B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  2604 - Benny: Masquerade of Death

  Benny found a copy of a play, The Masquerade of Death, and fell prey to a complex virus embedded in the text. She was comatose for four days, and dreamed of a storybook land with characters such as the Queen of Spring, the Duke of Autumn, the Matriarch of Winter and the Player of All Seasons. She used storyland logic to wake herself up.

  On Etheria, Abbot Primus greatly enjoyed watching the Galactic Snooker Championship. [918]

  2604 - Benny: Silver Lining

  Benny found a tomb of Cybermen on Tysir IV while giving an archaeology consult. The Cybermen hoped to weaken humanity with a plague, but Benny sealed the Cybermen within their tomb, and they were destroyed when it blew up.

  2604 - Benny: The Tree of Life

  The entrepreneur Hugo Tollip bought a jungle planet that he renamed Tollip’s World, and initiated research to commercialise or even weaponise the variety of DNA found there. Benny helped to prevent Tollip from transplanting a Tree of Life off world, fearing it would defensively create a virus powerful enough to wipe out humanity. Tollip was killed, and the hammies stored within the Trees were revived.

  2604 (24th December) - Benny: The Heart’s Desire [919]

  Benny became embroiled in a diversionary game between the Eternals Hardy and Barron on Marlowe’s World. She captured the prize of their game - a shard of Enlightenment - and used it to wish away a pulsar that was headed towards the Braxiatel Collection. For good measure, she turned Hardy and Barron into mortals. She then threw the Enlightenment shard out an airlock, confident that another Eternal would instantly claim it.

  2605 - Benny: The Kingdom of the Blind

  Benny came into telepathic contact with the enslaved descendents of the Halavans while examining artifacts from the lost civilisation on Petreus III. The Monoids had become increasingly cruel slave-masters, giving the Halavans numbers for names, and forcing any slave who developed the power of speech to forfeit one of their other senses. Benny aided the Halavans in regaining their telepathic gestalt, which enabled them to overpower their masters. The vengeful Halavans - despite Benny’s plea for mercy - psionically stripped the Monoids of their names and removed their ability to speak. They also used their mental prowess to destroy the Monoid planet, and set course back to Petreus III. [920]

  The CroSSScape were gestalt beings who had transferred their minds into a datascape. The sudden appearance in the datascape of a box that couldn’t be opened filled the CroSSScape with misery and loathing, and they theorised that their god - who had been imprisoned within the Tartarus Gate, a legendary gateway to Hell - could open it for them. To find the Gate, the CroSSScape presented themselves as a benevolent religious order that used an edifice, simply called “the Factory”, to reverse natural disasters by rolling back time on doomed worlds. The CroSSScape spent a year looking for the Gate and finally located it on Cerebus Iera, a desert world prone to freak electrical storms. [921]

  2605 (23rd September to 14th November) - Benny: A Life in Pieces: “Zardox Break” / “The Purpura Pawn” / “On Trial” [922]

  Earth had an official Acquisition of Alien Artifacts Department. A girl group, the Glitta Bitches, were working on a new Tri-D movie.

  Marck Morton became governor of Verum - the contested moon of Aequitas - and negotiated a peace that granted Verum independence. However, Morton was murdered on 23rd September, 2605. Jason Kane - who had leveraged his career as a xenoporn author and become a major celebrity on the resort planet Zardox, partly due to the salacious reporting of his exploits in Aventures de la Frontière Nouvelle - was charged with the crime, and thought to have killed Morton to steal a relic of the old empire, the Purpura Pawn, from him. [923]

  Jason’s trial began on 12th November; Benny helped to establish his innocence on 14th November. As they returned to the Collection, a bomb destroyed the courthouse, killing one hundred and thirty-one people. The crime was blamed on parties who had opposed Verum’s independence, stoking political tensions.

  On 1st December, Aequitas cut all ties with Verum. On 2nd December, the Earth Empire dissolved Verum’s government and secured the moon with peacekeeping troops; this instigated an era of hatred and terrorist incidents. On 2nd January, 2606, an Earth official named Matthew Barrister died in a shuttle explosion, after confiscating the remaining Ceatul Empire relics. The items officially went missing, but the Purpura Pawn, somehow, wound up in Braxiatel’s possession. [924]

  2606 - Benny: The Goddess Quandary [925]

  The leaky roof of the Etheria monastery was one of the Wonders of the Galaxy.

