B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  On Boxing Day, 2593, Benny won a bet on Fat Lightning, odds 8-1, at the annual St. Oscar’s slug-racing championships. She celebrated by “not getting absolutely bladdered”. [856]

  2594 (January) - Benny: Down [857]

  Tyler’s Folly declared independence from Earth, and the Republican Security Force responded by staging a military coup, declaring the colony there a police state. Benny’s actions helped the conceptual entity MEPHISTO to emerge, but prevented it from remaking reality in its image. MEPHISTO’s philosophy of pain amidst a utopia aided the further development of the People of the Worldsphere.

  2594 (January) - Benny: Deadfall [858]

  The Knights of Jeneve searched for descendants of their founder, Vazlov Baygent, hoping to host his preserved memories in one of them. Chris Cwej - identified as one of Baygent’s descendants - and Jason Kane thwarted the Knights’ efforts to find a Baygent-host aboard the KayBee 2, a prison ship.

  2594 - Benny: Ghost Devices

  The supercomputer God asked Benny to join an archaeological expedition to Canopus IV, where she found the Spire built by the long-dead Vo’lach race. Benny caused two Vo’lach Planetcracker missiles to travel into the past and damage the Spire. As God intended, this averted the paradox pertaining to the Spire’s nature, saving billions of lives.

  2594 - Benny: Mean Streets [859]

  Benny and Chris Cwej went to the planet Megerra and exposed The Project - an illicit undertaking by DevCorps to create genetically engineered miners with enhanced stamina. DevCorps was bankrupted. The Combine was currently the biggest crime syndicate in the galaxy.

  2594 - Benny: Tempest

  Benny gave a lecture to the archaeological society on the colony world of Tempest, then left for the spaceport aboard the Polar Express monorail. The business tycoon Nathan Costermann embarked on a murder and insurance scam involving the Drell Imnulate - an artifact of the Drell religion. After Benny exposed his plans, Costermann fell to his death.

  2594 - Benny: Walking to Babylon [860]

  !Ci!ci-tel and WiRgo!xu believed that the People of the Worldsphere had become complacent, and tried to goad the People and the Time Lords into war by establishing a treaty-violating time corridor to ancient Babylon. Benny went into the past and stopped the rogues, removing the need for God to destroy the time-corridor - and Babylon - with a singularity bomb.

  2594 - Benny: Oblivion

  The sentient spaceship Schirron Dream sought help from its old friends - Benny, Jason Kane, Chris Cwej and the late Roz Forrester, the last of whom the ship brought through time as a 20-year-old - after disruptions in space-time made its crew go missing. The wealthy Randolph Bane had found the Egg, an artifact in the Shadow Depository, and hoped to gain immortality from it even if the universe consequently perished. Bane and his rival, Simon Deed, were time-looped. Roz destroyed the Egg, but its final burst of power erased her memories of these events. The Schirron Dream crew was located, and Roz was sent back to her native time. [861]

  2594 - Benny: The Medusa Effect

  The Medusa had now been adrift for two decades, and Benny joined an expedition to recover it. She and Braxiatel learned that the Advanced Research Department at St. Oscar’s had been complicit in the deaths of the Medusa crew, but remained silent in exchange for a confession from Taffeta Graize, the main culprit. A synthoid containing the dead crew’s memories killed Graize.

  2594 - Benny: Dry Pilgrimage

  Genetic engineering had now eliminated all major human cancers and blood disorders. Cigarettes contained no harmful substances, but very few people still smoked. Chateau Yquatine was in production. [862]

  Saraani pilgrims fled an atheist revolution on their homeworld, and sought to establish themselves on an island on Dellah. Benny joined the Saraani aboard the cruise ship Lady of Lorelei as they searched for a suitable locale. Czaritza Violaine, the exiled leader of Visphok, cut a deal with some of the Saraani: they would use their mind-transference abilities (part of their reproductive cycle) to shift the minds of Violaine’s aged veterans into weaponised bioconstructs, in exchange for Violaine liberating Saraanis. The agreement went south, and Violaine was killed.

