[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 2

^{Part 1}

“I remember this.” She thought back to the visions of her primary school. The piles of red and white clay from which she sculpted crude living organisms, not fit to live. A faint echo of the guilt she’d felt, stabbing those wheezing, gurgling masses of tissue until they stopped writhing, now gripped her mind.

“You should. It’s how you were rebuilt when the master perfected you. It’s how you’ll perfect the uninitiated who now sleep in their bunks, with no idea what profound love and belonging await them when we bring them before the one who dwells at the bottom of the Foundry, in the most holy place.”

“Some part of me knew”, she lied through her teeth. “But I’ve seen nobody like myself until now, I was beginning to wonder if I’d dreamt it.” Being reconstituted by that thing in the trench touched his mind in a way she now knew it hadn’t touched hers. Presumably part of the deal James brokered with it, in the final hour of the Tartarus. He reassured her there were several more like them, deftly concealing their secret from the rest of the crew. And, she inferred, ‘perfecting’ the ones they could isolate someplace without cameras for long enough.

“There will be more of us soon?” He grinned, mouth full of yellow teeth. “So many more. All of the Belusarius, eventually. They’ll all come to know the master as we do. To return the warm, fulfilling love he showers us with. That’s what we’re created for. A loving relationship with him. You were reborn, perfected by him so that you could be worthy of his love. You have known the pure, visceral joy of it, and each new beating heart that we lead to him helps him recover. As our numbers grow, so does his health, hastening the day when they all come together.”

“Of...of course” she stammered. “Except for the ones that you use to mend?” He was until then in a sort of trance, consumed by residual ecstasy from his description of the thing that took James and his connection to it. He now instead looked slightly troubled.

“Some. That is not too much to ask, is it? To set aside some for ourselves. Three for every one, as we’re commanded.” Three for every one. Bits and pieces of James’ explanation came back to her. “It took someone from you, didn’t it.” He recoiled. “It? How could you refer to our father as-” She quickly corrected herself, threw in some convincingly delirious confessions of love for the horrid perversion of life she still remembered dissecting her, and this seemed to pacify him.

“My daughter. Of course the master is entitled to call his children home. But he is gracious, and gives us all the chance to reunite with the ones we love, whom he now holds to his bosom.” So….James could be retrieved? If her heart still beat, it would’ve skipped just then.

Was it wishful thinking? What else could he possibly mean? “So if you deliver three new…..children….to him, he will return your daughter?” The man beamed. “Yes, though he owes us nothing. That is the meaning of infinite grace.” She left him like that, muttering softly to himself. He didn’t even seem to notice her leave.

It was a good deal more than she wanted to know. Some of it was incredibly useful, but the rest only disturbed her. How many were like him, starry eyed and fanatical? Were there any whose minds were unchanged, like hers? Or was it possible she was like him, but not conscious of it?

All of that felt secondary to the heartening discovery that she could, in fact, extract James from the Foundry…..if she were willing to send three more to replace him. It seemed easy enough, until she began to imagine the process of actually deciding who to condemn to that place. And who to use for parts.

The Belusarius was a massive sphere surrounded by a ring shaped cluster of vertically oriented cylindrical pressure vessels, domed at either end and connected at various heights by cylindrical tunnels. At this depth, marine architects had limited choices: cylinders, domes and spheres. Anything else would’ve collapsed on itself.

Even so the hull was roughly a foot thick, and the small number of windows were all equally thick borosilicate glass. It made for a grim, uninviting place even when brightly lit. At night, it took on a surreal quality. The combination of distant dripping and the sound of air flowing from one chamber to the next brought to mind caves Olivia remembered touring as a child.

The handful of windows were without exception outward facing domes, falling into two categories; practical as in the case of the windows overlooking the sub docking terminal, or for psychological reasons. The second type were smaller, most between two and four feet across. These really didn’t serve any vital purpose as there was nothing to see outside, save for other parts of the Belusarius.

On her way to Vivian’s room, Olivia poked her head into one of the smaller windows to peer at the exterior. Everything further than 200 feet or so dissolved into a haze, only the illumination of exterior lights giving a sense of where the next tower was in relation.

