The Butterfly Effect


by
Tim St.Clair
© Copyright 2001
Redistibution in any form prohibited.
Part One – The Fruitfly Effect1
0.
The Creator sighed, found a way into his bowler hat, and went for a bouncy little stroll out across the lawn to think it through. It had all started so well. Where had it all gone wonky? No, this would take some time to sort out. Time enough even to sort out if it was possible to sort out. Nudging his carrot into the light, he studied it for a moment, sniffed it once or twice, and took a bite.
1.
In a long musty-smelling restaraunt-style dining room in some long-forgotten stuffy old boarding school overlooking a small, quaint town whose chimneys gaily farted out bluish tufts of smoke in to the gaseous air, He picked at his nose-hair, watching the others stareing, sniggering, saying things that he could not hear. His name was James.
“Yuck,” he said to his dinner, probing it to see if it would move again.
He was in a foul mood. He was always in a foul mood all the time, except when he was in a horrid mood. It was probably built into his genes; little pockets of foulness that only opened to the outside world. Inside those genes, behind the one-way pockets, however, he existed in his own very small world; a world in which imagination was constrained by the tight brown imitation leather belt wrapped right around its stomach. He was a special kind of human, James. His type of Human came in little black and yellow packets stuffed up the back of a supermarket shelf, near the imported Chinese Egg-Noodle, the ones with the spelling mistakes all through the cooking instructions. These packets were very cheap and boasted ‘Human(oid) - Just add Water and Stur!’.
James’ brand of Human would probably cost just ninety-nine cents. This was most likely the reason that His type of Human was so prevalent. It was also the reason that Humans had so many different and totally unworkable political systems such as the U.S. Democracy, but that’s another story.
This is his story. Well, a story that refers to him occasionally, at any rate. Okay, so it only mentions him at least three times in ten; lets just leave it at that. See? You thought this story was going to be about James. Well it’s not. No, this story is about The Nerds.
The Nerds were an elite bunch; well, so they thought. Everyone else just let them sit there (as long as they didn’t talk too loud). The Nerds: it was like an organisation where everyone had to believe they had an intelligence quotient two standard deviations above normal, where the mean (what they called x-bar) was one hundred, and a standard deviation (figured by them as std.dev) of roughly 14.6667. The Nerds all knew what all this meant (so did their math teachers) and so only they could use this terminology. If anyone else spoke with these terms, say over their tantalising out-of-date instant coffee, they’d be shunted off to sit and stay with The Nerds. For those of you that don’t know already, this is exactly the kind of thing that goes on in stuffy old boarding schools, to coin a stereotype.
The Nerds, beleiving that they were so intelligent because they debated so vigorously about Schrodïngers Multiple Universe Theory so often, thought James was just an ectogenetically engineered by-product and deserved to sit with the overly hormonal Footy Players. Which he did. Well, he was there first and they sat with him; there weren’t any seats left.
Scattered all around The Nerds’ table were all sorts of other overly stereotypical and overtly aloof (but not necessarily related) groups, each neatly ordered and classified by the single lateral consciousness that was The Nerds, who were in turn an overly stereotypical group themselves: The TeenyBoppers, The Footy Players, The Staff (horrid whisper, snigger), The Weirdo’s, The Muso’s, The Arty’s, The Foreigners; the list went on into endless possibility- The People Whose Socks Happened To Be A Different Colour, The People Who Just Sat There This Time But Would Normally Sit With The Footy Players, Those Other People Who Don’t Fit Well Into Stereotype Roles...
Thus The Nerds existed, seated alone in the middle of the room, their place reserved since the dawn of time. There were exits. There were windows of which The Outside could be seen. There were lights and there were curtains and there were lots of fiddly little things like trophies and pictures of Jesus all down the side, stuck on somehow. In the unclarified and disorganised minds of the rest of the students, a table was a table, and a group of people was a group of people, and you sat where you sat. There was nothing more to it than that. But The Nerds are possibly the most paranoid people (though they would never admit it, nor see it in themselves). In their minds, it was lucky that they got a place to sit. If there were a fire, all the exits would block with people. The Nerds would be the last out (they stick together the way Velcro sticks to ionised belly-button fluff). If a flash flood came through this way (the precise reason why there would be a flash flood in this particular room is a story in itself, a very long tale reserved for another day, another time, suffice to say it involves large amounts of ceramic plumbing that was installed at a time when plumbers were few and money was tight, and the Bursar had a friend who ‘thought he could do it cheaper’, and you know how Bursars are about saving money) they’d be at the bottom of the pile of people, along with the many other things often associated with flash floods, like bloated cows, mud and news helicopters. If, and this was worst of all, worse even that drowning in mud at the bottom of a cone of human beings with mysterious parts of bloated animals rubbing in your face while news crews film you, they had a spare seat and James walked in, there just wasn’t any place to run.
So James sat picking his nose. His baked cardboard dinner was cold, not that served ‘hot’ it wasn’t any better than served cold anyway. He had grassy stuff for beans, a lump of, well, something for a potato, gazpacho-like tomato sauce and best of all, cakey chocolate flavoured gravy (it was school food; they had to put something there to make them eat it). The Footy Players sat all around him, talking moves and plays and scores and the tactics of their opponents and all that other boring Footy Stuff. He asked for the salt. Nobody heard him. He had the sharp suspiscion that were he to sit here for much longer, he would be overcome with the salt smell of body odours, indiscreet wafers of putrid vagrance, tomato suace... It was all his, of course, the sauce and all. Living up to his most unintriguing psyche, he blamed it on the Footy Players. Nearby, snippets and snatchets of speech spuriously aurated in the audible environment as The Nerds talked seriously about the afterlife, the row of scary yet somehow irresistably pushable scientific buttons on calculators, and recalled recent experiences of apotheosis; that is, everyday Nerd Stuff.
Then, after the meal, The Nerds moved as one, past the now-empty tables, for most of the others had gone back to either swim, play music or watch ‘Babewatch’, an American attempt at TV Soap. Quite pointless, no storyline to speak of, no hidden meaning. American TV. You know how it is.
Outside the dining room they ran into James, who had just been reprimanded because he had quite accidentally fallen into somebody’s fist and somebody elses knee. Fancy that. The tight pack of Nerds then decided to go to their favourite place: The place of the Computer.
Here was a bizarre room; walls and a ceiling like most others, but jam packed with beeping creatures with glowing faces, whirring fans and pretty coloured wiring of all sorts.
And people! People who hated computers came in here. People with rollerblades on (which didn’t work on the soft, dirty carpet). People eating and drinking. People wrestling. People needing to do work. People watching other people. People with the people watching the other people and more people coming in to see what everyone else is doing in here. The computers were in overtime too. Between drink spillages and chair-against-mousepad fights, the computers processed away, doing their graphics and games and text things and printing and calculating and beeping and carrying on like there was no tomorrow. And there was the people who thought they were funny, turning on the fans in sub-zero winter and dithering with all had those twisty things that adjust the brightness of the lights and pulling out chairs when people went to sit down, and printing out completely black pages on the laser for no true reason, so that other people had to wait for ten minutes to use the printer, and locking the doors so that nobody could get in and attempting to rollerblade (which didn’t work, anyway) and ‘accidentally’ spilling somebody’s coffee all over his or her books, effectively gluing the pages together. It was a lively place!
And it was all under the control of The (All Supreme, no anchovies) Nerds.
And unfortunately James (just anchovies, no supreme).
The Nerds despised James: James shouldn’t be allowed to come in here anyway, said their cute but misguided logic.
So The Nerds2, in their infinite wisdom would lock James out. And the world would suddenly become a nicer place all over. Except outside the room, where some disgusting, smelly, irritable, stupid creature not fit to be called a plant or animal, let alone human, but maybe (only just) a fungus, lurked.
The Nerds are the Gods in the Place of the Computers. Gods because they all know what the hell a relational database management system is. How to use it (or give semblance thereof). Where to get paper and toner for the printer (because there isn’t any in it, ever) and what to do when the computers crash (turn it off and on very fast repeatedly because it ate your work!) and all that sort of super techy stuff.
James knows some of this stuff also, but doesn’t know how to explain it in a language other than binary (“...one-zero-zero-one zero-zero-zero-one-one zero-one-one...” etc). You see, if James is asked a question about, say developing an amortisation table in the Excel spreadsheet for use in a dbase database system to do a mail merge cross platform over a serial interface, he will go off and sulk, because he isn’t able to understand what the person means. The quester should have said something like: ‘James, While Not Toner, Do amortisation(excel)=database*(spreadsheet-1); computer print mumbo jumbo to me. R.S. 232 linkup PC. You can do it. End Do. End While. Go.’ Now this would seem a little backwards and mixed up, but James thinks like a computer (a very old, mechanical one, probably made by IBM) and only accepts input if what you say is said in the right way. In other words, although James thought in Computer Language, he couldn’t communicate so well in Human Language, which made things difficult.
Which, all in all, wasn’t a bad thing. He had the most irritating voice anybody could have imagined.
And so The Nerds, as was their way, relentlessly pressed on. The Nerds demand a computer (only one- they can do many things at once. Aah the joys of Multitasking) and get one straight away. One of The Nerds is big and nearly strong, and has a good knowledge of all the so-called ‘pressure-points’, which basically means that if he were to squeeze somebody’s arm, it would hurt that person very much. Plus, the person they asked was leaving anyway. Lucky, that.
So now they have use of a computer, and in a flash, they’ve somehow got it up and running, opened up more complicated things than you’d find in a physics-major’s thesis and already completed two days work in the space of a few seconds. Then, they’re gone, the only trace left of their existence, a small column of smoke rising gently from the computer keyboard. And (surely obscure in origin) a 2B graphite pencil.
The Nerds are five long termers plus a few wannabe’s, as well as one who is in the wrong group but doesn’t know where the Footy Players are right now. In exclusion to the wannabe’s, The Nerds span ages from sixteen to eighteen, and roam their territory like Japenese tourists photographing rocks in the southern half of the large territory in the north of the largest island on Earth. They –The Nerds- stop only for food and to protect their own kind. Children run in fear from strangers, dogs bark and knock over garbage tins, birds flee in terror. All of this not because of The Nerds, but because this’s what they do anyway. The Nerds just happen to be there when it happens.
This is the true essence of The Nerd. To summarise so far:
He, or as it may happen, She, as a direct result of that deep-down desire to be nerdy, is blamed for things which would have happened sooner or later anyway. Had they or not ever had a hand in it is never discussed. The Nerds Did It Anyway.
Somehow.
2.
The next day, James was plotting a way to get back at The Nerds, for it had to be they that made him get hit by that bus, all those weeks ago. Through thorough lack of planning and a dead-base stupidity rating, he somehow managed to completely miss this, his own plot. From another point of view, in any case. You see, all this has happened because James is in awe of himself. More seriously than most. In his mind3 (and those genes we were talking about earlier) he is like the supreme being, hovering proudly above the ground as he speeds his way towards the place where his story begins. They are shouting his name, calling out to him, reassuring him that, Yes! he is popular and, Yes! they all think of him what he thinks of him. He recalls an image of John F. Kennedy, in all his smiling glory, right before the was shot.
Outside his mind, back in what is commonly (and falsely, but we’ll get to that later) termed reality in fact, and approximately four steps behind, is one of The Younger Nerds, shouting apocalyptic abuse at the slothlike, wedeling figure that goops its way along a gravel path; a creature names James. So self possessed that it would keep bumbling into things and continuing on as if nothing happened. In this Nerds mind was an image of John F. Kennedy right after he was shot, and really looking not so glamorous at all.
No exorcist get rid of this demon (and yes, they’ve tried) called James. No exercise in military training can eject this blemish from history out into outer space, and No, they haven’t tried - do you know how much this kind of operation costs? No radical extremists were available at this time- they were all off shouting moral complaints at homosexual politicians about some environmental woodchipping issue. How typical. Can’t get good complaints these days…
And breakfast time. Exercise over (ie. a short walk to the mess hall), time to put on those calories. Kilojoules of energy to be had, here. Pity, though, that more kilojoules of energy could be attained from the ‘food’ served to them by eating the plate rather then the cereal.
Dietary Fibre issues aside, here. Look, it’s one of those days again. No, not Monday. That happened last Thursday week. This is worse. Much worse. Much, much worse. In fact, heinous. There is only two seats left in the entire eating gallery. There are only two people left to sit in the food hall. The Younger Nerd, first in because he tripped James on the stairs, is first to sit. Knowing the worst is to come, he exchanges places with a Nerd Wannabe, who must forgo this kind of initiation procedure in order to prove his or her worthiness to such a great and needed cause as Clan Nerd.
James is then present. James puts his left foot forward, walks, then his right, then his left, then realises that he is moving horizontally and that something gooey is all over his chest, and comes to a halt right under a table, amongst the legs of The Staff (horrid whisper, snigger). Moreover, today, this isn’t just The Staff (horrid whisper, snigger) table. No. Today, this The Big Knobs (snort, cough) Table. The School Board, at mess with The Lowlife Scum. And guess who, covered in orange juice soaked cornflakes, is under the table? No, not a mutant lobster man from Mars left out in one too many solar radiation storms. Or then again, maybe it is.
And she screamed. No, James hadn’t suddenly introverted into a foul smelling female! It was one of the Big Knobs (snort, cough). She had just seen some creature staring up at her from the baked beans. Those gentle, blinking blue eyes staring up from the plate. Lively food! There did exist stories around about the cross-eyed chef and it had something to do with small, furry animals going missing from the neighbours yard every so often. 
Suddenly, the table jumped, then cursed (well actually, yelled out the surname, in plural context, of a ludicrously rich American man. Hint: it has something to do with an easy method of traversing through fences) and swayed and then everything was quiet. James, milk stains, cornflakes and all stood at the end of the table, red faced and deathly silent. Seven old faces stared up at him, down along the bridges of their noses, heads tilted back so James, from his low vantage, could see right up into their heads via a certain smelling appendage4. Someone coughed in the dark silence of the dining hall. Someone else exploded (those damned baked beans again). One group of people got up and left, quickly. And the Big Knobs (snort, cough) just stared at the embarrassed weed fumbling away from the end of the table.
“Blimey,” said the one who had screamed in the same way as you would say ‘Holy Milkshake, Batman’. “The things that they keep under these tables. I propose we exchange them for new, sleeker models. Did you see the way our milk spilt?”
“I second the proposal.” An old man with an eyepatch spoke up through a yawn. “Any… oh… aah…”
Nobody replied. Somebody was already snoring.
3.
The Nerds were all laughing when James sat down with them. Laughing not at James, but at a theory that one of the Younger Nerds hat put forwards actually suggesting that there was a God. Although The Nerds did not believe in God, you see, just to cover their bets, they didn’t deny the existence of God, and therefore went to church occasionally anyway. Just in case.
“Why for strange-emotion you?” James asked in his manner. By the term ‘strange-emotion’ he meant ‘laugh’, but didn’t understand the concept.
The Nerds translated the question in their heads, figured out all the possible answers as defined by their own model of the Fibbonanci method, and then grossly ignored him.
All except the Younger Nerd who explained to The Strong Nerd the image he had thought of before that James reminded him of: The bit where John F. Kennedy’s brains exploded in a ball of caporious goo from his head from the impact of a lead projectile. He even explained what caporious goo actually was. The Nerds all laughed again, except James. But then, James wasn’t a Nerd.
Then they all felt a bit sick, as the visualisation caught up with them.
“So, James,” Ventured a Wannabe. The Oldest and as yet unnamed Nerd shot a dangerous look at him, but the Newbie continued, hopeful and watchful. “Have you ventured into the symbiotic relationship yet? I hear that National Existential Ennui Day is coming up soon and it requires that you have nothing to do that day except apply knowledge to the extraction of natural resources from otherworldly maudlin chaos internal to the multidimensional cosmos.”
The Oldest Nerd smiled. This kid had promise. It didn’t make relational sense, but then again, it wasn’t supposed to, was it. Well, was it?
Then wiped some milk from his well-rounded glasses. James, across the table, had splurted liquid out his nose and received a kick in the knee for it.
But he managed to reply. An excited kind of reply. A mixed up kind of excitement. A kind of mixed up kid, when you get down to it. “Yes, as I have matter fact a of!”
Translate. Surprise! Shock. Recognise it could not have been a joke as Black and Gold brand humans are not capable of humour (that costs extra, and comes in a separate shaker pack). These funny little thoughts (referred to by James as Background Task Daemons) went on inside each of the Nerds Brains (who each defined all logical sections of a humans neurocerebular structure as it’s own self supported unit, capable of thought and process separate from the others) but each time they rethought it through, the same answer appeared. It had to be it. James, wait for it, was one step ahead of them! But, this was simply impossible.
It shut every single person up. Except James. And the rest of the people in the mess hall who didn’t know what had happened anyway. Didn’t care.
Because four hours later he was still following them telling them about his self importance to their group (which made about as much sense as this sentence). 

In a non-related dimension, on a planet with the same space/time co-ordinates, just up the road (relatively positioned to the current position of James, many many dimensions away), a bird tweeted and dived for a small, yellow butterfly that was hovering above a flower. It caught it. Nearby, somebody was talking about a new branch of meteorology called the ‘Butterfly Effect’. Nobody listened. Nobody cared.

One week later, in the dimension where our story is currently taking place, which for clarity, we shall currently call ‘reality’, James was Head Nerd. Of Himself. All the other Nerds had been fired or were sent to serve time in the Library (and, boy, you just don’t want to know what goes on in there!) which was, at that time, run by The Library Monster, a renegade mutant brainless hippie drag queen book freak escaped from a top secret US Military genetic science testing site in the sixties through an experimental one way time portal: There was no escape. In fact, The Library Monster had suffered gross mutilations (perhaps some alien or CIA agent- where’s the distinction?- thought she was a cow) from using the time portal and now looked like a Komodo Dragon wearing purple satin pyjamas. Other features include bright red fluffy hair, coke-bottle glasses, lipstick thicker than the smog over Las Angeles and a voice with undertones suggesting ‘I’ll eat you My Pretty, and your little book too! E, hee, hee, hee!’. If seen, please return her to the sixties or, preferably, exorcise her into another dimension.

James decided that, today, he would be a poet. And so stroll he did into the Place of the Computer, which loomed silent throughout the pale night. Stars did not shine overhead,5 but clouds did approach with gleeful determination from the east. Somewhere, a dog howled; a car screeched and close, some lone creature was playing their R.E.M. CD6. Insanity, chaos and murderous evil glowed in James’ left eye (he had walked into the door on the way in) and all was silent except the whirring of little cooling fans. One was a tad loose, though, and so squeaked a bit.
Deserted. A single leaf of paper spewed out the top of the printer, a gust of wind throwing it up into the air, where it hit the fan and tore. There were still disks in the disk drives; pencils lay forgotten over work books (as always). Up near the end, on a spare chair, a single bright purple and green rollerblade lay alone, the back wheel slowly spinning.
In other words, everyone left in a hurry. Such was the presence of the New Head Nerd.
If anybody was still around outside at close enough range to hear, they would have heard a strange sound: Somewhere between a hacking spasm mixed up with great sighs. Anybody inside would have seen James, squirming face up on the ground, half laughing, half sobbing; totally evil.
“Today, The Tomorrow. The, World Nerds!” He screamed. How cliché.
4.
‘...Drop into fourth. Stupid move, that’s not fourth, that’s reverse. Where’s fourth? Bum! Too late! Back on the road, get past that- Watch out! Time can’t be up! No way! Fourteenth. Stupid corner. Who designed this game anyway. Oh, Sierra. That explains it, then...’
Such is the mind of a rev head arcade gamer.
Empty. But I just went to the bank!
Such is the wallet of that same rev head arcade gamer.
This gamer, who just happens to be a rev head arcade games lover (not just somebody who plays it because he might as well because this is his last dollar and everything), has virtually nothing to do with the story, although he did punch James in the face (who, notice, isn’t here right now because he’s not feeling well) earlier this day before coming here, and he does like Mississippi Chocolate Mud Cake (mmm) too. Everybody likes Mud cake. It’s the staple food of all Western Civilisation, and, incidentally, has nothing to do with the invention of flush toilets. Bet you never knew that.
The Nerds usually spent their weekends ‘hanging out’ (ie. being geeks) at the local videogame amusement parlour, a shop upstairs from the video hire place and just over the road from a cinema; A ludicrous spatial containment captivatingly titled ‘Videogame Amusement Parlour’ in a big yellow and red whizzy font. The windows were all plate glass painted on the inside with those big star-like images that you find on bargain buster shops - painted by the owners’ nine year old kid with housepaint - backwards (‘Well it looked right from where I was standing!’). Hanging out, for The Nerds anyway, meant standing around, playing games in some arcade or, if money was tight, sitting around watching those old BBC Channel 4 produced science documentaries about chaos theory or molecular biology, or other interesting topics that they could chat about (over some nice Kenyan filter coffee, perhaps?).
Today, however, was special. Today James would conquer the world. Well, he said he would anyway. The Nerds, no longer The Nerds by name but still by reputation, implanting their ages (minus one Wannabe who had to go buy some new clothes with his mum) throughout the electronised place of bassy thumping techno music, alpha-ray radiation sickness inducing low refresh rate screens and a horrid purple carpet that appeared to be out of the local pub.7 There were Five, now. Only The Five (hey, a cool name, better than The Nerds. No it’s not, sounds too much like The Famous Five “...and Timmy the dog...”) to do battle with James, the Head Nerd. Five to fight for survival, their name and because everybody hated James anyway. Five to go to the ends of the earth to replace Justice and Inequality where it once stood. Five to... Ah, whatever. After the next quick game.
5.
Lunch. Aromas of Mexican food wafting from the place where they all gathered to dine. The Footy Players weren’t here yet, The Outcasts weren’t here yet, The Arty’s weren’t here yet. Nobody was here yet. Except Those Who Used To Be Called The Nerds But Were All Fired By A Geek Named James, who sat unhappily amongst the rows of empty chairs and solemn, white tables. The doors up one end clanged, but it wasn’t somebody coming in; they just did that from time to time. Wind, you know. Clang. There they go again.
Lunch was boredom with a smell.
Mexican Lunch was the same thing but with a lingering aftertaste.
In fact, it was not unlike the taste you get after being violently sick on a very crammed public transport bus as a matter of fact. Lingering aftertaste... Metaphorically, those doors clanging open once more, The Head Nerd walked in, a rank smell following like salt from an ocean wave- strong, assured and, in a funny way, cleansing.
One of the older five from Those Who Used To Be Called The Nerds But Were All Fired By A Geek Named James, the one who used to be Head Nerd, a tall, gangly strange person- a freak if ever there was one- who had a strong grip and carried a pencil with no spare leds in it, called out something quite rude at The Head Nerd, who just walked on by, like we were all told to do by our mums when we were kids but, of course, reverse psychology rules applying here, we went and punched up the kids instead of ignoring them. Perhaps The Head Nerd didn’t have a mother who told him these things. Perhaps he didn’t have a mother. Either of these or his curly brown hair had jammed in his ears the last time he actually showered (and he needed to earlier because; a) He was dirty and had a blood nose; b) His head was swelling still and he thought he could shrink it with cold water; and c) Somebody told him that the water in the shower tasted like ‘Lemon Spritz’ (with real fruit you can’t see), and he had to know for sure. It didn’t, of course. Silly James).
Suddenly a holy apparition appeared. Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t happen, but in a world where James could exist, things definately weren’t normal. Anyhow, the wierd old codger, glowing away madly like all apparitions should, was a balding old man with a few sunspots on his forehead and really wrinkled skin over his elbows.
The old nerdy group, sitting alone at their table, automatically labeled this figure God in a single vote group descision. And hell, why not? If there was really a god, a point that may or may not be true, depending on your personal history, family, friends and most likely your early childhood as contributing factors to your belief, or lack thereof, this might as well be him. People went for the ‘holy light’ thing and popping in and out of existance on a whim. If that’s the mould people wanted, this old bugger fitted the slot perfectly.
He said in his not-quite-Brittish accent, “Oh, chaps, perhaps you could help me. I was wondering if-”
But of all the people whom the Greatest All-Knowing Creator Of All The Known Universe And Probably Beyond That As Well to pick, all the billions of people who’d’ve sucked out their eyeballs with a dust-o-matic just to have a few quiet words with the old chap8 God had to pick Those Who Used To Be Called The Nerds But Were All Fired By A Geek Named James. Whew!
And, remember, none of them believed in God (much).
So, just as suddenly as the man with the mercury nimbus appeared (pop!), He, thinking ‘Oh poo!’ popped off back to wherever it was that he’d been before (pop!).
Or so thought Those Who Used To Be Called The Nerds But Were All Fired By A Geek Named James.
6.
God Appeared. Too late to save the smelly dead creature beside him though, but it has been certified by certain newspapers (Scandal: God arrives too late!), that, in fact, he did appear, too late to, er, save the smelly, er, dead creature beside him...
In a desert. God stood, golf shoes in the hot, burnished sand, next to the chalky white remains of what seemed similar in skeletal structure as an Earth bound creature known there as the Camel. There was no sign of any water, and Gods’ Own SuperSense (a handy unit he picked up one day in K-Mart: It was on special for Christmas) told him that, well, there wasn’t any abundant bodies of water in this system. Where exactly he’d just ‘popped’ too was very iffy. On a nearby dune of the cold, herbish smelling planet, God spotted a metal disc, which he instantly knew contained all the Secrets to the Known Universe, Shortened, Revised Edition, Pocket Form, Oxford Press 1998. In fact, he remembered writing it and getting heaps of royalty payments for it. Which was good. God hadn’t had an real income before. The Church had always ‘needed’ more cash for, oh, the old gold statue or two here, or for a ‘study-tour’ across Europe staying 5 star all the way...
Then God was shot by a soldier with blue-in-blue eyes.
7.
James sat down. There were tables and tables, why did you have to sit here, Damn you! Thought the table. The chair was worse off, though... The Old Nerds ate in a kind of bankrupt silence- knowing that the future is dim, knowing that you’ve got a bank two paces behind you, knowing that your ex and son have twenty billion dollars of investors savings tucked away in their own names and the bank can’t get it...
And the five of them needed a plan. James hadn’t taken over the world yet.
Thorough planning would come later. The X-Nerds (Non-radioactive X-Men geeks) were now getting back to life, discussing the problems with four dimensional relative spacetime and what would happen if, say, somebody goes back in time and kills his Grandfather before he’s done the deed with the time travellers Grandmother? A ripe ol’ discussion.
The idea was simple: Send James back in time a long way, probably back to the French Revolution, where he can conveniently have his head removed from his body (An early cure for dandruff) and kicked around gaily by a bunch of arrogant sadomasochists who speak funny9. If he were to be sent into the future though, chances are- technology changing all the time, you see- that the X-Nerds may live to be old enough to meet him again. It did work that way, didn’t it?
Anyhow, he’d have to be excommunicated from society (not hard to arrange these days: Join a Political Correctness compaign) and somebody would have to send a ‘You’ll get better, soon. Guaranteed!’ Card to his folks -A nitrous oxide tank, a styrofoam cup and a small wormy tube full of gooey green liquid. But that could be arranged.
As for the bit about time travel, that would be a little harder, as current thinking on the matter reveals that there are little particles that travel back and forth in time but are hard to detect because today’s technology doesn’t do that kind of thing, and nobody can find a wormhole bigger than the theoretical size of the universe before the Big Bang.10
In the end what would just have to do as a Time Travel unit was built. It took two weeks since that first idea of sending James off into the future and many more ideas have arisen, and still, predictably, he hasn’t devoured the world in his grouse, nasal evilisms. Firstly, The X-Nerds (They like that name- The X-Nerds, by Marvin Comics! Coming to a Phosphor Screen Near You) could send James way back in time and forget about him, or send him way off into the future and hope that he is a bad dog and doesn’t come home this time, or, and this what they eventually do, but we aren’t up to that yet, are we? so just forget what I said, go themselves- become martyrs of the time travel revolution (and probably make certain historians very angry) and go have a jolly romp around plagiarising technology from one time to another, eating better food and doing all sorts of fun things (which we won’t go into until you’re older), generally re-enacting ‘Time Bandits’ and ‘Dr Who’. Follow that? Because we’re there now.
Sunday: The day when some people think that God wants them to go to church early in the morning. God doesn’t really like this. Would you like it if half the world sang at you at eight in the morning on a Sunday when most of them sound like the people who get up and defy death in those back street karaoke bars- Worse than when some completely deranged fool drags their fingernails down a chalkboard. Well, maybe not that bad. This Sunday was rainy, sunny, windy and through it all dead boring. And that was just Sunday Morning.
But come that fateful Sunday Afternoon and a strong breeze whisked through the tops of the yellowing poplar trees that danced along beside a withered, black gravel track to be lost amongst tall bushy Chinese Elms and a grand old Oak and eventually, somewhere, go ‘plunk’ smack bang into the front of somebody’s house. Stupid people, always putting houses in the middle of a path. Makes it hard to walk along a path if somebody goes and puts a house in the way, doesn’t it? Mid Afternoon; the waffly clouds shambling overhead, the tall spires and glass cages of the town rising up like black mountains into the hazy purple smog of a western sky, the whirr and incomprehensible drivel of the greyhound track just up the road- A typical Sunday Afternoon, indeed.
And after the big dangerous-looking time machine was filled with the Five members of the X-Nerds, plugged in, charged up, programmed and just about to catch on fire, James walked into the room to see what was making all the noise: How could he listen to his Modern Jazz album with all that noise? What’s the difference between Modern Jazz and heavy whirling machinery anyway?
Then all went black.
Then after it all went black, one of The Undecided walked into the room and said: “I quit. I don’t like being a Nerd. You get punched up too often. I want to be with The Footy Players. Where do the Footy Players sit anyway?” Since nobody was there, nobody heard him and since nobody heard him, nobody replied. He left the room and shut the door behind him.
8.
And then everything wasn’t black anymore. Everything was back to normal. Sort of.
God stood bleeding on a nearby dune, a fair string of curses flowing feebly across a million acres of untouched sand. A strange planet of shifting dunes of sand. God wondered what he should name this planet of Dunes, with all the Dunes of sand, and Dunes of Dunes stacked on top one another.
He settled on the name ‘Dirt’.
And when God realised that he was bleeding, the little round bullet hole sealed itself up. James stood nearby a blackened lug of metal. A piece of it fell to the ground.
“Whoops!” A voice from inside the smouldering remains of the world premiere Time Machine.11
“Will youh ghet hoff mhy noshe?” Somebody else quested.
“!” Went a smaller, lighter voice.
“Why, you do seem to have squished my attacker quite well, er-” Congratulated God, whose shiny white and black check golf shoes glinted unhappily in the sun. Then, as a ‘door’ fell open God spotted who it was, and unhappily added “Oh, it’s you.”
“Oh, Hello. You were, again? Sorry. Missed the name first time round, eh?” In a manner of speaking, most of the X-Nerds asked a similar question. God told them each, separately. None of them seemed to care anyway.
“I thought you didn’t believe in me,” He conceded.
“Bollocks!” One little titch burst out. If he were really talking to God, and it looked like he was, because this was the guy who’d they’d all seen in the dining hall two weeks back, and since he was now speaking for all the X-Nerds and probably James too, then those bets they all covered some time ago (the ones about attending church occasionally) might just prove handy. “If we didn’t believe in you, what are you doing here?”
God thought about it, scratching one of the little brown spots on his high forehead (God doesn’t think of himself as balding. It’s really an expanding forehead. Got to make room for all that knowledge, you know).
“Hmm,” was what He said, and left it at that; logic escaped him.
Then the Time Machine fell apart, that blasted wind started up and the seven of them decided it was probably time to leave. They meandered towards the south where a vast mountainous wall could be seen.
“So, uh, God-” The older X-Nerd started before God so rudely interrupted.
“Please, call me George.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s my name.”
“Oh. I didn’t know. Okay, uh, George-”
“That’s better.”
“What is?”
“You called me George.”
“I know. You asked me to.”
“So, get on with your question, then.” God said irritably.
“Oh. Okay. Where was it that you were-”
“What’s your name?” God asked, interrupting again, as He was becoming renowned for doing.
“Uh, Simon. Why?”
“Well, you know My name. I wanted to know yours.”
“Oh. That’s Stuart, the little fat one. That’s Errol, the other little fat one. And, uh-”
“I didn’t ask what their names were.”
“-Matthew and Karen. Well I’m telling You anyway.” God could be so obnoxious sometimes. So he rushed “But getting back to what I was saying, uh, where were you going?”
“What? Why don’t you ask sensible questions?” Then to himself, although everybody heard it anyway ‘Silly Humans. Never should have made ’em. Why did I ever get involved with mail-order shopping?’
9.
But they arrived. Then God said something about creating a fully functioning Kentucky Fried Chicken place. Nobody was really listening until they say a fully functioning Kentucky Fried Chicken place come into view, just over the next hill. I mean bitumen, dying shrubbery, that little box thing that you talk into, the one car in the drive through that you always get stuck behind, even when you’re eating in. Everything. Just sitting there in the middle of the desert. There was one car parked in the carpark, but that was probably the manager. The X-Nerds glanced at each other in that ‘Kentucky Tried Cooking’ look. But God liked KFC and beside sand, there wasn’t much else to eat.
So they ate all eleven secret herbs and spices and ate the white stringy stuff that grew below them (in the oven, probably) and drank the drinks that had somehow traversed a million light years through spacetime to get there. The best part of the entire experience was that the chairs were very hard, cold and probably designed by some sadist bent of giving everyone haemorrhoids and digestive tract overloads.

