The Paradox Corridor

Chapter 26: A Familiar Foe

All of a sudden Thalidia began to shake, and for the second time that day the alarms began to go of. Everyone but me and Stephen toppled to the ground, crawled for cover, and certain members shut themselves down out of fright. Stephen gripped onto the machine, lurching forward as another BOOOOM shook the room, causing anything and everything to fly everywhere. For the first time that night Stephen looked both out of control and confused.

"What? What? WHAT?!? What the hell is going on?!? The machine's field is extremely controlled, it should not be having this kind of effect on Thalidia! What's happening?" The machine, for it's part, kept trying to draw in energy, but whatever the commotion was had affected it the most. I saw lights on the machine begin to flash red and beep incessantly. I knew in my 'heart' that something absolutely terrible was going on. Then, suddenly, I received a message from the machine, which simply stated;

Machine: Code Red. Activating DEFCON 8. Opening the roof for immediate restoration of energy on a global scale. I advise caution.

I looked up and saw the roof sliding noiselessly open. From behind me, Stephen gasped as he witnessed what I witnessed: chaos. Absolute chaos. The night sky itself was on fire as HUGE Sorratakan ships tore through the sky, hurling down what seemed like fireballs down onto the pathetic, helpless Thalidia, which was unable to do anything to stop this horrible attack. I turned to Stephen to see what he would do, or say. Finally, after about 30 seconds worth of shock, he whimpered,

"This is no normal attack...this was deliberately planned. They knew...THEY KNEW exactly where the generators were. They must have known that they needed to destroy only 4 of them to stop the process of escape, while also leaving us completely defenseless...how? Was the survival of our planet only a dream, just to get swept away by their reality?" I watched on as the city I had marveled at only an hour before get decimated before my very eyes, and the fields torched by the balls of fire. I watched on as the planet I was built to save burned before my very eyes. Then, I heard a BOOM from behind me that dwarfed out any other noise happening at that moment, and I turned to see The Machine discharging every single last volt of energy into a concentrated beam that shot into the sky, and then exploded like a very fast firework. Those energy particles flew to every single thing that they had been ripped from that still existed. Unfortunately, one of the Sorratakan ships, a nasty looking one shaped like an jagged oval, except with wings that sported huge cannons, saw the 'firework' and turned in our direction. It seemed huge in comparison to many of the other Sorratakan ships. After watching it for awhile, I suddenly realized that we had no defenses left at all, and even through the lab had powered back on it, had no weapons to speak of. Stephen realized this too, and scrambled around frantically to no avail, trying to find something to protect us with, before tearfully giving up his fruitless search. We both somberly stared up at the mammoth that was now almost on top of us. As I tried to think of a scenario, any scenario, in which anybody on Thalidia lived, when all of a sudden I remembered Stephens words, from a long time ago, when he had first tried teaching me how to imagine:

"Think about how it could be better, and model it that way. Or, in machine terms, redesign it operate at it's maximum efficiency, taking in to account all of the tools available to us." Well, right now the situation was certainly not operating at maximum efficiency. We had absolutely no control and were about to get disintegrated, or worse. But then I remembered another thing, something that he had said not long ago;

"[there are] things that emitted a special kind of radiation, which is, under normal circumstances and when concentrated is unaffected by physical restraints such as miniaturization; which, on this Earth, is only found around you (the time vortex radiation)." And all of a sudden, I had a brain flash. Because of the radiation I emitted, I was apparently unaffected by many physical restraints. I realized then that one of many physical restraints was energy, and that another was programming. According to Stephen's logic, I could literally do anything I wanted to, and I would always have the energy for it, given that I had "cooked up" enough radiation. This seems like an extremely fast jump to conclusions, but remember: I was literally the culmination of the entire Thalidian race; I was far smarter and more powerful than anything else on the planet. So although it may seem like a far leap to you, it was rather easy for me. Anyways, I created a scanner immediately that was programmed to check how much of this radiation I had, working harder than I ever had. It only took mere seconds to create and activate this scanner, and it revealed that I had produced as much radiation as possible, any other radiation that was created became unstable and turned into air. (James, I know this all sounds incredibly confusing and impossible. Remember, PARADOX. Paradoxes aren't supposed to make sense.) Anyways, I knew what I had to do something with all that energy, and fast. The best idea I could come up with at the time was a shield, and using that energy I was able to create the program to make a shield, once again realizing that because time in a sense is a physical restraint, I was able to do it in about .8 milliseconds. A small protrusion popped out of the wall near my door, and it began glowing blue. With a crackle of energy a blast shot out. It stopped about ten feet away from me, shrunk a little, and then expanded extremely fast. It grew so big it covered the entire lab; and the ship, not expecting it at all, tried to veer away from this strange new obstacle far too late. With a CRUNCH, a ROAR, and a BOOM! the ship crashed straight into the safety bubble. The front of the ship, acting as if for all intents and purposes as if it had ran into an impenetrable wall, crunched, pieces of it falling off everywhere, and fires began breaking out all over the ship. It listed to the side, and one of it's forward engines straight up exploded. The bubble, however, was no more worse for the wear. All that had happened was the radiation level in my 'body' had gone down 40%. Although it had taken quite a bit of energy, I had successfully stopped an entire ship in it's tracks, and there was no way that it was going to try ramming again. The ship, with smoke flying everywhere off of it, backed up rather slowly. I saw the sides of it slowly open up, and giant cannons extended from it. This happened up and down the ship, until the ship had no less than 20 enormous cannons all aimed at the shield. I knew that the shield wouldn't last for long, so I began to create a new shield that would replace the current shield, but this one would be able to reflect energy blasts. As I shot off this new shield, I saw Stephen walk up to me, completely in shock.