Jason Kane records a message for Bernice, apologising for what happened before and explaining that it’s long past time that he tried to fix all the things that went so wrong. He knows he’s bound to fail spectacularly - in fact, he’s far more likely to crash, burn and die in the attempt - so he’s decided to send her a recording so at least she can understand his reasons. To make things more dramatically satisfying, he decides to start his story from not quite at the beginning.

Mira tells Jason she can smell the Enormous Space Octopus getting closer. She’s not sure how he ever thought the two of them could handle it alone because it’s just too big! The waiter greets them and introduces them to the calamari surprise, the speciality entrée of Le Maison Celestial, a restaurant for discriminating couples with an appetite for gourmet foods and other pleasures besides. When he tells them that only the lower-bred classes, who are unable to comprehend the difference between space-going octo-cephalopod and space-going squid, would refer to is at an Enormous Space Octopus, Jason takes offence to his tone. Jason had heard that Le Maison Celestial was supposed to be a classy place, yet the music playing in the background is anything but classy or romantic. In fact, it sounds more like something from the humorously anti-climactic prologue of his next exciting adventure. This would probably be the point at which they bring on the theme tune…

Jason attempts another recording but is still unhappy with his introduction. He admits that he’s been having problems with technology recently - not with the principles and the concepts, but with the number of boxes and buttons. He thinks the sheer quantity of possibly options are out to get him. For this reason he chose a recording device, the Practibractis Technologies 3000i Predictive Entry Digital Storage Unit, because it’s considered to be a bona fide antique back at the Braxiatel Collection from where he borrowed it. Unfortunately it keeps defaulting to a raft of pattern recognition filters and narrative editing routines.

It reminds him of when he was just a kid, when he got one of the first cheap consumer word processors for his birthday. Although he came from a nice, white, middle-class family, he was an isolated kid who was convinced he didn’t have any friends because he was a rebel. His wanted to be the next Harlan Ellison, but his writing was inspired by people like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and ‘Derek and Clive’, and the word processor didn‘t recognise some of the language he used so it kept changing his words to the nearest alternative. During his pre-teen years at school he was shrill, belligerent, clueless and political. He was furious that rich people didn‘t share their money with the poor, was physically sick that people could put others into concentration camps and was terrified by American nuclear weapons. When it came to his school essays, he thought he was being a hero by fighting the system, but because the word processor kept changing his words, he was the only person who ever knew what he was trying to say.

The point he’s making is that the factory settings on the Practibractis Technologies 3000i Predictive Entry Digital Storage Unit means it’s likely to process some details of his story wrong. It may even mess things about, but if he tries to correct it he’ll probably just make things worse. Which is the story of his life - if you try to edit or delete things, or change the way things were, you don’t know what you‘re going to end up with further down the line. His story begins in the restaurant, up on one of the ships that used to be part of the Mim blockade during the war. It was a bit expensive, but it was ideal for his purposes because it didn’t have any of the drones or security and recording devices that made secret meetings virtually impossible on the Collection.

When the waiter at Le Maison Celestial asks him if he’s made a reservation, Jason tells him he’s pretty famous around these parts. The waiter, regrettably, says he’s never heard of him and when Jason suggests he should get out more, he adds that he can’t find a credit stream or any other acceptable financial endowment in his name either. Mira discreetly suggests they go somewhere else, but Jason refuses to leave and becomes openly hostile. The waiter points out that Jason is making a scene, but this just antagonises him even more and he boasts about how he knows people of influence, including doctors, dentists and architects. The waiter has heard enough and when the restaurant staff produce guns and other weapons, Mira decides it really is time they left. Jason refuses to listen and says there’s no force in the Universe that’s going to make him leave…

