[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 7

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Olivia felt reluctant to take her gaze off it, lest it vanish or something even more out of place appear in its spot the moment she blinked. Unexpected, unwelcome change in a place she believed before to be unchanging.

The crystal sphere was where she left it, at least. The trip through to the beach was second nature by now, as was the link from there to Violet’s library. Olivia expected to be pounced upon immediately with questions about why she’d failed to rescue Violet from the hospital, imagining how the dialogue would go and struggling to find the words with which to break the bad news to the poor girl.

Instead she spotted Violet collapsed on the floor, bone white, her dress in tatters. Olivia rushed to her side, and knelt to hear what the girl was trying to say. “Something’s wrong out there, isn’t it? With my body.” There was no obvious way to render aid. She was not choking, or losing blood, or suffering any identifiable condition, just wasting away.

“Stay here, I’ll-” Olivia stammered. Violet simply smiled. “You’ll what? Imagine an ambulance? This is only a projection. It knows I’m here, Olivia. It’s outside the hull, always watching. Can’t get in, but...there are other ways.” She drifted off, somehow asleep within her own dream. Nothing Olivia did would rouse her, though she was still breathing.

“Don’t slip away from me.” Olivia pleaded, her voice breaking up. “I’m losing everything, piece by piece. James. Vivian. The final shred of humanity I thought I had left, those things I was sure I would never do no matter how desperate. Don’t you leave me too. There’s nothing else left.”

On her way back, she noticed the pipe to which the valve was mounted had somehow branched into smaller pipes, spreading out across the ceiling. Turning to open the door to the classroom she habitually woke up in, her hand met cold, rusty metal as it touched the knob. She could swear it was porcelain before.

Olivia awoke with fire in her eyes. The path was clear. Vivian would be no help, whatever enthralled the strange men she’d encountered in the commons was plainly beginning to corrupt her mind. It occurred to Olivia that she might be next.

Rescuing Violet was the one thing she swore to do before it took her, if that was to be her end. Some part of her still longed for James, but as the reality of her situation became more apparent she’d begun to perform triage on her list of priorities.

The clinic was as she’d left it, save for a new face behind the admissions desk. Olivia ran through scenarios in her mind. Could she claim to be a relative of Violet’s? No good, still didn’t know her last name. Besides which, a quick check of archived patient info would expose that as a lie. Likewise with claiming she was a shared patient. Everything became instantly simpler the moment she spotted the receptionist’s umbilical.

“I require access to the...ah...doctor’s lab facility. In service of the one who waits behind the wall.” Some lingo she’d picked up, and it did the trick. The cute petite brunette perked up at the last bit, made eye contact, then glanced at Olivia’s own umbilical. A knowing smile crept onto her lips. “Until the day that they all come together.” She punched in the access code and the door slid open.

After navigating the corridors as well as her memory would allow, she arrived at the cramped laboratory with the single bed, now empty. She fought back the panic. Had she awoken and been released? Couldn’t be, she was so weak in the dream. Olivia raced back to the front desk. “There was a patient being studied in Doctor Bizen’s lab. Just one, young woman, black hair. Where is she now?”

The brunette frowned. “Can’t you...feel her? She has been put to work on level twenty.” Olivia nodded nervously. “Oh yes, of course. Level twenty. I must need mending.” She backed away, then briskly walked to the commons and sat down to collect her thoughts. There was this strange blurry feeling, increasing as of late, which gave her reason to worry that her brain itself was breaking down. It made it immensely difficult to recall where she’d heard of level twenty before.

She nearly made it to the elevator when a familiar wiry old man blocked her path. “Oh, Dietrich! Small world! Or habitat, I suppose? Haha. I’m afraid I can’t speak with you when we’re not on the clock, though.” He didn’t answer, just stared at her midsection. She absentmindedly followed his gaze.

If her heart still worked it might’ve begun palpitating. He could see her umbilical. She reached out to him but he withdrew, still staring. “Dietrich, it’s not….I am not like the other ones. Hear me out, it’s actually very-” He broke away and ran for one of the branching corridors. Fuck, she thought. Another new variable.

