“Don’t balk, not yet. I’m very serious about what comes next. I can only keep the outer hatch open for 90 seconds before it will automatically seal and purge. The flood sensor would normally want to do that as soon as it detects seawater inside but I’ve written a recursive function into the routine that will choke the CPU, buying you that 90 seconds to get inside. Swim as far as you can with the mouthpiece, take a deep breath and pull yourself along the cable. Head for the only open hatch. If you make it, we’ll go out for beers later.” The screen went dark.
Had he imagined it? James wiped the condensation from the membrane in the direction of Tartatus. A pulsing red light illuminated the wide open outer hatch of the decompression chamber to which the prisoner transpo sub normally docked.
For someone whose tissues were full up with nitrogen, that chamber was the one safe passage back into Tartarus or to the surface. No other path, no other process could return them alive. In all the ocean, that chamber was his only possible ticket home.
90 seconds. More like 70 now. James frantically scrambled to the moon pool and, bracing for the cold, dove through it. Burning pain, convulsions, as horrid as before but now also seeming tedious, as his focus was entirely on getting through that hatch.
He bit down on the crusty rubber mouthpiece and drew in fresh air. One way or the other, it would be his last breath from the habitat. He found the quickest method of movement was a hand over hand motion, pulling himself along the umbilical. Like climbing a rope without the burden of gravity.
His muscles burned, not just from exertion but because he’d long since had to leave the mouthpiece behind and his body craved oxygen. Of course without any training in free diving, that sensation is initially more of a recommendation than a demand. He knew it could be ignored for a minute or so.
Every muscle in his core wanted to suck in water, but drawing his diaphragm up and making his chest rigid alleviated the stress somewhat. Hand over hand, eyes burning from the salt, drawing ever closer to the hatch. The single, narrow path to survival. The gateway to dry warmth and light. To Hank and Olivia. The hatch that was now swinging shut.
Jamming his arm in the opening was a gamble. The motor drawing the hatch shut might’ve been much stronger. There was no real need for that from an engineering standpoint, it was not the motor but the screw-driven clamps which sealed the door once shut. The force was instead firm but not in excess of his own strength; His whole body now aching for oxygen, James wedged his shoulder, then his chest, and finally his whole body between the hatch and the rim.
Getting leverage to push on it with his legs was the key, and as soon as he’d secured enough clearance, he tumbled into the chamber. Four clangs signified a dry seal and instantly he felt a sharp pressure on his eardrums as compressed hydrox gas forced the seawater out through check valves in the floor. Placing a finger in one ear, he withdrew it to find it covered in blood.
The salty copper flavor on his tongue told him that his nose was bleeding too, and he was having difficulty focusing his eyes. Not a good sign. James wondered how many more seconds of consciousness he had, and began to count. He didn’t make it to three.
After the usual routine of picking himself up off the cold concrete floor of the foundry and getting his bearings, James set off for the stairwell. He had no intention of descending it this time. Instead, the moment he confirmed that the umbilical was where he remembered it, he began a new expedition to locate the other end. His last attempt wasn’t especially revealing.
The cord’s point of origin was concealed by the rolling fog blanketing the lower half of the monstrous cavern, although it could just as easily be the point of termination. There was a sense of defiance, like the whole thing was a puzzle designed to be unsolvable and his job was to find some overlooked seam he could pry into.
He gripped the cord. It was cool and moist to the touch, mildly repulsive but keeping one hand on it reassured James that it wouldn’t suddenly vanish, or withdraw, or otherwise frustrate his efforts to trace it.
Finally he found himself in something resembling a boiler room. Pipes lining the walls vibrated slightly, blending their metallic rattling with the already deafening sound of churning water. The furthest corner of the room was dark, conspicuously so as the room was lit in such a way that it shouldn’t be.
James inched along the umbilical hand over hand until he could peer around the hulking central pipe at the darkened corner beyond it. The umbilical lifted from the floor about ten feet ahead of him and undulated weightlessly as it did in the cavern, trailing off into the shadowy blotch ahead. It was an unnatural darkness. Not caused by lack of light so far as he could tell, but having a definite volume to it.
