Daytripper
"We can go anywhere, anywhen, what do you want to see?" asked the Doctor, the console rumbling gently under his fingertips,
Out of all the universe? I hummed and hawed a bit, then was hit with inspiration,
"A blackhole eating an accretion disc." It was something I could never see without the TARDIS,
"Alright," he said, hitting a few keys and pushing a lever down, "blackhole it is."
He put it up on the screen beside the console, a huge, dappled disc shading up to painfully bright in the centre, with just a suggestion of a dark spot right at the heart, I peered into the image til my nose was almost in the screen- the detail was incredible,
"Can we get closer?"
The image jumped in magnification- the dark centre was quite apparent now, the glare from the disc lit the console one-sided, I winced, the Doctor dialled down the brightness, the dappled disc resolved into clumpiness, individual streamers smeared by the motion around the hole,
"And that's right outside the door?" I breathed,
"Right outside." He hit some keys and pulled a different lever, then he turned and walked over and opened the doors...
I stopped breathing, outside, through the doors, I could see the disc, the infinitesimal motion, the size- the reality of it stopped my thoughts, I approached the doors, open-mouthed, stood on the threshold of the TARDIS, and watched the known universe disappear into the next- borne beyond our knowledge, I grabbed hold of the door frame and leaned out to take in more of the immensity,
"Here." The Doctor grabbed my arm, wrapped his big hand around my wrist, let me curl my fingers around his, gripped the door frame with his other hand and let me lean right out. I could see nearly all around the TARDIS, the departing matter spread vastly beneath me in it's long dance to oblivion.
"What do you think?" he said, and I couldn't answer, couldn't think how to reply to this spectacle, so I turned back towards him and he pulled me in, and I hugged him one armed in the doorway and laughed because it was all so fantastic.
"Have you got some readings on the energy out there?" I knew the gamma rays had to be sky-high, the highest energy radiation produced in the universe as matter was torn out of it, he keyed the screen on the console to show a jagged line running obliquely across it, I couldn't read the notation on the graph, but it looked as I expected, massive amounts of high energy radiation, less of the lesser, I laid a finger on the greatest peak,
"Gamma rays?" He nodded vigorously, "Any gravity waves?"
He put up another graph I couldn't interpret, pointed out the tiny interference pattern formed by a nearby star, then he started talking about information continuity, open-mouthed I listened to him explain that quantum uncertainty determined that time could never really stop within a black hole, and the torsion force between particles would not allow the establishment of a singularity, so once a sufficient density of matter had built up there would be a big bang, and a new universe would be born within the throat of the black hole,
"Not death, but birth?"
"Yeah." he grinned and nodded,
"Did our own universe start this way?"
"Yeah." He grinned and nodded again.
"There somewhere I can read up on this stuff?"
"Oh yes." He nodded happily,
"Can you show me?"
He tried explaining it as we walked, it was a lot more difficult than even I'd anticipated, I had to be walked through it, he had to keep backtracking to concepts I understood, scratching his head and trying to find equivalencies in earth physics- in the end he resorted to waving his arms about in an effort to describe the process, I laughed,
"This could take a long time." he said,
"Got some unexpected time on my hands." I said, he grinned.
The Doctor pushed open a door into a dimly lit old fashioned human library, real fire in the grate, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, armchairs, and a neat audiovisual function, the screen took me through the theory, translated, illustrated the formulae in action, and would digress infinitely to answer my queries- it was wonderful. I found myself raiding the kitchen after hours at the black hole physics, being falling down tired, then the food giving me energy, and carrying on- because it started to make sense, I was remembering things, it was the most wonderful thing in the world to have my brain functioning fully again, I felt like I had every toy in the universe.
The Doctor found her head down on the table, asleep, she'd been running for 14 hours straight, drunk on her own ability to absorb new information. The instructional display hovered at the quantification of angular momentum of matter entering the black hole as part of the description of the manner in which information passed from the 'mother' into the 'daughter' universe, where the spin of the disk wound up the new universe's birth bang . He quirked a smile, and keyed the display off.