Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time 9: Knocking at Heaven's Door

She's a flying brick with the power to control one of the fundamental states of matter, but no one takes her seriously. That's about to change.

Previously, Gaseous Girl’s evil doppelganger had just sabotaged the stardrive core of the starship in which Gaseous Girl and her friends were attempting to find a wormhole and return everyone to their proper timeline. Now the ship is about to explode! Will anyone survive? To find out, read on!

---

Madeleine Smith Prime had never given much thought to how she would die, but she certainly hadn’t anticipated dying in a starfighter with four alternate-universe versions of herself. Technically, she didn't even exist. She had been erased from time. What would happen to her when the stardive core breached and the ship blossomed into light? Madeleine had no idea. She didn't want to find out, either. "Doesn't this thing have escape pods?" she suggested. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the blaring ship klaxons.

"Yes," Madeleine Smith-Harrington said bleakly. As the owner of the starfighter, she naturally knew all about what it had, and more relevantly, what it did not. "It has one. The pod can fit two, in a pinch, but that’s all."

"Oh," Madeleine Prime said. There were five people in the starfighter. The math did itself. "Great."

"My mecha-suit might be able to withstand open space for a short period," Lady Smith-Harrington added. "Not as long as the pod, but long enough to return to Earth."

"So, three," Madeleine Prime said. "Three out of five. Not bad."

Princess Madeleine of the Grey Castle had followed the conversation thanks to the starfighter's internal translation matrix. Now she rose up, throwing back her cloak dramatically. "I will stay with the ship. It is my honor."

"I'm stayin' too," Mad Maddie cut in. "Y'all go."

"We should do this fairly," Lady Smith-Harrington said. "We should draw for it."

"What about her?" Mad Maddie pointed towards Evil Madeleine, who was still lying unconscious on the teleporter pad. "She totally stays, right? I mean, one less bad guy to worry about?"

Madeleine Prime sighed. As the original Gaseous Girl, she had a feeling everyone would look to her. Truthfully, she didn't want to stay. Heroic sacrifices weren’t all they were cracked up to be, especially when you were the one doing the sacrificing. Not only that, she definitely didn't want Evil Madeleine going and taking the place of one of the good guys. But...she was Gaseous Girl. They all were. And Gaseous Girl had a code. "No. She gets the same chance as all of us," Madeleine Prime said.

"Hey, now-" Mad Maddie said angrily.

"She gets the same chance. That's it. So let's do this."

The ship's computer blithely announced that they had ten minutes to a stardrive core breach. Lady Smith-Harrington went to the replicator, and after exchanging a few harsh words with it, managed to replicate five plastic straws, with two slightly shorter than the rest. The drawing took only a few seconds.  Madeleine Prime drew for herself and for Evil Madeleine. Somehow, she wasn't surprised at all to get both short straws. It just wasn't her day. "You all should go, then," she said. "I hate long goodbyes."

"Same," Mad Maddie said. The other two nodded. They were all the same person, after all. Lady Smith-Harrington drew herself up and saluted Madeleine Prime, before powering up her mecha-suit and ejecting from the craft. The princess offered a formal curtsy; Mad Maddie bawled her way through a frantic hug and several tissues. Then they clambered into the escape pod and were gone. Madeleine Prime was alone on the starfighter with her evil counterpart.

She was very tired. She hadn't slept in a while, not since this whole crisis started. She'd fought alien behemoths, Shrieking Tree Demons, died, got resurrected, found herself wiped from existence... all of that was beginning to add up. She wondered if the replicator made coffee. Then she decided it didn't matter. She was about to get blown up by an exploding starship. Did she really want to be awake for that?

Evil Madeleine stirred. "Ow," she grumbled. "My head hurts. How hard did you hit me, you psycho?"

"I’m the psycho?” Madeleine Prime said. “You’re the one who- oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter. A lot more of you is going to hurt in a minute."

“What do you mean?” Evil Madeleine said suspiciously.

