The Final Days of Elizabeth Garvey

New short story!  A bit longer and a bit different from my previous two.  More to come, hopefully!  Enjoy.


Eleven years ago I was offered a job as a technician for a mining rig in the central pacific, an experimental super-facility sunk halfway to the bottom of the ocean.  Built by a massive corporation with footholds in everything from oil to fast food to entertainment, the rig was almost completely self-sufficient, a 22nd century city-state floating twenty thousand leagues under the sea.  Future home to some of the leading experts in a broad range of fields, the place was to be a hub of functional science, the magical world young scientists and engineers go to sleep dreaming about, where every new inspiration is publicly celebrated, backed by unlimited funding and unanimous support.  I leapt at the opportunity, despite the fact that it meant leaving behind a very comfortable life in California with no promise of ever being able to return, even for a vacation.  This was the chance of a lifetime, the culmination of everything I had ever done.  It had paid off, someone had recognized my genius and hard work.  Or so I thought.
Despite the decisive advances of women over the past few centuries, engineering still remains a field dominated by men.  So imagine my surprise when I showed up to discover that there were almost as many women on board as there were men.  A nice surprise, perhaps; it was several months before it occurred to me that my femaleness might have been the decisive factor in my recruitment.  I was good at what I did, easily competent to operate of repair and of the many vital systems that ran the rig, but it seemed that every day I ran into some new person whose intellect and drive made me feel impossibly out of my depth.  On shore I was a genius; here I’m only average, maybe a little bit below.
The rig is a massive tower, radiating out from a central shaft that holds the mining and fracking equipment.  A needle, digging slowly into the crust of the earth.  I was stationed near the bottom, operating remotely on the massive drill and collecting rock samples for the geological branch.  And for eleven years, the rig was my world.  To be grouped with so many other intelligent people in that kind of setting was exhilarating.  If you’re not a scientist, I’m not sure I can explain how euphoric it is to have a dedicated source of funding and support, one that you could have utter confidence in, that would always be there.  To live in a community that really, truly respected the work you did, that prized innovation and creativity above all else.  The rig was a magical place.  I suppose we changed the world.  You would know better than I; none of us could really spare enough time from whatever we were doing to really check on how our innovations had affected the world at large.
It was during the energy crisis of 2113 that I first met Jack Lee.  It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a global crisis, though it certainly felt like it to us.  Environmental changes had caused several cubic miles of jellyfish to drift on a course that intersected our hydroelectric farms, rendering the rigs’ main power source effectively useless.  Technicians and engineers from all departments were put on repair duty, which is how I found myself that summer in a scuba suit, holding a welder and a ‘jellyfish vacuum’, with a thin, dark-haired man named Jack babbling excitedly at me about the ecology of moon jellyfish.  Two and a half years later I married him in the decadent glass heart, a shimmering chapel that sat on top of the rig.  We were given a week off and a private submarine for the honeymoon, paid for by the rig.  Such marriages were not uncommon, even encouraged.  By that time, the first children of the rig were beginning to read.
Our marriage was a happy one, it certainly did wonders for our social life.  The jade band on my finger was a seeming all-access pass to the more exclusive clubs and hangouts, places where actual liquor was served, not just lab ethanol mixed with whatever sodas could be found.  In the beginning, the paranoia that I was only there for the purposes of marrying some man was rampant, but time eased that fear into a dull suspicion, and finally into acceptance.  To put it simply, life was good.
2117 was a big year for the rig.  In May, the first international underwater school was opened, consisting of two observation levels near the top of the rig.  Enrollment, supplies, and transportation were available free of charge to all official citizens, the curriculum featured everything from daycare to core college classes, with some of the most brilliant minds in the world providing one-on-one training and education for graduate degrees.  All married couples were scheduled to take a tour of the new facilities; Jack and I came back from ours with spinning heads, hearts bloated with euphoria like helium balloons.  We sat down, talked long into the night, and eventually made up our minds; the rig was our home, and that meant a place to start a family.  I’ll never forget the fire in Jack’s eyes four months later, when I told him I was pregnant.  It was exhilarating, and overwhelming, and terrifying, but it felt right.  Life went on, much as the sun still rises, rain still falls on the cocoon of a gestating caterpillar.  Inside, the caterpillar liquefies, rebuilt and molded by turbulence, but is the outside world changed by inner catharsis?
