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When Simon wakes up, the submarine isn’t the only thing he’s been welded into.
The back of his neck aches. He reaches up and touches it, finds cool metal leading to warm wires instead of rough but untouched skin. For a moment he forgets about the terms of his service to the general collective, the port they insisted was necessary to steer the SM-13, the goddamn irrevocable surgical procedure. His breath catches in his throat; his fingers stay very still. Then he remembers. He agreed to this.
He paces back and forth across the narrow space as the sub’s lowered into the ocean. Argues with the asshole in charge. Hooked into the port is a plug, connected to a long tube of tied-up wire, leading up into the ceiling. The ‘neural link’. There’s a sliding bit to it, a track for it to follow so he can do his job, starting above the pilot seat and ending at the camera panel. “Listen, this whole port thing–”
“You can’t take it out, convict.”
“Not what I was going to ask,” Simon hisses, though he was wondering. That’s a question better saved for the manuals, if they’ve even left him anything useful. “If something happens down there– like, the thing the ocean does where it moves, a lot– the hell’s this thing going to do with turbulence? Yank me around? Get torn out and fuck up my spine?”
A sigh rattles the radio. “Neither, so long as you don’t do anything stupid. It’s got plenty of slack. More than enough to hit the deck. Now, seriously, keep an eye on that depth meter–”
Simon groans, but throws himself down into the seat to listen. The back of his neck barely twinges.
✦
The controls feel good, under his fingers. One elbow pinning the map to the console, Simon draws his fingers across the coords and starts adjusting direction. He eases the sub forward, slow then faster, when nothing drastic happens. “You run like a dream,” he says under his breath, incredulous. It’s a piece of shit clunker, barely habitable, and he’s probably going to lose his mind steering it around—but a thrill goes down his spine anyway.
His skin prickles, a chill brushing along his arms, like water splashing along the sides of the ship. He slows it down and gets to his feet. The quiet scratch of metal-on-metal as the link follows fades into the white noise of the SM-13. Simon studies the camera controls, the panel next to it. He’s not at any of the marked coordinates yet, but curious, he presses the button anyway.
“Ah–”
The noise that escapes his mouth sounds embarrassingly high to his own ears. A jolt of pleasure runs down his spine as he stares blankly at the camera, knees weak. The afterimage lingers behind his eyelids long after the picture fades. The disbelief stays longer. Simon presses the button again, feels the same hit of pleasure. His pants start to feel tight. “Are you fucking serious?”
He ignores the reaction his body is having to all this and makes a beeline for the manuals, determined to figure out what he’s doing so he can get it all done faster. Each time he makes it to a location, he dutifully takes a picture in each direction. Each time he bites down on his lip and stares at the fucked-up floor of the ocean and tries very, very hard to ignore his dick, which hasn’t gotten the message of how fucked up this all is.
It doesn’t help that the SM-13 is so painfully warm. When Simon sits down at the controls and guides the ship to the next set of coordinates, that phantom chill brings dizzying relief. He takes a moment to dip his head down, rest it against the dashboard, telling himself, after this I’ll be free.
I’ll get out of here, they’ll take this thing out of my head, and I’ll be free.
The skin around the port throbs with his heartbeat.
✦
“I’m fucking telling you, there was something else down there! Something alive! I- I could feel the teeth through that goddamn link—”
“Convict, the link doesn’t work that way.” The captain sounds just as frustrated as he feels. Her one eye stares unerringly into his, brow furrowed. “Sometimes after prolonged connection, people can start to… imagine things. But the ship doesn’t have nerves. You aren’t feeling anything that isn’t programmed in.”
Simon digs his nails into his palms hard enough to leave marks for hours. The inside of the ship burns, and his head hurts, and despite his desperation to get out some part of him wants to go back down, keep taking pictures, swim circles in the blood for hours just to feel that high.
They knew what they were doing to his head. This isn’t fair, he thought, tasting copper in his mouth, this isn’t fair, this isn’t right!
“So why’d you program in,” and he stops, the confession caught in his throat. If it wasn’t supposed to feel that good—if it wasn’t supposed to feel good there—they’d know something was wrong with him. Something filthy. Better not to give them anything else to despise him for. “Nevermind. You’re not even gonna give me a straight answer. You’re not even holding up your end of the fucking DEAL—”
In the end he doesn’t get any answers, and it doesn’t matter. He chokes on regret and guilt and tries desperately to forget, as he descends again, that pressing the button and hurting all those people in there felt good.
It was just the port. It was just the link. He didn’t know. They never told him. He didn’t want that to happen.
The shadow at the back of the ship, at least, gives him something else to think about.
✦
Liar, Simon thinks through a haze of pain as the ship rams into the skeleton, as the SM-13 goes down, as his vision goes blurry and dark and the world fades around him. She can feel all of it. It isn’t just his own injuries that thrum under his skin but the injuries of something larger and strange, made of metal, breathing in and out and in and out and…
✦
When he wakes up, the power is out, and the only pain he feels is his own.
