[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 7

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He wouldn’t get the chance. At first, the only sign anything was happening was a subtle change in temperature and a buildup of pressure on his eardrums. It soon became obvious that waking up as Rodney was only the beginning, and that his perception would continue to betray him in increasingly perverse ways. Logically it all had to be coming from his own mind, and he knew that, but as it grew worse he struggled to believe that his own brain could torment itself this effectively.

The first symptoms were visual distortion. The dated floral pattern on his foam mattress began to move. Not going anyplace but rather visibly animating, the small flowers closing and opening, the vines they grew from writhing as if alive. This animation played out over the whole surface of the bed. It was the sort of illusion he expected would halt if he looked directly at it but it defied him and just kept on doing the impossible.

He resolved, then, to look at something else only to find that every surface in the habitat was undergoing continuous visual mutation. The hexagonal raised reinforcing pattern on the door of the small cabinet to one side of the sink reduced itself inwardly to smaller and smaller sub-hexagons. The closer he looked, the smaller the tiniest indivisible hexagonal unit became.

Some comfort came from the recognition that these effects were medically understood to be typical of certain types of hallucinatory experience. Whatever was happening, it was because the conditions of the cell were acting on parts of his brain responsible for interpreting vision and recognizing patterns. This helped slow his racing heart somewhat but it did not give him the control over his perception he hoped for.

As if to punish him for trying to understand it, the vision grew suddenly more severe. Patterns of rust along one of the steel pole safety grips next to the toilet slid up and down it carelessly, not concerned with the fact that rust is normally stationary.

Visual confusion he’d already noticed in the hexagonal ribbing of the cabinet door grew so strong that he became lost in it. Variations on hexagons, triangles and squares filled his vision and struggled to integrate smoothly with one another despite their different number of sides..

Hours might’ve passed before he broke free. There was no longer any reliable perception of time passing. The closest thing was the eventual realization that he was starving. But in this state, navigating to where the liquid food substitute was dispensed seemed impossible. Every nook and crevice he became immersed in was a whole universe unto itself and anything even slightly complex in a geometric sense exploded into a web of complexity he couldn’t look away from.

It was all taken from elements of objects within his vision but distorted so much that the best he could do was to infer where he must be in the small spherical room by which objects the currently visible fractal distortions were based on. He made the mistake of looking at his arm and fell over babbling in fright. It was a pulsating meat stalk. Every individual hair was distinguishable from the rest and they were waving like the cilia of a microorganism.

The color of his scrapes and blemishes was also amplified so that instead of being barely visible against Rod’s naturally reddish skin tone they were a bright angry red and looked infected. The spots on his finger joints where skin scrunched up as his fingers straightened were “breathing”, as were his largest pores when he thought to check them. The weathered skin on his hands looked elephantine, and when he made the even more foolish mistake of looking in the mirror again he couldn’t comprehend what type of animal he was.

There was an intensity and prominence of his eyes that made them seem to glow and pulsate. Every little facial hair was especially visible and gently waving like grass in a sustained wind. Blemishes and scratches glowed red and he went through several second stretches where he forgot who Rod was and instead wondered frantically who the stranger in the mirror could possibly be.

His heart was once again racing and threatened to burst. The furthest parts of the room were writhing, twisting, and pulsating in neon relief. He resigned himself to helpless weeping and prayer that it would end, but as the air pressure increased and forced him to keep yawning to equalize reality just continued to collapse around him.

It was relentless, and indifferent to his fear. The more he wished it would plateau the more the change accelerated to spite him. Compared to this, the foundry was a familiar comfort. He found himself wishing he could will himself asleep and return there. Anything to escape the false body he’d woken up in and the horrifying disruption of his senses that followed.

Faces began appearing in objects. Recognizably humanoid but elongated and gaunt, as if starved. Their eyes were closed until, wondering if they were alive, he looked directly at one. The eyes snapped open and it shrieked. James cried out too, stumbled backwards and resumed weeping. It was the most visceral fear he’d ever felt.