Sometime later, Jason orders burgers and beers for himself and Mira. Mira is worried about him and points out how battered he’s looking these days, but he tells her it’s not easy bringing up a half-Killoran eight year old. Peter is stronger than all but the most fiendishly augmented humans. She thinks Jason’s behaviour in the restaurant was contrived, as if his heart wasn’t really in it and he was just going through the motions. Jason wonders whether Mira is telepathically reading him and she’s angered by the suggestion. She explains that the telepaths who came out of the Catan Nebula are built within certain parameters. When the manufacturers first took Mira in, they ran every test on her to make sure she had absolutely no latent psionic abilities because they didn’t want their work contaminated by any natural talent. The nano-worms ate her central nervous system and replaced it to their own design. She comes with an in-built set of professional ethics which means that outside of her job she finds it impossible to use her telepathic skills in a social setting without the other person’s express consent. Although she was ‘re-wired’ after getting away from the people who built her, she chose to keep the restrictions as a self-preservation technique. If others found out she was an uncontrolled psionic, she’d be stoned to death. Jason isn’t convinced and he’s seen before how she can come up with insights just by looking at people, but Mira suggests that’s just because she has a brain and eyes in her head. She knows there’s a reason why they didn’t meet down on the Braxiatel Collection and she’s sure it’s not just for a shag. She also knows that he tends to regard other people just as tools to help him achieve his own agenda, so she asks him to get to the point. He finally admits why he wanted to see her - he seems to have picked a fight with someone who’s even more manipulative than he is. Someone who not only regards people as tools, but actually thinks the whole Universe is his toolbox…

Jason and Mira arrive at parking bay 792 where they’ve come to pick up the transport he’s arranged. She notices a lot of the ships here belong to the military, but when he points to his ship, she dismisses it as a total piece of haulage crap. She can’t believe he’s planning to use this to launch an assault on a god, but Jason assures her the person they’re going to see isn’t a god, he’s just a thingy who messes around with everybody’s lives because he can. She reminds him they were once members of the Plague Dogs and have access to a general infra-dynex hyper-systems military spec pulse-pump cannon-class interstellar battle corvette, but he argues it would just be a waste of a ship. Where they’re going they only need something that will last just long enough to get there and back, so the cheaper and more disposable it is, the better. He tells her they’re going to the end of the world - to Hell.

Jason continues recording the facts as far as he can remember them. He recognises this is a significant problem in itself - just how much of his memory can he validate and trust? It’s like trying to revisit a house that’s long since demolished. You can never go home again, not that he’d ever want to after some of the things that happened there! Recalling events from earlier in his life upsets Jason and he switches off the recording.

For some years Jason has had a growing suspicion that everything in his life was wrong, as if things weren’t supposed to be like this. Mira thinks it sounds like paranoia and that he assumes the Universe is out to get him because he’s not famous and can’t get laid. Jason assures her that’s not the case and that the Universe is actually out to get everyone, not just him. That wasn’t what he was talking about. The guy he’s up against is actively manipulating things and changing lives just to fit some plan of his own. The worst thing is he’s not actually evil, it’s just that he thinks other people’s lives are getting in his way, so he simply takes them out of time without a care. Jason believes that at this point in his timeline, he and Bernice should still be married and have two children, a son and daughter. That didn’t fit into the man’s precious continuity so they’ve been removed. Mira thinks it’s impossible to remove people from time without leaving traces as all the things they did and all their subsequent connections would unravel the world.

