The Crawford's Multiverse of Madness

Chapter 124 - Harvesting A Quasar

"Alice, Elizabeth are you ready to begin extraction?" I asked the nearby Alice, and Elizabeth as I held the Quasi Stellar Storage Unit.

The contraption was made from mostly Vibranium that had been enhanced a couple of thousand times over. I couldn't risk any of the energy escaping even if it was just primitive energy like Electromagnetic radiation.

To tell the truth, I have wanted to harness a Galactic Nucleus since I was back in my own Universe. The energy emitted by a supermassive black hole is amongst the most potent in all Universes, but also very unpredictable.

That's why this time we are harvesting cosmic energy, and not dark matter or dark energy. In the history of my world, we had only managed to successfully extract a couple of hundred Quasars; but that would take a couple of years for each.

Harvesting a Quasar was a delicate process since time was a bit tricky near a Quasar, and the intergalactic forces holding a galaxy together would be affected.

What Alice, Elizabeth, and I are attempting will be speeding up the process to a couple of seconds with the Pseudo Temporal Engine I found in the Felians Inheritance Temple. Even if the Temporal Engine was old, it was not unusable.

There were a number of things that could go wrong, maybe the accretion disk would shift and suddenly deviate under the gravitational strain of the AGES field?

Maybe the expelled particulates were supercharged beyond predictable parameters leading to a puncture in our Nano-suits?

Maybe the luminosity could be thousands of times greater than the relative galaxy we used to calibrate our instruments? Maybe reversing the gravitation and frictional forces could lead to the collapse of an already supermassive black hole?

There were many uncertainties, but the alternative would pain me more than anything – becoming gods through evolution.

Being a god should be awesome right? Not according to the memories inherited from Lorien – it is rather painful and many restrictions are imposed by ��The Laws of the World' which is like an entity that Governs all gods in the Multiverse.

"Are you sure that this won't affect any nearby Galaxies? What about the Energon People?" Alice asked floating in the void of space, still concerned about the planet we had spent the past two years – home of the Energon People.

"Stop being a worrywart Alice, we have a couple of minutes to get the job done and leave; at that time, we can leak any excess energies into the Multiversal current. Also, we have Project Reverse in case everything goes to hell," Elizabeth said as she had grown tired of our bickering.

I had actually been ready to execute this plan a year ago, but Alice forced me to redo the calculations a couple of times over just to make sure nothing could go wrong.

"We are good," I said as the communicator began scrambling a bit – I was a bit surprised since this should not occur, I had already calibrated our communicators with the electromagnetic interference in mind.

I could hear Alice sigh "Okay! Deploying AGES field in Nano-suits,"

Elizabeth and I could feel the time slow down near us, everything in the scope of the Quasar slowed down to a near-frozen state.

"Reducing the temperature to near absolute zero, reversing gravitation compression, reducing frictional coefficient to zero," Elizabeth said as she strained her eyes to observe the various codes representing the forces present near the black hole.

If she read any of the forces wrong, it could cause me to attempt extraction of the Quasar's energy a bit too early or a bit too late; in both cases, I would die without even having a fair chance at resisting.

"Okay, I think it's okay to go," Elizabeth said a bit uncertain, but projected confidence in her voice since certainty was required for delicate operations such as this one.

"Standing by to deploy Project Reverse if the plan fails," Alice whispered into the communicator, her left hand lingering over her right index finger.

"Okay, heading to the extraction point," I say as the communicator begins to frits; I should have aborted the mission then and there but I guess even I can be a bit too eager sometimes.

I float towards the Quasi Stellar Galactic Nucleus as I breathe a sigh of relief that the black hole in the distance was significantly weaker at the moment.

Still, stabilizing the black hole was a lot of work and would only last a couple of minutes at most – get in, extract, get out, leave this hell of a Universe.

One minute passed, then two and three, everything was going smoother than expected – maybe we won't need to use Project Reverse after all?

The extraction was about 50% completed, with the galactic nucleus getting lesser and lesser as a concentrated stream of orange energy filled the inside of the Quasi Stellar Storage Unit.

It requires a 5th level civilization at minimum to harvest a Galactic Core since this would condemn an entire Galaxy to death. Homo-Superiors did not care much about others; this was probably one of the reasons we were considered 'Mass Murderers'.

Holding the swirling energy in my hands, it began to trembling slightly – it had been a while since I held such a dense source of energy. Traveling from Universe to Universe with primitive energy sources was like going back to the stone age and playing with rocks for pass time.

I felt myself subconsciously tugging at the Forbidden Cube in my Mbeamer. I felt like half a person, well, I am exactly half a person with my memories sealed in The Forbidden Cube.

I could only lament my bad luck, since unlocking my memories at this time was akin to killing Alice, Elizabeth, and eventually myself.

Knowledge of the Forbidden Cube was a catastrophe to everyone but Homo-Superiors. Anything I could and would want to build could not be attempted without foundations in place for them.

I would have to retrofit an entire planet just to not destabilize its orbit as a result of building fairly useful tech from my world.

I internally sigh at my current lack of options, but also appreciated the fact that the Quasi Stellar Project is moving along relatively smoothly. However, as I have learned countless times before - nothing good lasts forever.

At that moment, I noticed the interference between the communicators becoming more and more unstable, but that should not happen unless....

"Fuck, Zeel there is a Radio Loud Quasar we missed previously," Alice yelled as she used Telekinesis to yank me along with the storage unit away from the steadily strengthening supermassive black hole.

Yeah, yanking someone with a storage unit that houses enough energy to rival a couple of million hydrogen bombs was not her best idea. I held onto the Quasi Stellar Storage Unit for dear life – literally, if the energy was reintroduced into an unstable Galactic Nucleus.... Well, we could all die.

I was about to yell at Elizabeth and Alice to get far away so I could activate Project Reverse – which is just a fancy way of saying 'Using a black hole connected to a nearby Seyfert Galaxy to spin opposite and counteract the forces of the black hole in this Galaxy'. My voice paused briefly as I looked towards my feet only to notice they were as thin as Chinese chopsticks.

"Fucking spaghettification almost killed me," I yelled through the communicators into the void of space.

At that moment, I had never regretted a situation more in my entire life. But to really appreciate how things came to this act of desperation, you have to retrace our steps to the moment we left the Lorien Universe.