[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 1

“This is the only way for me, I need you to see that. Where I am going, I will be happy.”

It seemed obvious in retrospect that finding a sewing kit aboard the Belusarius would be difficult. There was very little demand for such a thing at the bottom of the Pacific ocean. Olivia turned a small toolkit over in her hands, and scrutinized the contents. Just what she’d need if she were repairing delicate machinery.

Which in a sense she was, yet none of the tools looked suitable. “Have you got anything for working with fabrics?” The stocky, bearded shopkeeper looked up from his gun magazine. “Do you see a back room anywhere? What you’re lookin’ at is what I got.”

“What about meat, then?” He furrowed his brow. “What, like cutlery? Hey wait a minute, I recognize you! You’re that broad they rescued from the Tartarus! Holy shit, what happened over there?” She went cold. Sensing it was the wrong question, he edged out from behind the register and found her a small collection of utensils.

“Can’t imagine what that was like. My brother piloted the sub that brought you back. Ernie? With the hairy mole on his nose and the shitty jokes? Haha, you gotta know who I mean.” She did vaguely recall, but hadn’t expected a conversation. It was still more than she could manage after recent events.

“Hey, I’m sorry. If you don’t wanna talk about it, I get it. Here, that one’s free.” She looked down at the clear plastic box. “I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I really need very very sharp, small bladed knives. Like a scalpel. Several blades preferably, of different shapes.” He raised a bushy eyebrow. “And you need this for…?” She fell silent, and scolded herself inwardly for not having an excuse on hand. “Cleaning fish” was the best she could do.

“Huh. Where you gettin’ fresh fish? I thought all the edible sealife intake and processing was done on level 20. What are you doing, going out in an exosuit with a rod and tackle?” Olivia remained silent. He shrugged, and rummaged around in a big cardboard box he’d been in the process of unloading when she arrived.

After a moment of digging, he produced a small case of exacto knives, the closest match he could find for what she’d requested. He almost objected when she snatched it from him and ran off, before remembering he’d meant it to be a freebie anyway. “What the fuck happened to her over there?” He mumbled, as her figure hurriedly receded down the corridor.

Running was a mistake. Something quickly went wrong in her knee. It wasn’t outwardly visible but she could feel a sort of clicking, popping sensation as she extended her leg. Checking that the door to her room was locked, Olivia sat on the bed and rolled up her dress.

The most obvious damage was fatigue around the knee and hip joint. Her feet were also in pretty bad shape. She now knew to expect this as they endured a lot of impact stress and friction from her shoes. The skin was, in several places, thin enough to see muscle through it.

The knives were of no use just yet, but she knew she’d need them soon, as the problem with her knee worsened. A sharp knocking at the door panicked her. Reflexively, she threw the dress back over her legs, and quickly examined herself for anything obvious before answering. “Hey, I found it!” Olivia looked baffled. Vivian Hernandez stood before her, holding up a little blue case. “...The sewing kit you wanted? You didn’t already buy one, did you?”

Vivian was one of Olivia’s patients. Following several days of quarantine and questioning, she’d been released to resume her role as the Belusarius resident psychiatric therapist. Vivian was the typical case in a place like this, seasonal affective disorder from the lack of natural sunlight. Olivia also sensed mild neurotic tendencies in Vivian that she initially suspected were the result of months spent in relatively confined quarters, but which she’d since learned were eccentricities unique to the thirty-something Hispanic maintenance technician.

“No. I, uh. They didn’t have anything along those lines. Where’d you get this?” Vivian interpreted that as an implicit invitation, slipped in through the open door and threw herself on the bed. “Please! I know peeps. I guess I can tell you it’s a sub officer I dated since that actually doesn’t narrow it down a lot.”

The joke sailed ineffectually past Olivia who was now studying the small selection of needles the kit came with. “Speakin’ of connections, I got my hands on some top shelf wine. Drop by my room tonight, maybe 7 or 8? You need it, I heard shit got real hairy at the prison. Flooding, life support failure, whole fuckin’ thing on the verge of imploding.”

