Decompression

"The Nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist-deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."

- Carl Sagan 

Transcript

Along with your parent's old house, you inherited the feud with their neighbors. You thought you could make peace, after all, they’d hardly even met you, but there was no hope, they were old and set in their ways. You went to their door with cookies, and they spat on the ground and slammed their door. Even you have your limits. You don’t know what started the whole thing, but you decide to carry on the feud in honor of your dead parents. You double down when you realized just how fucked up the people you’re dealing with are. On your third day there they leave a mutilated rabbit on your doorstep. You decided to make their lives hell. Mail sent to your door by accident would be thrown in the gutter in front of their mailbox. You didn’t even like loud music that much, but they hated it so you’d listen out of spite all night. You’d mow your lawn maybe once a month, while they measured their grass twice a week. You flipped them off every time you had the misfortune of seeing them. When they left a headless baby bird on your porch you decided to get a camera and get the police involved. You’d tried to call about the rabbit and they’d told you it was just a cat, but you know that cats can’t cut something cleanly in half. You smash in their mailbox while they’re at work, and pour bleach in their yard. Soon, you start to see them less and less. You're ready now, eager for them to do it again. It’s 3 am when you get the notification that someone is on your porch. You see both of them sitting on the steps, facing away from the camera, no doubt mutilating some poor creature. Eager to catch them in the act you swing open the door. Sitting on your back porch are your neighbors, but with your porch light on you see that they're both separated cleanly at the waist. They’ve been propped up with sticks, torsos slapped onto bloody legs, but the woman is starting to fall. The sight paralyzes you, and you freeze. You don’t unfreeze until a shadow falls over them from someone hiding just out of sight. Then you jump up but it’s too late. Sticking its foot on your front door to keep it from closing is; The Podcast Inside Your House. 

You wake up, and you know it's the end. But you've trained for this, and you're ready. As ready as anyone can be anyway. 

We've woken you up just in time to put you back to sleep. When you open your eyes and see me lying on the gurney across from you, it's supposed to get you thinking about the things you aren’t supposed to think about. When you see the steel sphere between us at our feet, and realize what it does, it’s supposed to help bring those secrets closer to the surface. 

We both have oxygen masks on, IV drips in, and various tubes and needles nearby that they'll poke and prod us with if we’re under too long. Our heads have been shaved and a dozen small nodes are attached. I’ve only lost a month's worth of hair, I'm sure you’ve lost more. I wonder if that ever bothers the people we bring into this place, or if the mind doesn't make time for vanity in the face of death.

We're preparing for a long trip together. Neither of us tries to speak, oxygen masks aside, we're about to have our own private conversation. But my eyes tell you that this is the end, and your glare reminds me that you'll do everything you can to take me down with you.  

The people in the lab coats; scientists or doctors or spies, whatever they are, start counting down from sixty seconds. The lights on the bathysphere machine at our feet start flashing red, and although I've done this before, many times, my heart still speeds up. Someone touches my earpiece and reminds me of my name, and I hold onto it as they turn on the sedative, flooding my mask. I look over just as your eyes are closing. Together as the countdown hits ten seconds, we descend.

When I wake up on the other side it takes time to adjust. Every few seconds in my earpiece I hear “You've entered the Sunlight Zone, your name is Edgar Morris” and it keeps going until I buzz in and say “acknowledged.”

Zone one is recent memories. It’s what happened to the target just before they were caught, and the things on their mind. It’s like a dream but more focused. I see the target clearer now; a woman with long dark hair, the way it must have been before they caught her, and hazel eyes now, like mine. I think they'd been green before, but I push that thought to the side and focus on the mission. If they were green before then I'll need every ounce of focus. 

We're in the woods, but not any forest I recognize. It's all pine near our base, at the few forests that remain anyway. But she'd been snatched somewhere tropical. Glossy leaves and flowers and the memory of the sun beating down hard surround us. 

Panic and sweat and adrenaline overshadow everything. She knows they're going to get her, that we're going to get her. She’s not as scared as they usually are, but the fear is still there. I get just the big picture of her thoughts. She's worried about her cat of all things. Hidden in her mind are potentially world-ending secrets; lives ending in the most gruesome ways, and governments falling or rising depending on what she has, and that's what she's thinking about. Her fucking cat. I reach out, trying to probe further as I walk closer to her in the dreamscape. I try to feel for thoughts of children, parents, lovers, but there's nothing. Perhaps that's why she wasn't as scared as the others, she didn't have anyone she could take down with her. No one she loved anyway. 

