[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 5

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Failure to anticipate that some would need bone saws and sewing kits was understandable, though. She’d forgotten what made her different briefly, as she often did, while navigating the atriums and corridors of Belusarius’ 11th floor, searching for the medical center. The reminder came in the form of a group of five crewmen, all with umbilicals training from their stomachs back to patches of shadow in the far corner. The man from last night was not among them.

One of them gestured to her and the rest turned to look. They made uncomfortably protracted eye contact. One of them slowly nodded. Simply acknowledging her as one of them? Or were they planning something? She nodded back, hoping it was the former.

The medical center had likely been beautiful when new. Everything made from curvilinear white plastic, now beige in places from accumulated grime. The color scheme still managed to evoke sterility and thoughts of the afterlife. The conventional one, anyway.

Everything in this place was intentional, a design decision made at some stage with the central purpose of preventing psychological instability in an environment especially conducive to it. Olivia reflected on the events which brought her to this point and felt amused at the thought of losing her sanity over something as trivial as deep sea confinement.

“I was wondering when you’d show!” It took her several seconds to place the chubby little troll in the white labcoat who greeted her. Finally she recalled him from when she’d undergone cursory medical examination upon returning from the ruins of the Tartarus.

“Actually I’m here about someone in your care. Violet?” He blinked. “Does she have a last name?” Shit. Shit! Pretending to be family was now off the table. “She’s the daughter of a colleague. Just curious to know how she’s holding up. I understand she’s been in a coma for some time now.” The short, pudgy man raised one of his bushy eyebrows as he sat Olivia down on one side of a transparent plastic barrier, then passed through a door to the other side. Which he locked behind him.

“I’m sure you realize, given your line of work, that such details are confidential. Very interesting case though. But then you know all about that, right? It’s why you’re here.” She sat up straight. Inwardly, her paranoia flared up. Sudden awareness of the situation she’d been led into, coupled with memories of the anomalous readings he’d taken when she first arrived only now entered her conscious mind.

“I just….her mother is one of my patients, you see. She talks about her daughter constantly, so I thought-” The little man, now safe behind the barrier, violently interjected. “Bullshit. I can’t prove it as I can’t get at your professional records but that’s not why you’re here. Spare me, will you? Do you see that camera up there?”

She looked at the little round camera he pointed to, nestled in the corner of the ceiling. “...Being that this whole leaky tub is a government project, naturally they didn’t choose the cheapest cameras, but the ones they had a hookup for from an existing subcontractor. Now, those cameras do fine for CCTV. But they’re also capable of thermal imaging. The CCD is the same as the one used in handheld units state employees use to evaluate the insulation of properties applying for energy efficiency certification. You can see where I’m going with this, right?”

He turned the monitor around so she could see the camera feed. “You’re room temperature. Well below survivable limits. Hypothermia starts below 95 degrees, you’re at roughly 70 degrees. I almost missed it the first time! When I couldn’t find your pulse or hear a heartbeat right away I thought it was an equipment problem. On a whim I switched over to thermal, as I’d forgotten to take your temperature and wondered if the heart irregularities were due to the hours you spent in the frigid, slowly flooding Tartarus. You were cold alright, but to the point that you should’ve been dead. Shit, you should be dead right now. Yet you’re sitting there as if nothing’s wrong.”

She stood up and tried the door. Locked. “That’s triple bolted too, for the violent ones. I dunno what else is unusual about you but I doubt you can shatter an inch of acrylic.” He knocked the barrier and flashed a smug grin. She felt on the verge of losing it. It was finally happening, despite her best efforts. She’d been found out. Everything she feared most would follow. Wouldn’t it? “What happens to me now?”

He fell silent, still grinning and leaned back as far as the chair allowed as it audibly creaked under his weight. “Do you know what I did before this?” She didn’t care, and said as much. “Well you’re not going anywhere for the time being, so sit down and listen.” She complied with no small amount of anxiety, keeping her eyes locked on his as she did so.

“The focus of my research before I was stationed subsea was the region surrounding Chernobyl. Lots of groundbreaking work being done there even now. Everyone knows about the gonzo shit that made headlines like the foot long worms, the two headed elk, that sort of thing. But that’s all in line with what we expected from multigenerational exposure to increased but survivable levels of ionizing radiation. The real breakthrough occurred when samples of leaves from the forest floor revealed that they weren’t decomposing.”

