When Minds Collide (Phoenician Short #0.1)

By Marjorie F. Baldwin

When two brilliant scientists die together in a careless traffic accident, the Community, a fledgling human colony on an alien world, suffers a devastating blow. Joshua Scherrer and Andrew Caine might have loathed each other personally, but their collective knowledge was vital to humanity’s survival. Without them and their contributions, Administrator Stafar Baghendi fears for humanity's very survival.

In a desperate attempt to salvage both men, Stafar Baghendi uses an untried, theoretical gene therapy process, infusing the genetically-encoded memory of Andrew Caine into the DNA of Joshua Scherrer. The two men awaken to find themselves living together inside one mind, but their clashing personalities might prove a more fatal collision than the one that killed them the first time.

What none of the humans realize is that here on the Phoenician home world, the Seven Chiefs have a Plan for everything—and this time, the Plan will change the course of human history forever.

(The end of this short eBook contains an 8000-word excerpt of a Phoenician Series novel; actual length of this story is 29,000 words)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phoenician Books
• Release date: Jul 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476235936

Marjorie F. Baldwin

Marjorie F. Baldwin (aka "Friday") is a pen name used to write Science Fiction technothrillers, SF action/adventure series, some time travel short stories or novellas and old School SciFi. Friday's style will appeal to fans of Romantic SF (or SFR) since like Heinlein's character after whom she is named, she feels sex is part of the human condition. Of course, that assumes we're all human ^)^

Book preview

When Minds Collide

A Phoenician Series Short Story

by Marjorie F. Baldwin

(c) Copyright 2012-2014 Phoenician Books. All rights reserved.

Can two men co-exist inside one mind? Andrew Caine and Joshua Scherrer can barely co-exist on the same planet but after they're in a fatal car accident together, their only hope for revival is an experimental process that any reasonable scientist would have to be mad to try. Administrator Stafar Baghendi is just mad enough though, and he blends the two men into one. Can they accept their new existence together, or will their minds collide as fatally as the car crash that killed them?

When two brilliant scientists die together in a careless traffic accident, the Community, a fledgling human colony on an alien world, suffers a devastating blow. Joshua Scherrer and Andrew Caine might have loathed each other personally, but their collective knowledge was vital to humanity’s survival on this alien world. It is only Scherrer’s brilliant reprogramming of the machines only Caine can repair that will keep humanity from going extinct on this frontier world.

In a desperate attempt to salvage both men, the Community’s Administrator, Stafar Baghendi, uses an untried and theoretical gene therapy that will infuse the genetically-encoded memory of Andrew Caine onto the DNA of the material from which they can clone a new body for Joshua Scherrer. They have no memory source for Scherrer and no genetic source for Caine. Their survival will be together or not at all.

What none of the humans realize is that here on the Phoenician home world, the Seven Chiefs always have a Plan for everything. Just because humans are involved doesn’t make it an exception. It was their Plan all along to change the course of human history forever.

(The end of this short eBook contains an excerpt of a Phoenician Series novel; actual length of this story is only 28,500 words)

Cover Credits

Stock photo of and by Crissans Pacheco

Background Design by Sessha Batto

Cover Design by Sarah, The Webbiegrrl Writer

License Notes/Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this eBook. It is the copyrighted, intellectual property of the Author, and no part of it may be reproduced, copied or distributed, for commercial or non-commercial or personal purposes, in print, electronically, digitally or otherwise. Please respect the hard work of this Author and do not give illegal copies of this eBook to your friends but invite them to download their own copy from Smashwords, where they can also discover other titles from Phoenician Books. Thank you for supporting the hard work of this Phoenician Books Author.

This is a work of fiction. The names of people, places and things are products of the Author’s imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner for dramatic purposes and are not to be construed in any way as representing reality. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events or locations is entirely incidental.

Connect with Me Online

Find all my links at: http://about.me/FridayBaldwin

Table of Contents

When Minds Collide (28,500 words)

Ch1/6220 words

Ch2/3760 words

Ch3/5960 words

Ch4/5150 words

Ch5/2440 words

Ch6/4610 words

List of Titles in The Phoenician Series

Excerpt: Man Made Man (Book 1) (3800 words)

About the Author

Contact Information

~ 1 ~

William Harrington froze, his hand just short of opening the door to the lab. He hesitated because he knew there’d be a fight once he went through that door. The entire Membership of the Community, a surly bunch of independent thinkers, had sent William here with a summary judgment to execute. He was Director of Security so in their informal frontier system of justice, it was his official duty to deliver the verdict and enforce sentence. Today, he was tasked to shut down Andrew Caine’s research lab. The cowards had sent him not because he was Director of Security. No, William was here because Drew was his husband and Drew had a long-practiced tendency to argue with people who told him he couldn’t have what he wanted. Given Drew’s Scottish temper, he could usually intimidate just about anyone. Except William, of course. William Harrington had been winning arguments with Andrew Caine for over a hundred years of marriage. It was an art form, one Will had mastered after the first ten or twenty years.