Night time on an alien planet can be cold. Night time on an alien planet in a desert can be cold, too. Combine the two and you get something like ‘night time on an planet alien night on an alien cold in the planet a time can be desert’ which, surprise surprise, doesn’t make very much sense. Unless you are a human(oid) computer and Head Nerd, in which case it means than you are actually on some other planet, in the middle of nowhere, and it is likely to get cold.
God sat next to Simon, who, incidentally was the old Head Nerd before he became the Head X-Nerd. God and Simon got on reasonably well, thought God. God and Simon got on like Plums and Vegemite; sure it works, but boy does it taste terrible, thought Simon. Stuart and Errol and the other two sat around tending the fire, which was silly because God had started the fire right up out of the sand- A desert planet doesn’t have wood, or bits of newspaper left stuffed into little holes in the ground around empty public garbage bins. Not like Earth. James was elsewhere, most likely searching for a mirror so he could do his hair, which was a mess. Strange, he should have been looking for a comb. God insisted James come along. Which got The X-Nerds and God off on the wrong foot altogether. Which was not good for the relationship, or the arthritis.

So the next day, when the sun had come up, which, even on this sandy yellow alien planet, was after the night had expired, at about half past nine in the morning, the Universe ended. Time stopped ticking. The days of their lives no longer poured down like sands through the hourglass. And it was a nice way to finish the Universe, a nice warm planet, lots of lovely dunes, like at the beach, except there weren’t no beach round here. Pity, really. It would be interesting to see what the waves did when Time stopped. It was interesting, too, The X-Nerds didn’t feel hungry, didn’t get thirsty and were quite mystified at why their watches hadn’t stopped (and they were Casio’s too!). Stuart had the answer in, well, no Time at all: They didn’t tell the time; Time was relative to an objects position in space as viewed by a relative stationary object; in Earth’s case, the Sun, as for this place, nobody knew any locals (except God who’d been shot by one of them) and so couldn’t ask. So the small digital Casio watches, so bizarre, kept on predicting what the Time would be if the Universe hadn’t ended, in exactly the same way that it would stop if you ever needed to know the time before the Universe ended. Ah, such is Murphy’s Law...
And just before everything went black (very black, this time. A darker shade of black...), a gentle wind swept across the forlorn planet, unearthing (unarrakising?) a flaming golden sword, which God picked up.
“Been looking for this darn thing for aeons!” He said.
1012.
And In the End, there was not very much at all. Besides six Humans and God and a big golden sword. There was no light. There was no dark. There was no sound, no feeling that there was anything, and in fact, it were true. In The End, there was Nothing At All. Fancy that.
“Uh, God...” Ventured James quietly. In the End, for no real reason whatsoever, James could speak normally.
“Shhh!” God scolded. “You’re ruining the atmosphere of this!” His voice passed through the void like mud passes though glass.
“Oh. Sorry. It’s just that-”
“Shush!” God made a funny sound deep in his throat.
“Oh. Sorry. I won’t do it again. I-”
“Will you bloody-well shut up?” God’s voice was a very hoarse whisper. Or would have been if he didn’t shout so loud.
James grunted.
God seemed to pause. It was hard to judge, now that Time had stopped. How long had passed already? A second? A year? No, it couldn’t be a year. If it was a year already, James would have ultimately bored them to death. And what was death, anyhow? The X-nerds didn’t feel dead, even though obviously there was now nothing around saying that they were alive. Perhaps they were somewhere between life and death, or somewhere beyond death, like a busload of American Tourists.
Judging by their still-going Casios, they all came to vote that it was only three minutes, not a year. Anyway, after God paused, they all started walking after Him (they had been walking on the black void for quite some time, now). 
“Damn near ruined the End, you lot,” God seemed miffed.
“What?”
“They filmed the End of the Universe, you know, just for the record. The Time Library wants to keep these sort of things, you know, just in case somebody actually wants to review this Universe and recommend it to someone or something.”
The X-Nerds and James stared at God. So, they all shared the thought, there was more to this afterlife and end-of-the-universe business after all.
“Well, bugger me with a red rubber hose and forty feet of nylon string, it’s a bit lucky we covered out bets, then, isn’t it?” Simon half-joked, mimicking that poxy ‘Blackadder’ accent that Rowan Atkinson did so well (it was, after all, his character).
God didn’t get it when the X-Nerds laughed. God didn’t understand laughter, or Humans, for that matter, or James. God understood Golf, which is why he invented this Universe in the first place. But they never had a good a golf course anywhere in the entire Universe as he had just off his bedroom back home. Now, he thought, smiling to himself again, there’s a good fairway...
11.
And all faded away to nothing. The X-Nerds, always sticking together, knew only the whereabouts of the X-Nerds beside them. James was... elsewhere. And God? Well God seems to have strolled off mumbling something about greens and trees and little white hard things that you hit with sticks.
“Did anyone bring a torch?” Somebody asked.
Ingenuity applying to the X-Nerds only, five pinpoints of light appeared from out of the screens of their Casio watches. James’ watch obviously didn’t have a light. Which wouldn’t have mattered since James wasn’t here anyway. And because he didn’t have a watch. It wouldn’t have had a light even if he had had one. And even if he had had a light in the watch that he never had, the light wouldn’t have worked in the watch, and so it would have been pointless to try to use the light in the watch that he didn’t have, or even in the watch that he might have had, because either the watch would have been broken and the light wouldn’t have worked, or the watch would have worked but the light still wouldn’t have worked. Even if there was a light that worked in the watch he might have had, the batteries that would’ve lit the light wouldn’t light the light because they were dead, or would have been if he had had them. But he didn’t have a watch, and isn’t here, so it doesn’t matter.
So suddenly all The X-Nerds instantly started bumping into one another, all similarly drawn to each others’ light, like moths drawn to somebody’s face when they’re trying to sleep.
“Uh, Karen?” whispered Stuart. Karen, when out in the light, was the only female X-Nerd among them (in the dark, she was just someone squishy to walk into). She was quiet in her own way and rarely added anything to the small group, except in numbers. She was seventeen, had thorougly blondish hair and thoroughly brownish eyes. The brown eyes had it: Stuart, Errol and Karen had brown eyes, the other two had greyish blue eyes. The Head X-Nerd, Simon seemed to have one grey and one blue eye, which made him quite unique amongst all the groups. And true singular uniqueness is condemned in western societies. Which was why he became a Nerd in the first place.
“Smeg,” Came a voice through the darkness, then a clatter. It was the most irritable Head Nerd, James, bumbling through the darkness, still trying to see where he was going with his eyes, which was silly, because there was nothing at all to see- that’s the point of absolute nothingness. But what had clattered?
“Smegging hell!” The angered voice came again, and then something smashed. And a rumble like a landslide. James only used the ‘smeg’ word when he swore. He ‘borrowed’ it out of a novel he once read (he said he read it, anyway, but he actually watched in on the TV); his Idol, an hologram named Arnold J. Rimmer from the Grant/Naylor story, Red Dwarf.
But out here, what the hell was smashing and crashing.
Then they found out. The lights came on in two places: Two perfectly cylindrical cones of light shone down from way up above. The X-Nerds all stood in one, frozen fingers still on the little buttons on their watches. James stood a ways off in the midst of a few cardboard boxes, some of which appeared torn and broken. A good number of them had spilled a lifetimes supply of those little fluffy peanut shaped packing foam things, a stream of plastic that meandered off into the distance. The X-Nerds stood fast in their cone of light, a hard, white floor below them. Everything seemed to go very quiet, very cold. Then, in James’ cone of pure light, another box fell from somewhere up out of the lights circumference, smashing down on the ground. Lots of little marbles wheedled away across the floor, purring into the black distance.
James cursed once more and his cone of light flickered slightly but stabilised, like an active fluoro tube in a bathtub full of liquid margarine.
After the rolling marbles had stopped, some more time ticked by on their casio’s, even though it didn’t tick by anywhere else. An odd fog crept across the floor slowly, probing each next bit of territory slowly, then would rush and swirl as it attained the new landscape. The strange mist was ankle deep and smelt like a strawberry spearmint.
Clunk: The sound of a far off three phase power switch in an unsoundproofed stadium.
The cones of light expanded, grew outwards as if the floor was slowly dropping downwards. Then, as the light spread out, the X-Nerds could see that they stood in a big room. As a matter of fact, the walls, if there were any, were so far off that they were lost in the strange, swirling fog that hugged the ground like as if terrified of the immensely high, white sky. James stood about twenty metres away at an enormous mountain of boxes and crates. One side of the great pile of storage units, in about a three metre cleft, had cascaded down the pile onto the floor. James stood at the bottom, not looking embarrassed, because he didn’t know how. But it was his fault.
“Cool,” Errol said. Everyone else nodded. “Wish I had one of these!”
Pause; kind of like when everybody stops talking to take the same breath.
“So! Intruders,” A voice boomed, a thunderous deep voice that shook the ground and rolled freely over the miles of foggy voidscape. It didn’t sound like God. Where was God, anyway? “Intruders in My storage room!”
“Ah,” Simon grunted aloud, then whispered to his group “Looks like the end of level boss has arrived.”
“Whispers? Ha!” The big voice laughed. “Whispering will do you no good! I am All-Supreme!”
“He sounds like a giant pizza,” Karen stated surreptitiously, but without much humour.
Simon looked up, for it seemed that that’s where the voice came from. “Oh, well. Sorry. He did it-” pointing at James “- and we’ll be off now. Bye!”
The five started walking away from where James stood, but all walked into a Rather Invisible Object. Now some invisible objects aren’t really invisible. Glass for instance; Glass isn’t invisible, you just happen to be able to see right through it. But you know it’s there and if you get at the right angle, you can see the glass. Rather Invisible Objects, however, are like glass- they let the light through- but you can’t see then no matter what you do, which makes it hard to know its whereabouts.
And when there’s five of you all walking in a tight group fairly fast away from the scene of an accident with somebody with a big voice and a name like a pizza topping coming after you, and you walk into one of these rather invisible objects, you get flat faces and fall over.
Which is what happened, in that order.
“Oh cool. Fractal edge floor tiles,” Stuart mentioned after a moment on the floor. They all looked through the swimming mist at the floor. It wasn’t just one big floor, like cement or rubber; it was tiled, like a hospital morgue. What a nice thought. But each of the teeny tiles had a fractal edge on it, which meant that while the volume of each tile was fixed, or in fact bounded within ‘limits’, the surface area of the tile was proportioned reasonably exponentially to the volume of that tile, which simply meant, in non X-Nerd terms, infinite, or newspaper terms, “Really Really Big!”. Everything in this room was very infinite indeed.
But enough of that. The door they found was quite well made. It was set into the rather invisible object so smoothly that it hardly left a mark on the original surface. But it opened away from them, which was good. It was an interesting job, too. Hard to do, really. You could see through the door towards the neverending plains of churning fog, but the door opened into what seemed a hallway.
“Cross dimensional?” Simon reasoned clinically.
“Mm. Probably,” Karen said professionally. “Nice job.”
“Yeah.”
Behind them came that voice again, the one that thundered deep in their chests. “Stop! You can’t go! I... I need someone to talk to!” It was whinging.
And mixed up in that echoing shemozzle was the small, squeaky voice of James. “Wait! Hey, you. I’m Head Nerd! I order you to-”
But the X-Nerds were gone. The door slowly edged shut, the hallway was then no longer visible. James slumped down against a box. A single peanut shaped foam bauble floated down onto his chest as he stared vacantly off into an infinite, white distance...
12.
ROOM 101: MICROSOFT SUPPORT DESK.

