[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 6

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She laughed, blushed and returned to sorting through what looked like CCTV recordings. “What are those?” Olivia fiddled with the time indicator, speeding through hours of footage in the span of a few seconds.

“Tartarus is packed to the gills with security cameras. One of your buddies managed to access that network using a concealed smartpad. That’s how we knew when Remer and his goons were gone and it was safe to attempt a jailbreak.”

The reminder gave James a start. “Cray? Rod? Where are they? Are they okay?” She put a hand on his thigh and gestured to sit back down. “We haven’t located them yet but I’m certain they’re fine. Just prior to leaving the station, Remer transferred them to cells like yours. Before we brought you in to decompress, Hank and I were trying to figure out exactly which cells they’re in. Then we noticed this.”

She flipped rapidly through video feeds from the hundreds, maybe thousands of neutrally buoyant micro habitats hanging still against the night on all sides of the station. The scene in each was the same. Although some were empty, in every occupied cell the inmate was stripped nude and cowering in the corner.

“That was you, not so long ago.” He shuddered, remembering what came out of the shadow and agonizing over whether it was real or a narcosis induced hallucination. “What’s weird is, sometimes I’ll switch back to a feed I’ve already seen, and the prisoner is gone. Eight in the past hour. I’m glad we got you out of there when we did.”

It was a struggle to reconfigure the furniture within that tight space into something resembling Olivia’s office, but when James described his experiences in the cell she insisted on an impromptu session. As usual the more he tried to get away from the topic of Lisa, the more she tied everything into that. Soon discussion turned to the foundry, in particular the ghoulish abattoir at the lowest point.

“More of a reverse abattoir, right? From the sounds of it, rather than dismembering human remains, they were being assembled.” Where was she going with this? “I think my dream is related to the hallucination in your cell, and to the foundry. Lisa is emotionally dead to you, so you’re trying to rebuild her from the pieces that represent your remaining affection. I picked up on that, and elements of it wound up in my dream. The machinery in the foundry is designed to malfunction because for you it represents frustrations with the way that everything you depend on inevitably fails.”

James rolled on his side and scowled at her. “Is this supposed to be improving my mood?” She reclined and scribbled something invisibly on her notepad. “If that’s all you want I could just prescribe oxycontin, but it wouldn’t be a permanent solution. Tell me about the other dreams you had before this started.”

James rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. “The most recent recurring dream before I started visiting the foundry was the cave dream. Nowhere near as vivid or consistent, but it would pop up every few days during the first month after she left. I woke up naked in a cold, damp, pitch black cave. I’d turn around and look for a way out, but there was only a solid rock wall behind me. No way to go back.”

“So I trudge forward, shivering and miserable, hoping the cave lets out somewhere. Every time I became exhausted and tried to stop, friendly voices told me the cave would widen soon, then open up into fresh air and sunshine. So I got up and pushed on. But the cave never widened, it got narrower. And there was no light at the end, it just got so narrow I felt like it was crushing me and I couldn’t breathe.”

“Beyond that, the cave simply ended. Those voices lied to keep me going, when there was no reason to. It was the difference between stumbling cold and alone in the dark for a short distance, or for many miles. Better to stop when exhausted and wait to wake up, no?” Her answer was not forthcoming. When he glanced over to see if she was listening, there were tears in her eyes.

“I need you not to be obtuse with me.” Olivia, who was normally dispassionate during these sessions, suddenly had inflections of stress in her voice. “It doesn’t take a psych doctorate to interpret a dream like that. Why did you never tell me about this before?” That was equally obvious. “Because I knew you’d react like this. Can we not dwell on it?” May as well have been rhetorical, Olivia was now determined to focus on the cave dream.

“Do you have suicidal thoughts?” James shrugged. “Yeah, all the time. Everyone does though.” More quiet scribbling. “That’s a common misconception held by the clinically depressed. Having frequent suicidal thoughts isn’t normal. You know it’s the most selfish thing you can do, right?”

Passive until this point, James bolted upright and snapped back: “That’s the biggest load of shit. Selfishness is demanding someone live for your sake. That they prolong their own misery just because death terrifies you.”

James didn’t intend to injure Olivia the way his outburst clearly just did but there was no stopping it now. “Oh I know, ‘it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem’. But how often is it temporary? Life isn’t a film, when things take a turn for the unbearable there’s no guarantee that it will ever improve. For most people it doesn’t, there is no happy ending and the only way to minimize suffering is to cut it short. People who can’t acknowledge that because it’s not sufficiently uplifting are mentally children.” The damage was done. He laid back and waited for her to scold him.

