Part 19 - Back from the brink

I awoke to… nothingness. No space, no time, no body, no mind. The last thing I remembered was the Transduction Barriers spinning up as they received the unfathomable influx of energy from the singularity and then… nothing.

I have no idea how long I existed there. Could have been hours, or centuries. There was no time. But then I received a call with a familiar voice… my own.

First, how I got here.

Collapsing a star was child’s play, as Omega surmised. Holding it inside my interior without a Transduction ship was a different matter. The trip back took nearly nine hours in my timeline. I could feel the agony as my interior dimensions were ripped apart by the forces, the console room barely left in one piece as I materialized in the Panopticon. A burnt and scared console, collapsing roundels, and dimensions shuddering under the strain.

I knew the SASTAP portion of me was dying. I had only a few minutes of concentration to install the Eye before the dying systems took my own consciousness with them. I succeeded, or so I heard Oolon shout as the universe dissolved around me.

Back to the void: after some time, I heard the SASTAP calling to me… pulling me back as the universe of Anti-Matter pulled even harder to suck me in.

For a time, all I could feel was the SASTAP’s computer system. I honestly have no idea if only my consciousness or my organic body was pulled back. I do know that I recognized this feeling. Regeneration. Different this time though – slow, labored. Like a rebuilding instead of a rebirth.

And then I woke up. Inside a rebuilt and changed SASTAP. Organic again, in a new and very different body. I know I will have some catching up to do. Seems even as a Timelord, I’m pretty hard to kill.