Spectrum Jumping

Not even the faintest scent holds in this dome of white. I bless the unseen caretaker who is given the identity of a ghost running through the hallway. They alone make this place one of belonging. They wander, unnoticed, an invisible keeper. Everything is pristine, visually.

This air is crisp and brittle. It might shatter if I let loose my breath. The moment is too ripe to take action here. I wither myself, bating my lungs in the corner. Sharing a great rift, they hand-crafted these circumstances of a detrimental collision. This event is not mine to intercede.

“And you say this now? You’ve had the whole month to get this in order just to shove all your shit my way?” My coworker says. I haven’t known anyone long enough to know names. I just call him ‘red.’ 

“You’re being ridiculous. You’ve had nothing to do this quarter and whenever I give you anything that lightens everyone’s load, you yell like this. Why even work here if you don’t want to work?” coworker the second says, tapping the coffee machine. It flows out like ooze, spitting into his violet mug. “Give yourself some time to cool off and why don’t you see if you can cut some time sending bitchy emails to get this done.” Violet mug roams off once he has his coffee milked and sugared. He does this so fast, I can hardly see the flash of his hands. Red is left steaming, hotter than the coffee cup.

Red turns to me. I am busy laminating my spiderfish prints. I have not to foggiest what he might have to say to me. I did not stir, not even breathe. Violet mug was the one in the business of stirring, but I kept my cool and now I stand minding no one’s business but my own. I have no part in this. Don’t look at him, don’t look in those wrinkly red eyes. 

“Sally,” he said, as if he were my keeper. “I need you to do something for me.”

I sit on the banks of these tunnels; algae scumming the gneiss rock walls. Algae does not come with water, it is water. It expands to fill the entirety of this container. Sea lettuce laces the corners under my shoes and sugar kelp sticks itself like gum into and in between the flooring. Gutweed hangs from the sides, soaking in the splashing waterfall that sprang from the ceiling. Besides the spitting water, I can feel a rumbling deep below me and hear a quiet, whirring bit.

The water intake-outtake system is designed to alleviate pressure. These waterfalls run along the expanse of the central tunnels. The mines below are underground. These also have outtake systems in place in case of breaches. The caves are carved in V shapes. The main mining tunnel runs down to the main EOH (emergency outtake hatch). The splintering tunnels web off the EOH, with many lines between them. Each new finger has connecting points to all others from every segment.

Uma Oslo’s lab nestles itself like a wart along the main tunnel of Backhand Mine. The mine’s foreman is less than kind, so I was told. I wait for my escort, Dr. K, to arrive. She sends me a message straight into my cochlea. Start walking, I’ll catch you around the corner.

Fleeting passersby roam with two scopes targeted at me. They are keen to watch, to direct their guns my way. I may not blend in here, with my heavy black coat and air mask up my nostrils in the swampy passage, but I feel at ease knowing someone would soon be beside me. Was it wrong to want the company of someone like me, who wouldn’t glare?

I watch her round the bend. Coming to my side, I am swept up in her stride. She flows through these hallways like water, a hellbent shark barreling through. She dodges around them to keep her pace. Her mean mug is not an invitation to conversation. I also find these strangers unnerving, the way they hang up their hostility. When I look around, I don’t see mine. It is only a queer and faint familiarity, absent of any broad concept I could claim. Is it hers, anything here? She seems remote but not detached. I think I love the sea, at the surface. Perhaps, that is where my love ends. 

These are deep-sea miners. They tunnel within the ocean, and so are called the ‘rats of the sea’ by many dogmatic cretins. Ol’ Red sure likes to use that title. When he described the project to me he had said, Get down there and take notes on those sea rats. I am doing just as such.

The deepsea fishpeople have pale, translucent, and luminescent skin. Their eyes are pure white and semi-blind, but able enough to glare. They submerge into the water when they are not here, swimming back to their families. The pressure and the lack of air tighten my stomach and spin my head. My eyes keep locked on Dr. K as I follow behind her like a stray. 

She is gilled to breathe outside the tunnels, but not fit to swim. Her fins appear stunted, a sign of a human parent. She has the wirey, coiled body of the blue-blooded, blue-collared miners. Yet, her skin pigments. This skin shines a pure eggshell white. I cannot see through it. She blends as well as a beta fish. While she moves, others gawk perhaps more than they do at me. I can not help but envision her as an angel, the way she glides through the walkway. There is no noise as her heels graze the stone.