His first inclination was to pass his hand through it as an experiment. Before he could reach out, something began to emerge from the rift. Lily white skin dripping with sweat stretched over an incoherent jumble of bones. The mass slowly resolved itself as a shameful mockery of the human form.
Feelings of panic and nausea welled up inside James as it turned to face him. Every second intensified his anxiety until by force of will, rather than gaze directly upon the thing, James withdrew from the foundry and returned to the waking world.
“His eyes are moving.” Confusion set in. James felt intolerably hot, and someone’s fingers were forcibly spreading his eyelids open. He thrashed in protest. “Settle down. You collapsed during decompression. It’s not the bends, happened as soon as the chamber purged. I timed it to make sure you did your full 6 hours, the gut bacteria did their job, everything checks out in the procedural sense. It’s the open water swim that broke you.”
Mercifully, whoever the voice came from had stopped trying to force his eyes open. Once the feeling of lightheadedness left him James took it upon himself to crack open his eyes a bit. He found himself nude, propped up in a steel tub filled with steaming hot water. Hank and Olivia knelt beside it. His embarrassment subsided somewhat when he realized they’d saved his life.
“Looking good, color’s returning. Your pulse was so faint when we pulled you from the deco chamber I thought you were past saving. Olivia refused to believe it. I don’t know how you survived a two hundred foot free dive through near freezing water at these pressures, but here you are. I’ve heard it plays tricks with your perception, can’t begin to imagine what you saw.”
James opened his mouth, thinking back on his tiny luminous visitors outside the cell, but thought better of it. “Finish recovering and tell us over those beers I promised. The Navy pilots disappeared a few hours ago, no sign of them since. It’s weird, no question about it, but you know what they say about gift horses. Olivia, call me if he takes a turn for the worse. I’m going to see if I can find more meds.” Hank rose to his feet, towering over James on those long spindly legs, and strode out of view.
“So, did you see anything strange out there?” Olivia’s earnest look suddenly reminded James he was nude. His expression must’ve communicated that, as she made a visible effort to look anywhere but into the water.
“I...I ask because...Hank and I saw some strange things inside, while you were gone. We’re still not agreed as to whether they’re real or hallucinations.” James raise an eyebrow. “I might’ve. You go first, though.” She smiled, briefly glimpsed downward, then blushed and renewed her efforts to pretend that there was something incredibly interesting on the far wall that commanded her attention instead.
“I don’t know quite how to describe it. It was like a dream, but with the same clarity as waking life. And I wasn’t asleep for it, according to Hank for the entire duration of this...hallucination? I was walking with him, talking, laughing, saying things I don’t remember saying as if I was awake the entire time. Whoever that was, it wasn’t me. I was somewhere else.”
“I’ve shared my most private dreams with you for months” James offered. “I think I’ll enjoy being on the other end for a change. Let’s hear it.” Olivia furrowed her brow. “That’s it, though. I’m not convinced this was my dream. I mean, it’s not something my subconscious would ever come up with. And like I said, I seemed awake to everyone around me while I was experiencing it.”
The more she talked about it the more distraught she became. He wanted to comfort her, but also to hear more in the way of details. Olivia’s unusual episode was beginning to sound familiar. “I thought maybe it was pressure related. That’s known to cause hallucinations if you’re not acclimated to it. But internal atmospherics all report normal. That’s why Hank wanted to know if you suffered similar hallucinations. If that’s what they were.” Sounded like Hank. Eliminate all the mundane explanations first.
“I found myself wandering the halls of my primary school as a little girl. It was abandoned, and falling apart as if hundreds of years had passed since anyone else inhabited it. All doors were locked save for one that hung open as if inviting me in. I found a student laboratory, bare of supplies except for one table with two mountainous piles of clay. Everywhere else colors were muted or nonexistent, but one pile of clay was a very deep red and the other radiantly white. I thought it strange they should be here, and not in a crafts room, but instinctively began to sculpt with them.”