The sign was on the back of the door, chiselled into the old, tarnished brass. I was a grand old thing, oak panelling, gritty and cracked with age, dust. Very dusty. And it was also the door that just been used by five worried-looking people. Under that very door fine white mist seeped, a damp spot rotting into the old, reddish floorboards.
The X-Nerds sat just along the hallway, which was actually a narrow mall in some deserted village, at the withering table of some ancient caféteria. Overhead, whitish-yellow clouds raged through a ferocious orange sky, speeding overhead like in a hurricane. Water, or a liquid just a viscous, gurgled and plooped down behind a low grate in the wall. The room had been plastered and wallpapered in an angry red, but that had long ago peeled and tarnished to the present sullen displesantness. There was dirty glass in the window, grey with a scum that seemed to feed on the cold, molten sand. A tattered clothing shop across and along the street, deserted, clothes torn from the dummies which stood like silhouettes in the darkness.
It started to rain, the large dollops of water the colour of blood.
“Kind remind you of home?” Karen asked, quietly.
“Oh, yeah,” Matthew said. Matthew had been silent the entire journey. He and Karen had walked together most of the way, allowing the other three to do the talking, which was how things were done back when they were just plain Nerds. In this group, age or sex didn’t matter. Simon was leader, he’d been Head Nerd for as long as anyone could remember. Stuart was next in line, then Errol. Karen and Matthew (and the Nerd Wannabe’s, wherever they were) formed the body of the group. Agewise, however, Simon was oldest, then Matthew, then Stuart, Karen and then Errol. “Except we have cleaner windows at home. Mum likes to keep them clean.”
“Does anybody else think that all this is a bit strange?”
“What, you mean the end of the universe, Karen?”
Karen rested her head on an upturned palm, tracing rings of dust into the table. “No. Yes, well, the time machine working, meeting God, fractal-edge floortiles.”
“Seems fine to me,” Matthew grinned.
“Oh. I guess it’s just me, then.”
The rain continued unabated.
13.
In another dimension, one so often called parallel to Reality, at a time no longer relative to Reality’s Present, the weather patterns suddenly changed. A storm started to brew where a storm shouldn’t brew, and on the other side of the planet, a bird was suddenly thrown into the path of a speeding car by a freak gust of wind. On the grey back seat of that car a book titled ‘CHAOS’ lay open, exposing, amongst others, the words ‘The Butterfly Effect’.
The small bird fell dead into the grass beside the road.
14.
“...And then we ended up here.” James concluded his story.
The light from above paused, said “So, they deserted you? Why?”
The Head Nerd listened to the soft, strange voice. It was weird, but nobody had ever really talked much to him before, well, apart from his Dentist, but those conversations always seemed one-sided. Nobody ever wanted to hear his story. Now, here in a storage room at the End of the Universe, lived a disembodied voice that looked like a light who wanted to listen. It sounded like Marvin the Robot, out of the ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ TV Series- depressed and slow. He thought he saw a gleaming white robot standing nearby, but couldn’t be sure.
He remembered seeing the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy on TV and tried to recall whether the characters in it had had experiences similar to the one he was having now. Sure, it was a dream. You don’t just meet a god and wander over planets that aren’t there and talk to lights. Everybody knew that. About the lights. Therefore, it must be a dream. He must be dreaming something out of the Guide. But he couldn’t remember anything in the Guide being this wierd. He was a fool. Evrything in the Guide was this wierd. Or wierder.
But James went on, talking. He could, now there was nobody to hear him, talk like everybody else. He could communicate in human terms, not some computer parsed binary encryption that he was used to speaking in. Perhaps before he’d just been nervous. Perhaps in this strange dimension he was somehow different. Probably it was just that he was stupid.
And so here, in these cool swirling mists, in a room where Time itself did not exist, nor the rules of quantum particle physics or the rules of thermodynamics, in fact nothing but fractal tiles, mist, boxes of foam baubles and a talking light existed within this entire reality, James went on talking.
15.
“Up on the hill, near that big house!” Karen was excited to have spotted him first. The X-Nerds- casual, not military- moved as one.
God swung his club, a tiny white projectile bursting off the ground, curving, curving, flying across the ground.
Plop. Into a pond. Suddenly, the pond wasn’t there, only a flat piece of ground. The pond had vanished completely. The small golfball lay unmoving on the short, green grass. Beside it, a small, yellow fish, small enough to, say, put in ones ear, snuggled into the grass, its unblinking eye turned towards the raging sky.
“Handy, that.” Stuart called out just as God swung again. God half turned, missed the ball and dug a sizeable chunk of green life from the turf. Then cursed a string of curses that would make geraniums turn brown and wither.
“I was wondering where you lot had gotten to,” God said when they arrived next to him. God hadn’t noticed James wasn’t with them. Perhaps he’d learned from past experience. “I guess you don’t know your way around the celestial city.”
“This dump is the Celestial City? Like, paradise and heaven and all that?”
“For man’s sake, no! This is the celestial city, sure. Heaven and Hell don’t exist.”
“But what about when you die? The afterlife and all that?”
“Afterlife? What nitwit gave you that idea? Afterlife indeed!” God spat penderously. “No, this is where you were supposed to go when you died,” God explained. “Except when everyone got here, they were dead.”
“What about us, then?” Matthew asked, as if he’d come up with a question God couldn’t answer, like one of those Mensa puzzles that you’d get each Christmas from your Uncle, something you’d never forgive him for.
“Well, you are exceptions,” God cheated, quickly masking his doubt with apparent ingenuity. “You see, uh, when your Universe ended, everyone who was still alive got to come here. Yeah.”
“So...?”
“Where are they? Oh, they’ll be arriving soon. I hope.”
“Why?” Karen questioned.
“What?” God questioned back.
Again, with explanations this time. “Why would they want to come to a dump like this?”
“It’s not a dump,” God defended. “It looked good in it’s day.”
“A squizillion years ago.”
“So?” God seemed a bit hurt. He looked down at the little golf ball on the soft turf. It waited patiently for Him to whack it again.
“Well,” Karen argued, “If you’ve got all these people going to arrive soon, don’t you think you may as well tidy the place up a bit-” God wanted to interrupt here, but Karen could be very assertive at times. “-It is a little dusty, after all.”
God considered this. He turned from the X-Nerds, brushed them back a little and whacked the gold ball. It shouted “Wheeee!” as it sailed through the air, before landing only feet from the flag.
“No.”
“What? Why not? The place is a dump.” Karen whined.
Simon looked imploringly at God, a sorry expression indeed. “Look, God. George. The place seems a bit run down-”
“Yeah well what will you be doing for the rest of eternity? Huh? And the other twenty-two billion other lifeforms that will live here? You can patch it up.” God was getting angry. You could tell. A whisp of steam lifted from his left shoe as he started to pace towards the flag on the green.
“Ah,” Simon blurted carefully. “Yes, well, I suppose we’ll be off then, shall we? Got to get home for tea, don’t we. Bye!”
This had become a habit for the group. Sneaking off when things turned a bit grim. But it almost always did the trick and things so far had worked out fairly well. Especially now since they’d lost James. Perhaps it wasn’t best to disturb God while he was playing Golf. Perhaps it wasn’t best to disturb him no matter what he was doing.
16.
A billion light years away, and about the same number before, back in a small room in a house, there was a small black mark on the floor. This roundish blot which seemed smudged on the pretty, white carpet, moved.
It did not move much, or very fast, but it did move. 
One of The Undecided then slammed the door back open, opened his mouth to say something else, but had to close it again because he’d forgotten what it was he was going to say. He had forgotten because, only moments before, when he’d just stormed out, the room had contained a large, metallic machine that appeared as if it were ready to burst into flame. Now, he’d stormed back in, and it and the six people who were also in the room with the machine had mysteriously vanished. All that remained of their existence, it seemed, was a small quivering black blot on the floor.
A wind burst through the window, billowing curtains screaming into the room like two giant blundering grannies grasping for their respective walking frames.
The blot moved, just a little, very slowly. It shimmered like liquid boot polish; or black coffee in a black mug. It seemed to want to... No, that was silly. It couldn’t. It was a black blot on the carpet, for God’s sake.
It burped. Silly as it may have been, it had done it anyway.
The young Undecided knelt, peered deep into the jellylike lump of quavering nothingness that continued to burp its way across the carpet. A face appeared in the shiny black surface, the blackened mirror of the youngster gazing back up into his astonished green eyes; and the blot of blackness separated into four equal parts, each of which reflected a miniature of its surroundings, cast in matte noir, a quivering reflection of a quiet, peaceful reality.
17.
The sign buzzed, as all pink-red neon signs should do. It was a flickering sign at a diner, by no means at the edge of town. The Celestial City, a city known to some of the locals as ‘Castip-Ulstyity- Ity’; to other (more sober) members, ‘The Capital’; to most just plain old ‘Celestial City’. Though not quite next to the road, due to a badly placed council carpark, three run-down hotels and a minature golf course, the Diner was a popular enough place. All the lifeforms left from the End of the Universe had arrived, plippered into place with only a minor puff of smoke, a while earlier. The city fared well, the usual assortment of city life teeming through back streets and underneath bridges. Life hadn’t returned to normal though, when designing the city millions of years ago, God hadn’t expected there to be any problems in transport: People had their own donkey and were granted feet so that they could walk. Humans, however, being one of the more ingeniously stupid creatures in the now-expired Universe, had invented Public Transport, which had been brought along to the ‘afterlife’ (just in case). Over five million years of evolution had developed one of the most complex life forms in the entire Universe- the Human Being- and over that five million years, those same humans couldn’t even invent a good public transport system that actually moved people form Point A to Point B. Instead, they’d invented Taxi’s: money-guzzling beast engineered to move people from point A through to some other character in a different civilisations’ alphabet, and to start out in the wrong direction.
Some of the other lifeforms, simpler, sleeker models which had less bits that could break or fall off, had developed quite creative methods of travelling. On one particular world, a planet so enormous that even their satellites thought the world was flat for the time they took to cross the sky, the lifeforms13 had developed a surprising method of transporting objects from Point A to Point B: Build giant conveyor belts all around the entire planet and sit by them. In other words, to go from Point A to Point B, the creatures became Point C and moved Point A by Point C to Point B to simulate movement.
Unfortunately, for the Celestial City, only the Humans had thought to bring their taxis and busses and diesel locomotives along, just as a reminder of home.
The door to the Diner was open already, propped that way with a chunk of brick tied neatly in a pink stocking. A hot tongue of steamy air spewed out into the twilight carrying yet another bout of ’flu and disease. Fortunately, people couldn’t die of disease in the afterlife. It was about it’s only true merit. Come to that, they couldn’t actually die of anything. Already there were some pretty silly looking corpses walking around.
The X-Nerds hadn’t been here before, but it seemed a friendly enough place: The counter supported the usual array of locals- the man with his hat pulled over his face, the man staring into his muddy coffee, the woman in the rich red (and utterly cheap) Kaftan whose crossed legs could be seen through an envelope of blue smoke. A few tables and chairs were by the window; by the door.  A jukebox churned out all the standards quietly in the corner. Somebody was coming out of the Ladies’. Nobody you’d know, just a familiar looking face.
The X-Nerds sat in the corner; hard white chairs, but comfortable enough. Elvis hung on the wall. Not just a picture. Elvis hung on the wall.
“Something doesn’t feel quite right,” ventured Karen. They didn’t eat out normally.
“Hm,” Simon agreed. Karen was right, as usual. It felt like the quiet before the storm; a tenseness in the air- as if some great adventure was about to start and forever throw their lives into deranged chaos (not that their lives weren’t already thrown into deranged chaos).
“Lets order, huh,” Matthew said on hearing his stomach grumbling. “I could eat a horse. As long as it’s dead, cooked and garnished so badly that you think your out in a field eating grass. But, yes, I could eat a horse.”
18.
Mmun-mnuu-eee-ooo-mmoan-i-muuu-nooo...
The sound echoed through the great, dark tunnels- a sound like a thousand monks who’d forgotten the words to the hymn. It was only five hundred monks who didn’t know the words to a hymn, but their eternal mumble was echoing off the walls and so seemed a thousand voices.
The tunnels were low, carved, tiled and painted in red-ochre, and resembled the twisting maze of sewers under the Celestial City. Throughout them, the low chants vaguely drifted, dwindling, echoing, whittling away slowly at the very foundation of rock. The droll undertone of Vox-Multiformis (the name given to the chant14) imitated a thousand times over against the rough, hand-hewn walls.
No outsider had ever stood in the Great Halls of Lorna-Major (well, nobody anybody present could recall, anyway). No outsider could imagine the infinity of the halls and tunnels that crisscrossed the cathedral. Lorna-Major was a solitary planet. A lone planet orbiting a lone white-dwarf sun, the only planet outside the Universe, atmosphere part oxygen, part sulfur, mostly methane. Large yellow clouds streamed over the barren waste of rock and dust. A sea of methane and other short chemical chain combinations of carbon and hydrogen, with the occasional chlorine, nitrogen and oxygen thrown in for good measure. A sea of death, the fish once brought here from a small planet known as Sol3-L1, already dead before set free to rot into the smelly, sodden swamp-like ocean.
For many aeons, thousands of generations far surpassing any amount of time known within the Universe, the Monks of Lorna-Major have practiced worship to their Gods. They, for reasons forgotten centuries ago, provided themselves with the technology to remove both their own planet and the nearest sun to its present position, just on the transition between the Universe and pre-atomic Void.
This didn’t go down well with the other six inhabited planets and two C-class genetic research moons in their solar system, but nobody complained because they all froze to death very quickly. All except one particular batch of a shiny black, jellylike lifeform, which quivered very slowly in its petri dish, very cold, very alone, but very intelligent.
Now, Lorna-Major had become the centre for culture, the centre for religion and politics. Lorna-Major had one of the best Universities outside the Universe (the only one), a Library with books that told the story of the universe with simple, full colour glossy photos and little pop-up cross-referencing multi-dimensional models in the centre pages.
It had a great restaurant too, where lots of weird and wonderful people came to be seen. Not to be seen eating, though, as most of the food was caught on the marshy beaches of nearby methanic and sulfuric oceans, and therefore was quite poisonous. But the food was cheap! And they made great Martinis (shaken, not stirred), with those little umbrellas too!
I-moo-numm-eee-loo-ba-loo-ba-muu...
The chant continued. Nobody knew what it meant, its origin had been obscured by the mists of time (and those same mists of time had seeped into the section of library that contained the books explaining the chant, and indeed, the entire point of the religion, and had dissolved the manuscripts and papers in its putrid smelling green gas). The chants were sung- murmured and mumbled- by the remaining five hundred monks (remaining awake, that is) who didn’t know the words but weren’t going to let anyone else know that by not singing them. All in all, the sound like a far off earthquake rumbled out of the high-roofed cathedral.
Up the back, near a large vertical tapestry, a balding man and a grey-haired woman. All the monks were balding men, but only these two had sunspots on their head. All the monks wore brown garb hessian sheets (they called the ‘robes’, but they were really potato sacks they stole from a military bunker). Also, the two monks with sunspots were wearing golf outfits: disgusting pastel combinations in corduroy and felt with checkered blue and yellow socks and black and white leather shoes. This would have made them stand out in normal instances, but the candles had melted down so far in this area that nobody could see anything anyway.  There was a fair amount of snoring going on in this area too. 
One God said to the other, “Pretty boring service, huh?”
The other God replied sleepily, “Mmm-unk-oo-lee-o”, thinking somebody had awakened her because She wasn’t chanting. Promptly, She fell asleep again.
Then suddenly, over the amplifiers (after the air-raid siren went off to wake everybody up) came a voice. It was a nasal voice, a whine ensured to keep your attention (“...I wish he would just shut-up!...”) and seemed to be very excited about something.
“Hark!” The voice said ecstatically. Then again “Hark! The Universe of our Escape.”
“Whatever that means,” said one of the Gods, quietly, up the back, to himself.
Then, with a slowness that tried to heighten the anticipation, but only managed to reassure some of the monks back into slumber, the roof of the cathedral opened to allow the monks to see the great expanse of stars above them.
“The End of Time is nigh! The End of the Universe is-” But that was as far as the irritable screaming voice got. Unfortunately, opening the roof meant letting in the toxicating gasses of the atmosphere- Methane, sulphur, nitrogen and so on, nothing if which any of the monks could breathe-  and all of the short, balding Monks who wore brown potato sacks and knew all the answers to the Universe, died in a great racking spasm of asphyxiation. One last slight cough and- Dead Silence.
But the two Gods got a good view of the show. Immune to Methane and sulfur and whatever else the Universe and beyond could throw at them, they sat perfectly happily (as only they could do) and watched the great embodiment of their work slowly spiral gaily into itself, closing in, exploding and imploding, then, instantly, ceasing to exist at all.
There came a small voice. “I’m late. I hope I’m not too late.” Up the other end, some doors opened and a lone monk surveyed the scene. “Oh dear,” his toneless, nasal voice complained. Then, he too fell over and died.
All that was left was one sun, a restaurant that served deadly food and a cathedral with one thousand dead monks lying inconspicuously amongst the silent pews.
“How ’bout a round or two, Randall?” Quested the female God of the other.
“My place or yours?” The other said.
“Hmm. I know-”
“George?”
“Yes,” And it was decided. “Let’s go see George.”
19.
“And in just a moment, we’ll go back to back with two great classics from the Eurythmics, but right now, let’s see what’s happening in your world.”
It was a nice room. There were pictures on the walls: Planets and dinosaurs. There was a small glossy print on the back on the door. It was green and black and read ‘The X-Files’. There was a calendar. On a bookshelf crammed with looseleaf and old tattered books, an FM radio was going.
The bed was unmade and the window was slightly ajar.
The blot lay quivering; squalid on carpet. It had split, re-split, and again, like a cellular lifeform, replicating the original over and over. A thousand score black jellies lay tremulating on the carpet; silent, alone. It seemed to be grinning. It was an evil grin.
20.
“One Horse, garlic bread and a one point two-five of Pepsi,” The waitress, a short blonde with one blue eye (only one - in the center of her forehead), handed over the goods.
“Pepsi?” The X-Nerds cried.
“Pepsi. We don’t have Coca Cola.”
“Oh,” Simon was at a loss. No Coke. They’d found out earlier that they didn’t have plain water either. “Do you stock, it’s rather rare, a little drink called ‘Purdey’s Elixir Vitae’?”
“Elixir Vitae? Do we stock a drink with a name like that?” The waitress burst out laughing, a golden little laugh that made some of the men in the corner involuntarily squirm.
“Boy,” She went on. Simon hated it when he was refered to as ‘Boy’. “Boy, let me tell you this. We’re in the Celestial City, here. This is the city of the Undead. Not back home on some little yellow planet with a-”
“Uh, actually it’s blue and green-”
“Green? Who ever heard of a green planet?” A couple of people in the corner looked up, raised their arms like schoolkids. A couple of people with purple skin and eyes in the palms of their hands. The waitress looked at them for a long time, defeatedly. “Whatever. We ain’t there now. We don’t have this drink of life. Shit, kid, we aren’t even alive any more!”
“Well, actually,” started Stuart, who was well into the garlic bread. “We are. We asked God and He-”
“You asked WHO?” Someone at a nearby table burst out, but he was obviously referring to somebody within his own conversation, so the five turned back to their own conversation and politely ignored him. An oversized cauliflower with three ‘legs’ and no arms wandered in, grumbling about, of all things, conveyor belts.
“And,” Stuart continued, a crust of the yummy bread dangling precariously from his lip. “He said that we were all alive and that the afterlife-”
“Afterlife? Who gave you that idea? On our planet, we’ve been sending people back and forth across dimensions for centuries. In none of them were any creatures who talked about no Afterlife.” The waitress laughed hard at the five stupid suckers sitting in her shop. She turned to go serve another customer, her long spiny tail knocking salt all over the remaining four-out-of-twelve slices of hot, yellowish bread. Matthew had almost finished eating the garnished horse. He looked up and said “-...”.
21.
“Randall? Linda? What are you doing here. Last I heard, you were building a computer-generated Universe out near the Lorna-Major Academic Academy. What brings you here?” George was just finishing the seventeen-thousandth hole on his personal golf course. He reached out with his free hand and plucked two drivers from mid-air. Handing them to the two other Gods he added “Did they bore you almost to death, out there?”
“Well, actually, they seem to have bored themselves to death. Actually.” Linda said.
George looked up sharply as he placed three round, white things on the green turf. “What do you mean?”
“Well, last I saw, they were all rolling around dying between moans. They’d opened up the roof just before the Universe ended and then they all died.” 
“But they can’t have. The Universe ended some time ago.” George appeared to be on verge of panic.
“But we saw it. Stars and all, ended and dissapeared right there-” Randall stopped. He and Linda glanced at each other, suddenly understanding. It was their Universe that had ended! Their long hard work at programming a computer to genrate a holo-projected virtual Universe and they had just sat happily watching the show when it crashed!
An unhappy silence descended. The golfballs waited in joyous rapture at the thought of being thwacked again.
George was first to speak. “But, as you say. What of the Monks of Lorna-Major. Are they allright?”
Linda told him what happened, in full glorious detail. George despaired.
“And you let it happen?” He suddenly exploded, furious.
“Yes.”
“And you don’t know what you’ve done?”
“Yes. We sat and watched our Universe crash. Do you know-”
“The chant! You idiots. ‘Vox-Multiformis’ means ‘Voice of Stability’ in some distant, misunderstood language!” Steam rose from God’s shoes again. He really did have a sweating problem. “That chant was the Vox-Multiformis, You dolts!”
“Oh, well. Um-” Linda started. Randall stood and started at George’s feet. ‘They’re steaming,’ His only thought.
“It means, You spastic, elastic brained morons from the planet Zot, that boaring mumble was keeping the balance between good and evil all throughout all the Universes, I seem to recall. Something like that anyway. Mine, yours and a million others! And you let that bloody smelly planet collect more gas than those monks could breathe! And now they’re dead! You... You-” George shook an angry finger at the other two Gods, who both wore the silly grin of a schoolchild who knows he’s in trouble and hasn’t got a hope of blaming anyone- except, with distant possibility rising, each other.
And so it was that he, George, the undisputed vegetative God that he was, did something that hadn’t occured since the very start of the Universes. In fact, the very start of everything.
When the Unseen and Unknown OverGod had first balanced the chaos and energy and formed the Gods and formed the Void between each Universe, He placed within each Universe- each Dimension-  a small but powerful symbol, a shiny, black object, no larger than a pencil case, to balance the order with the chaos. Let loose, the black Flux Scalis, as it was termed and therefore became, could tip the scale between primeval forces and rend everything- Gods and all- Chaos and Energy once more. In other words, kill everyone and make everything else totally useless.
Anyway, George called a meeting.
22.
The Flux Scalis was, in many other Universes and their relative dimensions, the night, the shadows, the creatures that lived in cupboards and under beds15. Flux Scalis was evil concentrated, not just some satanic cult bent on eating goats’ liver and drinking the blood of a cockerel. Real evil, chaos by another name, came to the other Universes as dark wraiths, hopelessness and despair, boogey men, and mail-order shopping TV networks.
On Earth, many many aeons before the Universe ended and Time stopped, in a small room in a small house in a large country, on some nice carpet, Flux Scalis slowly writhed and mutated. A large living creature, a foetus in the womb that was quiet and empty, growing outwards and upwards like a balloon trying to burst. As it grew, it lost some of black sheen, lost some of it’s jelly-like properties.
Then, it stopped. It stopped growing upwards and outwards. Now, devoid of all its former blackness, mutated into something less insidious, more transportable, it stood on two freshly formed feet, smiling that evil smile that the Mormons have every Easter when they come to tell you that the world will end next Saturday just after lunch. And here’s a pamphlet on our ‘way’.
Ouside, some children swung gaily on some black tyres suspended by a heavy steel chain, their young laughter splitting an ear shattering silence.
The Flux Scalis blinked and took her first ever breath. She was ready.
23.
After the initial jeers and boos and then cries of understanding, the assembly of Gods settled down. George had explained the basics of what had happened was waiting for the initial response. Perhaps he should go have a cup of tea. Maybe a round or two.
Someone, about halfway back in the assembly, then spoke up. “Who stared it? Let them fix it.”
“How? It’s already happened, hasn’t it?” One other God said.
“No, you’re thinking only through one dimension and in one direction.”
“What? Where have you been for the last ten million aeons? The fact is that that we are going in this direction-”  the God speaking motioned ahead of him, “- and you are thinking in this direction.” He motioned in the opposite direction.
Someone else got up and shouted (he was way up the back) “No! He means go back to before it happened-”
“That would mean unending the Universe!” George protested.
“So?” Came the distant God again. “We could all do that. Just somebody would have to go back in time and-”
“Who?” Yet another God protested. “Nobody wants to go back there. I’m glad the whole stinking mess is over.”
A little voice shimmied across from the edge of the room. “Oh shoot! Where did that go? Damned stapler.”
“It’s only a stinking mess because you let it get that way. You are a God, you know. You could have fixed it up with a wave of your hand, or didn’t you know?”
“Oh, bloody hell, you lot,” came that voice from up the back again. “Can’t we at least talk about something sensible here. We’ve got a problem and we have to unend the stupid universes. So bloody-”
“Not neccisarily,” One female God up the front interjected. “If we could use one of the five dimensions parrallel to the Celestial City, outside time to form a mesh between ourselves and all the universes before they’ve finished-”
“But we’d still have to unend the universes.” Somebody new shouted at her as if she were deaf and stupid. He was about three seats away.
“Now you listen to me young man-”
“Why, thankyou, you old hag.”
“Oh look, now I’ve lost my two-b pencil.”
George let them argue. Arguments between Gods can only go so far. He knew what He’d do, and He also knew just who he’d send back into the Universe to fix it.
24.
Flux Scalis wandered through the rooms and hallways of the house. So far she’d destroyed  most of the contents of the rooms she’d visited. Now, wandering into the kitchen, she saw her first Human. A small, young Human. He was The Undecided and stood eating some black paste spread on bread.
Looking around the room, the Flux saw many intriguing items- electric knives, a toaster, a sink full of water, onions. Then she saw a sight that horrified even her - a jar full of gherkins16. She formatted a plan inside her mind, ready to spring the excruciating trap, ready to begin fulfilling her destiny.
In the background, Anne Lennox was singing about sweet dreams.
He died slowly, and in terrible agony. The skin on his shoulder seared away to the white bone in putrid black smoke with the scalding touch of the Flux, and he screamed, dropping his bread onto the floor, face down. It stuck fast on the linolium, but he did not care anymore. He tore away from his female attacker, his hand splashing into the sink, dashing water about the room. He did not care.
Then the Flux swished the toaster into the sink. The toasting bread was now ruined, but the screaming boy did not vex as the current swung up his arm, renting raw flesh from bone in jerking spasms of blood-bubbling fury.
The boy shot back across the room, twisting his back sideways on the hard table. He hay motionless but alive on the floor, his bread now smeared into oblivion.
On a twist of fate that had nothing to do with the horrendous tortures planned by the flux, an egg rolled from the bench to break over his face.
The murderess grabbed the electric knife and in many minutes of blood soaked glee amidst the terrible screaming, had sawed the now-dead body into hundreds of glistening peices. 
She took her time to eat the raw meat and clean up every last blot of the iron enriched blood. She ate him with onions and cheese, garnished with the cat. She put his eyes on toothpicks and had them with champagne. The Flux could see more of these Human things far off, through the trees, down a black pebble road. She knew only that she must kill them as well. Subtlety, though, was the key.
She grabbed a meat clever and stromped purposefully out the door.
25.
She screamed. And screamed. Her purse fell to the floor and bounced once on the red tiles. She held her head with both hands, her body thrusting right then left. Her face became that of elemental pain, disfigured by hurting. Then, she seemed transparent. Did this happen often? she thought. Was it something to do with the Diner?
One alien in the corner was just about to order what this woman had eaten earlier. For some reason, he now declined, ordering the Upside Down Lobster dish instead.
With a last groan, a vortex appeared superimposed with her body, as is trying to occupy the same space. The colours of her body swirled, twisted inside themselves, became more transparent her head seemed forty feet from her neck, her feet lifted from the floor. Then, the grotesque being swirled into itself and was no more. Her clothes fell to the floor, but she was not naked. She had ceased to exist.
The same thing happened to a man just outside.
26.
George sat at a desk in his bedroom, watching the evening news. Number one story, an old lady on the outskirts of the Celestial City would have been two-hundred and four today, she had calculated, if Time hadn’t stopped and impeded her progress towards old age.  She was a strange old woman, alien in almost every way- smelly, purple, dismembered-  except her clothing style. Celestial City had some of the Universes best fashion designers (in fact, all of them), and she appeared as if she shopped with them all. 
Second up on the news was the weather, then a quick report showing that incredible numbers of the cities population were being ‘sucked’ into vortexes of primeval chaos and ceased to exist. At the end of the news broadcast, as if to prove a point, the news reader, an old man with very thick glasses and a grey moustache, did it himself.
And the station went to an ad break. A small company on the other side of the city had just imported a new batch of Purdey’s Elixir Vitae (where from was anyone’s guess), a refreshingly expensive new drink containing ridiculously inexpensive ingredients such as air and water.
God hit the remote: The TV went off.
“Sally,” He said into his intercom. “Get me the X-Nerds.” It was like calling for Superman.
A pause. “Right away, Mr God,” said a tiny, female voice, a voice similar to that of a telephone operator. God could have summoned them and they would have appeared right away, out of the nothingness. But doing it this way, making the X-Nerds cross half of Celestial City in a silly little yellow taxicab sent specifically for them, and making them pay for it at the end, was much more satisfying, and, hey, more fun.
At eight to nine they arrived. God had sent the taxi at six-thirty, so that meant that he had inconvenienced them quite a bit. Good. They had inconvenienced him enough by starting all this.
The door opened, slowly, a creaking noise. On the floor just behind it lay a soft cushion with a platinum ball-point pen on it. It was Sally, God’s secretary. She stated routinely “The X-Nerds, Mr God.”
“Oh. Show them in, and, uh, Sally, you look great in Red.” God conceded.
The cushion blushed. The small platinum pen just lay there. Sally left and showed the X-Nerds in. God offered them a brandy but they refused, not because they were underage, but because brandy tastes disgusting.
“I’ll have a Coke!” Errol said, but God ignored him.
God did not say anything but motioned them to follow him over to a bookcase. They did so, noting that God seemed a little angry at something (no change there). They stood by the bookcase. God reached out, took a blue book, and just like in those old Frankenstein movies, the bookcase swung around to a secret room. Except in the old Frankenstein movies, the book was red.
God stood on the dais, the X-Nerds still beside the bookcase staring out over the sea of a hundred old people in golf suits. A wave of discordant colour sense rolled over the five stunned Humans as time after time they saw a bad taste in clothes repeated out over each God, male and female. Still, it was better than seeing them without golf clothes on. Some clothes, even this sort, were better than none at all.
“So much for God wearing a flowing white sheet, like some strange people thought back on Earth,” Simon said. His image of God was a short, fat man, much like the Budda, except wearing a plain suit three sizes too small with a jacket, no tie, sitting on a big leather lounge. Hangabout, perhaps that was his image of a police commissioner. Confusion niggled its way in. Maybe it was a politician. Or a mafia boss? The real Ronald MacDonald?
God did in fact have a leather lounge, and also owned a suit. But, like all Gods, wore his Golf clothes, just in case they had time for a game.
“Gods! Please!” Still the congregation of Gods shouted at each other, arguing not the multiple Universe theory, they knew about that one, but of electrophysical time flux as applied to nuclear-based newtonian models of virtual universes. Slowly the flares and tempers settled, George formed rainclouds within the room and given them all a cold shower, just to be sure.
Up in the back corner, just after the clouds had dispersed through a little grate in the ceiling designed for that purpose, a small door creaked open noisily and a K-Mart shopping trolley stood in the opening, a menacing grin etched into the wire frame that was its body.
“Whoa! Wrong room! Sorry!” It said. Then the door closed and everybody turned back to George and the X-Nerds, waiting expectantly.
God spoke, more to the X-Nerds than to the other Gods.
“Everyone,” Said God. “This is Simon Kszuckesnerd.”
“It’s pronounced Ecks Nerd,” corrected Karen. “What a fole.”
“Simon,” He said, and Simon edged forward a little. “Why did you come here? More specifically, tell us how you came to be here in the Celestial City.”
Simon hated it when he was singled out and so slinked backwards until he bumbled back into the bookcase.
“Uh,” He faltered. “You brought us here, right after you were shot.”
This caused a commotion amongst the seated Gods. A fly landing caused commotion amongst the gods. Whilst they were arguing the Head X-Nerd started to mumble again, trying the old escape routine. “Yes. Well, we’ll be off then.” And reached for the blue book God had used to switch the bookcase around. It wasn’t there. He turned to see God waggling it at him, shaking his head from side to side in the universal signal for ‘no’. He had that menacing, devious smile just like Parker Lewis in ‘Parker Lewis can’t Lose’, which came on after the news each night.
“Oh, bugger,” Said Karen. By speaking, all the hundreds of voices were suddenly a memory and attention instantly snapped around to her.
“Oh, bigger bugger!” She added, staring at ancient faces older than the Universe itself.
“Karen,” smiled George, trying to get Karen to tell the story. His eyes went very narrow as he said it. God had a cute grimace when he was trying to be devious, she thought.
It was in this way- in a large room hidden behind a bookshelf, next to Gods own bedroom, in the Celestial City at the end of the Universe, in a place that had all the Time in the world for Karen to tell her story- that all the assembled Gods learned of the story of James and his conquest of Earth. From bare beginnings when the Nerds, young at this stage, as a matter of fact still Nerd Wannabees, back when the Nerd old-boys were called Tech Heads, leapt at the idea that James might want to be a Nerd. The Nerds were in limited supply. Nerds were hard to come by and Good Nerds even harder. James had looked promised to be a Good Nerd, even, a much-envied SuperNerd, such a nerd he was.
“But then,” Karen’s captivating account went on, “Then James became different. Something in him seemed to burn out- later we found it was his brain- and he became a stranger to the Nerds’ Way. He started to believe in life after death. He started to loose faith in Nostradamus, not real faith, because it’s all crap anyway, just the sort of faith you instill in somebody else making them believe that you believe. He even started to believe in Go..ho..ho..hod. Um, so you can see what a fool he was. Yes.”
The gods looked confused17. Karen ignored them, continued. “He stopped watching the X-Files on TV. Then he committed the biggest Nerd Sin, he stopped using Computers.
“Nerds must use computers. In order to survive; to continue to fight and seek out the Great Question; to be in touch with the action; to remain in essence, A Nerd.”
Someone coughed then yawned. Other than that, the place was silent. Then outside the little door at the back came tremendous crash. It sounded precicely like a K-Mart shopping trolley with red wheels rolling down grey cement stairs with a corroded dark blue iron railing.
Karen politely shouted “Oi! Listen, will you?” Then continued on with her narrative.
“James had become vaguely akin to a computer, though more like a computer without an operating system: Expensive but useless. He forgot how to talk properly, he somehow unlearned how to stand up for himself and for what is right. He became completely unbearable.
“Then we, the X-Nerds, for we’d been dumped by James from the status of Nerds, all decided to get rid of James and send him to a different time. We built a time machine and while still in the testing phase, it was accidentally activated it and brought ourselves and James to another time, where we met God. He brought us here and here we are.” Karen concluded simply. Karen was good at telling stories.
The question was simple and the X-Nerds should have expected it to be asked. “Where is this ‘James’ character now?”
They, the X-Nerds, looked at each other, stupefied, then all spoke.
“Who cares?”
“He’s gone, and that’s the point of why we built the time machine in the first place-”
“Why does it matter?” 
The Gods themselves considered this. A Human, so deranged that he had both lost the plot and been lost from the plot. A Human so stupid that he stopped knowing how to be a  Human.
But so what? He was a Human, anyway. And Humans were stupid anyway. So why should it matter what these Humans thought of him? Anyway?
“No! We all want to know where this ‘James’ character is!” One of the Gods roared. It  was Randall.
“Uh, I don’t, really.” Said Linda, who sat nearby.
“Shut up, Linda.” Scolded the first God.
“Well I don’t. And don’t you tell me-” She was furious at him for some reason.
“Shut up, Linda. Just shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Randall got so excited that he started to sound like a human. He looked up and George and the X-Nerds and all the seated assembly were looking quite directly back at him. He blushed a little, grinned stupidly and quested in a puny voice “How about I shut up, then?”.
George nodded, his sunspots glinting sweat in the light. He didn’t say anything. Just nodded. He nodded a bit more.
“Well?” He said to the X-Nerds, meaning the question about James’ whereabouts. The X-Nerds each shrugged. They knew he was probably still sitting in the fog playing with the packing foam, but he was happy there. He could stay there, couldn’t he?
27.
Felicity Scalore owned a Casino, two yachts and a little farm in a quiet, sleepy village. This was where she spent most of her days. Her managers and commanders kept the dollars rolling in and she had established a nice little private guest house. Happy little married couples would come along, quietly, up the back roads behind the boring village, to stay at the guest house, just for the honeymoon. Then one of them would be murdered, or have mortal wounds inflicted apon them. Never by any of the townsfolk, who hardly knew the comings and goings of the guesthouse. Never, it seemed by the gentle Felicity. She seemed a sweet young woman, content with her life. It almost always ended out that one of the couples that had stayed there had done it. Murdered the other, maimed their new lover, or would simply vanish and never a trace would be found. Nobody would ever suspect Felicity. Such a nice girl could never harm people like that. If somebody suspected her, they would just forget about it. Just like that.
Felicity would always continue, though, shrugging off to circumstance or to a foul, drawn out plot, drawing the partner into such a back road, run down cottage in order to kill. Occasionally, when it became too much, she would leave to go to her Casino, or take a holiday on a cruise ship. Sometimes, the murders would still happen.
It was all a little too silly, but what the hey.
Nobody in the small village knew much about her past. Usually, a small, tight community could figure somebody out- would know people who knew people and information would travel down the grapevine. Felicity, it seemed, had no background. Nobody knew anything about her, other than she had first bought the hobby farm and guest house around four years back, and that she’d moved from a town where, the year she moved, seven teenagers had vanished, without a trace. They hadn’t run away. The forensic people hadn’t seen any chemical or genetic traces of their existence anywhere.
Seven people from Felicity’s home town vanished the year Felicity left. But she was such a sweet young girl that everybody put it all down to coincidence. She was such a nice girl.

Felicity Scalore, looked out at the setting sun, a fiery red, the colour of warm, liquid blood. In her black-in-black eyes she knew, tonight, there’d be another murder. Tonight she was hungry again. And another section of the future’s history would be wiped out altogether.
“I’ll get you, whoever you are,” She said quietly to the sunset, so her guest could not hear her. “I don’t know your name, but I’ve seen where you live. You are mine.”

Moments later, Felicity’s guest was torn limb from limb by a black creature, the colour and texture of molasses. The being chewing and slurping as the still living body twitched and screamed in agony, watched its own warm carcass devoured by the terrible hunter.
28.
And in The Capital, the Celestial City, another Human fell prey to the vortex and became nothing. The new newsreader had said earlier on that evenings bulletin that the vortex only affected Humans. Nobody else was reported having the same problems. It seemed that some strange procedure was systematically wiping out numbers of seemingly unrelated Humans, the only links being the genealogy: People belonging to the one family often all fell victim to the vortex. It was not determined how this was possible.
One division of the council in the Celestial City was set up to explore the possibilities of these actions. Only when their project leader, a Human, was sucked into himself by the selective vortex, did the project team understand just how the vortex worked- it turned you inside out mathematically but not physically, then applied a dual cosine wave to the relative physical plane of existance, and then the equation divided by zero and an error was generated. Unfortunately, the fabric of whatever the Celestial City was fabricated with couldn’t handle the error and the cause of the error was nullified. In these cases, the cause of the error was the human, and so the vortex was applied to the humans and they simply vanished in a puff of, well, logic.
But as to stopping these strange occurances from happening, nobody had any ideas. One week after this discovery the project team was dissasembled and scattered and the whole idea of looking for the impossible was abandoned.
In other words, nobody really cared what the hell happened to the Humans and their damned Public Transport systems.
29.
As it had been left, white mist still crept under the door. The street had remained, in essence, the same. The little caféteria had re-opened, the clothes shop hadn’t. Room 101, as the withered sign on the door still said, hadn’t been looked into. 
The door opened slowly, allowing white light and a little of the low-set fog to spill out into the dim street. The stony ground sadly reflected the light.
“This is the place, right?” Linda asked. Linda had needed to get away from the irritating Randall for just a while. Since their virtual Universe had crashed, the God Randall had been getting more and more arrogant and obnoxious, ordering Her around, telling Her to shut up all the time. Soon, He would go too far. “It looks unused.”
“Uh huh,” George responded. Across the street, sitting on a bench, the five Humans who reputedly started this whole thing sat, unhappy with the Gods’ decision to send James back to Earth with them after they’ve figured out how to unend the Universe for both the X-Nerds and James without actually unending it and spoiling the stays of the other individuals in Celestial City. “This is it.”
The great white cross-dimensional gap in front of them stood empty. A marble rolled out through the door onto the street. 
“Yo! James!” God rumbled into the whiteness as they all wandered in. Behind them, the door remained open.
Nothing.
“Heigh-ho! Jamie,” Yelled Linda, her high pitch piercing.
After the echo, nothing.
“He wandered off,” Said a sad, lonely voice.
“Mikal! How you doing?” George looked up into a cone of light, smiling.
“Oh, it’s you, George. Fine, fine.” A beam of white smoky light shined on Linda’s face. “Haven’t seen you ’round here before.” A lonely cone of light is a cautious cone of light, remember.
“No, Mikal. I’m Linda, George’s, uh, cousin. I’m from out near Lorna-Major. Just visiting, you know,” Explained the female God. She wandered around aimlessly, trying to kick up the stubborn floor-hogging mist. It didn’t work.
“Oh. Pleased to meet you. So, uh George. What brings you around here? Something up?”
“I found that flaming golden sword again,” God produced the item he’d found on the desert planet and placed it on the floor. It was lost to the fog.
“Oh. I didn’t realise you’d lost it. Is that all?” The voice thundered, not angrily, but thundered because that’s how he spoke. In a room of infinite dimension, the reverb was magnificant. Long ago had considered SPEAKING LIKE THIS, but anyone who did that was just being silly18.
“No,” And George spoke up at the light, telling him of the events and why they needed James.
“Oh. Well, James got bored and wandered off that way-” A shaft of light flickered away from the stack of boxes in the middle of the room, a direction pretty much directly away from the hidden door that the X-Nerds had used to leave the storage dimension. “- just after these five left. He could be anywhere.”
So the two Gods, the X-Nerds and a shaft of light started to move in that direction, walking at a slow speed because Errol said he didn’t feel well.
“Well you did have to go and eat an Equus Caballus, didn’t you!” Karen scolded, and giggled at him. Hanging out with the Gods hadn’t changed her much. She spoke a little more, but what she said was still as nerdy as ever.
The X-Nerds, by some strange coincidence, all thought back over the recent period. They couldn’t really tell how long or short their stay in Celestial City had been. Sure their Casio’s were still going (How?), but they weren’t even half close to telling the time here in the Land Outside Time19, because the sun tended to rise at different times each day, depending on how tired the population of the city were. It was a good system- No matter how long you slept in, you still got up just after dawn. That made getting to work a hell of a lot easier. Not that anyone went to work, these days. Except for Fast Food employees, Accountants and Taxi Drivers.
Simon glanced around at the other four Humans tracking across a bland, empty room the size of a Universe. They were actually walking with two Gods, something nobody else he knew had ever done. Something probably nobody has done. Probably. They were also walking alongside a talking beam of light that shone it way along with them. He was dead positive that nobody he could think of had ever done that before. He felt special.
Errol didn’t feel so special. As a matter of fact, he felt so disgustingly unspecial that just being grossly and colourfully sick all over everybody simply wouldn’t justify this kind of unspecialness. He’d eaten a horse. Eating a horse should not be attempted often- Once is enough. Even for a small horse. Why did he even order a horse? Then, with a suddenness that made his eyes grow wide (well, technically, his eyelids), he realised that he hadn’t ordered a horse for lunch. No wonder the big fearsome ogre at the next table had looked funny at him- It was his horse he had eaten! ‘Well,’ thought Errol. ‘I hope he liked my cheeseburger instead.’
Stuart, Matthew and Karen wandered silently, staring at the fractal floortiles, their mind as blank as the void around them.
“James!” Thundered Mikal, the beam of light. Linda started to wonder how a beam of light could speak. It must be confusing if a God can’t figure it out; then again... Then she thought about Mikal himself. If he was a beam of light, where was he coming from? Where was he going to? If he pointed off into that white distance, where would he go? Where would he come from? And if he did shine down from a source, and the roof was an infinite distance ­­above, could he be higher still? Really, it was all a bit much. What happened when the bulb went?
There was no reply.
Then as the X-Nerds had done so before them in their plight from James, the two Gods that wandered aimlessly in front of them now walked into one of those Rather Invisible Objects. Mikal, having only a bunch of free-flowing photons for a body simply reflected off it.
“Oh, wow!” he said. “You know, I invented these darned invisible doors so they wouldn’t spoil the view. Then I could never find one again because I kept either passing through them or bouncing off them. Open it. See where it goes.”
“You mean you don’t know?” Linda asked him.
“How can I? I’m just a beam of light, aren’t I?”
Linda let it drop.
“He’s been here,” Stuart said, picking up a peanut shaped object. It was a piece of packing foam. He held it up for all to see. Nobody saw it. It was white: The room behind, above, below, in fact all around was the same shade of white also. That wasn’t the reason why nobody saw it. The reason was because nobody looked.
Because George had just opened the door and everybody else was already through it- except Mikal who found it hard to shine through. He gave up trying and decided to stay behind where he was.
And so Stuart went through it too, into a cold, dark room. Now everybody could see that he was holding up a small peanut shaped piece of packing foam. He put it in his pocket.
“Bye!” George said to Mikal. “We’ll chat later.” Mikal agreed and the door closed.
Suddenly, it was very dark. Fairly cold too.
“James?” Hollered somebody. Something thudded. There was another strange sound, like that of a tongueless ox in alot of pain. “Oh, James?”
The lights came on. Matthew stood by a light switch. Simon was lying on the floor clutching his shin and making socially uninviting noises. Karen and Errol were standing behind the two Gods. Stuart was wandering down a hallway, glancing in through the open doorways, shouting the word ‘James’ often.
They all followed him.
In the room at the end of the hall were James’ clothes, but no James. On the floor, near them, a smudged black mark, the texture of molasses. The smudge slowly wobbled.
“Uh. Look at this,” Stuart pointed into a dim tray of  black liquid. A small sign in its side said:
LORNA-MAJOR CLASS C GENETIC RESEARCH LABORATORY
FLUX SAMPLE A3.4  -  DO NOT EAT!
The God George gagged and started to sweat.
30.
A new Time Machine. Brand spanking new and ready for action. It seated six (with room for baggage).
The old Time Machine was built from bits of cornflake boxes, a tube of toothpaste, a big heavy twiddly thing from an old discarded TV set, a can of silver spraypaint and a cyclo-magnetron made from the innards of a microwave oven, and now lay withering into the sand on some desert planet.
The new Time Machine was a state-of-the-art up and coming attraction of polished chrome interiors, ceramic plate external architecture, Potassium-sealed glass and little whirly things all down the side. The chrome interior housed electroplasma chronafluxions (pieces of Time), the ceramic plate architecture protected the craft from the extremes of temperature, the potassium plate glass acted as a smash-proof windscreen and the whirly things made it look particularly snazzy. Looks are important to the self-conscious time bandit.
The interior was finished in a rich-red wool-based carpet (waterproof just in case), black leather seats and matching steering column, and a deep azure wood-grain dash styled by some of Celestial Cities finest craftsmen, and a small but functional bathroom. There was even a small refrigerator stocked with fresh mineral water (Purdey’s Elixir Vitae), Coca-Cola and a tasty little orange-mango mix Linda had whipped up for them.
The entire contraption was the size of a small caravan.
The X-Nerds, geeks, sorry schmucks, and whatever else they may have been, had class.
They also had a job or two to do: Save the Universe; return the Humans to Celestial City; minimise the Flux Scalis into it’s original form and return it to the labs on Lorna-Major’s frozen genetic reasearch moon; Restore the monks at the Lorna-Major Academic Academy to life and start up that wretched chanting again; Return life on Earth back to normal; And get George a can of ruta bega beer from the planet ‘Grook’. Grook’s Beer was disreputed to be the best in the Universe.
“Now I hope you haven’t forgotten anything,” Linda said to the X-Nerds, who sat inside the machine, strapped in, ready to go. “Whose driving?”
The five Humans looked at each other. Nobody had the faintest idea of how to actually drive the machine. Simon told this to Linda, who told George, who got angry at Linda and told Her to tell the X-Nerds how to operate it, which She did.
And, now, ready to go, the machines hatch was sealed, the X-Nerds smiling from behind the slightly yellow glass, Simon could be seen reaching out towards the console. He pushed a big fat red button and a little blue light on the top of the craft started to flash slowly. A grindy-whirring sound whirred grindily (they’d recorded the sound of the TARDIS out of Doctor Who and it was now playing) and in an instant, the five X-Nerds and Time Machine dematerialised.
On the ground where the Time Machine had been only moments before lay a single peanut shaped piece of packing foam.
31.
The question was not whether the glass was half full or the glass was half empty, no, what was in fact in question was a cheeseburger.
The cheeseburger was invented by an Earth-based science-oriented food production laboratory franchise known as MacDonalds. There were such laboratories in almost every burb in the larger cities, and at least one in each town that supported a district population of over ten-thousand people. MacDonalds supported a population whose primary dietary intake approximated carbon-based materials such as polythene and cellophane. Burgers, Shakes and Fries, as their products were called, were what the franchise sold, but making people want to eat three month old pre-cooked tyre rubber and crinkle cut shopping bag plastic was what the franchise specialised in. On other planets, a large man painted in white, red and yellow, with a red nose, red frizzy hair and the name ‘Ronald’ would be soon dismembered, tossed in the microwave for a half hour or so and then eaten. On some planets, magical clowns called ‘Ronald MacDonald’ were delicacies. On Earth, however, where the locals couldn’t appreciate the subtle but sensual flavours of their own species, he was simply a gimmick to get kids to want to drag their mums and dads off to these petrochemical food-engineering labs to eat.
The cheeseburger was the real feat of modern engineering and marketing. Why, people would ask, would people want to eat two bits of sodden bread with a single piece of cheese and manufactured meat (with five parts per hundred actual meat) between them? But people did. A cheeseburger, in some parts of the world, meant just that. Two bits of bread with a piece of cheese between. Very tasty.
In the year the Humans called ‘Nineteen Eighty-Eight’, what the rest of the Universe called ‘oh you know...’,20 some visiting aliens took the idea of this ‘cheeseburger’ and applied it to the rest of the Universe. It caught on, making the two founding aliens very rich. Unfortunately, for those two aliens, all that wealth accumulated on their home planet and the excess weight of money and precious, rare metals shifted the gravitational balance of their planet and it spiralled into a sun, leaving both the surrounding cosmos very poor, and the rest of the universe without the recipe for a Cheeseburger (these aliens can’t be that smart).
On a small, lonely blue planet, the only one in it’s entire galaxy to support semi-intelligent life (including polititians), also the only planet in the entire Universe to broadcast more radio frequencies than an exploding Quasar, in a small but clean building, underneath a major bank, in a large overpopulated city, just over the road from a good place to buy old LP records, behind a large palm tree, along the road from a recent horrific car accident, was a man. Never mind him. Next to him, a woman sat eating a Cheeseburger. She didn’t know it then, but her house was on fire. What she also didn’t know was that a large cubic alien spacecraft had landed by the pool in her back yard and that two small creatures who looked a hell of a lot like little red sofa cushions were sliding around taking sucrose samples from her lawn. And that a cat was dead on the road outside her neighbours house.
She never found out because as she stood to throw the paper that had wrapped her hardly eaten cheeseburger into a nearby rubbish bin, she was struck down by an out-of-control ambulance speeding to the crash scene just up the road.
In a gutter on the small blue planet, in a city somewhere, just across the road from a great little place where you can buy old LP records, lay a body, bleeding, cold, dead. Nearby the shattered, upturned head, along the agonisingly twisted white arm, in the twitching hand, a cheeseburger lay chilling in the cold, dawn air.
It disappeared, dissolving away like people teleporting off the ‘Enteprise’. It even made a similar sound to people teleporting off the ‘Enteprise’. Oddy enough, the alien spacecraft teleporting this particular cheeseburger from its natural habitat, was named the U.S.S. Schmucknozzle. Had it been named the Enterprise, the owners would have been up against a pretty tough law suit.
Nobody ever found out about the missing burger. Nobody ever cared.
At least, not yet.
32.
Something was wrong. Something felt different. Had She done it? Had She finally defeated him? It felt is if-.
No. He had not vanished into himself, as She knew so many others had. He had-. It was hard to describe. It felt as if the one She sought, the one She hated most, had infiltrated Her at Her darkest heart- closed in around her womb, gone beyond it, somehow. If that was possible...
Felicity Scalore snapped at the dying roses that adorned her simple garden. Agitated, she pulled each petal from one bud and left them crumpled apon the ground, small blood-red sores abbraised against the earth. She seemed lost in thought.
Her guest lay dead, just there behind her, his cold corpse slowly becoming transparent, as if it no longer wished to be there and somehow willed itself to vanish. Then it closed in apon itself in a small but furious vortex, and was gone altogether.
“It is done,” She said calmly to herself, but it was almost a question. She did not know how it would feel after he was gone. ‘This is how it must feel’ She thought.
Moments later, Felicity Scalore vanished herself, all that remained, it seemed was a smudge on the ground, a shiny blot of molasses seeping into the ground. Nobody ever found out what happened to the sweet young girl who owned a casino, two yachts and a guest house. Perhaps, it was rumoured around the sleepy little village, she had found out too much. She was such a nice young girl. Pretty, too.
A car was driving up the road, black tinted windows reflecting the yellow sun.
33.
Space: The bit in between everything else.
Space was big. Very big. In fact, it was so big if somebody were to stretch it right out, it would reach all the way across the Universe. And space was full of all sorts of things: Plants, people, planets, suns, stars, gasses, electromagnetic forces, little tiny sattelites sent out by the people of Earth in the sixties; Everything.
And somewhere, sitting (well, they could be moving but it was her to tell) in the middle of nowhere was a little object with five Humans in it. One of them was asleep, one had her feet up in the dashboard while she watched and old Abbot and Costello re-run, and the other three were drinking Coka Cola and having a gentle chat.
“Oh, Mr SpaceTime, here, come on down!” Mathew jabbed, an unbeliever.
“No Listen!” Stuart cut in. Then he took a deep breath and picked up a fork to motion with. “Since we travel faster than light in order to travel through time in this ship, then according to Einstein’s model of gravitation, our ship will feel the reverse effects of gravity on the other side of the speed of light, and therefore, instead of falling into the sun, we will fall away from it, and so when we go backwards through time at speeds way above the speed of light the reverseal of gravitation, magnetism and all those other things becomes inversely proportioned to the relative speed below the speed of light, in what I call the apparent Universe, which we can accept in theory as zero, and/or non-zero, and therefore we went the other way. It would be easy to model mathematically, and with the right knowledge of three-dimensional logarithmic calculus and it’s relative Euclidean path through the fourth dimension of spacetime, to safely and accurately predict and plot a course backwards so that our virtual relative path reflected across a dimensional axis would therefore be inverse to our actual path experienced in three dimensional spacetime.” Stuart smiled his nerdy little smile.
Matthew’s eyes had dried out and he sat staring into the leather of his seat. His bottom lip was quivering as he made a small sound: ‘ba-ba-ba-ba’. Perhaps he didn’t understand the bit about Euclidean geometry.
He took a swig of Coke, swallowed, then said “Do you know how to do that?”
“I was kind of hoping you would.”
“I see,” and his face knotted in concentration.
“I have an idea,” Abbot and Costello was over and Karen turned around. “Lets keep pushing the red button until we get somewhere.”
And that’s what they did. Nobody understood the mathematics behind four-dimensional virtual flight paths and astrophysical gravitational effects, and so they couldn’t actually plan what they were doing, so they did it the same way that everyone else would do it: Just push the button, already.