  In 2594, the fox-like Valethske searched for their former gods, the Khorlthochloi, and fought with the Sontarans. The Earth Empire had colonised the Thynemnus system, and a mass immigration led to tensions. The planet Korsair was established to settle disputes. The Valethske attacked one of the new colonies, overwhelming the Korsairs and capturing colonists for their larder. [863]

  On Ordifica, Fitz was initiated into Faction Paradox around 2594. Laura Tobin, who would become the Doctor’s companion Compassion, was sent to Ordifica the same year. [864]

  2595 - Benny: The Sword of Forever [865]

  Armstrong City was a settlement in the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon.

  Marillian, unofficially the third-richest man in the world, now owned London and Greenwich. Benny encountered Marillian while investigating the journal of Guillaume de Beaujeu, and platonically married him to get a childbirth license - a pre-requirement for her accessing the texts within the British Library. Marillian assisted Benny in recovering the finger of John the Baptist from Castle Arginy, and what they believed was the skull of Christ from a Templar museum in Paris. He then made off with both items.

  Benny realised that four items associated with Christ - the Spear of Longinus that pierced Christ’s side, Christ’s Crown of Thorns, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant - could be combined to form the Sword of Forever: a device capable of creating entire worlds and timelines. Marillian’s master, Gebmoses III, died while trying to use the Sword to retroactively create a master race cloned from Christ’s skull.

  Evidence suggested that Benny had died using the Sword - which was intended for use by a higher power, and would kill any human who operated it - to recreate Earth’s timeline after its destruction. She dutifully welcomed God into her heart and died to activate the Sword. Earth’s timeline was reinstated, and Benny was restored to life in a new body.

  St. Oscar’s University Press published Benny’s An Eye for Wisdom: Repetitive Poems of the Early Ikkaban Period in 2595. [866] Bev Tarrant, a skilled thief from the future, found herself in the year 2595. [867]

  c 2595 - Benny: Buried Treasures: “Making Myths” [868]

  Benny and her friend Keri, a Pakhar journalist, visited the declining tourist planet Shangri-La; Benny claimed to have discovered the famed Mud Fields of Agrivan there. A video of Keri running atop a giant cart wheel motivated thousands of Pakhar to make bookings to Shangri-La, reviving the planet’s economy.

  c 2595 - Benny: Buried Treasures: “Closure”

  On the planet Panyos, the despotic regime led by Ulrich Hescarti ended when he was shot in the back by one of his own people. After witnessing the horrors of Hescarti’s ethnic cleansing programme, Benny used her time ring to travel back and change his personal history.

  2595 - Benny: Another Girl, Another Planet

  Archaeologist Lizbeth Fugard researched the heritage of the colony planet Dimetos by studying the industrial sites established there by Eurogen Butler. Bantu Cooperative, a weapons manufacturer, sabotaged Fugard’s operations to conceal how many installations had been built atop Eurogen nuclear reactors and disused mine workings, hoping to curry favour with the Dimetos administration. Benny stymied Bantu by destroying their largest research facility, but obliterated the biggest Dimetan archaeological site in the process.

  The only surviving Dimetan, Csoker, killed himself rather than endure as the last of his race. Fugard became a professor of sidereal mythology at Youkali University. [869]

  2595 (21st June) - Benny: Beige Planet Mars [870]

  On Mars, human slaves were illegal, but vat-grown clone slaves were permitted. “Spartan” was slang for a staunchly homosexual soldier who detested weakness in either gender.

  Jason Kane had embarked on a lucrative career writing semi-autobiographical xenoporn novels; his first book, Nights of the Perfumed Tentacle,
sold twelve million copies. Bernice’s Down Amongst the Dead Men was in its sixth printing. Benny was attending an academic conference that celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of Mars’ terraforming and had a passionate reunion with Jason Kane - who, unknown to her, was in a relationship with the organiser of the event, the Pakhar named Professor Megali Scoblow. Benny failed to prepare her paper for the conference and instead gave a stream-of-consciousness delivery - in which she accidently exposed fellow academic Elizabeth Trinity as the notorious war criminal Tellassar.

  Philip and Christina York, the trillionaire couple who owned YorkCorp, nearly started a nuclear conflict on Mars while fending off a hostile takeover from Bantu Cooperative. Together, Benny and Jason prevented the holocaust. Trinity submitted herself to General Keele for judgment.