Again, Olivia stiffened up. Vivian either didn’t recognize this or was undeterred, rambling on and on about the rumors she’d heard concerning the sinking of the Tartarus midwater detention center. It was her least endearing quality, but Olivia felt thankful simply to have made a friend so quickly. She’d left that damp, shadowy husk as completely alone as it was possible to be.

“If that’s what you’re going to talk about if I drop by later…” Vivian brushed it off. “No, no it’s cool. You deal with it however. Do shrinks go to other shrinks or just talk to themselves? Ha! Anyway I got some movies and shit, I figured we’d get hammered and watch whatever looks good.”

She thought of explaining again how improper it was to spend time that way with a patient, but it required her to assert herself in a way she felt too feeble for at the moment. Moreso with every passing day. “I’m not much of a wine person, but we can watch something. I was in the middle of important business when you arrived, please leave me to it.”

Vivian looked skeptical and glanced around, scanning the room for anything resembling important business. Mercifully, rather than challenge the explanation she just flounced out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Olivia locked it and this time resolved to leave it that way.

“When did I even get these?” Olivia angled the mirror for a better view of the long cuts on her hip which hung open, dry flaps of skin tearing like tissue paper as she bent at the waist. The only thread which even came close to matching her skin tone was a pastel pink, titled “peach” on the end of the spool.

She winced as the needle entered her flesh. It was a matter of instinct. There was no pain to speak of, only a dull pinching sensation which just barely registered that she’d been stuck by something. Within a few minutes she’d neatly sewn the gash shut and concealed it with makeup.

In the process she reflected on elements of history that fascinated her as an undergrad. Gilgamesh, the earliest conventional Campbellian epic, had been required reading. It told the story of a king who could not accept the death of his closest friend, and traveled the world in search of some means of resurrecting him. The fantasy of life after death, or some means of cheating it found in every culture.

Every Chinese Dynasty, for example, was replete with con men who made their living convincing the sitting emperor that whatever alchemical concoction only they knew how to make was the secret to immortality. Many times it included mercury and in fact hastened the poor fool’s death. The alchemist was, if he knew what was good for him, nowhere to be found by the time this occurred.

The reality that she was now immortal required a major shift in thinking, ever since the small contingent of marines extracted her from the dripping, crippled wreckage of the Tartarus. There was an initial burst of euphoria. Justifiable, she reassured herself.

Death was after all a primal fear which most healthy people had to find some rationale for rejecting if they were to live their lives in a fulfilling way. Acceptance of human mortality meant constant confrontation with the reality that one day you’d simply be out of time. In a hospital bed, if you’re lucky, surrounded by loved ones and accelerating towards a hard, uncompromising wall of pitch black.

“But not me,” she thought. “I’ll stay like this. Forever.” This giddiness fell apart when she reflected on the price. If she’d never gone to the Tartarus and simply received news that James had been lost when it took on water and sunk to the bottom, she could believe he was in a better place. But that was impossible for her now. The long, pale umbilical trailing from her belly to a patch of shadow in the corner served as an ever present reminder of where James actually was.

In the weeks following her rescue, she began to discover various other costs of her new ageless condition. The first inkling of what was to come dawned on her when, during a brief medical examination while in quarantine, the nurse couldn’t find her pulse. Further efforts to identify a heartbeat using a stethoscope also failed.

Olivia, panicked by the possibility that she’d be discovered, consciously tried to make her heart beat and found that she could. A minute or two of producing what she imagined a healthy heartbeat should sound like apparently satisfied the nurse, who also noted that the cuff used to measure blood pressure “must be broken” as it read zero.

That information was on file somewhere. She hoped it would seem so clearly erroneous that any qualified doctor would assume it was a glitch and disregard it. But her cardiovascular inactivity was just the tip of the iceberg. She’d also collected a few scrapes on the way out of the Tartarus that had been carefully bandaged at the time.

