Museum Core Chapter 130: Poking Reality With a Stick

The last few days until the second merge came and went in a flash, during which Thomas both did everything and felt as though he had achieved nothing.

His biggest “achievement” was moving the Belfast right next to the Natural History Museum via a newly-dug trench, just in case she was needed, though perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t managed that.

Because since the Brits knew about the imminent chaos, they’d raised the general alert level. “Serepticiously.”

Which meant that everyone and their dog had noticed, and since they only had a tiny fraction of the needed information to make deductions on, it had been decided that this had to be a reaction to him.

And so on, and so forth.

Plenty of political shit had gone down, and in the end, he hadn’t really been able to do much against it since they were playing the whole thing close to the vest.

Yes, he could have gotten a lot of influence by revealing the whole “I can plant transformation zones five days from now,” but at the same time, he’d have painted a target so large on his back that even he might not be able to handle it.

The risk of someone, somehow, putting together that certain British researchers had been looking into the safest places to put future transformation zones was bad enough. Yeah, sure, they’d signed magically binding NDAs, but what about connecting the dots on internet searches or something?

Speaking of which, Frye had come through on that front beyond all expectations.

Or rather, judging by the way he’d had the files that had been delivered to Thomas separated into “useful” and “probably useless but should be read anyway,” the researches that had been hired had gone completely over the top, starting at the best locations for another transformation zone the size of the one he currently found himself in, then quickly scaling to something the size of Eurasia, which was terrifiying but something that was still within the real of possibility.

Still, they’d just kept going bigger.

Where to put a new celestial body the size of the moon, for example. Or another planet the size of the Earth, or Mars, or even a second gas giant as large as Jupiter, all without destabilizing the delicate balance of gravity in the solar system.

And so on.

All the way up to what to do if an alien galaxy got dropped on his head, how to move it for a smooth transition, and “merge,” etc. Although Thomas sincerely doubted that it would come to that … and that that particular idea was accurate. Granted, he was no astrophysicist, but this paper had been written far too quickly for him to believe adequate time could have been devoted to such a complex topic.

Either way, it seemed the scientists had had fun. Now he just had to put it all into practice.

Thomas glanced over at the device, forewarning the imminent collision of universes.

Ten more minutes. Ten more bloody minutes. Too long to just “sit out,” staring at the numbers scrolling down towards zero, yet easily short enough to run out without him realizing if he started doing something else and lost track of time … which would be the grossest act of negligence since the dawn of recorded history.

Urgh.

Those were the kinds of situations that he absolutely hated.

“Ten more minutes,” Elias grinned over at Thomas from his library, which had recently been sized up for the former fairy’s recovered human form. “Nervous?”

“Obviously, I’m nervous,” Thomas growled back, at which the other man only chuckled.

“Yeah. Just ignore that, and focus on doing what you can,” Elias said. “You’ll do great, you’ve done more than enough planning.”

Then why did it all feel oh so insufficient? Like he should have done more?

He sighed and went back to staring at the damn clock.

The BPA was doing a big training thing up in the highlands, which was their excuse for having none of their personnel in the jungle, just in case he felt the need to pull down a big threat straight on top of his own head.

Not that that was likely, anyhting strong enough to require that would also have a massive zone attached to itself, which would then crush the entirety of the British Isles and perhaps even part of the European mainland, costing him all suport, ruining all his international relations, making himself inaccessible to humans for a long time, and so on … it would be very much a last resort move and even Scottland would not be safe at that point. And from there …

Thomas checked the clock again. Six minutes.

He spawned in a few more of his new creatures, just to make sure that if he did immediately wind up in a fight, he’d have some more forces available, but that only spent twenty seconds at most.

What were some more topics to distract himself with?

Safe places to put zones were the Australian Outback, the Sahara, large chunks of rural China, the arctic and antarctic circles if he boht had and was able to identify any cold-themed zones, Siberia also still had huge chunks of functionally empty areas, depending on the size of the zone, India also had a whole lot of almost completely empty areas due to most of its population being yammed into its vast cities …

Then there was also a whole lot of political commentary.

Much of it had decidedly Britain-centric ulterior motives, such as a rather intense focus on where in and around the British Isles there would be space, but those were not only obvious but had been marked as “potentially biased” by Frye. Though Thomas also felt that the director would have obviously preferred something that empowered this nation, but the man also did his best to respect Thomas’ autonomy in most things.