The forest around us shifted if I looked at it too long. Ferns turned to wildflowers, fronds turned to pine needles. I refocused, keeping my memories out as best as possible. I zeroed in on the heat and the bugs, trying to immerse in her world. 

She's not running in the dreamscape but she is out of breath, sort of in limbo, standing but looking confused. I stay near her, taking in everything I can, but nothing I'm not supposed to. I see hints of a building or structure in the distance, but that's not for my eyes. When I feel like I've seen and felt everything useful on the surface, I get closer to her and she senses me. She turns around slowly but by the time she sees me, my hand is on her shoulder, and we're descending once again. 

Each level is more disorienting than the last, as the pressure builds. I hear several repeats of “You've entered the Twilight Zone, your name is Edgar Morris” before I get my bearings enough to radio back and acknowledge. Like its namesake, the drop-off into the next zone is sharp. Things are quick to become more emotional and abstract. Vision and hearing stay mostly intact but other senses start to blur. 

I'm in her domain now, whoever she is. 

I hear the sound of children playing, and I feel carefree in a way I haven’t in decades. She’s brought me far into the past. That’s become the common practice. Think about safe memories, what you were doing when you were too young to have important secrets. And maybe even win some measure of sympathy from your captors. But that wouldn’t work, not with us. Not at this level anyway. 

I think back to who I know that has green eyes and pale skin but stop myself, any distractions could mean death. 

She’s brought me to a birthday party. We’re outside somewhere hot, but I can’t be sure if it’s the same climate as the one she was caught in. I see her running across the lawn, aged six or seven, with a group of other children. Her hair was lighter then, but I know it’s her instantly because no one else ever feels quite real down here but the target. A little boy a few years younger than her trails beside her. He’s calling for her to slow down, he’s calling her Dottie. That’s her name then, Dottie. If we didn’t already know that, we’ve got it now. 

I make sure to take in everything around me, as the boys upstairs will be watching too. I’d watched back my first mission, years ago. The scanners filled in the gaps, they added logic where there wasn’t. The hills behind the house shifted if I looked at them too long, growing taller or shorter, but played back they’d be static. Faces, unless they were ones she remembered well, would be filled in with approximations. 

I left Dottie alone, taking in as much intel as I could on what I was supposed to. I walked across the grassy lawn, the blades shifting like the ocean if I looked too closely, and zoomed in on the other faces of people she might be close to. I walked up to different adults and glanced at them, but they ignored me, their faces bare of any features. 

There were only two adults whose faces Dottie seemed to remember clearly, and I made sure to get good shots for the boys topside. The man had the same hazel eyes as Dottie, and I figured we likely had her parents. Her mother had the same short, sort of choppy hairstyle as my mother had worn when I was a child, so Dottie was likely the same age as me. I pushed that thought to the side when her mother's hair started turning blond like mine. I needed to focus.

There didn’t seem to be much that Dottie recalled apart from her family. I caught up with her at a picnic table singing Happy Birthday to a little girl whose face she didn’t really remember, and I watched the little girl blow out her candles with a mouth that only appeared when she opened it. Her eyes were mere suggestions on a tan slab. 

I’d seen everything of value here, it was time to move on, either by my hand or hers. I’d gotten close enough that Dottie was watching me, her party hat falling off her small head. I wondered if she'd acclimated yet. 

I quickly had my answer. The scene change was instantaneous but not disorienting, we were still at Twilight. Suddenly we were in a hallway at a school, and she was a few years older. She was trying to blend in with the crowd but it didn’t work because she didn’t remember any of their faces. I picked her out right away. I chased after her, eventually passing a teacher whose face she remembered clearly, an old woman. I slowed down just enough to send a clear picture of the woman’s face topside. 

I got closer and suddenly we were camping, somewhere with snow this time. I forced my mind blank, the familiarity immediately trying to bring up my own memories of childhood romps in the snow. There were pine trees here, and I saw them clearer than the other forest we’d been to, but likely only because I was filling in the gaps with my own memories. 

