[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 17

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 13, 14, 15, 16}

“It is for eternity, isn’t it? You cannot create life, but you can preserve it. Nothing lives here, but nothing dies either.” The voice took shape as a beautiful nude woman, skin as white as porcelain. The seams were much less visible now, the parts more precisely matched, the face now correctly seated on the skull beneath it. Practice makes perfect.

“The one you recognized first is alive, comforted here for all time in my bosom. He would be dead if not for me. He owes his life to me, yes?” James mulled over that, but answered defiantly. “You saved a life. For that I am grateful. I see what you do here and I am beginning to understand why you do it. But you are not what you imagine yourself to be.” The Foundry quaked around him. James raised his arms to block a shower of dust and debris loosed from the ceiling. Evidently not what it wanted to hear.

“What am I then, insect? Feeble little bicameral mind which lives for scarcely eighty years, which can be killed by an unexpected fall or a bacterium, tell me what you believe me to be.” James thought back on many things then. The dangling cluster of organs in the cavern. The increasingly humanlike figures that it used to lure me here. More than anything he thought of Olivia’s dream, and the abattoir. “I don’t know what you are. But I know that you are not God.”

The ground shook more violently this time and did not cease entirely. Even as it spoke again the room around James rumbled. “There is nobody else. In all the universe, there is humanity, and there is me. I have been split many times, into parts which lay dormant beneath the seas of a thousand worlds. A childish attempt to delay the culmination of all things, when those pieces finally come together.”

James waited for some time after it finished speaking for the rumbling to die down. The respite would be short lived. “There were others, weren’t there? Besides humanity. It wasn’t always just you and us, was it? But where are they now? In places like this, I’d wager. Incomplete little worlds you built, dollhouses for your dolls where you can fawn over the one thing you are powerless to create, and make them love you.”

James was thrown to his feet by the violent movement that followed. Lights blew out. Some in the cages were startled into momentary awareness of their surroundings, and began to scream. This only enraged the creature more. James fought his way up the stairs as glass from shattered lights above rained down around him.

“I have not made them do anything! They came to love me of their own free will! That is how it must be, and the only way that I want it! I make them whole again in ways that would be impossible otherwise! They stay because they love me!”

James reached the top of the stairwell and paused in the doorway. “What about Olivia?” It was salt in an already inflamed wound. The more that the concentration of the creature was disrupted, the more the Foundry fell to pieces. He stepped through the doorway just as the collapsing concrete shell around it crushed its steel frame. Just as he made it to the sub, the shaking stopped.

“Don’t go. I’ll do anything. I’ll be anything. You cannot begin to understand the loneliness of it. Billions of years in the bitterly cold darkness of your ocean, endlessly decomposing and regenerating, waiting for something to evolve that could love me.”

James climbed into the sub and reached for the hatch. “You promised”, it bellowed. “You promised her that you wouldn’t leave her here.” Visions of Olivia’s body pinned open like a lab animal in the abbatoir tormented him. Now, finally, he felt he had a handle on what it was that so desperately wanted him here. And who the unoccupied cage was for. Death beyond death, a Hell that no human religion ever dreamt of. “What do you propose?”

The Tartarus sub dispatch lay in ruins. Flickering lights hung from the ceiling, bulkheads bulged under pressure and threatened to give way. Gunshots rang out, as did frantic voices. Every so often a pack of inmates tore down the hallway, screaming as a shadowy mass crept along the walls and ceiling behind them, pale hands emerging from and melting back into it.

Amidst this chaos Remer sat quietly at the control terminal, cleaning his disassembled rifle. Next to him a morbid little man overflowing his stolen Tartarus security uniform rocked back and forth whispering to himself.

“Must’ve gone over trigger discipline with Bruce a million times. Gun goes off in a great big pressure vessel, even if it doesn’t hit a window all kinds of things can happen. Bulkheads fail. Lights go out. That’s a playground for whatever’s coming out of the shadows. It lives in there, doesn’t it?” There was no trace of fear, anger or anything else in his voice.

The fat, filthy little man next to him giggled and brandished a box of munitions. “Beyond the shadow. The shadow is only the opening in the wall. He is the one that waits behind the wall.” The deep thud of a distant explosion rattled their chairs and knocked out another of the lights. “He waits behind the wall until the time is right. You and I will join him there soon, we will join the great family.”

Remer finished reassembling the rifle and loaded a magazine. “Is that right.” The little man rocked more feverishly and nodded. “He holds this metal shell together, even now. So that others can find it. They, too, will join the family. Their flesh and blood of innocence will nourish him, and nourish the little one. The more that pass through the veil of death and into his embrace, the closer we are to the day that they all come together.”

Remer was going to ask what exactly would come together but a glance at the demented little man reminded him that he was idly chatting with a madman as the station fell to pieces around him. Overtaken by what he once thought was something to conquer and study, but which he now recognized as a gaping maw that would eventually draw him into it no matter how he fought.

He smiled. “You know, Antonio was religious. Thought there’d be angels waiting to escort him to heaven after the end. Bruce didn’t think much of that stuff, but he had his own security blanket. Called it the Singularity, from some book he carries with him. Always telling me I gotta read that fuckin’ book. But that’s his fallback. He said his generation is special, the first ones to become immortal. Gonna upload their brains into robots, however that’s supposed to work. He didn’t see it for what it is, just another escapist fantasy.”

“Every generation has had to face the cruel reality of death. They’ve all had their books, trinkets and talismans, some scheme to cheat death. Maybe they really believe it or maybe they believe only as much as they need to go on living. It’s a difficult thing, knowing for certain that you will a few decades from now be an old man laying on your death bed, waiting for the day that you don’t wake up. Nowhere left to go but black. I told him, this truly will happen to you, the same as it has happened to every other person who ever lived, and there is no way out of it. That every second he spent pretending that there is some alternative to death, he was not an adult.”

“But you were wrong!” The little man stood up and danced about, clapping with glee. “The one who waits behind the wall receives us. We join the family, and are preserved there in perfect bliss for ever and ever. Until the day that the pieces come together.”

Now only the lights in the sub dispatch seemed to be working. Outside the last few prison cells went dark. Soon, the dispatch lights would lose power as well. “If there is anything on the other side of the black”, he thought, “I’ll find out soon.”

“Holding down the fort?” Remer spun in his chair to see James and Hank standing just inside of the light’s penumbra. “Holy fuck, it’s you. Thought I’d seen the last of you in the tunnels. I didn’t understand then….” He held his arms out at the chaos around him. “....the scope of what we were dealing with. I thought it was something we could capture and take back with us. But it’s captured us, hasn’t it? We’re practically inside of it now.”

James nodded somberly. Remer noticed James was dripping wet. “Where the fuck have you been, anyway? Antonio and Bruce didn’t make it in the tunnels. How’d you get out?” The demented little man pranced about James and Hank, who both recoiled to avoid touching him. “He has been to see the master! There he learned of what is, and what is to be! But even he will join the family, when the master fulfils the bargain!”

Remer smirked. “Struck a deal with the devil, did you?” James only beckoned for Remer to follow. Hank voiced reservations, Remer reached for his rifle. “The shadows won’t take you. That was one of the conditions. You won’t need the rifle, just come.”

The two kept close to James through the damp, darkened corridors. Finally they arrived in the control room which had once been the center of their search for Cray and Rodney. In the dead center of the far wall swirled a mass of living shadow. Remer and Hank both stepped back. James didn’t. “It won’t take you. Don’t ask me how I know, you’ll see in a moment.” And indeed soon after he’d said it, a figure emerged from the shadow.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 18!}