[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 6

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4,}

“I’m in a transpo sub. When you didn’t show up for your appointment, I contacted Tartarus reception. Hank told me what happened with the marines, that you were confined to an external cell. This is probably outside of my duties as your therapist but we work for the same company. We’re co-workers at least, and over the course of our sessions, I feel like we’ve-”

His response was explosive, and her reaction confirmed that it was hurtful although that wasn’t his intent. “Olivia, that was the stupidest thing you could’ve done. Turn back. First off, those jarheads tossed me in this cell and odds are they’ll do the same to you. Second, there’s something really fucking weird going on here. The station looks empty. It’s not, I caught people darting between rooms earlier, they’re holed up and avoiding the corridors. I think they’re being kept here. If you dock with Tartarus you might never leave.”

She sat wide eyed and grim, telling James a moment later what he’d already inferred from her silence. “We....we’ve already docked, James. The hatch is opening now.” Just before the link cut out he heard a sliver of what he felt certain was Remer’s voice. He had her now. The feeling of despair was incredible. What little he had left of the world he knew was rapidly dwindling, miles below the Pacific and yet strangely he felt no more alone than usual.

“Can’t believe he’s gone.” Remer and the other two soldiers stood before a tremendous concave porthole, spiderwebbed with metal reinforcement beams. Outside the countless separate cells swayed gently in the currents, looking from this distance like fireflies.

“That could’ve been any of us. We weren’t more than a hundred feet apart when Drake’s cavitation bubble collapsed. His sub hit seawater at two hundred miles an hour and crumpled like a beer can. If he’d been ahead of us by a few seconds-”

Remer cut in. Not loudly, it was not his style, but the force was felt. “Or if topside had given us the actual minimum safe distance. But then, they knew we wouldn’t launch if they did.” The others nodded somberly.

“Don’t worry boys, I’m keeping score. Do you know what I did before this? Commercial diving. I worked from a subsea mining platform in French Polynesia. Pristine beaches, pretty girls, not that I ever saw any of it. I don’t think I felt tropical sunshine on my back once in the six years I worked for that outfit. It’s unnatural. We’re primates, Tony. Our instincts are suited for tracking prey across the savannah. Riding a steel capsule a quarter mile straight down while breathing an artificial atmosphere, then diving out into an enveloping cold dark abyss and trudging across powdery white terrain last seen by our ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago is about the most god damned unnatural condition I can conceive of for us.”

Antonio nodded, stroking his beard. These maudlin rants were another quirk of his to which they were well accustomed. Remer continued. “But you know what? What doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger. Or cripples us!” He obviously expected a laugh, and they were not inclined to disappoint him.

“I do think it made me stronger. I had a lot of time to myself down there. I saw things I still can’t talk about. But what changed me most wasn’t out there in the water, it was internal. I got to thinking about how it was that an air breathing ape came to be two thousand feet underwater in a rubber suit peering out through plastic. You know, you’re seventy percent sea water right? Exact same salinity. We came from the sea. Or, I should say we were driven from it. We were weak back then, evicted from our ancestral home by faster, meaner predators. But look at us now! Cutting through the sea in a streak of fire, leaving a wake that deafens whales. Crushing between metal claws the ancient, unchanging creatures that once made a meal of us. Augmenting our bodies so that we can tread the soft sand of the deep seabed, gods of land and water alike. In our distant evolutionary history we were driven from this place, but we’ve returned as masters.”

Antonio wiped a tear from his eye. Bruce couldn’t stop clapping. Remer’s selection process strongly favored sycophants. “So wait, have the prisoners been augmented? We’re what, two miles down? And those capsules are directly exposed to outside pressure.” Remer snorted.

“We’re about five times as deep as normal human biology will tolerate. The prisoners gets injections containing gut bacteria extracted from some creepy crawly they found in the trench, lets them endure the pressure, and decompress quickly by some chemical method when they’re released or transferred. But right now they’re fully saturated with nitrogen, this way they have no prayer of escape. Where would they go? They can’t come in here, sudden decompression would splatter them all over the walls. They can’t surface either, same deal. Maybe they could get to another cell, but who gives a shit if they kill each other?”