On a small blue-green planet, on the distant outskirts of a large (size 10-B) spiral galaxy, halfway through one arm, just a few million klicks from a small yellowy-white star, outside a little cave just up from a wide river, somebody sat. She looked out over the swaying grasses, past the ancient thrity metre high trees, through the herd of grazing deer and strange black and white spotted kangaroos at a large white rock. It had just appeared (pop!) like that, out of thin air. Then five people were around it, squatting and they made a small fire. Which set the surrounding grassland on fire. Which burned very fast towards the sitting female. Who got up suddenly in order to get the hell out of there. Who hit her head (ouch!). Who fell over because for her, all had gone suddenly black. Luckily her dog (a wolf actually - named ‘Wolf’) dragged her body back into the cave while the fire passed.
“Woof, woof. Bark” said Wolf, wagging its tail.
The year was Not.
According to one of those fandangled dials that spewed its way excessively across the dash, the year was 9999**mn* and the time was 25:82:01:101. In other words, the X-Nerds had gone so far back in time that the little clock thing that measured the year, date and time had spun out and ticked over backwards. And since the Earth was in a funny orbit still the day had a handful more hours to it. The most accurate clock in all history was Wilbert Borfnorkle’s Highly Successful Digital Chronology Calculalator, which boasted ten hours a day, ten days a week, ten days a month and fourteen point eight one six two three months a year (the fellow was slightly mad). The God George had tried to duplicate this (making minor ajustments as he saw fit, as to not infringe copyright hence pay the royalties), and had installed this slightly-defective prototype unit21 in the the time machine. He could safely call it a write-off22,23.
“Earth; Millions of years ago the earth looked like this,” Simon said. “Like this only bigger.”
“This is Terra,” Matthew commented to nobody in particular. He had taken to calling his home planet by its old name after he saw it someplace. It sounded more... Nerdy.
“According to the digital based geographic survey monitor-” Started Karen professionally.
“The Map,” Stuart butted in, translating to anyone actually paying attention.
“-We are almost exacly in the same spot as our house is back when we started,” Which made everybody think of home and of how everybody was. No, they weren’t thinking of the food in the mess hall, or of willfully submitting to the torture that the Footy Players often asked for (with clenched fists) or any of that. They longed to see their mums and dads and more importantly, to get back into the routine of using a computer. It was all right using the crappy old technology that Celestial City had to offer (like direct nerve injection virtual reality and neutrino cortex splicing), but what The X-Nerds really wanted was to get back to their own time, save the Universe, live happily ever after with lots of money and a good accountant who likes to add up all those nagging numbers for them; and especially to re-learn how to program kernal patching routines on their home computers with a program they called ‘emacs’, their computer teacher called ‘E. Mack’ and fellow students didn’t call anything because when they loaded it all they got was a flashing cursor.
Then there was James.
Could he be destroyed so easily? Was Terra (Earth, remember?), and indeed the Universe, a better place altogether? Had James really gone to pot and turned into a sodden black liquid on the floor?
This was just one of the question nagging the collective mind of the X-Nerds.
Then there was the case of a certain grassfire and a dazed looking woman fumbling along through the grass towards them. Beside her strode a wolf named ‘Wolf’. It had that look.
“Hello,” Simon called out.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Karen hissed, whispering for no apparent reason. “Like here we are a billion years ago talking to a cavewoman and she’s going to understand English. What is this? Doctor Who?”
“Well we had the Doctor Who sound, didn’t we?”
“Oh chaps!” The breezy woman called back in an air headed kind of way. She was blonde too. And had blue eyes. Not that this actually means anything... really.
“Greetings, moonmen!” She hollared, smiling. Then, in a slow, punctuated voice, she added: “My name is Amy and I am a woman. Do you know what a woman is?” Did they know what a woman was? Hubba hubba; Stuart was captivated.
She smiled again, coming closer. It was the smile of an airheaded girl who appeared to have been drinking a foul potion (at least an over-proof liquor, double shot). Or cough mix. Or herbal tea.
The X-Nerds played dumb. Struck dumb their minds played over with the possibilities.
“Amy. Ayy-mee,” She said pointing to her chest. The motion was recognised.
“Stuart, Karen, Matthew, Errol,” Simon said pointing; quickly. “I’m Simon. Sorry to bother, but we needed a good stretch. I suppose we’ll be-” Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.
And Amy took her turn at the whole mouth-open-boggle-eyes routine. The wolf sat calmly by her side, staring at the strangers with eyes that said ‘I love you. D’oh. Nothin’ in my head. Lovey-lovey-love you’ and a rolling wet tounge that literally dripped spittle every time the dog-breath rasped out.
At least, thought Amy, they could have done something imaginative like said ‘Take me to your leader’ or pointed a ray gun at her and frizzled all her clothes off so’s she’d be naked and have to turn and run away very embarrased. Like on TV24. These people were no fun at all.
Matthew had considered saying ‘Take me to your leader’ and pointing a ray gun, but he thought she wouldn’t understand what the hell he was on about.
Out and about, Karen had spotted a rhinocerous-looking creature except one or two with more sharp ends than normal (she counted seven). It looked like a really big spiny lizard but ran faster. She considered leaving. Flat out.
Inside the alien spacecraft though, she was comforted by the soft carpet and carbonated smell of spilt Coca Cola. Anyway, that was before the oversize rhino hit the spacecraft. Well, she got out fast too, but stopped shortly because an unconcious rhino lay in her path. IT STUNK.
“Well,” Stuart was absolutely engorged with interest about the stunned ancestor of human history, and in the moments between boggle-eyed looks at each other, had been chatting her up quite thoroughly. When he stopped to see the other three waiting for him, he rather piteously added “We’d better be going. Nice to have met you and all and sorry we can’t stay for tea-”
“Ug,” She blurted. It was a sound that in the old language (the one before they invented language) meant ‘Please stay, I have a shoulder in the oven and the folks are coming over this evening and boy are you a cutie. Perhaps later we can snuggle up close and see what transpires...’. Now you know why some people think English is an intrinsically convoluted and linguistically overburdened language.
“No, sorry. Can’t stay. Unghk-g,” Stuart replied, being yanked off his feet by Matthew, adding the only portion of cavespeak he knew (but never fully understood) as they stuffed him into the timecraft. It actually meant ‘Did you know a giant hamster actually created the universe and he was made of Swiss Cheese?’. As a matter of fact, this statement was actually the conception of the idea of God, and elsewhere in the Universe, due to the sudden belief in it (the word makes the object25) a Giant Hamster appeared, the same Giant Hamster that allegedly became the Father of the Gods. Of course, had he said ‘Unghk-h’ He’d have explained all the reasons why his friends were dragging him off, and that maybe after this was all over-...’.
Amy looked displeased. She thought the universe had been created by a implosion of parallel uni-dimensional universes centered on an ethreal second physical dimension non-inverting anti-energy emitting white singularity-hole that ruptured the time-space continuum. But she kind of liked this smallish, roundish funny speaking human - he was... cute, and so took his word. Just before they left, Stuart popped out again to say toodle-loo properly.
It was a drawn out goodbye. The other four X-Nerds sat watching, wating (they had the time) as the two other people outside chatted, said their farewells. Stuart couldn’t promise he’d be back. Obviously. That’d probably upset Time and History somewhat. Amy didn’t want him to go (of course- she got a bit lonely when all she had to talk to was a wolf, her parents and lots of grass). Amy wanted to kiss goodbye but Stuart didn’t know how; that he’d never kissed before-
Amy showed him, though. Hard. Long. Vigourously. Stuart tried to turn red, but be was blushing too much for it to work.
He got in, winked at Karen, then waved to the earthling. Amy waved back. The wolf named Wolf barked once and then Errol pushed the red button.
Nothing happened. A small dial registered that something (possibly them, possibly something altogether different) had moved through time though.
He pushed it again.
Everything changed.
“Wow!” He said. Everybody was listening because he was the only one speaking. They had visited so many planets and galaxies that it was just all old-hat to them now. And Errol, whose turn it was to do the honours (push the button) had no intention of shutting up at any stage. “Like, it must have been one of those chaotic proabilities again. Like, we just chanced upon traveversing so little through space-time that we virtually stayed in the same place.”
Neat. But it had only lasted a second or two. Stuart was looking out at the blonde-haired blue-eyed girl when they vanished through time. An image of her illustrious body flicked in his eyelids for a tenth of a second, then was gone.
34.
James wasn’t happy. He’d just accidently slipped on a peice of leather-based carpet (what was it doing here anyway?) and spilt a barrel of molasses on his clothes. He had been forced to take them off (all but his underwear, for sake of decency) and discard the remains in the dark, cold storeroom. Luckily he had discovered an old locker and one of the bronze storage cabinets had contained, of all things, a brown hessian robe made from an old potato sack. It was itchy but helped keep him warm. Just.
There were voices, he’d heard them earlier. He had tried to go back, but after that ‘accident’ with the rope-and-chain bridge over an abyssmic canal in which he absently cut through one of the bearing beams of the bridge with an oxyacetalene torch and utterly destroyed it, there was no turning back.
There was a light at the end of a tunnel. It was moving towards James at horrific speed. Like a bullet train, really. With distaste in his mouth, he realised that he had fallen into a deep hole and was quite quickly approaching the
But it didn’t hurt. He was actually standing upright (now how did that happen?) and the tunnel stretched out behind him, a horizontal gash in a rockface. As the light dimmed away, he picked out shapes, colours, smells. He stood in front of a fire, a small fire that churned out alot of smoke. The cave was set back into a rocky outcrop in the middle of a grassland. The grass swayed madly as it burned.
Then he saw a large spiny looking rhinocerous charging another object. Its dim outline suggested a vehicle of some kind- a car, perhaps, one of those Mazda 121 bubblemobiles?
People. Six people and a little thing he couldn’t see that waved through the grass. Four of them moved in behind the dull vehicle-object. Two remained outside. Then one moved off to where the others had gone. With sick revulsion, he recognised that waddling figure. He recalled the other four. They seemed to be familiar too.
The Head Nerd watched as the X-Nerds vanished, the huge Mazda-like shape popping out of existance. He dropped a single white peanut-shaped piece of packing foam in the cave behind him. His pockets seemed to be full of them.
A few moments later he bore the terrible brunt of a woman come home to find her house being invaded by an ugly, stinking boy, wearing a potato sack over his underwear, right when that womans parents are showing up too. Life could be so cruel sometimes.
From through the sooty grass... “Amy! Who’s the boyfriend...”
35.
“It appears to be a small, roundish lifeform, but our deep space tests have proved that if it is actually alive, then it can somehow live in airless outer space,” The voice came from an empty sofa. Or was it empty? Three small red cushions lay on the red velvet. On a nearby coffee table, amongst the coffee mug rings and newspapers, lay a cheeseburger.
“Can you eat it?” One of the cushions said.
“No. How do expect to eat that? It’s... It’s...” One other cushion was lost for words. “Well. Of course we can’t eat it. We’re cusions, for gods sake!”
“Oh. Let’s sell it then! We’ll make other people eat it.”
“Great idea!”
And throughout the Universe, that horrific day became known as ‘The Day of the Red Velvet Cushions’.26
36.
Felicity Scalore’s essence lay back on the floor, quivering. Once again she was a blob of molasses- dark and unmotivating. She knew she had failed. She knew she would have to start again. Dang it.
She knew that this time she would have to succeed or else be utterly destroyed. The black in black jelly turned a shade red.
Her single exploded eye stared vacantly up at the ceiling, an image reflecting from where no image was. It looked exactly like the Head Nerd, James.
With a slight annoyance to the surrounding air, a ‘smooshe’ sound, and a faint tingle of sparks it vanished. In it’s place, a large structure, glass and ceramic with little whirly things down the side. Suddenly everything was very silent.
37.
In another far off dimension, people ran in fear from giant tidal waves. They ran through the rain, ran through the showers of lightning that fell from the white-grey sky, ran from the greatness of water swelling above and behind them. On the other side of the planet, a butterfly landed gently on a green leaf but was shortly squashed into a sickly yellow ooze when a blob of utter black materialised just above it and felt the effects of gravity once more. Slowly, the butterfly was absorbed into the blackness. The blackness felt the shape, responded, started to change. This time, it would be more subtle still, it thought. So cross-dimensionally subtle.
In a parked car nearby, still open to the same page, a book lay displaying a bunch of words to an uncaring ceiling. Amongst them, though, the words ‘The Butterfly Effect’ seemed to eminate a sense of pure dread, a sense that small change here made a large change there.
The newly formed pure black butterfly took off, swirling the air above and beneath its shiny wings.
38.
“Mr God?” came that small voice out of George’s intercom. “I’ve got those top secret reuslts you ordered on the X-Nerd Files.”
George was busy, though, standing on a bright orange chair searching a cupboard for his only (dubbed) video of Spaceballs. It was his favourite movie, especially those scenes of Planet Spaceball showing the golfball-like buildings.
“Mr God? Are you there?” interrupted the voice again.
“Yes, yes. Coming. Just a moment,” George was in many ways like the Human race he supposedly invented: He’d talk to the phone or, as the case may be, intercom, fully knowing that to make it work, you had to push a little button. Therefore talking to an inanimate object incapable of listening, or even if so incapable of understanding, without pushing the button, or even after doing so, was an exercise in futility.
“Mr God, I know you’re there.” interjected the voice. “If you don’t want me anymore, then just say so. I’m out here working hard for you, Mr God, rushing about getting documents and calling people in and you just can’t imagine what’s that’s doing to my lining. Well, I may as well just lie aimlessly on my couch at home, you know, waiting ’till my stuffing falls out-”
“Send it in,” George said bluntly, cutting her off, finger lifting from the button. She got like this sometimes.
The little nasal voice smiled, which under normal circumstances would have been hard to achieve, but things worked different around God, and everything was allright again. “Right away, Mr God.”
A moment later, God was pondering what he saw. He nodded once and said things like ‘Yes,’ and ‘Uh huh,’ often, at which point he would start nodding again. His eyes darted back and forth across the page.
“What?” he suddenly exploded. Sally was still in the room, gleefully watching George reading the papers, and turned a mite pink when he did this. Her first encounter with God’s sudden mood swings and quaking single-word sentances had made her stuffing run cold. But it was a good, steady job. She was guarenteed a nice lounge suite to live on, plenty of opportunities to meet people, though some creatures did have the discourtesy to sit on her on occasion. Still, when George went off like he’d just done, her normally rosy red appearance did lose a little of its hue.
At that point in time Sally was thinking of a nice holiday, perhaps even a long, relaxing dry clean. Maybe she go the whole zipper and treat herself to a restuff in one of those posh Pillow Houses. She had the money - a credit line as big as God’s ego, but it wasn’t that. It was, well, George had seemed a little stressed since his Universe ended. Perhaps she’d go after things settled down a bit. She wasn’t expecting what was about to occur.
“Oh my, oh my o my o my. Oh my o me o my,” God was, well, flustered and he let the papers fall to the desk.
“Sally,” he instructed. “Somehow, we seem to have developed a problem. Can we get in touch with the X-Nerds? This is important.”
“I’ll get right on it, Mr God,” Sally replied, sliding out the door. She was suddenly worried. She hadn’t seen God go off like this before. Something was definately wrong and more than wrong. God would never be this worried about anything, unless it was-.
Sally screamed; a muffled sound, realising the truth. Quicker than a bad cheque, she phoned up Linda and asked the God to meet her at a nearby restaraunt. Then, she grabbed her platignum ball-point pen and slid vigorously out the door and into the night.
39.
“What the hey-?” Stuart called out. He’d just discovered that the time machine had a glove compartment and so had opened it. Inside, there was the usual assortment of scrap papers, warped casettes, cigarette lighters with no gas, windscreen cleaners and an instruction manual for the time vehicle. Promptly, he fell into reading it. He occasionally nodded and mumbled to himself and nobody took really that much notice of him. 
Thus it was for the next few minutes. Everybody was silent except Stuart, who continued to mumble and nod.
Karen look in the fridge for something cool to drink. Linda’s orange-mango juice had run out.
Up the front there was a pile of scrap papers. Amongst them lay an unused postcard from the Taj Mahal.
“Wow!” Stuart dropped the book and flung Simon out of the driving seat.
“Now,” he shouted. “We’ve gotta choice here. Either I push this red button and we travel through time, like normal, or I push this blue button-” he flicked up a panel. In a little groove there was nestled an assortment of buttons and dials. “-and we can travel no only through Time and Space but cross dimensionally through parallel universes!”
He was busting to try it.
The others stared at him, then looked at the newfound buttons. There was another red one, a blue one, a range of yellow toggle-style switches and a little surface-mount green one flush with the end of the groove. Then, all eyes turned back to Stuart. Somewhere, a little red LED started to flash urgently.

Space hung before them. It was like normal space - eight planets revolving around a sun, each with one or two moons, none carrying any detectable lifeforms whatsoever. There were far off nebulae, little red lights, a galaxy or two, some space junk that happened to look alot like the Voyager spacecraft and, in a bizarre but surely interesting twist of fate, an uprooted oak tree wafting past. And there was a creamic and chrome cross-dimensional-space/time vehicle twisting aimless though the dark ether.
There was also that supernova, too.
“It seems we have a choice, here,” Matthew stated.
“Hmmm,” drolled Simon, looking at the white ball of light hurtling though the absence of matter outside.
Karen, like Errol, was asleep on one of the chairs. Stuart still sat up front. He was reading the Owners Manual.
“Hmmm?” asked Matthew, a little stunned for some reason.
“Hmmm,” came the reply again.
“Wait.” It was Stuart who’d said that, and he now looked back at the them. “If we wait until the energy from that nova gets to us then translate that energy into energy we can use to make a jump, then we can probably go alot further, or something.”
“Hmmm,” said the other two together. They didn’t need to go a little further. What they needed was to go someplace predictable; to have some way of steering the vehicle through space, time and other dimensions.
“Well,” went Stuart. “If we do that, we may have more possibility of steering us to where we want to go.”
There must be some logic in that, somewhere.
“Well,” went Stuart again. “We may end up visiting every possible point in every possible universe at every possible time possible. Anyway, the probability of us actually getting back to our own dimension to the exact right space/time coordinates, when none of the factors are known and all other relative factors are presumed, therefore taken to be either zero or infinite, depending on the first factors, are virtually zero. Probably even less.”
Now, if there wasn’t any logic in that, he would just give up.
The other two looked blankly at him. They might as well have been thinking about cheeseburgers.
“Well,” Stuart started again. “When we-”
Karen woke up and said “Fish.” Then she went back to sleep.
The interruption caused Stuart to completely forget what he was about to say.
“I think I’d like a cheeseburger,” said Matthew.
Simon said “Hmmm,” and went back to looking at the supernova.

Space and everything it contained still hung there like insects suspended in jelly. Still, the tiny spaceship twisted through boring old three-dimensional space, whilst rushing towards it at a very fast speed came a huge white light: The photonic plasma of a supernova. As the sheet of white energy touched the spacecraft, the tiny vessel seemed to dissapear and yet remain in the same spot all at once. Then, clearly, two vessels could be seen. One of those vessels dissapeared and yet an infinity of the clever little time machines could be seen, streching off into the distance. The effect was the same as two mirrors positioned opposite to each other, forever reflecting rays of light back and forth, multiplying the image by itself geometrically.
Then the light was gone, passed into the blackness, and only one of the multitude of tiny, insect like ships remained.
40.
‘GRAND OPENING’ stated the sign. It didn’t say of what. It, like all big signs, was etched firmly into the ground of a nearby planet, a multicoloured mountain range visible from the nearby spaceway. Just ahead, on a reasonably sized asteroid, a multitude of space-fareing vehicles were parked.
Stuart drove: he knew how. He was just shouting complaints at other drivers, fully knowing that in Space, nobody hears you scream. Somehow, though, screaming at the other drivers always made him feel better. If this traffic continued, he was of the mind to jump out at the next asteroid belt and shove a comet up their hyperdrives.
The five X-Nerds sat gripping their seats as the time machine whipped through the cosmos along the galactic superhighway, a toll-based space freeway linking one side of the Milky Way galaxy with the other, where insane speeds could be reached and the rules of driving along it had been breached so often that nobody even bothered policing them anymore. Dead planets either side had been carved up for advertising or the occasional Kwik-Stop, reknowned to be the best place to stop ever (also the slowest). Some people had said that it was so good that if you didn’t leave immediately, then you’d be there forever just hanging around basking in the goodness of the place. Indeed, some Kwik-Stops had become planetry graveyards of abandoned space cruisers and freighters.
The Kwik-Stop franchise had spread all throughout the galaxy very quickly and soon had outgrown the need for competition to survive and monopolised the market. It was reputed, however, that one new little franchise soon to be opened on a galactic tollway in an undesignated galaxy was set to be the ruin of the Universes only one-stop shop.
Karen said she needed to go to the loo (and the one in the spacecraft was out of paper) and so Stuart, kind as ever, decided to stop at the next avaliable facility. He’d just passed a planet that said ‘GRAND OPENING’ in a tall, proud snow-capped sans-serif mountain range and so pulled to the exit lane and slowed down.
When he’d passed through the airlock of the franchise’s asteroid, he noticed immediately that this was no Kwik-Stop. The plastic-looking play areas and Pizza-Hut style architecture of the place, put together with the gay yellow, red and brown paintwork and plate-glass windows suggested something a little more sinister.
There was of course the tall Golden Arches forming a large ‘M’ shape, and underneath, the embossed image of a red cushion beatifically smiling it’s bennediction to all. The car-park was almost full but Stuart eventually found a spot - on top of a large pink convertible with the initails ‘E.P’ embezled in gold all up the side. It sat there a moment, as if in deep thought.
What in Gods name was a MacDonalds franchise doing here in deep outer space?
The X-Nerds were about to learn the whole, sinister truth.
Karen said that they could do this after she’d been to the loo.
41.
The butterfly was no ordinary butterfly. Apart from being very black, rather big and simply the largest lump of concentrated evil in that particular Universe, it had the capability to destroy all.
The butterfly rose from a flower, lifting suddenly on a strange air current. It flew higher and higher until it was at the same level as the surrounding trees. Far away, beyond a parked vehicle, through the bushes and undergrowth, a Human man with a backpack wandered along an old path. He was walking away from the giant black butterfly.
The Butterfly dipped and dived, riding on the air currents like it were an integral part of them. Then, as if it were a hawk that had spotted a slow hare below, it dived, disrupting the eddies of the surrounding air.
Just by gaily flipping through the flowers, disturbing the air currents ever so slightly, she was changing the weather patterns ever so slightly. The small change affected other parts of the weather which forced a Lorenz effector of wheather changes; changing one thing slightly, another alot. This in turn called up storms and strange tidal occurences where normally there would be none. Technically, this was termed The Butterfly Effect, though, strange enough, on many planets in many Universes, the butterfly still flew gaily from plant to plant; the local inhabitants not bothering to destroy this perpertrator of destruction.
Why had God invented the butterfly if it would only cause mass flooding and hailstorms? Logically, and according to The Butterfly Effect, to accurately create a weather prediction program, one must get rid of all the butterflies. Still, it was strange why nobody had thought of this.
The Flux Scalis butterfly was no ordinary butterfly for other reasons, too. Due to her strange makeup (1 part concentrated evil to 1 part molasses), her Butterfly Effect no only affected her present surroundings, but caused the Butterfly Fluxions (virtual Butterflies) to ripple out into any nearby dimensions and cause strange physical effects there too. These effects would cause other Butterfly Effects and the problem would double. Quadruple. Octaple.
Now this is subtle, she thought.
42.
James stood on a knoll overlooking a vast, prehistoric valley. He was yelling quite loud, but the wind was against him and it was no good. 
He was yelling anyway because he was plain stupid.
He could see two people running through the long grass. They apeared to be older than thirty and grossly unshaven - about the average of your average Art teacher. James likes Art class. He got to show his stuff (author’s note: stuff is in singular form) in all sorts of mediums- paint, crayon, paper maché, reconstituted meat by-products.
Anyway, the people he could see were a long way away from him and he knew they did not see him (they were running in the same direction as he was looking). Strange, though, he thought to himself, it seemed as if they were chasing an old Chesterfield Sofa across the uncounted miles of the valley. One of them appeared to be carrying a bag James once saw on a documentary about Athens Airport.
He never got to see what happened because a big branch from the tree he was standing under fell and he was knocked down by its green mass.