I zipped open the tent in front of me and found Dottie’s parents waiting inside, but there was no sign of her. I already knew what they looked like so I didn’t bother taking in their faces, though I did note the absence of the suspected little brother from earlier and the ragged clothes they wore as they held their foreheads together. Perhaps they were camping out of necessity rather than fun. When I stepped outside, fresh tracks in the snow gave her away instantly. This was her mistake. I’d grown up in the snow, and I was still my current self. She had shorter legs now and she stumbled in the unfamiliar terrain. 

She fell to the ground and I caught up to her. She was perhaps twelve or so in this memory, keeping me out of anything important. Usually, this part of the process could take hours, and I braced for another scene change, but it didn’t come. She could have run through every banal event. One target had taken me through every choir concert, every track meet, every school play. It was strange that she didn’t try that, she simply sat up and waited, glaring me down. It made me wonder if perhaps she didn’t take me through those distractions because she simply didn’t have them. An entire life defined by the war wouldn’t be unusual. 

It was on me to take us down again. She didn’t try to run, instead, she turned to face me and held out her hand. I took it and helped her up as we dropped down another level. 

“You’ve entered the Midnight Zone. Your name is Edgar Morris.” I don’t know how long I’d been listening to that on a loop before I radioed back “acknowledged.” I open my eyes slowly, and it’s the opposite of waking up. The Midnight zone is sometimes all we need. It’s your passions, your loves, the core of who you are as a person. I don’t know what the boys upstairs are looking for but it’s possible it’s right here. 

It’s the feelings first in this zone. Emotions that aren’t my own; determination, passion, and hatred above all else. Then the room comes into view and it’s familiar, not only to her but to me. The architecture is different of course, more tan than gray, with drywall instead of wood and metal, like it was once something else, something comfortable before the war necessitated change. But the purpose is the same as the buildings I’ve spent so much time in. We’re in a classroom in a training facility. The windows are open, but I don’t see anything of value at first glance. The teacher is unmasked, and Dottie knows their face well. The boys upstairs will now too. I start looking around and get just a glimpse of the man beside us when Dottie starts to peel away from her memory. I have to decide if I run or try to get as much intel as possible. Even one face would be invaluable to us, so I stay put and send the face of the man next to me upstairs. Then Dottie remembers where we are. She reaches out and grabs my face in her hands, stopping me. She says simply “You already have him. You can’t have them.” 

We descend. 

“You’ve entered the Abyssal zone. Your name is Edgar Morris.”

The Abyss is where the brain realizes that there is an intruder present and that it can defend itself. The brain pulls out all the stops and weaponizes itself in a way that’s specific but different for everyone. It singles out your worst memory and brings it to the surface. Sometimes that would be as simple as watching a grandparent die of cancer or watching a bomb strike from a distance. Sometimes it would be much worse.

For the accidentally well defended it would be where our agents would watch their leg get blown off in a prairie, or watch a friend get shot in the head. But the memories aren’t limited to wartime. Agents go through the target's worst memories with them, whenever they happened. Sometimes they would find themselves holding a baby as it died, or left alone as a child with someone they should never have been alone with. 

For the agents who weren’t well-defended, intel was easy to extract. Enemy agents would see a car crash or a sad farewell in a hospital and that would be that. 

When the Bathyspheres were in their infancy, only the truly unlucky could defend themselves well. After the machines became common knowledge, we realized we could create our own defenses. The only limit was how far you could push your own people before they broke. Or worse, turned on you. Interrogation resistance was dialed up to eleven. 

We started torturing our own people just to torture the enemy. In a way, things went back to the time before the Bathyspheres, when information was extracted with pain. Those without particularly harsh and disturbing memories were punished the most, so they wouldn’t be helpless in the face of capture. We called it Enhanced Defense Training. The practice became the ultimate equalizer. It made us all the same amount of fucked up. Our methods were much lighter than what the enemy would do to our people if they caught us of course. But those tasked with doling out defense training were always quick to remind recruits that their methods had been modeled after their enemies. 

This had all been a bit after my time. I had plenty to defend myself with already. But apparently, Dottie hadn’t. 

The first time I entered a target, their emotions were overwhelming, all-encompassing. It made me realize that everyone feels things differently and that I felt less than most. The small glimpses I’d gotten into other’s lives, and their feelings, had helped me acclimate a little bit more each time, but it was never easy. At this level, I’m almost completely tuned into Dottie now and the fear is overwhelming. 

She’s brought me here so quickly.  She could have stalled more in the Twilight Zone. She could have made a few small sacrifices in the Midnight Zone to buy herself more time. But she didn’t. She knew that her secrets would be well protected with whatever she had in store for me here, in The Abyss. 

