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Joe Stone's life is turned upside down following a chance meeting with a beautiful woman called Zee. They are taken on a journey by a desperate, dying species, experiencing an experimental evaluation of human kind from deep within their subconscious, and then enjoying a blossoming love affair set to the backdrop of an alien world.

However, a sinister force has deadly plans for them, so their resultant escape takes them into direct interaction with a pansophical entity .

Guardian of the alternative realities - The Flux

You can download it from Amazon for your Kindle (Type in "DJ Burnham" to bring it up quickly) or click HERE

Genre : Sci-fi

Status : Available to buy

 

See below for the opening to the book.

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Prologue

The contoured surfaces pulsated with swimming lights, giving the cabin a preternatural life of its own. Humanoid creatures worked feverishly at their positions, cabin temperature matching ideal body temperature, sweet-scented atmosphere filling their lungs, plunging scaly hands into the iridescent jelly that formed the main screens in front of them. The set of their features would be interpreted by another of their kind as intense concentration. Arms half-immersed in a substance that, by virtue of the ease of its penetration and perfect verticality, would defy any Earth-bound physics, giving no clues as to the activities within. No levers or buttons, dials nor gauges; at least, none that a human would recognise. Hands subtly caressing areas of denser gelatinous matter, watching for local changes in colour and shades therein, to witness the success of their labours. Symbiotic communication with a living material that filled every panel and conduit, which in turn was currently engaged in a similar interaction with the organic nature of the energy matter through which they were rapidly passing. The Flux.
Lengthy periods of preparation had preceded the voyage. Many years spent familiarising themselves with the ship, winning its trust and respect, understanding its nature to a point of intimacy that a human might describe as love. Then followed a quazi-religious interval to build the mental discipline and focus that would enable them to maintain unwavering concentration in a state that was equivalent to a deep, but wakeful, meditation. It was to be a long journey, punctuated only by fleeting breaks to consume essential fluids and regenerate their exhausted mental reserves. Sleep was brief, but the benefits were immeasurably magnified by playing back the enormous banks of recorded dreams, stored within the ship's memory banks, stimulating phenomenally rapid recovery and biochemical rebalance within the brain.
Each crew member had spent every sleep period, for two of their years leading up to departure, on board the ship. Cranium immersed in a jelly screen at the head of a couch, while they slept. The ship absorbing and storing every detail of each individual's slumbering reverie, ready to be replayed to the original owner of the dreams. The dreams themselves contained codes and information which the ship could translate back to them, under cover of images and emotions, to create a super-charged sleep. Each crew member was vital to the mission, their wakeful contact with the ship had to be maintained as continuously as possible, if they were all to survive the passage and so complete the first stage of their task.
Through from the cabin was a chamber containing the crew's sleep pods, with a jelly screen at the head of each one. Opposite the outward crew's pods were another ten. These were all closed and permanently filled, the occupants immersed for the length of the outward journey, the ship elegantly reducing their body activity to a state akin to hibernation. They would awaken soon and their tasks would begin, for these were the scientists of the species.
In the next and final chamber, was the sleepers' equipment and the objective of this great undertaking. Two large transparent tanks stood in readiness, already connected to a port in the bank of equipment. Similarly ergonomic to the first cabin, four contoured couches jutted out into the chamber, each with its own jelly screen. The tubes, pipes and conduits leading from the port carried the same gelatinous matter of the living ship, entering the tanks and spreading out into a capillary network of progressively finer scale, hanging gracefully, waiting...
 

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