Half a day later, he wandered that same valley. He’d seen a bunch of horses stampede by, chased by a somewhat hungry looking lion. He’d left Amy when she clubbed him repeatedly with her mothers withered walking stick. Her mother, who happened to be popping round for tea when James showed up, had almost instantly seen that he wasn’t wanted and joined the chase. Amy’s father would have too, but the Cricket scores were on the TV and ‘...well, those two will call if they need me...’.
James was kicking a blue rubber beachball along the ground. He’d found alot of stuff scattered across the grassland - bits of luggage (he’d changed clothes: he now wore a safari suit he’d picked out of a large, brown suitcase whose airline label said ‘Athens’), the beachball he now kicked, a thong (only one) and a large unopened bag of Jelly Babies. He’d opened these and was now munching on them. They were the nice ones, covered in that white powdery sugar.
It hadn’t really occured to him yet that he was walking around on prehistoric Earth, eating and kicking things that logically couldn’t have been there. He couldn’t yet even grasp the basics of chance repositioning of space/time anomalies, which was why the objects were when and where they were. He hadn’t clicked to this fact even when he saw the TV set in Amy’s cave, or that she even lived in a cave rather than a house. He’d picked up the bit about her dog (or Wolf, actually) named Wolf, but lots of people had them for a pet and so this didn’t worry him.
What did in fact worry him was the impression that he wasn’t going anywhere. Sure, he was shambling along in open grasslands, but he didn’t have a destination in mind. He remembered the incident the previous day, or one of the incidents, in any case, where he saw the X-Nerds getting into a large caravan and just dissapearing. He started to wonder that they didn’t like him and had decided to leave him stranded on this strange, alien planet.
Then that hit him. Alien planet... Alien planet... There was something about those words that made him shudder. He popped a green Jelly Baby in his mouth and wondered purposefully about his adventures. Questions filled his mind; a new experience.
How did he get here? What was his purpose in life and how should he fulfil this purpose? Who was the girl in the cave? Did the X-Nerds really like him or was it really a façade above deeper, inner feelings or contempt? If you had three oranges and you took two, what would be left?
He kicked the ball very hard when the answers started to resolve. It bounced on a tuft of grass and lay smiling wanly in the gentle sun. Just to be sure of himself, he stuffed the remaining handful of Jelly Babies, three red ones, an orange one and a greenish-yellow one, in his mouth, chewed, swallowed and sat down to think it through.
He came to the same conclusion.
The conclusion was this: His life wasn’t worth the paper it was written on: The X-Nerds hated the heck out of him- despised him utterly; Amy was just some girl who lived with her dog in a cave; He probably should do something purposeful with himself- seek a higher enlightenment27, rid the universe of all evil- that kind of thing; and Two (his maths wasn’t very good28).
He then decided to leave this planet and find something interesting to do. Before wondering how to do this, he first had to decide which path to follow- personal enlightenment or super hero avenger person. He went with the second, not knowing a thing about enlightenment or even what the heck it meant.
“Now,” he thought aloud, at the blue ball lying in the grass. “How do I get of this planet?”
Then suddenly, a spaceship landed. It was a pink convertible cruiser, sleek and expensive-looking, and James could hear a familiar, solemn tune from inside. It had the initials ‘E.P.’ written in gold up the side. A smiling face greeted James.
43.
One the menu were cheeseburgers, shakes and sundaes (but no fries). This wasn’t MacDonalds, but very much similar. It was actually MacCushions, a new, exciting place to eat (at least to anybody not from Earth) specialising in new high technology foodstuffs so inedible that one burger ususally lasted for weeks (even in a glove compartment); it was for this reason that cheeseburgers had become so popular throughout the galaxy. This and the fact that MacCushions only sold cheeseburgers. Nobody had told them about Quarters or Fillet-O-Fish or any of the other food proof products sold by their twisted step-sister company MacDonalds. The cheeseburger sold at the MacCushions little enteprise was a lovingly recreated model of the origional cheeseburger, now locked safely away in a vault a nondescript asteroid nearby. When sold, the cheeseburger had that self-same underside thumb-print of the origional, almost exactly across from the huge bite mark. Also, red sauce dribled down the left hand side (looking towards the bite) even before the burger was heated. After primary cooking, the burgers were stored ouside in deep space so no bacteria formed and destroyed the aroma,29 then when requested, heated until grossly soggy in a conventional oven (two-fifty for one-thirty in the six-fifty-six in MacSpeak).
And talk about popular. Why anybody would want to eat them is one of the Great Seven Mysteries.30
The X-Nerds sat glumly at one table, surrounded by all sorts of people- alien, humanoid, mechanoid, android, Anoid31, and an overall general amalgam of societies, cultures and races. Music was playing behind the grey noise of two hundred voices speaking a hundred languages- it was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, by Elvis Preseley.

“He told me you’d be here,” A hardened female voice was talking to the X-Nerds. They watched the sound of the voice momentarily then followed its path back up to a well rounded cheery looking Human. She had a smiling face, and this fact probably accounted for the cheery look. It was a look of kindness: Green glowing eyes, dark lipstick, shadow on the eyes, hair the colour of an orange cat on wet straw. The voice itself was accented towards Irish, though what an Irish woman was doing eating cloned MacDonalds burgers thirteen thousand light years from home was anybody’s guess. Maybe she got lost on the way home from the Local.
Since none of the X-Nerds said anything (it was a statement: You don’t reply to statements), the Irish woman said “That he did. I be Ezme Pearson and I own that pink convertible you so parked your truck on.”
Errol was smiling, his teeth showing. Simon was silent. Stuart was polishing off a sundae (special - no toppings). Karen and Matthew just were sitting there, filling up the picture.
“It is no matter, though,” She went on. “I won’t be leaving as soon as the five of yer be leaving.”
Simon asked the who question.
Ezme told them about James.
The other were shocked.
Simon asked about his present location.
Ezme replied, expressing that whilst he was a seemingly nice young fellow and had promising character traits, she had to leave him on a nearby planet because he talked too much, and to be seen with someone wearing a safari suit was not done.32
The others were by this time completely astounded and making bubbling noises with their lips.
Simon asked which planet but Ezme didn’t know.
“Thankyou, Miss Pearson,” Errol’s imbecielic voice carried after her as she ducked off into the crowd.
Simon asked what they should do next.
“First of all, I think you should stop doing that,” Stuart said, slurping up the last drops of creamy liquid ice from the bottom of his sundae container.
Simon questioned as to what he was talking about.
“That!” Stuart said, annoyed.
“What?” Simon asked again, completely misunderstanding the entire point of the conversation.
“Oh never mind,” Stuart said as flatly as he could manage.
Simon didn’t say anything.
“Just shut up, hey?” Stuart said.
There was a pause.
This was followed by another.
Soon, everybody in the room was pausing, looking around at everybody else pausing and wondering why everybody else was looking around at everyone, pausing. Somebody looked out the door but nobody was stealing any of the vehicles outside. There wasn’t a freak meteor shower. In fact, not much at all was going on. Except everybody was pausing at each other.
So everybody in the room shrugged and started talking again and the pause was over.
“So,” Karen ventured.
“So?” Simon asked.
“Look, will you bloody well stop it? All I- We want to know is where do we go from here? What do we do? You’re Head X-Nerd,” Karen pointed an accusing finger at Simon. “What now?”
Simon looked at the finger. It hung there at the end of Karen’s arm, pointing right into his face. It was a small finger, he noticed. It was unmarked, there were no scars or warts on it. In fact, it was a rather nice finger. He looked back along the arm, pausing only to see the scar below the elbow. For some reason, more than half the people he knew had a scar just below the elbow. He thought it must be something to do with Genetics. Then he looked back into Karen’s brown eyes. They were hard, accusing. Simons were soft, baffled. These two sets of eyes darted back and forth, relaying slight subconscious messages, probing, sensing things. Simon didn’t notice Karens arm had dropped from its menacing position. They continued to gaze into each other eyes.
Seconds passed.
Then from out of nowhere a Gas repairman fell onto their table, breaking the visual conversation out of its knot of tangled expressions.
All ten eyes looked up at the hole in the cieling. There were lots of wires and pipes up there. Gas was pouring out of one half-inch tube. After approximately twelve and a half seconds, they moved as one, back outside, into their time machine and without saying a word were back onto the tollway within minutes.
44.
James grimaced as the five young people approached. A pleasant looking spacecraft had only moments before descended from the sky and touched down a dozen or so metres away, scorching the grass. It sat there cooling quickly before the door opened.
The X-Nerds stared out across the fire at James. James stared back at them.
It was dark- the sun had gone down and the light amplification unit inside the time machine, the other red button on the dash, had been able to easily pinpoint the fire on the unpopulated advertising planet- right in the middle of an ‘O’ made of mountains.
“Hello, James,” Matthew led, apphrehensive.
“Hello, Matthew,” James followed, his eyes narrow.
The other X-Nerds watched in grim anticipation. For some reason, Karen stood next to and half behind Simon. Matthew had spoken first. He could speak for them now. Simon felt that he did not have to speak for them all the time, and, rightfully, shouldn’t even if he did. Errol sat down on a nearby log, then decided that it was wet and so stood again.
James didn’t appear to be the same, said a shared thought amongst the X-Nerds. He appeared, well, more self-conscious, more purposeful, perhaps once again ambitious. Still, he was wearing a Safari Suit. How can you take somebody seriously if they will wear a Safari suit?33
The X-Nerds, with exception to Karen, who stood almost shyly behind Simon, still appeared a little gang of people, disjointed, travelling with purpose yet without apparent destination, friends just with friends for no other reason.
Breaking the thoughtful, self critical silence came the sound of a two-way radio cackling. Matthew shot a glance at James who was shooting a stare back at him, and went off to see what it was.
The fire was warm.
Matthew was away for a long time. When he came back he looked a little less sure of himself and apparently quite anxious and purposeful. He strode up to the fire, basked in it’s reddish heat for no longer than a moment, then told them what had happened.
“That was George,” He started cleanly. “Since when did we have a two-way radio tuned in to the end of the Universe?”
“Since when did we have a two-way radio?” Stuart asked, looking into the fire.
“Well we have one now. It was in the glove box,” Matthew obviously wanted to tell them about what God had told him, but Stuart cut him off.
“I was beginning to suspect something odd about that glove box. It seems to fit more in it than it can fit.”
“So? All glove boxes have more in them than they can fit. That’s what owning a car, or in this case, a spaceship, is all about.” Simon pointed out.
“What? You buy a car because it has a glovebox?”
“Yeah. Why not? Why would you want a car anyway when there’s public transport?” Errol broke in.
Matthew did not take part in the resulting vocal feud. He instead started to tell anyone listening about what George had told him. “It seems we have a little problem on our hands.”
He paused here, expecting someone to make a smart comment. Nobody did. Karen turned about to warm her back, and black and orange shadows danced over the surrounding panorama.
He continued. “Did you know that just outside the Universe there are two worlds? One of them is the Lorna Minor World Design Institute, where they make planets like this one - advertising and so on. The other is the Lorna Major Academic Academy, where monks go to learn and do whatever monks do.”
James coughed, a strange sound for an alien world devoid of any animal life. They all shook their heads, not wanting to say ‘no’. It wasn’t really the sort of question you said ‘no’ to anyhow. It wasn’t really a question, come to that.
“Also, these monks sing and chant. All monks should sing and chant,” He said this with a slight smile, the only one amongst all six people. Within a negative second, the mood change was gone and he went on talking. “The problem is, this particular chant apparently keeps the balance between order and chaos within all the universes and any other dimensions.”
This caused a stir, but only because each of them held different views on the why’s and wherefores of the politics of order/chaos based systems, as opposed to ‘clockwork’ systems, where there was only one system and the perception of that system was relative to the viewer and therefore all realities became entirely subjective.
“Yeah, anyway. This chant got stopped accidently because Randall and Linda’s Virtual Universe Computer accidently crashed and, I’m not really sure how, but all the monks just up and died.”
Silence only broken by breathing.
“What this means is somewhere in one of the Universes, there is a discontinuity of order and chaos has become the overruling factor. Ususally, George says, the chaos takes the form of black molasses, an object described by the now deceased monks as Flux Scalis. It appears that there was some in the room we discovered with Mikal- the one next to the place with the packing foam.”
Magically, James drew a small peice of white foam from his pocket. It was peanut shaped and it shrivelled quickly when he dropped it into the fire.
“The problem lies-”
“Hang on a bit, can you?” Simon asked Matthew, holding up an arm. He turned from the fire, walked forward and was soon lost from view into the inky black of night.
A minute passed. The fire crackled and James put another branch on. Simon came back into view and flexed his knees at the fire.
“That’s better,” he said, by way of explanation, then waited for Matthew to continue.
“Okay. Where was I? Oh, yes. The problem lies with the flux itself. It appears that all sorts of Human beings have mysteriously vanished from the Celestial City- hundreds of them, all genetically related. This seems to mean, to me anyhow, that this Flux thing has at some stage been getting rid of Humans, sometime before the Universe ended, therefore creating a reality where those humans did not exist outside time, and therefore they dissapeared. Like on ‘Back to the Future’.
“Anyway, more to the point, the Gods report that the Flux has dissapeared from one universe and They fear that it may have somehow entered another universe. Since They cannot detect amounts of the stuff, only that it exists. To go back and destroy it would mean that George and the other Gods would have to unend the universes and that would make everybody in the Celestial City rather unhappy. He instructed us to find it and destroy it.”
James was looking a little unsure of himself. “Gods? I thought there was only one. And where’s the Celestial City? What’s the Celestial City?”
Matthew looked thoughtfully at James. He didn’t know, did he? He couldn’t know, could he. Then, he looked at Simon suggestively. Simon shrugged and Matthew went into details about the Celestial City and all the Gods and their off-colour golf suits and the teeming life in the celestial city. The fire had burned low by the time he’d finished.

It was very late. The white stars blazed unfamiliar patterns above the six of them. It really wasn’t that cold; the fire kept them warm and although they could have slept once more inside the time machine, it got stuffy in there and there was no real reason to. Here was a nice planet, nice real air to breathe, and a warm fire to sit around.
Stuart was asleep, curled up in a little ball with his head against a tuft of grass. Matthew had fetched two pillows from the spaceship and he and Errol were using them. James had fallen asleep with his head between his knees and arms around his shins. Simon and Karen sat together, backs to the same tree, staring up at the sky, memorising the star formations and making up names for new constellations.
“Look, there’s Borricarius,” Karen whispered sleepily but with gentle mirth. She was pointing up, but in no particular direction. Simon’s eyes graced her arm and index finger once again and then stared up into the open sky. It had rained before they touched down, but the rain had been light. Still, the air was clear and the stars twinkled only slightly. He could see a group of quite bright stars in the general direction to Karen’s aim.
After a while, Karen said “It’s Borric the computer Repair Man, fixing a broken monitor cable with a flathead screwdriver.”
There were five stars there. Yep, that’s obscure enough.
By the time Simon had pointed out another constellation and thought up a good name, Karen was asleep. Simon got up, threw some more wood on the fire and then sat back down at the tree and slowly dozed off, smiling for no apparent reason.
45.
In a very different, yet strikinlgy similar parallel dimension, a duplicate copy of the universe ever so wrongly termed ‘reality’, the X-Nerds had chosen not to stop at the Grand Opening of the newest MacCushions franchise. In fact, they never knew that MacCushions even existed, and therefore James was left stranded on the advertising planet, where it must be presumed that he later died, the body never actually found. A small piece of that white peanut shaped packing foam lay forgotton on the dry, lifeless ground.
Then one day, in that similar yet unfathomably different Time, the X-Nerds spotted a nice looking planet, full of life. They decided to drop in and started looking for an unpopulated place to land.
46.
Sally was hard at work at the filing cabinet when Linda burst in.
“I have got to talk with George,” She said in even tones. She was in a big hurry.
“One moment,” Sally said. Then she slunk over to the intercom, held down a button and stated: “The God Linda is hear to see you, Mr God. She says it’s rather urgent.” She smiled nicely at Linda, who fretted politely next to the door into George’s room. George had somehow sealed the door so that even other Gods must wait to be ‘buzzed’ in by his secretary, the little red cushion.
A feeble voice eminated from the intercom. It sounded toneless and dry. “Okay. Send her in. Thankyou, Sally. You’re doing a great job.” George thought flattery didn’t hurt every now and then, so he flattered her all the time.
Sally pushed a button on her desk and the door into George’s room mysteriously opened. Linda almost ran into the room.
The door closed behind Her, just as mysteriously.
Inside, George offered Linda a brandy. George offered everybody a brandy whenever He could. George liked brandy and thought everybody should like brandy, too, and so gave everybody the chance to try it.
Linda grabbed the decanter, not minding the glass, and drank deeply. Placing the glass bottle down on the desk, She started to explain why she’d come over, but got as far as “Ahhh! Huh!”. Linda did not normally drink brandy. It gave her quite a start.
George sat behind his desk, took a two chrome golf balls from mid air and started to roll them both around in one hand.
Linda swallowed twice, coughed, then said “The Flux is missing from your Universe. I don’t know where it is. I’ve just been over chatting with Mikal about that room we were in before- the one with the Flux Sample in that tray. Then I decided to just check up the records on all the Flux samples in all the different dimensions. They’re all there, happy as Larry in their own dimensions, all except yours.”
George came to his feet. He slowly paced around his desk, rolling the reflective golf balls in the palm of his hand. He was humming tunelessly while he nutted out the possibilities. On his desk lay a stack of papers. He glanced at them but did not pick them up.
Linda had already nutted out the possibilities. “You know, of course, that there are only two possibilities. One, it has just up and vanished and order is overruling. Not very likely, of course. Especially in that mess you call a Universe. Or, it has somehow jumped cross dimensionally and the Great Hamster only knows what that could do.”
George paused before giving her access to the stack of paper on his desk. Linda scanned it and nodded occasionally. As she read, George started talking. “We must get in contact with the X-Nerds and tell them to find James and take him to the Flux. He’ll know what to do then.” Then He thought about this. “I got the impression when I first spoke to James that he didn’t know about himself- his other self. I don’t think it would be wise to tell him ot the X-Nerds about it. They all seem a bit touchy and if they’re to come against the Flux, then they need to be as confident as they can.”
Linda had read the notes; in all her aeons perfecting the now defunct Virtual Universe Computer, she learned to speed read the technical manuals that came with each Universe. Plus She was a god, and that helped. She’d just read over a hundred pages of hand-written notes in under a minute.
“Then we should use the two-way to contact them.” She said smugly.
“Two-way? That ship doesn’t-”
“I’ll just go back in time to before they left the Celestial City and put one in and then come back here.” She vanished for a second, then reappeared holding a two-way radio handset. She handed it over to George.
George said thankyou and called the X-Nerds and give them their instructions. Linda helped herself to another brandy.
47.
James sat silently as he and the X-Nerds sped through the cosmos in search of another Flux Scalis. James had at first grumbled and mumbled abuse at the X-Nerds for leaving him in the first place, but the X-Nerds were used to ignoring him and did so easily. Now his patient silence worried the X-Nerds- they’d never seen him like this.
In their travels, they’d discovered that most likely spot to find the Flux Scalis was on the frozen genetic research moons around the same spot as where Lorna Major used to be, before they moved to their new residence outside the Universe.
It was pure coincidence that the X-Nerds had discovered this location, and that in their present dimension, the Lorna Major Academic Academy hadn’t been teleported outside it’s universe. In fact, the lovely old monks had been happy to show the X-Nerds and James around. They all saw everything- they had the time to, now Stuart had completely overcome the controls of the Time Machine, they couldn’t be late for anything. Or so they hoped.
The Lorna Major Academic Academy, and it’s sister planet, the Lorna Minor World Design Institute, occupied the same orbit around the same sun, pi radians out of phase to each other in their huge orbital trajectories, however only the Academic Academy really needed the sun. The World Design Institute was entirely self sufficient, converting the pure energy of the universe into matter and heat in order to achieve its goals of building planets for customers. In truth, the World Design Institute wasn’t a planet at all, just a large collection of losely strung together frames and sectors, a rough cube capable of splitting up the middle to release the final planet, but the scale of the operation and fact that all sorts of universities and smaller foundations were scattered throughout the immense frameworks had decided to call the whole shebang Lorna Minor.
The founders of the Lorna Minor World Design Institute had discovered in their peliminary reasearch a way of fooling the surrounding universe and dimensions into believing that the open area inside the World Design Institute was infinitly larger than the physical area taken to surround it- In other words, five-dimensional physics applied to the inside of the structure. The founders wrongly believed that this astounding fact was created due to the fact that under five dimensional physics, normal three dimensional space was aligned through four dimensional space/time in such a way as all points in the third dimension were in the same positions in three dimensional space yet aligned at different times in four dimensional space, and therefore altogether visible as three dimensions in it’s five dimensional relative counterpart. It was only discovered some centuries after the Institute had opened that all matter inside the Institute was actually wormholeded outside the area occupied by all the universes and was therefore an infinite area non-limited by space/time. Some fanatics of five dimensional physics studying at the Academic Academy on Lorna Major still believed that this was not the case and the Institutes founders were in fact correct. Some other fanatics said that everybody should just shut up because some people have a headache around here, you know.
After this discovery, Lorna Major was privately offered the opportunity to relocate herself and the local Sun to a lovely little spot outside the universe, for a small fee, of course. In this reality, Lorna Major declined the offer, but in certain others, it had gladly accepted and now revolved in its lonely orbit outside all space and time.

An old monk with a rather annoying voice mumbled something incompresensible at the six time travellers and handed them each a large helmet. He didn’t speak any English and so waited for them to put on the helmets.
They were bulky and a little top heavy, but once they’d automatically sealed themselves around their necks, became a little easier to manage.
“Can you hear me correctly?” He asked. They X-Nerds nodded. James waited next to a door and didn’t respond. The old monk went up to him and whacked the back of his helmet with his hand. James yelped as his head bounced around inside the helmet. Then the monk repeated the question. This time James nodded.
“If you would just follow me then,” The monk smilied and wandered through a door, motioning for them to follow. James was last through and closed the door behind him. Suddenly it was very dark.
“My name is Ahkn, and I will be your guide through the Library,” said an annoying voice from nowhere. In the darkness a door opened and the X-Nerds and James could see a yellowy green gas hugging the floor of the tunnel ahead. Suddenly, oxygen flowed within their helmets, and each person ‘aah’ed. Little twinlking lights came on inside the helmets and then everyone could see everyone else’s face. Ahkn now wore a similar helmet too, though it was well worn and his head didn’t sway and turn in the same way as their own.
Ahkn continued talking, his lips very slightly out of sync with the voice. Ahkn liked to talk. “These helmets will allow us to breathe in this place, as the harsh gasses of this planet would instantly dissolve your lungs and you would die a horribly painful, bloody and slow death, gurgling and drowning in your own oozing, red blood. These helmets will translate my language into the most recognised language amongst you. You do all speak the same language?”
“Yes,” Matthew, who was just behind Ahkn replied. They all walked through yet another door and out into a huge room. He thought they must get alot of visitors here, with the World Design Institute so close.
“Yes. Of course you do,” Ahkn mumbled. “Ah, here we are,” He pulled a little cord hanging down from the darkness above and suddenly lights came on throughout the Library.
The library was big. The library was very big. Hundreds of rows of scrolls and books stretched away one direction, and in the other, shelves and desks were stacked high with disks, tapes and computer equipment, although it was like nothing any of the X-Nerds had ever seen before. Soon they were wandering their own directions, glancing about them and occasionally pulling down one of the spidery scripts to read. Amazingly, the helmets automatically translated as they read the obscure symbols and diagrams.
“Wander as far as you like,” Ahkn’s voice seemed right in their ears, although he still stood at the entrance. “All these rows follow back around to here so you don’t get lost.”
Simon had wandered towards the computer equipment, as had James. Stuart and Errol had gone off together, straight ahead towards a more colourful appearing section of the Library. Matthew edged towards the scroll section whilst Karen picked a random direction and started walking.
“They’ve got everything,” Matthews voice carried hollowly in all their helmets. It seemed to be right behind them all, and yet Matthew could be seen wandering up a distant corridor of scrolls and parchments into the dim, distant silence.
The minutes ticked by as each of the six intrepid travellers explored and discovered amazing and exciting facts for themselves. Occasionally there would come a distant rumble, but nothing ever came of it and so it these soon went unheard. After a while, nobody spoke, and each seemed to exist within their own, silent world.
 
“Hey, eveyone! Come have a look at this,” Karen’s voice carried steadily to everyone.
There was a startled pause. “Where are you?” Asked five voices simultaneously.
“Come to the middle and I’ll show you.”
About ten minutes later, everybody stood near the centre of the Library. Ahkn was sleeping next to the door, seated back to the wall.
For some reason Karen was whispering. “I think I found something on the Flux.”
“Where?” James asked pointedly. He seemed very interested in the Flux Scalis- certainly much more interested than any of the X-Nerds. To them, the Flux was just another step to getting home.
“Uh, follow me,” and Karen led the way down a seemingly random passage. They walked for around three minutes, then came to a spot where the dust had been disturbed. Karen pointed at a couple of books on the floor. “Those mention the Flux but don’t really tell you much.”
James picked one up and turned to the middle page and sat down to read.
“This one, however,” she told the rest of them, holding up an electronic book, “gives you just about everything on the Flux- how it was formed, what it looks like, the rules of physics it follows, and boy, does it follow some wierd ones.”
Simon took it from her and paged through the first few chapters with his finger. There were diagrams, scribbled notes, holograms and even a chemical analysis of the object.
“It’s molasses!” Simon exclaimed. “Well, it’s got the same chemical structure of it, anyway. It seems that this researcher even tried eating some to see what it tastes like.”
“And?” Karen asked the taller boy.
“And what?” Simon asked, as was his way.
“And, what did it taste like, der?”
“Oh. I don’t know,” Simon admitted. “That’s where that particular set of notes stopped. I guess it didn’t agree with him.” He grinned.
“It absorbed him,” James stated professionally.
“Huh? How do you know?”
“I just do. That’s how the Flux works. It is concentrated evil- and it absorbes any hate and bad feelings of any living thing it touches. Any goodness and love is nullified by the evil and hate, like currents cancelling each other out.”
Everybody usually had ignored James up until that point because anything he said was mixed up and backwards. Now he was becoming the centre of attention because it seemed he knew more about what they were doing than any of them. His thoughts were becoming clearer, more structured and even, oddly, interesting.
“How can you just know something?” Stuart countered, stepping logically through his sentance.
“I don’t know. But I know that that’s how the Flux works. Besides, it says so just here,” He showed them the page he was reading. Stuart read it and nodded, a slow, eerie thought occuring to him - Was that humour? From James?
They stood there for a few more minutes, reading or paging through books of pictures and numbers.
“I think we should go see if we can see what we’re up against,” Stuart said. James look at him sharply, but said nothing.
48.
In a not too far off dimension, a spaceship landed in a field. It was a deserted field, though there were tyre tracks in the mud.
It was raining. The sky was black with cloud and a ghastly wind tore across the short grass, tossing up dead leaves and bits of old newspapers. One of these newspapers flapped up against the windscreen of the spaceship, hugging the glass, but was soon torn away in the swirling wind.
Then came lightning and thunder. Great spears of lightning fell and forked and fell again, spewing out across the miles of soaking ground, lighting up the storm in brilliant gashes of white, followed immediately by thrashing cracks of thunder that echoed and rolled through the mountainous terrain as if they were nothing at all.
The sky lit up and a tree near the spaceship exploded. It was very noisy.

“Ripper of a storm, huh?” Matthew grinned with mad glee.
“Did you just see how close that lightning struck?” Karen blubbered. She wandered back towards the back of the ship and stopped at a cupboard. She open it, reached inside and grabbed a packet of Burger Rings from the second shelf. Then she closed the cupboard door and continued to walk away from the front.
Stuart heard the TV come on in the back and went to investigate. His voice carried through the craft easily. “Do you know you’re not supposed to watch TV during electrical storms?” His voice said.
Karen’s voice exaspered. “No, you idiot. That’s phones. You’re not supposed to use phones in electrical storms.”
“No. I specifically remember my-” There was an almightly crash of thunder. The spaceship shuddered. For a moment, the two voices up the back of the spaceship were muffled.
“-to watch TV.”
“Shhh! Sit down.”
“It was phones too. I remember now.”
“Shush!” There was laughter, but it was on the TV.
Matthew spoke. “Yep. Remember we all used to sit up on the balcony back home and watch the storms out over the gorge country?” He sighed in its memory and sadly smiled, his home in his minds’ eye.
Simon sat on the left hand front-most seat, staring out the indestructable windscreen, making faces at his reflection in the yellowish glass. Errol sat reading the Owners Manual. Stuart had discarded it after his rather heavy landing on this very rainy planet. Matthew was attempting to sleep, but with all the noise, couldn’t. His stomach grumbled.
They waited. Simon watched the rain form puddles on the ground. The water was running off in little streamlets, trickling off into the dense undergrowth only metres away.
It seemed to be getting heavier. It seemed to be getting darker.

After the storm had subsided, Stuart and Karen went for a walk and Matthew finally went to sleep. Simon went outside but only to look at the spacecraft. They han’t done a space-to-ground entry before and he noticed that the ceramic underside of the craft was slightly blackened, though nothing was burnt.
It was a nice planet. The air was quite clear after the rain, and although they’d noticed lights from cities and other signs of intelligent life, they hadn’t yet come across any people.
That was until the car drove up.
In the car was a man.
He was dressed in a suit.
A grey, expensive looking suit.
He was driving an expensive looking car.
It whined softly, a sound strikingly similar to an Italian electric car.
The car was not Italian.
He didn’t look happy, but it was hard to tell from thirty metres.

Stuart cautioned Karen into silence. It was darker in the dense undergrowth, and the difference between this wet dimness and the light, open field where the spaceship was parked was astounding. The duo could see both Simon standing outside the spaceship and a man hesitantly walking towards him, some twenty metres to their right.
The light was very bright, but their eyes slowly adjusted. It was also very quiet, the only sounds being a distant bird calling out hopelessly.
The cautious man raised his right hand, smiled, turned his palm upwards, took another step, then swiftly pulled out something from behind his back with his left hand and pointed it at Simon.
It was a gun. Definately a gun.

“Karen,” Whispered Stuart. Karen turned to hear Stuart. “I think if we rush out holding hands, laughing, maybe he’ll think-” He stopped to think.
Karen wanted to know why he’d stopped. “What? That we’d been for a... walk in the woods?”
“Uh. Uh, yeah. You know, kind of look startled and that. Maybe he’ll run off, and...” Stuart shrugged.
So? The plan was a little bland. “Oh. I suppose it’s worth a try.”
Karen’s right hand found it’s way into Stuart’s left. It was warm, she noted. Warm and soft. Stuart looked down and saw a scar below her elbow. He had one just like it, he recalled, only a bit higher.
After a pace, Stuart quietly said “What if he turns it on us?”.
“He won’t,” Karen reassured Stuart, but began to wonder if this was the right thing to do. She turned to view Stuart’s rounded face, winked, and smiled a nice smile at him. He reflected it immediately.

