Morning. Morning at last. Not just any morning, but the one I’d been waiting for, that we had all been waiting for. It had been 18 months. That’s 547 days, give or take, alone at the bottom of this giant fish tank in the middle of nowhere. Just me, my cot, dehydrated food and 18 million gallons of water around me. Sure, I had some books too, but with barely anything else to do I’d blasted through them in 5 months, give or take. I begged the guys up top to send some more, but that would ‘alter the accuracy of the experiment’ they told me. Imagine, a year and a half of your life spent on your own with no day or night in a room the size of a garage with as much to do as a doctor’s waiting room, living on packets of tasteless powder. I shouldn’t complain – I signed up for this. I knew what I was getting myself into.
Mars – the first manned mission, a political gambit for made up points on the world theatre. The people in office didn’t really care about going there, but I did. The researchers keeping an eye on me did. The taxpayers funding this, from my cot and suit to the food I ate and every rivet in the rocket, they cared, at least some of them. Soon the world would, and I’d be the one to step foot up there. The physical tests ran fine and I’d been staying in shape as best I could down there, but finally I would be free.
After a restless night sleep the alarm beside my cot rang to announce the arrival of 7am. Without thinking I instinctively smashed the button on top to silence it before my senses roused and a smile gripped my face as I realised that it was the day I could surface and leave. I could see the sun, my family, taste fresh air – actual, real air, not just the stuffy mix they pumped in here. I was looking forward to going out with all the researchers for the steak I’d been promised, but most of all just going home and being done with this.
I rolled myself out of the cot and took a last look around at the instruments and controls, the readings of the devices, and drew myself a shower. The whole time I stood beneath the splashing water from the hose all I could think about was freedom and wondered about all the things I’d missed, about how the world had changed in my stasis. There was no television down here, no phone, no news about the outside world. I hadn’t even had contact with the researchers, but they’d watched me around the clock with a fervent voyeurism.
I’d normally have breakfast after the shower, but I decided I’d skip that today. I could wait that extra time for some coffee and doughnuts surface side, hell, maybe they’d even brought me waffles. It was all due to come to an end at exactly 8, and so I packed what few clothes and belongings I’d had with me and waited with my eyes fixed on the monitor panel, unmoving, counting down each second as though it were my last. The digital clock on top of the console ticked away and my heart jumped as it flicked to 08:00 – I stood up and grinned from ear to ear awaiting the research team’s broadcast, eager to hear their results once I’d removed myself from this votive prison.
The screen remained blank. I waited.
The minute on the clock changed and there was still nothing. Thinking I’d been wrong about the day I checked the console, but that wasn’t it. During my isolation here I had nothing but time to kill, but now I was allowed it back I wanted to claw away at every second I could. Still I stared at the monitor, wishing, daring it to do something. I began to reason with myself that there might not be a message; that the room will be lifted out of the tank and the steel bridge will extend with their smiling faces on the other side.
08:10, and yet I waited.
My impatience grew and I arched my head to peer through the tiny window to look for any activity above the water, but there was no angle to get a clear view. Tapping away at the console I sent a message to the team, asking where they were. It was designed for relaying my tasks and experiment data; I couldn’t get a reply but they’d at least be able to know I was still down here waiting for them.
As the clock dialled to 9 I ratified that I’d have to be the one to release myself. In the back of the pod was an airlock to be used in case of emergencies, or if the unending solitude became completely unbearable. Doing so would bring a premature end to the experiment and my expulsion from the project but by now I’d had enough of waiting. Kept in a storage locker was a spacesuit, suitable for short term submersion and packed with an oxygen tank. It was a spare, but it was the real deal. Piece by piece I suited up from the boots right up to the helmet, tightening the gloves and checking every built in system before sealing the door behind me.
I smashed the glass on the emergency release and pulled the red metal lever. With a hiss the air left the room and cold water began to fill the claustrophobic chamber from my feet and up. As it reached past my head I started to feel the pressure change with the weight of those 18 million gallons pressing down on me and my suit until finally, the chamber door opened to the world outside.
I gripped the edge of the doorway and pulled myself out into the water, instinctively looking up. Floating to the surface I felt a mixture of jubilation and trepidation, my mind flicking between freedom and reasons why they might have left me down there. My head crested through the water’s surface and it drained off my visor to reveal the innards of the laboratory I’d been stationed in. I pulled myself up out of the water and removed my helmet, placing it down at the water’s edge.
