[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 10

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}

James didn’t intend to injure Olivia the way his outburst clearly just did but there was no stopping it now. “Oh I know, ‘it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem’. But how often is it temporary? Life isn’t a film, when things take a turn for the unbearable there’s no guarantee that it will ever improve. For most people it doesn’t, there is no happy ending and the only way to minimize suffering is to cut it short. People who can’t acknowledge that because it’s not sufficiently uplifting are mentally children.” The damage was done. He laid back and waited for her to scold him.

Instead she sat quietly for a while, then continued with professional language but a faltering voice. “How long have you felt this way?” By comparison with the visibly rattled Olivia, James was the picture of serenity.

“Olivia, I don’t sincerely intend to kill myself. I’m not sure how to explain this in a way that won’t sound morbid or upsetting to you but part of how I’ve continued getting out of bed each day, doing my job, enduring Rod’s antagonism is my new perspective. All of my plans for the future used to revolve around raising kids with Lisa, growing old with her, making her as happy as I possibly could.”

“So when she left, it was the end for me. I was supposed to die on that day and in a very real sense I did, but somehow my body kept going. I just kept waking up morning after morning in disbelief that I could apparently keep on existing in a world where she doesn’t love me. I’m supposed to be dead. Every day of my life since then has been a bonus. Like I’ve stolen it.”

She looked winded. No doubt it was a lot to absorb but for a professional who dealt with depression as a matter of course she seemed unexpectedly disturbed by James’ confession. With some effort Olivia slowed her breathing, focused and pressed on with the session.

“James, nobody ever lives out the future that they plan. Eventually the course of their life diverges so much from what they envisioned that they learn to let go of those plans and live life as it happens. If you believe in God, you could think of it as letting his plan for your life-” He gestured dismissively.

“Fine, but the principle is sound. You’re still a young man. Either you’ll move past this depression or you won’t, either way you’re going to keep on existing for a very long time. Whether or not you actually live, that’s up to you.”

She put her warm, frail hand on his and squeezed for a moment. Then without another word she stood up and left the room. It left James feeling sobered, and wondering if he’d been overly dramatic. But as he took inventory of the things he’d told her in the past hour he could find none that he felt were untrue.

It seemed like the tactful thing to give Olivia a good thirty second head start, besides which he knew she’d bring all of this up during the next session and he badly wanted to put off talking about it again until then.

James counted down the last few seconds then lurched to his feet and headed for the corridor. He found Hank hunched over a row of several dozen identical monitors arranged in a semicircle in front of the enormous dome window he’d first seen the floating prison cells through.

Olivia was fiddling with the touchscreen interface at the far end of the crescent control panel. He did his best to avoid eye contact. Hank edged along the controls, casually poking virtual buttons on a few of the screens as he approached James.

“We’ve found Cray and we’re working on a plan to retrieve him. We haven’t found Rod yet. Needle in a haystack, there are thousands of cells and without access to the prisoner database the best we can manage is to flip through the surveillance feeds until we spot him. Could use your help with that, if you’re feeling up to it.”

James faked a smile, nodded and after a brief tutorial on how to work the user interface he was off to the races. Every feed looked nearly the same, as the camera was positioned identically in every habitat. The only difference was where the prisoner was huddled or if there was a prisoner inside at all.

None seemed healthy, all were wedged into a corner or pacing frantically. There was no audio but he could see their lips moving, even those curled up in a corner rocked gently and whispered something to themselves.

“Can we get audio?” Hank moved back over to James and plugged in a headset. “We only have one, so if I need it for something I’ll be back.” James indicated agreement and with a quick touchscreen gesture Hank cut in the audio feed.

James sat dumbfounded. Then switched to the next cell and listened for another long while. Then to the next. He took off the ear-enveloping headphones and turned to Hank. “Have you listened in? To the prisoners, I mean.” Hank shrugged. “No need, we’ll know Rod when we see him.”

James considered handing the headphones to Hank and having him listen but reconsidered. No need to distract him, finding Rod was the top priority. No matter which cell he brought up on the monitor, if it contained a prisoner they were either crouched in a corner rocking gently or pacing rapidly from one end of the cell to the other, muttering “the flesh and blood of innocence” over and over.

The current feed showed a middle eastern man of slender build with a long tangled beard holding his head in both hands, pacing like the others. “The flesh and blood of innocence. The flesh and blood of innocence. The flesh and blood of innocence.” Suddenly he turned and looked directly into the camera. “To kill them all would make me God.”

While Olivia and James took the shotgun approach, flipping rapidly through camera feeds in hopes of spotting Rod or Cray, Hank was shoulder deep in the station’s software. The idea as he explained it was to look for recent changes to the ordering in the prisoner registry known to occur when unscheduled admissions take place. Which is a particularly banal way of saying that someone’s been unlawfully imprisoned.

The software was lowest bidder garbageware programmed by Indian teenagers, and knowledge of that gave Hank confidence in his expectation that multiple backdoors must exist. They were well hidden, but he’d begun searching for them shortly after transferring to Tartarus so if anything it was remarkable that finding the first backdoor had taken this long. Nonetheless there it was, a flickering dropdown menu with several normally greyed out options now available. Hank clicked “Cell directory”.

What he got was a list of recent and scheduled executions. This was technically a more difficult prize to obtain as it was behind an additional layer of security, but at first it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the search for Rod so Hank nearly closed the window in disgust. It was glimpsing Rodney’s name that stopped him. This section of the application logged the use of pressurization routines normally used to execute prisoners right in their cells.

As the process was initially intoxicating and came on unexpectedly it created fewer opportunities for prisoners to act out violently when confronted with the reality that they’d be dead in a few minutes. There’s a lot that could go wrong in a place where the uninterrupted operation of sophisticated machinery is all that prevents you from being instantly smashed by the full weight of the ocean.

The potential damage a madman might cause, escaped from his handlers on the way to some interior execution chamber, gave the architects of this high tech torture pit good reason to design each cell such that the conditions inside could be remotely manipulated. And like a frog slowly brought to a boil, provided the transition was gradual, the condemned would be extinguished before they could realize anything was amiss.

That seemed to be what happened to Rod, except the log indicated that the execution process was halted and reversed several times before it could finish. For a minute he dwelled on what that must’ve been like for Rod, his body cycled through it’s maximum tolerable range of pressure and gas mixtures several times in the span of two days, tissues saturating and outgassing like a sponge, neurons crackling uncontrollably under pressures that did not permit them to organize conscious thought.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 11!}