“Secret Federation of Investigation. Hold you position,” The man stated. He had a very professional sounding voice. A voice that wouldn’t think twice about killing if it had to.
He also spoke English, more an American accent to it, though. Simon used think this strange that one so far from his home planet could speak a language evolved over many years with startling clarity. That was before he discovered the Celestial City, where everybody (except the little cauliflower people with three legs) spoke English.
Simon smiled.
“State you I.D. plate, name and mission,” The professional voice barked.
Simon didn’t know what to do. “Uh, I.D. plate? I don’t know what an I.D. plate is. I don’t think they registered this thing.”
“State your I.D. plate, name and mission,” The man said evenly, raising his gun a little more.
“My name is Simon,” He didn’t say his last name because he didn’t like the idea of his name getting onto any mailing lists or anything. People could find addresses and things from just a name, these days. “And I’m on a mission from God.”
The man wielding the gun was a little startled for just a second. It was exactly at this moment that Stuart and Karen burst forth out of the undergrowth to the mans left, laughing and holding hands. They stopped when they saw the gun.
Their eyes went wide and Karen screamed once, then buried her head into Stuart’s right shoulder, whimpering a little. Stuart put an arm protectively around Karen’s head.
“What? Who?” Stuart tried to sound shocked. He looked at the man in the grey suit and then at Simon. Stuart did not wink.
“What is the meaning of this? Who are you?” He said authoritivly.
The man slowly spun, quite calmly, to point his gun at them, glancing suggestively back at Simon.
“If you were of this planet, then you would know who I was,” The bad man stated. There was no tone to his voice. “Join your friend.”
Karen unburied her head from Stuart’s shoulder and looked up into Stuart’s eyes. Stuart grimaced. She shrugged and they untangled themselves smartly and walked over to meet Simon.
“So much for that, then,” She whispered.
“Silence!” Hollared the man. “You will stay there,” he said, walking slowly, menacingly, around the caravan-sized spaceship. He dissapeared from view.
“What was that all about?” Simon nervously asked the younger two.
Karen winked mischievously at him and said nothing.
“I said silence!” came the voice again.
Then the three of them heard the door of the spaceship click. There was more silence and then a sickening crash and a single shot. The three friends rushed around only to see the man in the grey suit lying face first in the mud, unconcious. Errol sat in the doorway, wiping his hands on his shirt. Apparently, he’d kicked the door open just as the man had bent down to open it himself, and the blow had knocked him out cold.
The man groaned, Errol got up, went over to him and squatted next to his head, looking at the blood running from his nose. Suddenly, the man woke, turned and had fired another shot before Errol knocked him cold again with his fist, an almost instantaneous action caused by the fright.
Stuart and Karen had already gone inside by this time, and Simon had started to climb the single step into the machine before this happened.
Blood splattered the opposite wall as a small copper bullet tore through the side of his right leg, an inch above his knee. It did not puncture the far side of the ceramic plate spaceship.
Karen screamed, a long, horrible sound magnified by the enclosure.
Simon only winced, the hurt in his leg too much for even a cry of pain. His hand instantly gripped his leg and he fell on his left shoulder.
“Damn, ow!” he said because he’d hurt his shoulder now.
Errol did not attend to Simon, as Stuart and Karen had already started first aid. All five X-Nerds had each completed their first aid certificates and each knew instinctively what to do. Instead, he took the gun from the unconscious alien man and threw it hard into the dense undergrowth. It clattered on something. Then he tore the man’s grey coat and tied his arms and legs with strips of the smooth, strong material. He threw the remains of the ruined suit over the mans face. Red blood still dribbled from his nose. Then he did something strange. He pulled a postcard from his pocket- it was a picture of the Taj Mahal- and dropped it on the mans body.
“Here,” he said. “You can learn about us from this.”
Simon thought this probably would be a good time to pass out.
“Rice,” Said Karen, looking at Stuart, who nodded but did not say a word, his eyes wide with shock. He searched for some bandages.
Dark clouds were once again forming in the west.
49.
Linda was stareing vacantly at George, across the table, her bottom lip dangling dangerously close to her chin. George was wondering why Linda was stareing vacantly at him. Linda held a glass in her right hand. It had a few drops of whisky in it, and two lumps of ice.
The brandy had run out. Now the whisky was running low. Fortunately, George’s secretary enjoyed going out and fetching things for him, and right now she was probably on her way back from the bar just up the road with a new bottle of brandy.
“Ohmigod,” Linda sounded shocked. She slammed the glass down onto the deep red desk, a sharp cracking sound, and ran from the room quickly, not saying anything else.
George thought he heard a retching sound.
A few moments later, Linda came back in, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her yellow golf clothes.
“Oh my,” she gasped, then resumed her place. Her cup magically filled with water, mixing with the remaining millilitres of whisky. She drank noisily.
George stared at her.
As if guided by an autocue, she started talking.
“Randall and I used to have so much fun together.”
Aah, Randall, thought George. He had been wondering why Linda had not been herself these last few days. Normally, she couldn’t be dragged from the greens, but lately she’d never even looked at a club or golfball.
“When we were first working on the VUC34, we were together all the time, night and day, slaving over the hot little computers, drinking coffee and watching late night television broadcast from Earth. Do you know that that little planet puts out more garbage over the waves than you would find in your average sub-cluster galaxy? Anyway, it was fun, then.
“We had this little house- well, it was large enough to hold the computers and all our notes and stuff. It was just sort of floating in the void. Then one day, just like that, ‘poof’- there was this planet and a sun, just sitting there. We moved our house onto that planet, which we found out later was called Lorna Major.” She finished off her cup, belched, then filled it again with more of the whisky that was on the table. She had a drink.
George had heard all this before. Linda had visited before; before Lorna Major relocated. He recalled something urgent about her last visit, but couldn’t remember what. She’d told him about her plans to create the VUC and that she and Randall were happy together, living in a small house outside all the Universes in the pre-atomic nothingness. He knew she wanted to talk, so he let her.
They had the time.
“And so we became interested in the Academy and the restaraunt, although they didn’t serve very nice fish. It was a little dry for my taste. We occasionally went to the services, which were very boaring. They all just sat around, moaning and groaning, wearing their stupid potato sacks. It’s a wonder they didn’t freeze to death.” Linda paused, she hoped, dramatically.
“Randall and I even went on a holiday to Earth. We’ve got a postcard, somewhere. I wish I had it, it’s got a great picture of this big marble place with huge long greens out the front. We were thrown into gaol for that.” She smiled, remembering.
“You what?” George started. He reached for a brandy but there was none. He buzzed Sally and asked her to bring in the new bottle. She did so, duly noting that Linda was swaying in her chair. The cushion didn’t say anything but smiled understandingly at George and left, closing the door.
George poured himself a drink. It tasted good.
“Oh yesyesyes,” Linda continued, as if there had been no interruption. “It was such a great fairway, nice and straight. It had no obstructions, except for the pond up the middle. I never have figured out why you’d place a pond up the middle.
“Anyway, we left gaol about half an hour after they’d put us in- we must have just vanished. I don’t remember how we got out, but I recall it was exciting. Somebody helped us, yes that was it. I wonder who? Anyhow, then we went flying and looked all around the world at everything- just to do it. They have a strange world there, but there is alot to look at. It’s a very strange world. Did I tell you that they put out more radio waves than most other planets I’ve seen? I must have.” Since her last stop, Linda had polished off two more glasses of the heart-warming drink, and her head was lolling about on her shoulders. Her voice was very slurred.
“Anyway, I don’t know why, but Randall and I have been fighting lately. He’s always been bickering, and that’s probably why I love him, but, you know, it’s just that lately he’s been getting on my nerves. We never do anything together anymore. We never talk. He’s such a jerk.” She fell asleep. Her drink spilled all over her lap, but she did not wake.
George sighed. He decided to go and see Randall. Perhaps talk things through, play a round of too. These two loved each other too much to treat each other like this.
“Sally,” he gave instructions to his intercom whilst holding down a small black button. “I want you to keep an eye on Linda. She’s in here asleep. When she wakes, do not let her drink any more.”
There was a pause. Sally liked to pause when George spoke to her. It made the mood more... uh, more.
“Right away, Mr God,” was her response.
Linda started to snore.
50.
“That?” Simon asked, pointing into the dark tray. “It’s just black stuff in a tray.”
“That is the Flux,” stated James professionally. Like, he knew all about the flux but he didn’t know anything else. He’s learned to speak; the time in the room with Mikal had taught him that, but still, when it all came down, he was still as stupid as ever. “It’s the most evil thing in the universe.”
“After the mash potato they served us at school,” Stuart noted.
“No, it isn’t evil,” Karen told him. “It’s the most concentrated form of goodness in the universe. Everybody knows that, otherwise why would they tell us to eat it all the time?”
“Oh, of course. Silly me. I suppose when you mix them, like when you mix matter and anti-matter, they cancel each other out.”
“No. You get baked beans in gravy, then.” Karen smiled at Stuart and walked off to have a look around.
“There’s logic in that somewhere,” Stuart said. Then he looked pointedly across the bench at Matthew who just tilted his head and grimaced.
There was nothing left to do. They’d come to Lorna Major to find out about the Flux Scalis, something they’d now done. They’s seen the biggest and most comprehensive library anywhere in any universe, and they’s gone to have a peep at the molten black lard-in-a-tray known quite well for its ability to vaporise any living thing that touched it.
Now they didn’t know what to do.

After a stark dinner- an instant noodle pack from a nearby (and quite handy) refrigerator, heated over a small fire, the X-Nerds and James assembled in the Time Machine. They waved goodbye to the monks. The Monks did not wave back.
Karen whispered “We’ll make ourselves look purposeful if we leave just like that. Good appearences, you know.”
She pushed the red button and the machine vanished through time and space.
Then Karen screamed.
51.
Jean-Pierre von Gorfenwherria, or Gorf for short, sat across from an unruly bunch. They were playing Kraal, a card game much similar to blackjack, except with more room for cheating. There were four of them, mercinaries by the look, as guns lay beside broadswords and dirks, leather armour amongst the bullet-proof vests. There were wooden boxed brimming with stringy packing, flippantly hiding rockets and other highly dangerous and destructive weapons.
The four cheap soldiers sat on crates, drinking a reddish brew and belching often.
“You’re a stinking, low-life, graat-sucking cheat, Jarl,” bellowed Gorf. He threw his hand down on the table. There were five identical cards.
“You’re the one whose had the cards up his sleeve all night, you pig-shouldered brazenbeast,” Gorf’s opponent shot back.
“And I don’t have sleeves, thank you very much.”
“Well if you did, you would.”
“Aha! So you did, eh?” Gorf jumped to his feet. The other two unshaven card players hastily moved back, one accidently spilling his brew on Jarl’s lap.
Jarl punched him. Jarl punched the other, just for the hell of it. Just in case.
Then Jarl was kicked in the shin by Gorf, and the fight was on.
Outside the little hut the sun was warm. The breeze blew gaily across the scorched landscape and smoke lifted joyously into the air from a nearby bomb crater. A bee landed on a flower but set off a very old and extemely touchy land mine and instantly became many extra parts of the scenery.
It was a normal day.
A window on the earthen hut smashed and the greater part of an arm cascaded through. It, however, decided not to stick around to enjoy the day and slithered back through the broken window frame.
There was alot of noise, primarily the sounds of yelling and fighting.
The door on the hut burst open and two great men flew out, grappling each other. Another followed and yet another stood in the doorway, swigging a frothing brew from an old wooden tankard.
“Let that be a lesson to yerall!” He stated primly, then turned and slammed the door behind him.
It was at this point that a large white object with whirly things all down the side fell from the sky and lodged itself upside-down in the hut’s dirt-covered roof.
There came an aghast silence. Smoke still lazily rose from a nearby crater.

“Er.”
There was a gun in his face. James did not seem to like the proposition of having a gun in his face and so had pushed Stuart in front of him.
“Oh,” Stuart stated, and grinned, his top and bottom teeth showing.
“Well,” Came a harsh, female voice. It wasn’t Karen’s. “That does it for my tomatoes!”
From out of a side door inside the hut, a side door that incidently adjoined a further room used for sleeping and preparing food, stormed a woman, apparently aged in her mid twenties by Earth standards. She had dark straw-blonde hair and green, heavily guarded and pocketed eyes.
Her hands were wrinked and calloused and brown from dirt. She was pretty.
“Now look, you four. If you would ever-” She stopped. She looked at the big white thing  hanging through the roof, twisting her head up the other way as if to get a better view. There was somebody in it, six people actually, all looking through the door of the vehicle which was obviously upside-down. The four men were pointing guns and knives at them, their game of Krall lying forgotten on the ground.
“-stop fighting... Ah.” The woman dropped something on the ground. It looked like a cheeseburger, though now, looking at the four dirty parts spread on the earthen floor, nobody could tell.
“Ah,” she bumbled again.
There was a muffled sound, a voice from within the small white spaceship. “Oh dear... No, Um-?”
There was another. This one sounded female. “What?”
“Look,” There was a slight click. Nothing happened. “See? Battery’s dead or something. Um.”
“Oh dear.”
Click. Click. Clickety-clickety-clickety-click.
“Oh dear.”
Silence.
“Well, that’s it then.”
“Out!” harshed a voice, a voice carrying a gun. A voice connected to a big hairy arm carrying a big black gun.
James fell. Stuart fell on him. Matthew stepped out and swung down.
“Out,” that voice said again. “Now!”
Simon jumped down, landing square on James’s upturned hand. Then he helped Karen down. They both looked a little sheepish.
Then a gun went off. Nobody moved. Each of the X-Nerds and James felt their chests, their hips, their legs. Nope, wasn’t them.
Except that Simon’s hand came back with blood on it.
“Argh! You’ve shot me, you idiot!” He cried. Then he fell on his left shoulder and wailed a little. Well, a lot.
“Hey! That’s what it is!” Said one of the men at the door. He grinned.
Gorf looked at him, rather dissaprovingly. “Oh good. After this long, we finally get some prisoners and you go and shoot them.”
“There was this little switch behind the trigger. I only-”
“Jarl,” Gorf smilied at the men. He punched him in the mouth. “Shut up,” Gorf said placidly.
The other woman had rushed over to Simon, as had Karen. They both appeared to know what to do, and carred him off into the next room. He was now unconscious and dangled limply in their supportive arms.
Gorf sighed. Why was he here? Why did he have to survive if these were the people he had to survive with?
He motioned the others to move to the next room. Guns in their backs made them do so.

“We’re on a mission from God,” Karen said matter-of-factly.
The other woman, whose name was, funnily enough, Frank, looked up. Under the circumstances, she was completely prepared for this answer.
She nodded. How else could six humans appear from nowhere and destroy somebody’s home in a large cooking pot-looking creamic tub?
“You’re all aliens, then, I take it?”
“Aliens?”
“Yes. You’re not from around here, then?”
“Uh,” Karen didn’t know where here was. “No. I don’t think so. We’re from Earth, actually.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Oh.”
“Never seen no real aliens before. Of course, we’re all from the same planet, not this one of course, but still, I’ve never seen no real dinky-die space aliens before. Are they all like you?”
“Like us? Aliens,” Karen was really turned about by the conversation. She gnawed at the side of her left index finger. “Um, no. Some are blue.”
“Aah,” Frank said knowingly. “And I’ve always thought they’d be little green men, for some reason, driving big things that look like them things you put under tea-cups.”
“Saucers?”
“Yep. That’s them.”
There was a short pause.
“There are green ones too,” Karen said, pulling Simon up onto a makeshift bed. He groaned and then fell limp again. He was still bleeding, though not as profusely. Red blood seeped onto the floor.
“Oh?”
“Yes, they look like little cauliflowers with legs.”
“Uh huh,” Frank nodded. “I see.”
“Oh.”
Well. That was it. That was as far as the conversation was going to go. It seemed that nobody wanted to talk about the usual things- the weather, politics, last weeks footy scores. The silence came down as a hammer strikes an anvil.
It was lucky that the big man, Gorf, burst in, because a whole new conversation could then start. Karen had already started to hear that white noise that one hears when trying to think how to start a conversation in a spot where one can’t exist.
The X-Nerds stumbled in. James walked in, smiling aimlessly. The other two mercinaries walked in. Jarl did not.
The door was closed and the two rough-looking cheap soldiers stood either side of the door.
“They’re aliens,” Frank’s hard voice said after a while. Frank herself looked rather startled and scolded her voice for talking by itself.
“Uh huh,” Then of course, the conversation happened again, and ended up in the same spot. This time, James cut in at the end.
“Have you seen this woman?” He held up a polaroid of a black blot. It was rather shiny looking.
That was a woman? Yes, these people were definately aliens. “It looks like molasses,” Gorf said, his head tilted slightly to the right.
James got the message. Gorf hadn’t seen a blot of mollasses running around vaprising things. He thought that odd.

The door burst open, clacking into one of the guards noses. He yelped. The other guard didn’t do anything.
“Listen here-” the new voice began. Then “Oo’s this, then?” It asked. It belonged to an unfamiliar face, at least unfamiliar to the outworlders.
“We’re friends-” Karen took charge. She was becoming good at taking charge.
The new man stopped. Prisoners weren’t supposed to talk. That was the job of their captors. For a moment, his tall red-clad body swayed undecidedly, then Jarl, who now stood behind the man said “Hey! No talking.”
“Uh,” said the new man. “Yeah. No talking!”
Gorf told them about the X-Nerds. The new man laughed when Gorf told him about how Simon had been wounded. Then the new man turned and punched Jarl in the mouth.
Jarl went outside. A moment later, there was an explosion and the sound of dirt raining down. A cloud of dust blew through the door.
Simon groaned. The bleeding was slowing, mainly due to the new bandages now wrapped around his leg. He did not fall back into unconciousness, but remained in pain, awake. He groaned again and said “Who are you?” to the new man in the kind of voice that made everyone else wince. 
The new, gruff looking man smiled. “Your worst nighmare,” He threw back his head and heaved heavy laughter throughout the building.
“He’s my brother,” said Frank, her tone dissaproving.
“Then, who are you?” Asked Simon of Frank. His head turned sharply towards her.
“Frank’s the name, Rebel’s the game. You are our prisoners, and you’re coming withus!” She smiled, trying to look extremely frighteneing.
Simon sighed. He was surrounded by every kind of Chuck Norris wannabe. They were bad poets, too. And bad actors. Extremely just like Chuck Norris.
“Oh-kay,” he conceeded. The next thing he said was slow, deliberate and entirely for theatric purposes. “Okay, then. What are we fighting for?”
There was a word, a single syllable word, in there someplace. It didn’t seem right. ‘What are we fighting for?’ The sentance gonged and resonated within the five other empty heads (the mercinary-looking natives) as they sought its meaning.
The new man looked at his sister, then at Gorf, then at the two guards. One guard was clutching his nose. The new man did not know why. The other was eating a tomato. Then he drew himself up dramatically, drew a sword and held it aloft, swished his cloak around his shoulder and bellowed “The Hollow of Destiny!”.
Simon cut in straight away in a very planitive voice. “The Hollow of Destiny. What’s that? Is that a survey map or computer game?”
“Maybe it’s a big sword, passed down for generations,” Karen smiled at him, happy to see him his usual self. Humour heals all wounds. “One that has magical powers and fends off evil.”
Simon smiled at the new man. The new man frowned back. Simon changed his smile to a questioning look by raising his eyebrows. The new man did not change his expression. Simon’s face seemed to grin like a madman’s. The new man’s suddenly did likewise.
Had Simon been able, he would have backed away at this point. Alas...
The new man bent down and breathed heavily into Simon’s face.
His breath, Simon noted, smelled just like an ice-cream soda, cherry flavour. Perhaps that was what the red frothy drink in the other room was.
A moment later there was the sound of gunfire outside. Just outside. Right outside.
52.
“Stuart?” Karen whispered? Everybody was asleep except Karen and Stuart, who now sat up the front of the Time Machine. Deep space fell away from them outside the yellow glass. God had just called on their new radio. For some reason it was in the glove compartment; the one they didn’t know they had.
“Uh huh?” Stuart whispered back.
“What are we going to do?”
Simon was up the back of the caravan-sized spaceship, his breating even. Matthew had curled up in front of the TV, which was filling the rear of the craft with the hiss of white flickering static.
“You mean with him?”
“No, us. All of us,” she paused. “We’re completely lost. I don’t know where or when we are, or where we’re going.”
“If you don’t care where you’re going, then you aren’t lost,” Stuart joked. Karen shared a moment of this joy with Stuart but returned to her sombre mood. Her hand once again slipped into Stuart’s, gently squeezing it.
“We can’t just keep pushing the red button and hoping to go somewhere interesting. We have to find the Flux and save the Humans and all that. We don’t even know where any of them are, now. And I want to go home.”
That was it. They all just wanted to go home, back to how they were before they’d even built the first Time Machine.
“This whole expedition with Gods and time machines is so rediculous. James wasn’t that bad,” Karen had a need for talk. Stuart sat patiently, he wanted to hear her out for some reason. Outside, the black shoud of dark continued unabated. It seemed like night out there, yet there was no real night and day. The Time Machine sat relatively motionless to the distant pockmarked array of stars. “We all put up with him. Hell, the Time Machine was a bunch of toothpaste tubes and cornflake boxes. It wasn’t supposed to work! Now look at us, stuck in deep space all because of some stupid God. You’d think we’re just pawns in some kind of science fiction story.”
There was a gonging sound, really very faint. Perhaps it had come from the TV, but the sound was way down and it was louder than that, wasn’t it?
Stuart looked at Karen in an odd kind of way. Karen looked back at Stuart. Something felt funny, like a deja vu feeling without the sense of seeing it all before. It was more like... Well, it wasn’t like anything they ever felt before. And it was just between the two of them. For that one moment, the spaceship seemed to be just the set on some low-budget telemovie, the whirring of fans and blipping of lights as distant and unreal as the recent trail of events.
The feeling passed as Karen cautiously started talking again. “ I’m getting wierded out, here. Which way do you want to go?”
Then Stuart gasped. “Look!” and he pointed out into the blackness. They could both see a similar-looking spaceship, a clone of their ship hurtling through space, whirly things and all.
“It’s us!” Karen stated. Both Stuart and Karen could almost pick out faces in the front. What they did manage to see was two very white blobs seated in the front. They didn’t look real, more statue-like, dummies even. Very thin dummies. They were not moving. The ship continued its long haul out of sight and into the cold, unforgiving universe. It didn’t stop.
“I wonder what was wrong.”
“How did we get out there?” Stuart whispered. “And why didn’t we stop?”
Karen thought about it as she fired the main Chronafluxion engines. “I have a strange suspicion...” but that was all she said.
Ahead of them, Time bent away again, a path of swirling lights and eerie gravitational effects tubing out into an infinite distance ahead, sucking once more at their miniscule spaceship like the giant hands of an uncaring child stealing away with a meaningless lolly.
53.
“George.”
The doors burst open and both George and Linda looked up sharply. Sally was nowhere to be seen. The room was quiet, there was no music playing or fans humming.
One by one, the five all stormed in, out from behind the doors in Sally’s office into George’s room.
“We have to talk,” a voice said.
“Who are you?” George demanded. He stood, stormed over to the intruders and held them back. Linda, behind George, stood and stared at them angrily.
“You can call us the X-Nerds, George.” The last word was almost spat. “Hello, Linda. How’s Randall?” the X-Nerd speaking acknowledged. Linda looked puzzled but nodded greetings back to him. “Who?”
“How do you know who I am? You are not like Us.”
“We know all about You.”
Silence.
The X-Nerds’ mood changed. “We’ve come from the ends of the Universe looking for You, literally.” He smiled. “I’m Simon, by the way.”
“Yes, I was just about to ask that. So,” He didn’t know what to say. “Why are you here?”
Simon told them their story, carfully leaving out certain details about the other end of the Universe.
“And so you came back here, to before the Universes were all started and just storm in seeking our help? As if we will help you, mere mortal. We are Gods.”
“This has to do with the Flux,” No response.
Simon went on reguardless. “Just give us a hand or you’ll be...” Uh. Just how do you threaten a God, anyway?
“We’ll be what?”
“Uh. You won’t be able to play Golf anymore,35” Simon invented.
It worked. George and Linda screamed and sprang outside after the X-Nerds, back across the empty rolling fields that would one day support the Celestial City, back to a white doorway into another Dimension. Inside, across the fog and fractal floortiles stood an impressive-looking spaceship, stationary in the void.
“You need to get back home for an important event in future history, Linda,” Simon told the female God. Linda did not dispute this and simply vanished in an instant. She didn’t even bother saying goodbye.
“And you,” Simon singled George out from the non-multitudes standing in front of the X-Nerds. “You are coming with us.” Simon spun dramatically but he yelped and clutched his leg. Although the bullet had passed right through the leg without tearing too many muscles, the wound had not yet healed. He sat on a nearby seat to recover.
“Now just a minute, here,” George started after them.
“No ‘But’s!” Karen voiced, her interjection stern.
“But I didn’t say ‘But’!”
“Aah! Yes you did!”
“No I didn’t,” God bit his upper lip.
 Matthew stated “He didn’t, actually.”
“And who’se side are you on?”
“He’s on mine,” George said.
“No, he was just saying that George didn’t say ‘but’.” Stuart told Karen. Karen turned to Stuart, wanting to win this one.
“Look,” She started. It was a good start; strong, assertive, everything she’d need to see this thing through. She paused to suck in her breath and repeated the word. “Look. He did say ‘but’ and Matthew was obviously taking sides. You are also-”
“No he wasn’t,” God intterupted.
Karen ploughed on, right over Him, “-are against me. What did I do to-”
“No I’m not!”
“He’s not, Karen.”
“Yeah,” George added, still biting his upper lip because he’d lost track of this conversation some time back. His eyes shot back and forth like a politician reading the autocue.
“-deserve this? I got us out of that mess back there and-”
“No, actually it was a co-operative effort. We all helped,” Matthew started his own conversation, with George, who sat and watched Karen talk over Stuart and listened to Matthew tell him about some cooperative thing.
“What about me?” Stuart shot back. “I was just some blot hanging off your hand, was I?”
“Yes. I mean No,” Karen fumbled.
“But it was mostly my fight-” Matthew was saying.
“Aah, the old, what’s the word? Start’s with ‘F’. Anyway, I’m just a blot, then. That’s what you think-”
“No! I didn’t mean it like that, bugger you. I meant ‘no’,” Karen started to plead. “It’s just that when-”
“Yeah, see!”
And Simon said “I’d like a nice hot shower.”
George sat smiling like a stupid tourist, enjoying life as only one can when one’s brain doesn’t understand a single thing happening around it. Kind of like the way an Englishman devestates his own country by simply being English.
Simon sat rubbing his upper leg. He seemed, for some reason, to be in pain. George walked away from the madcap arguments without even as much as a dent to it’s vigour, joined Simon and they both went outside to enjoy the sunshine.

“Where are we, then?” Simon asked.
“We’re still at the Celestial City. Or where the Celestial City will be...” Karen ludicrousised.
“I know that,” Simon highlighted. “Where are we in the plans? You lot have been beating out the details for the last god-knows how long-”
“No I don’t. I never said-” God cut in but he was also cut off.
“-and I’ve not worked out head nor tail of what the hell you were talking about. Can I read the agenda?”
Karen took a breath and pushed George up the back of the Timecraft. That would be a big start, getting Him out of the way. He sat and watched TV. He liked to watch TV, yet didn’t know how they got all the little people inside. 
“Do we have an agenda?” Simon also asked.
“Yes, and I will now inform you of it. Please be quiet and do not interrupt.”
You sound just like a com puter, thought Simon. You do not look like a com puter.
Karen started to read. She read out a messy but well-documented history or what had already come to pass. Simon and the others nodded goadingly. Then Karen started into what they had to do next. It included taking God to the Lorna-Major Academic Academy to inquisite the Monks about the Flux (of which he knew nothing about, having not invented it yet), then leaving Him to His own devices (stranding him there) and flying back to Earth to discern what the Flux had done and how. She mentioned James’ name once.
“Then we shall sort out the other bits and pieces that God and Linda told us about before we left the Celestial City. Black and white, there it is.” Karen handed a sheet of paper to Simon and sat back in her seat. She closed her eyes, expecting the usual flood of questions. There was a great deal of silence.
Simon had raised his left hand to his mouth and now suckled the side of the index finger, reading, nodding.
God was laughing at the TV. Donoghue was on, interviewing a transexual Nazi Eskimo from Arizona.
54.
It stood on a stark knoll, silhouetted on a black skyline. Ragged arcs of lightning whipped through the cloud, falling dangerously close. There was a dead wood; or it seemed dead from a distance: Upturned and twisted roots and branches fighting for space, darkening the road below. A gnarled wagon lay rotting into a sodden quagmire, one iron wheel slowly creaking in the icicle of wind. Bones from- animals? People?- lay bleached white by a forgotten sun, torturing the unpleasant, purplish vista. The road cut the landscape like a varicose vein.
The Castle was of a chilly grey stone, a brusque atmosphere seeping from between the hand-cut holes. The portcullis had rusted into the mortar and a neat hole had been carved by use through the great iron gate.
Inside, it was much, much darker and very cold. There were horrific screams filtering underneath a door, echoing down long tunnels until their noise became a droning reverberation occasionally punctuated by a grim silence. Elsewhere, from another direction, came another scream, a female scream, then a sick, dull thud and dread silence.
Thunder from above tore down, whetting the air with yet more torment.
It began raining, an acrid, sulfurous rain that carried a hint of sleet.
A warhorse plodded noisily on bumpy black cobble, its worn hooves unshod. Behind, in the sleigh, five prisoners huddled in the slow drizzle, each shivering. Behind the wheeled vehicle, a band of mercinaries dragged the heavy shackle that bound their ankles.
One of the mercinaries was whispering to another. “Don’t see why they get to ride in that thing, anyway,” The gruff man aimed his nose at the steel vehicle behind the horse. He yelled something obscene at the six people inside. They took no notice.
“Shut up, Gorf,” came a hard female voice from behind.

