything from protomatter, and the stuff is the very cornerstone of all life in our universe. But once the singularity matures, it flushes its core from the inside out, steadily recycling the material back into the universe.  It's like urban renewal on a galactic scale.  Trash goes into a black hole, and shit pops out in stars and stellar nurseries, and even other singularities.  Think of black holes as the great galactic recyclers that are constant in every single itineration of the multiverse.  A singularity that exists here will exist in universe 5/653109.  

       

       But there is a whole different effect when you punch a sixth dimensional hole in the universe.  There is no graceful balance, or redistribution of matter.  When you open a hole to another egg clutch you are subject to the laws of osmosis.  In a nutshell, your multiverse can have its guts sucked out by a bigger multiverse.  When matter...or part of the Guf are sucked into this kind of a hole, it is lost.  As soon as it reaches the other side it will be violently reorganized based upon new laws of physics.  Those souls don't just die, they are torn apart.

       So you are prolly wondering what fifth and sixth dimensional holes had to do with me escaping from an entire battlegroup.  Who gives a shit how I stucco the interdimensional walls, right?  Well the reason is that often the best way to fix a class six laceration is by plugging it with a micro-singularity.  Remember; it's always better to have a fifth dimensional hole than a sixth, so plug it with a black hole.

       So how is that handy when I have a whole armada coming at me?  Because creating black holes is sorta our thing.  See, back on earth we were taught that you had to collapse a whole star to get a black hole, but that ain't true.  Really all you have to do to create a black hole is compress matter down past its Shwarzchild radius, and not even a lotta matter at that.  In school we learned by using snowballs.  Hydrogen and oxygen are easier to compress atomically so they're perfect for creating an atom-sized black hole.

       But don't let their size fool ya.  A micro-singularity still has infinite mass and density, they can shape time, and gobble up entire worlds just like the big ones.  It would be easy enough to just shove these assholes into a dimensional closet.  

       It was no problem to focus my energy on the lead fighter. He was way out there ahead of the other attack craft, like he jumped the gun and just had to be the first guy in line.  Faster than he could have blinked his eyes, if he had eyes, I had crushed his ship down to the size of a pinhead.  After that I really laid on the power as I crushed his atoms down until the subcomponents were crushed into a single homogenus goo.  All of the protons and electrons and sub-atomic parts were now a solid mass of infinitely dense material known as protomatter.

       And that's all that it took.  Since a black hole is essentially invisible on all but a few spectrums, visible only while it's feeding, these guys never even saw it.  They just ran headlong into death.  Ships just vanished like blips on a radar as they were gobbled up.  The more mass it gained, the faster it spun.  With the accretion disk forming fast, I could see the bow of the first Dreadnaught being torn apart at the molecular level by the spinning debris field.  That's how a black hole feeds, by tearing you to sub-atomic bits in a whirling tidal pool of disembodied matter.  Think of an accretion disk as the black hole's way to pre-digest you.

       I watched the first of the big ships vanish in a flash of energy as it was pulled into the micro-singularity.  In less than a second a half mile of steel and cannons was violently pulled into a singularity that was so small it was invisible to the human eye.  Well, your eye, anyhow.  Can you imagine the racket that must have made if sound carried in space?

       I was still fighting their dampening field, but getting nowhere.  I had hoped that the transmitter was in the lead ship, but now I see that was not the case.  My Onkx is sending me alarms that it has no relocation capabilities so I'm stuck there still. 

       But the bad guys have figured out that there's a singularity there.  Though they may not be able to see it with the naked eye, the gravitational distortions would be visible on several of their devices.  I can see them altering course around the micro-singularity.

       "Nice try, please pick up your free gift as you exit the building." Giving a smug grin I do the last thing the enemy would expect; I push the singularity towards them on a collision course.  Everything orbits something bigger, so I just need to nudge the thing along what should be its new orbit to GamusOrb, the regional celestial super-giant.  

       Like a cosmic bowling ball, my baby black hole took out fighters and destroyers like pins in a lane.  If they jinked to one side I could change the MS's course by increasing it's rotational speed a tad bit.  I know it sounds crazy, but we actually do this pretty regularly.  Remember, this is how you fix a galactic gunshot wound, and I've been working the ER for a decade now.  I can juggle singularities, and I don't mean that as a euphemism either.  Juggle, literally.  It's required learning for new pleebs when they first come to ClovisMene.  If there is one thing you gotta know how to do out here in Clovis is handle raw singularities. Granted, it's a lot easier when you're wearing a million watts of focused-beam equipment.

       I'd finished cleaning up the fleet, letting my little black vacuum gobble up every last one of those ships, but that's when I noticed that the dampening effect did not let up.  In fact, it started to get worse.  I can't get a bearing on the source of the field, but it's got me locked down pretty tight.

       The next thing I know, the micro singularity has started rotating hells fast, like a thousand RPM faster than I had left it.  Not only that, but I the truck stopped working so I had no control over my little spinning ball of death.  One by one my systems were winking out until all I had was life support, and that's when it happened; the black hole changed course on its own.

       So there I am, just hanging in empty space.  I can't do anything besides wave my arms and watch as my own damned black hole approached on a collision course.  I had no way of explaining it, the whole thing baffled me completely.  I should have full control of my Onkx by now, and that singularity should never have reversed course like that, at least not without significant external influence.  But all of that was irrelevant since I was about to be gobbled up by the damned thing.