Yes, it is.  Because we changed, and the way we saw the world changed with us.  And if that had been the biggest change in our lives, perhaps we could have died happy.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.  The other reason 2117 was a big year occurred in November.  Our child was a genderless lump that had just developed fingers.  Jack took on a part-time job teaching ecology 101 as a night course.  Mining and drilling found a highly unprecedented rock.
Within twenty-four hours the rig was ablaze with the news of large, flat fields of porous, grey stone featuring large calcite crystals and a high silicon content.  Jack was more excited about it than I was; my interests had always lain mostly inside the rig, on circuitry and metal, moving parts of machines.  But apparently the rock, which had been nicknamed ‘end-stone’, after an old video game, was a very big deal.  Theories bounced across lunch halls and break rooms.  Someone in oil analysis developed a silicon-based form of radiometric dating for the sole purpose of dating the stone; preliminary tests indicated that the stone was seemingly older than the earth itself.  The results were largely ignored, but some people, my husband included, incorporated the results into their theorizing, which grew ever wilder the more information came in.  The most plausible suggestion that took into account the supposed age of the stone was that the end-stone was remnants from the earths’ past collision with Remus, the collision which had supposedly formed our moon.  The fields could contain well-preserved records of an era of our history which had been mostly lost to space.  Now, the discovery of a new rock wasn’t exactly huge; the pacific basin was a goldmine for discoveries of all types.  It is because of what happened afterwards that I count the discovery of the seemingly innocuous end-stone as such a major event.
In early June of 2118 I gave birth to Florence, seven pounds and very healthy.  The end-stone craze had mostly died down, though I suspect among geologists the excitement was still burning strong.  After nine years the pocket of oil we had originally drilled was finally running dry; talk began of moving the rig, a two-year operation that sounded just crazy enough to work.  Crude scans showed high quantities of hydrocarbons to the east, a solid indicator of possible oil.  The October ballot would feature a number of articles on the subject of moving, namely concerning the how and the where to.  The rig had adopted a sort of representative communism, in which people only voted on issues pertaining to their field of work or study.  I voted on a number of technical and mechanical decisions, Jack joined a committee to discuss where and how they were to set up the rig, with respect to the environment.  It was through him that the end-stone came directly into our lives.
To Jack, the ecology of the region to our east had been fascinating, even before the end-stone had been found there.  It was heavy with chordates, but lacked any plant life.  And there were no sperm whale carcasses, which meant no giant squid.  All in all, a very odd place, and Jack’s ecological/geological committee dredged up more strange facts every day.  He came home rambling about it, how the composition of vented gases was considerably different, x-rays showed signs of dinosaur-sized fossils that predated the mesozoic era.  Three new species of crab had been discovered, including a wacky ten-legged species that Jack developed a serious crush on.  New crabs!  I mostly tuned him out.  We had a child to raise, and he was becoming more and more work every day.
Still, while the nature of Jack’s work held little interest to me, the consequences of it were inescapable.  The man who had recruited Jack was a geneticist named Harvey Sommers, a history enthusiast from Texas who had recruited an all-male committee with a hidden agenda that became clearer every day; he wanted the eastern end-stone fields declared off-limits, a kind of wildlife sanctuary.  And the more he dragged our family into his political shenanigans, the harder it became to feel sympathetic to his cause.  With my job in oil, most of my co-workers were adamantly against the cause my husband supported, and as 2118 became 2119, the resentment against my family became almost palpable.  Jack was no help; Harvey had so thoroughly indoctrinated him that he refused to even discuss the matter with me.