  Benny had completed a documentary on the legendary warlord Aldebrath for the Tri-D Broadcasting Company, and the monks on Etheria invited her to learn whether their planetoid system contained his final resting place. Tri-D’s central news bureau was on Angola V. Benny’s friend Keri, a journalist for Tri-D, documented the search.

  Benny found Aldebrath’s ship, the Fervent Hope, in one of Etheria’s outer planetoids. Aldebrath’s mind was in the ship’s computer systems, and she used her love-inducing telepathy to stop a religious uprising. Keri’s reputation had suffered after she botched an expose on the multi-zillionaire Stellis Gadd, and Benny ended their friendship after learning that Keri had hampered her search to get a better story. Benny took Aldebrath and the Fervent Hope back to the Collection, only to find that Clarissa Jones, one of the Collection’s administrators, had gone missing...

  2606 - Benny: Parallel Lives: “The Serpent’s Tooth” / “Hiding Places” / “Jason and the Pirates” / “Parallel Lives” [926]

  Clarissa Jones abruptly kidnapped Peter and disappeared. Benny followed them to Atwalla 3, a medieval world in the Fallan Nebula where women had no rights. She went undercover as a man, joined some knights on a successful quest and was rewarded by being married to Jesh, the daughter of Emperor Jodal. Benny bluffed Jodal into thinking that a virus had been devised that would let the Atwallan breed with other species - an act that would, in time, destroy the Atwallan bloodline. Jodal considered Benny’s threat to unleash the virus unless he granted the Atwallan females equal rights.

  Jason joined the search for Peter late, having been delayed - or so he told Benny - owing to an escapade where he had to join some pirates led by Buggering Barnabas Jimmity Jim-Bob Hullabaloo, aboard their ship The Black Pig.

  Benny, Jason, Bev and Adrian confronted Clarissa on the suburban worlds of Thuban. Clarissa said she was from the future, and that she wanted to raise Peter to avoid the life that Benny suspected was in wait for him. She relented and returned Peter to Benny, but a scuffle led to Bev killing Clarissa as she drew a gun on Adrian.

  Bernice’s cat Wolsey died from natural causes, and was buried in the Collection’s garden. Bev and Adrian were now in relationship. Temporal distortion revised the history of the Collection’s gardener, Hass - he was no longer a Martian, and always had been a Yesodi, a jellyfish-like being capable of generating a vast store of radiation within its pressure suit. [927]

  2606 (January) - Benny: The Lost Museum [928]

  Benny and Jason went to salvage exhibits from the Trib Museum, as the dictatorial regime on the planet housing it had fallen. Jason quelled the carnage by tricking each faction into thinking that the other had backed down.

  2606 (February) - Benny: The Crystal of Cantus [929]

  The Galyari performed a production of Macbeth on Berkoff IV.

  The crystal that allowed Ronan McGinley to control the Cybermen on Cantus was killing him, and a new Cyber-controller was required. Braxiatel tried and failed to install Jason as the new Cyber-controller; Benny learned of his treachery, and Jason broke Braxiatel’s mental conditioning. Benny used the crystal to eradicate the Cantus Cybermen, then destroyed it. His machinations exposed, Braxiatel departed from the Collection. In his absence, the Draconians made a claim to planetoid KS-159.

  2606 - Benny: The Tartarus Gate [930]

  The Craxitanian government was so grateful to Benny for finding their prized temple, they rew
arded her with ten boxes of their famed champagne.

  The CroSSScape captured Bernice, thinking that - thanks to her body having already accommodated the mind of a goddess - she could serve as the physical host to their god. The Factory regressed time on Cerebus Iera to when the Tartarus Gate - a black hole, held in perfect balance - had last been opened, and the god transferred across. The god cast the CroSSScape into the Hell that lay beyond the Gate, and was then trapped in a datascape box.

  2606 - Benny: Timeless Passages

  Important manuscripts had been lost when a giant space aardvark accidentally inhaled the Splendid Biblious Spiroplex of the ten billion sapients of Zoomos Prime. Rare documents in this era included The Atrocity Exhibitions, The Augenblick Presidency by Robert Dallek and Aristotle’s Poetics, Part 3: Smokey is the Bandit. The Adjudicators were still active.