At this stage, I was completely immersed in her memory. I was merely a passenger, going along for whatever ride she was going to take me on. When I opened my eyes I was strapped to a table, and Dottie was strapped to the table next to me. I suppose that’s fitting. 

It didn’t seem like it would be that different from our defense training. Though I’d never been on the receiving end, I’d taught many lessons. When they started shocking us, I was ready. As ready as anyone can be anyway. 

There are only so many ways you can hurt someone without damaging them. I was intimately familiar with all of them.

From our experiments on test subjects, we realized that four hours of enhanced defense training was what most people could handle. That would help run the clock out on the bathysphere, with the added chance that whoever was diving into your mind would leave early if they couldn’t handle the pain. 

They’d put a clock in the bare concrete room where they did their training. It was the only other thing in the room besides the table Dottie was on, and the small table next to it full of various tools. I could make it four hours. 

In the abyss, you’re almost like a ghost. You get dragged along with the target’s memories, and whatever happened to them happens to you right alongside them. Sometimes you see yourself as them, sometimes you’re beside them, while everything happening to them is duplicated for you. It’s like you’re having double vision. 

When we hit six hours I realized something was very wrong, that perhaps they’d crossed lines we hadn’t. The possibility had been discussed, of course, hit 48 hours and you’d be invincible, enemy agents wouldn’t have time to get to the trenches, get the information they needed, and decompress on the way to the surface. We’d tried it of course, but the few unlucky test subjects had been entirely useless when we were done. 

They were beating us when I heard “Edgar Morris. Your time is up. Resurface now, or continue the mission, the choice is yours.”

I can’t press my earbud, but that’s really only to help ground me anyway. The boys upstairs can see and hear everything. I say through the blood pooling in my mouth “Acknowledged. I’m going to the trenches.” Whatever secrets Dottie has that would be important enough to warrant protection as drastic as this, meant that time was of the essence. What she had could mean life or death for everyone and everything on the planet. I had to try. 

The boys upstairs did not radio back. Focus was critical. 

Knowing I had an end time helped. They wouldn’t keep going past 48 hours. There would be no point, I was dead anyway. Every few hours the torturers swapped out. I learned that even I did not know all of the ways you can hurt someone without permanently damaging them.

I kept telling myself “world-ending secrets, governments rising and falling, and lives ending in the most gruesome ways.” I told myself it might be completely up to me to save the world. I also took a great deal of satisfaction in the fact that I screamed less than Dottie did. 

When it was over the room vanished and we descended together. 

“You’ve entered the Hadal Zone. Your name was Edgar Morris. Thank you for your service.” The loop kept playing as Dottie and I acclimated to our descent. I don’t know how long it was before I radioed back “acknowledged.” But time didn’t matter anymore, this was the end. 

It's just us now. No distractions, no more defenses save for the most important one. We’re truly tied together here. Dottie’s inside my head now, just like I’m inside hers. It's the most intimate bond either of us will ever share.  When we come to, we’re lying close together, my arm under her back, her hair sprawled out over my chest, like some sick parody of intimacy. 

Though we’re on opposite sides, I respect her dedication. I’ve always felt more of a camaraderie with my fellow agents than with the people who pull the strings, on either side. I decide we have time to let her say her last words, while I gather the strength to do what needs to be done. 

Finally, I ask her “What the fuck do you have that’s worth all that?” 

She replied simply, “I don’t know.”

I lead us into the conversation that we’ve both certainly had with other people countless times before. “How can you side with them? After what they’ve done?” 

She moves away from me, finding the strength to get up at last. “In the Midnight Zone, the man you saw, Luke.” She smiles. “You didn't get anything useful there. He’s already dead.” She starts looking around us, taking in the trench, looking for weapons, but only out of obligation to try, she knows it’s over. “I loved him. I know we’re not supposed to.” I feel her anger, her rage now as if it were my own. “That was nothing compared to what your people did to him.” 

I move away from her, sitting up. On my end, the trench is always the same. The scientists or doctors, whatever they are, don't understand exactly what it is yet. But they theorize that the brain takes you somewhere comfortable after it’s brought up the worst things it can. It’s a sort of recovery. 

My trench is the creek by my old house, where I spent the first twelve years of my life. That wasn’t before the war, but it was before the war found its way to me. Before it took away everything.

