[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 6

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Vivian laughed. “Me? I didn’t do all this, I’m just storing it. The others bring what they’ve collected here, I keep it chilled so it’s still good when they need it.” Olivia’s faced was contorted into an expression of baffled disgust. “Others?” She recalled the men she’d run into the other night, in particular the one who ranted so bizarrely. What was Vivian to them? Some kind of parts dealer?

“This is just temporary too. Until we can find someplace more secure. The lowest levels are practically empty, most of us agree that’s where we should really get an operation going.” It was too much to take in. Implications upon implications. Who was this person? The Vivian she knew could never stomach something like this.

Thinking back to her altercation with Dr. Bizen, Olivia realized she was also changing into someone unfamiliar to herself. Each act seemed necessary and justifiable at the time, but they built on one another, snowballing into atrocity.

“There’s over a hundred of us now. Think of the logistics! Each one of us needs essentially a whole body worth of replacement parts what, once a month? Less? Not all at the same time, but piecemeal, like the ship of Theseus. Meeting that demand required that some of us get our shit together and organize some kind of infrastructure for dismantling bodies, cleaning the parts, then properly storing them for later use. All without arousing suspicion.”

As if anticipating the question, Vivian continued. “Perfecting all of the Belusarius security officials was one of the first things we did. When someone reports a missing person, they are assured everything will be done to find them, but that’s the end of it. We’re distributed pretty evenly throughout this place so with a little coordination we can reinforce one anothers’ lies, claim that we’ve seen the missing engineer, nurse, sailor or whoever else hiding on deck 15 to avoid work. Whatever it takes to placate them. By the time enough of the crew realize what’s happening, there will be more of us than them.”

It occurred to Olivia for the first time that Vivian was likely to turn on her if it became clear that she did not want to be complicit. Aspects of her speech had begun to resemble that of the others, and she now facilitated unspeakable acts as a matter of course. So she forced a smile and sat quietly as Vivian carefully took her legs apart with a surgical saw and began integrating the new joints. The elbows were next, followed by a couple of fresh vertebra for her neck and lower back.

“Yenno, there’s a lot in your abdomen you don’t need anymore. Pancreas, liver, kidneys, spleen. I had mine out yesterday, it’s very slimming. I can do that for you while I’m at it.” Olivia cringed, but did not stop smiling for fear of betraying her disgust. “Some other time. You’ve done enough.” Vivian finished mending the openings in her neck. “Stand up, walk about. Do some stretches.” Olivia complied. No cracking or popping. Everything felt as good as new. Her elation very briefly drowned out how disturbing the context was.

“It’s perfect. You’ve gotten so good at mending! I can’t mend for shit, I’ve been using a sewing kit all this time. I’ll just come to you from now on.” A chill went through her as she realized she meant it. The feeling of wear and fatigue was gone. Even the normal aches she remembered from before the Tartarus were absent. She was not just good as new, but noticeably better. A closer look at Vivian revealed the same was true for her.

“Haha! I was wondering when you’d notice. Yeah, these aren’t my tits. The thighs are also aftermarket, you might say. Rachael, that horrible bitch from human resources. Remember that warning slip she gave me for clocking out two minutes early? I clocked her out. Her head’s in a fridge on the bottom row in case I want her lips, I haven’t decided.”

Absolutely beyond the pale. She’d gone from necessity, supporting the survival needs of the ever increasing number of fabricants aboard the Belusarius, to elective self improvement. It was now impossible not to say something. “Is this really….Should we be doing this? You don’t seem at all disturbed by it.”

Vivian looked quizzical. “What else can we do? We’ll fall apart if we don’t repair ourselves. We need to increase our numbers so that the remaining crew can’t destroy us when we’re discovered. That’s the endgame, Liv. Everyone aboard this tub will be like us. I give it three weeks. Maybe less. Fuck, if this bothers you…” She gestured to the fridges, “...You should see what they’re building on level 20. Or maybe not. Are you up to this? You’re not gonna create problems for the rest of us, are you?”

She spoke with what sounded like concern, but there was a detectable menacing quality to it as well. “Oh. Oh, no.” Olivia stammered. “I understand now. It all makes sense! There’s no other way if we want to survive. All part of his plan, right?” She flashed a smile, struggling not to visibly tremble and feeling glad that she could no longer sweat. Vivian warmly smiled back. “Exactly. Everything according to the master’s plan. Stick with me, Liv. You’ll get first choice of top shelf parts.”

