4
The mind and soul-jarring transition that had accompanied all his previous journeys across universes never came.
Instead, the experience was very different, so much so, that he struggled to fully explain it to himself.
There was a flash of white the moment the shuttle made contact with the gateway and then, just like that, everything was different.
As the world around him began to take shape again, he found himself standing, not in Frobisher’s shuttle, but beneath an endless bronze sky.
Far more peculiar than what was above him, however, was what he was standing on since it seemed impossible.
All around him, stretching into infinity, was a vast, seamless ocean.
Once he realized that he didn’t stand on solid land at all but on the calm watery surface itself, he immediately lost his balance, his mind fully expecting a plunge deep into this unknown sea. Instead, the surface was solid, and even as he readjusted himself and took a steadying step, the clearly wet and fluid ocean beneath him refused to give way.
Michael had always loved the sea, enjoyed exploring its depth whenever he got the chance and had even once seriously considered following his late mother’s footsteps and becoming an oceanographer, so the notion that he could, in fact, stand on top of one, walk on water, as it were, was one of the most surreal experiences of his life.
That was until he looked up and toward where he expected to find the horizon, only to see that this ocean was noticeably curving upward just before its stark azure texture merged with the sky.
Looking at or even considering this physics-defying phenomenon for too long was hurting his brain, so he made a conscious effort to look anywhere else.
“What is this place?”
He turned to see that Westren Frobisher had posed the question, standing just a few meters at his side. Bensu to his left.
Both men were clearly as enraptured by their surroundings as he had been.
Michael shook his head. “I don’t know. Some sort of ocean planet?”
The scientist considered him with a puzzled look. “An ocean of sand?”
Michael ventured another look at the distance, disturbingly realizing that the horizons were inverted no matter which way he turned, giving the impression that they were standing on the inside of a planet rather than the outside. He didn’t want to consider that this ocean was literally all around him, including above him. “All I see is water.”
Frobisher took a couple of steps. “I see nothing but a desert,” he said. “And it appears to be all around us as if we were standing on the surface of an immense rigid shell Dyson Sphere.”
“Our perceptions are different,” Michael said. He had read of such cases and it was certainly not the strangest thing that had happened over the last few days. “It suggests some sort of intelligence,” he added and then looked at Bensu. “What do you see?”
The former bartender turned interdimensional guru didn’t respond straight away. It took him a moment to finally focus his gaze on him. “It is difficult to explain. But I believe we are still on the shuttle.”
Michael nodded. “But where is the shuttle?”
“Something is happening,” Frobisher said and began to step backward.
Michael felt it a moment later. The surface of the ocean he stood on was beginning to rumble and waves were splashing against his legs.
The storm had come out of nowhere. A strong wind was making it difficult to remain standing while the peculiarly dry waves were threatening to make him lose whatever was left of his sense of balance.
“They are here.”
“Who?” Frobisher asked Bensu, having to shout to make himself heard over the noise all around them.
Something was bubbling under the surface of the water, and not just in one place, but everywhere he looked. The disturbances gave way to solid black objects rising from the sea, the nearest one just a couple of meters in front of him.
They were monoliths, climbing toward the sky, shaped like perfect rectangles, with surfaces so dark and smooth, he could see his own reflection on the ones nearest to him. There seemed to be an infinite amount of them, reaching out from the sea everywhere he looked, surrounding him and the others on all sides.
Each monolith was easily ten meters tall with enough distance between each one to truly give him a sense of the sheer number of those things, even if he had already given up trying to count them.
“The Beholders,” Michael whispered. He had no idea how he knew this, but he was absolutely certain that was exactly what was looking at.
Bensu nodded. “We have arrived in their universe. The center of everything that has been happening. Here there are only the Beholders.”
“They are the ones responsible for it all?” Frobisher said, his voice low and full of awe and perhaps fear.
“You should not have come here,” the voice boomed all around them with enough force, Michael instinctively reached for his ears. He couldn’t tell if it had come from a single monolith or all of them. “You do not belong in this place.”