Removing the bandages later on revealed that no healing occurred. On top of this, while she felt comfortably warm most of the time, Vivian swore up and down that she was ice cold to the touch and badly needed some vodka. Vivian’s solutions only rarely didn’t involve inebriation.

“It’s like taxidermy. Or embalming,” she thought to herself. “I’m not alive, but I’m not dead either. At least, I’m not decomposing. But I also can’t heal.” It was a challenge not to scratch absent mindedly, or pick at a scab. Lots of little changes were required to minimize wear and tear. Despite that, she could feel herself breaking down inside and didn’t know what to do. Would it even kill her, she wondered. Or would she slowly erode into still-conscious dust?

To combat seasonal affective disorder, the Belusarius administration recently implemented a cycle of gradually dimming and intensifying full spectrum lighting intended to simulate night and day. It was never pitch black as work proceeded 24/7, but it was dim enough more than half the time that leaving her room was possible.

James warned her about this, but she’d still made the mistake of wandering into direct, bright light once or twice. Intense nausea struck her, and she noticed the shadow her umbilical led to quivering, then beginning to shrink. She’d retreated immediately into a dimmer corner of the room to recover.

Too many eyes on her had the same effect. She wondered how comparable it was to social anxiety. The experience for her was painful, in a physical sense. She’d tripped over a toolbox on the way to her room recently, and the moment all of the dozen or so people present stared at her, it sent her into convulsions. She insisted she just needed a glass of water. What she really needed was for at least half of them to leave in search of that water so she could retreat to her room.

Olivia dreaded the prospect of discovering any more stipulations. What seemed like immortality at first, as the caveats piled up, now struck her as protracted leprosy. To think that James fed himself to the Foundry as payment for this.

The prospect of natural, permanent death began taking on a sense of dignity she’d never recognized before. Was suicide possible? Fear of what might happen if it failed to kill her prevented any attempt. More intense by far was her fear that someone would eventually discover what made her different from the rest of the crew.

So, there was a narrow sense in which she felt relieved to see a white, coiled umbilical trailing from a crewman’s navel receding into a shadow on the wall. He was not quite six feet, gaunt except for a pot belly, and hirsute. Until he saw her own umbilical, he was startled that she’d noticed his. He was the first to speak. “We can see each other as we are. The haze only conceals us from the imperfect.”

He went on to explain it was a sort of influence they exerted on the occipital lobe. “There’s a blood vessel obscuring the retina. It’s called retinal vein occlusion. In the dead center of your vision, you’re not actually receiving any information from the rods and cones. It’s being filled in, extrapolated by part of the brain. The inverse is also possible, to prevent the brain from correctly interpreting what it does see, such that it simply doesn’t recognize what’s there. Instead, it fills that space with what it expects to see. To everyone else we look healthy and normal as you could hope for. So, while your patch job is impressive, I wouldn’t bother.” He gestured to a cut on her arm she’d carefully sewn shut.

“But if I don’t, I’ll be in pieces by the end of the month” she objected. He raised an eyebrow. “You mean you can’t mend it?” Olivia pressed him for details, and he obliged. “You were built this way. I don’t understand why it didn’t come to you, nobody had to explain it to me. I just sort of knew how to do it after I was perfected by master.”

Olivia frowned. Something about the way he spoke briefly illuminated the outline of a reality she hoped wasn’t what she suspected. He withdrew a small folded cloth from his pocket which, in the dim lighting, she took a moment to realize was soaked with blood. Inside was a chunk of skin and muscle. She heaved, but forced herself not to look away.

As she followed his movements, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal what would, for a normal person, be a life threatening wound. A good deal of his forearm was torn open but not bleeding. “Accident with a power saw”, he offered.

He then pressed the chunk of flesh to the wound in his arm and began to massage it. Before her eyes, he molded it like clay until it took the shape of the missing portion of his forearm. “It’s that easy.” He produced his arm for inspection, and sure enough it looked as if the wound never existed.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 2!}