Instead she sat quietly for a while, then continued with professional language but a faltering voice. “How long have you felt this way?” By comparison with the visibly rattled Olivia, James was the picture of serenity.

“Olivia, I don’t sincerely intend to kill myself. I’m not sure how to explain this in a way that won’t sound morbid or upsetting to you but part of how I’ve continued getting out of bed each day, doing my job, enduring Rod’s antagonism is my new perspective. All of my plans for the future used to revolve around raising kids with Lisa, growing old with her, making her as happy as I possibly could.”

“So when she left, it was the end for me. I was supposed to die on that day and in a very real sense I did, but somehow my body kept going. I just kept waking up morning after morning in disbelief that I could apparently keep on existing in a world where she doesn’t love me. I’m supposed to be dead. Every day of my life since then has been a bonus. Like I’ve stolen it.”

She looked winded. No doubt it was a lot to absorb but for a professional who dealt with depression as a matter of course she seemed unexpectedly disturbed by James’ confession. With some effort Olivia slowed her breathing, focused and pressed on with the session.

“James, nobody ever lives out the future that they plan. Eventually the course of their life diverges so much from what they envisioned that they learn to let go of those plans and live life as it happens. If you believe in God, you could think of it as letting his plan for your life-” He gestured dismissively.

“Fine, but the principle is sound. You’re still a young man. Either you’ll move past this depression or you won’t, either way you’re going to keep on existing for a very long time. Whether or not you actually live, that’s up to you.”

She put her warm, frail hand on his and squeezed for a moment. Then without another word she stood up and left the room. It left James feeling sobered, and wondering if he’d been overly dramatic. But as he took inventory of the things he’d told her in the past hour he could find none that he felt were untrue.

It seemed like the tactful thing to give Olivia a good thirty second head start, besides which he knew she’d bring all of this up during the next session and he badly wanted to put off talking about it again until then.

James counted down the last few seconds then lurched to his feet and headed for the corridor. He found Hank hunched over a row of several dozen identical monitors arranged in a semicircle in front of the enormous dome window he’d first seen the floating prison cells through.

Olivia was fiddling with the touchscreen interface at the far end of the crescent control panel. He did his best to avoid eye contact. Hank edged along the controls, casually poking virtual buttons on a few of the screens as he approached James.

“We’ve found Cray and we’re working on a plan to retrieve him. We haven’t found Rod yet. Needle in a haystack, there are thousands of cells and without access to the prisoner database the best we can manage is to flip through the surveillance feeds until we spot him. Could use your help with that, if you’re feeling up to it.”

James faked a smile, nodded and after a brief tutorial on how to work the user interface he was off to the races. Every feed looked nearly the same, as the camera was positioned identically in every habitat. The only difference was where the prisoner was huddled or if there was a prisoner inside at all.

None seemed healthy, all were wedged into a corner or pacing frantically. There was no audio but he could see their lips moving, even those curled up in a corner rocked gently and whispered something to themselves.

“Can we get audio?” Hank moved back over to James and plugged in a headset. “We only have one, so if I need it for something I’ll be back.” James indicated agreement and with a quick touchscreen gesture Hank cut in the audio feed.

James sat dumbfounded. Then switched to the next cell and listened for another long while. Then to the next. He took off the ear-enveloping headphones and turned to Hank. “Have you listened in? To the prisoners, I mean.” Hank shrugged. “No need, we’ll know Rod when we see him.”

James considered handing the headphones to Hank and having him listen but reconsidered. No need to distract him, finding Rod was the top priority. No matter which cell he brought up on the monitor, if it contained a prisoner they were either crouched in a corner rocking gently or pacing rapidly from one end of the cell to the other, muttering “the flesh and blood of innocence” over and over.

The current feed showed a middle eastern man of slender build with a long tangled beard holding his head in both hands, pacing like the others. “The flesh and blood of innocence. The flesh and blood of innocence. The flesh and blood of innocence.” Suddenly he turned and looked directly into the camera. “To kill them all would make me God.”

While Olivia and James took the shotgun approach, flipping rapidly through camera feeds in hopes of spotting Rod or Cray, Hank was shoulder deep in the station’s software. The idea as he explained it was to look for recent changes to the ordering in the prisoner registry known to occur when unscheduled admissions take place. Which is a particularly banal way of saying that someone’s been unlawfully imprisoned.

