The Pattern Ship (The Pattern Universe) Read Online Free PDF Page A

caused his vision to blur.
    He didn’t agree with the Mickey Mouse scientists who said his body was adapting to the metal’s presence, he knew the damned thing was killing him in slow, but definite stages. He accepted the fact, even liked the euphoric style buzz it sometimes gave him as it reached new levels of toxicity.
    Now, he needed it to calm down before he could continue. So he waited patiently for the pain to ebb to manageable levels.
    The room was in darkness, but caught the ambient lighting from the street lights as well as from a security light on the front window display. He could see sufficiently for his purpose and looking across the room, espied his first objective.
    He was about to move when something he saw caused him to freeze again, maintaining his start pose.
    A long thin beam of light appeared just a few feet in front of him.
    It formed a curtain of glare that he couldn’t see through as it moved steadily towards him. Weird, or what?
    What was this, an unexpected security feature?
    He looked up, but discovered nothing that could create this illuminated curtain.
    Zeke went to move aside, as he did so it changed direction to intercept him.
    The colour of the beam changed from white to red and then to a polar ice blue as if it had detected his proximity.
    His hands on the floor in front were caught first. The light appearing so intense at the point of contact with his gloves, that it seemed to illuminate the finger joints inside as it progressed past his knuckles up his hands continuing on towards his body.
    Still frozen not daring to move, a strange tingling sensation, similar to pins and needles except much more intense, spread wherever the beam touched him. It wasn’t painful, although it set his teeth on edge making them vibrate as it approached closer to his face. He realised there must be sonic aspects to the beam. He didn’t fancy losing his fillings.
    Concerned now that this might actual harm him, or cause him extreme pain, Zeke tried to move out of its path, but found that he was now frozen in place. Either that, or he was no longer in command of his muscles and limbs. Either way he was now in trouble.
    His head was now an inch from the beam which was working across to him at a steady predetermined pace.
    He tried to blink, couldn’t.
    The light now reached his face, blinding him as it continued its journey across him. His eyes tingled making him want to rub them with his knuckles, which were also still itching from contact with the light beam.
    When the beam made contact with his skull, alarm bells jangled inside his head. The beam was reacting in a spectacular fashion with his metal plate.
    The intense tingling now surged into a flaring agony. His optic nerves recorded the inside of his skull exploding with multi-coloured sparkles as if all his synapses were firing at once. Just before it reached a point of actually making him scream out loud, he blacked out.
    ***
    Zirkos was concerned. The scan of the being showed that it had indeed a large amount of Pheson Alacite in its body.
    The largest amount was concentrated within the being’s head which had somehow bonded to its brain matter so extraction without killing the creature would prove difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, it needed that compound to create the processors for the ship’s A.I., which left it with a moral dilemma. To kill a living being to create an Artificial Intelligence was unacceptable.
    It was not as if it had to do something immediately anyway, the process of pollution of the Alacite into the human’s bloodstream was slowly killing it. While it was also manifesting itself at a cellular level, changing the genetic make-up of the being, it would result in a race against time to complete the transformation before the process killed its host.
    Interesting! Zirkos had not come across this form of reaction before. The cells were forming into something entirely different to the hosts DNA. It remained to be seen what it