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

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“No, god damnit. This is what I was preparing you for.” The weakness set in. Olivia felt her body failing. Her vision began to blur and she found her arms and legs increasingly failed to receive signals from her brain. “Turn the lights down.” Vivian was still in the throes of fear. “Please. Turn them down. I’m dying.” Her skin grew dry and small cracks began to form. Blisters bubbled up, her joints stiffened, and breathing became immensely difficult.

Vivian regained composure, enough so to reach for the dial and begin dimming the lights. But she did not once stop staring at Olivia, her mouth hanging open. This was likely the first thing she’d ever seen that could be called paranormal. For most people, whose understanding of the universe assumes that it is internally consistent, comprehensible and more or less as it appears to be, even the smallest glimpse of what lay behind that veneer can fundamentally undermine their mental health.

This was what it seemed to Olivia was happening inside of Vivian’s mind. The lights were now at the low level they’d been during the film and Olivia’s appearance was slowly returning to normal. Vivian held her head in both hands, brow furrowed, and struggled to accept what she’d seen. First things first. She reached for the bottle of wine and began to study the label.

“I’m afraid it isn’t the wine”. Olivia took the bottle from her and set it aside. When she reached for Vivian’s hand, she recoiled. “I told you, I’m still your bestie. Nothing about me has changed. Can you imagine what it’s been like for me, hiding this from everyone? I showed you because I thought you’d understand.”

She did, to a degree. “So...when you said I could live forever. Stop aging, stay like this for as long as I want. You meant...whatever the fuck I just saw? What did you do, Liv? What the fuck did you do? What are you, even? I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I still can’t….I mean, how is it even possible? What are you?”

“I’m not sure. There isn’t anything similar I could use as a basis for comparison. A lot more happened aboard the Tartarus than made it into the reports.” Vivian got back into her seat, but remained rigidly upright, poised as if to run should anything else along the same lines occur unexpectedly. “I can see that. Holy fuck. That’s some Exorcist shit. What happened over there? What did they do to you?”

“Not they, he. Or it. I don’t know if it’s gendered. Something began speaking to us in hallucinations, very soon after we reached the Tartarus. It must’ve been just barely within range. James had it the worst. It kept taking him someplace whenever he fell asleep. Something like a dream, but persistent, as if it were a real physical location. It keeps people there. Tartarus prisoners, mostly. Takes them apart, puts them back together, God knows why. But when it remakes us, we’re forever changed. Ageless, preserved like cured leather. And somehow, nobody else can see what’s been done, except in bright light.”

It wasn’t the whole story, but it was enough to make sense of what she’d seen. Vivian digested it, then said something surprising. “And you were just going to sit on this? Fuck my ass, Olivia, you’ve discovered the fountain of youth. I still don’t really understand any of that shit about how it works, but who fucking cares? Do you have any idea what you’ve got? Who doesn’t want to live forever? You could be the richest bitch alive! You could start a fuckin’ religion, I don’t know. Can you really do this to other people?”

“Well, I can’t. Not yet, I need more practice. But I know someone who can. And if you really feel that way, I can lead you to him.”

“Eternally perfected Vivian. Forever beautiful, rebuilt from her own parts. Everlasting Vivian, with temporary stitched seams and permanently preserved skin.” It helped immensely that she’d kept drinking on the way. Olivia helped the stumbling lush down the dark, mouldy corridors to the most holy place, at the very bottom of the Foundry. Now she hung from the wrought iron rack, still upsettingly fresh in Olivia’s memory as the place she’d been dissected. The process now happening to Vivian.

“Forever pretty skin, forever pretty hair. Permanently rebuilt and grateful for it.” The incomprehensible babble came from the flesh puppet, hovering a good foot or so above the soft, squishy floor, an umbilical trailing from its deformed torso back to a large pulsating orifice in the floor. As it droned on, Olivia felt as though in a trance. Was there hidden meaning to it?