The nearest tower was possible to make out clearly, a string of numbers and “USN UWH 006: BELUSARIUS” in tall black type. Simple robots, somewhat resembling the ones that vacuumed and washed the floors inside, slowly scoured the hull to prevent marine organisms from coating it.

Windows on the outer hull which faced away from the rest of the towers revealed a baffling view. There was simply nothing to see. Not the familiar expanse of space which at least is decorated with stars, but a vast, oppressive darkness in every direction which yielded no points of reference with which to self orient. Olivia wondered to herself if this was really more comforting than an absence of windows. Just as she was about to turn away, the mass appeared.

It was difficult at first to be sure whether it was a real object or just a trick of the shadow. But as it passed closer to Belusarius, exterior lights touched it just lightly enough to resolve an absolutely massive silhouette. It was now impossible to look away. The more of it passed by the narrow spot that the lights illuminated, the larger it necessarily was. Rapidly, the possibilities dwindled. No squid or whale was this size.

For a moment she considered calling out, but held back. There wasn’t a soul around, save for the strange fellow she’d spoken to earlier, and even if she could find someone, they’d only fetch others. A crowd would grow, and after they’d seen what they came to, their attention would turn to the woman who discovered it.

The familiar, cascading waves of pain would then return as her carefully preserved husk began to wither. Within minutes the illusion would fall away. Her imagination ran wild with the various things they might do to her upon discovering what she really was.

Fear of discovery jockeyed furiously with the deep seated terror creeping through her as the wall of pale, soft flesh sailed by outside. With the possibilities now reduced to one, it was almost unsurprising when the eye came into view.

The sclera and iris were two slightly different shades of red, against which veins were only visible because they carried black blood. The pupil lazily glided around, then came to rest on Olivia. She dry heaved and fell backwards. The room blurred and began to sway around her, as the familiar nausea returned. Everything seemed to pulsate, a low frequency vibration transferred through the hull and into her body.

“Olivia! Are you alright!” She snapped her head towards the sound. Vivian stood there as if oblivious to what lay just outside. Yet when Olivia pointed to it and began to whimper, she was stunned to see only the black void on the other side of the window. “What happened? I saw you fall.” Olivia could only stammer and point to the porthole. Vivian craned her neck looking through it from different angles, but saw only pitch black seawater. She glanced back at Olivia and raised an eyebrow.

“I was headed over to see you because I thought maybe you’d forgotten our date. When I spotted you standing by the porthole I was about to yell to get your attention, but then you collapsed. Are you sure you don’t want to stop by the medbay? It’s closed, but there’s a kiosk outside that will do limited diagnosis and dispense basic stuff like sleep aids.”

It was a lot of work to convince Vivian not to worry. She doted on Olivia the way Olivia remembered doting on James. She was somewhat touched but didn’t feel the same sort of closeness and worried she might’ve lost that capacity. Ever since James was taken, the desperation to retrieve him had slowly expanded within her, displacing everything else.

Vivian’s room was the same cramped dimensions as every other ‘crew cabin’ on the Belusarius, made smaller by clutter. Olivia began to say something but remembered she was a guest. It was also difficult not to mention what she’d seen peering in through the window, but she knew that without any evidence, it would only cast doubt on her sanity.

“Hope you like romcoms from the 2010s. They got a streaming content service down here but it was supplied by a defense contractor so it’s preloaded with all the films it’ll ever have, none of which are recent. I dunno who chose ‘em but he’s got shit taste in movies.” Vivian draped herself across the couch, only shifting her leg to make room for Olivia as an afterthought.

There wasn’t much of a plot to follow, but Olivia was elsewhere anyway. Her thoughts returned again and again to the eye. There was no obvious way to broach the topic without either revealing more than she wanted to, or coming off as a lunatic. What else could it have been? But the last she knew it was down in the trench, forever on the verge of death.

Vivian was generous with the wine. Not wanting to be impolite, Olivia matched her glass for glass. For the first time, she discovered that she could no longer become drunk. If she noticed, Vivian wasn’t bothered. But soon the combination of the drinks and the movie sent her into a teary-eyed, maudlin mood.