Jason tells her that a couple of years ago he had a ‘friend’ called Ms Jones (well, perhaps calling her a friend is a bit of a stretch) but it was someone he thought he knew and understood well. But then she went completely nuts, abducted Bernice’s boy Peter for no good reason, and in the total mess that followed, she finished up dead. Mira is convinced that sounds like a typical example of someone going crazy, but Jason was always struck by how uncharacteristic it was. It was as if Ms Jones was an actor, going along with a script she didn’t even like. This was what first led Jason to realise how screwed up things were. A lot of the people Jason knows, including Bernice and Bev Tarrant, are not where they should be in time because Braxiatel moves things around. Ms Jones herself was really born only six years ago and her parents worked on the Stonehauser Medical Facility which was destroyed in a Draconian raid just two months ago! That means that in the normal timeline Ms Jones died before she reached the age of seven. Then Jason realised that Draconian Ambassador Kothar was playing someone else’s game too, and in exchange for a favour, Kothar gave him something tangible. The genetic data taken from a body found at the Facility matched Ms Jones’s files perfectly with no margin for error. Jason arranged for the body to be sent to him, but it never made it. It vanished without trace, as did the records of everyone who lived at the Facility. Only he knows about it and he suspects that he’s starting to become immune to whatever’s affecting everyone else, perhaps because of what he’s been through in the past. The guy they’re up against is screwing with people’s lives, but by the very nature of the act, no one even knows about it. Fortunately Jason knows there’s a place where all the deleted things go - it’s at the end of the world and they’re coming up on it right now!

Jason brings the ship to a stop but when Mira looks at the screen she finds they’re still deep in space. She’s far from impressed, but Jason tells her they’re not looking at things from the right direction. He activates the dimensional translators and turns the ship at a right angle to reality - and then suddenly the whole ship seems to break apart. Jason says this is why it wasn’t worth bringing along the infra-dynex hyper-systems military spec pulse-pump cannon-class interstellar battle corvette. Any physical matter going through translation suffers irreparable damage, but the control cabin is surrounded by a force field to cushion the effect, so they should be safe. Although Jason has never actually tested it before…

The effect soon diminishes and it looks as though they’ve come through unscathed. With any luck they might even make it back out again. Jason fires off a signal flare to attract attention and then explains to Mira that they’ve fallen through the cracks into null-time, or fractured time as it‘s sometimes known. They’re now in a sort of control zone, although it might not look like it from the chaos they can see on the screens. Jason says the term refers to a control group, like those used in medicine where two virtually identical experiments are conducted, but only one group receives treatment and the control group, receives nothing. A ship approaches and a voice comes over the communicator announcing itself as Enormous Space Octopus 666-702, here to take them to Station Zero. The price for towing them will be 150 mortal souls. It seems the prices have gone up since Jason was last here.

Station Zero is one of the few coherent places in fractured time. It used to be called the Tartarus Gate, the mythical gateway to hell, but it’s under new management these days. It’s one of the few multiversal crossover gates that doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of that race that tries to lord it over time. The place seems to be filled with fiends and demons from Hell and Jason admits that one or two humans have found their way here by accident over the centuries and this is probably where our concept of Hell originally came from. This is where Jason himself was stuck for a few years after he fell off the face of the Universe. It’s just another place, albeit one that’s slightly more dangerous than usual. They’re approached by a couple of ugly looking creatures, so both Jason and Mira start making outrageous claims about the size of the weapons they’re carrying until the creatures decide to leave them alone. Eventually they arrive at their destination and Jason warns Mira to be prepared as they could find anything inside…

Mira is surprised to find that Jason has brought her to a travel agent’s shop. A seven-foot tall demon greets them and Jason introduces him as his former boss, Azagrazar. Jason needs a favour and asks if he still has any back-pay owing, and fortunately it seems he still has some mortal souls coming to him. Jason explains to a shocked Mira that this is just the name of the currency used in the demon dimensions. Jason tells Azagrazar that he needs to find specific points out there in fractured time, but the zone is difficult to navigate as it contains everything that’s ever happened and ever will happen. Azagrazar realises Jason needs to find the temporal and spatial points that are meaningful to him personally, but fortunately he just happens to be the finest translocation in seven separate universes. First he must analyse Jason’s particular requirements and he produces a Mind-Sucker fresh from the Slime-Pits of Detestable Goolies which he attaches to Jason’s head. The creature screeches and creates a neurological gestalt with Jason to extrapolate a coherent timeline. Azagrazar needs to ascertain the correct locations in time and space because crossing time streams can be unconscionably dangerous if things aren’t precisely judged. Unfortunately he’s detected a problem and it seems that significant portions of Jason’s timeline have somehow been excised. Not just re-diverted or altered, but actually deleted…