It happened slowly, as I’m sure it always does.  Obsession is a sneaky thing, it falls over a man like the shadow of a stormcloud, darker, darker, until one day you wake up and realize that this is no ordinary stress, that the man you married is gone, and you fear there’s no bringing him back.  So you pretend, you hope against hope that you’re wrong, that he’s still there, somewhere, because when all you can do is hope, it’s the scariest thing in the world to let go, to admit that you truly have nothing, however hard you cling to the ledge, you’re already falling.
So for months, I just... endured.  Floated through scorn and resentment, going home to the non-comfort of a man who, on the rare nights when he was actually home, was barely there at all.  The committee was taking a toll on his health, yet he refused to see a doctor.  All of us on the rig were pale, but Jack had developed a waxy sallowness, sunken and blue around the eyes.  He would mutter in his sleep, looping, nonsensical ramblings about prehistoric worms, lava monsters and buried cities.  I would wake to find him already up, drinking triple-brewed tea and looking worse than ever.  On the worst days, the days where he was manic, babbling, practically screaming about God knows what, he hardly seemed to recognize his son, moving about the apartment like Florence was a watermelon I spent my days dressing up in costumes.
Everyone has a breaking point; mine was June 12th, 2119.  Florence was turning one.  It was a small, low-key event, neighbors and close friends.  I cooked Florence a small honey-raspberry cupcake, though he seemed far more interested in the candle.  By the time Jack burst through the door, three hours late, the only guest left was Alena, my co-worker of eight years, close friend and only confidante.  I still remember everything from that night, from the smear of frosting on the wall behind Florence’s chair to the dark spot of wine on Alena’s beige scarf to the faint rings of moisture around my husband’s eyes, the way it welled up in the corners, wetting his eyelashes into jagged spikes.
“...hollow, Liz, there’s air under the rock!  Caves!  Do you know what this means?  There could be anything down there, with this level of heat and moisture, sealed up for millenia, and you just wanted to drill through it, destroy an ecosystem that’s been untouched since-”
I rose up and slapped him across the face.  “What the hell is wrong with you?”  I screamed.  “Today was our son’s birthday, and all you seem to care about is some stupid rock, and crabs, and you’re never home, you don’t seem to care about anything that happens in my life, and you’re sick, Jack, you have to take a break.  You have to see someone.”  The tears burned riverbeds into my cheeks.  Jack stopped, blinking like a fish out of water.  Florence began to cry, Alena took him into another room.
“Look, I get that you’re stressed, but-”
“Stressed!  Jack, you’re killing yourself.  You’re killing us, this can’t go on any longer,”
He grabbed me by the shoulders  “Liz, I know these last few months have been hard, but you have to understand what this means for us!”  He shook me, the world wobbled.  “This is it, the tipping point!  We can never move the rig now, with this discovery the entire place will have a whole new job, one that’ll last for years.  And I’m on the committee that discovered it!  We’re going to be famous, baby.  We’re going to be rich!  We can move into a better apartment, we’ll finally have the financial security to start a family...”  He danced away, lunatic fire burning in his eyes.  And from somewhere outside of my body, I heard myself whisper.
“Get out.”  I took a deep breath, he stopped.  “Get out, get out get out get OUT OF MY HOUSE, NOW!  I don’t know who you are, but you’re not the man I married, you’re not the man I want our son raised by.  You have no place in this family, and I never want to see your face again.”  I stepped forward, everything blurred through a veil of tears.  “So get OUT!”
He paused, confusion, anger, pain swirling over his face.  After a moment of desperate struggle, anger won.  “I see what this is about,” he whispered.  “It’s all so clear now.”
“Is it?”  I sobbed.
