The grieving Tanaka is sorely tempted by the offer of an eternity of observation, without needing to act. While he’s lost in debate, a terrified Misha bolts from the lab through a side door.
Meanwhile, Defender Zik is trapped in the time warp! He screams out for help, hoping that his voice will reach Tanaka across the temporal abyss he finds himself in!
Zik’s voice snaps Tanaka into action, and he leaps to the aid of his good friend, shutting down the machine. Zik falls to the floor of the infernal machine — is he okay?!
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!