Later, Jason and Mira start bearing down on the first set of co-ordinates that Azagrazar gave them. It took him long enough to sort things out and Jason explains that his timeline is so convoluted it’s like a bloody switchback. Now it’s time for Mira to do her mind-link thing. The first thing she notices when she enters his head is how many holes there are inside and frankly she’s amazed he’s still able to function. Jason admits that his life is basically one big autonomic response. He seals himself inside a holographic suit and starts testing the holo-systems before activating the inject portal…

For his recording, Jason explains that he based his plan on computer games in which the players went into a computer generated environment and shared the score for killing monsters. To increase their score, players used to pare their teams down to two people, one to fight and the other to provide him with the energy he needed to stay alive. In this case, Jason is diving into fractured time and reconnecting with the parts of his life that were lost, while Mira is linked to him as a lifeline. As Jason prepares to reclaim the shattered fragments of his life, he’s getting a growing feeling that there’s something he’s forgotten. Something important he was supposed to do in his life, but he never did.

When Mira finds that she and Jason have arrived in yet another sodding bar, he‘s forced to admit that he did spend quite a lot of his life in places like this. Mira had been expecting the bits of Jason’s life that had been snipped away to be the important bits - bits like the first time Jason and Bernice ever made love. Jason thinks changes like that would have been noticed and the man they’re after is too sneaky for that. He’s deliberately taken the times when Jason’s memory was a little incapacitated (in other words, drunk out of his skull) and is targeting the bits around the edges that make the important things mean something. Jason spots himself and Bernice in the corner and suddenly remembers what bit of his life this is…

Bernice is explaining to the younger Jason that after her mother died she was all alone as she never knew her father. The young Jason makes a glib comment about how lucky she is and Bernice is furious. She turns on him and asks if he has any idea what it’s like to grow up without a father? Jason tells her she’s much better off without him, but Bernice has heard this before. She knows Jason’s father used to beat him, but Jason cuts in and says he’s not talking about the odd backhander. He’s talking about the real thing - sustained and ritualised torture, the sort of thing you never forget, no matter how much you wish you could. Those memories are inside him all the time. He tells her his father had a system of crime and punishment that he used to go through so there was a kind of crazy logic to them even though you could never see them coming. There was one time where his father told Jason’s sister Lucy that he’d seen her touching herself in a bad place. She was only six and didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but her father would say the same thing at the same time every day, each time telling her he was going to ‘correct’ her behaviour. Jason and Lucy were both terrified, but nothing would ever happen and eventually the warnings themselves because a sort of routine. Then the school holidays started, giving their father more time to act before anyone else would see Lucy. Over three days, once a day at exactly the same time, he would break one of her fingers with a mallet and chisel wrapped in masking tape. The fact that he’d do it at the same time was a vital part of the process, so he always made sure he did it late in the evening, just in case his train was delayed from work. He made her use ice packs so that when he eventually took her to casualty, he could say he accidentally slammed her hand in the car door. If they were living in some scummy urban housing estate they’d have had the social services calling them from the moment Jason first ’fell down the stairs’. But because nice, white and middle class families aren’t supposed to do things like that, the mechanisms to detect and deal with it weren’t in place.