  The origin of the Labyrinth on the planet Kerykeion was unknown, but it contained one of the biggest collections of human publications outside Earth, with more than two hundred million books, including the only known copy of Gay Bulgaria. A corporation, Omni-Spatial Mercantile Dynamics (OSMD), sought to buy Kerykeion because the Labyrinth’s passages stretched into different points in space-time, which is how the original librarians there acquired their collection.

  Bev Tarrant was now administrating the Braxiatel Collection, and sent Bernice to purchase rare books from the Labyrinth before the OSMD buy-out. Benny met - and destroyed - a murderous cyborg sent from the future by OSMD’s descendents. [931] The librarian Hermione Wolfe wound up owning the Labyrinth, and cut a deal with the Braxiatel Collection as to the Labyrinth’s holdings.

  Braxiatel had merged his TARDIS with the Collection before his departure. Without him, the Collection became subject to breakdowns. [932]

  2607 - Benny: The Worst Thing in the World

  Horses were believed to be extinct. Pop sensation Manda I had a new single, entitled “Pumpin’ Out Your Baby of Love”, set to the holovid of her daughter’s birth.

  The Drome had been established as a self-contained community that produced televised content for GalNet, and was located a half an hour from the Galactic Transit Core. The Drome’s offerings included the Inspector Wembley movies, the long-running soap Squaxaboolon Street, Topless Garden Makeovers, Whose Stool is That?, Airhead Factor, The Larder in the Garden, Mutilation Razor-Motor-Scooter Hockey on Ice, Frock and Fanny and a revival of The Infinity Division. Galnet had at least 4796 channels.

  Jason Kane was being interviewed about his work on Xenomorphic Bondage Slaves, Part 37, and asked Benny to investigate mysterious occurrences at the Drome. Its central computer, an AI named Marvin, had become so advanced that it was altering reality in accordance with people’s beliefs. The Drome’s production teams became murderous and zombie-like; Benny resolved the situation by singing a happy song, making everyone act as if they were in an old-style musical. Official reports said that a terrorist attack had caused mass hallucinations.

  2607 (summer) - Benny: The Summer of Love [933]

  The Draconians and other races continued to have aspirations on the area of space that included the Collection. Bev undertook negotiations to avert war between six races. The Collection’s systems further deteriorated, and exerted strain on all thirteen dimensions, causing people to randomly jump through time. Hass recommended planting Simpson’s Thin Weave, which would work its roots into the Collection’s soil and bind everything on a temporal level. As a side effect, the Thin Weave’s pollen ramped up the libidos of everyone present, and a mass orgy ensued. Jason predicted that when word of this spread, student enrolment at the Collection would be up next year.

  Bev asked Benny and Jason to undertake a mission to ancient Greece, and they left using their time rings... [934]

  2607 (autumn) - Benny: Old Friends: “Cheating the Reaper” / “The Soul’s Prism” [935]

  The disgraced Ivo FitzIndri had died on the ex-mining planet Balgoris, and Benny attended his funeral. Benny’s ex-lover Simon Kyle was now an Admiral with Spacefleet. Benny, Jason and Kyle discovered that a Mim - one of a race of shapeshifters, whose natural forms were bundles of toxic sponge-like matter - had killed FitzIndri as part of a scheme to steal Balgoran artifacts. The Mim was incinerated in an ancient Balgoran tomb, and the loss of the items within removed any historical objection to Balgoris revamping itself as a retirement locale and holiday resort.

  Jason privately warned Kyle to forever stay away from Benny, lest Jason show her a video recording of Kyle deliberately leaving Jason to die after the Mim attacked him. Benny visited the local temple of the Order of the Lost Lemuroidea, and her testimony cleared FitzIndri’s name and that of his bloodline.

  2607 (October) - Benny: The Empire State [936]

  Benny unearthed the Stone of Barter on a desert moon, thinking it could help her locate Irving Braxiatel - the being most likely to stabilise the Collection, and avert the brewing interplanetary war. The Stone caused Benny to acquire Maggi Matsumoto’s “fixer” talent, and she accidentally recreated the long-destroyed Empire State as a hodgepodge of her textbook readings about the edifice and her own desires. The new State decayed, and Benny was forced to destroy it again. Matsumoto regained her fixer abilities, and Braxiatel was liberated from the Stone - he had been resting in it for some millennia. Benny persuaded him to return to the Collection.