It became slightly more bearable as the voice continued. Michael could now see intricate gold patterns on the smooth surfaces of those monoliths that pulsed with light as the voice spoke.
“You must return where you belong and accept your fate.”
“You mean perish along all the universes you are destroying,” Michael said angrily, glaring at several different monoliths around him, still not fully understanding if he was facing a single intelligence or many different individual ones.
“We are correcting the flow of all things. The equilibrium of the multiverse is out of balance due to the actions of your kind, caused over centuries in countless universes. You have treated the space-time continuum with wanton disregard, damaging its very fabric beyond all repair. We are correcting your mistakes.”
“What are they talking about?” Frobisher said
Bensu took a step forward as if to challenge the Beholders. “They speak of how the normal state of the quantum-verse has been altered over the centuries through technology and other means. The way individuals and groups of people have bent the rules of time and space over and over again.”
“And your solution to this damage is to just tear it all down and what? Start over again?” Michael said sharply.
“It is the only acceptable manner in which to correct your mistakes.”
Michael shook his head. “And destroy countless lives? I refuse to accept that. There must be another way.”
“Your acceptance of the fact is inconsequential. We have watched and studied the multiverse longer than your mind could fathom. We have calculated the outcome of all actions and all events far beyond your understanding. We have reached the only possible conclusion. The multiverse must begin anew.”
“And let me guess,” Michael said, still struggling to successfully suppress his anger. “It all restarts here? You’re tearing down everything but your own home?”
“For there to be anything there must be something to begin with. We will form the core from which all else will regrow and prosper. A multiverse that will be guided and controlled by us to ensure it will never be corrupted again.”
“How very convenient for you,” said Frobisher.
“Without our intervention, all universes, including this one, will eventually perish. Once there is nothing, there cannot ever be anything again. We are seeking to preserve space and time, life and energy, purpose and ambition.”
“Preserving it by destroying everything,” Michael said. “Not the most original plan I’ve heard.”
Bensu took another step forward. “If you were to stop all your efforts to destroy the quantum-verse. When would this total collapse occur?”
“It is pointless to ask questions if you are incapable to comprehend the answers.”
“Humor us,” Michael said.
There was a sharp, high-pitched tone that reverberated through Michael’s entire body and forced him onto his knees with excruciating pain. It lasted mere seconds but it had felt like hours. It took a few more moments for his blurred vision to return to normal. That’s when he saw that Frobisher had been equally affected but recovering more slowly.
Bensu, on the other hand, was still standing. He turned toward him. “To put it in terms that you would understand,” he said calmly and as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. “It’s a number so massive, it is almost impossible to accurately determine the amount of digits it contains. It is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.”
“Graham’s number,” Frobisher whispered, having recovered sufficiently to having overheard Bensu’s comment. “That is insane.”
“Time is inessential,” the Beholder voice boomed. “The death of the multiverse is inevitable. Action must be taken to correct this. And only we have the cognitive ability to comprehend the problem and take the necessary steps to rectify it.”
Frobisher was just shaking his head slowly, mumbling to himself. “You are destroying everything because of something that will not happen for essentially an eternity.”
But for Michael, something else was slowly coming into focus, like a puzzle that had his final pieces being slotted into place. He considered Bensu for a moment before he turned toward the nearest monolith. “No,” he said firmly. “You are wrong.”
“There can be no error in our calculations. Our logic is irrefutable. The multiverse will cease to exist if we do not carry out corrective actions.”
“Maybe. But you’re wrong about something else. You’re not the only ones with the ability to understand this problem,” he said and then stepped up to Bensu and then looked him in the eye. “You understand, don’t you?”
“I … I’m not sure.”
“That is not possible,” the voice droned.
But Michael was certain now. “Yes, you do. You’ve known all along. You knew about the Ring and where to find it. You knew what it was capable of and you knew what these Beholders were up to. You were the only one with the power to pierce universes, to stand up to them, to bring us here.”
“Only the Beholders can understand the Beholders.”
