Phantasm's Edge

by Dai Kirai

A New Life

John Smith looked around his TARDIS. Despite the outside being a three foot box, inside was bigger than any place he had ever lived. The control room was at least fifty feet in diameter with the control spire in the middle. Below the spire, under the walkway, was where all the wiring spread out from and made it an easy to access mess. The spire itself was a polished chrome filled with dials and readouts. The shape of the room was semi-spherical so the different exotic particles could bounce around, the mirrors along the walls aided in that even if they were a bit tacky. The designs were only half his.

He looked at the dials, trying to remember what the various buttons and levers did. He hadn’t put them all in or hooked even half of them up, it had been too much work for just one person. John pulled and turned knobs at near random, going more off of intuition based on his own designs and what he knew of Mrs. Sparkle.

A readout popped up on of the screens with a date. A few twists of an old rotary dial until he found the proper date. December, 20th, 2012, near midnight. He slammed the floor bound lever with his foot, using the hand holds around the console as the TARDIS took off, giving a sick wheeze as it bounced around.

For all I know this is just bouncing around Canterlot Castle and causing a proper mess.

One final crunch cause his machine to stop moving, unfortunately for John he didn’t stop, his face slammed directly into the spire. His feet then went out as he grasped his pained nose. The young doctor then proceeded to smack his chin on the console and ass on the floor. “If this is just some prank by the Princesses…” John muttered before checking his jacket pocket. It had taken a while to construct this machine, far longer than expected. So when he had some downtime it was spent coming up with a plan. It was rather simple, return to when the Alcubierre drive first malfunctioned; show them his numbers for why it would fail. Problem solved. “Then I will buy a nice house in the middle of nowhere, park my time machine, and never see another person or pony for months at a time.” A calm life, that sounds blissful.

His formula was still right where it belonged. John slowly returned to his feet, grabbing onto rails as he stood. “Next, visit an actual doctor to check for a concussion.” The world around him kept spinning, and whatever he had for breakfast made a last ditch rebellion to escape.

John fumbled out the door, closing and locking it behind him, then looked out at the vast desert. It wasn’t that he didn’t think the machine would work, he was almost positive it would, or blow up in a marvelous fashion. But his mind still had trouble processing that the view had really changed.

To one side of his machine sat a chain link fence topped with razor wire, far in the distance on the other side sat a white bubble tent. “Thar she be.” Hoping his dizzy walk would look more like a swagger and thankful almost no one would be around to see. After a few minutes John could approximate a normal human, or at least one that hadn’t been bounced around time and space.

Halfway to the facility John Smith is stopped by a professionally dressed man. He could have been Secret Service. “I’m afraid you aren’t allowed to be here sir. I must ask you to leave.” This guard’s voice was breathy, as if he had been running. His age was hard to peg down; he had a physique of a long distance runner with absolutely no hair anywhere visible. There was also no sweat in the pale moonlight that would indicate he should be breathing hard.

“But the Alcubierre Drive in there will go critical. The professor wanted me to run his number just in case. He forgot to carry the one.” John forced a laugh and pulled the calculations from his pocket.

The guard considered it for a moment, looking at John, the paper, and the surrounding desert, brows knitted. “I assure you that it is all under control.”

“I can tell you that it isn’t.” John used the hand holding his papers at the facility. “If we don’t do something that drive is going to go critical!”

The guard wasn’t budging. “I can tell you everything will happen just like it’s supposed to.

“Why don’t we call your boss and let him decide then. Would hate for you to lose your job.” He felt the seconds ticking away. “There’s no way you can know what’s going on here.”

“What are you?” The guard had one hand on a radio and the other resting by his leg. “How are you absorbing magic?”

Smith took a step back. How does he know about magic? It doesn’t even exist here yet. How can he even SEE magic? That requires specialized equipment. He reached into his pants pocket for the small gift a friend left him, a special gun that had destroyed the first iteration of the TARDIS. Before John’s hand was even out of his pocket though the guard had a 9mm trained on his chest. He saw two flashes as pain blossomed in his chest.

John falls onto his back, it was the worst pain he had ever felt.

“I know the calculations, it was much more than a missing decimal. It will just be written up as human error.” The guard reached down and took Shikaishi’s gun from John’s pocket. “Yet somehow you know about this and have this odd gun.” The guard flicked the gun into a pile of sand. “But soon that bullet in your heart will kill you and the explosion will remove all traces; on both sides.” He then walked away, straight at the white mass spreading from the research facility.

The pain was spreading through John’s body. What had started in his chest and worsened with every beat of his weakening heart soon felt like every cell in his body was being ripped apart. The magic his body had been storing now searched for a way out. The golden glow of his body was quickly overshadowed by the expanding explosion of humanities first interstellar drive.

Comments

[OtherMidnight11]

Plz continue I like the way the books going so far!!!!! ^w^