[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 11
Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Olivia felt reluctant to take her gaze off it, lest it vanish or something even more out of place appear in its spot the moment she blinked. Unexpected, unwelcome change in a place she believed before to be unchanging.
The crystal sphere was where she left it, at least. The trip through to the beach was second nature by now, as was the link from there to Violet’s library. Olivia expected to be pounced upon immediately with questions about why she’d failed to rescue Violet from the hospital, imagining how the dialogue would go and struggling to find the words with which to break the bad news to the poor girl.
Instead she spotted Violet collapsed on the floor, bone white, her dress in tatters. Olivia rushed to her side, and knelt to hear what the girl was trying to say. “Something’s wrong out there, isn’t it? With my body.” There was no obvious way to render aid. She was not choking, or losing blood, or suffering any identifiable condition, just wasting away.
“Stay here, I’ll-” Olivia stammered. Violet simply smiled. “You’ll what? Imagine an ambulance? This is only a projection. It knows I’m here, Olivia. It’s outside the hull, always watching. Can’t get in, but...there are other ways.” She drifted off, somehow asleep within her own dream. Nothing Olivia did would rouse her, though she was still breathing.
“Don’t slip away from me.” Olivia pleaded, her voice breaking up. “I’m losing everything, piece by piece. James. Vivian. The final shred of humanity I thought I had left, those things I was sure I would never do no matter how desperate. Don’t you leave me too. There’s nothing else left.”
On her way back, she noticed the pipe to which the valve was mounted had somehow branched into smaller pipes, spreading out across the ceiling. Turning to open the door to the classroom she habitually woke up in, her hand met cold, rusty metal as it touched the knob. She could swear it was porcelain before.
Olivia awoke with fire in her eyes. The path was clear. Vivian would be no help, whatever enthralled the strange men she’d encountered in the commons was plainly beginning to corrupt her mind. It occurred to Olivia that she might be next.
Rescuing Violet was the one thing she swore to do before it took her, if that was to be her end. Some part of her still longed for James, but as the reality of her situation became more apparent she’d begun to perform triage on her list of priorities.
The clinic was as she’d left it, save for a new face behind the admissions desk. Olivia ran through scenarios in her mind. Could she claim to be a relative of Violet’s? No good, still didn’t know her last name. Besides which, a quick check of archived patient info would expose that as a lie. Likewise with claiming she was a shared patient. Everything became instantly simpler the moment she spotted the receptionist’s umbilical.
“I require access to the...ah...doctor’s lab facility. In service of the one who waits behind the wall.” Some lingo she’d picked up, and it did the trick. The cute petite brunette perked up at the last bit, made eye contact, then glanced at Olivia’s own umbilical. A knowing smile crept onto her lips. “Until the day that they all come together.” She punched in the access code and the door slid open.
After navigating the corridors as well as her memory would allow, she arrived at the cramped laboratory with the single bed, now empty. She fought back the panic. Had she awoken and been released? Couldn’t be, she was so weak in the dream. Olivia raced back to the front desk. “There was a patient being studied in Doctor Bizen’s lab. Just one, young woman, black hair. Where is she now?”
The brunette frowned. “Can’t you...feel her? She has been put to work on level twenty.” Olivia nodded nervously. “Oh yes, of course. Level twenty. I must need mending.” She backed away, then briskly walked to the commons and sat down to collect her thoughts. There was this strange blurry feeling, increasing as of late, which gave her reason to worry that her brain itself was breaking down. It made it immensely difficult to recall where she’d heard of level twenty before.
She nearly made it to the elevator when a familiar wiry old man blocked her path. “Oh, Dietrich! Small world! Or habitat, I suppose? Haha. I’m afraid I can’t speak with you when we’re not on the clock, though.” He didn’t answer, just stared at her midsection. She absentmindedly followed his gaze.
If her heart still worked it might’ve begun palpitating. He could see her umbilical. She reached out to him but he withdrew, still staring. “Dietrich, it’s not….I am not like the other ones. Hear me out, it’s actually very-” He broke away and ran for one of the branching corridors. Fuck, she thought. Another new variable.
Despite having been down here for most of a decade the Belusarius was still incomplete. Floors below 17 were unlit and unheated, used mainly as cold storage for perishables. Not level 20, though. It all came back to her the moment the elevator car descended within earshot of the maddening noise of machinery at work. The shop keeper. Level 20.
She could feel the cold but was oddly not uncomfortable. Her body did not fight it, simply assumed ambient temperature. The elevator let out in a frigid, dripping room with nothing in the way of carpeting or ceiling panels, just bare steel. A sealed hatch in the wall opposite the elevator blocked the way.
Closer examination revealed a numerical keypad to one side. As she struggled uselessly to force the hatch open, her brain began to tingle. That familiar, foreboding sensation she remembered all too vividly from the Tartarus. Only this time, it was not some inscrutable hallucination but the voice of Violet whispering weakly to her.
“You’re close...I can feel you. I don’t know where I am. It’s dark, cold and loud. Some kind of machine room. Olivia, I’m scared. I’m starting to feel better, they must have fixed me, but something’s not right. You said you’d get me out of here, didn’t you? You said you wouldn’t let them take me.”
Her pleas ripped through olivia like sniper rounds. Simultaneously, she flogged herself for failing the girl, and wished they’d never met. If only she didn’t know her. All of this would still have happened but it would not agonize her so. Worthless to play with “what ifs”. She was close now, just on the other side of that hatch. It was only a matter of discovering the code.
“I haven’t abandoned you. I am so sorry, they moved you from the lab before I could get in. I will save you, Violet. I promise that. Whatever it takes, I’ll remove you from this place. We’ll escape to the surface together, start a new life.”
There was no reply. Olivia could only retreat the way she came. Noticing, in passing, thin rusty pipes snaking across the ceiling. The trip up to the populated levels was a sort of journey up from the depths, mimicking the ascent she hoped to make with Violet before things got out of hand. It wouldn’t be long now, either.
She wasn’t keeping count, but every day she saw more fabricants, and fewer who had not yet been converted. The latter were now a minority and still blissfully unaware. Except for one, who was waiting for her when she exited the elevator into the common area.
“There’s one of ‘em now! Don’t you see?” Dietrich had gathered a small crowd, mostly other sub pilots but a few mechanics as well. “Don’t you be fooled, she ain’t real! Cold inside! Walks ‘round like a livin’, breathin’ woman but her heart don’t beat. You can’t see it like I can fellers, not just to look at her”
They went from dubious to irritated almost immediately upon studying Olivia and seeing nothing out of the ordinary. “So this is your shrink, huh Deets? You need one.” The rest laughed and began to disperse. “No you blinkered fools! Put your hands on her! She’s cold as ice! More of ‘em every day too! You’re surrounded an’ you don’t even know it!” He chased after them but they were beyond listening.
The picture of how things had progressed so far without anyone noticing grew slightly more clear. None of them, she thought, would believe in anything out of the ordinary unless it leapt up and smacked them in the face. Even if they were to catch a glimpse of something strange, by some slip of hers or another of the fabricants, would the average person believe it? More likely they’d put it down to exhaustion, or drinking, or anything but what it was.
Stay Tuned for Part 12!