“You want to move the rig!  Just drill through all that unknown life, destroy invaluable history just to get at your precious oil, make a few bucks and then walk away.  You don’t even care about the possibilities of what could be down there!  Or are you just doing this to spite me?  Well, you know what?  It isn’t going to work.  You want me out?  Good!  I’m leaving, we’re going to win, and when you crawl back to me, I will just leave you in the street.  So goodbye, my love,” he spat.  “I hope you rot.”  He turned around, I sank to the ground, anguish settling across the universe.  His words as he stepped out the door flickered through the air like shimmering, venomous bats.  “no respect... we’ll show her.  She’ll never get the better of us... selfish bitch...”
Alena rushed back into the room, still holding a crying Florence.  I grabbed him, cradling him to my chest.  Alena held me as I rocked, long into the night.
The next day, I woke up and went to work.  Co-workers offered condolences; I ignored, them focusing only on my job.  After putting in three hours of unpaid OT, I went home to discover a letter waiting for me; Jack was requesting a divorce.  Full custody to me, no alimony.  A clean break.  It was a week before I could bring myself to sign off.  I wished we had fought; hell, sometimes I wished he had hit me, just to give me a sign that he wanted to stay.
Life went on, grey and inevitable as ever.  It’s my way of dealing with grief, I suppose, to just... push it down, keep it all inside and throw myself into the biggest distraction I can find.  During the days I was happy, content and confident that I had made the right decision, but at night, lying all alone in my bed, I took out my secret box of hurts and inadequacies and guilts and let them wash over me, crawling back into the comfort of pain and pity, out of the warmth and light I knew I didn’t deserve.  Still, time soothed me, gave life new light, until only occasionally did grief overtake me as it once had nearly every day.
I only saw Jack alive one more time, in November of that year.  Florence was at day-care, I was shopping in the grand mall, a six-story panopticon of innumerable shops and department stores.  I was walking out of a J & C’s, he was headed somewhere to my left.  Our eyes met, neither of us said a word.  I’m not sure he even recognized me.
He looked terrible, like an untreated mental patient, or a prisoner of war.  Emaciated, smelly and unshaven, hunched over and pale.  Nervous shivers racked his body, he stepped gingerly, as if walking hurt.  But worst of all was his eyes, sunken, bloodshot pits framed by sallow, loose skin draped over sharp bone.  They were the eyes of a man who is truly lost, lifeless and unseeing.  Eyes that belonged in a wax museum, or a jar of formaldehyde.
Just behind him stood Harvey, who was guiding this empty, pathetic shell through the crowds.  He practically had my ex-husband on a leash, and when he saw me, his eyes flashed with victorious wrath.  Homicide flashed through my mind, but I shoved it down.  Maybe someday, when Florence was old enough to understand.  Now, of course, I wish I had done it then.
And that was the last time I ever saw or heard of him until his obituary on February 3rd, 2120.  Harvey, of course, was everywhere, the firebrand protector of the east.  But his right hand, his faithful pet?  Not a word.  Jack Lee had disappeared.  Then he slashed himself open, wrote a small novel with his own blood on the glass wall of an observation deck, and hanged himself.  You can find a record of what he wrote on Pacific News, if you want, but much of it is incomprehensible.  Stories of ancient life, cities inside the earth, sleeping, dreaming intelligence locked under the end-stone to the east.  All unconfirmed speculation far beyond even the wildest theories of the geologists and ecologists studying that area.
Also disturbingly similar to the whispers that used to slip from Jack’s lips in the dead of night.  A creeping suspicion rose up in my mind; what if he was right?  There was end-stone extending for hundreds of miles to the east, what if some crazy Jules Verne world was hidden down there, shut off from all other life for millions of years?
What if it was communicating with Jack across some telepathic link?
As outlandish and cheesy as it was, I never quite shook the idea, if only to convince myself that perhaps Jack hadn’t gone mad for nothing.