“Exactly,” Michael said, his eyes still on Bensu.
“You think I’m one of them?”
“You heard them say it. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“I … I don’t know,” he said. “It’s so difficult to remember. I was inside Xylion’s mind for so long. And before that. I was without a body for what felt like centuries longer. Then there was Celerias. There I had many bodies, many sleeves before it was destroyed by a supernova,” he said. Then, very slowly, as if he was only now realizing the truth, he looked up at the nearest monolith, his features hardening. “A supernova that you created to try and destroy me.”
“You are the aberration. That cannot be,” the voice said, and Michael thought that for the first time since it had spoken, he could hear something other than certainty in that voice.
“With all this vast intellect you claim you possess; you were clearly wrong about Bensu. I wonder, perhaps you’re wrong about the multiverse. About a plan that would see the destruction of all life that has ever existed,” Michael said.
“No,” the voice boomed with such power, it seemed to come from all around them and it forced all three of them to the ground, finding themselves on their hands and knees.
Bensu didn’t stay down for long. “I remember now. I counseled against all of this. I urged you to reconsider but you wouldn’t listen. So I left. I left to learn more about the quantum-verse and to try and fully understand what it was you claimed needed to be wiped out.”
“You are the aberration. An anomaly that must be terminated to allow the inevitable to occur.”
“I traveled across the multiverse, became part of countless civilizations. I saw them rise and fall over eons.”
“Your activities were irrelevant, without purpose.”
But Bensu shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think my experiences made me stronger, more powerful. And I think I started to learn what the Beholders had long since forgotten. That there is more to the multiverse than statistical probability.”
“The end of the multiverse is a statistical certainty.”
“Over time I began to forget about who I really was. Until Celerias. And once I started to remember, you realized that I had become a threat to your plans and you decided to neutralize me by wiping out an entire planet.”
“A minor sacrifice in the greater scheme.”
“I tried to stop it. I tried to prevent the cataclysmic solar flares that you had set in motion but my resources were too limited. In the end, an entire planet died because I had chosen it as a home. Because you were afraid of what I had become. But you failed.”
“An error that we will correct. The anomaly must be terminated.”
The monoliths all around them seemed to grow in size until Michael could no longer see the sky above. Bright rays of pure golden light were slung toward them and he had no doubt that they would cook them alive.
He raised his hands in a futile attempt to shield himself from the power bearing down on them.
But there was no impact.
When he lowered his hands again, he saw why. Some sort of bubble-shaped energy field had appeared around them and it was holding back the Beholders. For now.
Bensu, down on one knee, was clearly the source of the field. But he was struggling to maintain it. His trembling body and the sweat pearls running down his face were making that much obvious.
“The anomaly must be terminated.”
Bensu turned to look at Michael. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
He quickly approached him. “No, you were clearly right. They tried to destroy you because they feared you. They feared that you had become powerful enough to stop them. That means you’re a threat to them. You can oppose them.”
But he shook his head. “I think I may have misjudged a little,” he said, clearly struggling to get the words out while the vast majority of his effort was clearly concentrated on repelling the Beholder attack. “Maybe I waited too long. Whatever threat I was to them, it’s too late now. I cannot fight them all.”
“You must try.”
“I cannot. But you still can.”
Michael had no idea what he was talking about.
“Try again, Captain.
You.
Must.
Try.
Again.”
Bensu closed his eyes.
Michael felt an immense heat and just like that he was back in the shuttle.
“What just happened?” Frobisher said, clearly disorientated by the sudden change of environment.
Michael looked around. The two of them were alone in the shuttle. Outside the viewport, all he could see was that intense golden light, and the entire ship was trembling furiously underneath them.
“He must have sent us back,” Michael said.
“But we’re still in this Beholder-verse,” Frobisher said. “Where can we go?”
Michael was racking his brain but the only answer he could come up with was nowhere. The entire quantum-verse was being annihilated as to the Beholders’ insane designs. The only place that would remain was their own universe.
“The anomaly must be terminated.”