We roam this territory, foreign to me, with the explicit purpose of leaving. I take out my wax-paper notebook to view where Backhand Mine is marked. At first, I was certain this was just a nickname but soon an official sign looms above us, with a mocking arrow. It seems to say that there is only one this to expect in that direction. I pause here. I have not yet spoken with Dr. K and I want to have the facts before we head down to the Backhand EOH.

“I was told not to approach the foreman, what does he look like?”

“He’s pale and glowy,” she said. I suppose I could not expect much more unless he had any defined features for a deepsea fishperson. “…and he wears an interesting hat with a long brim.”

I nod.

“And Uma?”

“Uma is an apeman,” she says. I blink. Is that what they call us?

With my brows knitted, I nod again and save my displeasure for later. I am sure it will all hit me at once, once I see the sunlight and can breathe properly. I have never felt so damp in my short life. 

As we step down inside, the scanners all beep twice in a chorus, and the ceiling above us flashes green. A robot voice greets us, “Hello and welcome to ‘Backhand Mind.” This last part overlays with a fishperson speaking in monotone. I keep my eyes on my feet as it grows steep. My rubbery clogs are finding almost no traction. They wobble and slide. 

The doctor slides too, but does so with intention. She glides down through until she waits for me just before the grate. I smell the seawater being spat up from the bottom. It is not the same smell as the debris and minerals from the surface. Here, it is more chemical. This might be the pollution from the machinery. There stands not only miners here but frackers far below.

The lab entrance yawns and vaporizes away. Deepsea strangers usher us inside, all bored and eager to begin. There are others at this absurd time.; a disastrous mess of noise is shoved out of the whistling holes of a pipe. It sounds like tectonic bubbles, baleen breaches, and marbles rolling down a hill. 

Here I rest, stuck to the side, scribbling nonsense in my notebook of what I can see. Uma Oslo is not so apparent. Amongst the fishpeople, there are just as many humans here. They are acclimated to the cold of this structured abyss and wear blouses, button-ups, pencil skirts, and backless dresses. I feel puffy and as if I take up more space than is welcome. It was not the roomiest lab. 

I seem to have become a weed infestation; my impatience grows, my faculties diminish, and I seem to suck all the light and joy from the room. My partner, easy-going, is facile to reason with. They address her as  ‘Alize’ rather than Dr. K, Alize Kayani. She removes her scarf from her neck and drapes it as a shawl around her shoulders. It is pea green and teal with copper coral patterns. Her long, gray pants barely kiss her deep purple wedges. I have not before noticed her eyes, and how the white of her iris tinges with golden hue. 

We shift to a different location, plotting our (metaphorical) entrances and (physical) exits. The closest of the others are garbed in black like I am, though sleek and sheer, watching like crows. They all shuffle their talons and caw amongst each other. They are difficult to discern out of the water. Their words become flat in the tunnels, and their fishy mouths blab like they are swollen. It is a tone unfamiliar to me. 

I realize now that they do not speak oddly, rather I hear oddly. I am the rat who skitters through the tunnels eeking and coming to rest, panting, in the shadows. I am the wide-eyed pest here to watch for any falling crumbs of information. If only I could grow pale and translucent, instead of baring this obvious, furry coat. 

Alize leaves me be, but stays beside me, luring others closer. This place is theirs, through further years and experience - these huffing fish. Can they each individually call it ‘mine’? The room we have found, if it were spacious, I might have felt less stuffy. I stick out like a cowlick and my pensive mood does me no favors. 

Pairs of two stride by, friends with droll and slack words like mud. They speak freely and unreservedly, not caring how they might come off. They don’t, but the others in black do. They try to look relaxed and keep their speech fluid, but I can they are being intentionally withdrawn. I suppose I might come off like that too; reticent. I am only burdening my companion. My tongue only so often dares to interrupt my pencil as I scribble, introducing myself to Dr. K’s many friends - fish and human alike. There is a limit before I feel I must scurry back out of these many holes, and share my findings of these tunnels of theirs. 

“It’s time, it’s time ~,” Uma Olso announces theatrically to the chattering crowd. I can tell it is her from her fanfare and excitement. This showing is held by her to demonstrate her worth to her colleagues. She has long, braided hair tied around her pants in a belt fashion. It is a fish-tail braid, which I consider to be rather inapt. 