I wasn’t unduly upset at his death, though it did sting; there was finally absolutely no hope of bringing him back.  Life merely went on as usual, moments slipping through our fingers as if they would never run out.  Despite the fascination and rich political complexity of the are to the east, it remained largely untouched, nobody exactly sure how to go about exploring the mysteries beneath its surface.  Moving the rig was postponed indefinitely, and for the first time, funding for experimental research and experimenting was cut.  Pay cuts, decreased availability of everyday commodities, harsh reminders that for all our freedom, we were still governed by a corporation.  I changed back to my maiden name, Elizabeth Garvey, but doing so caused me to fall through the cracks in the social security system.  My insurance was frozen, and I barely made enough to support me and Florence as it was.  My home, that simmering pot of intellect and creativity, was falling apart.  Yet part of me remained detached, some kind of perspective center in my brain assured me that this was no big deal.  Then I learned that Florence might be taken away from me, and it became a very big deal indeed.
It started small, with a little public outreach, some blogging.  But the activism bug was rampaging through the rig, and it bit me early.  My story was striking, and I attracted followers early on.  If there were an award for bitch of the year, I would probably have won it.  Single mom, divorced and in her thirties, taking on the world, asking tough questions and not taking no for an answer.  Florence was not yet two.  I was making enemies to the point where the size of the opposition was a better indicator of my success than the size of my supporters.  Then I remembered something, a new angle that changed everything, doused the flame that burned in the back of the mind of nearly every woman on the rig with gasoline.  Why were we here?  It was no great secret that the ratio of men to women on the rig was roughly equal, but under the right light the fact became sinister, ominous.  Were we just breeding stock?  Only there to pass on the proud male heritage of brilliance that was the trademark of our little underwater country?  My arguments were dismissed as wild extrapolation by skeptics who didn’t understand that the purpose of my arguments was wild extrapolation.  Nevertheless, people were listening.  My life began to form purpose I never knew could exist.  The influence I held was intoxicating, perhaps too much so.  Embroiled as I was in national politics, I had been neglecting the reason I had started it all in the first place.
June 4th, 2120 I received a letter informing me that I now shared custody of Florence G. Lee with Entretech corp. child services, effective immediately.  He would no longer live with me, moved to a group home near the school/daycare facilities.  It was as if the light had gone out of my life, I was a candle without a flame, and the darkness crept up on me from all sides.  
By far the lowest moment of my life occurred during a psych evaluation, part of the hearing to determine visitation, child support and so on.  Throughout the eval I could tell I was doing poorly, but when it drew to a close, I learned that the outcome had been fixed all along.
“You know, Ms. Garvey,” my interviewer said as he pushed his chair back and stood up.  “I’ve been following your activism work for some time now.”  My heart leapt into my throat; did I have a supporter?
“He leaned in and whispered in my ear.  “And I intend to see to it that an ungrateful cunt like you will never have the privilege of raising a child.”
All I remember after that is waking up in a hospital, sick and tired, with a nurse telling me that my son had been taken to California for adoption.
I won’t bother with the period that followed, the endgame.  Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t put it into words.  Just know this; there are moments in life where the world itself seems an illusion, time and space and matter and mass, all meaningless.  When isolation, grief and anguish and not enemies, but friends, lights in the dark.  But the dark is a sheet, the blindness that you impose upon yourself, and the lights are only the missing patched, holes through which you can see the true darkness of life.  And is there anything more horrible than that?
Yes.  It turns out there is.  The universe is a cruel master, with no respect for the quibbling emotions of those who see light where there is only shadow.  July 9, 2120.  I woke to the sounds of panic and mayhem, and stepped out of my door into what could have been someone else’s nightmare.  Mr. Sanchez, my neighbor, fan into me, terror clouding his face.
