“This is why you did this? So I would respect you? I know a thing or two about torture. You could have asked me for advice…”
“We don’t do torture, Sergei. We do negotiation. Nobody forced you to take our money. We only want what we paid for.”
A fat girl, gobbling sweets and cake under a table at a wedding reception.
Sergei Lyubyenko reclined as much as his shackles and the bolted-down steel chair allowed, and slid his mangled, three-fingered hand out of its cuff. He flashed his sly, sorry grin, as if they’d both tried to flee, as if they’d been caught together, and would both be punished.
A gray-faced mastiff rolls in a laboratory cage, licking his prodigious cock and balls.
“I need your goodwill like my asshole needs a tongue,” he finally replied. “I told you where to find the Rybinsk in less than an hour. I assumed our business was concluded. Was I wrong?”
The dog again, now busily devouring its own hind legs.
Ingrid pinched the bridge of her nose. She could smell the dog with the clarity of memory. “You described something else you saw while under hypnosis…”
“Remote viewing is not hypnosis, but no matter. You got what you paid for. The Rybinsk is unrecoverable, yes? But you know exactly where she is. Now, I believe when I came in, I had a hat…”
“We paid you to remote view the wreck, but also the source of the unusual radiation signatures, and to find out what happened to the Nereid and Triton 3 submersibles.”
Sergei produced a pouch from his breast pocket and, using only one hand and his agile lips, rolled a scrawny cigarette. “You rose to this job not just for your good looks, yes? You are a sensitive, but your talents are unformed. They have never been pushed…” He waggled the cigarette at her. She lit it, hand shaky, flinching when he almost touched her.
“Sergei, my superiors are very disappointed in you and, to put it frankly, they’re also highly dubious of your alleged abilities.”
He smiled and shrugged. President Nixon hunches over on the toilet aboard Air Force One, masturbating grimly into a Sears catalog.
“Maybe you think that because you survived the KGB treatment, you’re invincible and answerable to no one. But we are not a government. This is not a country. This is a private ship in international waters, over the deepest hole in the earth. And my superiors in Hong Kong, Moscow and San Francisco may deal in shit most of them don’t believe in, but they expect results. Whatever you think you’ve endured before, I can guarantee you it’s nothing compared to what’ll happen to you, if you don’t show us what we want to know.”
Sergei yawned, exposing yellow but sturdy, straight teeth. “Do you know where I was going? I stopped in Bangkok, who would not, but I was going back to Russia. If you truly know anything about me, think about that.”
She nodded. When Sergei slipped the KGB and defected, they arrested his wife and two sons. Somewhere in that dizzying succession of Premiers in the late 80’s, all of them were executed. They did this to make him come out to the South Pacific to view something they called Opaque Zone 38a, so they could drop a tactical nuclear weapon on it.
“Moscow is worse than ever, but is five time zones from nearest water.” He sighed and rolled another smoke. “You were a very fat girl, when young, yes, Ingrid? Nobody liked you or understood, but is clear to me.”
“This is not getting us any closer to our objective, Sergei.”
“You were not just piggy little girl, no. You thought if you ate faster, if you ate everything, you would grow up faster, not so? But you only grew fat.”
Ingrid declined to play his game.
“It must eat at you, no?” he pressed. “To be unable to do this, yourself. Such a fool, you actually want to do it, don’t you?”
Her doctorate was in psychology, but her training as a remote observer required intense concentration on a host vector—the pair of eyes through which she would see whatever her handlers set as her objective. Her success rate was near perfect, with targets she’d slept with.
Sergei was more properly classified as a projector. He could leave his body and roam freely on what mediums used to call the astral plane or the aether. He needed no prior contact with the target, nothing but a cigarette and his preposterous fee. His hit rate was legendary, before Opaque Zone 38a drove him insane.
He killed the cigarette and gestured for another. In the past, he would go into his trance after taking his first drag, and rest his hand on the table before him with the lit cigarette gnawing away at the stained paper. In about seven minutes, the cigarette burned his fingers, and jolted him awake. Back into his body.
She reached out with her Bic disposable lighter and lit the shaking cigarette. He took one hit off it and held the smoke in until the burst capillaries on his nose and cheeks flared deep violet. His frosty blue eyes sparkled at her, then went vague and rolled back under drooping lids.
Ingrid reached out and took the cigarette from his unfeeling fingers, stubbed it out on the table.
Now, they would get to the bottom of this. He would not come back without answers.
His three-fingered hand shot out and seized her arm, pulling her across the table towards his empty face. His other arm snaked around her neck to cradle her head, and somehow, she was powerless to push back or strike him.
When her body fell across the table and settled against Sergei, Ingrid was not inside it.
* * *
Everything goes blue.
A blue so pure and bright, she thinks, he’s taken my sight, I’m blind.
Blue deepened to indigo as she began to understand that she was seeing all there was to see. When confronted by a featureless color field, the human eye tends to fill the void with visual hallucinations—the ganzfeld effect—but no optical illusions rose up out of the darkening blue, leaving her to conclude that she was not viewing this with her eyes.
Let us go and see, Sergei whispered, let us go together. She did not hear him or feel him—or anything else—but he was there. The only sensation she felt was a tugging that echoed his gnarled, nicotine-stained grip on her wrist, dragging her inexorably down into the void.
One time on assignment in Thailand, Ingrid got so stoned on opium that she felt like she tumbled up out of her body. She saw her empty vessel on the silk pallet, drooling as the boy loaded another bolus of tarry resin into her bowl, and then the jumbled rooftops and skeins of wires and cables connecting every synapse of the city, and she was terrified beyond anything she ever experienced before. She fought a raging riptide that tried to pull her up into the smoggy sky, battled back to her body to find herself shivering in a pool of cold urine as the boy and his family went through her pockets.
Sergei chuckled at her panic, and offered her a body.
Through a pair of dead black eyes that perceived the ocean as layers of heat and gradients of food trails, she watched the light fail and felt the pressure build as their perfect cruise missile dove beyond the reach of the sun.
The rude nub of brain that housed them both was little more than a binary box flashing eat/don’t eat as it scented trails of organic waste streaming away from the research ship.
You could learn to love life as a shark, I think, he thought at her. I could leave you here—
Sergei trampled the mako shark’s hardwired instincts and drove it to descend ever deeper. The indigo zone gave way to a blue-black twilight, broken by the murky horizon of the ocean floor at the edge of the Marianas Trench. The sheer cliffs of slimy basalt tumbled away into perfect blackness.