We are all corralled now; all are shoved into the nooks of the room by her lab assistants, in their dressy blue jackets. As soon as I center on the metal disks laid out back here, I am attacked by a sudden unsheathing of a plastic tube. It encloses around me automatically. The horrible noises returned and the chatter was envigorated. I see the other guests in black having issues getting centered. When they do, they shriek as it locks them inside.

Dr. K stays beside me in her own tube. We all seem to be paired with speakers and hanging viewing-visors. The floor below peels up and spins us to face Pf. Oslo. 

“Spectrum jumps aren’t easy for most! They are like diving from the frozen clutches of winter to the desert sun,” she explains, stepping before a podium that was not there moments before. 

“Fishpeople have long been able to go from aired environments to deepwater. This has to do with their resilient and shifting amphibian structure. Much as this has been the case, many buildings here are designed to be both emptied and consumed by the sea. On one side, my partner Kline was the engineer behind Jellal, the government-funded station originally built to accommodate the needs of citizens… in need. They are the kin of those situated too close to the experimentation and resulting underground radiation. 

“By diversification of these environments, we can form barriers against leakage. The nature of Jellal's fuel method of environmental shifting allowed for its destruction to be rather catastrophic. Jellal was destroyed in an underwater atomic cloud that was ‘awakened’ when a twenty-thousand-meter pit formed from the underground collapse. This is larger than the KSB Hole SG-3, for reference. In the aftermath, the board claims this has nothing to do with their fracking but, I digress…” Her face sours and she faces to her left, where the ‘agents of frack’ are officed. She sweeps back her bangs with a manicured hand and clears her throat. Her rosy face is still beaming at whatever it is we are here to unveil. I wonder just how many people died that day, but it does not seem as if she is eager to mention this.

“There are no ruins of Jellal, only ash, but there were blueprints and resources left. A newer station is again being erected. This time, we know precisely what chemical people there are exposed to. The chemical is called Xenon Tetrafluoride.

“Now, Jellal was less of a shelter and more of a hospital, where mutated fishpeople were tested for ongoing sessions that would lead to research preventing their abnormalities. These included primarily gaping pores, gauntness, brittle bones, and pigmented skin…” she carries on. Alize buzzes my ear again. I hear her speak for the first time in anger.

“That is what they want us to believe,” Dr. K whispers, mouth closed. She must surely be a ventriloquist the way she utters these syllables so clearly without as much as a tremor of her lips. “They are lab rats tested on for the cruel and sick amusement of apeman. All their time is spent in dark rooms. These all have geothermal furnaces, reaching temperatures no ordinary human can stand, neither fish nor ape. At two hundred degrees Celsius, they sleep while their skin comes off in chunks. It does not hurt them because the XT chemical destroys their pain receptors and boosts their already thick flesh growth to the point that they are insulated against this ridiculous heat. The apemen found it very amusing and exciting. These test subjects have a low life expectancy regardless, lower left to Jellal, which was better known as the ‘hairless rat factory.’ Kilne is a ruthless murderer and Dr. Oslo was who designed the geothermal furnaces and tempered cages.”

My pen races, ink stopping and splattering in a pendulum fashion. Out of hate and rage, Alize spews information so quickly that I tenderly ask her to please let me keep pace with her information. I also make sure to say it with an overwhelming amount of sympathy and willingness to continue.

  She explains that Kline was also the tender of bacterium samples. These are left to sit in the damp chill air of the ‘sick room’ where any fallen test-subjects are stripped to the bone for cell samples. Then, the bones are ground up too, to test their properties. I do not remember if I put it earlier, but I will write it here just in case: the XT chemical also heavily affects the mental capabilities of all afflicted. It is rare for humans to experience this exact string of symptoms, as their skin does not absorb the chemical as readily. Fishpeople, on the other hand, absorb water to extract oxygen. That is not to say that no humans were subjected to Jellal. 

It had not seemed real to Kilne at the time, the properties of these mutated fishpeole. The outer shell of the skin becomes like igneous rock, hardening like pumice once extracted from the heated rooms. It is easy to do procedures on the “junk-rats,” as he called them, because their bodies stiffen once introduced to the air-conditioning of the office. If the procedure lasts longer than a span of twenty minutes, the patients die.

They curl into holey statues of greyed sinew. Their pulpy, goopy eyes expand. Dr. K has never spoken with an XT patient herself, and never had the slightest idea that they were feeling or sentient, for that matter, until Pf. Oslo had taken her personally down to Jellal station before the atomic-fracking incident. This was when Alize knew what was happening. 