  2607 (October) - Benny: The Tub Full of Cats [937]

  Tensions between the Draconians and the Mim worsened, and both sides established blockades around the Collection. Benny, Braxiatel and Maggi returned to the Collection aboard Gravity’s Rainbow, a spaceship that was technically, for tax purposes, owned by some cats. The Rainbow was equipped with a Deselby Matango filter which could make the ship invisible to the laws of physics, but required someone to function as an “anchorite” to bring the ship back into reality. The Rainbow’s current anchorite, Captain Anthony Rogers, emerged from the filter and died of old age. Maggi permanently took his place.

  2607 (23rd-24th October) - Benny: The Judas Gift [938]

  Under the Universal Rules of Engagement, weapons such as radiation chains, phase cannons and biogenic assaults could not be used on sentient species. Texts on the Draconians included The Rough Guide to Draconia, The Time Out Guide to Draconia and Twitching for Draconians.

  Braxiatel somewhat stabilised the Collection’s systems. The Earth Parliament tried to stay out of the Draconian-Mim stand off, and considered having the Terran Reserves set up a buffer zone. Ambassador Kothar of Draconia sought revenge against Bev Tarrant for the death of his blood brother Ethan, and while his use of the Judas Gift severed Bev’s left hand, she was able to fake her death and escape the Collection.

  The Draconians destroyed the Stonehauser Medical Facility, which serviced dozens of species. They also landed combat troops on the Collection and occupied it.

  (=) Clarissa Jones, age six, was killed along with her parents in the attack on the Stonehauser facility. Braxiatel changed history so that an older version of Clarissa could serve as an administrator to the Collection. [939]

  Bernard Jones, a xenophobic clone-maker who worked at Stonehauser, was killed in the attack. He had facilitated the replacement of Earth President (and Empress) Fiona Dickens with a clone of herself. Per her conditioning, the clone-Dickens instigated a number of anti-extra-terrestrial policies upon Jones’ death. [940]

  2607 (November) - Benny: Freedom of Information [941]

  Braxiatel resolved the Draconian-Mim standoff by having Hass store up his radiation output, then open his containment suit on the Mim-Sphere. The Mim were obliterated almost to the point of extinction. In return, the Draconian Emperor withdrew his troops from the Collection, and agreed that the Collection would have sovereignty while remaining in Draconian space.

  2607 (November) - Benny: Nobody’s Children: “All Mimsy Were the Borogoves” / “The Loyal Left Hand” / “Nursery Politics” [942]

  The Draconian-Mim conflict had entailed deployment of panic-inducing phase cannons aga
inst Proxima Longissima. Eight million Mim fled the planet, and the Draconians claimed jurisdiction over the borogoves - nurseries for infant Mim - left behind.

  Benny became pregnant with Jason’s child, but miscarried. She learned - partly due to a Mim artifact she found in the ruins of Windsor Safari Park - that Project Narcissus had continued after the Dalek Wars, and had been redirected against Earth’s rivals. At least thirty high-ranking Draconians were Mim infiltrators. In exchange for their not bringing the Empire to ruin, the infiltrators were selected to oversee the borogoves in Draconia’s name until the Mim children came of age, at which time the Emperor would honourably banish them from Draconian space. The arrangement prevented an Institute from acquiring the Mim progeny for use against Earth’s enemies.

  2607 (December) - Benny: The End of the World / Benny: The Final Amendment / Benny: The Two Jasons [943]

  On Earth, clones were being generated for use as TV celebrities; New Newport had experienced an Equity uprising as cloned actors demanded various rights. GalNet 4 was now running Season 15 of The Jason Kane Show based upon Jason’s books, with clones of Benny, Jason and their friends performing farcical hi-jinks. Hollyoaks: Life on Phobos was also being shown, as was Fat, Fat, Fat, Fat, Fat, Fat! Imperials were a currency used on Earth, and various establishments there displayed a rape-risk rating. Celebrity news reported that the owner of London was about to get married - again. Le Maison Celestial had established itself as a gourmet restaurant in a spaceship that was previously part of the Mim blockade. The White Rabbit pub, formerly an Earth establishment, had been relocated to Bedrock XII.