I’d seen bedrooms and living rooms. I’d seen schools and churches and mountains and lakes. I’d seen other forests. But Dottie’s trench, her safe space was the most similar to mine I’d ever seen. It was the same hot tropical forest we’d caught her in, with the addition of a small creek running through it. Her’s had ferns and thick grasses on the edge of the water, while mine had a bed of slate jutting out from the pines. Where our memories met in the middle the snow mixed with loose sand. We felt hot and cold at the same time, and when I sat up I felt her fear. This was it. I don’t know what she felt from me in that moment. I was more tired than anything. 

“Any last words?” I ask her. 

“I’ve already said them to someone else.” She said.

As we both acclimated, our forests started merging. Snow started falling on the ferns, bright blossoms sprouted on the pines. Birds and bugs sounded out over the quiet of the pine needles and the snow. Her forest was taking over mine. 

In the trenches, it came down to size and strength. There were smooth rocks in Dottie’s Creek, that on a smaller opponent perhaps would have been useful. But it wasn’t even a fight between us, I towered over her. Now it was just a matter of following protocol. 

The one thing both of our sides could agree upon was that in the nuclear age, our war was bigger than us. We had precious few ground rules we followed to make sure that there would be someone left when the war was over. 

The idea was simple and had been brought about by the generation before us. Anyone willing to possess or extract potentially world-ending secrets should have to get literal blood on their hands. The tradition came from an old idea at the very start of the nuclear age, an idea that was never implemented but might have saved countless lives. The idea was that potentially apocalyptic nuclear codes should be tattooed on the inside of someone’s ribcage. And if whoever was in charge wanted to access them, they had to carve open their chest. They had to understand the cost of what they were doing. 

For decades now both sides had been sending back bodies with the hearts carved out. It was an honorable death, and it reminded us all what was at stake. 

It wasn’t always possible in the dreamscape, not everyone had the right tools. But I was lucky I guess. The slate that jutted out at the edge of my creek came out in big chunks when I needed it. It snapped jagged and rough, and though it might break, I could always snap off another piece to finish the job. 

Back in the real world, I’d used the slate to scrape off the skin of a soldier who’d done the same to my mother. It was an honorable weapon because it cut me too when I wielded it. 

As I held Dottie down she tried to reason with me, to tell me that I didn’t know what was at stake, but I didn’t listen. Her emotions were taking me over, and I wanted to believe her so badly, but I managed to hold on to what little of myself still remained. 

I gave Dottie a proper sendoff; an Agents death. I considered killing more honorable in the dreamscape because I felt it with her as I carved out her heart. 

I only had a few minutes after she died, but for those few minutes, we were truly merged. I could see everything; all of her memories, her thoughts, and her feelings were mine. For the first time in my life, I felt the full spectrum of human emotion, and it was glorious and horrible at the same time. 

I knew what we needed instantly. It was a string of 12 numbers. I radioed in to send it topside, then said “This is Edgar Morris. It’s been an honor.”

I set Dottie’s heart next to me on the forest floor. I watched the creek wash away the blood dripping from her body, but I didn’t put my hands in. It was important to remember what was at stake. I wanted the boys upstairs to see it too, for as long as they could. 

My quiet, cold, lovely forest got louder as more birds and bugs took over. The snow melted, and the wind slowed. The sun banished the last of the cold, and I watched plants with glossy leaves grow over the bed of needles. This was her revenge, total decompression sickness. 

Her body would die now, but her mind was overwriting mine. I wondered how long they’d keep my body alive for. They could send other agents into midnight with more than enough time to get back. They could find every face I’d ever- she’d ever seen. 

I tried to hold onto my mother's face, how it had been in life, of course, not the gruesome sight it had been after her death. But it slipped away, replaced by Dottie’s mother. All of the things that had made me myself melted away, and I felt okay with that. I looked at my hands now and they were almost as gory as they’d been when I’d held Luke’s body. 

The boy's topside could see when the end was near and they radioed down “Thank You Edgar Morris. You’ve done the right thing.” 

God I hope so. 

World-ending secrets, governments rising and falling, lives ending in the most gruesome ways. As Dottie’s mind erased mine I picked up her heart and held it to my chest. 

I know this is the end, but I’ve trained for it, and I’m ready. As ready as anyone can be anyway. 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Facebook and X. And Until next time; take the time to see your loved ones this week, we've missed them too and we can’t get a good look at them unless you do.