“-we’re in, now,” Simon stopped talking and looked up. The X-Nerds had been connected to a cold stone wall by a single steel chain threaded through heavy iron rings about their ankles. The one-size-fits-all ankle ring had rubbed the skin from his ankle, and a blood blister had formed either side of his ankle, just above the bone.
He looked out through iron bars into the dim dungeon at an approacing figure, then past him at the bright orange brazier bellowing heat into the large, low room. Somewhere he could hear a slow, rhythically impaired drip.
The figure out in the dungeon stopped, stooped low for he had a large hump on his back, and leaning heavily on a thick cane, fumbled in his pocket for a noisy set of huge skeleton keys. Noting that they weren’t there, he turned slowly, his knees creaking, and remounted the tight staircase and dissapeared into the inky blackness.
Karen had been chained next to Stuart and lay sobbing. She was shocked at what some of the terrible guards had tried to do to her. She felt both sorry and thankful that Matthew had had stepped in to guard her from these viscous attacks. He now lay unconcious on the cold stone for he had provoked attack more than once. Simon droned on in his low voice with Errol, conferring escape. James had already been taken away by the strange little hunchback.
Once again, the round shouldered man hobbled down the stairs and stood at the bottom searching his pockets frantically for the keys. This time he found them, and opened the cage in which the X-Nerds lay. He unlocked the chain from around Simon’s ankle, and yanked him to his feet, which made him yelp and tumble in pain. After a moment, the hunchback pushed him out of the cage and after locking everything up again, dissapeared behind Simon up the stairs.
Karen stared up the narrow case of stairs after them, horrified. Stuart and Errol glanced at each other and sighed. Each silently wondered where the other were being taken and why none of them were calling out at all.
Moments later, the hunchback took Karen, then came back for Errol.
When he approached the last time from out of the black haze, he murmered something and Matthew awoke as if on cue. Stuart had to help Mattew up the narrow staircase, almost blinded by the darkness that was all around. At one point his sleeve caught on an iron hook, tearing a large hole in the fabric. He could not do anything about it.
He had to escape.
“Come along, then,” the ugly old hunchback poked at them.
Stuart tried subterfuge. “What about the other one? Down there still.” He pointed back down the stairs and the old hunchback turned to look.
“There were six, I was told by,” the decrepit man said. 
“You’ve only been down five times, though,” Stuart goaded. “Five plus one is Six.”
“How many have I got of you?” The old man wondered aloud. He was apparently very slow minded. “I’ve been down five times and there’s-”
“You’ve got to go down one more time,” soothed Stuart. Matthew was almost awake, his eyes were red and his head hung low. He was breathing heavily.
The old man though about this and then turned to descend the stairs. “You follow me down,” he eventuated. “You can’t get away, anyway. There’s guards. They have swords.”
Stuart waited until he was two steps down the rickety, narrow staircase, then quite proficiently kicked the old man in the back, causing him to lose his footing and cascade screaming down the stone steps.
“Whoops!” apologised Stuart. “Won’t happen again!”
Matthew was almost to his senses when Stuart grabbed his arm and ran. Matthew at once opened his eyes properly and understood the situation: Flee. Down the long, dark corridor then ran, stumbled, fought on, until at last they came to a staircase. Unfortunately, they were presented with two choices, namely Up and Down.
“Down!” Husked Matthew, who was cathing his breath.
Stuart thought about it a moment longer but said “No. Up is where there’s probably more guards and things. Who’d think we try to escape to where the enemy is.”
“Eh? What do you mean?”
“Oh, sorry. We’re going up.” Stuart grabbed Matthew’s arm again, pulled.
“Oh,” Matthew glanced down the stairs into the darkness. “I suppose down would lead to the dungeons, anyway.”
Then from behind, there came a howl of rage and despair. The two X-Nerds ran up the stairs, unthinking.
And into a bright, warm hallway. Matthew sucked in warm air and blew it out his nose. Stuart’s head danced back and forth, looking for any signs of danger.
Noises came: Leather boots on stone. Quickly, Stuart grabbed Matthew by the arm and darted into a nearby doorway without checking it first. It was dark, warm, silent.
Outisde, the crunch of boots stamped past the door. He opened the door an inch and was about to once again dash along the hallway when he heard the voice.
“Stuart!” A low, whispered voice eminated from the darkness. He recognised this voice.
“Hello, James,” Matthew led, apphrehensive.
“Hello, Matthew,” James followed, a narrow voice projecting through the darkness..
55.
In flight, the great black butterfly was almost graceful, the heavy wings dancing over air like a lonely yellow pingpong ball on a crystal clear stream in spring. On the goregeous green bud of a rose, the butterfly would settle, a strange sight as the goodness of the flower would dissapear, being slowly replaced by something that has no life. And the black butterfly would once again lift off the ground, torturing the air and leaving to find something else to kill.
A black butterfly nestled on a black road is normally hard to see, but the truckdriver saw it. What could miss a two metre wide butterfly prancing fluently on the middle of a country thoroughfare? The driver summarised the situation in his mind and asked himself ‘You have a butterfly, a giant black dwarf of the Danaus Plexippus species if I’m not mistaken, and a Mack. One hits the other. Who wins?’
His answer was correct.
A black puddle nestled on a black road is fairly difficult to see, but a black puddle on a roadway and all over the front of a truck and all over the countryside, isn’t.
When finally it began to rain, the angry molasses washed away, diluted and completely invalid; completely useless.
56.
“We have sent a delegation to that particular planet requesting the use of these meats to be used in the burgers. The nephew of a public servant contracted out by the sub-commitee responsible for the political linguistic reimpairment campaign came up with the name, which as you all now know is MacSpam, of course, this means the origional name ‘Fillet-o-spam’ gets the flick. With their approval, we expect to be using these so-called meats in our burgers by the turn of the cycle.”
After speaking, the room elapsed into silence.
The room was a tad posh, containing no less than fourteen solid gold sofas, twelve real hand-woven tenth century Persian carpets from Earth, and the core of a supernova caught in mid-collapse, suspended in a reversing gravitational field. Of course, if that particular item, the size of a squash ball, hadn’t been suspended in the gravity field, everything would be rendered useless by the sheer force of gravity exerted by the tiny mass - estimated at four thousand trillion megatonnes per square millimeter - and that would be that.
However, there were no people oggling away at the tumultuous richness of the room, only sofas, coffee tables, carpets, chandeleirs, hologram TV’s, little red cushions...
Each member of the immense race of little red cushions everywhere had been issued with a complementary platignum ball-point pen, just for the hell of speding some money. MacCushions had become so rich, selling cheeseburgers to the unsuspecting multitudes that their entire planet was even now tottering on its orbital path due to all the extra weight of the accumulated wealth. And that rotten supernova core wouldn’t be helping, either.
Every time a space traveller would land on this planet, he or she would always take one of the little red cushions back with him, unwittingly spreading the planets natural population throughout the Universes, and usually also ending up with a rather nice looking ball point pen.
MacCushions was also becoming so big- it’s annual profits were expressed as a one with four infinity symbols following- that they were coming across the need to widen their range from just cheeseburgers, for the universes supply of cheese was withering with demand far exceeding supply. Nobody had thought of carving up the Great Giant Hamster, for in Him was the best cheese of all.
After the discovery of the one-hundred and tenth element in the periodic table - Spam, MacCushions’ board of directors decided to adopt Spam as a new, innovative food product, in their muchly awaited comeback to the Cheese Shortage Crisis. 
“But it’s not food!” was the main objection, but as was immediately (and correctly) pointed out, nor was the Cheeseburger. After the delegation to the Spam Manufacturing planet had given the all-clear, two proud new burgers hit the range- MacSpam and (for dieters) MacSpam Lite.
Precisely one year after the release, the cushions home planet fell from its orbit and plunged into its sun. The resulting shift in their sun’s mass and with the additional gravitation effects eminating from the packaged supernova core, the entire solar system collapsed and formed one of the largest supernovas ever witnessed, containing enough energy to, say, replicate a time traveller into every dimension at the same time, forcing multiple copies of the same thing throughout every universe, probably with the effect of screwing up history completely.
Meanwhile, in some distant parts of the universes, some cushions still survive. Almost every MacCushions outlet is still in full service.
57.
“Excuse me?” Simon asked a nearby fellow as the six time travellers clambered out of the vehicle. “Sir, excuse me.”
There was three people dressed up in space suits to greet them. Why they were wearing space suits in this really most interesting tasting air was beyond Simon. A great cathederal rose behind the welcoming party. It appeared to be made of hand-hewn brick.
One of the space-suited men pointed to his helmet and shook his head. Simon reached for the helmet, yanking it off, thinking the man couldn’t hear him. The shocked spaceman wheezed a little and then fell over, gasping for air. Simon witnessed the air from his helmet mixing with the outside air, which was to say turning green and rolling away happily.
The other two men from the welcoming party yelled something and dragged the now twitching man back towards the big Cathederal hurriedly.
The X-Nerds were quite interested in this display.
“Must be some kind of welcoming ritual, don’t you think?” George surmised. The others just nodded and patted Him on the back, saying thing like ‘Yeah, right,’ and ‘Come on, we’d best be along, now’.
George followed like a lost dog.
Inside the great Cathederal they were confronted with more masked men. There were helmets hanging on a nearby rack and one of the suited men were motioning to their helmets, just like the first.
Simon pulled his helmet off too to ask what he was doing.
After a few more moments of confusion, the X-Nerds and George were wearing the helmets. They found they could understand everything around them; signs would be translated as they glanced at them, and the headpieces were fitted with radio communicators and little lights. The air was also more breathable; not as smelly.
“You are back,” a voice said in their ears. “You of course remember me, perhaps?”
The X-Nerds shook their heads- a stupid motion to attempt when wearing five kilograms around your head.
“Would it help if I said my name was Ahkn?”
Again the X-Nerds shook their heads.
“Are you sure? You left only one week ago.”
The X-Nerds turned their heads left and right in order to symbolise ‘No’. They even did it slowly.
“We’ve never ever been here before,” Karen explained. This caused a stir amongst the monks. Ahkn contemplated aloud at how this was so.
She asked him “When did you see us? Was He with us?” She motioned at George.
This time Ahkn shook his head. His head did not swerve and sway as did the X-Nerds. “No, there was another. He was shorter and, well, sorry to be offensive, but, uh...”
“Go right ahead.”
“Well, he was a complete and utter git, basically,” Some of the other monks agreed. Ahkn shook his head again, this time in sorrow that people like this actually existed.
“His name- would it be by chance ‘James’?” Simon asked of the man.
Ahkn pondered this, starting to wander towards a nearby door. A flame burned in a brazier next to the wall at thier right. “Hmmm. Yes, I think you may be right.”
“Hmmm,” Simon hummed. Simon was the best ‘hmmm’er anybody knew. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“Why yes, yes. I do believe it is.” Ahkn didn’t know the meaning of the word rhetorical. He thought that, No. Why the heck is that interesting. Stupid boy; it’s not interesting.
Simon glared at him as if he was on fire. Ahkn checked, just to be sure.

After a supper of fish (a bit dry, thought George) and little golden brown potato balls, the X-Nerds got down to business. Ahkn wasn’t told about George being a God just yet; he was still a little shaken about the multiple parallel universe thing. He made a mental note that the library here at the Academy needed a little updating. George was reading the book about the Flux, occasionally mumbling thing like ‘That’s a good idea’ or ‘I wonder why?’. In the end though, he inquired of Ahkn about the Flux’s taste. Ahkn suggested that it was similar to licorice, yet perhaps a little more acidic; hinting that the taste may be similar to a mix of tataric acid, tabasco and molasses. George started to feel hungry once more.
Finally Ahkn was told about George and ‘the God thing’. Unfortunately Ahkn had a weak heart and had a severe heart attack and died in horrible burning agony.
George restored him to life, though. Which was lucky, really, that he’d been there and all. It also kind of proved that he was in fact a God, doing the old restore-to-life parlour tricks. George also tardily restored the planet to full health, banishing the sulfuric and methanic to the oceans, not realising of course that this would make the fish taste horrible and also cause them all to die, float to the surface and release the gasses once more, anyway.
In fact, God was great for parlour tricks, and after Ahkn had had his third caffeine enhanced cup of a steamed coffee paste (which must have burned all the way down), proceeded to give the monks a rather special magic show- lightning balls, novae and vortexes, creating lifeforms from Play Skool brand (non-toxic) Plasticine- the works. It was a real screamer for there was not one monk left not screaming by the end.

The next day Errol awoke with the idea and went to find George straight away. He came back around half an hour later to find the X-Nerds still lazing about in their beds, being served a rich, work breakfast by silent monks in brown garb.
Karen sighed contentedly and rose from the straw-filled linen that was her bed. “This is the life, huh?” She said to the others. They all nodded and smiled. It was going to be a nice, slow day. “Where can I wash? I need to do womany things, too.” She asked a monk. He rubbed his bald scalp, then pointed towards a door. The holy man winked at Karen and grinned obtrusively.
Karen went off to clean up, sliding the heavy bolt in the door behind her. Just to make sure.
Errol had told them that it was a nice day outside, and that the Time machine was at this moment being polished and cleaned, inside and out, by the multitudes of brown clad monks. He also mentioned that these holy followers were good at doing this kind of thing. Besides, there was a God physically resident in the Cathederal and that kind of thing usually sparks up a bit of activity in the church world.
Errol didn’t tell the others, however, of the other things that he’d done that morning. They find out at the morning mass. And it’d be another problem solved, hopefully.
Breakfast was nice.

While Ahkn was doing some religious thing up the front, allegedly honouring George, Linda arrived. Then George was up the front doing Godlike things, bestowing bennedictions left, right and center, blessing everything from water to windmills, and having a ball. He’d put on a long flowing white gown (for sake of appearances) that flipped and wallowed in a zyphir breeze that nobody else could feel.
“What are you doing here?” Simon whispered to the God. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the other Lorna Major Academic Academy?”
“I know you,” She stated, recalling something. “Anyway, I needed a book on a certain type of computer. I tried the library at home but somebody’s borrowed the book I want.” Linda’s voice came back, low, kinda surprised too.
“What type of computer?”
“Oh, it’s a bit of an old one. You’re from Earth, so you’d probably know it. An AS400 made by somebody called ibn. Funny name, that, ibn. It’s hard to say and you Terrans usually have easy-to-say names.”
Simon grinned, and said “Like George, Randall and Linda, you mean?”
Linda almost growled at him.
Simon then said “What are you looking up that crap for? Anyway, it’s I. B. M. not I- B- N- ibn.”
“Oh,” Linda looked startled. “Oh, well then, they probably had it then.”
“And it isn’t somebody’s name. It’s the name of a company.”
“A what?”
What do you mean ‘What’? “Like a whole bunch of people. They form a group called a company and give the group a name. IBM have called the group IBM, obviously.”
“Oh. Then I didn’t need to come here after all,” Linda was just about ready to vanish again when she saw George. Her face went red and she stifled a laugh very badly. Some nearby novice monks turned about and wondered both why a woman was in the crowd and what she was doing wearing a terrible yellow and white golf outfit. Nevertheless, each quickly turned back in rapt adoration at the God up the front doing the bestowings and endowments.
“What in the seven thousand three hundred and thriteen hells is He doing?” She asked the X-Nerds.
“Cool, huh?” Simon replied.
“Yeah, and its the first time I’ve ever seen Him not wearing golf clothes,” Errol added.
Linda looked at the X-Nerds, wondering how they’d put Him in this mess. They had to have done it. “I’ve never seen Him in anything but His golf clothes, and that’s saying something. Is He wearing them underneath?”
“I certainly hope so. I’d hate for that breeze to blow that gown up if He’s not.” Errol pictured.
“Eugh!” Linda laughed. She decided to stick around to see what else happened.
After a pause long enough to let George bless a boaring looking brown cloth, Linda accused Errol that all this had been his idea. He was the one who was grinning the most.
Errol smiled mysteriously and aired “The best is yet to come!”.
They waited. George sprinked ‘holy’ water onto somebody’s head and let out a flowery little speech, all the while smiling that idiot smile of his.
Eventually, he tired of this little charade and drew himself up seriously. One withered old monk tried to persuade him to bestow more flowery blessings on his second cousins’ five year old cow who was just about ready to die anyway, but George glared him down. That same old monk never said another word. He could never drink milk again either. Or do up his shoelaces, but he’d never been able to do that anyway.
“It is to more serious matters that I turn your attention, Children.” George bellowed. 
“Children?” Linda scolded Errol, who shrugged. “I’d like to hear your story one day.”
Errol smiled and said “Look into my mind. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Er. You see. Well, the point is. It’s not that I. Well, actually. Er, no.”
“Oh. Well then, come here and I’ll tell you.” He took on the universal whispering stance.
Linda lent to him, listening intently, and then smiled knowingly after a few moments. The others wanted to know why, but by then both Errol and Linda were smiling that self-similar mysterious little smile, as if laughing without laughing. Errol handed Karen a piece of paper, its torn edge revealing only a handful of words: ‘There must be maintained a balance between...’.
“Bugger,” Karen hated these ‘little’ suprises.
George was doing the flowery speech up the front, going into the usual church things. “There is a great evil in the Universe,” He was saying, which was true, there was always a great evil somewhere. If there wasn’t, many film producers and writers and people in general would be most displeased. Every so often, the God pointed at a random monk. “And it is up to You to do something about it. There must be maintained a balance between order and chaos or chaos will rule and alst thy lives will be rend worthless.”
George waited. It had to come. Errol had figured out the notes on the pedestal before him and had even written in the cues of when to pause and when not to. It was very well planned, He thought.
He could see Errol sitting way up the back, but he couldn’t see Linda, and in fact, didn’t even know that she was there with them. He could see Errol’s hand dancing like a conductor leading the symphony. Finally, Errol swung a large stroke and somebody up the front dragged George’s attention away with a question.
“Right on time,” Errol whispered.
“But, O, uh, God, What can we, uh, I mean, us mere mortals do in Your aid to fight chaos? We haven’t got your powers and all that, yeah, uh.”
This was it; this was the big moment. And boy did He feel silly doing it.
“Moore loore poore laar jaar moor loore jaare karre vmore-” George chanted, waving his arms in such a way as to suggest that they all join in. Very slowly, his cheeks turned from now red back to normal as more of the monks stood and chanted the strange nonsense, each looking decidedly blank.
“Now My Children, I have placed a magic power on this, the Vox Multiformis, the Big Loud Song of Order and Power. Should it be so stoppered, the power will be broken and chaos will slay you all.” That certainly sounded mystical. “I charge thee all and all thy children and thy childrens’ children, and thy childrens’ childrens’- ah you get the idea- to keep this chant going, night and day, until the Universe is no more. Then shalt thee all have overcome the beast that is Chaos.”
Then somebody cheered but he was silenced by the thousands of now-frightened monks, chanting for their lives. George displayed his sense of the theatric by tearing off the silly looking robe, jumping off stage and pushing his way through the crowd to where the X-Nerds waited. Errol and Linda had already gone, talking and laughing.
“Let’s go outside, then, shall we?” George pushed them through the back door and out into the sunlight.
After a warm silence, George noticed Linda and went to her but Karen got to speak first. “Errol?” was what she said.
“Yes,” posed Simon, in the understanding that by not asking the inevitable question, Karen had asked the inevitable question. How zen of her.
Matthew found a chair, opened his ears to them all, and resolutely closed his eyes, basking happily in the warm yellow sunlight.
Errol pieced together the long winded explanation he’d been planning all morning, then shortened it to a shrug and the words “We did what we had to do. Lets go.”
In the end, over the dim din of the chant, Linda explained to the X-Nerds what Errol told had told her.
“Yeah, but what gives with the bestowing and thee’s and thou’s talk in there?” Karen asked.
“And that stupid flowing cape?” Linda added. “You know, The others will just love to hear about this one. I must say, you did look completely stupid up there.”
“Please. Don’t go spreading it around. I was talking to history as well as a thousand monks,” George whined.
“Ai was talking to hystory as weel as a thousand monks,” Linda imitated George’s silly voice.
“And please don’t tell anyone about the cape. I’d hate it to come into fashion.”
Linda looked michevous. “You know, one day I might need something from you. I have a very good memory, you know.” She left it hanging. George looked shocked and puzzled.
“Don’t worry. Unless you do something bad to me, I’ll not tell. However...” Linda trailed off and wandered over to Errol. Karen followed.
George said to Simon “What did I do to her?” Then he said to Matthew “I didn’t do anything to her, did I?”
Stuart said “Oh, but you might. You know, foreward planning and all that?” Then he glanced at George’s pained expression and walked over to where Linda now sat with the other two.
58.
In the darkness of the room James’ voice carried well. Stuart and Matthew could just make out his shape, a blot against the blackness.
“No, I saw them go past with some guards,” he was saying. “If I went out there, I’d be with them now.”
“So where’d they go?” Stuart whispered.
Boots again creaked past outside. When they’d faded, James said that they’d gone up some stairs at the end of the hall. That was the last he’d heard.
“And the others? Gorf and Frank and the rest. Have they been by?” Stuart interrogated.
“No. I thought I heard Frank yelling though. That’s when the guards came by. I don’t know what happened after that.”
Stuart sat down to think. Matthew was holding his head in his hands and moaning. He had a terrible headache and wanted to lie down on something soft.
“They’ll be looking for us, you know. Probably look in here, whatever this place is.”
Matthew groaned. “I’ll go.”
“What?”
“I dunno. Go lie in the hall and say that you left me or something. I need to lie down anyway.”
“You can’t do that!” Stuart started.
“Well, it has-” James started just as Matthew lay down on a carpeted floor.
“No, James. That’s just stupid. Matthew, you’ve probably got concussion or something. Are you listening to me?”
Matthew had passed out.
Stuart, frustrated, swore.
“I’ve never heard you swear before,” James changed the topic.
“I didn’t swear. Your word against mine. I know who I’d believe,” Stuart growled hotly.
James grimaced. “His plan has it’s merits, though. He’s unconscious now, so we put him out in the hall. They find him, and care for him-”
“Who say’s they’ll do that? They might as well just chuck him over the wall. You saw how they treated him before.”
“Yeah, but he’s a valuable prisoner. It they wanted to kill us, don’t you think they’d have done it back at the hut, instead of taking us here and locking us up in that bloody dungeon?”
Stuart glanced sullenly at James, who appeared to be taking the situation into hand well. “And follow them? What if there’s just a door at the top and they’re on the other side? What if they-”
“What if the world just blows up? What if there’s a fire? What bloody if. I’m doing it.” James was bigger than Stuart and easily flung him out of the way. He dragged Matthew by the legs to the door, opened it widely and pulled the floppy body out into the hallway. Then as Stuart was recovering, stomped off down the hallway and sat beneath the stairs, only slightly masked from view.
“I’m staying here,” Stuart mouthed. “Just in case.” The door closed to a fraction.
James did not say anything.

Stuart awoke to the noise of a scuffle and suddenly realised that he’d been sleeping. He was seated, head between his knees, in the dark room. The door was ajar and he figured that for the door to be opened that much more, somebody must have opened it. He now sat in the opposite corner of the room, stooped in shadow. If anybody had looked in, he must have looked much like an dark ornament or statue, sitting in an odd pose in a dark corner, not moving at all. From his view he could see that Matthew’s body had been removed from the hall and that from the amount of noise in the hall, James’ body was being removed at this instant.
Stuart shuddered as he heard a familiar sick, empty thud and the crack of flesh against a stone floor. He ended up hoping that it was not James, or at least not as final as it had sounded if it were.
He put his head back between his knees, his eyes wide, but not dareing to breathe.
A shadow moved across the doorway, but the door crackled on harsh metal hinges. The room resonated with the click that meant the door had been shut.
Stuart could hear a drum, perhaps music, perhaps a war drum or something. It was a full minute before he realised that it was his own heart, rushing inside his head, the pressure spurting past his ears.
It had gone very silent, save the now easing blood rush. He could no longer hear the screams from far below, nor the punctuated echo of leather boots on polished stone, nor the icy wind racing past the hollow stones of the wall. He had come to the eye of the storm.
Stuart was too scared to be frightened. He was also very, very alone.
59.
The nippy little Time vehicle zipped through space, down one great long stretch of the pan-galactic freeway. The occupants were happy because they’d been able to join the freeway at no charge, as Gods, those carrying Gods or vertically inclined churchmen got on free. At this very moment they were zooming along at insane speeds behing a big pink caddilac convertible at the end of a long line of space vehicles which also included a bright red VW omnibus, a white yuppie-carrying Mercedes Cruiser and a two-tone winnebego. Every now and then the procession would be passed by a white spark, a bad news carrier in the hyperluminal lane. Approaching on the event horizon the occupants of the time machine could see a huge ball of fire out from which stood a MacCushions sign and the rear end of a forty-kilometer long space freighter. The rear section of the spacecraft had splattered all over the freeway, and even now, the traffic was getting a bit tight. Another VW Microbus pulled in behind them, this one white with a blue stripe and large tinted windows. Heavy bassy techno music thumped out over the waves36, unmutable even by the silence of space.
About half an hour later, on God’s watch anyhow37, they passed the stricken MacCushions. Apparently, according to the live news broadcast, one of the new MacSpam Lite burger processing machines had exploded. The news reader (a little purple wart-like critter with multiple eyes on coil-like sticks) reported that other MacCushions franchises should check their MacSpam Lite machines due to a manufacturing fault- it appeared that if the burger bun were exposed to light at any stage through the steam-frying process (prior to the final few minutes in the oven), then there would be an instant nuclear fusion reaction within the bun crust, posing a potentially lethal environment to the whole planet concerned. But not to you, the buying customer. Scientists were now working on how to incorporate trilithium crystals into the burger to impede any possible reactions. There were suggestions of reversing the polarity of the steam fryers too.
The X-Nerds, George and Linda sat avidly watching the news broadcast on the little TV screen in the Time machine, as the news cameras always seemed to follow the best action; looking outside at the flames just didn’t seem intense enough. Bits of the planet were falling off everywhere and a white glow could be seen eminating from the base of the huge MacCushions sign. A moment later, the was a big explosion - bigger than the explosions in Star Wars even - and a white nuclear cloud vaporised the planet. On the TV it looked most excellent, enhanced, brilliantly choreographed. Ouside the windscreen it looked somehow unreal, dull.
Anyway, the show was over and the occupants of the time machine decided that it was probably time to put a few planets between themselves and those horrible, dirty, arrogant, post-modernistic, techno freaking hippies in the van behind them. Just for the hell of it, the little white machine actually indicated- left- and then turned right into the superluminal lane. By effectivly using their time shifting capabilities, the X-Nerds and the two Gods and their time machine actually arrived at the other end of the universe before they’d even left this end.
Which was to say that they’d gone very, very fast.

“The next problem is finding James,” Simon said to the others as Linda got out. They had arrived at the Lorna Minor World Deisgn Institute, a classic modular superstructure of steel and earth strung together with billions of kilometers of metal twine, cables and magnetic force, and had docked at one of a million docking stations. Bits of mountains and oceans floated around in the strange void, not floating off, just hovering menacingly, and ready formed planets hung noiseless nearby, awaiting their departure.
“Just look for the little white fluffy packing foam things,” Karen said.
“Huh?”
“These things,” She produced one of the unoffeding little items from her pocket and dropped it onto the metal floor. It wafted away on an extrememly light breeze only to be caught on a strategically placed corner. George picked it up and handed it to Simon, who put it in his pocket. “I’ve seen them in a few places. I have no idea where they came from but I remember finding them in that room beside Mikal’s dimension.”
“Where?” Asked both George and Linda.
“Never mind. Just someplace we’ve all been in a different time.”
“Oh. When?” persisted the male God. “Is it some time I know?”
“Never mind, I said. Look, the point it, that if we can somehow home in on these silly little through time then we’ve basically found him.”
Nobody spoke for a moment, then Linda said “Nope. You can’t do it. At least not with this machine.”
There went another moment when nobody spoke, then Simon, depressed, said “Well. That’s that then. What’s next on the list?”
After a moment shuffling through papers inside the glovebox, Stuart pulled a sheet of bleached white paper from his top pocket and fingered his way through the notes scrawled on his side. The other side contained a hand sketched image (in red pen) of the space/time craft. It’s quality was very low.
“Ah yeah. The Flux Scalis thing. We’ve got to bag it and put it back on Lorna Minor’s Bio research moon, or something like that,” he read.
Phlup! Simon was phlupping his lips again, a sound not at all similar to opening a refigerator door. “Might as well get going then,” he finished.
“What? You’re not going to stick around for a while and have a look at the World Design Institute. You know, their research into five dimensional physics, although obsolete, is quite interesting.” Linda was saying as Simon clambered back into the spaceship.
Simon didn’t want anything to do with five dimensional physics, especially considering it was obsolete and completely unprovable. However as expected, the others all wanted to go see everything. Simon grudgingly agreed to tag along, but kept complaining about his leg. It was healing as it should, perhaps a little quicker than it would if he were a unionist recieving medical benefits.
The group of seven were now walking through a round glass-like tunnel floating above thousands of kilometers of void. The sense of vertigo along the two-kilometer length of this particular link tube was astounding, especially due to the fact that although the other side of Lorna Minor was well over a light-year away through relative space-time and the edge of the universe, they could all quite clearly see the structure and people wandering through the glass-like tubes on unknown errands.
“I think I’ll be sick,” Simon complained. Seeing his moment, he hastened to add “And my leg hurts.”
They wandered unhindered through a series of grey rooms and more tunnels until finally they came across a subway-like train station.
The gods were allowed free travel on the train, but any form of payment was requested of the X-Nerds. Simon, unthinking, removed the little white peanut of foam from his pocket an handed it to the ticket officer. The little female behind the glass completely freaked for no apparent reason and handed them their tickets. Then she fled the train station screaming incoherently.
“Oh. What’d you give her?” Linda asked.
“That little foam baubel thing,”
Linda looked impressed. “You’ve just set her up for life, you know.”
“How’s that. People like little peices of packing foam around here?”
“It’s not that,” Linda told them. “Here at Lorna Minor, people deal in energy and bank energy and the whole systems a giant energy generating system. The whose system, you could say, is made of energy. What you gave her wasn’t made of energy, it was made of matter, and you would not believe the amount of energy it required to create an atom of matter.”
“Yeah?” Simon wished he’d kept the little white thing.
“No,” Linda laughed. “You actually gave her about twenty bucks worth and those tickets are worth about five cents each. You got ripped off big time!”
Simon looked at his feet. “Then why did she run off screaming?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps she was a schizo or something,” Linda smiled and stepped onto the train. The X-Nerds followed and the train buzzed foreward down the glass tube.

Vertigo has nothing on this train ride.
Imagine sitting in a train, staring out the window at a landscape that hardly ever changes perspective, with the feeling that there is nothing below you for the next, say billion kilometers, except a big, dark abyss, and that you are tumbling helplessly into it. Then imagine feeling this for an entire two-hour train ride, trapped in a little glass bubble with only a sweet-sounding voice-over coming from a speaker that you can’t turn off telling you about how great a deal you’ll get when you invest in a planet made by the World Design Institute. Over and over and over.
Then imagine the shock you get when you realise that you are actually going up and you dock in a port that you didn’t even see approaching, and are tossed negligently out of that same little glass bubble into a room with no texture or colour.
It can be quite strenuous, to say the very least.
But imagine what comes next; a non-dimension at the border of the universe; a kind of fuzzy greyish not unlike an untuned trinitron TV showing rgb static seen from four hundred metres. And depending on how you ‘land’, your physical dimensions become subjective to your own physical reality and you can see everyone else but cannot interact with their physical realities, and therefore tend to pass through them, walk normally on a different physical plane and discover new and horrfying things about perspective that you’d never even dreamed about.
The only thing worse than imagining these things is actually having to go through them.
As did the X-Nerds and two golf clad gods.
After bumbling around in the grey dimensionlessness for a moment or two, the occupants of the bubble train stepped out of a cement wall into a tasteful and well furnished office. Out the window was a beautiful vista of a golden sunset of glacier covered peaks, and it appeared that they were now standing around forty stories above the ground, wherever that was.

The X-Nerds looked around, and back. Behind them lay the cement wall of the office, hard and cold. To their left, two hand-carved oak doors and a bookshelf. To their right, the window. Ahead, a desk and a large chair, facing away, puffing out smoke.
Technically, the smoke wasn’t coming from the chair, but from the presumed owner, sitting back in it, staring up at the rows of books aligning the walls of the office.
When the smoking chair turned38, the woman sitting in it gagged, coughed, spluttered then stood up and coughed again.
“How the hell did you get in here?” She exclaimed once she’d recovered from her raking cough. She appeared to be in her very early twenties, blonde, and was, how to put it? Top Notch B-Euatiful.
But Stuart had already rushed foreward: He knew who this was!
“Amy!” He cried. Karen’s jaw dropped.
60.
Darkness filled the air with its cold prescence, reeking acrid ozone through a grill in the stone walls. Chitter filled the crevices and holes as rats and other bloodthirsty animals fought and burrowed through the seemingly endless walls, scratching and scathing at the impenetrable rock. In places, foul smelling liquids seeped and oozed down the walls to pool and stream across the floor, dissapearing down the strange grills set ocassionally and unskillfully into the wall. Spider webs turned and tossed dead in the air.
Malevolent eyes stared up through a rusted grill in the floor, screaming out in twisted pain, not making a sound.
Though a chill wind, a voice edged down from a high place, a madness of twisted charms and spiteful well-wishes ordering everything to a flaming and bloody hell.
A huge iron-clad door stood at one end of the keep, muffling a long rumble of sound.

Stuart crept. He would be discovered soon, he knew that, as he was drawing near to the place where the voices originated. He’d started hearing the voices at the top of the first set of stairs, and he’d also heard Karen scream. There was blood on the ground.
 Stooped in the dread silence the fortress castle offered, Stuart moved from shadow to shadow, chasing echos and following instincts. Twice now he’d ended up in the wrong spot; stairs leading down or locked doors. In a remote part of his brain, a little process posed that this was one of the best designed castles he’d seen in real life or in computer games and that he’d have to remember it.
And he’d remember it, all right. There was nothing that could make him forget.
He stopped. Voices came from the left, then the right, and somewhere far those leather boots creaked against the stone cobble. He could hear something breathing and it was not him. He turned, but he could see nothing but the dark shadows.
There was a hand over his mouth and his eyes were wide. Not long after that, everything became an aching blur as the horrible taste of ammonia and some other chemical filled his mouth.

