B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (231 page)

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, a bestseller) and took possession of his great unpublished work,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 extinct 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]

(=) Benny and Jason would eventually have two children - Keith Brannigan Summerfield-Kane and his younger sister Rebecca - and raise them alongside Benny’s son Peter. Braxiatel, fearing that Keith and Rebecca would be too much of a drain on Benny’s time, revised her history so they were never born.
 [893]

Braxiatel also changed the timelines so that Benny’s friend Keri was a native of the twenty-sixth century, not the fortieth.
 [894]
In this era, nano-suppressants were available that cured colds and flu within minutes.
 [895]
Trans-Universal Export was “all over the galaxy” in Bernice’s era. Messages between its various branches were sent across subspace using the Omninet bandwidth.
 [896]

2599 (31st December) to 2600 (1st-6th January) - Benny: The Doomsday Manuscript
 [897]

The Fifth Axis, a military dictatorship, expanded its territory by subjugating numerous worlds. The planet Kasagrad resided in Axis space, but was protected by a global force field. Kolonel Daglan Straklant, claiming to head the Axis’ relic restoration team, approached Benny and Braxiatel with an offer to help retrieve
The Doomsday Manuscript
from Kasagrad. Benny and Braxiatel realised Straklant was using them to deactivate Kasagrad’s defence screen; owing to their actions, Kasagrad forces wiped out an Axis’ Sixth Fleet, and forced a retreat to the old Merinfast Line. The Axis arrested Straklant on charges of treason.

2600 - Benny: The Secret of Cassandra
 [898]

Benny vacationed on the Earth colony Chosan, and was caught in a conflict between the warring continents of Calabraxia and Pevena. Cassandra Colley, a brilliant Pevenan neurotech designer, had transferred her mind into a synthetic form - a living bomb that was powerful enough to destroy the whole of Calabraxia. Colley’s armaments were neutralised, and she was given into the care of her father, Captain Damien Colley.

The Pevenans and Calabraxians were mutually horrified by the scale of Colley’s plans, and negotiated a peace.
 [899]

2600 (February) - Benny: The Squire’s Crystal
 [900]

The aged collector Arsine de Vallen believed that the cavern of the legendary Soul-Sucker - a squire named Avil Fenman, who came into possession of a soul-swapping crystal on the planet Hera and was imprisoned by the noble Knights of Rowan - was on planetoid KS-159. One of de Vallen’s agents found Avril’s cavern, where her mind had indeed survived in a crystal. Wanting to question Avril about the crystal’s applications, de Vallen’s agent transferred Avril’s mind into Benny’s body - but Avril/Benny escaped and, after so long an imprisonment, availed herself of fleshly pleasures. She had a fling with the Collection’s construction manager, Adrian Wall - a member of the Killoran race. Wall thought that he and Benny were in a relationship. More bodyswapping ensued, and de Vallen died after a botched bodyswapping attempt. Everyone regained their proper form, and Avril’s mind was finally deposited into the body of a security guard named Bill, whose mind had dissipated. Braxiatel let Avril/Bill continue living in her cavern, and Avril smashed the bodyswapping crystal to better guarantee her freedom.