“This is just like me an’ Jeff. It’s practically about us. I’m that girl! Who plays her? She’s beautiful. But she’s me. Keeps going through men trying to recreate what she had, and lost. It’s too perfect. I forgot I get like this, I’m sorry. This has to be weird for you.” Olivia, tense until then due to her preoccupations, now softened. Vivian was difficult not to like. There was no pretense with her. Whether it helped or harmed her, she always thrust her feelings out into the harsh light. To be returned, or picked at by vultures.

“You haven’t brought up Jeff recently, I hoped you were finally over him.” Vivian sniffled, and wiped at her nose with one sleeve. “I felt pathetic. I wanted to seem over him. I should be by now! I’m an old woman Olivia.” She laughed. “Viv, 33 isn’t old.” It didn’t seem to help. “Easy for you to say. You’re still in your twenties. How come you don’t got nobody? You’re not like me, are you? Still hung up on some guy who trampled your heart?”

James. She trembled, thinking about the unseemly bliss he’d found for himself. A hell that he preferred to her. “No...No, nothing like that. I’m married to my work, I guess.” Vivian’s beet red face scrunched up, with connotations of skepticism. Being her, she pressed the matter.

“I don’t believe it. Leggy blonde like you, stuck in a tin can at the bottom of the big blue with thousands of men? Loads of ‘em ripped from hard labor, then there’s the Submariners with those uniforms. God help me, the uniforms. You mean to tell me you never…?”

“I’ve always been content with my own company. There was only one time I ever felt strongly connected to someone.” Viv grinned. “Nailed it. You fell for him but it didn’t work out. You coulda just been straight with me. Who you talkin’ to here? We besties, bitch! We’re the same, got the same man problems. It’s never anything but problems either. I grew up with three brothers, I know.”

The more she went on about men, the more Olivia dwelled on James. It was painful and she wished it would stop, but she also found herself badly wanting to comfort Vivian.

“Why can’t I get over him? It’s been so long. What’s the matter with me? How am I gonna be put together enough to know the right guy when I see him? Who could love me like this? I’m a mess, Olivia. And I just keep getting older, breaking down, decaying.” Emotionally, she was bleeding out. For someone as sensitive as Olivia it was excruciating to witness. So, impulsively, she showed her hand.

“...Supposing you didn’t have to. Get older, I mean.” Vivian stared, eyes still bloodshot from crying. “What? You mean like, be 33 forever?” Olivia laughed. “If you want. I think it’s possible to regress too, if you source parts from someone younger. But I’m getting ahead of myself. How badly do you want this?”

Vivian was now fully engaged, but not yet to the point of seriously entertaining the idea. “Where’s this going? Is there a punchline? Who would turn something like that down?” It was very enticing, Olivia thought. Initially. “It’s exactly what it sounds like. You stop aging, and you can reshape your body however you like. You will never grow old. You will never die. You are a blank canvas that can be whatever you imagine, if your skill is sufficient.”

Vivian looked unsettled. “Still don’t understand why you’re saying any of this. It’s pure fantasy. I half expect you to start talking about Jesus, and eternal life. If that’s what this is about, you should meet my mother. She’s all about that shit.” Olivia sighed. “Turn up the lights for a moment. But when I ask you to, dial them back down. No questions, you’ll understand in a moment.”

In part because she was intrigued but also because she was drunk enough to humor the request without too much thought, Vivian paused the movie, stumbled across the room and turned the lights up to maximum brightness. “I don’t get it. What now?” She looked back at Olivia, who gestured for her to sit down. She did so, and waited.

“In a minute, everything I said will make sense to you. But first I want you to remember the time we’ve spent together. Have I ever been anything but a sweetheart? Have I given you any reason to be afraid of me?” Vivian frowned at the tone of the questions, but shook her head. “Good. Then trust that when the haze falls away, it’s still me you’re looking at. Don’t be afraid. Don’t leave the room or talk to anyone about this. You reek of booze, I doubt they’d listen, but still. I need you to be cool about this.”

It wasn’t clear why she’d become so grim until her face began to shimmer. The same sort of distortion effect seen on a highway on a hot day now gently lapped at the outline of her face, hair, and soon her entire body. Scars became apparent where none were visible before. Olivia’s skin gradually faded from a rosy pink to a mildly greenish white. Her eyes sunk in, her features became withered and skeletal, and stitched-up lacerations appeared all over her arms and legs. Vivian shrieked, and fell out of her chair trying to get away.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 2!}