“It felt nothing like clay to the touch. Both the red and the white felt warm and soft in my hands. I found that two pieces would merge when touching to create any shade of red or pink, depending on the ratio I combined them in. I next found that when I sculpted from these different shades, they became living tissue of different kinds. With pure red clay I could fashion muscles, arteries, and blood. With the right shade of pink I could sculpt living brains, lungs, and skin. With white I could make eyes, bones and teeth.”
“The moment I added each to the growing sculpture it became real flesh. I was so enamored with it that I didn’t pay close attention to what I was actually making until it began gurgling in pain. It was a monstrosity. An abstract, misshapen pile of living tissue, obviously suffering. I watched for a while as it wheezed, pulsated and struggled to live. But then I remembered, I was the one who created this error. I was responsible for its suffering, and obligated to end it. Tears rolled down my face as I stabbed at it with the sculpting knife, smashed it, tore it to pieces, as much to end its agony as to relieve my own embarrassment.”
“Even with the lingering shame, there was also a strong determination in me to do justice to this awesome power I’d discovered. I created one clumsy, regrettable creature after the next. Each time hoping for improvement but having to destroy the pitiable thing when it proved no more fit to live than the last. Despair overcame me. I reflected on the intricacy and beauty of nature, compared my own abortive imitations to it and found them severely wanting.”
“That is to say, I found myself wanting. I was a child, handed a box of crayons and told to reproduce a Van Gogh. Most of all, try as I might, I could not stop crying. The shame was so powerful, nothing else made it through. I stopped only when struck with the terrible epiphany that perhaps the nature I aspired to imitate was itself the crude creation of lesser gods, seeming perfect to me only because I had never seen what genuine life looks like. All at once I could see myself as a second order creation, a mistake in a universe of mistakes, fashioned by someone trying desperately to imitate the work of a being as far beyond it’s own intelligence as it was beyond mine.”
“Without warning, I lurched from that reality to another. It was pitch black, frigid and damp, smelling strongly of mold. After several more minutes of stumbling blindly through dark, cold corridors, the passage opened up into a dimly lit chamber. This chamber was impossible to understand. Everything was in some stage of decay. Walls caked with dried blood. Bones, meat and intestines suspended in wire netting from overhead racks. Machines, assembled from bone and resembling looms, in the process of weaving together muscles. Everything stank of death.”
“The central table had a human figure on it, but the anatomy was wrong. One joint was impacted. The eyes were deeply inset, and jet black. The face was deformed, and the limbs were all proportioned differently. Long scars covered the body, encircling joints like seams. From the belly button, an umbilical cord trailed across the chamber into a huge veiny orifice embedded in the floor.”
“I fell to my knees in a fit of hysterics. It was too much, all at once. A place no human was meant to see. The far corner of the chamber was then blotted out by a thick, soupy patch of shadow. The cobbled together thing on the table sat up, got off the table, and without its mismatched feet ever touching the floor it floated across the room and vanished into that dark patch of nothing.”
“This proved to be the last thing I needed to witness before surrendering myself to madness. I writhed, screaming profanities on the blood encrusted concrete floor of that unspeakable place for what seemed like days. When I awoke I was not ten feet from where I was when the ordeal began. Hank was with me, and insisted only a few seconds had passed.”
“I began crying. I don’t blame him for being confused. I was confused too, and scared out of my wits. And nauseous. In large part from what I’d just seen, but it’s also symptomatic of whatever causes the visions. When Hank had his, it was followed by the same feeling. That’s part of the reason why I’m now certain we were touched by the same phenomenon.”
“What I want to know is whether or not it’s happened to you. Hank and I had very similar experiences independent of one another, so I’m satisfied that it’s something external that can affect anyone aboard the Tartarus. But you were outside of the station in one of the prison habitats. That’s why I need to know whether it reached you as well, so we can estimate the radius of effect.”
“You sound so composed, considering.” James struggled to pull a shirt over his head. The fabric clung stubbornly to his skin and made him wish he’d taken the time to properly dry off. “I have a few hours on you”, she said. “Earlier today, I went through all of this myself.” James peeked around the door frame. “With the bathtub? I’m sorry I missed that.”
Stay Tuned for Part 6!