  The fiasco ruined Professor Scoblow’s academic career. She became Jason’s xenoporn editor. She was personally featured in Volume 7 (Nibbling Around the Mousehole, a bestseller) and took possession of his great unpublished work, Barely Humanoid. [871]

  2595 - Benny: Where Angels Fear

  Immensely powerful beings thought to be the former gods of the People freed themselves from imprisonment on Dellah. As the gods’ influence spread, Dellah experienced a burst of increasingly violent religious fanaticism; both the Time Lords and the supercomputer God feared this was the start of a much larger conflict. Benny and Braxiatel were separated as a fleet evacuated many Dellans, and Earth quarantined the planet.

  The Time Lords were concerned with this situation. [872]

  2595 - Benny: The Mary-Sue Extrusion [873]

  The gods had such dominance over Dellah, it was turning to desert. Their influence spread into space - Thanaxos, the system neighbouring Dellah, was gripped in a religious fever until Emile Mars-Smith, an ex-St. Oscar’s student, went into seclusion to restrain the god nestled within him.

  Pseudopod Enterprises Corporation dispatched an agent - a synthoid with Stratum Seven-level clearance - to find Bernice and learn more about the gods. The Agent discovered that Benny had rescued Wolsey from Dellah after submitting herself to a “Mary-Sue”: a process that overwrites one’s personality with a new persona, and helped her to resist the gods’ influence.

  Benny’s former homeworld of Beta Caprisis was still abandoned, and had been since the Dalek assault there.

  2595 - Benny: Dead Romance [874]

  The Time Lords feared the gods to such an extent, they altered their treaty with the People. In exchange for not siding with the gods, the People would be allowed to develop time technology. The Time Lords also, using Chris Cwej as their agent, sought to prepare a bottle universe - one that contained a replica of 1970 Earth - as a shelter in case the gods became too powerful.

  Cwej went into the bottle universe, and performed rituals that would manipulate the bottle’s protocols and give the Time Lords access. He cloned three women and ritualistically murdered two of them - but the third escaped and came to believe she was a 23-year-old art student named Christine Summerfield. Cwej found himself unable to kill Christine, and they became lovers.

  Cwej created and murdered yet-another clone, and a portal opened over London. The Time Lords poured forth, and reshaped the bottle Earth to their purposes. The world’s nations fruitlessly launched a nuclear strike; Cwej caught a fatal radiation burst and was slated for regeneration. The Time Lords mutated the bottle-humanity into slaves or surrogate Time-Lords-in-waiting. Christine left the bottle.

  c 2596 - Benny: Tears of the Oracle [875]

  Despite the new treaty, God predicted an 87% chance of war between the People and the Time Lords.

  Braxiatel learned that the Oracle of the Lost was probably located on planetoid KS-159 - which he won by gambling with its owner, Howard Denson, at Vega Station. Benny and Braxiatel led an expedition to KS-159, but the parasite within the Oracle started murdering their associates. The Time Lords force-regenerated Chris Cwej into a shorter body, and sent him to help.

  The parasite jumped into Benny’s robotic porter Joseph - who was actually a drone of the People Ship J-Kibb, and had been deployed by God to spy on Benny. God directed the J-Kibb to crash onto Dellah, believing that the parasite’s ability to spread uncertainty would counter-act the faith and religious mania that empowered the gods. The Oracle confirmed that the universal war was now much less likely to occur.

  The Time Lords sterilised the planet Ordifica, which killed three hundred million people. Two thousand survivors, including Laura Tobin and Fitz, were evacuated to the Justinian, which headed to the year 1799. [876]

  2596 - Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet [877]

  The Proximan Chain had been established as a collection of space stations, planetary settlements and colonies. It was connected by a series of transit pads, and had a population of seven billion. The Chain lacked a cohesive law, and was largely inhabited by corporations doing shady business. Benny and Braxiatel recruited synthoids - Artificial Personality Embodiments (APEs) - to hunt down any gods who eluded the Dellan quarantine. The freelance APE Kara Delbane was murdered, and Benny agreed to help Delbane’s lover, the Stratrum Seven agent, find her killers. Absolam Sleed had survived his former encounter with the Agent and Delbane, and been transformed into a crystalline entity. Benny killed Sleed and the Dellan god merged with him, ending their plan to slaughter the Proximan Chain populace with a mutagenic bomb.

