[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 8

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

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He turned the monitor around so she could see the camera feed. “You’re room temperature. Well below survivable limits. Hypothermia starts below 95 degrees, you’re at roughly 70 degrees. I almost missed it the first time! When I couldn’t find your pulse or hear a heartbeat right away I thought it was an equipment problem. On a whim I switched over to thermal, as I’d forgotten to take your temperature and wondered if the heart irregularities were due to the hours you spent in the frigid, slowly flooding Tartarus. You were cold alright, but to the point that you should’ve been dead. Shit, you should be dead right now. Yet you’re sitting there as if nothing’s wrong.”

She stood up and tried the door. Locked. “That’s triple bolted too, for the violent ones. I dunno what else is unusual about you but I doubt you can shatter an inch of acrylic.” He knocked the barrier and flashed a smug grin. She felt on the verge of losing it. It was finally happening, despite her best efforts. She’d been found out. Everything she feared most would follow. Wouldn’t it? “What happens to me now?”

He fell silent, still grinning and leaned back as far as the chair allowed as it audibly creaked under his weight. “Do you know what I did before this?” She didn’t care, and said as much. “Well you’re not going anywhere for the time being, so sit down and listen.” She complied with no small amount of anxiety, keeping her eyes locked on his as she did so.

“The focus of my research before I was stationed subsea was the region surrounding Chernobyl. Lots of groundbreaking work being done there even now. Everyone knows about the gonzo shit that made headlines like the foot long worms, the two headed elk, that sort of thing. But that’s all in line with what we expected from multigenerational exposure to increased but survivable levels of ionizing radiation. The real breakthrough occurred when samples of leaves from the forest floor revealed that they weren’t decomposing.”

With that revelation, the picture grew slightly more clear. “Bizarre, right? What kind of precedent exists for that? The private sector life extension guys were at the time focusing mostly on Turritopsis Nutricula, the multiple well studied lines of cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks and the negligible senescence seen in salmon, lobsters and so on. This anomaly with the Chernobyl plant life represented an entire new avenue of research. The funding was immediate and beyond my wildest expectations. With no cure for aging on the horizon, deep pocketed investors now turned to what looked like a plausible means of slowing down the process or arresting it entirely. Finally, I thought I was onto something I could use to make a name for myself.”

Olivia sat, arms crossed, scanning the room for any means of escape she might’ve missed. For the first time she noticed a nametag on his labcoat, “G. Bizen”. He clearly had only the smallest sense of what he’d stumbled onto or he wouldn’t imagine that trapping her in here could turn out well for him. “But they sent you subsea, huh.”

He frowned. “I was told it was a remote laboratory with top of the line facilities. That much was true. Remote might’ve been understating it a bit.” His eyelid twitched. He went on about the secrecy and deceit involved. Wherever he spoke of Belusarius his voice faltered. Was he beginning to sweat?

“Not an aquanaut at heart, I take it.” He chuckled nervously. “I do alright. So long as I’ve got these.” He patted a vial of pills in the breast pocket of his labcoat that Olivia took for anti-anxiety meds. “Anyway, that brings us to where we are now. I wasted time studying the same collection of samples for the first few weeks, not comprehending why it was necessary to do this at the bottom of the Pacific until….” His voice trailed off, and Olivia filled the gap.

“Violet.” Their eyes met again, this time in mutual recognition. He seemed on the verge of speaking several times before he settled on a question. “What are you? You’re not human. Not life as we know it, so to speak. Were you ever human or are you copies manufactured somewhere? A Navy project, maybe?” Olivia felt mild relief. He knew far less than she’d initially assumed. Not wanting to rectify that, she remained silent.

