Free The Lucifer Code by Michael Cordy

felt she was attached in some way to Ariel, still being ripped from her. But the pain was emotional not physical, fear, loss, grief and rage combining together. She tried again to scream but she had no voice.
    She tried to struggle but she had no body. She was an amorphous entity, enveloped in darkness, rushing towards an unknowable void.
    Ahead, a bright cone of light appeared, flickering in the dark, drawing her into its magnetic field. She was travelling so fast that she was soon inside it, a part of it. It appeared to stand still, its beam disintegrating into particles as she merged with it, becoming indivisible from it. Her being was no more than a collection of shimmering packets of light. The light evoked a memory and she waited for Ariel to join her again and lead her to the source.
    Then, just as she thought Ariel might be there, the emotional pain spiked to new heights as the last raw connection pulled at her. She wished then that she could cut herself free and float peacefully away.
    But there was no escaping the elastic grip that pulled her out of the light, back into the darkness, back to herself. . .
    Her staring eyes closed and then opened again as Amber woke with a start. All the time the NeuroTranslator continued to monitor her. And now the night nurse was soothing her, mopping her brow.
    She was so focused on her patient that she paid no heed to the pulsing wavelengths dancing across the top half of the NeuroTranslator screen as Brian's neural net assimilated the abnormal aspect of Amber's brain. She rearranged the disturbed bedclothes, relieved that her charge was calm now, and didn't register the twenty-six-second change in tone emitted by the humming device.
    When Amber Grant went back to sleep, and the nurse retreated gratefully for a cup of coffee, the NeuroTranslator had returned to its even hum.
    *
    The Red Ark. Cape Town. 33deg 55' S, 18deg 22' E
    Six thousand miles away, Xavier Accosta, the Red Pope, sat alone in his office on the upper deck of the Red Ark. The leatherbound book cradled in his hands looked even older than its hundred years, its spine cracked from being opened too many times at the same page. He let it fall open at the same passage it always did. Breathing deeply, he rearranged his scarlet robes and flexed his damaged left leg, allowing the pain to dissipate. Then he began to read, his dark eyes moving slowly across the page as he savoured each word of the familiar text:
    Extract from the Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Montpellier, France, 1905
    Notes on the experiment between Dr Baurieux and the criminal Languille in which the doctor tries to communicate with the condemned man's severed head immediately after execution by guillotine.
    Immediately after the decapitation, the condemned man's eyelids and lips contracted for five or six seconds ... I waited a few seconds and the contractions ceased, the face relaxed, the eyelids closed half-way over the eyeballs so that only the whites of the eyes were visible, exactly like dying or newly deceased people.
    At that moment I shouted 'Languille' in a loud voice, and I saw that his eyes opened slowly and without twitching, the movements were distinct and clear, the look was not dull and empty, the eyes which were fully alive were indisputably looking at me. After a few seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and steadily.
    I addressed him again. Once more, the eyelids were raised slowly, without contractions, and two undoubtedly alive eyes looked at me attentively with an expression even more piercing than the first time. Then the eyes shut once again. I made a third attempt. No reaction. The whole episode lasted between twenty-five and thirty seconds.
    Dr Baurieux, Montpellier, France, 1905
    whenever Accosta read these words he felt both disturbed and excited, imagining what Languille's eyes had seen as his soul departed.
    He looked up at four high-resolution holographic plasma screens on the oak-panelled wall in front of him. Two