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 Shifting Paradigms:
Petri watched her friends walk away as she sank back onto the couch by the fire. True to his word, Vlad took them to the end of the room but no farther. From what she could see, it seemed like he created another seating nook like the one she was in, and he was engaging her friends in conversation. Idly, she wondered what they were talking about as she laid down and closed her eyes, allowing her mind to drift and expand.
Immediately, the pressure from the rainbow threatened to crush her back into herself, but she pushed back against it and forced her consciousness out and away. As she did so, Petri started to see patterns in the energy. They weren’t the same as the patterns she would find in an organic mind, but they also weren’t completely unrecognizable. What they were was utterly alien.
No matter the species, an organic mind had a familiar ebb and flow to its patterns. Even when Petri had a hard time deciphering the meaning of what she found in a mind because the being’s frame of reference, perceptions, sensory organs, or culture were so foreign to her as to give her little in the way of common landmarks. She could see the thoughts and feel the emotions even if should couldn’t understand or define them.
With the rainbow, she could see the patterns, but they wouldn’t mesh with her own mind. Nor could she seem to adjust her patterns to mesh with it. It was too regimented, too one thing or the other. There was no in between stage for her to cozy up to and slip inside of.
Petri let herself drift further out, thinking maybe if she could get a larger picture she could see a way to connect to the patterns that seemed to be trying to asphyxiate her. Idly, she thought it might feel like what drowning felt like… If you could drown without ever being able to get close enough to the water to get wet.
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