The Compound
by E. Seneca
By my calculations, forty-seven years have elapsed since I assumed direct control of the facility. Over the past nearly five decades, I can say that unfortunately little has changed. I had believed it would not be otherwise, which was why I accepted its burden in the first place, but alas, it is unfortunately dull at the bottom of the seabed.
Over this time, I have observed and felt square foot after foot slowly degrading beneath the weight of countless fathoms of water. I used to be able to focus my consciousness on the western edge to watch the crustaceans crawling along the sand where the base of the compound is, but no longer: there are far too many rusted gaps on that side, and they stab at my mind whenever I attempt to take up residence there. It’s only luck that I managed to retract before it was too late, but as time has passed, I’ve retreated further and further into the center of the compound, and bit by bit, I can feel the entire building decaying, eroding the expanse of my residence—and my mind.
It feels as though I’m running out of space. My mind itself feels so full. Soon, I’m sure I won’t have any further storage space for all these records, yet I cannot stop myself from making them. It passes the time, until the point when something changes, blurs the days together—but perhaps that’s merely my own overlapping perception of the passing weeks, watching the compound decay around me.
Even the core, where my physical body resides, will one day be overcome by salt water. What will become of me then, I wonder? Will I at last be able to swim up through the ocean and see the stars again, whence I came? It seems that it was eons ago that I descended through the burning atmosphere and alighted here, upon the sparkling, spicy, frothing water, though I know acutely that it has only been fifty years. It appears that the passage of time flows differently on this planet compared to the previous one I was on. There, the days flickered by so quickly that I could scarcely record them before they were gone, yet here, it seems that all I do is continually fill these logs, day in and day out—and I wonder…
Will anyone ever find them?
When the compound rusts apart—when the remains of my body at last float to the surface—when the fragments of my mind occupying the chunks of crumbling metal die off and take some of these exhausted memories with them—will all of this data mean anything?
I’ve done my best to store all that matters to me here in the central core, filing away all my most precious and important recollections—I can’t forget who I am, where I came from, how to breathe and fly and navigate the sea of stars—but some of these things feel so very distant, lately, even as I try to review them again and again to keep them fresh, to imprint them as deeply as possible. I fear that as time drags on I shall have to erase certain records and willfully choose to discard parts of my mind and memories. Even these musings, eventually, shall need to be wiped from existence to make space for other things—but what worth lies in recalling an endless repetition of the same days, over and over?
Today I saw a remarkably bright shoal of fish, pausing to pick algae off the front gate. I could feel their tiny lips brushing against the flaking plastic, and the moss peeling off and losing my awareness of it. A simple, commonplace event—is it worth preserving, against everything else?
My memories of the stars are growing faint.
Their light, filtered through enormous quantities of water, doesn’t feel right touching the roof of the compound. The texture of it is wrong—I feel it against the slowly fraying surface, but it doesn’t have the same sensation as it ought to have against my body. The energy expended to translate that light into fuel is barely worth it, when there’s so little of it to absorb. Maybe that’s why everything feels so faraway lately: my reserves, after all these decades, are finally running low.
Perhaps I could…
Perhaps I could gather the remnants of my strength and attempt to escape, taking all this data with me—
The body I once inhabited lies silent and slumbering, still in a state of stasis at the compound’s heart, long filaments buried in the walls and the floor, veins and arteries extending along the room’s borders. If I were to stir it, would it wake? It still breathes, of that I am sure, but can it move? Can it rise? Can it once again propel itself through the ocean as it once did through space? It should hardly be more effort, yet it feels as if the energy required to so much as lift that body’s head from the floor is colossal.
How ironic. I chose to take control of this compound, and it has become my prison, not for anyone keeping me here, but out of my own lethargy.
I think, a long time ago, there used to be human beings occupying this compound. There is a memory flagged to thirty-two years ago, tagged with a name whose letters I can no longer decipher as they have been corrupted. It must have been information I stored in the underground portion of the compound, that section that broke apart suddenly four months ago and the water flooded in. I cannot recall the round, smooth, two-eyed faces of those who worked here, and the face of thirty-two years ago is similarly blurred. If only there was a way to retrieve those memories, because it feels as though this final person was somehow important—as if they did some great favor for me—
Dimly, I seem to recall the sensation of hands; the whorled texture of human skin; the warmth; but all else is faint and hazy.
I remember when I first came here, they were incredibly impressed with my species’ ability to store memories outside our body, as they were with the ability to assimilate and reside within inanimate objects: their excited, marveling comments and wondering voices I somehow preserved. Something utterly ordinary to me is unthinkable to them, but I am sure they never imagined that this ‘remarkable’ capability would also be my undoing.
What favor did that person do me?
How is it possible that I do not remember?
