With a blinding flash, the singularity is established in the infernal machine! As Defender Zik, Tanaka and Misha look on in horror, Dr. Wagner celebrates his achievement. Shoving Zik aside, Wagner sprints for the black hole, encouraging the others to jump in and experience the entire future of the universe in one leap of faith!
Wagner disappears into the singularity, and Zik begins to float towards it! Can he escape?!
While Tanaka bars the door, Zik tries to ride history’s first centaur rodeo. Misha the gorillaur grabs your favorite space hero off her back and flings him across the room. Recovering quickly, Zik squares off with the giant creature, while the holographic dragon continues to distract it.
Meanwhile, Tanaka finishes with the door, effectively blocking the much larger Marco from entering, and he leaps up onto the steel frame which surrounds the lab. He gazes down on the chaos and hesitates. Does he really want to help Zik stop the singularity machine, or could this be an escape from the pain of his lost clan?
Zik plays for time, keeping Dr. Wagner talking so he can figure out how to get out of this jam. But the jam they’re in is worse than they imagined!
Wagner reveals that despite causing his aging to dramatically slow, he is now at the limits of his life. Since he can’t see all of time unfold by becoming immortal, he’ll bring the rest of the future to himself, quickly! The machine he’s built creates a singularity and channels the warping of space-time so that for everyone in its field, the entire rest of time rushes towards them quickly, allowing them to see everything! Wagner reasons that this expanded perception must enable total enlightenment of the soul.
Sensibly, Zik asks why Wagner can’t perform this time manipulation elsewhere, where it won’t encompass his entire home planet and its population. But Wagner’s ethos dictates that if you can raise someone to a higher level of enlightenment, it would be unenlightened to avoid doing so. To him, enlightenment can be bestowed, and should be, whether the recipient agrees or not, because they are yet too unenlightened to understand the gift they’re receiving.
With that, Wagner turns to his diabolical machine and begins the process! The equipment revs up with a noise Misha the gorillaur knows only too well, and she starts getting nervous. Zik tells Tanaka to get ready, because he has a plan to use that nervousness to help stop the experiment. But Tanaka isn’t totally on board! This time warp experiment can give him the ability to stop worrying about what to do next, and passively observe what arrives. It’s what he’s been doing since recovering from the Jairian attack on his clan, and this provides an easy escape from the pain. Zik counters that it’s not up to Wagner to make a decision that robs everyone of the right to determine their own destiny, and with that, he steels himself for action!
Defender Zik is led into the lab of the sinister Dr. Wagner, along with Tanaka, still held by Misha the gorillaur. The lab is full of strange equipment and a platform surrounded by large rings. Zik presses Wagner for information, hoping to buy time to prevent him from destroying the planet. But Wagner is unconcerned with the deaths of millions of Zozians, because he’s convinced he’s bestowing enlightenment instead. Zik calls him crazy.
That sets Wagner off on an angry rant about how much he contributed to the secretive Project Zoz that enabled humans to leave Earth and come to Zoz all those years ago. He continues that his new challenge has been unlocking the secrets of immortality, and amazes the others by revealing that he’s over a thousand years old already! An incredulous Tanaka asks how that’s possible, and Wagner replies that he did to himself what he’s done with everything he’s touched over the years: he repaired the flaws he perceived in the original design! Returning to the topic at hand, he promises the shocked duo enlightenment!
A mighty brawl erupts in the jungle, as the gorillaurs attack Defender Zik and his Chadee pal Tanaka! As the huge male takes a swipe at Zik, a female sneaks up on Tanaka, who is drawing his pistol. She grabs Tanaka from behind in a half-Nelson, forcing him to drop the gun!
Zik and the huge male square off, but it goes about as badly for Zik as you might expect. With his suit integrity beginning to decline, Zik also whips out his pistol and aims at the male. However, the female has Tanaka in a death grip! One false move, and Tanaka gets a dirt nap!
Surrendering his gun, Zik pleads for his good friend’s life. They’re captives of these enormous, mysterious creatures!
As they continue to walk into the jungle, Zik and Tanaka, unaware that they’re being stalked, talk about how to handle Tanaka’s predicament as a Ronin Chadee. Zik suggests that Tanaka could ride with his crew on the Temerity, which Tanaka seems open to.
Meanwhile, Zik’s helmet visor scanners are going crazy. There’s so many life forms that it’s unable to separate one from the other and form an analysis. Or is it because it’s encountering something it’s never scanned before? Something large, and not in the database?
Suddenly, a GORILLA CENTAUR jumps out of the dense brush and attacks!!