And staying here was not an option. Bensu had bought them time but it was rapidly running out.
“Try again,” Michael said.
“What does that mean? Try what again? And how?” Frobisher was at a loss.
Michael looked around the shuttle that had brought them to this universe. Powered by an ingenuous trans-dimensional engine designed by Wes Frobisher and his brother.
In another time, in a different universe, that engine had been used to attempt to transport people over vast distances. That experiment had failed and his brother had died. And then, Frobisher, a different version of him, had repurposed the dark anti-matter engine to transport himself into the past. And Michael and an away team had followed him through time.
He looked up at Frobisher again, the man who looked so much like the man who had killed his brother. After everything they had been through, he still found it a struggle to not see Matthew’s killer when he looked at him. “It’s not where to go, Doctor. It’s when.”
“What?”
“You said it yourself. The dark anti-matter engine could be used to manipulate the chroniton field.”
“Hypothetically.”
“No,” Michael shook his head. “It can be done. I know it can because I used it to go back to the past.”
“Even if that were true, that was in a different universe, using a different engine altogether. This one was never designed to do any of that,” Frobisher said, sounding more than a bit exasperated. “It would take weeks, no months, to make the calculations and alter the design to allow for temporal operations and even then I’m not sure it would work.”
“The anomaly must be terminated.”
The light outside was so bright now, it hurt to even look at it. The shuttle was once again beginning to fall apart, with bulkhead panels shaking loose and dropping to the deck. Michael had no idea how this tough little shuttle was even still in one piece after everything it had endured.
He grabbed Frobisher and pushed him into the pilot seat. “We don’t even have minutes, Doctor. You’ll just have to work fast.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Try again. That’s what he said. He knew it was possible, Doctor. Bensu knew. Just do it. Do something.”
Frobisher began to operate the console. “None of this makes any kind of sense. I don’t even know if—”
Michael looked up to see that the Beholder energy was burning itself through the viewport. His vision was the first thing to go, then he felt heat like had never felt before. Then he felt nothing.
Time had run out.
The mind and soul-jarring transition that had accompanied all his previous journeys across universes never came.
Instead, the experience was very different, so much so, that he struggled to fully explain it to himself.
There was a flash of white the moment the shuttle made contact with the gateway and then, just like that, everything was different.
As the world around him began to take shape again, he found himself standing, not in Frobisher’s shuttle, but beneath an endless bronze sky.
Far more peculiar than what was above him, however, was what he was standing on since it seemed impossible.
All around him, stretching into infinity, was a vast, seamless ocean.
Once he realized that he didn’t stand on solid land at all but on the calm watery surface itself, he immediately lost his balance, his mind fully expecting a plunge deep into this unknown sea. Instead, the surface was solid, and even as he readjusted himself and took a steadying step, the clearly wet and fluid ocean beneath him refused to give way.
Michael had always loved the sea, enjoyed exploring its depth whenever he got the chance and had even once seriously considered following his late mother’s footsteps and becoming an oceanographer, so the notion that he could, in fact, stand on top of one, walk on water, as it were, was one of the most surreal experiences of his life.
That was until he looked up and toward where he expected to find the horizon, only to see that this ocean was noticeably curving upward just before its stark azure texture merged with the sky.
Looking at or even considering this physics-defying phenomenon for too long was hurting his brain, so he made a conscious effort to look anywhere else.
“What is this place?”
He turned to see that Westren Frobisher had posed the question, standing just a few meters at his side. Bensu to his left.
Both men were clearly as enraptured by their surroundings as he had been.
Michael shook his head. “I don’t know. Some sort of ocean planet?”
The scientist considered him with a puzzled look. “An ocean of sand?”
Michael ventured another look at the distance, disturbingly realizing that the horizons were inverted no matter which way he turned, giving the impression that they were standing on the inside of a planet rather than the outside. He didn’t want to consider that this ocean was literally all around him, including above him. “All I see is water.”
Frobisher took a couple of steps. “I see nothing but a desert,” he said. “And it appears to be all around us as if we were standing on the surface of an immense rigid shell Dyson Sphere.”