But every surface had one or more faces, so there was no corner he could hide in where he did not eventually notice at least a small one which was dormant until he became aware of it, after which it sprang to life and screamed at him with wide, empty eyes. He was ready to die if that would make it stop. But before he could take inventory of the methods available in the tiny cell to hang or stab himself, every element of the hallucination began to unify.

The distortions on every surface now had a definite direction to them, all of which flowed towards a single spot on the wall above his bed. The fractal web bent towards it as though being pulled into a black hole. And soon that spot did begin to grow dark. There was no logical reason, given the lighting, why a shadow should appear there but like everything else he’d witnessed over the past hour it had no regard for what ought to be, only continued to grow even as he willed it to stop.

Soon every element of visual distortion around him was sucked into the patch of shadow. After this the room returned to more or less how he remembered it before the hallucination began, except that the wall above his bed was now engulfed completely in darkness. A perfect blackbody mass that brought to mind the endless dark expanse outside the cell.

When a woman’s hand emerged from the shadow wall it was almost expected, and easily the least anomalous thing he’d recently experienced. The hand was followed by an equally pale, fragile forearm. Then upper arm.

Questions arose when the arm did not at this point terminate in a shoulder or appear to be attached to a torso where it should be, but instead continued with new sections, each roughly the length from your shoulder to your elbow or from your elbow to your wrist.

Faintly noticeable seams marked the point where each section ended and the next began. Like they’d been combined to form this gently wavering pseudopod, comprised of parts superficially similar to a human arm but in an obviously nonhuman configuration.

Finally the hand stopped, still beckoning as it lingered less than a foot from James. It hesitated, then crossed the remaining distance to caress his face. It was stiff and cold, but the way it stroked his cheek was familiar.

“Just what in God’s name is that.” Frank Remer hunched over the bank of monitors that Olivia and Hank had occupied until Remer and his men unexpectedly returned. On one of the screens, Rod huddled on his bed while the pale, patchwork arm hung in the air before him. Antonio and Bruce turned their attention from Hank and Olivia to the monitor.

It didn’t escape Hank’s notice that the moment they did so, the arm convulsed slightly. “I don’t see it. Turn up the illumination.” Remer tapped an icon representing that prison pod, and from the sub-menu that appeared he dragged the “light” slider from 30% to 90%. There was just enough time for Bruce and Antonio to recognize the arm and turn white. A split second later it thrashed violently and withdrew into the shadow, which then faded until the wall where it had been returned to normal.

“Some time in the next fifteen seconds, one of you’d better start talking.” Olivia cast a sidelong glance at Hank, an unspoken agreement not to cooperate. Frank made a show of looking at his watch, and sighed. “I’ve cherished our time together. But I would’ve expected that you’d know me well enough by now to know what happens when I don’t get what I ask for.”

Frank turned back to the monitors, selected a prison habitat, and brought up the video feed. All three gasped as they spotted Cray, sound asleep on the bed. Remer tapped a small icon resembling a skull. Outside there was a bright flash, and in the distance the gently scattering debris of what used to be the prison cell began drifting into the deep.

The monitors’ feed turned to static. “Hydrox is flammable as fuck. Shocking, I know.” Bruce and Antonio cackled. “NO!” James lurched forward but was restrained by Remer’s men. That couldn’t have just happened. Cray couldn’t be dead. Vanished in a distant flash, the only friend he’d known for the past three years. Remer selected Rod’s cell on the touchscreen.

“You’re insane! Stop this!” Oliva screamed, more deeply affected by the strategic display of brutality than Hank. Remer’s finger hovered just above the icon. “Give me a reason to.” Olivia froze in quiet contemplation. She looked back at Hank with an agonized expression. He shrugged.

It took more than an hour to relate everything they’d seen and felt while aboard the Tartarus to Frank and his men. For his part he sat in total silence, slowly stroking his stubble. “I thought we got it. I thought we fuckin’ got it. The warheads detonated didn’t they?” Antonio looked like he was losing it. He’d been especially enraptured by Hank and Olivia’s story. Frank turned and muttered “Settle down. They must’ve gone off, we all felt it.” Hank’s ears perked up. “Warheads?”