  2596 - Benny: The Joy Device

  Benny decided to have an adventure-filled holiday on the Rim frontier, with famed adventurer Dent Harper serving as her guide. Jason worried that Benny would enjoy herself so much that she’d never return home, and worked to prevent her from having a good time - or the stamina for an assignation with Harper. Braxiatel took possession of Dorpfeld’s Prism, and filed in the KS-159 archives.

  2596 - Benny: Twilight of the Gods [878]

  The remaining gods on Dellah began to war amongst themselves, and the Time Lords and the People considered extinguishing them with a “doomsday probe” powerful enough to wipe out Dellah’s sector of space. Hoping to avert this, Benny, Jason and Chris smuggled a dimensional-transfer node to Dellah using the Revelation - a dimension-hopping ship developed on Earth - then warped Dellah into the dimension from which the gods had originated. The gods stood revealled as a breakaway group of the Ferutu. They attacked Benny’s group with temporal bolts - Benny’s body was rejuvenated by about five years, and Chris reverted to his blonde-haired incarnation. Jason was left behind as Benny and Chris fled in the Revelation, trapping the Ferutu.

  The accomplished diplomat Terin Sevic negotiated a peace on the war-torn planet of Vremnya, enabling wealthy patrons - including Braxiatel - to establish a university there. Braxiatel arranged for Benny to become the head of the new university’s archaeology department. He also initiated construction of the Braxiatel Collection on KS-159.

  Braxiatel deliberately situated the Collection near an energy field in space, one that produced interdimensional leakage strong enough to power a hundred colonies. He worked to keep the existence of the energy field a secret, fearing the Time Lords’ enemies would exploit it. [879]

  During a research term at Vremnya, Benny produced the documentary Our Martians, Ourselves. [880] In 2597, Bev Tarrant teamed with a smuggler, Ethan, who tried to kill her and steal their haul. Bev killed him instead. [881]

  A space-time fissure opened in Lezama Park in Buenos Aires, and remained active for a century. A few dozen people fell through the fissure and emerged on the other side of the universe at the planet Deindus, four million years in the future. The humans died, but the presence of their organic matter led to the creation of the Deindum.

  (=) Samuel Frost destroyed Buenos Aires to prevent the Deindum’s existence. Bernice aided a Deindum creation, the android Robyn, in re-establishing the original timeline. [882]

  The Twenty-Seventh Century

  During the twenty-seventh century, oxygen factories were built in London. [883] Archaeologists unearthed documents pertaining to the exti
nct Ultani race and its bioharmonics, but failed to recognise their importance. The texts were filed, along with cosmographic mission reports, in the archives on Nocturne. [884] Colony World 4378976.Delta-Four was founded in the twenty-seventh century. The inhabitants soon started going “fantasy crazy” as a result of interactions with the microscopic native life, and the government banned all fiction to curb this problem. [885]

  Bernice Summerfield at the Braxiatel Collection

  Professor Bernice Summerfield became attached to the Braxiatel Collection, which touted itself as “A collection of everything. The various departments of the Braxiatel Collection house antique artifacts, literature, playscripts, recordings of events and people and performances, geological specimens, software and hardware of days gone by...” [886] The Collection housed 40% of the recognised Wonders of the Galaxy. [887]

  Wolsey the cat had become a father - again - even though he’d been neutered, as the local fauna at the Collection were genetic hybrids, and bred in a curious fashion. [888] Braxiatel built Benny a new Joseph drone, with at least fifty terabytes of data storage. [889]

  Jason Kane escaped from the Ferutu’s domain, and wound up in the employ of Agraxar Flatchlock, a travel agent from an infernal dimension. [890] He didn’t age while in the Ferutu realm, owing to Dr. Gilhooly’s Theory of Transdimensional Contrivance. [891]

  Braxiatel foresaw that the Deindum - a race that would evolve in the distant future - would develop time travel and conquer many worlds in many time periods, becoming strong enough to challenge even the Time Lords. He also discovered that Bernice would heavily impact the Deindum’s development - that her memories and experiences would influence the primordial soup from which they would evolve. He increasingly meddled in Bernice’s affairs and adjusted some of her personal history, hoping that, as a failsafe against his other efforts to curtail the Deindum failing, he could influence the future conquerors through her. [892]