The concrete body of the lab wasn’t bathed in a cool white light as it had been before from long halogen lamps, nor did its machines and computers chitter and bleep away. The quiet murmur of scientists had fallen into a deafening silence, and the ghoulish carmine glow of the emergency lighting washed over the entirety of the cold structure with dim indifference. It felt like the inside of some artificial womb, like I’d just emerged from my egg after a long period of incubation only to awaken to this.
A bemused panic set in and I found myself almost humbled by the scale of the place in its hollow silence. With painfully slow steps I wandered through the lurid darkness up a flight of steel steps to the observation platform where the majority of the machinery had been housed, the command centre of this experiment. Normally it would be abuzz with scuttering researchers entering data and observing my every move. Now, I found nothing.
Some of the metal fixtures had corroded since I last saw them – brown flecks lifted up from the surface of tables and rails, exposing their hollow innards. The screens were all completely dark, and piles of notes scrawled on clipboards lay scattered across the floor, browning and curling up at their edges. I noticed something else as I looked down; brown stains sunk into the floor. As I scanned around I saw more and more of them, little drops leading away and big splashes across the walls and machines with a dark brown rusted hue. I looked up to see where it might have come from to find the ceiling crumbled away, partially missing in areas. In the darkness I hadn’t thought to look up, although there was no sunlight, no moonlight, nothing at all beyond it. Squinting through the tepid light into the void beyond I could make out a roof far beyond that curved and spanned what I assumed to be the entirety of the complex, given its distance and size. My fears grew further as I began to fear the worst – those stains weren’t simply drops of rusty water dripping from the beams above, it was blood.
I followed the trails from the control centre further into the laboratory, down hallways and into the refectory. Cutlery, plates, even food still lay out at the tables there. Flasks and lunchboxes sat on tables and coats still hung from their seats, some splattered with those same rusty red splotches. The food had long since decayed and shrivelled into indistinguishable clumps save for the most artificial items that had been packed with preservatives. The steak dinner I’d been promised didn’t seem so appetising anymore.
Wandering through from isle to isle I recognised the artifacts of some of the colleagues I had worked with previously and my mind wandered to memories of them. For a second I stood and looked around, remembering the life that bustled through here every lunch hour. My mind began to play tricks on me, playing on my fears that I wasn’t alone in here and I tried to soothe myself by humming a tune quietly as my footsteps echoed through the decaying body of the lab.
I made my way further in past offices with shrivelled up plants and shattered windows, overturned tables and more shadowed spatters against the floor and walls. I tried to piece together what happened – someone turning over the table to hide behind it, but the blood marks prove that it was no use. There weren’t any bullet holes through the table, nor in the wall, and no real signs of any struggle. Whoever this office belonged to didn’t put up much of a fight.
I made my way past the sample processing rooms, sterile areas for researching articles brought back from Mars to be processed and studied. I stared through the smashed safety glass at the tables and equipment – electron mass spectrometers, centrifuges, scales, and all sorts of things I wasn’t paid enough to know how to use. Far in the back I could see a large sample sitting beneath lamps that had long since burned out, a large gnarled oval rock with a deep auburn hue. I couldn’t take my eyes off it – it seemed deeply familiar somehow. It stirred feelings of cold quiet within me, of a peaceful place under the stars. I looked up again through the smashed ceiling but no stars shone for me.
At last I snapped myself back into my senses and pressed on, finding the security booth and the entrance. The doors to the compound had been smashed off their hinges leaving the tiled entrance fully open to the elements. Leaves and dirt had made their way inside among a large pool of splattered blood, but the shell constructed around the desecrated remains of the lab cut the wind from blowing anything else in. It was like a time capsule, a memento mori for the aftermath of whatever happened here. There were bullet holes around the entrance and shell casings still scattered across the ground. I noticed a pistol behind the security booth sitting on the ground surrounded by more marks. It wasn’t enough firepower to stop whatever had happened.
