Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [12]
The contradictions inherent in this didn’t even register with him: such awareness was fading as the electrodes probed their way through his frontal and prefrontal cortices, seeking out the appropriate neuronal clusters to interface with.
As his consciousness closed down completely, his last sensation was that of cold water, drip-drip-dripping onto his skin.
Chapter Two
The dome loomed up out of the darkness, suddenly just there like a sleeping whale, discovered amongst the kelp and weeds. John had expected something, but not this. The sonar – in one of its brief, functioning moments – had given a clean, sharp pulse, something incredibly dense and suspiciously big. Something forty yards below the boat, where, by rights, nothing like it should have been. As he swung the lamp across it, the beam glimmered back; muted and tinted greeny brown by the silt and the algae in the water, the reflected light flashed across him, as if someone inside was as curious about him as he was about it.
He angled the lamp downwards and manoeuvred himself closer to the behemoth. As he reached out to touch it, he felt an odd tingle in his arm, like a tiny electrical current – not painful, but disconcerting. What was even more disconcerting was the matching arm that reached out of the depths of the thing, a mirror image of his own. As he drew closer, the arm likewise reached out for him, until their fingertips touched at the surface.
The thing was slippery... no, not slippery. Skiddy. If there was such a word. As though the chromed surface was pushing him away, reluctant to be touched. It was a sensation he’d never experienced before. Like a kitten in front of its first mirror, John moved from side to side, watching his own dimmed reflection, slightly stretched out like a comedy face in the back of a spoon.
He craned his head back, restrained by the helmet, and pointed the lamp up. The curve of the object faded a way into distant darkness in all directions.
He moved back, sensing the water tingling around him, silently seething with forces and energies that scared him.
Perhaps it was these energies that were making him feel nervous, edgy; not the fact that, buried in the seabed off the Orkney islands was a huge, mirrored hemisphere; not the fact that, as he stared into its glassy depths, it almost seemed to be looking right back at him.
He shuddered, realising how cold he was, and checked his watch – about eight minutes of air left. Just time for a quick swim around the thing. He pushed away from the seabed, the water thickening even more with the flurry of sand, and began to move around it. It was very disorientating: even as he knew he was moving, the featureless surface of the dome gave the impression that he was standing still. Only the odd floating clump of weed or other debris, caught in the beam from his lamp, convinced him that he was actually moving.
Five minutes later, he was on the point of giving up and returning to the surface: he could only get a vague impression of the dome’s size, judging by its curvature. But for all he knew, he could have circumnavigated it totally, and be back where he started. But then he saw something on its surface that he hadn’t seen before.
A couple of feet up from where the dome (it only then occurred to him that he’d been assuming it was a dome – for all he knew, it could be a sphere, half buried in the seabed) met the sand was a dark, starfish shape, the size of a spreadeagled man.
He swung the light over it, noticing the dull, reflective glint of metal under the thick accretion