       Well, right about now you're prolly wondering how the hell I got away from certain death like it was a movie cliffhanger? Tune in and see how our heroine escapes from the evil Singulus Maximus...  But the truth is that I didn't.  Nope, I got pulled into my own black hole.

       See, I was just about to start panicking when something occurred to me.  Y'see, black holes are really just a conduit that runs through the entire multiverse.  You can get anywhere from there, assuming you have the right equipment.  So I threw everything I had into some lateral movement, changing my course just enough that I wasn't on a direct course with the black hole.  If I tried to enter that way then the subsequent release of raw energy would fry my systems.  Without the Onkx I get crushed like everyone else.  I would need to control my entry.

       Heading toward the swirling rings that spun about the singularity, I knew my best chances were to enter via the accretion disk.  But even that was tricky.  Think of an accretion disk as a bench grinder; you poke a finger in there and it will turn your hand into saw dust.  That's the thing about black holes most people don't realize; you are torn to bits long before you are crushed into protomatter.  With the whole time dilation effect of the singularity, to an observer it would take a thousand years for an object to actually make it into the hole.  But to the person going into the hole it would happen in the blink of an eye.  Because of your retarded passage through 4th dimensional time, you would simply cease to exist between thoughts.  Poof!

       From here it was all textbook.  Yes, I actually studied this process in school.  And yes, it is true that I had never actually done it in real life.  Sure, sure, I can juggle the fucking things, but actually entering one is another story.  Still, I work the problem by the numbers.  First objective is to break myself down into smaller components.  If I don't, the accretion disc sure as hell will.  I blink my eyes one last time before morphing into a gaseous plasma form.  It was a tricky morph, splitting myself over and over again into smaller and smaller pieces while maintaining my consciousness within the distributed network of my form.  But there I was, an intelligent cloud of highly charged particles.

       I can feel myself being pulled into the spinning disc as the sky above me lights up with a fountain of X-rays.  I knew that it meant the hole was feeding, and that soon it would be my molecules being crushed until they leaked X-rays, but I couldn't help but be awestruck by the view.  It was beautiful as the sky glowed blue to my enhanced eyes.  The temporal space around me was eerily silent as I looked at the rapids ahead of me.  In the back of my mind I remember thinking aloud that any second now I would either succeed, or be blotted out of existence...any second...

       I blinked my eyes and I was sitting on the couch at home.  My body was still buzzing with that feeling it gets right after a complete morphic refresh.  There's always this tingling sensation right after I completely change forms.  Everything feels laggy as my Onkx finishes restarting.  For the first time I realize that it had worked, I was still alive.

       "Proud of yourself are you?" DorLek asked from his seat on the other couch.

       Looking up I realize he is not alone.  There on the other couches and chairs are all of my instructors.  I see Bara down on the end, a mug of Cree in his hand.  Giving me a wink with three of his eyes, he lets me know I did okay.

       "Was this a test?" I realize right away why the black hole got loose from me and reversed course; they had engineered it. "How the hell did you send that thing back on me?"

       "If a singularity is constant in every itineration of the multiverse..." DorLek trailed off, expecting me to figure it out on my own.

       "If it's constant in every alternate dimension then it can also be manipulated from any of those other places." It came to me finally.  The Boss had simply gone to the next thread in the multiverse and pushed around my singularity from there.  That was the danger of playing with the things; other people can play with 'em too.

       Blinking my eyes I paused to look at my internal chronometer.  I had been in the singularity for 6.2k years, but it had only been seconds to me.

       "You chose to enter the singularity?" Dorat Tuva, my Fabrication professor seemed displeased.

       "Yeah." I shrugged, "I figured I'd use the frame dragging to restart my Onkx, and the auto systems would displace me to safe coordinates." 

       "You forced a manual restart?" DorLek had a twinkle to his eye as he considered my strategy.

       "Basically I was just clutch-starting a standard transmission, except that instead of getting the car rolling on the road, the road was already moving." My response was a pretty close paraphrase of the very description my Master had given in class.  I wanted him to know that I had been listening.

       "And if the restart had failed?" Dorat Tuva was at it again.  I could tell he was looking for something, and whatever it was I sure as hell better know the answer.

       "I set a go-command before I entered the dilation effect, just in case my Onkx could get better traction as it passed thru the event horizon." Reciting from memory, it had been easy for my DuNai brain to pull up that lesson.  At the time I had wondered why he chose to repeat himself. 

       The critiques from each of my instructors went on and on for some time while I waited patiently.  Then I felt something from Master Cuda.  

       Speaking through the Guf, I felt his thanks for choosing to sacrifice myself rather than cause any more pain to the Guf.  He knew that I had not taken the easy path.  Survival in a black hole was more art form than science, a lotta things coulda gone wrong.  I had chosen the Guf over myself, and I could feel his admiration for it.  Of all the souls I have touched, his was one of the most profound I've ever met.  Master Cuda had this consuming singular focus to bring this galaxy to full ascension.  Right then I understood why this guy was still here when his people had moved along a billion years ago; he planned to ascend with Clovis Mene.  He would stand his post like the good soldier until this pitiful and tortured Guf was fit to scrabble its way out of its galactic egg.  I could not help but admire his determination and dedication.  It was maniacal the way Cuda lived, but he was a universal constant in an ever-changing world.