“Perfectly preserved Vivian. Eternally young, in love with her new body, and with her father, who perfects her through this Fabricant, his most cherished instrument.” Olivia blinked. Fabricant? Somehow she expected it to refer to itself as the master. The other one like her she’d run into never used any other name. The pale, spindly figure was only roughly humanoid and exuded sickness and decay. Yet his every movement of the small bladed tool was swift and precise. Before her eyes, in a matter of minutes Vivian was dismantled. Methodically, gingerly taken apart the way you might disassemble a delicate clock.

Each of her organs sat awaiting reimplantation in the familiar glass jars, hung as they were from the iron frame. Vivian remained conscious throughout, but not lucid. “Olivia...Something’s wrong. I don’t want this. Put me in bed” she mumbled. The process was too far along now to be reversed. “Shhh. You’re gonna be fine. It’ll be over before you know it.” The hobbled, floating surgeon cackled.

“Perfect little puppet Vivian. With puppet eyes, puppet ears, a real working puppet mouth and nose. Carefully crafted puppet Vivian, reduced to her parts and then put back together. Remade in the father’s image and grateful for it.”

The room and all of its contents were built from viscera. Veins snaked across the gently rippling walls. Bone columns reached up to where a ceiling would be. Instead the room opened to a sky filled with grey stormclouds. Machinery of one sort or another littered the room. Some kind of loom made from bone and sinew, used to weave muscle from individual fibers. Racks upon racks of organs, intestines draped over the edge.

“Finally completed Vivian. Made whole again by the one who waits behind the wall. Perfectly put together puppet Vivian, with neat little stitched up arms, stitched up legs and a pretty puppet head. Ready to carry father’s message into the world and eternally, permanently grateful.”

Olivia spun around. As good as his word, there stood Vivian, rapidly recovering from her stupor. She’d be pissed when she discovered she couldn’t get drunk anymore. Yet, it was done. Vivian was speechless. It seemed to Olivia that she must be overwhelmed with happiness until it dawned on her that, because the effects of the alcohol were now completely gone, she’d only just fully comprehended where she was and what she’d agreed to. This was confirmed when she began screaming and writhing on the ground.

Shadow engulfed her, and a second later she was back in her room. She continued to thrash and shriek until Olivia persuaded her to open her eyes, at which point the familiar surroundings calmed her somewhat. “That was fucking real, wasn’t it”. Olivia nodded. “So that wasn’t some dosed wine or some shit. That really fucking happened.” Again, she nodded. For a moment Vivian looked ready to resume screaming.

“Please don’t. You’ll attract security. You’ll find that your new body weakens when focused on, moreso with the number of people looking. There’s something about direct awareness that exerts a force against whatever these bodies are made of that’s corrosive to it.” Vivian began crying. “Oh for God’s sake. This is what you asked for. Do you realize you’re never going to look a day older than you are now? If you’re consistent about upkeep.”

Vivian wiped tears from her eyes with a pyjama shirt she’d put on. “...Up...Upkeep?” Olivia produced the small sewing kit from her pocket. “You can’t heal. That’s the short version. You’re not going to decompose either, but little things like cuts and scrapes aren’t going to take care of themselves. That’s what I use this for.” She brandished a needle.

Vivian sat dumbfounded, her teary eyes wide open and staring at nothing in particular. “So….I’ll never die.” Olivia grinned. “Yup. That’s the silver lining. Think of it as a mansion you’ve bought. The downsides are like debt. Very high maintenance, you may have to do a few things you’d rather not in order to keep it, but it’s a hell of a payoff.” Vivian still stared aimlessly but now, slowly, began to crack a smile. “I’ll never grow old….I’ll never die.”

Morning came, such as it is three miles underwater. With Vivian more or less recovered and instructed in the basics of bright light and attention evasion, Olivia threw on a jacket and hat to shade herself and set off for her office to finish filling out funding authorization requests. Some of her patients received subsidized therapy for one reason or the other, but it required periodically renewing it through the slow, inefficient mechanism of a government department devoted specifically to mental health services for submariners.

Which, naturally, was a sub-department of something slightly less specific. And so on and so forth, like nested Russian dolls. It was this convoluted machine that criminals were fed into topside, which then digested them, holding them for years at a time in the large intestine of prison, determining guilt by trial, then re-trial, then appeals.