Which, in turn, had bought him and his people a whole lot of goodwill, so perhaps it wasn’t entirely selfless … but “we treat each other with respect and do things for each other” was one of the core principles that made society function, and it was weird how few people seemed to have realized that.

As for the report itself, there were basically three versions: spread the new zones out “randomly” anywhere they’d fit, spread the zones out while keeping them away from Russia and China, or place at least two-thirds as close as possible to England and her allies, but not all of them.

But even last one was semi-risky, even with the zones partially placed elsewehre as a red hering of sorts, since not only would it have been somewhat obvious that there’d been some kind of fix, but also was there every risk that someone would attack before their foes got too much use out of the zones and gained power overwhelming.

Speaking of the report, it had contained one more key piece of interest: the way the actual merging of solid objects worked.

Simply put, it didn’t. Things that could move to make space, like air or water, were made to move, but solid objects were overridden instead.

In other words, anything he plopped into the ocean would raise the water level and increase the Earth’s mass; anything he planted onto land would “only” wreak havoc by its presence.

Yet another thing he had to think about … but not something that would make too great a difference unless he was slapped with a whole lot more transformation zones than he expected.

Apparently, the moon was currently drifting away from the planet at a rate of three centimeters a year, but pulling it down would require a far greater increase in mass than one might have instinctively expected. Something actually absurd, to the point where it wasn’t a matter of percentage but multiplication.

How much fun the regular people of Earth would be having with a heavily increased mass and greatly increased ocean level, though, that was a whole other issue, the one he would actually have to be concerned about.

Once again, Thomas looked at the clock, did a double-take, then glared at it.

Three. More. Minutes.

Part of him was tempted to just activate the vortex manipulator now, just to make sure it was active when it was needed, but he’d read the instruction manual, and it had been rather explicit in that how leaving it active for longer than strictly necessary was a terrible idea of apocalyptic proportions.

So while it might have made him feel better to switch the damn thing on now, he had to wait, keyed up as though he’d downed an entire pallet of energy drinks alongside enough sweets for his organs to rock sugar, listening to Death Metal the whole time … all that energy and nowhere to vent it save watching the timer, yet when it came to patience, excess energy was the exact opposite of helpful.

And that was basically how he spent the next. One. Hundred. And. Eighty. Seconds.

Well, one hundred and seventy, he didn’t cut the activation of the device whose fuelling had shaped the past year of his life that close, irrespective of the warnings from the manual.

Runes began to glow, magical conduits hummed to life, each of the anchor beast parts began to emanate an energy even Thomas could not perceive despite sensing all forms of energy, mundane, supernatural, and otherwise being one of the fundamental components of being a dungeon core … yet there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that there was something coming off them, warping reality around them in a way that may not be obvious yet unmistakably present.

And then the world around him melted away …

***

All around him, universes spread out. He just knew that’s what they were, representations of infinitely large existences, mashed down into a singular thing he could conceptually wrap his head around, realities being mashed together by an invisible yet inexorable force, some merging, others brushing past each other, slowly exchanining pieces, like impossibly massive … things mating, or … or some other metaphor appropriate for the sheer enourmity of what he could see, capable of encapsulating just what was happening here.

And in the center of it all lay … well, there lay … the universe? His universe? Universe Earth? Universe Major? What the hell did you want to call everything you’d ever known, separate from other, equally all-encompassing, realities that were distinct in more ways than which side of the barrier they lay on …

Yet even if this particular corner of existence hadn’t been the center of his perspective, it would have stood out regardless, he realized.

Because while all universes were infinite in their own right, realities in which you could get as far from the center as you could possibly move and still be capable of moving an infinite distance further, you would leave all things light and matter behind far earlier than you would in the one Thomas resided in.

Everything was similarly spaced and all, just … even having a single, solitary galaxy was “crowded” by the standard of most of what he could see.

That simple realization took his perception of everything and wrenched, the cluttered mess suddenly transforming into a more … well, not exactly ordered, but certainly easier to understand, form.

Random, scattered, worlds were being pulled from their homes and placed in new ones, forming solar systems, then star clusters, then even more until suddenly, he was staring at entire new galaxies …

It was like how Elias had said, the multiverse had grown too big, and was collapsing into something more “stable,” something far less messy … it was truly beautiful, not didn’t seem to have anything to do with Earth.

He could have been staring around at the raw fabric of existence for a minute or an hour, he genuinely couldn’t tell, but however long it had been, he was jerked out of it by the blare of a siren, and red symbols that were unfamiliar but quite literally screamed danger highlighting countless, infinitessimally tiny against the vastness of … everything, tearing through the fabric of his reality and moving straight towards the little blue marble he called home. Or so he assumed.