Olivia left the claustrophobic room with its rows of fridges and their troubling contents, replaying something Vivian told her in her mind. “You should see what they’re building on level 20.” She shuddered. But that would have to wait. Violet was still lying comatose in Dr. Bizen’s lab.

Someone would notice he was missing. Even if their fears were quelled by Belusarius security, somebody would eventually replace him and resume his work. It would not take long for that person to realize, as Dr. Bizen had, that something about the comatose girl was out of the ordinary.

By Vivian’s description, the number of missing persons was rapidly approaching a critical mass where the rest of the crew would no longer be possible to deceive. The geometric rate of abductions for parts, not even considering the ones converted to fabricants, was unsustainable in the extreme. It was a matter of days, a week at most. If Violet was not rescued before then, she never would be.

Olivia returned to her office, consumed by thoughts of Violet. In particular how she could explain her failure to reach her without mentioning what she’d done to Dr. Bizen. She wanted to go directly to her apartment to sleep, but an obstacle prevented it. In spite of everything going on in her life outside of work, she was still the Belusarius resident psychiatrist, and she had an appointment to keep.

The patient was a haggard little man with a scruffy grey beard and mustache but nothing on top to speak of save for a few wispy grey stragglers. As she approached her office she noticed something unusual about his body language. He was shifting slightly in his seat every few seconds, eyes darting around the room and when she got close enough to see him clearly it became apparent that he was quite sweaty.

“You’re the shrink? Funny joke. Is there a hidden camera or something?” She took a moment to parse it and figure out that he was put off by her beauty. Rather than get off to a bad start, she let it slide and invited him into her office.

He identified himself as Dietrich Feuerstein, until recently a transpo sub pilot. “I’d have put up more of a fight if this weren’t paid leave. Just sign something that says I’m sane so I can get back to work, it’ll save us both a great deal of time.” She didn’t respond, instead tidying up a little and getting herself settled. “It says here I’m to perform a psychiatric evaluation, so I will. How long it takes depends entirely on whether you cooperate.”

This seemed to take the fight out of him. He grimaced, then collapsed into the leather recliner intended for patients. “I thought you’d have one of those couch dealies so I could lay down.” She laughed. “I get that alot. My old office had one but it’s not like they’re regulation equipment. Why don’t you tell me why you think you were sent to me?”

The sentence was carefully qualified so as not to suggest he actually needed therapy. He struck her as inclined to defensiveness and she did not want to give that reflex any oxygen. “I’m here because I saw something out there I shouldn’t have, and was dumb enough to report it. I can’t even be as mad as I’d like because in their shoes I’d have done the same thing. Pilot comes in raving about a giant baby out there walking along the seabed, of course you’re gonna-”

Olivia cut in. “Pardon me, giant baby?” He frowned. “Don’t you start. I never said it was real or nothin’. I’m just tellin’ it like I saw it. Tall enough my lights only caught the head and chest. Easily a thousand feet, maybe more and white as porcelain. Proportions wasn’t right for a baby, but the face was.”

Olivia was stunned. The eye she’d seen peering in through the porthole was no hallucination. She’d feared as much but wasn’t willing to deal with it at the time. “What did you do when you saw it?” He looked contemplative. “Well, for a few seconds I thought what the boss man thinks. That I’d lost my fuckin’ mind. But I kept looking and it kept existing. Blinked, rubbed my eyes, I was sober too. It didn’t seem to notice me. Stood there a moment, then turned and ambled off into the darkness. If I’d taken some time to collect myself and really think hard about whether it was a good idea to tell the guys about it, I wouldn’t be here.”

It was a struggle not to betray to him that what he’d said was meaningful to her. The unexpected bombshell left her at a loss for words, so for the time being she furrowed her brow, nodded, and pretended to jot down notes on a pad of paper. All the while her mind raced. How could it leave the trench? The last she knew, it had been nuked to atoms by Frank Remer and his squadmates. Why now? If was up and moving, why stick around instead of heading for shore? What would happen when it did?

Dietrich snapped his fingers. “I ain’t paying for this time, but I don’t want to waste it all the same. Do you got anything to say about all this? Prescribe me something.” She took a small digital recorder from her desk drawer and asked him if he consented to being recorded. When he did, she hit the appropriate button, then replied.