The guard came to attention and saluted. Far away at the other end of the cathederal-like throne room, in a shroud of smoke and cloth stood a man warming his hands on a red fire. His back was to the room but he dismissed the guard without turning.
The four X-Nerds and James stood huddled together about halfway along the room, silent. Each faced the distant man, not dareing to tear their eyes from him.
The room was warm.
His voice was hard, yet somehow familiar, as if one heard in a dream a long time ago.
“Do you mock me with you prescence?” He asked without turning.
“Where are the people we came with?” Simon spat defiantly. His wounded leg stung but there was no time for that now.
“They are, shall we say, safe? Yes. But, young brat, why should you care for the ones that wounded you?” The strange man rolled his ‘r’s slightly, as if English was not his natural language.
He was well informed, thought Simon. Yet what was the extent of his knowledge?
“We choose the lesser of two evils,” Simon stated flatly.
The man laughed then stopped. Suddenly he spun around and strode towards them menacingly.
“Then I am Evil? Am I evil? Have I not welcomed you here into my home, offered you shelter and food?” He spoke
Simon continued to speak for the group. “Do you sleep in the dungeons? You certainly treat your guests with an esteem matching your command.”
“So young and yet so bitter.” The man was within five metres. “I note a new arrival in the group, yet one is missing. Tell me how this can be so.”
Since nobody spoke, the strange man requested the guard to re-enter the room.
“Tell me, Captain. How is it that six prisoners left the dungeon yet only five appear before me, two of which, I might add, need medical attention and one in need of amenities?” He smiled at Karen, who appeared gracious, stunned.
The guard faltered, then told the man about the incident in the hallway. The guard was dismissed, however the commanding man did make a note of his report in a small notebook.
“Forgive me. My name is Luther. You probably remember me, yes?”
“I’ve not seen you before, that’s for sure,” Simon reproached.
Then Luther had a gun in his hand, a small, black chrome semi-automatic pistol. He was pointing it directly at Simon. “Do you remember me now?”
“No,” Simon confessed, hoping that it was the right answer. He was nervous, as would be anyone stareing down a loaded barrel.
“State you name, I.D. plate and mission,” the evil man gruffed.
“What?” Simon’s left hand fell to his side, where instantly he could feel Karen’s warm hand clutching it in absolute fear.
Luther put the gun away, into the top left of his jacket, then spun on his right heel. “Interesting,” he murmered. After a moments pause, he once again summoned the Captain of the Guard, and requested him to escort the ‘guests’ to a safe but comfortable room. The order was followed instantly.
Behind them, the X-Nerds could hear the man summoning their origional captors Frank, Gorf and the others.

Stuart blinked the blurriness from his eyes and stared into the darkness. At this point he could make out the large shapes of pipes and taps. A small electric emergency light bathed the room in an ugly blood-red glow. There were people in there too.
“Things aren’t what they seem, young lad,” said one of the shapes. Suddenly there were hands reaching out for him, tearing him from the uncomfortable security of his daze. A moment or so later, his vision had cleared and the ringing in his ears stopped. His eyes were quickly adjusting to the red light and he could make out a small but technologically advanced room lined with dim lights and computer monitors.
“We saw your party arrive,” that same voice said again. “Everyone else has been taken to Luther.”
Stuart shook his head at the mention of the name, not daring to speak.
“He’s master of this wretched fortress, living in the dark ages and tearing all of us back with him. Damn him. From what we’ve heard over the waves, your party is a hot topic. The Man seems to think you’re some kind of threat to his rule.”
“The Man?” Stuart’s voice sounded weak, frightened.
“Luther. Come, you’re with friends, here. We must talk quickly as he’ll be searching for you. How’d you escape anyway? He’s got guards just about everywhere.”
Stuart walked around in a tight circle, breathing the humid air deeply. “Have you got anything to drink? Water or something?”
“Get him some water,” the man said to somebody else nearby. The person hesitated but dissapeared. “I’m Karl, by the way. We’re the good guys here.”
The other person came back with a steel mug full of warm water. “It’s still hot,” he said. “We boil the water down here. Never know what’s in it.”
Stuart drank half and set the mug down ona huge valve nearby. “Where am I?”
“In the castle. Under the castle. What’s it matter? You don’t need to know.”
In the background came the noise of somebody typing at a computer keyboard. A long haired woman sat with her back to them, labouring over the technology, reading through lines of strange numbers and symbols pouring across the small green screen. “The kids are in a guest room and He’s with the others now.”
“Are the kids all right?” the man asked the woman, not smiling.
“It seems so,” the woman at the computer read through a few more lines of the strange character set onscreen. “It appears he got them in there and then sent them to that room without interrogating them.”
“That’s not good. How’s the guard? Can we get them out?”
“Why’s that not good news? He hasn’t done anything to them yet, has he?” Stuart asked.
“That’s right. ‘Yet’ is the important word though. This is Karen, by the way.”
Stuart looked at the computer operator and smiled sadly. “The girl in my group is called Karen.”
“Right. She your girl or something?”
“Huh! No. Just a good friend, that’s all.”
“Somebody to miss,” Karl said.
“Karl!” scolded Karen. “Think what the kid’s been through.”
Karl grimaced. “Yeah, sorry kid.”
“Stuart,” Stuart introduced himself, then stuck out his hand. Karl shook it and smiled curtly.
“Well? Why’s The Man want to see you so bad? What do you know that’s got him so worried?”
“What? How do I know? I don’t know.”
“Hey, kid. You must know something if he’s gone out back across the fields to get you and your group. Where you from?” 
Stuart paused; was it right to just tell anybody that ‘Hey, I’m a time traveller trying to save the universe’? It sounded so unreal, so dumb. If he did say that anyway they’d probably just laugh and think he was just some kid that got mixed up in somebody elses problem. He took another sip of water from the steel mug.
“I’m not from around here. Where is here, anyway?” he added.
“There’s a good one, kid. Where is here? Have to pin that one up.” He looked at Stuart and saw that he really didn’t know. “Hell kid. Where are you from? You’re mixed up big time in some god awful world war and you don’t even know where the hell you are. Do you know those people you came in with?”
Stuart shook his head. “We’d crashed through their roof and they took us prisoner. Simon got shot in the leg and then we were saized by this Luther or whatever his name is and brought here.”
Karl spun around. “Bloody hell. You’re just some kids messing around in a friggin’ war zone. I thought you were something special, something big.” The man had started to pace, but on his third step spun and said “Wait. You said you crashed through the roof.”
“That’s right. Came nearly right through it.”
“That must be it. What were you in? Some kind of car or a tank or something?”
Stuart decided to go for it; they could only laugh and he had nothing to lose. “A spaceship.”
There came a sudden, prolonged silence. The computer bleeped and carried on, and liquid gurgled in the overhead pipes, but otherwise, nobody even breathed. Stuart could hear the blood pulsing past his ears again.
Karl rubbed his chin and pursed his lips, his eyes gone wide. Then he spoke. “You’re telling me-”
“Yes. A spaceship. A big white ceramic and chrome spaceship. Virtually indestructable too. We crashed upside down through the roof of whoseever it was’s house.” Stuart told the truth.
“Deep,” Karen said. She turned back to the keyboard and continued to type, but her focus was still on the boy Stuart. She could see him in the reflection of a computer’s screen.
Karl wiped his brow. “Damn deep. Come with me, kid.” He guided Stuart through a door and down a pipe-encrusted corridor. Spider webs dangled from everything, all bathed in that horrid red light.
After passing through the door at the end, Stuart was confronted by a room full of unclean looking men and women sitting around a hot stove. All were stareing right at him.
“Tell them what you told me, kid,” Karl told him. Stuart told them and the room was wrapped in more silence. None disputed his claim.
“Tell us more about this craft. Why would The Man want you? Is there something special about your particular spaceship?”
Stuart seemed suprised. “You don’t mind that I’m an ‘alien’?”
“Hell, kid. Half of us got here in the same way- crashing or replying to fake distress calls. Most of us are in some way familiar with some kind of spaceship.”
Stuart relaxed. Perhaps he could talk a little more freely here. He had made up his mind not to tell them about his real reasons for being in the spaceship just yet. “All right then. What we arrived in-”
“There’s others?” somebody asked.
“Yeah,” answered Karl. “Five else of ’em got brought in with Frank’s lot. Keep going, kid.”
“Okay. Anyway, we arrived in out spaceship and crashed into the house. The spaceship’s, uh, I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s also a time machine.”
The room echoed with laughter. Karl silenced them, but he also looked as dubious as the rest.
“No, I’m serious. The ship’s probably the most advanced peice of engineering in the Universe. It’s capable of hyperluminal travel and time travel, although we haven’t quite mastered the time travel bit.”
Some of the ruffians had heard of or experienced hyperluminal travel and so this knowledge was passed on through the others. Still, the atmosphere of the room still seemed unsatisfied with the claim that the ship could travel through time. If it were from the future, why hadn’t anyone else come back through time.
“Why else would Luther want us so badly?” With this question, Stuart singlehandedly convinced ninety percent of the crowd that his tale was in fact truth.
The question he’d wanted to evade, of course, came. “Where’d a kid like you get a ship like that?”
Stuart tried to think of a way to keep God’s name out of this. It would sound so rediculous to say that a whole bunch of misfit gods in goofball clothing made the spacecraft.
Eventually, he said “It has to do with the monks at the Lorna Major Academic Academy. We’re kind of on a mission that has to do with them. It’s a holy thing.”
“Kind of-?” Karl asked.
“Yeah.” Stuart wasn’t going to say anything more. “I don’t want to go into it, it’s too wierd and I’m not sure I can trust you with the informaion.”
Karl looked humorously at Stuart. “Can’t trust us with the information.” Then to the crowd “I think we’ll accept what this kid says as true. Whatever the real story is, we can’t afford not to. And nobody asks him further of his history or future, whatever that means. But it appears that these five-”
“Six,” Stuart interrupted with the correct figure, his eyes elsewhere, calculating.
“-then six people have to be trusted. We can’t let that rabid dog Luther get his hands on that machine. What that’d do for us and indeed the entire universe is, well... who knows?” Karl went on further to make preparations to rescue Frank’s team from Luther and then to start to think how to free Stuart’s friends and silence Luther once and for all.
Stuart was taken to a squat but functional room where he was shown a bed and facilities. Then, once again, he was left alone, this time safe in a cramped but welcome room, somewhere deep underneath a medieval-like castle, whose cold purple-grey stones only added to the torn and sorrowful landscape.
Somewhere, a sorrowful owl hooted its haunting song and drifted away on a wind that wasn’t even there.
61.
“Whoa!” Amy cried, her head in a spin. “Run that bit by me again.”
Stuart was rushing to tell Amy of all the experiences they’d had. Karen sat with him, keeping a close eye on them both. She’d said she didn’t want to go with the others earlier, but Stuart was beginning to suspect that that wasn’t the real reason for her wish to remain behind. He couldn’t think of another reason.
Simon and the others had gone off somewhere with one of Amy’s associates to peer out into the works of the planet building firm and marvel at the wonders around every corner. It was about time to have a good break and settle down for a couple of days in real accomodation and relax. George and Linda had meandered off on their own paths, mumbling and chatting something about tees and fairways.
“George and Linda are Gods. We picked them up at the start of the Universe and at the Lorna Major Academic Academy before the Celestial City was made and then in a roundabout way came here,” Stuart smiled his nerdy little smile.
Amy was still unsure about ‘the god thing’. She’d been raised an athiest, or more precisely, ignorant of the existance of gods. Up until the point that Stuart first implanted the idea that a giant hamster created the universe (“Unghk-g”) when trying to express that he couldn’t stay due to something important (“Unghk-h”) that he had to do elsewhere, Amy had believed that the Universe and all it contained was the purpose and result of a catastrophic explosion that was otherwise known as the Big Pop. She though she’s known that asking silly questions like ‘What came before the Big Pop’ was futile and the answer was, as always, ‘Nothing. Anyway, what does it matter?’. Still, when Stuart had placed the germ of thought in her mind that she could blame it all on an anomaly known as ‘God’ (or as was the case, The Giant Hamster), someone who was mysterious and withdrawn and also someone who’d she’d probably never get a chance to meet, she had decided to take the easy way out and blame the existance of the Universe and all it contained on God and hope that He knew all the why’s and what if’s of everything. Now she’s met God. Two God’s actually, and now knew that they were just as stupid as the next person and didn’t have a clue. Her very life’s foundations were crumbling and apparently she was suffering a bit of a nervous breakdown.
“Never mind that, Amy,” said Stuart, placing his left hand on Amy’s shoulder affectionately. “Forget it. Tell me- us- how you got here. How long have you been here?”
Karen nudged Stuart seemingly neglectfully and Stuart released Amy’s soft shoulder and sat back in his seat.
Amy gathered herself from maudlin thoughts and stared kindly at Stuart. Karen bit her upper lip and reached for a glass of water, her eyes calculating, narrow. Finally she excused herself, saying that she needed to find a bathroom and freshen up.
“You don’t look a day older than when I saw you last,” Amy said to Stuart as Karen closed the door.
“No. I’m probably only a couple of months older. A week. I don’t know. My watch has stopped. I lost track of time a fair way back.” Stuart looked at his watch, the black case surrounding a blank grey screen. “You look about five years older.”
Amy turned away slightly, slightly shocked. He meant well, she thought, and probably didn’t realise what he’d said. She smiled and turned back. “Thankyou, I guess.”
“How long have you been here. Are you in charge, or something?”
“Gosh no. I only work here. Cheap labour,” She paused, recollected. “About the time that you first found me-” She paused in memory. “-things started to happen that I didn’t understand. People started appearing and dissapearing just by themselves with no warning. I had a pet wolf then. He was loving, careing, young. One day he was just running along through the grass chasing a bearcat and pop! Then he just wasn’t there anymore. Between step.”
A thoughtful silence.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Stuart blinked at the blonde.
“Thankyou. He was a good friend. Anyway, one day a big object fell out of the sky onto the ground and we all rushed over to see what it was. Then I was taken inside the ship and that was the last time I saw home. They brought me here and I’ve been working here ever since drawing pictures and words for them to make into planets.”
Stuart thought for a while, sipping on his glass of water. “Do you miss home?”
Amy spun about in her chair to stare again at the bookcase. There was a long pause, whilst Amy silently sobbed in the memory of her family.
“I miss my mum and dad,” Stuart mumbled sadly. “I want to go home too.”
Then both Amy and Stuart stood, crossed the barrier that was the table, and hugged each other, each thinking of their own families and that safe, warm place they called home.
And, of course, it was at this point that Karen re-entered the room with her mouth open, ready to speak. For an enduring moment her mouth remained open as she stared openly at the embracing couple. Then she flared hotly “Well. I never!”
She slammed the door and her footsteps could be heard stamping away. Something smashed.
There was a stunned silence. Stuart disembraced Amy and started at the door. Then he turned back to the older woman and genuinely puzzled, asked “Do you know what that was about?”
Amy however pushed Stuart to an arms length away and surmised him. “You don’t get it do you?” She said evenly.
“What?” Stuart puzzled.
“Uh, never mind. You wait here,” Amy pushed him back into the chair and pounded off through the door after Karen, the wooden door slamming behind her. There was the glib sound of leather-based shoes walking carefully over thin, broken ceramic.
Stuart poured the rest of the water down his throat then sat stareing out the window at the beautiful vista, wondering what the hell was going on.

Simon opened the door. His host was ushering them along at a fair speed, and they hadn’t had that much chance to actually see the planet being engineered.
“Grag,” Simon asked the blue-skinned alien herding them along the hallways. “Do we actually get to see the planet being built?”
“Next door,” Grag replied. He was right. Through the next door was a long glassy tunnel out through a dark grey construction zone. The touring X-Nerds could see great arcs of blue electricity falling from one side of the construction zone to the other. They wandered slowly for about a kilometer along the see-through tube, then stopped to view the dangerous work outside.
“What’s this do, then?” Errol asked the guide.
Grag pointed to where the lightning was striking. “See there? It hits a barrier there and builds up energy. When there’s enough, it releases the energy but confines it within a gravitational field and then the field compresses and collapses. This causes the high movement of the energy to slow down bump into each other. Then a big lump of matter falls out and down there-“ he motioned downwards to a red-looking magma bubble. “Then it’s just poured onto the planet where it’s needed and the mountains are formed. Watch.”
The X-Nerds watched a mountain range being formed. It was a beautiful sight although it all happened very fast. First, the bolt of lightning stopped and then a large white ball of fire droped down into the magma pit. Then the lightning bolt started again and the process continued. Everything was just so big. It was fascinating.
“Obviously, there’s a bit more to it than that. Now, down here you will find the core supply...” The X-Nerds followed their guide Grag down a nearby staircase and away from the arcing electricity.

Linda and George sat calmly in a nice looking office. Holograms of planets hung everywhere, each a little different. George noticed one planet etched with a giant yellow ‘M’ shape, golden arches, if you will, and wondered who it was for.
Some doors opened and a pleasant-looking man walked briskly in, taking a seat at his own pace. He smiled and greeted the pair in his office with a calm delight.
After the usual bout of small talk and a nice cup of tea, George said “We’d like to see your range of planets.”
“Aah, to business is it then? All right,” the man sat back in his chair comfortably. “Now then, before we get started examining the ranges, would this be for advertising use? We can do great deals if you agree to let us put our name on the planets as well.”
Linda looked a George. George replied “No. It’s for personal use, actually. We’d like a large planet, not too mountainous or oceanous. Just a nice rolling world, grassy and with enough water to look pleasant. And some trees, too. Sand bunkers, that kind of thing.”
The man hesitated and stared at the sign on his desk. It read Henry Fblodd, Phd. Engineering, Sales. “I don’t get many personal buyers these days. Might it be too much to enquire as to the purpose of this planet?”
“Golf,” said both the gods simultaneously.
“Golf? Hitting a ball with sticks for absolutely no reason at all? Are you mad?” the man, whose name appeared to be Henry Fblodd, sat forward suddenly. Then he realised that these two old people probably were mad and that it was none of his business. He was here to do sales. Sales was his thing. He was a Sales Engineer Phd, for god’s sake. He apologised and sat back once again.
“We’d like to see a range, please,” George stated. “And a price, too.”
After the front-end man, Henry Fblodd, has left the room, Linda asked George if this was the right thing to do.
“Of course. We’ll let them take their time. You know, come by every hundred years or so and make sure it’s right. Then we’ll be able to put it up somewhere, maybe even out near my place and retreat there after everything is over and have a tournament or something. Winner gets to keep the planet. That kind of thing.”
“Mmm,” Linda finally agreed. “But it was your idea. It might not be allowed, you know.”
“Linda, we’re Gods. We’re in control. We can do what we like, and what we like is playing Golf. Right? Who’s not going to allow it? The Creator? Has anyone actually ever seen him?”
“But-”
Henry opened the door and walked back in. “I think I have just what you are looking for. But there is a waiting list, you do understand?”
“Yes. We were hopeing that you’d actually take your time. You know, touch it up a bit more than usual.”
“Sure. I understand. Right. Would you like another cup of tea?”
“No thanks,” Linda replied. George shook his head.
“Oh, okay. All right then, about the price. We usually require some kind of downpayment first, that is after you’ve decided on a planet and a style. We need to see your credit details and a few other things, but don’t worry. Our accountants are the finest in the universe and will patch you up for that in no time.
“Anyway, lets not discuss the price.”
“No,” interrupted Linda, glancing sideways at George. “Lets.”
The Sales Engineer sat down cautiously. This is all wrong, he though. People didn’t wan’t to talk about the price. They wanted results. It’s a test. It’s something to do with my Phd. Sure it is.
“Yes. The price. Uh-”
“If it’s no trouble, we’d like to pay the full price now.” George smiled at the confused man. Linda, however, glared at George.
“Uh huh. Yes,” Henry was very much taken aback. “I’ll just go, uh, get the accountants then, shall I? Yes. I’ll do that. Yes, haha, be calm.”
Henry Fblodd, Phd, Sales Engineer for the Lorna Minor World Design Academy fled the room screaming incoherently.

Stuart jerked his head around as the doors snapped open again. His chair spun with him.
“Karen-” He started but was cut off.
“I’m so sorry, Stu,” She never called him ‘Stu’. What was wrong? Why was she sorry? Where was Amy? What was that flowery smell?
“I wasn’t thinking when I came in before,” Karen closed the door and wandered over the where Stuart sat. She reached out and gently pulled him out of the chair, smiling. She surfaced the back of his hand with her thumb.
“Oh. Uh, I never-” Stuart tried again, but this time his words were not allowed to come out, as suddenly his lips were covered by Karens. He pulled away long enough to say “Oh my.”

“You should see the place,” Simon commented to Amy. “It’s so big; and wierd.”
“I have! I live and work here,” She laughed back.
The X-Nerds had just walked in from an elevator to find Amy all alone in one room.
“Where’s Stuart?” Matthew asked, looking around. “And Karen?”
Amy paused, smoothly gravitating towards a door protectively. “Uh, they’re around. Went for a walk, I would suppose. Where’s the other two- George and Linda? They went with you, didn’t they?” Very cool, one part of her brain stated.
“No.”
“Oh. I wonder where they are.”
“They’re not here? They could be anywhere!”
“Yes, I know.” Amy looked to the side in concentration.
The door behind Amy opened and Stuart led Karen out by her right hand. “Oo,” Stuart hollowed, looking around at the other X-Nerds with his eyebrows high. Karen was her head down a little and didn’t let go of Stuarts’ hand.
Simon raised his right eyebrow, grinning, and nobody said a word.
Amy broke the elation. “There’s someone comeing up the elevator. I wonder who it is.”
“It’s probably George and Linda, looking for a golf course,” Errol mused.
“Yeah. Why a golf course?”
“Never mind. It’s a long story.”
But when the elevator bell binged and the doors opened, it wasn’t George or Linda. Everything very suddenly went extremely quiet and still.
62.
Stuart awoke again, but this time to the silence of the pipes. They weren’t really silent, as water or some other liquid sloshed through occasionally, but there was no other noise.
He swung around from his bunk and let his feet rest on the floor.
Everything was too silent. He couldn’t hear anyone ouside, nor the computer up the hall bleeping and bipping as it had done all through the past night, if it had been night, anyway, as he had seen no windows.
After releiving himself in the adjoining bathroom, he wandered out to find his shoes and clothes. He found his clothes but no shoes.
There was a dead rat beside the door.
Stuart became nervous, frightened. He threw the door open and heard more silence. He turned right and ran up the passage towards the computer center he’d been in the night before. It was dark, silent, empty. The computer equipment was smashed and ruined beyond repair.
And it was so so quiet. Stuart’s stomach gurgled and the blood thumped behind his skull. It was the silence of death, but he wasn’t dead. He ran back along the passage, looking for any signs of life.
Nothing.
He knew he’d go insane if there weren’t any sound, any movement. He welcomed the sounds of the pipes when a flush of water gurgled its way past, a hissing, shoshing noise. A noise. A sound.
He could not find any stairs. There was, however, an old door, but it had been locked or bolted from the other side. He’s need a battering ram to break it down, and even that would have been slow. But he didn’t have a battering ram. He didn’t have anything.
He thought he’d heard a slight shuffle at the dark end of the hall, the end that housed the now-defunct computer equipment and within a moment, Stuart had located a door painted to look like a part of the wall. There was no handle and no visible hinges, suggesting a one way door that you had to push. It would not budge. If he only had a battering ram or something heavy, maybe he could knock it down.
In every room, the chairs and tabled were large, cumbersome, and very heavy, as most were either long thick planks or solid iron. He had nothing to bash at the door with.
Water sloshed by once more in the thin pipes above him.
Stuart screamed with frustration, then got an idea. He could only just reach the pipes on the ceiling, but only just was enough. He grabbed a firm double hand hold on a two inch pipe and jerked his body up and down. The pipe did not even budge. He tried a different pipe. This time, the pipe seemed to bend a slight amount, but that was all. On his fourth go, the pipe he was jerking on broke free. Pressurised water hosed forth from the uncomplete pipe.
Unfortunately, on the way down, the pipe Stuart was now clutching clipped the light, shattering the blood-red bulb.
Everything went very dark. Stuart clutched the pipe still, water gushing down all over him, sloshing all over the floor.
“Damn it,” he shouted. Then he yelled his frustration, swinging the two-inch pipe in a wide arc. It struck the wall before it should have, jarring his arm badly. He dropped the pipe into the absolute darkness and fell to the wet floor weeping like a small child, in the darkness, alone. He felt a peice of the shattered light peirce mid torso, but he now didn’t care as red warmth spread over his left side. Water was freely flowing about him and starting to pool and trickle away down the corridor.

There was a light seeping up from the watery abyss. It wasn’t a bright light, but any light is something in a totally black room. Stuart was waist deep in the cold water, still gushing in at a tremendous rate, filling the rooms with its black wetness. The floor was well waterproofed, and hardly any water was escaping under the two sealed doors he’d found. He hadn’t found his shoes and twice he’d felt something cut his feet, which would be bleeding slowly but surely uderwater. The cut on his side had stopped bleeding, but his wet shirt was sticking to the cut, making it hard and painful to move.
“Help!” He screamed once more. He knew it would be no good. His noise was mostly drowned out by the rushing of water. He’s found the two-inch pipe again and had a bash at the painted door, but it didn’t work. His only worry now was that the water would be reaching the computer equipment very soon now, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it was still live. If it were- well. He was hoping that it wasn’t.
That light, though, filtering up from somewhere below. That had promise. He clutched the metal pipe, took a deap breath and-
Underwater, the sound of gurgling, splashing water filled his ears. He shuffled down towards the light and saw that it was a small clear panel under some carpet on the floor. He went up for air.
Just after dropping below the surface once more the sound came, amplified even by the water. Boom! Boom! Boom! A slow but sure rumble similar to a distant thunderstorm, or the missle fire one sees on the news every night about some foriegn country. Always a foriegn country. Stuart popped up for air as the booming sound continued. It was clearer above the water. There were audible explosions associated with the heavy rumbling sounds, as if artillery were shelling the castle.
His shirt was stinging his side and in a desparate, painful moment, he tore a hole around the wound, leaving part of his cotton shirt clotted into his side. He took a great deep breath and ducked once more below the rippling water into the shroud of frightening darkness. He tore back the carpet and light burned his eyes. The floor here was like glass or perspex, and he was stareing down over a three-metre drop into roaring light over a strange room. Using the awkward pipe, he bashed and thrashed at the floor. Suddenly there were round shiny faces below him and he let out a burst of air in fright, which bubbled to the surface. He followed the bubbles up and gasped for air. White light echoed up through the waist-deep water, lighting up the hallway. He could hear and feel a tapping on the floor below him and also the distant shelling.
Water poured from the pipe above him, sloshing about his head madly.
Then the floor gave way and he was sucked in a great torrent down the tiny hole in the floor and into pure whiteness.

“Do you hear that?” Boom! Boom! Boom! Karen whispered.
“Hear it? I can bloody well feel it!” Simon whispered back.
Creeping along a hallway, the X-Nerds accompanied by James stopped in an alcove to plan a little further ahead. “If we go up there-” Matthew was pointing into the dark hallway ahead. They could hear footsteps somewhere behind them, but they were far off and not hurried.
“Hey, this moves!” Errol rasped. Everybody turned about to see Errol leaning on a dark wall. Simon and Karen joined in and suprisingly, the stone wall swivelled around to reveal a cold and unused secret passage. Each of the people filed in and James, the last through, was asked to close the door behind them. He struggled to do so, but finally managed. With the stone door closed, the darkness folded around them like a glove.
White light cascaded and played in front of them. The polished whiteness of a room, the chrome and polished stone of strange spacecraft.
The X-Nerds danced and fretted about one particular craft, a small white ceramic ship about the size of a small caravan. It was their ship, except all smashed and broken looking from the outside. Errol pulled open the door, rusted with age. On the floor just inside the door lay a skelatal forearm and hand of a human being. The rest of the ship looked bareable. Errol threw the skeleton away before Karen or the others could see it, shivering with cold and oncoming fear.
“It’s our ship,” Simon stated. “But it looks a hundred years old.”
Matthew was over near a rack of spacesuits. “Here, look what I found.”
“Yeah,” said Simon. “So what?”
“Well, if we were to just jump in the Time Machine and do the deed and end up in deep space, how do you think we survive with no windscreen?” He was right, of course. The Time Machines windscreen was blackened and broken. The X-Nerds and James rushed over to put on the shabby copper-coloured spacesuits.
“What about Stuart?” Karen was asking repeatedly.
Simon stopped to think. “Best I can think of is that we’ll come back for him.”
“Leave him? They’re damn well shelling this castle out there.” Karen shouted. “There’s sections of the walls being blown out of this bloody place left right and center and you want to leave Stuart here!”
“Wherever he is,” Matthew said, not adding his feeling that Stuart might have already gone- elsewhere.
“Yeah. And that’s why,” Simon yelled back at Karen, angry and frustrated. “You go out there and you’ll either be shot by some paranoid guard or scattered around the counrtyside by one of the bombs coming over those walls. Think about it, woman!”
Karen glared sullenly, defiantly, at Simon and fastened her gold-tint helmet on her head. It smelled dusty.
There was a muffled thumping noise. “Look! Up there!” Matthew said, pointing. Everybody turned their heads up towardws the dark ceiling where the outline of a face could be seen floating above the darkness
Then the room rocked with a huge explosion. Suddenly everything was wet and peices of the ceiling rained down on them all.
Stuart way lying moaning on the floor, blood gushing from his bare feet and left side. His shirt was torn and twisted and he clutched a thick metal pipe in his left hand. His ankle was twisted the wrong way and he looked terrible.
More of the roof rained down.
“Stuart!” The others all cried, rushing over.
The door was creaking open, a brash sound amongst the thunderous destruction. “Stop!” Ordered a voice.
The X-Nerds only glanced at the man who’d spoken. He was dragging his leg as it appeared to be broken. Blood dripped from the side of his face.
“Luther,” Stuart whispered before he passed out.
“Get in!” Matthew barked. He was already up the front of the time machine, making ready for takeoff. Simon and James dragged Stuart’s limp body into the the machine even as the desparate Luther attempted to cross the wet, tile floor. He slipped and landed heavily on his broken leg, and screeched in hard pain.
“He needs a suit!” Screamed Karen as Matthew was about to hit the button. One side of the room caved in apon itself. Underneath the dusty carnage lay the rest of the coppery spacesuits.
“We’ll have to chance it!” Matthew yelled back over the noise. “If we don’t make it, or come out somewhere in space, then it won’t really matter much more anyway.”
Karen, past fear now, saw the logic in the situation, and gave the all clear. They didn’t even bother closing the door.
Matthew looked out the windscreen at the screaming man outside, dragging himself along the wet tile floor towards the ceramic time machine, vengence and excruciating pain in his dark, dark eyes. A trail of hot red blood washed across the floor as black dust tumbled down.
“Go you idiot!” Karen was screaming at him. His hand smashed the big red button even as the roof collapsed, raining pipes, dust, water, mortar, stone, cables.
Then he stared for a very long time at the nice polished wooden floor, listening to the soothing musak, breathing slowly and evenly into his loose-fitting gold-tint helmet.

“Get him in here,” Matthew heaved. He was standing in a quiet little elevator. The time machine had landed in somebody’s office, one with no doors other than the elevator. They’d had no choice other than the window, but it was a twenty storey drop out there.
“James,” Instructed Simon, who held the unconscious Stuart by the arms. James lifted Stuarts legs easily and they carried him into the elevator. As Errol and Karen walked in, Matthew pushed a random button, and the doors edged closed uneasily.
Nice music played.
The X-Nerds, dressed in copper coloured spacesuits, dusty, torn and wet stood silently in the welcome silence, each silent in the non-thought that comes about after any terrifying life-threatening incident.
The elevator hurried along, playing some more very light fractal music, soothing and calm.
Then the little elevator bell binged and the doors slid open.
Everything very suddenly went extremely quiet and still.

The X-Nerds and James stared disquietly at the X-Nerds and Amy. In the elevator, Karen fainted, falling across the threshhold that was the doorway, keeping the elevator doors open. The X-Nerds stared at the X-Nerds, too astounded to speak.
Then George and Linda bumbled in. “You’ll never guess what we just bought!” Then George saw the X-Nerds stareing at the elevator. He looked into the elevator and saw the X-Nerds stareing out of the elevator. Linda looked like a statue from a wax museum.
“Okay,” God fretted, waving both hands in front of his body. “Nobody move.”

End of Part 1