“Our perceptions are different,” Michael said. He had read of such cases and it was certainly not the strangest thing that had happened over the last few days. “It suggests some sort of intelligence,” he added and then looked at Bensu. “What do you see?”
The former bartender turned interdimensional guru didn’t respond straight away. It took him a moment to finally focus his gaze on him. “It is difficult to explain. But I believe we are still on the shuttle.”
Michael nodded. “But where is the shuttle?”
“Something is happening,” Frobisher said and began to step backward.
Michael felt it a moment later. The surface of the ocean he stood on was beginning to rumble and waves were splashing against his legs.
The storm had come out of nowhere. A strong wind was making it difficult to remain standing while the peculiarly dry waves were threatening to make him lose whatever was left of his sense of balance.
“They are here.”
“Who?” Frobisher asked Bensu, having to shout to make himself heard over the noise all around them.
Something was bubbling under the surface of the water, and not just in one place, but everywhere he looked. The disturbances gave way to solid black objects rising from the sea, the nearest one just a couple of meters in front of him.
They were monoliths, climbing toward the sky, shaped like perfect rectangles, with surfaces so dark and smooth, he could see his own reflection on the ones nearest to him. There seemed to be an infinite amount of them, reaching out from the sea everywhere he looked, surrounding him and the others on all sides.
Each monolith was easily ten meters tall with enough distance between each one to truly give him a sense of the sheer number of those things, even if he had already given up trying to count them.
“The Beholders,” Michael whispered. He had no idea how he knew this, but he was absolutely certain that was exactly what was looking at.
Bensu nodded. “We have arrived in their universe. The center of everything that has been happening. Here there are only the Beholders.”
“They are the ones responsible for it all?” Frobisher said, his voice low and full of awe and perhaps fear.
“You should not have come here,” the voice boomed all around them with enough force, Michael instinctively reached for his ears. He couldn’t tell if it had come from a single monolith or all of them. “You do not belong in this place.”
It became slightly more bearable as the voice continued. Michael could now see intricate gold patterns on the smooth surfaces of those monoliths that pulsed with light as the voice spoke.
“You must return where you belong and accept your fate.”
“You mean perish along all the universes you are destroying,” Michael said angrily, glaring at several different monoliths around him, still not fully understanding if he was facing a single intelligence or many different individual ones.
“We are correcting the flow of all things. The equilibrium of the multiverse is out of balance due to the actions of your kind, caused over centuries in countless universes. You have treated the space-time continuum with wanton disregard, damaging its very fabric beyond all repair. We are correcting your mistakes.”
“What are they talking about?” Frobisher said
Bensu took a step forward as if to challenge the Beholders. “They speak of how the normal state of the quantum-verse has been altered over the centuries through technology and other means. The way individuals and groups of people have bent the rules of time and space over and over again.”
“And your solution to this damage is to just tear it all down and what? Start over again?” Michael said sharply.
“It is the only acceptable manner in which to correct your mistakes.”
Michael shook his head. “And destroy countless lives? I refuse to accept that. There must be another way.”
“Your acceptance of the fact is inconsequential. We have watched and studied the multiverse longer than your mind could fathom. We have calculated the outcome of all actions and all events far beyond your understanding. We have reached the only possible conclusion. The multiverse must begin anew.”
“And let me guess,” Michael said, still struggling to successfully suppress his anger. “It all restarts here? You’re tearing down everything but your own home?”
“For there to be anything there must be something to begin with. We will form the core from which all else will regrow and prosper. A multiverse that will be guided and controlled by us to ensure it will never be corrupted again.”
“How very convenient for you,” said Frobisher.
“Without our intervention, all universes, including this one, will eventually perish. Once there is nothing, there cannot ever be anything again. We are seeking to preserve space and time, life and energy, purpose and ambition.”
“Preserving it by destroying everything,” Michael said. “Not the most original plan I’ve heard.”