Trembling, I took my first steps outside the complex in a year and a half to find the world hadn’t changed as I’d expected. The metal cover over the complex I’d seen through the roof spanned the entire complex, trapping in a few cars that now began to corrode as they died along with this place. I made my way around entirely, wishing that I hadn’t skipped breakfast as my stomach growled. I didn’t feel like eating anymore but my body still hungered for real food. As I completed my circuit around the dome I found no exit, no way to climb out, nothing that would let me cut through it – there were chemicals in the lab, but I didn’t have the know-how to craft thermite or stitch together a makeshift electric saw, and I didn’t have the strength left in me to dig out of here either.
I was trapped. Why was I even left alive in this place if everything else was dead, what purpose could my sole survival have? What had even happened to the people here, and why the dome?
With nothing else to do I strode back inside. I collected one of the pistols from the security station and checked the magazine for ammunition, ready to load a bullet into my own skull before having to isolate myself all over again. 18 months was enough for me, and now in this haunting catacomb in its hellish haze I could take no more of this intolerable solitude. As I slid the magazine out I saw it was empty. I felt a little disappointment, but at the same time a snag of relief. Mindlessly now I wandered to the firearms cabinet knowing full well that it should be locked but even if I couldn’t break out of this place, I could at least break into that. When I reached it, I saw an empty case. No guns, no ammunition, nothing. Like the bodies here, they were missing - fate was determined to make me suffer.
With nothing else left for me I made my way back through to the control room and gazed at the ruddy, uterine waters from which I’d emerged earlier that day. I wouldn’t be able to make it back into my isolation pod; it was never built to evacuate water from the airlock while still underwater. I sat down at the edge of the water and rested my hand on my helmet, staring down at the hull that had been my prison and my home for that year and a half. I thought about the optimism I’d shown when I was going in there, the hope to stand on an entirely different world. I thought about my family and my youth, unable to grasp the faces of the people that had loved me as my mind hazed.
My self pity was cut short as through the twinkling surface of the water the image of an opening refracted through the tiny waves. There was a conduit for the water to drain and clean the massive pool near the bottom – large enough for me to fit in. They might have blocked it off, but the outlet was far beyond the dome. It was a small glimmer of hope, but it might work. Immediately I put my helmet back on and turned on the oxygen to hear that familiar hissing as the suit pressurised before slipping myself back into the water. I swam down past my enclosure and eyed it as if passing an old friend before sinking further down into the depths below to find the entrance of the tunnel, roughly a meter across. It was entirely dark down there but my suit was thankfully equipped with lights. I knew if I could make it to the inside of the pump that I could make it the rest of the way.
Progressing along the pipe the water began to grow murky and my light shone across particulates floating lazily around, undisturbed for some time. It became thicker and thicker and a chunky yellow-brown slime had risen to the top of the pipe. I looked forward to see where it was coming from straight into a pile of bloated corpses rising to the top of the water, their skin pale and loose, their flesh coming undone and melding into a morbid soup. Horrified, I tried not to look as I gently pulled them past me to make my way beyond. There were quite a few of them – whatever fate they’d escaped led to this one. Surely an instantaneous death would have been better than drowning like this. There was a morbid comfort in knowing that I wouldn’t rest here alone, at least.
At the end of their resting place I came across a pile of rubble. Pieces too lodged together to move with my hands that had been placed there to block the way out – they really wanted this place sealed up. My frustration and panic reached a peak now and I started to hyperventilate, thrashing around in the water to try and toss back each rock. I didn’t know how far it went back and the movement disturbed the bodies and dislodged their flesh, marring my vision. Tears streamed down my face as I cried out beneath the water, giving up and staring at the rocks through a cloud of saturated flesh and blood.
Then, silence one more.
I snapped to my senses as memories flooded back to me. The memories of everyone here, the people from the samples lab, the guard booth, the cafeteria, all of them. They tricked me. They put me there under the water. I removed the helmet and let cold water fill the suit.
I squeezed my tendrils out of the mouth of this flesh puppet, the one who I chased into that pod after consuming so many. His voice called out in my mind demanding control again, but I squeezed out completely and left his husk there. I didn’t need him anymore. Squeezing my leathery tendrils beneath the rocks I had much more leverage over them and tossed them aside with ease until I was able to nimbly squeeze my body through the tiny gaps between the rocks and boulders. It wasn’t long until I reached the end of the tunnel and clambered my way up the inner workings of the pump and out into a dry pipe that led out into the world. I carried myself along, hurrying my way as I saw a glimmer of light splashing through the end.
I was what they were afraid of. I was the reason they built that dome. I was hungry, and now I was free.