Despite having been down here for most of a decade the Belusarius was still incomplete. Floors below 17 were unlit and unheated, used mainly as cold storage for perishables. Not level 20, though. It all came back to her the moment the elevator car descended within earshot of the maddening noise of machinery at work. The shop keeper. Level 20.

She could feel the cold but was oddly not uncomfortable. Her body did not fight it, simply assumed ambient temperature. The elevator let out in a frigid, dripping room with nothing in the way of carpeting or ceiling panels, just bare steel. A sealed hatch in the wall opposite the elevator blocked the way.

Closer examination revealed a numerical keypad to one side. As she struggled uselessly to force the hatch open, her brain began to tingle. That familiar, foreboding sensation she remembered all too vividly from the Tartarus. Only this time, it was not some inscrutable hallucination but the voice of Violet whispering weakly to her.

“You’re close...I can feel you. I don’t know where I am. It’s dark, cold and loud. Some kind of machine room. Olivia, I’m scared. I’m starting to feel better, they must have fixed me, but something’s not right. You said you’d get me out of here, didn’t you? You said you wouldn’t let them take me.”

Her pleas ripped through olivia like sniper rounds. Simultaneously, she flogged herself for failing the girl, and wished they’d never met. If only she didn’t know her. All of this would still have happened but it would not agonize her so. Worthless to play with “what ifs”. She was close now, just on the other side of that hatch. It was only a matter of discovering the code.

“I haven’t abandoned you. I am so sorry, they moved you from the lab before I could get in. I will save you, Violet. I promise that. Whatever it takes, I’ll remove you from this place. We’ll escape to the surface together, start a new life.”

There was no reply. Olivia could only retreat the way she came. Noticing, in passing, thin rusty pipes snaking across the ceiling. The trip up to the populated levels was a sort of journey up from the depths, mimicking the ascent she hoped to make with Violet before things got out of hand. It wouldn’t be long now, either.

She wasn’t keeping count, but every day she saw more fabricants, and fewer who had not yet been converted. The latter were now a minority and still blissfully unaware. Except for one, who was waiting for her when she exited the elevator into the common area.

“There’s one of ‘em now! Don’t you see?” Dietrich had gathered a small crowd, mostly other sub pilots but a few mechanics as well. “Don’t you be fooled, she ain’t real! Cold inside! Walks ‘round like a livin’, breathin’ woman but her heart don’t beat. You can’t see it like I can fellers, not just to look at her”

They went from dubious to irritated almost immediately upon studying Olivia and seeing nothing out of the ordinary. “So this is your shrink, huh Deets? You need one.” The rest laughed and began to disperse. “No you blinkered fools! Put your hands on her! She’s cold as ice! More of ‘em every day too! You’re surrounded an’ you don’t even know it!” He chased after them but they were beyond listening.

The picture of how things had progressed so far without anyone noticing grew slightly more clear. None of them, she thought, would believe in anything out of the ordinary unless it leapt up and smacked them in the face. Even if they were to catch a glimpse of something strange, by some slip of hers or another of the fabricants, would the average person believe it? More likely they’d put it down to exhaustion, or drinking, or anything but what it was.

There was an indeterminate feeling somewhere between exhilaration and anxiety, watching the Belusarius being overrun. Privy to knowledge of a rapidly spreading contagion which she had no reason to fear as she’d succumbed to and become a part of it long ago. This creeping sickness which would have horrified her when she was healthy now comforted her instead. The more it spread, the safer she would be once discovered.

If any healthy part of her mind survived that might’ve recoiled in disgust, witnessing this perverse corruption propagate among the crew, it was more or less resigned to it now. There was no longer a voice which pleaded with her to work against it, that she was still human, that the immense creature plodding about just outside the reach of Belusarius’ external lights might still be stopped.

All she felt capable of saving from it now was Violet. The one sweet, unspoiled thing she could still pluck from this unfolding nightmare before it consumed everything. As she made her way to her room, she caught herself studying the figure of a girl in her early twenties as she tightened a terminal contact in some sort of electrical box. “I’d kill for her legs”, she thought.