Bensu took another step forward. “If you were to stop all your efforts to destroy the quantum-verse. When would this total collapse occur?”
“It is pointless to ask questions if you are incapable to comprehend the answers.”
“Humor us,” Michael said.
There was a sharp, high-pitched tone that reverberated through Michael’s entire body and forced him onto his knees with excruciating pain. It lasted mere seconds but it had felt like hours. It took a few more moments for his blurred vision to return to normal. That’s when he saw that Frobisher had been equally affected but recovering more slowly.
Bensu, on the other hand, was still standing. He turned toward him. “To put it in terms that you would understand,” he said calmly and as if nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. “It’s a number so massive, it is almost impossible to accurately determine the amount of digits it contains. It is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.”
“Graham’s number,” Frobisher whispered, having recovered sufficiently to having overheard Bensu’s comment. “That is insane.”
“Time is inessential,” the Beholder voice boomed. “The death of the multiverse is inevitable. Action must be taken to correct this. And only we have the cognitive ability to comprehend the problem and take the necessary steps to rectify it.”
Frobisher was just shaking his head slowly, mumbling to himself. “You are destroying everything because of something that will not happen for essentially an eternity.”
But for Michael, something else was slowly coming into focus, like a puzzle that had his final pieces being slotted into place. He considered Bensu for a moment before he turned toward the nearest monolith. “No,” he said firmly. “You are wrong.”
“There can be no error in our calculations. Our logic is irrefutable. The multiverse will cease to exist if we do not carry out corrective actions.”
“Maybe. But you’re wrong about something else. You’re not the only ones with the ability to understand this problem,” he said and then stepped up to Bensu and then looked him in the eye. “You understand, don’t you?”
“I … I’m not sure.”
“That is not possible,” the voice droned.
But Michael was certain now. “Yes, you do. You’ve known all along. You knew about the Ring and where to find it. You knew what it was capable of and you knew what these Beholders were up to. You were the only one with the power to pierce universes, to stand up to them, to bring us here.”
“Only the Beholders can understand the Beholders.”
“Exactly,” Michael said, his eyes still on Bensu.
“You think I’m one of them?”
“You heard them say it. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“I … I don’t know,” he said. “It’s so difficult to remember. I was inside Xylion’s mind for so long. And before that. I was without a body for what felt like centuries longer. Then there was Celerias. There I had many bodies, many sleeves before it was destroyed by a supernova,” he said. Then, very slowly, as if he was only now realizing the truth, he looked up at the nearest monolith, his features hardening. “A supernova that you created to try and destroy me.”
“You are the aberration. That cannot be,” the voice said, and Michael thought that for the first time since it had spoken, he could hear something other than certainty in that voice.
“With all this vast intellect you claim you possess; you were clearly wrong about Bensu. I wonder, perhaps you’re wrong about the multiverse. About a plan that would see the destruction of all life that has ever existed,” Michael said.
“No,” the voice boomed with such power, it seemed to come from all around them and it forced all three of them to the ground, finding themselves on their hands and knees.
Bensu didn’t stay down for long. “I remember now. I counseled against all of this. I urged you to reconsider but you wouldn’t listen. So I left. I left to learn more about the quantum-verse and to try and fully understand what it was you claimed needed to be wiped out.”
“You are the aberration. An anomaly that must be terminated to allow the inevitable to occur.”
“I traveled across the multiverse, became part of countless civilizations. I saw them rise and fall over eons.”
“Your activities were irrelevant, without purpose.”
But Bensu shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think my experiences made me stronger, more powerful. And I think I started to learn what the Beholders had long since forgotten. That there is more to the multiverse than statistical probability.”
“The end of the multiverse is a statistical certainty.”
“Over time I began to forget about who I really was. Until Celerias. And once I started to remember, you realized that I had become a threat to your plans and you decided to neutralize me by wiping out an entire planet.”
“A minor sacrifice in the greater scheme.”
“I tried to stop it. I tried to prevent the cataclysmic solar flares that you had set in motion but my resources were too limited. In the end, an entire planet died because I had chosen it as a home. Because you were afraid of what I had become. But you failed.”