The worst thing was their mum - she was getting her share of the beatings too and was permanently shell-shocked, but to a kid their mother is one of the two most powerful people in the world. When she didn’t do anything to save them and even covered up for him, it felt like she was a collaborator. As a child, Jason became confused and the love and hate he felt for his mother was mixed up all together. In the end, his father completely lost it and used a rolled-up newspaper on her like a brick. That night Jason looked at himself in the mirror and saw the blood in the toilet. He thought about sticking a kitchen knife in his father and burying him under the patio, but instead he just walked out of the house, went into town and caught the last train of the night. He didn’t even pack. He left his mum and little Lucy behind and feels guilty for not looking after her. He was nearly 13, but Lucy wasn’t even nine. Bernice listens to the story in horror and tries to apologise for what she said earlier, but Jason dismisses it and says she wasn’t to know. He’s never told anyone else this story before…

Watching from afar, Mira is also shocked by what she’s heard. Suddenly the present-day Jason starts to convulse and begs her to get him out of here quickly. Back in the real world, she helps him to remove his holographic suit and then he throws up all over the floor. When he recovers, he tells Mira this was the important thing that’s been missing. He was supposed to go back for his sister, but he never did. What could possibly make him forget his own sister? Mira points out that this all happened centuries ago, but Jason says they now have the technology to drop him back there. Mira argues that it’s one thing to observe what happened, but it’s another thing entirely to interact. Jason refuses to listen and says he can drop her back off at Station Zero and she’ll be able to get back home from there, or she can join him if she wants…

Sometime later, Jason is back in his holographic suit when he appears on a residential street as if from nowhere. He’s back in his old homestead - the House of Pain! He can hear an argument taking place inside the house, but Mira urges him to stick to their agreed plan. They watch as the young version of Jason storms out of the house, then the older version asks Mira to flip him forward about 48 hours. He checks that the holographic shield is functioning, then he approaches the front door and rings the bell. Jason’s father opens the door and Jason introduces himself as Detective-Inspector Summerfield from the Child Protection Taskforce. He asks if he can come in for a word, and nervously Peter Jonathan Kane agrees…

Jason contacts Bernice and tries to tell her that something’s happened, but discovers that she’s currently with an old friend, catching up on the good old days. She reminds him about the good old days - when you could still trust people. He tells her he needs her, but she says he always does and she‘s always giving him a second chance, despite her better judgement. She’s busy at the moment, so although she resists the temptation to tell him to rot in hell, she asks him to go away and leave her alone. She promises to talk to him when she gets back, but at the moment she’s really upset with him so she switches off the communicator.

Jason switches the recorder back on. There wasn’t much he could do with his father as he couldn’t exactly knife him and say good riddance - how many lives would be altered and destroyed if he did that? In the end he told his father that the disappearance of little Jason was being actively investigated and all resources were being used on the case as part of a new initiative that would involve covert and constant surveillance of his home. He also set up a trust fund for Lucy that the parents couldn’t access. That was all he could do, but he hopes and prays it’s enough and that he‘s finally done right by her. Now the databanks are replete with data, so he and Mira are heading home. The data contains the genetic records from the Stonehauser Medical Facility which have been indexed, filed and stamped, together with details of Clarissa Jones and her entire family tree and coherent data on his own life. He now has solid proof of temporal manipulation, that their lives are being messed with. He wants to talk to Bernice because she always understands, no matter what came between them. Talking to her helps him get things straight in his head. He now knows what he’s going to do, but he decides to wait until he sees her. He orders the machine to delete his recording.

Back at the Braxiatel Collection, Jason greets Adrian, who notes that he seems particularly pleased with himself. He tells Adrian he’s put some ghosts to rest and has a new lease on life. Adrian says Peter has been waiting to see him and asks if he remembered to bring something back from wherever he’s been. Jason says he needs to catch up with Brax quickly as it‘s long past time they resolved their differences, so Adrian says he’ll send Peter their way.