With that revelation, the picture grew slightly more clear. “Bizarre, right? What kind of precedent exists for that? The private sector life extension guys were at the time focusing mostly on Turritopsis Nutricula, the multiple well studied lines of cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks and the negligible senescence seen in salmon, lobsters and so on. This anomaly with the Chernobyl plant life represented an entire new avenue of research. The funding was immediate and beyond my wildest expectations. With no cure for aging on the horizon, deep pocketed investors now turned to what looked like a plausible means of slowing down the process or arresting it entirely. Finally, I thought I was onto something I could use to make a name for myself.”

Olivia sat, arms crossed, scanning the room for any means of escape she might’ve missed. For the first time she noticed a nametag on his labcoat, “G. Bizen”. He clearly had only the smallest sense of what he’d stumbled onto or he wouldn’t imagine that trapping her in here could turn out well for him. “But they sent you subsea, huh.”

He frowned. “I was told it was a remote laboratory with top of the line facilities. That much was true. Remote might’ve been understating it a bit.” His eyelid twitched. He went on about the secrecy and deceit involved. Wherever he spoke of Belusarius his voice faltered. Was he beginning to sweat?

“Not an aquanaut at heart, I take it.” He chuckled nervously. “I do alright. So long as I’ve got these.” He patted a vial of pills in the breast pocket of his labcoat that Olivia took for anti-anxiety meds. “Anyway, that brings us to where we are now. I wasted time studying the same collection of samples for the first few weeks, not comprehending why it was necessary to do this at the bottom of the Pacific until….” His voice trailed off, and Olivia filled the gap.

“Violet.” Their eyes met again, this time in mutual recognition. He seemed on the verge of speaking several times before he settled on a question. “What are you? You’re not human. Not life as we know it, so to speak. Were you ever human or are you copies manufactured somewhere? A Navy project, maybe?” Olivia felt mild relief. He knew far less than she’d initially assumed. Not wanting to rectify that, she remained silent.

“I tried injecting bacteria into the girl’s body. They starved. Didn’t recognize anything in there as edible. I tried taking a blood sample. The tiny bit of sludge I managed to extract didn’t seem to carry oxygen or perform any function useful to the body. Do you realize the impossibility of it? It isn’t just that you don’t decompose. That’s at least not in violation of the law of conservation if your body behaves like a somewhat closed system. But you move! You think, you talk. How do your muscles get the ATP they need? Where does the sugar that your brain needs to function come from? You’re a walking impossibility. I haven’t shared any of this with my colleagues in large part out of fear they would institutionalize me.”

So he was the only one who’d caught on? Olivia’s mind raced as he continued to prattle. “So obviously, you’re not a closed system. You’re receiving some type of energy from an outside source. Do you eat? I don’t see how you could digest anything. You also should have fallen to pieces by now. Even without decomposition, general thermal and kinetic stress on the body should’ve done the job. Something is working within you to resist it, but imperfectly. After I drew blood I noticed the hole on Violet’s arm wouldn’t heal. It drew tight, but didn’t heal. She wasn’t developing bed sores. Her hair neither fell out, nor grew. When her mother tearfully spoke with me about the prospect of some day needing to decide whether to take her off life support, I had in fact done so already a few days prior. We both know she has no need of it.”

His candor was worrying. Why tell her all this, unless he didn’t intend to release her? Idly, she focused on the patch of shadow that her umbilical vanished into, tucked away in the darkness under one of the chairs against the far wall. It’d raise so many more questions for him if he could see it. Questions he didn’t yet know that he didn’t want the answers to.

“I didn’t put it all together until I saw your thermal footage. But there were signs. Every so often I’d get really anomalous results from a crewman. Advanced cellular damage in an afflicted limb one week. Then the next week, it’s good as new. Wouldn’t let me draw blood, cited religious objections. Now it all makes sense. How many of you are there? If you don’t heal, how do you keep your bodies from falling apart? What’s your relation to the girl? I’ve told you everything I know. Kindly fill in the gaps.”

She sat quietly, staring at the spot where her umbilical faded into darkness, lost in thought. He continued. “I do know you don’t like bright light. Found that out with the girl. Nearly killed her by accident, or whatever passes for death. You know, for one of you. I am not a cruel man by nature, but I know when I’m onto something big, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to understand it. I need to know whether you’re the product of some classified project I’ll wind up in prison for exposing, or if you really are my discovery. It works best for both of us if you cooperate.”

