[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 2

^{Previous parts: 1}

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In the weeks following her rescue, she began to discover various other costs of her new ageless condition. The first inkling of what was to come dawned on her when, during a brief medical examination while in quarantine, the nurse couldn’t find her pulse. Further efforts to identify a heartbeat using a stethoscope also failed.

Olivia, panicked by the possibility that she’d be discovered, consciously tried to make her heart beat and found that she could. A minute or two of producing what she imagined a healthy heartbeat should sound like apparently satisfied the nurse, who also noted that the cuff used to measure blood pressure “must be broken” as it read zero.

That information was on file somewhere. She hoped it would seem so clearly erroneous that any qualified doctor would assume it was a glitch and disregard it. But her cardiovascular inactivity was just the tip of the iceberg. She’d also collected a few scrapes on the way out of the Tartarus that had been carefully bandaged at the time.

Removing the bandages later on revealed that no healing occurred. On top of this, while she felt comfortably warm most of the time, Vivian swore up and down that she was ice cold to the touch and badly needed some vodka. Vivian’s solutions only rarely didn’t involve inebriation.

“It’s like taxidermy. Or embalming,” she thought to herself. “I’m not alive, but I’m not dead either. At least, I’m not decomposing. But I also can’t heal.” It was a challenge not to scratch absent mindedly, or pick at a scab. Lots of little changes were required to minimize wear and tear. Despite that, she could feel herself breaking down inside and didn’t know what to do. Would it even kill her, she wondered. Or would she slowly erode into still-conscious dust?

To combat seasonal affective disorder, the Belusarius administration recently implemented a cycle of gradually dimming and intensifying full spectrum lighting intended to simulate night and day. It was never pitch black as work proceeded 24/7, but it was dim enough more than half the time that leaving her room was possible.

James warned her about this, but she’d still made the mistake of wandering into direct, bright light once or twice. Intense nausea struck her, and she noticed the shadow her umbilical led to quivering, then beginning to shrink. She’d retreated immediately into a dimmer corner of the room to recover.

Too many eyes on her had the same effect. She wondered how comparable it was to social anxiety. The experience for her was painful, in a physical sense. She’d tripped over a toolbox on the way to her room recently, and the moment all of the dozen or so people present stared at her, it sent her into convulsions. She insisted she just needed a glass of water. What she really needed was for at least half of them to leave in search of that water so she could retreat to her room.

Olivia dreaded the prospect of discovering any more stipulations. What seemed like immortality at first, as the caveats piled up, now struck her as protracted leprosy. To think that James fed himself to the Foundry as payment for this.

The prospect of natural, permanent death began taking on a sense of dignity she’d never recognized before. Was suicide possible? Fear of what might happen if it failed to kill her prevented any attempt. More intense by far was her fear that someone would eventually discover what made her different from the rest of the crew.

So, there was a narrow sense in which she felt relieved to see a white, coiled umbilical trailing from a crewman’s navel receding into a shadow on the wall. He was not quite six feet, gaunt except for a pot belly, and hirsute. Until he saw her own umbilical, he was startled that she’d noticed his. He was the first to speak. “We can see each other as we are. The haze only conceals us from the imperfect.”

He went on to explain it was a sort of influence they exerted on the occipital lobe. “There’s a blood vessel obscuring the retina. It’s called retinal vein occlusion. In the dead center of your vision, you’re not actually receiving any information from the rods and cones. It’s being filled in, extrapolated by part of the brain. The inverse is also possible, to prevent the brain from correctly interpreting what it does see, such that it simply doesn’t recognize what’s there. Instead, it fills that space with what it expects to see. To everyone else we look healthy and normal as you could hope for. So, while your patch job is impressive, I wouldn’t bother.” He gestured to a cut on her arm she’d carefully sewn shut.

“But if I don’t, I’ll be in pieces by the end of the month” she objected. He raised an eyebrow. “You mean you can’t mend it?” Olivia pressed him for details, and he obliged. “You were built this way. I don’t understand why it didn’t come to you, nobody had to explain it to me. I just sort of knew how to do it after I was perfected by master.”

Olivia frowned. Something about the way he spoke briefly illuminated the outline of a reality she hoped wasn’t what she suspected. He withdrew a small folded cloth from his pocket which, in the dim lighting, she took a moment to realize was soaked with blood. Inside was a chunk of skin and muscle. She heaved, but forced herself not to look away.

As she followed his movements, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal what would, for a normal person, be a life threatening wound. A good deal of his forearm was torn open but not bleeding. “Accident with a power saw”, he offered.

He then pressed the chunk of flesh to the wound in his arm and began to massage it. Before her eyes, he molded it like clay until it took the shape of the missing portion of his forearm. “It’s that easy.” He produced his arm for inspection, and sure enough it looked as if the wound never existed.

“I remember this.” She thought back to the visions of her primary school. The piles of red and white clay from which she sculpted crude living organisms, not fit to live. A faint echo of the guilt she’d felt, stabbing those wheezing, gurgling masses of tissue until they stopped writhing, now gripped her mind.

“You should. It’s how you were rebuilt when the master perfected you. It’s how you’ll perfect the uninitiated who now sleep in their bunks, with no idea what profound love and belonging await them when we bring them before the one who dwells at the bottom of the Foundry, in the most holy place.”

“Some part of me knew”, she lied through her teeth. “But I’ve seen nobody like myself until now, I was beginning to wonder if I’d dreamt it.” Being reconstituted by that thing in the trench touched his mind in a way she now knew it hadn’t touched hers. Presumably part of the deal James brokered with it, in the final hour of the Tartarus. He reassured her there were several more like them, deftly concealing their secret from the rest of the crew. And, she inferred, ‘perfecting’ the ones they could isolate someplace without cameras for long enough.

“There will be more of us soon?” He grinned, mouth full of yellow teeth. “So many more. All of the Belusarius, eventually. They’ll all come to know the master as we do. To return the warm, fulfilling love he showers us with. That’s what we’re created for. A loving relationship with him. You were reborn, perfected by him so that you could be worthy of his love. You have known the pure, visceral joy of it, and each new beating heart that we lead to him helps him recover. As our numbers grow, so does his health, hastening the day when they all come together.”

“Of...of course” she stammered. “Except for the ones that you use to mend?” He was until then in a sort of trance, consumed by residual ecstasy from his description of the thing that took James and his connection to it. He now instead looked slightly troubled.

“Some. That is not too much to ask, is it? To set aside some for ourselves. Three for every one, as we’re commanded.” Three for every one. Bits and pieces of James’ explanation came back to her. “It took someone from you, didn’t it.” He recoiled. “It? How could you refer to our father as-” She quickly corrected herself, threw in some convincingly delirious confessions of love for the horrid perversion of life she still remembered dissecting her, and this seemed to pacify him.

“My daughter. Of course the master is entitled to call his children home. But he is gracious, and gives us all the chance to reunite with the ones we love, whom he now holds to his bosom.” So….James could be retrieved? If her heart still beat, it would’ve skipped just then.

Was it wishful thinking? What else could he possibly mean? “So if you deliver three new…..children….to him, he will return your daughter?” The man beamed. “Yes, though he owes us nothing. That is the meaning of infinite grace.” She left him like that, muttering softly to himself. He didn’t even seem to notice her leave.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}