“Look, I’m going to bed,” Madeleine Prime said. “Wake me if we survive.”

"Hey-" Evil Madeleine started to protest. Madeleine Prime merely stepped past her into the Century Comet's small sleeping quarters, the door sliding shut behind her and muffling the alarms. The sleeping arrangements weren't much: two small cots, one for the pilot, one for a co-pilot. "Dim the lights," Madeleine Prime said to the computer. "Play something classical. I don't care what."

The computer launched into Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the second movement. Madeleine vaguely recognized it from some old apocalyptic movie she'd seen once. "Figures," she said again, and decided that might as well be her last word. She lay down on the cot, closed her eyes, and waited for the stardrive core to breach and blast her into atoms. She heard the distant alarms die off; she presumed the ship had given up trying. Then, there was a sudden blinding flash.

She felt it for one instant. Then she didn’t, and all was dark. Madeleine was just starting to worry when she felt a bump, and saw a flash of golden light, and suddenly she found herself standing on a cloud before shining white walls. "Ah," Madeleine said, somewhat pleased. "I made it to heaven. Huzzah."

"Not quite," said a voice.

Madeleine turned to see who it was, and her mouth fell open in shock. "Santa?" 

"Technically it’s Saint Nicholas,” said the tall man in a red cloak, “but close enough. I imagine you expected Peter, but he handles ordinary arrivals. Your case is … complicated."

"Yeah, that figures. Look, I don’t understand what happened, I died, my cousin Gregory resurrected me but it went wrong, a bunch of other mes showed up, I don’t know, and then I died again, and now I’m here," Madeleine said. “I don't know how I got here, but I'm here. Can you sort out the theological explanations later maybe? I’d really like my harp and fluffy cloud now."

“I would,” Nicholas said, “but here’s the problem that we have. You were correct when you assumed back on Earth that you were Madeline Prime. You make a choice in this timeline, and there’s another Madeline in another timeline who made an opposite choice, and so on. Which means if you don’t exist…”

“None of them exist either,” Madeleine said, wincing. “Oh boy.”

“Exactly,” Nicholas said.

Madeleine sank down on the cloud, burying her face in her hands.  "Lovely. So how do I fix it?"

She expected Nicholas to assign some sort of task, probably very difficult, almost certainly messy. She did not expect him to say nothing. A long pause ensued. "Nick?" she said. "How do I fix it?"

"You assume that you can."

That was not what she wanted to hear. "Look, I know it's a time thing, and I've said before I hate time things, but even time things are fixable. Remember the Dark Earth Crisis of '09? Remember when Confederate Connie tried to go back and change the War of 1812? Or that thing with Julius Caesar and the lasers? Been there, done that, hated it, still fixed it."

"This isn't just what you call a time thing," Nicholas said. "This is a...I suppose you would call it a reality thing. All the timelines could collapse. Every universe, everywhere."

"Can't the Big Guy fix it?" Madeleine said, motioning towards the Pearly Gates.

Nicholas shrugged. "Naturally. For example, he could wipe the slate clean and start over. But that seems a bit drastic. He'd prefer it if you worked out the problem yourself. Show initiative, so to speak."

"I don't get it," Madeleine said. "You just said I couldn't fix it."

"No, you can't, but another you can. And you can fix what you did."

For the first time, Madeleine was glad she had died; otherwise she just knew she'd have a splitting headache from all this. "You want to explain that?"

Nicholas said, slowly and patiently, "You, yourself, Madeleine Prime, are not the one who caused the breakdown in reality. But someone else did. Specifically, the evil version of yourself.  And what she did, you can undo."

Madeleine almost smiled. "Okay. That makes sense. So I just have to track down my bad self and stop her. You wouldn't happen to know where she is, would you?"

"I do,” Nicholas said somberly. “She was on your starship, so she has died as well. And, given her nature and activities, while you went here, she went to the Other Place."

"Oh .... dear, " Madeleine said. She didn't think it would be appropriate to use a stronger expletive at the gates of heaven.

Read the Next Chapter