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:
Taking a deep breath, Petri allowed her consciousness to drift. It was difficult for her to relax her control that much, especially with all that was riding on her success, but she knew from her experiences melding with the Collective and in connecting to the rainbow that all the thought and reason in the world wouldn’t help her here; she needed to feel her way through it. She had learned from the Arcanum that in order to connect to another mind without losing the pattern of her own, she had to allow her thoughts to shift slightly until they were close, in a compatible pattern, but not in exactly the same configuration as the mind or minds she wanted to meld with.
The Arcanum called it “harmonics," and thought about it like music. All the instruments needed to blend together into a complete piece of music, but they didn’t do that by all creating the exact same sounds at the exact same frequency in the exact same rhythm. Each instrument had its own part in the song, but only by coming together harmoniously could they make a symphony.
When she melded with the Collective, Petri found a way to weave her consciousness into the song that was already in progress. In retrospect, she thought the process might be likened to listening to a band play for a while, and then jumping in once she thought she understood the tune they were playing and where they were going with it. Vlad and the Arcanum seemed to believe she could do the same thing with the rainbow, but the rainbow didn’t play any music she could recognize. It was like trying to insert herself into a jumble of discordant notes being played directly on the neurons in her brain without going insane, and then trying to turn that into something pleasing to the ear. She had no idea how to even start.
When she had shattered the barriers within the Collective, she had simply overpowered their song with one of her own. Like a foghorn amongst a string quartet, she had blown apart their melody and made them dance to the tune she played. But that wouldn’t work in this case, either. The Arcanum didn’t want her to destroy the rainbow; they wanted her to meld with it.
Up until now, since Petri had learned to shield her mind enough to function within the rainbow. Her strategy involved keeping her mental pattern slightly out of sync with the patterns in the rainbow. She thought of it as being half a dimension out of phase with her surroundings; there, but not there. The way some people sometimes claimed to see ghostly apparitions in rooms they entered; or like a tune that wasn’t quite loud enough to pick up, but was just on the edge of one’s hearing. Doing that allowed her to protect herself, and she used the technology in the taps to bridge the resulting gap and interact with the rainbow.
But that was clearly not going to be sufficient for what the Arcanum now wanted of her. Still, she needed to start somewhere, and she wanted to check on her friends, so it seemed her best bet was to try to make the same sort of shift in her consciousness that would put her just out of sync with the rainbow. Enough so that she would be able to talk with the others and see if they had any ideas. And, so, she drifted, and as she drifted, she sent out tendrils of her mind to feel out where the fire around her was least intense. Moving in that direction, Petri eventually discovered the point where the heat was still perceivable, but tolerable, and settled her mind there. She then reached for her connection to the taps and brought the rainbow into focus, simultaneously dropping the last remnants of her protective bubble.
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