[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 4

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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.

Turning to re-enter the habitat James was arrested by the sight of hundreds of small lights surrounding him. They floated gently in the currents on all sides, numbering in the hundreds, and he felt awed by their beauty until his eyes adjusted. Seen clearly, they were human fetuses.

James recoiled, thrashing again against the side of the habitat. Each trailed a thin, fragile umbilical cord behind them in the same direction, vanishing into a shadowy mass no more than fifteen feet away. James clawed at the billowing membrane of the habitat but it afforded no handholds.

One of the tiny things turned to look at James with round, black little eyes. It’s flesh was translucent and he could discern a partially developed heart. By this point it was unsurprising that the heart was not beating.

It sat still in the delicate little creature’s chest, a formless black lump radiating withered veins and arteries that spread out from it’s chest to each extremity. Only when he tore his attention away from these morbid details did he notice that the hundreds of others were now facing him as well.

Once back inside, James rolled on his back and cried. It was not so much what had just happened but the residual stress from his experience with the shadow woman before, finally released by this newest episode. “Am I losing my mind? Is it the injections? Or are they wearing off?”

Rapidly he cycled through the possibilities, rejecting each as quickly as it arose. Injections were automatic, one in the neck when you slept, administered by a mechanism in the bed. But if he went too long without one surely some type of warning would appear on the monitor?

Wiping the condensation from the membrane he peered out into the abyss at the habitat nearest his. He could see the silhouette of a prisoner huddled stationary near the edge of the floorspace. Wiping condensation from a spot opposite that one he peered at another habitat and saw the same thing.

How many were like this? It seemed at least understandable that some might refuse the injections in protest. It put the fear of god into James, who wasted no time laying himself out on the rough foam pad provided, his neck carefully aligned with the red stripe as indicated by the instructions printed below it. Overhead the unblinking eye of a tiny ccd camera monitored his face for signs of rem sleep. Upon detecting them, the needle emerged.

Cold concrete. Especially unwelcome after his midnight dip. Of course, the foundry. Of course. Soon his wits were restored and he was up and about, wandering the corridors. It was until that point routine for everything to be as he left it, so it did startle James to trip over a tightly wound cable of some kind.

In one direction it snaked across the floor, over concrete debris and waste paper. In the other direction it dropped off the first step of the spiral staircase, and edging himself over for a better view James confirmed that it trailed all the way down the steps.

Before deciding which way to follow the cord, he more closely examined it. Spongy to the touch, but firm. Like leather but more pliable. It was pale, and slightly damp. Gripping it in one hand he felt it pulsate. The realization that it was alive gave him a start, but not so much as when the entire thing rose from the floor and began to slowly undulate in midair.

Conducting the coin toss in his head, James headed down the stairwell. He thought idly that it might’ve been easier with the cord on the ground, as it now spiraled down the stairs a few feet above the stairs themselves and was a pain to edge around.

It’s a hell of a thing to expect nothing and still be disappointed. At the bottom of the stairwell, the source of the cord became at once apparent, and also more cryptic. Hovering at eye level and rippling slightly in slow motion the cord passed James and then receded down into the fog. Whatever the source, it was below that fog.

He had neither the means to see through it nor any desire to lower himself into the unknown. It didn’t even properly resemble fog, more like stormcloud cover as viewed from above. Feeling defeated, James returned to the shaft and ascended the stairs. As he neared the top he noticed movement in the cord, beyond the normal swaying. Something was at the cord’s other end. And it was moving.

Morning arrived. Such as it was, in the darkness of the deep sea. With it came the unease of waking up in a strange bed, and the sudden influx of memories from the night before washing over James like a high tide. He was usually glad to leave that place, but lately frustrated too.

Each time he felt as though he was on the verge of discovering something crucial to understanding the foundry. What it was, how he related to it, whether it was anything more than a very persistent recurring dream. Throwing his legs over the side of the bed he sat up, hunched over and held his head. The dreams couldn’t be a pressure symptom, they predated the injections, all of this.

Poking around his neck, he hit on the sensitive spot and confirmed in the mirror that he’d been injected in his sleep. He did feel refreshed. How much of that was simply because he expected to? He looked at his hands, and then at the membrane around him. No hallucinations, but also not really sure what he was looking for.

A loud crackle made him jump, and instinctively he positioned himself to drop down the central hatch. For all the good that would do. If anything were to join him in his cell, provided it had hands, the hatch could be opened from both sides and would offer nothing in the way of protection.

It turned out to be the monitor, activated remotely and struggling to resolve a clear image. Then as if there had never been any obstruction, a crystal clear video feed of Hank Kowalczyk snapped into place on the dusty little screen.

“James? James, are you there?” He realized he’d left the camera turned off from his side and switched it on. “Thank god. Are you hurt? Were you injected? Have you eaten anything?”

Sensory overload. James had endless questions of his own but none would form on his lips. “Listen, I’m working to get you out of there. The marines have assumed control of the station, I can’t say for certain whether that’s within their power. The station is Navy property, but of course it’s also a prison with just one warden.”

He let a wry smile creep onto his face as he said that. “I have no doubt of their mastery of a supercav subfighter but if any among them know how to lock me out of the Tartarus mainframe they haven’t done it yet. I can’t get a sub out to you, but the decompression chamber for returning prisoners can be flooded and opened to the sea.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 5!}