Being of the Field by Traci Harding Read Free Book Online Page A

living organism—or rather, they’d failed to discover how nature could have perfected this complicated process by accident.
    It almost seemed as if this substance was performing the function of an incubator. Taren was now extremely curious as to what was taking place below the cloud mass.
    The buzzer on the lab door alerted Taren to company.
    ‘Come in, it’s not locked.’ She looked up from her screen to see who her visitor was. ‘What are you doing here?’
    When Taren awoke she was aching from sleeping hunched over at her desk. ‘Ooo-ah,’ she moaned, having a good stretch. ‘I must have been zonked.’ She couldn’t recall feeling fatigued or dropping off to sleep. ‘Now where the hell was I?’
    Taren looked around to get her bearings and noticed that the arrowhead of her handheld FFRD monitor was bouncing at the negative end of the indicator, just as it had been when they’d first approached the anomaly.
    ‘Oh no,’ she mumbled, trying to get a grip on what living matter might be causing the huge quantum disturbance in the room. There was nothing and no one in sight. The entire crew could not cause such a huge fluctuation to register, so she alone had no hope.
    She looked at the gaseous substance of undulating colour held in the transparent tube in the observation room. ‘It couldn’t be.’ She looked back to check the reading to find the needle drifting back over the zero, or centre point of the FFRD register and into the positive. ‘No!’ She glanced at the sample and quickly back to the monitor which did a little bounce in the positive.
    ‘It’s communicating!’ Taren gasped, and jumped back from the desk. ‘No, that’s impossible. It’s just a gas!’
    ‘Dr Lennox?’
    Taren woke with a start, gasping with fright. She looked directly to the handheld FFRD sitting on the desk where she’d plugged it into a data history analysis machine—the needle was sitting dead still at zero point. ‘Oh, thank heavens.’ She held her chest, relieved beyond belief to discover she’d been dreaming.
    ‘I think you were having a bad dream,’ someone said. Taren spun around in her chair to find Lucian standing in the doorway.
    ‘Caught sleeping on the job, hey?’ Taren winced. ‘That doesn’t look too good, does it?’
    Lucian didn’t look worried. ‘You’ve had a full day,’ he said. ‘If our sample is not an immediate threat, why don’t you get some sleep?’
    ‘I’ve got some very interesting information regarding—’
    Lucian held up a hand. ‘We’ll meet at breakfast this evening,’ he decreed. ‘Just because a lot of people on AMIE are up at all hours doesn’t mean we have to be. Go to bed,’ he ordered, over her impending objection. ‘Good morning.’ He raised a hand in farewell. ‘See you at sunset when I arise.’
    Taren didn’t want to go to bed. Her strange gas was all too interesting. ‘We could be discovering the as-yet-undetermined, elusive substance that has the potential to create an energetic reaction sufficient to transform a mixture of molecules into something with the basic characteristics of a living organism, and he wants me to sleep!’ Was there a connection between her field theory and this substance? By her reckoning everything evolved through interaction with the field. Could it be that this substance was just her field made manifest? Or perhaps this substance was an instrument of the field?
    ‘Questions that must wait for the morrow.’ She closed her folders, and switched off any system that was not needed. ‘I guess I have earned a rest.’ She yawned—her brain may have been on overdrive but her body sure needed sleep. ‘Now all I have to do is remember where my living quarters are.’
    Out through the windows in the flight deck the only thing to be seen was the steam rising from the hot-water surface of Oceane fogging any other view. And night was closing in.
    On her way to get some rest, Taren stopped to admire Zeven at work, battling high seas