Sudden embarrassed expressions confirmed that they hadn’t meant to reveal that much. But, in for a penny. “Well, what the hell. It’s not like any of you will leave this station.” Frank eased back into his seat and lit a cigarette. “The Navy is fighting something down there in the trench. Not sure what. Heard rumors, but none of us was ever close enough to see it. The mental case your buddies brought here from the Belusarius was a member of the crew that discovered it.”

He gestured to James. “You know better than I do how badly it messed him up. That’s why we can’t get close. Lost three pilots that way. They got close enough to where it could touch their minds, made them see things. One detonated his torpedoes while they were still in the tubes because he believed he’d already fired them. The other stopped responding and plummeted into the trench never to be heard from again. We established the radius of this thing’s influence by trial and error. My team was the first to successfully nuke the target. But not before Drake got a little too close. It made him believe his nuclear salt water rocket engine was melting down. He slowed as much as he could and collapsed his cavitation bubble. Hitting bare sea water at that speed, it may as well have been a brick wall.”

His voice was slow and wavering now. It was eerie to see a man like Remer so much as hinting at emotion. “Command gave us the wrong minimum safe distance for that yield, We weren’t supposed to return from the mission. Now I know why.” Remer gestured to the monitor which still displayed Rod, huddling in his cell.

“We had a talk with the prisoner you transferred. Took it with a grain of salt because of his condition, but he said once you get close enough to that thing, it does something to your brain. It can reach other people through you. None of this is for certain, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say that’s what you’ve been experiencing.” He puffed thoughtfully, the smoke swirling up into a scrubber intake overhead.

“So this is all because of you. Because you came here.” Olivia could barely conceal her contempt. Frank just laughed. “You’re the one who came to us, sweetheart. And your friends were fucked the moment they took the helmet off that prisoner. You know that’s true, the weird shit started before we got here. Either way, now we’re all up to our eyeballs in the same shit.”

“Nukes didn’t kill it, none of us can return to the surface until it’s dead, and we’re all puppets on a stage that it controls. Theoretically we could be more fucked than this, but I don’t see how.”

James, silent until now, jumped in. “Of course it’s hostile to you. You detonated nuclear warheads on it. It’s visited me a few times now, if it wanted to kill me I’d already be dead.” Remer raised an eyebrow. “Is that so? You’ve given me a wonderful idea.”

“I wish I knew what Remer’s up to.” Hank paced around the small, dank metal room. A single porthole gazed out into darkness, opposite a heavy duty hatch. “I should’ve stayed quiet.” James muttered as he stood shackled to the far wall. Olivia caressed his face. “Don’t beat yourself up, James”. He smirked. “That’s normally Rodney’s job”.

It reminded them of Cray, and the room became awkwardly silent for the next few seconds. There was also a palpable sense of dread, as they’d been given no reason why they were locked in a structurally reinforced cell together but knowing Remer it didn’t bode well.

“You know, I was inside his head for a while. Rodney’s.” Olivia cocked her head, so James continued. “I don’t know how but I woke up in that cell, and I was Rodney. It put me there, I think. At first I thought it wanted me to share in Rod’s suffering. But while I was in there, I could remember Rod’s life. I had no idea, the things inflicted on him as a small boy.”

“The imagery wasn’t too clear but even that was overwhelming. I could remember how it felt, how confused he was that another human being let alone his own father would do those things. I could remember when he had to testify against him. I remembered his highschool homeroom finding out about it on the net, saying unforgivable things just for the pleasure of causing him pain.”

“In spite of their constant abuse he kept approaching them, desperate to be friends, wanting to find in them the closeness he never got to have with his father. His mother blamed him for putting her husband in jail and couldn’t be made to see that it was richly deserved. She drove him out of the house as soon as she legally could and he spent the next four years homeless.”

James visibly teared up. “As bad as his childhood was, the streets were worse. My whole life I’ve felt that other people are often unfeeling, sadistic ogres. But James knew that to be true, from firsthand experience. Everything about him makes sense now. The things he did to me were so tame by comparison with what was done to him. I don’t think he could help himself, that ugliness was a reflexive defense against attacks he subconsciously believed could come at any moment. In spite of everything he subjected me to while we worked together I can no longer bring myself to hate him. I just feel intense sorrow.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 8!}