Home Writing Artwork Photography About News Contact Links
m
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.
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...