The whole of the process could easily eat up most of a human lifespan. If the poor idiots caught up in all of this met a laundry list of highly specific criteria, the government machine excreted them into Tartarus. With the partially flooded remains of that multibillion dollar ultramax prison sitting on the seabed, what rug would society now sweep its waste under?

It was the work of four uninterrupted hours to finish the fat stack of paperwork and file it correctly. Although she remained sitting for most of that time, by the end she felt as though she’d just run a marathon. The thought of the long trek back to her room was daunting. Instead she resigned herself to the exhaustion, leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes.

When she next opened her eyes, she wondered if she’d slept at all. It initially appeared that she was still in her office. But as she studied the details of the room, it became apparent that it was just a very lucid dream. Little things were out of place. The color of books on the shelves. The pattern of the wallpaper. The text on the wall placard was garbled, and shifted about like a fluid as she moved her head to study it more closely.

The realization that she was dreaming seemed to trigger a nearly imperceptible tremor. She stood up, walked to the door and opened it. Outside was not the familiar round corridor lined with dripping portholes, but the hallway of what she immediately recognized as her primary school.

She shuddered. To return here so soon after the Tartarus incident implied possibilities she wasn’t willing to seriously entertain. Instead she clung to the narrow chance that it was like any other dream, only recurring because of recent trauma. Olivia struggled to bury her trepidation as she crept down the darkened hallway.

It was different from last time, at least. Before it had looked abandoned for centuries. Now it looked clean, in good repair, and recently used. It was still empty, though. For the most part.

When she glimpsed a short, thin figure around the corner, she immediately withdrew. Her heart was thumping so loudly she feared it would be heard even at a distance. Very slowly, she inched her way to the edge of the wall and peered around it.

As her eyes adjusted the figure revealed itself to be a young girl, pale and with black hair down to her waist. As she looked on, the girl opened a locker and produced from it a small glass sphere.

What happened next defied logic. She seemed to walk into the center of the sphere. It happened so quickly Olivia couldn’t wrap her head around it. It looked like someone walking down a distant tunnel, shrinking in size as they grow more distant, except the tunnel was a small glass orb the size of an orange and she entered it from the side, relative to Olivia.

The orb fell to the ground but didn’t shatter. Olivia waited to see if anything else along the same lines would occur, but all was still and silent. An overhead light fixture hung slightly loose from the ceiling and flickered, casting intermittent shadows. She deliberated over what to do next. Of all the places she might visit in a dream this was the last place she wanted to be, so wherever the girl went to, Olivia resolved to follow.

The orb was warm to the touch. Perhaps because it’d been recently held, but it felt warmer than that could explain by itself. Gazing into it, Olivia saw some other place, as if through a telescope. The space around it was like a tiny cosmos, twinkling points of light swirling around within the glass. There was no sign of how to enter it. Olivia stared into the shimmering, three dimensional hole at the center and what looked to be a beach on the other side.

The longer she stared, the more it grew. By the time she figured out what was happening, she’d passed through it. Humid air engulfed her, and warm tropical sunlight bathed her sickly pale skin. She cringed, worrying about direct sunlight, before remembering that of course it was just a dream.

The island was tiny, and near the shoreline it turned out to be littered with little glass orbs like the one she’d seen the girl pass through a minute ago. Picking them up one at a time but taking care not to stare into them for too long, she determined that each led to a different place. Some sort of travel hub.

When she spotted the girl lying contentedly on the beach, she called out to her. “Hi! What is this place?” The girl bolted upright, then ran for a particular orb and vanished into it. Not the first impression she’d hoped to make. It was easier than expected to find the right orb, as when she looked into the right one, she saw the girl’s worried face peering back. When they made eye contact, the girl ducked out of view. Could she prevent passage? Only one way to find out.

The new dreamscape she found herself in resembled an ornate, well appointed library. The shelves were polished oak with gold trim and intricately detailed plush red rugs lined the paths between them. It smelled of age, dust, and varnish. She glimpsed the girl darting behind a bookcase, and pursued.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}