“I tried injecting bacteria into the girl’s body. They starved. Didn’t recognize anything in there as edible. I tried taking a blood sample. The tiny bit of sludge I managed to extract didn’t seem to carry oxygen or perform any function useful to the body. Do you realize the impossibility of it? It isn’t just that you don’t decompose. That’s at least not in violation of the law of conservation if your body behaves like a somewhat closed system. But you move! You think, you talk. How do your muscles get the ATP they need? Where does the sugar that your brain needs to function come from? You’re a walking impossibility. I haven’t shared any of this with my colleagues in large part out of fear they would institutionalize me.”

So he was the only one who’d caught on? Olivia’s mind raced as he continued to prattle. “So obviously, you’re not a closed system. You’re receiving some type of energy from an outside source. Do you eat? I don’t see how you could digest anything. You also should have fallen to pieces by now. Even without decomposition, general thermal and kinetic stress on the body should’ve done the job. Something is working within you to resist it, but imperfectly. After I drew blood I noticed the hole on Violet’s arm wouldn’t heal. It drew tight, but didn’t heal. She wasn’t developing bed sores. Her hair neither fell out, nor grew. When her mother tearfully spoke with me about the prospect of some day needing to decide whether to take her off life support, I had in fact done so already a few days prior. We both know she has no need of it.”

His candor was worrying. Why tell her all this, unless he didn’t intend to release her? Idly, she focused on the patch of shadow that her umbilical vanished into, tucked away in the darkness under one of the chairs against the far wall. It’d raise so many more questions for him if he could see it. Questions he didn’t yet know that he didn’t want the answers to.

“I didn’t put it all together until I saw your thermal footage. But there were signs. Every so often I’d get really anomalous results from a crewman. Advanced cellular damage in an afflicted limb one week. Then the next week, it’s good as new. Wouldn’t let me draw blood, cited religious objections. Now it all makes sense. How many of you are there? If you don’t heal, how do you keep your bodies from falling apart? What’s your relation to the girl? I’ve told you everything I know. Kindly fill in the gaps.”

She sat quietly, staring at the spot where her umbilical faded into darkness, lost in thought. He continued. “I do know you don’t like bright light. Found that out with the girl. Nearly killed her by accident, or whatever passes for death. You know, for one of you. I am not a cruel man by nature, but I know when I’m onto something big, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to understand it. I need to know whether you’re the product of some classified project I’ll wind up in prison for exposing, or if you really are my discovery. It works best for both of us if you cooperate.”

He made a superficial effort at sounding sympathetic, but it did very little to mask the ruthlessness of the ultimatum he’d presented her with. The bottom line, as Olivia figured, was that she would most likely wind up like Violet if things continued as they were. Now frantic but struggling not to reveal it, she studied the stout fellow threatening her not so subtly from behind the plastic barrier.

Nothing in his eyes suggested he was bluffing. His face looked youthful, but greying hair around his temples suggested intense stress, no doubt relating to what she suspected was a strong aversion to confined spaces and the psychological toll of his recent discoveries. Just behind him, she spotted chest cavity x-rays hanging on a wall mounted light table.

“Everything you want to know”, she said slowly and deliberately, “can be found by imaging Violet’s heart with an x-ray machine. The key to why our bodies work differently can be found there. You’re a smart guy, that should be all the hint you need.”

He looked puzzled. “I already did that. Nothing about the cardiovascular system looked out of the ordinary except of course that the heart doesn’t beat and the blood is congealed. What specifically am I looking for?” He whirled around, stood up and turned on the light table. To get a better look, he then turned the lights off in his little room behind the barrier. It was all she needed.

“I don’t think you’re a cruel man”, she crooned. “You just want recognition. Accolades! Something to show for the decades you’ve devoted to science.” He harrumphed in the dark little room, closely studying the portion of the x-ray depicting Violet’s heart.

“I’m not such a bad person either, Mr Bizen. I’ll see to it that you receive the celebration you’ve dreamed of. Forever.” Engrossed in the x-ray photograph, he did not notice a patch of shadow forming on the wall nearby, or the dozens of bony, pale arms emerging from it, reaching hungrily for the fringe of his coat.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 9!}