Co-workers of hers had been cut off left and right until every week she would see someone new at the desk, taking in calls from angry funders wondering why their money was put into this useless rat factory yielding no results.

“I am creating an indestructible body,” Kline liked to say, puffing around the facility or cleaning out the filters. He was always in Jellal. 

She noticed that the firing directly correlated to a certain misbehavior. When her fellow workers would unlock the door to the heat rooms with their aluminum suits and study them without permission, they were always caught on the footage. Yet, something came to mind when she finally visited the facilities with Pf. Olso. 

The cut-loose employees might have learned something that they did not want them to spread. For a full decade, she has attended these labs in the mines without having ever seen the source ‘hosptial.’ She started at the age of fifteen when she was hired as an unpaid intern to un-clog filters and crush the cinnamon for Ms. Olso’s Basak Salep. 

Her ‘spectrum jump’ came at age twenty-five. She was trusted well enough to be alone in the building. She went around checking the pressure of the tanks holding the surplus of what she now knew to be a false antidote. This mucusy syrup is given to the test-subjects to calm them down and make them think that they are getting better. Really, it is the thermostat increasing and numbing any sense of feeling that they had left.

~ I am leaving out the exact instructions Alize gave me during the meeting. I will simply explain what it was that we did after Uma Olso’s brave presentation of ‘unbreakable skin’ when we arrived at ‘New Jellal.’ Her presentation was written down in front of her, so just email her for it, please. 

It is around midnight, I think. I pull up my sun-charter from my pocket. The black smog of the surface sky gives no room for the dying sun past it in the vast span of the Milky Way. I miss the surface already, watching it through a square in my palm. Though I am deeper beneath the earth than I have ever been, I finally stand as a woman on a mission worthwhile. That makes my fear eb.

With her tool belt in hand, Alize slings on an air-rigged hazmat suit and goes inside the specimen room. She is fearless. I hear a large sack hitting glass and a gust of steam. I peer through the brown window. A knob comes undone, the four bolts that held it in place loosening from their rust and oxidation. The heat and humidity had done them in more than Dr. K’s blunt force. 

One of the imprisoned XT patients was crying. Or, at least, they made an effort as the fluid evaporated from its pumice face to crinkle its rugged nose. They rose to the top of the chamber. 

Dr. K’s suit resists the burns that would result from the heat spurts. She manages to tighten the knob before the shift in pressure broke the tank entirely - and possibly the whole room. Two other specimens lie further back as this one watches the doctor with blind eyes and screeches, shoving all its bottled-up emotion in one mournful cry. They bang on the one-sided glass, again and again, stirred from their heat-induced coma. Perhaps they know what monster they have been molded into.

“'ana 'aerif ma tafealunah,” they plea. “wahadhih alhudud muhina.”

The ‘spectrum jump’ sets in for me. Though Pf. Oslo and Dr. Kayani both use it, it holds different meanings for both. Perhaps, it is a common deepsea phrase. Dr. K found that she had been blind to a deep-rooted hate that allows innocents to be tortured cruelly and experimentally. Her knowledge upturned her actions. Meanwhile, Pf. Oslo and Kline Oslo used the knowledge of XT patients’ cellular properties to justify taking new actions. How many fishpeople did not know of these patients? Of their taken family?

She has explained to me and now shows me this wretched holding cell, all this before I had even known of its existence. When she first struck the tank, the knob came loose and the glass had cracked. The stream of heat that follows her breaking the glass now almost tears right through her suit. She is left intact, though singed, unlike the ebony glass that shatters around her and the previous boundaries of the heat room. Though I am curious where the ‘sick-room’ is, we agreed to leave the dead here as evidence of malpractice. 

Letting the jet of warm air occupy the entire specimen room, Dr. K waves me to move aside. She has long since turned off the furnaces. As she blasts the main gait with a magnetic hammer, she opens them up to the amplified room. The metal shutters click and the new space dawns on the three people slowly rising to inspect their situation. The one who had cried out now quiets. They shake as they crawl out, leaving skin behind as it is singed into the tank floor. They are numb and blind, but they follow the sound of rushing air. 

There will be many repercussions, but it feels very right. The room is filling with heat, but Dr. K does all she can to dispel it. There is another suit if the worst case comes. I feel so much pain looking at them - their crater skin and bulging eyes. I trust the doctor to heal them somehow. We all have a great bit of healing to do down here, after today. No, this sunken world will never be mine, but that is fine with me.