B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (234 page)

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 against 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.

Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart became the personal bodyguard to Howard, the son of Earth President Fiona Dickens, and recruited Benny to investigate the president’s increasingly strange behaviour. They stopped the clone-Dickens - who threw herself to her death - from pushing the Earth Empire into open warfare with various alien races. The clone of Benny from
The Jason Kane Show
became Earth president, while the original Dickens and Howard went travelling with Kadiatu.

Simultaneous to these events, Jason Kane learned that, owing to Braxiatel’s machinations, large portions of his timeline had been altered or deleted altogether. Jason threatened Braxiatel with exposure - in response, Braxiatel goaded Peter into thinking that Jason was a threat to Bernice. Peter’s savage side took over, and he killed Jason.

Jason’s associate Mira threw off Braxiatel’s conditioning, and started a new life with a Jason-clone.

2607 (31st December) - TW: “Overture”
 [944]

Jack Harkness visited the planet Zog. An alien representative gave him a sonic failsafe to curtail its sleeper agents on Earth, 1941, and Jack duly sent it back to his former self.

2607 (December) to 2608 - Benny: The Wake
 [945]

The dance version of “Abide With Me” was played at Jason’s funeral, and his xenoporn books were republished. A provisional government was now running the Collection. Bernice continued teaching at the Collection for a time, but deduced Braxiatel and Hass’ involvement in the Mim’s downfall. Lacking the evidence and support to challenge Braxiatel directly, Benny snuck away from the Collection with Peter, and went on the run in a spaceship.

2608 - Benny: Beyond the Sea
 [946]

Galaxo-Starbucks-Disney copyrighted the name “Atlantis” when it opened up The Real Atlantis. Benny took a job producing a documentary of a lost civilisation on the watery world of Maximediras, which was rebranding itself as a tourist stop. Isolationist members of the micro-organisms who inhabited Maximediras animated some cadavers, and tried to push the human colonists off world. Benny curtailed the rogues, and the micro-organisms’ government invited the colonists to share the planet with them.

Peter was transported back to 65,000 BC; Benny followed him after unearthing the time ring that he lost in a lava flow. They separately returned to their native era, after Benny made a side trip to 1893. Upon her return, Benny had manuscripts of some unpublished Sherlock Holmes adventures. These included
The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel
and
The Cautionary Tale of Ludvig Cooray
- the latter of which involved the disappearance of the nephew of a minor German aristocrat.
 [947]

2608 - Benny: The Diet of Worms
 [948]

On Earth, the Depository served as an archive for cultural and literary giants whose works had survived the Dalek Wars, including Martin Luther, Charles Darwin, Wilkie Collins and Barbara Cartland. Earth Central halved the Depository’s budget, and a bibliotaph, Myrtle Bunnage, wanted to regain this funding by giving the impression that paper-eating worms had infested the facility. The worms consumed a manuscript by Cartland that contained extra-terrestrial paper, and thereby gained the ability to recite any text they ate. Bernice contained the situation and saved the worms - who were now the sole source of documents written by Luther, Darwin and Cartland.

c 2609 - The Company of Friends: “Benny’s Story”
 [949]

Hired by Countess Venhella, Bernice excavated 50-million-year-old rock on Epsilon Minima and thereby found the buried TARDIS key, which summoned the eighth Doctor’s TARDIS. Venhella believed that TARDISes were an enslaved species, and tried to liberate the Doctor’s Ship with a manumitter - a forbidden Gallifreyan device. Improper use of the manumitter created cracks in the fabric of the universe, and threatened to unleash ravenous monstrosities. The Doctor and Benny were briefly flung back to Epsilon Minima’s past, but returned - whereupon the Doctor sealed the space-time cracks. He and Benny shared some adventures before he successfully took her home.