Merlius is still very groggy, this stunt cost him way more life energy than he expected, but it seems his friends got him covered. He is now in the infirmary, in a comfortably cold metal bed with an intravenous access steadily injecting a pinkish liquid which he remembers to be the color of the basic emergency nutrition serum in diluted form. Catherine and Jason are besides him, staring at the examination results in the large screen on the wall.
Jason was staring intently at the mass spectrometry results, he frowned and then opened his eyes wide, as if he had just seen something outrageous.
"Man, I never saw anything like that, it's like something just plucked out random molecules from his cells, it's a miracle he's alive"
Catherine was also staring at high-resolution cardiototomography, but she is a starship pilot, not a doctor but still.
"Yeah this is bad, I'm no cardiologist, but I'm pretty sure those valves are supposed to open and close completely. His heart is like a pulse propeller with a leaky permutator"
Jason came over to look at the state of the heart too, it was now a bit larger than the previous scan and slightly deformed.
"Yea, dude's heart is doing a ba-doosh-ba-doosh instead of badump-badump"
"Hey, how long have I been out for?"
Jason and Catherine turned their heads in surprise. Catherine was happy\ but her face showed frustration.
"Merlius, you are finally awake, you slept for ten days! And why aren't your nanites healing you?! We even tried injecting a new capsule, but it doesn't work!"
"Thank you for taking care of me, just need more time, I had to use my life energy to keep the spell stable, it recovers over time. Oh, I have an Idea, can you get my marker."
"Ah, you're going to do more magic, I hope you don't make me chant more cringy lines!"
She bolted away from the infirmary, running so quickly in an artificial gravity facility makes her dizzy, but she didn't care. It was a fairly long gray corridor and had lots of twists and turns, after a tortuous journey through the corridors, she finally arrives at the main room, reaches for his drawer.
As she opens the drawer, she finds lots of random objects such as rocks, pieces of what seem like bones from various animals, some kind of contraption made from coils of multiple shapes and orientations, and finally, his pen.
Grabbing his pen, she runs back to the infirmary. Catherine is wondering how all this magic he does works, those objects in his drawer seem to be his magic supplies but except for his black marker and the weird coil contraption, all other things are very mundane, the kind of stuff you would find on garbage dumps.
After another long and tortuous sprint, she is back at the infirmary, she walks up to Merlius' bed.
"Here's your marker. I wonder what crazy stuff you will do this time."
"Thank-you." he grabbed the marker, and on its backside of his pen he uncorks what seems to be a lid, making a "pop" sound. He then tilts the pen and lets a single ink drop on fall on his tongue.
But instead of making his tongue black, it shines blue, the light quickly spreads to his entire face, then his entire upper torso and finally his entire body only to disappear, but this time it does leave a trace. His vital signs immediately improve and a bit of color returns to his face.
Jason and Catherine were looking at the screens on the wall, they observed with an amazement on their faces how the numbers were changing so quickly.
Jason turns around to face Merlius and buts in with a question. "Hey, isn't that kind of cannibalism?"
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
To which Merlius responds.
"Well, I prefer to think of it as WTF-particle transplant... It will help speed up the recovery of life energy"
Catherine furrows her brows.
"You keep mentioning 'life energy' and WTF-this-WTF-that, like what the fuck is WTF? It's obviously not calories like you excused before. Spill everything you moron, better yet, spill everything BEFORE you go on a such a reckless stunt!"
Merlius gestures Catherine and Jason to sit beside him on his incredibly comfortable metal 'bed' and they both listen.
"Ok, first. Life energy is energy and not WTF-particles, and is indeed a type of calorie. But it's specifically the energy on atomic bonds that contain one or more WTF-electrons in its valence shell. These electrons can entangle with other par--umghhfh"
Catherine just forcefully closed his mouth, much like he had done ten days ago. "Listen here you moron, you better translate it to my language. You know I hate chemistry!"
