Levels Of Connection...

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:
Turning to the friends in question, she asked, “How are you guys doing?”

Chessie looked at Daji and back at Petri. Shrugging, she said, “We’re fine, hun.” Daji nodded his assent, though he refused to look directly at her. Petri wasn’t surprised; she knew he wasn’t ever likely to forgive her for “betraying the galaxy,” which is what he considered her cooperation with the Arcanum.

She wasn’t too worried about her friends in the short term. Unlike her, they had been allowed to connect to the rainbow using regular HD taps, and Petri was grateful that concerns about what effect the taps she was using might have on their minds wasn’t something she was now being distracted by. Surprisingly, it hadn’t taken much persuasion to convince the Arcanum to spare Petri's friends the risk. To be honest, Petri hadn’t even been sure she would be able to form the necessary shield for her mind with the next-generation technology, and she had practice in protecting herself from the rainbow’s energy. But, in her case, she had known there would be no compromise, so she had focused on protecting her friends. The Arcanum wanted Petri to use the new taps they had invented so that she would have the greatest possible access to the rainbow to make the meld.

But, there were no such considerations when it came to Chessie and Daji, and Vlad and the Arcanum had learned through their experiments that most humanoids lacked the mental control to be able to handle the extra bandwidth without damaging their brains. Petri thought Daji might have been able to do it with his Shujaa training, but she wasn’t sure. And even though Chessie had a lot of experience as a diddler, she didn’t have the kind of mental training that Daji did, and Petri was afraid Chessie wouldn’t be able to protect herself. Which meant Petri would have ended up spending a significant portion of her attention on keeping her friends safe.

Vlad had been an unexpected ally in convincing the Arcanum it would be better to allow Petri’s friends to use the established technology. The aliens hadn’t been united about making all of them use the new taps, but there had been some debate within the Collective. But, when Petri and Vlad had argued together that she’d make faster progress in achieving a meld with the rainbow if she wasn’t simultaneously distracted by trying to shield her friends from having their minds burned out, the Arcanum had acquiesced on the matter.