Rounding the corner, her path was blocked by a pair of men in blue mechanic’s coveralls. “I told you, shithead. Do you think I’m high now? Drunk? Making things up? There’s one, right in front of you, just like I said.” They both wore some bizarre sort of headgear, black metal with lenses for eyes, held to their faces by elastic straps. When she approached to ask if she knew either of them, the two turned tail and fled down the corridor into darkness. It troubled her but only briefly, as there was sleeping to do.

Her room grew increasingly messy with time as she’d done little else besides sleep and the bare minimum her position aboard the Belusarius required of her. More and more of her life was spent unconscious lately. If she were her own patient, Olivia thought, she’d peg it as escapism. But even in sleep, there was no escape from it.

She sat down in front of the mirror, turned on the lights and scrutinized her face. Wrinkles at the corners of her eyes were turning into noticeable cracks. Possible to conceal with makeup for now but she would need at least a partial face transplant soon. Olivia resolved to minimize her expressions so as to stress the skin as little as possible, until a donor could be found.

She rolled her head, then flexed her arms searching for telltale clicks and pops indicating something was amiss inside. Nothing. Vivian had really done a bang up job. No doubt she was getting quite a bit of practice recently. “I’ll have to get her to teach me how she does it” Olivia muttered. Moving on to her midsection, abdomen and legs, she noticed a growing crease where her dress pinched her waist. If left alone the skin would eventually wear out and split. Easy enough to take a belt shaped strip of skin from the same donor as the facial tissue.

She stared into the mirror and blinked a few times, revisiting her thoughts. She knew it to be perverse. But as if the strangeness were slowly enveloping her, it became more and more difficult over time to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with any of it. The part of her which once recoiled at human suffering was being replaced, piecemeal, by reinforced memories of the torments she’d endured as a girl.

“People are fundamentally rotten. They deserve much worse than what I’ve done.” she thought. Yet her heart wrestled with it. It seemed a distorted view of things. As far from the truth as a child’s naive belief in the inherent goodness of all people. The truth should be somewhere in the middle, shouldn’t it? But whenever she tried to steer her mind in that direction, it was somehow diverted back to thoughts of her youth. Of the group of girls she’d earnestly tried to befriend day after day, though they would mock her, steal her things and on one occasion had held her down in a field outside the school to force-feed her dirt and leaves.

The more she fought it, the more these pathways in her brain were reinforced. For the first time she felt aware of something tampering with her conscious mind. So subtly before that she’d not suspected it, but the faint outline of it was now visible to her, in a manner of speaking. Her eyes widened. She stood up and paced frantically, unsure whether to shout threats at whatever it was. In what direction? And what to call it?

Memories of the immense eye outside the porthole returned. And Dietrich’s tall tales of what he’d seen out in the open sea. This, too, she refused. Not by her own volition. Something diverted her from it, however hard she tried to focus. Sudden nausea washed over her and she struggled briefly to remain upright. The same feeling you get when you’re being watched, magnified a billion times.

The feeling had never been this intense, but she knew, or suspected very strongly that it was the sensation of the creature’s focus brought to bear on her. As it could see her, so too could she glimpse in her mind the nature of the thing which studied her now. No human language sufficed to describe it. It was vast, like a skeletal web spreading out before her. But delicate, dry. Leather and hair. Paper, string and wood. Dust. Preserved tissue stretched over the gaps. Gently waving, pulsating, and whispering to her so quietly she couldn’t make out the words.

“The real you”, she muttered. “Behind the puppets. At the end of every umbilical.” She felt the reflection of deep satisfaction, that she might look upon it knowingly. But also intense desperation. Longing for the only thing that could make it complete.

“I no longer want James. I understand now. He’s exactly where he needs to be. If I were to remove him, this world would be agony by contrast with the perfect bliss he’s enveloped in. I thought...I don’t know. I thought I could replace Lisa. The secret fantasies of a childish heart. I know now that there’s nothing he needs to be rescued from. But there is another. A girl, Violet. She was taken from the hospital.”

Long, raspy breaths followed. Then more whispering, but this time loud enough to hear. There was a stilted rhythm to it, neither poetry nor song. “I am well pleased with you, heirophant. You deliver them so willingly. As you wish, but one remains.” It took a moment to work it out. Vivian and the doctor. One more would make three.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 8!}