He, quite literally, could not see any specifics, yet even that assumption tore apart the image before him, instead showing him a much more familiar picture.

Earth, “from space,” albeit with the unfamiliar colored smears of existing transformation zones, making him do a double-take.

And all around it were the threat symbols, each radiating … actually, they didn’t seem dangerous or hostile in the least, but he could easily sense what they were about, and how big they were.

The answer to that question was too big, far too big.

As in, the smallest one was still twice the size of Australia, and things only got worse from there … well, no, there were actually a ton of tiny ones too, but he genuinely had neither the time nor brainpower to spare to do anything with them, not when there were the big suckers incoming.

“Shit!” Thomas mentally yelled, unsure and uncaring of who’d heard that, if that had stayed in the privacy of his mind or been screamed out by every avatar he currently had active, and slammed down on the mental button the vortex controller oh so helpfully provided.

Everything froze. Well, the Earth kept spinning, but the world fragments, which seemed to have splintered off while other realities seamlessly merged, froze in place, though Thomas could feel the machine start to whine in protest at the strain.

Immediately, he tried to come up with the best combinations, suddenly feeling as though he’d forgotten literally everything about the solar system, which also pulled itself up on its own as the vortex controller reacted to his wishes.

What was compatible? What could go where? Could he …

Everything needed to go on a place with enough gravity to maintain the atmosphere, and he needed to get enough of them to cover certain other places simultaneously or else he’d wind up killing everyone on certain places as he needed to replace entire areas at once …

He could feel the vortex controller beginning to whine as he began to as more and more of it, barking out orders, pre-coordinating certain actions while also holding back the merge, delaying it as much as possible, yet it was still doing its actual job, controlling the way existence itself was shaped by foreign interlopers.

Then, even as he was putting the finishing touches to his plan, the “stasis” function gave up the ghost, and realities were smashed together like some divine toddler making a mess of their playroom.

Venus seemed to explode as Thomas watched, only for it to, all too soon, be revealed as being entirely whole, a slight adjustment to the way the designated sections merged having ejected its toxic, corosive atmosphere to make way for the nearly a hundred different transformation zones he’d placed there, all related to heat in some way as far as he could sense, more suited to the “chillier” areas that now covered most of Mars.

Jovian moons and large asteroids were suddenly combined with more exotic areas like cave systems that had seemingly previously existed all on their own, entirely independent of the sort of thing that normally surrounded their like, as though they were either the exact same as the Divine Hunting Grounds, or actually part of them, Europa gained an actual ocean as he merged both aquatic and volcano zones in a way that would hopefully be sustainable.

But the sheer mass of zones wasn’t the weird part. It was how they worked. Because there weren’t individual anchor beasts, there were entire networks of them, yet “beasts” failed to seem like the right title; it was more like … like some kind of noble or king or queen or whatever the intelligent beings in those zones called their leaders was holding it together in concert with their allies.

He just hoped he hadn’t killed them all. There was no way on God’s Green Earth, literally, for all those zones to fit on where they’d been aiming, everything would have overlapped into a titanic mess that would have annihilated everything, or made such a complete hash of the planet that all civilization would come to an end, both the existing and new, there was no way he could have done anything but stop it, yet part of him couldn’t help but worry that he’d become the worst mass murder in human history.

Also, he’d doubtlessly catch at least some flak for not taking advantage of any of the little zones, perhaps even planting a couple in conveniently British spots …

And then the vortex controller kicked him out and shut down.

***

From one moment to the next, Thomas suddenly found himself back in his “body,” weird as that was.

He’d gotten used to living as a disembodied reality warper anchored to a particular object, yet while connected to the vortex controller, things had been just a smidge more complicated, with just a handful of extra dimensions involved … but that was that.

Things were over and done with.

The Earth was saved and, with a little luck, having aliens hanging over everyone’s heads would focus more than a few minds and make people act for the common good … yeah, no, never gonna happen.

But them at least reigning in the sabotage and warmongering a little should be within the realm of possibility.

Throw in the fact that the dohickey that had alerted him to the merge was showing “no intrusions imminent,” and things should have enough time to stabilize. Unless some moron took that stability as their chance to muck things up again, which was also entirely possible.

Wait … was that a rift growing in the middle of the vortex manipulator?

*******************************************************************************Two more chapters