“That would be premature at this point. To be candid, you seem perfectly cogent to me. Your hallucination could easily have been caused by environmental factors. Trace gases in your sub’s atmospheric mixture, excess CO2, anomalous pressure buildup and so on. In that case meds wouldn’t help you in a lasting way. Of course I can’t go poke at your sub looking for problems of that nature, I’m a psychiatrist not a mechanic. That’s no doubt being taken care of as we speak. Just relax, treat this as a casual get together and an opportunity to vent.”

He did, and over the next hour she learned a great deal about his family history, dissatisfaction in his work and estranged grandson. But he kept coming back to what he’d seen outside the Belusarius. He eagerly agreed when she characterized it as a hallucination, perhaps because he didn’t want her to think he was seriously entertaining any other possibilities.

She was sorely tempted to tell him about the trench, the body, and the Tartarus. But no, it was best for her if he could be convinced that he’d had some type of mental breakdown in the sub. She resolved to start subtly steering him towards that conclusion.

“Anything you say here is of course confidential, the law requires it. So if you take any sort of mind altering substances, now is the time to-” He waved it off angrily. “It ain’t drugs, alright? This is what I was afraid of. I...I mean, I’m not saying what it was, you understand? But it can’t be drugs as I don’t touch that stuff. I used to smoke before I transferred down here but they don’t abide by that in a recirculated environment. Don’t say drinking neither, I never took that up. Not in a way where I’d start seeing things.”

Olivia finished jotting down notes, something she knew caused patients some anxiety. She secretly relished feeling mysterious. “I’ll take you at your word. I’m sure they already tested your blood anyway, if anything turned up you’d be on the first sub headed topside. What does that leave? It might help if you tell me more about the kinds of things you see.”

He furrowed his brow. Several false starts followed, each time he stammered, then shut up and looked contemplative as if having difficulty finding words. “It weren’t just the baby. Something in my head felt like pins and needles when I was near it, you know? Like when you sit on your leg for too long, but in my head. Felt sick too, threw up my lunch once they pulled me out the sub. That’s when I saw my first one.”

He was now sweating bullets, the droplets collecting on his chin. “It was my buddy Reinhard. Works in the sub dispatch, knew something was wrong the minute I saw him. His face was messed up. Like it was a couple different peoples’ faces put together. The lines where they joined was like scar tissue. His arms was different from each other, he walked with a limp and didn’t smile at me or make none of his off color jokes.”

It was all sounding uncomfortably familiar to Olivia. She considered pre-emptively opening a shadow on the wall behind him. It would be so easy to make this problem disappear before it grew any worse. “I seen more of ‘em since. But it comes an’ goes. Like, when I look at Reinhard now his face looks like it always did. I dunno why but it fades in and out, maybe I really am losin’ it?”

She self consciously tucked her umbilical under the lining of her shirt. But no, if he could see her now, he would not be laying so comfortably. So vulnerably. She began to amass flecks of darkness behind him, swirling into the beginnings of a portal. Just then he stood up. “That was an hour. I don’t gotta stay longer, you don’t gotta listen longer. Paperwork says I need three more sessions. Guess I’ll see you next week.”

Olivia stood up and reached to stop him but he was out the door. She allowed the shadow to dissipate, sank into her chair and pondered what he’d said. For the time being he seemed to be the only one who periodically saw through the haze. If it remained just him, there was no real danger, was there? Nobody would believe his ravings. Anyway, there was a more pressing matter to attend to.

She tidied up the office somewhat, dimmed the lights, and slumped in her chair. With no windows in sight and the gentle hiss of air circulation drowning out distant creaks and groans of the hull, it was easy to forget she wasn’t in her old office topside. Dwelling on memories of her life before it turned to this mess proved comforting, and within the minute she was fast asleep.

Where before it disturbed her, the school was now becoming an increasingly comforting sight. However unsettlingly lucid and persistent, it was at least recognizably a product of her own subconscious. It came as something of a shock, then, to walk past an enormous rusty valve on the way to the lockers where she kept the crystal sphere.

Olivia paused a moment, studying it more closely. Where a brand name appeared to be stamped into the round steel mechanism, the lines comprising the text swam about maddeningly. “Probably something like “Company” or “Valves, inc.” Who makes these? Nobody, I bet.” She narrowed her eyes. Nothing else about it yielded any clues. But what was it doing in the middle of a school hallway?

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 7!}