The software was lowest bidder garbageware programmed by Indian teenagers, and knowledge of that gave Hank confidence in his expectation that multiple backdoors must exist. They were well hidden, but he’d begun searching for them shortly after transferring to Tartarus so if anything it was remarkable that finding the first backdoor had taken this long. Nonetheless there it was, a flickering dropdown menu with several normally greyed out options now available. Hank clicked “Cell directory”.

What he got was a list of recent and scheduled executions. This was technically a more difficult prize to obtain as it was behind an additional layer of security, but at first it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the search for Rod so Hank nearly closed the window in disgust. It was glimpsing Rodney’s name that stopped him. This section of the application logged the use of pressurization routines normally used to execute prisoners right in their cells.

As the process was initially intoxicating and came on unexpectedly it created fewer opportunities for prisoners to act out violently when confronted with the reality that they’d be dead in a few minutes. There’s a lot that could go wrong in a place where the uninterrupted operation of sophisticated machinery is all that prevents you from being instantly smashed by the full weight of the ocean.

The potential damage a madman might cause, escaped from his handlers on the way to some interior execution chamber, gave the architects of this high tech torture pit good reason to design each cell such that the conditions inside could be remotely manipulated. And like a frog slowly brought to a boil, provided the transition was gradual, the condemned would be extinguished before they could realize anything was amiss.

That seemed to be what happened to Rod, except the log indicated that the execution process was halted and reversed several times before it could finish. For a minute he dwelled on what that must’ve been like for Rod, his body cycled through it’s maximum tolerable range of pressure and gas mixtures several times in the span of two days, tissues saturating and outgassing like a sponge, neurons crackling uncontrollably under pressures that did not permit them to organize conscious thought.

For whatever reason thinking, feeling humans who imagined themselves to be morally upright designed what Hank felt certain was the closest possible approximation of Hell, and Rod had just endured several round trips. The possibility dawned on Hank that the quivering, demented creature they hoped to rescue from his cell would not be the man who went in. His stomach gurgled with either hunger or nausea. It was the unsettling feeling that could be either one, difficult to put into words but which everyone’s experienced at some point.

Across the room Hank noticed James slumped over the console. Slightly aggravating. But he thought back on the trauma of crossing that expanse of frigid water and impossible pressure and decided James could sleep as much as he liked for the next few days. Unconsciousness was a sort of brief escape from the hopelessness of their situation, more cause for envy than irritation.

James rubbed his eyes and sat up. Soon after he registered and accepted that he was neither aboard the Tartarus, nor in the familiar rusted confines of the foundry. Instead he found himself back inside of his cell. Laughter issued forth uncontrollably, wavering at times, threatening to turn into sobbing but never making good on it. Was it really possible he hadn’t escaped?

His neck was sore from the last injection. Rubbing it and withdrawing his hand produced a tiny red blotch where residual blood from the puncture soaked into his finger. Waves of anxiety impacted his mind, gripped it for a moment and then passed one after the next. It was a reality he could not accept but which confronted his senses every second his eyes remained open.

He got up and spent a few minutes pacing around the perimeter of the cell, touching things, smelling them, challenging what he still hoped was a cruel illusion to keep it’s seams hidden. Just as he felt ready to conclude there were none, he looked in the mirror and saw Rodney’s battered face looking back.

He tried several things following that discovery. The first was to lay back down and try to get some sleep. The same principle where one reboots a computer to fix some serious operating system malfunction, he hoped would apply here as well, against all odds. When he sat up an hour later and still saw Rodney in the mirror his next recourse was to smash his head into the sink over and over until blood ran down his face, mixing with equally salty tears.

He wasn’t confused, exactly. He knew what he saw, but felt frustrated because it was something he knew couldn’t be so and yet his eyes kept telling him it was. Poking, pulling at and otherwise deforming his face did nothing to change it back. Curling up in the entry/exit hatch and shouting that he wasn’t fooled by whoever was doing this likewise accomplished nothing, as Rodney’s now bloody face still greeted him every time he checked the mirror.

Soon he was seriously entertaining the thought of fashioning a sharp implement and cutting this false face off of his skull. The state of medical technology permitted full recovery from this and even improvement, while the pain of being forced to witness and accept an impossibility exceeded the pain that he imagined slicing off his own face would entail.

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