“An error that we will correct. The anomaly must be terminated.”
The monoliths all around them seemed to grow in size until Michael could no longer see the sky above. Bright rays of pure golden light were slung toward them and he had no doubt that they would cook them alive.
He raised his hands in a futile attempt to shield himself from the power bearing down on them.
But there was no impact.
When he lowered his hands again, he saw why. Some sort of bubble-shaped energy field had appeared around them and it was holding back the Beholders. For now.
Bensu, down on one knee, was clearly the source of the field. But he was struggling to maintain it. His trembling body and the sweat pearls running down his face were making that much obvious.
“The anomaly must be terminated.”
Bensu turned to look at Michael. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
He quickly approached him. “No, you were clearly right. They tried to destroy you because they feared you. They feared that you had become powerful enough to stop them. That means you’re a threat to them. You can oppose them.”
But he shook his head. “I think I may have misjudged a little,” he said, clearly struggling to get the words out while the vast majority of his effort was clearly concentrated on repelling the Beholder attack. “Maybe I waited too long. Whatever threat I was to them, it’s too late now. I cannot fight them all.”
“You must try.”
“I cannot. But you still can.”
Michael had no idea what he was talking about.
“Try again, Captain.
You.
Must.
Try.
Again.”
Bensu closed his eyes.
Michael felt an immense heat and just like that he was back in the shuttle.
“What just happened?” Frobisher said, clearly disorientated by the sudden change of environment.
Michael looked around. The two of them were alone in the shuttle. Outside the viewport, all he could see was that intense golden light, and the entire ship was trembling furiously underneath them.
“He must have sent us back,” Michael said.
“But we’re still in this Beholder-verse,” Frobisher said. “Where can we go?”
Michael was racking his brain but the only answer he could come up with was nowhere. The entire quantum-verse was being annihilated as to the Beholders’ insane designs. The only place that would remain was their own universe.
“The anomaly must be terminated.”
And staying here was not an option. Bensu had bought them time but it was rapidly running out.
“Try again,” Michael said.
“What does that mean? Try what again? And how?” Frobisher was at a loss.
Michael looked around the shuttle that had brought them to this universe. Powered by an ingenuous trans-dimensional engine designed by Wes Frobisher and his brother.
In another time, in a different universe, that engine had been used to attempt to transport people over vast distances. That experiment had failed and his brother had died. And then, Frobisher, a different version of him, had repurposed the dark anti-matter engine to transport himself into the past. And Michael and an away team had followed him through time.
He looked up at Frobisher again, the man who looked so much like the man who had killed his brother. After everything they had been through, he still found it a struggle to not see Matthew’s killer when he looked at him. “It’s not where to go, Doctor. It’s when.”
“What?”
“You said it yourself. The dark anti-matter engine could be used to manipulate the chroniton field.”
“Hypothetically.”
“No,” Michael shook his head. “It can be done. I know it can because I used it to go back to the past.”
“Even if that were true, that was in a different universe, using a different engine altogether. This one was never designed to do any of that,” Frobisher said, sounding more than a bit exasperated. “It would take weeks, no months, to make the calculations and alter the design to allow for temporal operations and even then I’m not sure it would work.”
“The anomaly must be terminated.”
The light outside was so bright now, it hurt to even look at it. The shuttle was once again beginning to fall apart, with bulkhead panels shaking loose and dropping to the deck. Michael had no idea how this tough little shuttle was even still in one piece after everything it had endured.
He grabbed Frobisher and pushed him into the pilot seat. “We don’t even have minutes, Doctor. You’ll just have to work fast.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Try again. That’s what he said. He knew it was possible, Doctor. Bensu knew. Just do it. Do something.”
Frobisher began to operate the console. “None of this makes any kind of sense. I don’t even know if—”
Michael looked up to see that the Beholder energy was burning itself through the viewport. His vision was the first thing to go, then he felt heat like had never felt before. Then he felt nothing.
Time had run out.
