Chapter 50

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 Halfway to the tear, the bronze, metallic angel rotated 180 degrees and began decelerating at the same phenomenal rate at which she had previously been accelerating.

 It may be worth noting that a young graduate student, who had been following the angel from the moment she raced past an orbiting telescope that had been monitoring objects in the Oort Cloud, was inspired to change his doctoral thesis theme "Organic Compounds in Icy Deposits in Long-Period Comets" to "Ultra-High Acceleration Techniques in Extra-Solar System Transportation Devices". His professors thought the paper excessively fanciful, poorly argued and unacceptable. Rather than rewrite the thesis, the student dropped out, set up a company to exploit his ideas from the thesis and became stinking rich. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with our story.

 By the time she reached the tear, the angel had slowed considerably, to a few thousand kilometres per hour. She entered the tear, which to her seemed like a long, dark tunnel with a few stars visible at the far end. In a moment, she exited the tear in her own universe. Slowly, her wings spread outward, followed by her hands. Her knees bent and moved apart slightly. As this was happening, flakes broke off her bronze-like exterior and trailed behind her like a glittering comet tail. She decelerated further, causing much of the debris to speed past her.

 Once her speed had dropped to a mere couple hundred kilometres per hour, she began spiralling as she moved forward. She opened the box and let out sparkling pieces of soul that trailed behind her spirals. The box empty, she pushed it aside, brought her arms, legs and wings together and accelerated rapidly towards an Earth, which from space looked very much, but not exactly, like Maxwell's. Beneath the clouds upon almost familiar continents lived a population of angels that numbered in the scant millions and who lived in stone and brick buildings reminiscent of Medieval Europe.

 Meanwhile, the pieces of soul slowly dissolved into space and into the latticework of dark matter. At the same time, the tear in the fabric of the universe slowly came together and mended itself like a cut in the flesh.

 Something that was almost a sound resonated across this universe. It was oddly reminiscent of a burp.

 


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