The Chronicles of Inthandonia Delirium Delirium: My body is wracked with pain, my immune system breaking down under the invasion of nanocytes flooding my bloodstream. Agony lances through my being as the alien tentacle rammed into my eye socket thrusts its micro-fibres deep into the molecular structure of my brain. It calls upon all my training with the Dancing Monks to still my consciousness, to unhook each individual pain stimulus from my awareness. My physical body slowly withdraws from my knowing, the torrent of torment fading before the depth of my trance. The mad alien Ship-mind is trying to broach my defences, to read my every thought and subjugate my will to its insane purposes. Even in the fogs of pain and intimate assault I sense this Ship-mind is simply seeking to defend itself, to understand what it perceives as an intruder. It could slay me in an instant should it so wish – its nanobot army controls every aspect of my physical being – yet it seeks rather to understand me. Why am I here, why have I broken into its millennia of madness? What threat do I and my kind represent to the ship and its ultimate aim – to protect and perpetuate what remains of the scrambled virtual totality of the Skrellian Race? I came here with no thought of warfare or of perpetrating some insult to this immensely old being. Curiosity was my main motive, bolstered by a strong urge to help. I had sensed this Ship-mind’s distress across half of continental Kizzmir. As I was a foreign contaminant aboard the Ship so the Skrell vessel itself was a contaminant to the planetary Field of Consciousness. The straight lines of digital consciousness in a massive Artificial Intelligence such as the Skrell Ship warped the topological curves and cycles of the natural planetary magisphere. A skilled Wizard can sense that warping and twisting of the natural webs of Mind and Causality that surround Inthandonia. I’d first felt it when I began mastering Higher Meditation states at the Temple of Eight Million Compassionate Souls in Kaania. Once I’d sensed its presence I’d simply had to come here. Regardless of my intent the Skrell ship-board defences see my presence as an attack and it has responded accordingly. It seeks to know my mind – its insidious filaments now cradle every cell and neuron of my brain in a flexible crystalline web. It models every chemical and electrical gradient, every nerve and tissue, everything as it happens in my head and uses its massive arrays of quantum computing units to attempt to decode my thoughts. It fails. There is no thought for it to read – my mind is blank. A deep centre of serenity and light exists at the core of my being and there I sit, suspended in an inviolate circle of stone. There is no thought, just centred being. The pain and delirium rage in my mind’s sky like a storm over a hilltop and like a stone I sit and watch it pass. Nine days and nine nights I lay stretched across the laboratory stands while the Skrell AI ravaged my body. Finally it gave up. It had not gained access to my mind – not at all. It also had no idea that I had gained the upper hand!