Conquering Instinct

Hey Everyone!! :-)

Here's a little bit more of the third installment in the Petri Dish Chronicles! As always, the disclaimer is that this is a draft and, as such, it's unedited and likely full of errors and is subject to revision, revamping, and being completely scrapped and rewritten. But, with that in mind, I'm reasonably satisfied with the basics of it, at least at the moment, or I wouldn't have bothered posting it. Enjoy! :-)

Excerpt from the third Petri Dish book:
The darkness was short-lived and ended in an explosion of light, sound, and color. It was exponentially worse than even the first time she had entered the rainbow, long before she had learned to shield herself, and Petri knew it was her first test. If she failed to find a way to cope with this sensory overload enough to at least function and interact with the others, she had no chance of forming the kind of meld with the rainbow the Arcanum wanted her to make. Which would mean she and her friends would die.

Not knowing what to do, and desperate to protect herself from what felt like having her mind immersed directly into a fire, Petri fell back on instinct. She encased herself in an impenetrable bubble, which walled her off from the chaos surrounding her. Once she had recovered from the psychic shock, her memory slowly returned to her, and she was able to start reasoning through what had happened. Then she just needed to figure out what she should do next.

It was the taps, she remembered. The next-generation technology developed by the Arcanum. Their bandwidth far exceeded that of even the HD taps her friends were using, and she had never experienced anything quite like them before. After recovering a bit more, Petri realized her last thought was inaccurate. She had experienced something like it before, when she was first learning to connect to the Collective. And she had reacted in much the same way, by cocooning herself in a bubble and locking herself in and everyone else out. But that wasn’t going to work in this case; at least, not in the long-term.

In order to complete the mission the Arcanum had sent her in here to accomplish, and save the her own life and the lives of her friends, she needed to find a way to wall herself off just enough to protect herself, but not so much that she couldn’t interact with her surroundings or other people. She had done just that when she had connected to the Collective but, unlike then, this time there was a time limit.

With that in mind, Petri focused on reducing the opacity of the bubble she had put herself in. Slowly, the walls around her thinned and she could see her friends and Vlad standing nearby looking at her. Waiting. Unfortunately, the thinner the barrier she placed between herself and the rainbow, the thinner the barrier was between the rainbow and her mind. It wasn’t long before she could feel the pressure and heat trying to eat into her psyche, once again.