Memoirs of a Timelord

by Ralph Rotten

  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 t
emporal 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.

  The long and short of it was that I passed with good marks. There had been a few things I missed, little technical details mostly, but I had performed well enough that I was advanced to the next stage of my training. After years of toiling in the spice mines of Kessel, I was ready to begin the mind-bending phase of my training; Causation and Factorization. And I'd do it simultaneously while completing medical school. Couldn't be any worse than galactic law school...at least I hoped. Legal Practices had been a decade-long snoozer.

  The Ethereals

  I was back in the Boss's training galaxy when I saw my first angel. I have to say that I didn't know what he was at first. Strike that; none of my DuNai implants or enhancements could detect anything about the man as he stood there looking over the airless lunar surface. I only realized he was there because the Guf told me he was. To anyone else I was all alone on this rogue moon where the temps hover just above zero Kelvin. As it was, I had to make some tricky mods to my own body to survive here. So finding out there's some random guy standing twenty feet away was unsettling. Especially since he was dressed like he was going to a BBQ, with his shorts and flip flops.

  It took a second to figure out he was an Ethereal. Common to all galaxies, the Ethereal are embryonic nursemaids. Think of them as a smart eggshell protecting the Guf until ascension. They have fantastic powers and the ability to see anything on our plane of existence, yet they are dumb as a bricks when it comes to managing organics and other corporeal life forms. They simply don't understand our perspective as mortal beings. That's what Timelords are for.

  But I had been a little concerned to know there was an angel watching me. They have some serious abilities. Individually they can change an entire solar system and everything in it, including me, just by wiggling their nose Elizabeth Montgomery style. An angel could make me never have existed, at least in this galaxy. It was their only limitation; they were bound to their own galaxies, but within it they could change anything. Editing the laws of physics was not out of the question for these guys.

  I lied, they had one other limitation. There was one person they couldn't fuck with, and that was whoever controlled the Guf. A lotta people can sense the Well of Souls, hear its voices, but the Guf is monogamous and will only truly answer to one Alpha at a time. Control the Guf, and the Ethereals will follow you.

  Although I knew this galaxy intimately, I was new to being the Alpha. I didn't know if this guy would respect that or not. It's something to worry about when he can toss you out of the galaxy on your head if he wants to. As the Alpha, I would have influence over the Ethereals, but not any kind of absolute control. They were sentient beings with their own jobs and little interest in corporeal issues. Would you give a shit about problems in a termite nest in Africa? No, and neither do they...mostly.

  So why was this snapperhead shadowing me? I was just about to get irritated when I remembered my dear Mother's advice: Be polite and introduce yourself.

  "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Timmy on over." I kidded as I addressed him directly thru the Guf. "I am Jenna Ramirez, and you would be?"

  A second or two passed before he entered the visible spectrum. I couldn't help but frown when I saw that he was wearing my cousin Timmy's face. Like I said, great powers but dumb as bricks. He had the ability to pull the image from my own memory banks, but too dumb to understand the pain associated with the face. Timmy had killed himself on Mother's day, about a year before I died. Most likely this Ethereal had simply picked the only Timmy in my memory banks, or maybe he chose that face because of the emotional attachment? It was hard to tell with these guys. They comprehended the most intricate laws of physics, yet they're mystified by chocolate.

  "This form, it hurts you?" He seemed unsure of the words before changing his appearance to my Mother's face. "Is this better? I did find much contention in those files as well."

  It was true, my mother and I had some rocky years before I ran off and joined the Army. Seeing this knucklehead wearing her face only made me bristle.

  "Just be John Wayne, how about that?" I gave a sharp directive to keep this guy from replaying my life before my eyes. In a flash he was the Duke, complete with the swagger and six-shooter. I hadn't realized he was so tall. Imagine that; John Wayne on the moon. How many people you know can honestly say they seen that? I took a selfie.

  "I'm Shirley." He happily introduced h
imself, prolly unaware of the general mismatch of his chosen name. Ethereals have no gender, so the concept of boy's names went right over his head.

  "Surely you jest," I gave a smirk, knowing the humor would probably not register. "Shirley, eh? Well the real John Wayne was actually named Marion, and Stacy Keach was a pretty good tough guy despite the girl's name, so I guess I can work with Shirley Wayne."

  "There are so many stories in your head, these..." he paused for the right word, "movies? You have many thousands in your memory. They are fascinating. They are not real life, yet you use them to measure the world around you. Interesting. Would you mind if I watched them all?" His eyes looked sincere, but that was just how the Duke was.

  "As long as you're already poking around in there with a shovel, sure, why not." I said as if it mattered. I swear I could almost feel him studying every movie I ever seen, even the dirty ones my boyfriend convinced me to watch.

  "So much media. Your people are not at all like the Voh. Why is that?" He seemed truly curious as he drew closer almost hesitantly.

  "Their mommy didn't love them as much as ours did." I couldn't really think of a good reason besides the fact that they were a hodgepodge race that loathed itself. Besides, I knew this guy was listening to me through the Guf so he got the idea in full HD color. Whether or not he would understand the gist of what I was saying was another question.

  "You are from a place very far from here." He spoke the words while imparting an understanding of just how far from home I really was. The distance was incomprehensible as I felt his thoughts wash over me. Suddenly I felt so damned depressed. There was just something so overwhelming about the vast distance that I felt almost hopeless. He had expressed his feelings in both time and space, and managed to crush every last one of my hopes. Right away I knew from his thoughts that I was hell and gone from Earth. In that brief glimpse I had seen millions of galaxies between here and home. The only reason my head didn't explode from the image was because of my DuNai implants.