“Eggs, Elizabeth,” he cried.  “They’re eggs!  All this time, he was right.  Jack was right, and now...”  He trailed off, a tear rolling down his face.  “This is the end.  The rig is doomed.”  He took off, swept away by the current of people sweeping through our hallway.  Then I too was swept away, pushed on all side by people who had no idea where they were going, around and around in circles through the mad sirens and flashing lights.  Eventually I found myself in the hollow of one of the east-side windows, people still streaming past me in terror, separated from me only by the guard rail I had somehow slipped through.
Eggs.  The end-stone was eggs, buried under the skin of the earth for countless ages.  Something scaly punched through the surface of one of them, black tendrils streaming out like worms.  The monster that emerged looked, if anything, a little like a jellyfish, amorphous and translucent.  Glittering organs shone through black skin, uncountable limbs moved like smoke, bending and twisting in ways that defied depth.  Blue eyes, pointed slits over malignant orbs, glowed from any number of possible places, like a cubist painting.  Then it... moved, only, it didn’t move.  I mean, it moved, but not in any particular direction.  But then it was closer.  The only way I can describe it is that, the thing stood still, and moved the rest of the world around it.  Shapes flickered and flared through the air, balls and pillars of darkness that split apart and came back together again, moving towards and then through the rig at impossible speeds.  A nebulous shadow flashed through my window, bulbous black skin fading in and out of reality as it passed me.
The thing that had hatched came closer, indescribably large, framed by distant mountains, silhouettes shadowed by endless miles of water.  The terror, the... wrongness of it is impossible to put into words, it doesn’t come through the senses we learn about in kindergarten.  It’s like the image of a smell, the sound of a picture.  Whatever it is, it gets inside your head, under your skin. it reshapes your reality.  And still the thing moved closer, blurring its surroundings like light around a black hole.  A tendril the diameter of an airplane smashed through the rig several stories above me; shattering glass, screams, and the pneumatic hiss of forty-ton airlocks sealing shut.  The room I was in detached, spinning my vision on its head.  We were sinking.  The room slammed into the monster, throwing me against the glass, six inches from its skin.  It was rough, like a frogs, pores he size of my head like screaming mouths.  Slimy, viscous shadows oozed out of them, crawling long the glass before slipping away.  And still, that inexorable, inconsolable wrongness just washed over me, tearing apart my mind.  In that moment, I knew what it felt like to go mad.
And then... it was gone, behind me, above me, the entire room was sinking, spinning slowly on a downward trajectory.  Once, I caught a flash of the end-stone fields through the window, and I swear I saw beams of light radiating out of it, perhaps the streetlights of some demonic city, perhaps something I can’t possibly fathom.  I can’t compare that creature to any living thing, it is part of a world we know nothing about, can do nothing about.  No thought of fight ever crossed my mind; it would be easier to extinguish the sun.  I just sank, trapped in a steel box at the bottom of the ocean, and knew the true despair of life.
The engineers who designed the rig did their jobs well; these walls will probably hold for another dozen years.  But the air certainly won’t, and the power could go out at any minute.  The fact that I can still type is a miracle.  I have no real hope of rescue, death is a certainty.  I’m surprised I’ve made it this long without being crushed under some monsters’ foot like an empty can of soda.
And yet, I’m okay.  I haven’t gone mad, I know that for a fact.  And I feel fine.  I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking back on my life, the events that made me the woman I am today.  Thinking about Florence.  I’m sure he’s safe in California, at least for the time being.  Something tells me that within a few months’ time there will be nothing left of humanity.  My window is face-down, but I think at least two more have hatched.   But it’s funny.  Even if my son does survive, I wish that he had never been taken from me, that he could be here to die in my arms.  Whatever the world is to become, he shouldn’t have to live in it a single day.
In the face of such total evil, it seems reasonable to assume that it was all for nothing, but I can’t accept that.  It’s not as much that things happen for a reason, it’s that things have a reason because they happened.  And everything that’s happened to me, everything I’ve caused to happen, it all created meaning, it changed me, it changed the world around me, and what more meaning could there possibly be to life?

-Elizabeth Garvey