William just wasn’t in the mood for a fight today, regardless of who won in the end. He and Drew had barely spoken in weeks. The last thing he wanted was to have their first words after the long silence be words of anger. He wouldn’t be the problem. He could keep his temper, but Drew wouldn’t. Closing Drew’s lab was a harsh punishment. The Membership could have let Drew choose another line of research but William had completely agreed on the need for stricter limits, even for the great Andrew Caine. No, especially for Drew. If he was allowed to move forward with the Ronningers, the Artificial Lifeforms, or ALs, that he was designing right now, it wouldn’t turn out well. It was bad enough Drew thought of himself as God, creating these things as though he were creating life, but Ronningers weren’t life. They were death, personified. Literally.

Named after Alfred Ronninger, Drew’s mentor and the original founder of the field, these things were a blend of Organic Lifeforms with inorganic augmentation. The term cyborg would be more appropriate than AL but words like borg elicited unprofessional giggles from some while making others run screaming from the room. Better to use the innocuous term AL. Previously, ALs had merely used sophisticated algorithms to emulate human thought and done so with entirely Inorganic piece parts. The Ronningers, however, were made from living people—or rather, people who had been alive before they became Ronningers. These creatures were a grotesque realization of the Frankenstein story and completely unethical, which was why Alfred Ronninger, himself, had abandoned the project. He’d never figured out a reasonable method for creating the things other than using defective human designs and gutting out their brains to make room for the AI that would run the show.

The original plan had been to have Ronningers run the ship for the long journey from Earth to wherever they ended up. Instead, when Ronningers hadn’t been worked out in time for the launch, sustainment of a few dozen humans became a necessity. They’d brought the rest of humanity with them, of course, but in vitro. So to speak. The genetic samples in the Vault represented over a million unique human profiles, enough to re-establish the human race if they could just create a viable settlement into which to introduce new people. Selecting which profiles would be used to breed the new human race had been a political battle William had been happy to have no part of, but selection had been made, the Vault filled and sealed and the ship launched. Then they’d crashed and been too busy with mere survival on this alien world to start a selective breeding program.

Drew had insisted they could use the abandoned Ronninger project to alleviate some of the grunt work, to build shelters and water filtration facilities, but he’d made Ronningers from discarded human designs like Alfred had done. It was still unethical and still not worth the cost of human life. The defective humans could be brainwashed with that new memory replacement process Stafar and Alyssia had developed and called Adjustments. What a nice, neat term for rewriting a person’s mind. William didn’t think they were much more ethical than Drew at the moment.

At least William’s Proctors would be real people with fully-organic minds who could make informed choices. The Adjustments to Proctors would be minimal, just enough for a state of obsequiousness. Conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs was not the same as having a machine inside your head running the show.

If Will opened the door and found a defective design or worse, some dead Proctor on Drew’s table, there’d be no question what he had to do next. A dead Proctor was not on Cory’s logs for crèche failures this week so Andrew Caine would have to explain where he’d gotten the body—and William knew where that would lead. Drew would deny having murdered the man to forcibly donate his body to science. Drew just didn’t see how wrong his choices were anymore. It was all enough to make Will question the very fabric of their marriage now. And that was really what held him back from opening the door on the argument that might end his life with Andrew Caine.

He procrastinated another minute by straightening his perfectly straight tunic. Knee-length, royal-blue and piped in gold, his tunic had a military cut to it and needed no adjustment. It had been designed to stay looking trim through all forms of motion. It was also the only piece of clothing he’d managed to rescue so lucky for him it was so versatile and durable.

He checked the toes of his military boots, hoping to find a mark he might have to clean off—anything he could use as a means of delaying the inevitable. The spit-and-polish gloss shined back at him mockingly. He sighed and reached a hand up to check his long, dark hair. Hanging down his back past his waist, he had it gathered into a bunch at the nape with a gold and silver filigree clasp that Andrew had given him as an engagement gift and he’d given back to Drew at their wedding. It had been a symbolic trade of something that meant something to both of them. It had been Drew’s mother’s broach and she’d been the first and only person to meet and accept will into Drew’s family back on Earth. Finding nothing else to use as a means of procrastination, Will let go of the past and opened the door into his future.

Andrew Caine looked up when the door opened, William was hovering in the doorway, staring with intent