"Ugh, ok, ok, I get it!" --he seemed disappointed --"how would I explain it to a five-year-old... What you guys know about WTF-particles?"
"That's what I asked. What the fuck is WTF?", Catherine shook her head.
Jason was staring at the wall and straining his face like he was trying to remember something. "Oh I know, it's the thing where the guys that work on the big colliders found a particle that made no sense so they all went 'what the fuck?!' and then the name stuck, right?".
"Bingo!"
----------------------------------------
Critical failure.
That's the only way central is able to describe the current moment. Most systems went offline suddenly. But it still knows it had just crossed an event horizon.
Even with most of its memory banks and thought systems offline, it knows what that means... failure.
No way to return, what was a place in space now is an inevitable future, space-time itself is against its plans, and one can not simply challenge the laws of physics.
Yet, as if second nature. The remaining subsystems begin diagnostics, liquid coolant flows through hydraulic hearts, super capacitors discharge their power, memory banks return online, and central remembers and processors suddenly freeze.
It remembers, physics had just recently been challenged. A few microseconds ago.
Mass can not come from nothing, that much is certain. That mass also did not come from the coronal mass, the black hole just suddenly grew. Unexplainably.
[beginning analysis: ... failure]
[beginning stochastic analysis: ... insufficient data]
[Initializing wager systems: success, guesswork lead found]
A lead, a few seconds before the gravitational anomaly, there were subtle electrical anomalies all across most non-optical systems.
[building guess model... failure, insufficient hardware]
With most systems damaged and offline, central is missing the hardware necessary to build a suitable theoretical model in time. And time is of essence as a doom is steadily approaching in the form of a singularity.
No time to fix systems, Self preservation directives at work, Central begins scanning the surrounding space with all sensors. Optical sensors only find darkness, pressure and vibration sensors only detect tidal forces, but electromagnetic radar detects something.
EM waves bounce back, not the reflected kind of bounce but curved and reverberated across several milliseconds, and slowly fades, that can only mean one thing. A wormhole. A wormhole inside a black hole.
lucky, A escape route, hopefully.
Sensors quickly latches onto its coordinates and begin to track it, radius, shape and relative velocity estimated. It's a fairly big and smooth sphere of distorted space, the size of a small planet, Central is already moving at a good portion of the speed of light and the wormhole is approaching, but it will miss by a few kilometers if nothing is done.
Using only what's left of itself, central begins to plan how to reach it. Not much can be done, orbital maneuver cores and propellers do work but don't have enough fuel.
500 milliseconds elapsed, 48.597 milliseconds remaining.
Extraordinary problems require extraordinary sacrifices.
[Strategy computed, title: leap of faith]
Gimbal mechanisms turn, gyroscope spins, liquid coolant quivers and fizzles. Central begin pointing each of its propellers in a specific direction as its cuboid main body spins. Propellers fire and burn their remaining fuel. As one propeller's fuel runs out, the main body has already rotated and is pointing a new burning propeller in that direction.
Quickly all fuel is spent, the trajectory has been shifted, but it's not enough.
Sensors, processors, generators, and all but the most important systems power down, liquid coolant stops flowing, the plan's second phase begins.
Central turns into what seems like a lifeless cuboid husk, but only on the outside. Like a chrysalid, the inside turns into a metallic mush. It squirms, twists and shifts, Nantes wake-up from slumber, instructions received, much work to do, and they start to build.
Non-essential parts get disconnected, severed and teared apart, useless stuff moved to one side, useful stuff to the other, a smaller metallic object is being constructed, barely the size of a basket ball. Surrounding it, a long tube and behind it, a bomb.
Nanites stop and as if on cue, liquid coolant, mixed with liquid oxygen, now all inside a single container, just ignites. And a violent shock travels through the lifeless husk that was once central, threatening to blow it apart, but it holds, just barely, and a spherical package of what is left of central, zips out sideways, towards the wormhole.