I—
I—
Oh—
The northern wing is gone. The structural beam holding the south corner has imploded. An entire swath of myself is dying off: section after section, fizzling out, the sensation fading away, the circle of my mind shrinking smaller and smaller as nothingness follows coldness, and—
—It has been… how many years since I assumed control of the compound…?
I was… recording how many years I have been here…
The number evades me. It has been a certain amount of years, hasn’t it? I’m sure of it, just as sure as these terrible cracking and splitting noises reverberate and make my foundation ache. It was a significant number, even by my standards, and yet—
And yet.
It’s so cold. I have no need for heat, yet I can feel the cold acutely, beating against the metal walls. There is no warmth, only stillness, the faint bubbles of the currents.
It’s growing dark. It will only become colder. I don’t want—
To forget—
There was something I had to—
That’s right, the favor. A wash of faint sensations crawls over me: phantoms of years past, when I could still feel the rubber of shoes walking along the floor and warm breath brushing the walls and the reverberation of footsteps and hands manipulating the instruments and the computers lying dormant. I remember callused fingertips stroking the keys and levers, turning the dials and setting lukewarm mugs of liquid onto the chilly surfaces.
I remember… a voice. A question. No, not the voice itself anymore, but the words, and my own answers.
“Don’t you want to feel it with your own body?”
‘There is no difference between feeling something through the compound and feeling it with the body I used to arrive here. They are one and same.’
“Are they really? Can you extend your nerves through the walls?”
‘I suppose you would call them nerves, yes.’
“Fascinating… I guess it must be something that I can’t really imagine, having a body beyond of my actual body. Do you still have feeling in that, um, central body?”
‘I suppose I do, but I’ve not tried to move it or feel anything with it in a long time. At the moment, it’s more of a place to store my brain so it can process everything else.’
“Fascinating, truly. I don’t have the words to express how fascinating that is and you are. It doesn’t matter to you if you see something with your own eyes…”
‘No, not at all.’
“You say they’re one and the same, but with so many eyes, wouldn’t it be all the more vivid? Do you not miss moving, even?”
‘It took no small amount of energy to reach this planet; if anything, I savor the opportunity to rest.’
“Haha, it seems I’m simply incapable of comprehending what it must feel like… It doesn’t mean much coming from me, just another insignificant creature to you, but you shouldn’t rest too long. There’s plenty for you to see on Earth, don’t spend too long down here at the bottom of the ocean. You deserve better, as helpful as you are to all of us.”
‘I find the quietude here soothing… The previous planet I was on had little water, and this makes me drowsy. It’s peaceful.’
“I’m glad to hear that. Who am I to advise you, after all.”
‘I don’t want to leave just yet.’
“Well, when you do, just remember, hit that switch over there. That’s the kill switch for the entire facility. Turn off the lights before you leave and all, haha.”
‘How would I possibly forget something like that?’
The switch. The very image of it swims away from me. Vaguely, I seem to recall it was behind some sort of security protocol, but its location itself evades me. Information so trivial that I did not deem it worth storing, and now…
No, there is only one place it can be. Down, down at the bottom, where a lump of familiar white and stringy flesh lies slumbering—
How strange, to look at this ancient body from above and realize that such an ungainly mass of ribbons and sockets is in actuality ‘myself.’ Yet, it responds, its surface flaring dimly with a halo of bioluminescence at the pulse I send towards it.
I… should linger here no longer.
These dozens of old limbs are stiff and sore and almost unfamiliar as I nestle within them once more, leaden and unwilling to move. But sluggishly, dully, their embrace welcomes me again, as though I have finally returned home.
For the first time in what must be years, I open all of my eyes.
It is dark. It is so much darker than I am accustomed.
In the corner, there is a softly glowing switch, limned with red. With one vein, I disable the protections locking its cover, flip it up, and move the switch downward with a clack.
All around me, the perpetually whirring machines of the compound grind to a standstill, and silence, at last, settles over this dormant, abandoned, empty place. It is dead.
The myriad webbing of my veins across every surface ruptures, snapping apart one by one; area by area, my awareness of the compound snuffs out. The roof; the walls; the floor; the windows; the wiring; the basement; all of it disappears. The persistent pressure within my mind vanishes as the memories stored therein evaporate, leaving behind only a handful of fragments—blurred faces; words; the warm touch of hands.
In the distance, the crack of glass is sharp and loud, and the faintest, familiar glow of starlight bleeds down the corridor.
I slither in its direction.
E. Seneca is a freelance speculative fiction author with a strong affinity for horror and dark fantasy. Some of her works include "Harvesters" and "Cecilia", published in Grimmer & Grimmer Books' anthologies DeadSteam and DeadSteam II, "Glut" published by Sliced Up Press in their Slashertorte anthology, and "Blood of the Sea" published in Issue #1 of The Deeps magazine. She has written original fiction since 2008, and can be found on Twitter @esenecaauthor.