That seemed to satisfy them. “You know, I was a Tartarus inmate once.” Shocked silence. “What for?” Clearly an unwelcome question. “...Not important. But I know guards have control of the breathing mixture for individual cells. They jacked with mine a lot, mostly when I was violent. The funny thing is that even on regular air, at about 115 feet the sensation’s great. You feel happy, euphoric even. Cooperative. Couldn’t imagine hurting anyone. They call it the martini effect. Accelerated healing, wonderful dreams, idyllic all around. Much deeper though, and shit begins to go wrong. Dizziness. You get clumsy. Simple ideas obsess you. Feels like you’re surrounded by something that hates you and you’re just waiting for it to make a move.”

“The hallucinations start around 200 feet unless you switch mixtures. You’ll burst out in nervous laughter, no idea why. Terror strikes you, then fades away. Everything gets louder, brighter, feels like you’re floating. Most guys start babbling and frothing at the mouth. I stuck it out, tried not to react, didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. Over time I developed a tolerance. But there’s a point somewhere around 2,300 feet equivalent where even if you’re breathing hydrox, if you haven’t had your injections then reality just falls out from under you. At that pressure the firing threshold for your neurons drops to zero, so they go off at random. Your brain lights up like a christmas tree and you experience the purest, most visceral madness possible. Words fail me, but it’s nothing I’d want to share with another human being anyway.”

Bruce clapped like an idiot until Antonio got ahold of him. There was a tear snaking down Remer’s cheek. It followed the contour of a long scar leading into the bag under his eye and came to rest. That tear was far more unsettling than anything he’d said.

For the third time in the past hour James found himself hunched over the pitifully small plastic marine toilet at the edge of the habitat’s floorspace. What he’d assumed before was a reaction to the shadow figure hallucination he now figured for a reaction to the injections.

With no place to go and nothing to pass the time, after scrutinizing every square inch of available space James turned his attention to his own body, and quickly located the still-tender needle marks. It answered a number of questions for him, first and foremost how there could be a crescent shaped moon pool at the edge of the platform through which to slip out into the water at a depth where the pressure would normally compact him into a space the size of a grapefruit.

Seawater gently lapped at the edge of the pool, spreading mild humidity and a salty scent throughout the habitat interior. The only other entry or exit was a hatch in the floor which led to a cramped cylindrical lower deck with a single docking collar inset in the wall, presumably how they’d gotten him inside from the sub. In the ten or so hours before he worked up the courage to dive outside, James spent about a third of that time huddled in the docking chamber just for a change of scenery. Eventually though, he did egress.

If you’ve ever captured an insect in a jar you’ll note the first thing it does is to find the jar’s outer wall. Then it climbs, and locates the highest point. This instinct is found not just in insects but in all animals. Above all else we hate confinement, the untold centuries of bloody warfare over the matter of personal freedom that fill our history books were high level expressions of this very low level instinct. And so for lack of any other option, James slipped out of the habitat and into the open sea.

The cold was immediate and brutal. It was not just a sensation, but a physical impact that flattened James’ lungs against the back of his ribcage. For a moment he thrashed, disoriented and stinging from the cold until numbness set in and his central nervous system no longer felt as though it were on fire.

He groped around the moon pool exterior until his insensate, fumbling fingers found the looped hookah hose terminating in a stale rubber mouthpiece which he bit down on and eagerly sucked. The rush of warm air was orgasmic. For a moment his body felt wholly rejuvenated until he again became aware of the cold.

The warmth of the air coming from the mouthpiece did help counteract that somewhat but he could already tell his EVA time would be measured in seconds. Those seconds were spent crawling around the outside of the habitat, at times upside down, searching for anything useful to a man looking to break out of the most secure prison conceivable. All he found was a cage filled with fuzzy white crabs.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 7!}