He made a superficial effort at sounding sympathetic, but it did very little to mask the ruthlessness of the ultimatum he’d presented her with. The bottom line, as Olivia figured, was that she would most likely wind up like Violet if things continued as they were. Now frantic but struggling not to reveal it, she studied the stout fellow threatening her not so subtly from behind the plastic barrier.

Nothing in his eyes suggested he was bluffing. His face looked youthful, but greying hair around his temples suggested intense stress, no doubt relating to what she suspected was a strong aversion to confined spaces and the psychological toll of his recent discoveries. Just behind him, she spotted chest cavity x-rays hanging on a wall mounted light table.

“Everything you want to know”, she said slowly and deliberately, “can be found by imaging Violet’s heart with an x-ray machine. The key to why our bodies work differently can be found there. You’re a smart guy, that should be all the hint you need.”

He looked puzzled. “I already did that. Nothing about the cardiovascular system looked out of the ordinary except of course that the heart doesn’t beat and the blood is congealed. What specifically am I looking for?” He whirled around, stood up and turned on the light table. To get a better look, he then turned the lights off in his little room behind the barrier. It was all she needed.

“I don’t think you’re a cruel man”, she crooned. “You just want recognition. Accolades! Something to show for the decades you’ve devoted to science.” He harrumphed in the dark little room, closely studying the portion of the x-ray depicting Violet’s heart.

“I’m not such a bad person either, Mr Bizen. I’ll see to it that you receive the celebration you’ve dreamed of. Forever.” Engrossed in the x-ray photograph, he did not notice a patch of shadow forming on the wall nearby, or the dozens of bony, pale arms emerging from it, reaching hungrily for the fringe of his coat.

He managed only an abrupt screech as he was dragged into it. A second later he was gone, as was the shadow. Olivia now sat alone in the dimly lit examination room, still locked in but immensely relieved.

Soon she’d bang on the door for help. But for the moment, Olivia set aside a few minutes to concoct an explanation as to how she’d gotten herself locked in here, and where the good doctor had vanished to. One close call was enough. She now more fully appreciated how easily her life, such as it was, could come to an end if she were careless.

The face which greeted her when the door finally opened was Vivian’s. Olivia cried out in relief. The strength she’d summoned to dispose of Dr. Bizen now left her and she struggled to stand. Vivian helped her up, but where she gripped Olivia’s arm, a seam in her skin split open.

“Fuck, I’m sorry. No, don’t cover it, you’ll attract attention if people think you’re wounded. Let the haze conceal it.” The two walked quickly but calmly from the clinic back to the hub, then to the tower in which Vivian’s apartment was located. “How did you know I was in trouble?” Vivian pointed to Olivia’s umbilical. “I could feel it. We’re connected. When you opened the shadow, I knew something had gone wrong. Don’t do that too much, by the way. It consumes a lot of energy, and he’s still weak for the moment.”

Olivia stared. The words spilled out of Vivian’s mouth as casually as if she were discussing taxes, recent films or her work schedule. “He? What “He” do you mean?” Vivian sighed and declined to answer. Soon enough the two reached her apartment. Upon slipping inside Olivia was shocked to find small fridges stacked up to the ceiling all along one wall.

“Pretty sweet, right? Normally just one per apartment but I perfected the guy who allocates shit from the warehouse module. He fudges the records, has these delivered in nondescript crates, and-” Olivia chose that moment to interrupt. “What are they for? Who needs all this?” Vivian furrowed her brow, as if Olivia was supposed to know. She swung open one of the fridge doors.

Stacked inside were all manner of body parts. Eyes, feet, hands, individual fingers, sections of thigh and calf, shoulders, hearts, lungs, stomachs and so on. Olivia’s jaw hung open. Vivian just walked down the row opening one door after the next as if to show off. “Take anything you want from rows three though six, that’s all women. The rest are male bits. I know your joints need replacing, knock yourself out.”

Olivia gaped at the spectacle before her, then looked at Vivian who stood, deadpan and blinking, trying to hand her a neatly severed knee. Olivia sat down, breathing heavily and struggling to find words. “Vivian, what have you….How many have you killed? When I let you in on all of this, I had no idea you would...Jesus, Vivian. Holy fucking shit.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 6!}