In his study, Irving Braxiatel greets Jason warmly, but Jason tells him he can stuff his greeting and says it’s time to stop playing games. Braxiatel reminds him that he’s already apologised for that unpleasant business with the Cybermen and asks if there’s anything else he can do to make things better. Jason demands to know about Clarissa Jones. He tells Brax he knows what’s been going on - a bit of re-writing here, a bit of smudging the corners there - but Clarissa grew up in this neck of the woods and she would have noticed the changes he was making, so Brax took her out of the picture by bumping her off. Twice. Jason says there never was a war between the Draconians and the Mim, at least not until Braxiatel changed things. But now the Mim are all but extinct and thousands of other people have been killed. Everything has been turned upside down across the galaxy. Braxiatel suggests things have actually been made “better”, which Jason takes as a confession. Jason knows that by this stage in his life, he and Bernice should have had children, but because of Brax they got divorced and he even ended up in Hell. Braxiatel becomes angry and says he really can’t be held responsible for every stupid thing Jason’s done and it’s about time he accepted some personal responsibility himself. He grudgingly admits that he may have had a hand in removing Rebecca and Keith from the timeline, but he did that because they would have taken up too much of Bernice’s time. He says Bernice is special and has a role to play at his side, which makes Jason think he’s in love with her, but Brax dismisses the suggestion and says she’s useful to him, that’s all. He says Bernice truly understands time and is prepared to make the difficult decisions, which is something he noticed about her when they first met. She probably thinks she learnt it during her travels, but that ability was within her long before she ever got to Heaven. Jason argues that Bernice is only interested in history, but Braxiatel says they both preserve the past and in so doing safeguard the future. That’s what his Collection is ultimately for.

This comment prompts Jason to accuse Braxiatel of doing something to the Collection with his ship, but Braxiatel tells him he needs to think more ambitiously - the Collection is his ship! The spaceport is a doorway back into time and space and they’re completely sealed off here. Jason realises this means no one will be able to catch Braxiatel unawares again as they did during the unexpected Dalek invasion. It also makes altering the timelines that much easier. Braxiatel admits to having plucked Bernice’s friend Ker'a'nol from a thousand years in the future, then re-wrote her whole life as if she’d always been from this time. Not a single person noticed and he’s been wanting to show off about that for ages! Jason wonders why he would do that and then realises Braxiatel needed Bernice out of the way while he worked on Clarissa. But it doesn’t end there - Brax then reveals that Jason’s friend Mira actually died during the Fifth Axis occupation. It was most unfortunate because Brax knew Jason would tell her anything, so he fixed things and persuaded her to see things from his point of view. She was suitably grateful and has kept in touch with him ever since. Brax casually asks how Jason’s father was and notes how alike the two of them look. Jason becomes even more angry and insists that his interference stops right now, but Brax asks him who precisely is going to stop him?

Jason considers contacting Braxiatel’s own people, but Brax just laughs at the suggestion and says they’ve gone their merry way and they never really cared anyway. Jason tries another tack and says he’ll stop Brax personally if he has to, even if it means telling Bernice the truth. Braxiatel realises Jason means it, so he tries to hypnotise him, but now that he’s been rumbled it doesn’t work on him any more. However, there are other ways to ensure Jason’s silence, once and for all. For the first time since storming in, Jason begins to realise he’s in a dangerous place and becomes afraid. He tries to leave, but Brax has no intention of letting him go now…

Suddenly the door opens and a delighted Peter runs in and hugs his beloved Uncle Jason. Jason is relieved and invites Peter to come with him to collect the present he’s brought back for him, but before he leaves he turns to Braxiatel and taunts him one more time. But instead of reacting, Braxiatel simply turns to Peter and tells him his mummy isn’t safe because Uncle Jason is putting her in danger. In fact, he says Uncle Jason wants to hurt everyone here, but it’s Bernice he wants to hurt most of all. The change in Peter is instant and dramatic and the youngster begins growling and snarling. Jason urges the boy not to listen, but Braxiatel tells him he’s the only one who can protect his mummy. Peter becomes an uncontrollable animal and turns on Jason and slowly begins ripping into him. Jason screams in agony while Braxiatel tells him he was never good enough for Bernice. Fighting for his life against the savage attack, Jason tells the boy that one day he’ll remember what he’s done and he wants him to know that he doesn’t blame him and that he wasn’t responsible for his actions. As Jason ruminates on the story of his life, he lets out a final scream and then it’s all over.