Simon presses the button. The camera flashes, illuminating the back of the ship. Nothing happens to him. No spark of pleasure, no reward for doing what needs to be done. The link shut down with the ship’s power, he realizes. He swallows, hard, slamming his hand into the button again as the light fades. Another flash. His stomach turns uneasily. Good. Great! Good fucking riddance.
Whatever consequence there might be for turning the ship back on while he’s hooked into it, he ignores. He has a job to do, and he doesn’t need a little treat to do it. Survival is enough. He finds the supplies on his own, and the crawlspace soon after. Even with the slack the wires give him, he’s not sure he’ll be able to go down there himself until he finds another hinge. It runs all the way down the ship, a barely visible line of metal to be pried up, just big enough to fit the wires between.
“Thank fuck,” he mutters. His already-broken nails are bleeding by the time he gets it sorted. He wipes them off on his pants, ignoring them as he thinks through lighting up the place. Without the link, he doesn’t hesitate to tape down the camera button. “No distractions. Get it done.”
The tape falls off before the power rumbles back to life, and the electric current doesn’t fry his brain through the port, so Simon’s feeling pretty good about his repair job before he crawls back up and sees the glass start to shatter. The sudden pain in his head threatens to split him open. Crack. He doesn’t want to die he doesn’t want to die they don’t want to die—
“Hull breach. Hull breach. Hull breach—”
Simon surges forward and slams the porthole closed, before the ship implodes and takes him with it. He takes a deep breath and feels the heat, then the smoke.
“Fire. Hull breach. Fire.”
Goddammit.
✦
By the time he’s put all the fires out, literal and metaphorical, Simon’s forgotten why it’d be a bad idea to tape down the camera while the power’s on. He tears off strips with his teeth, enough of them that it should stick, and slaps them unceremoniously down on the button. The first jolt of pleasure barely registers as he walks back to the captain’s chair. The second makes him hesitate; the third has him swearing under his breath, white-knuckling the controls.
Sporadic, they were easy enough to deal with. Now, on a regular rhythm, they’re agonizing. Simon reaches down and unbuckles his pants, kicking them off with his feet while his hands pull the ship away from a wall. He’s not going to- to jack off in here, okay? He just needs some breathing room. There’s a damp spot on his boxers he ignores, locking his whines behind his teeth. It’s humiliating. Apparently it isn’t enough for the Consolidation just to put him in a situation where they knew he was probably going to die, but they had to fuck with his head and make him like it. “Who the fuck do they think they are,” he mumbles. “Not even Eden was doing shit li-ike–” His voice cracks on a moan, and he snaps his mouth shut.
Message received. Better not to talk at all.
Easier thought than done, though, especially when his shirt starts to feel painful on his chest, chafing against his nipples. Simon growls under his breath and stops the ship in place, tearing out of his layers until he’s just in his harness, glaring down at his chest. Sweat glistens on his skin, water wasted by the suffocating heat and the flush beneath his skin. At least losing the layers has him feeling a little less like he’s being boiled alive. With some effort he focuses back on getting back into charted territory.
It falls into a strange monotony: steer the ship with one eye on the camera and an ear out for the proximity alarm, get up and mark off the map, reapply the tape when it falls off, repeat. The monotony makes it easy to ignore the threat of the dwindling oxygen, the hallucinations, the part of him begging for release, everything. All he has to do is get through this.
He’s choking on a moan before he even realizes he has a hand shoved into his boxers.
“Fffuck me, dammit—”
Simon reaches for the binder on the floor blindly, shoving it onto the acceleration. He doesn’t have the time to stop the SM-13, but he doesn’t have the self-control to stop this, now that he’s started. The constant arousal has left him a mess already, the glide of his hand made easy, the slick noise making his ears burn. He shifts in his seat. Peeling off the leather stings, and he whimpers. His cock jumps in his grip.
God, he’s out of his mind. The Consolidation was probably recording everything, even with the radio out of commission. They barely saw him as a person already, and rutting into his own hand because the slow-death-by-camera-radiation is getting him off makes him feel like an animal. Simon swears under his breath again, thumbs over the head of his cock. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, I’m close– “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon—”
He slaps his hand over his mouth and comes, spilling all over his fingers and stomach with a muffled groan.
“Hh…” Simon breathes out, feeling wrung out and limp from pain and pleasure both. Distantly, he registers the sound of the tape falling from the camera button to the floor with a dull smack. A break and a problem. His eyes flutter shut. “Fix it in a minute…”
A single beep breaks through his loose-limbed sprawl, his whole body going tense. Another. Faster. The proximity alarm wails. Simon scrambles up to throw the binder off the dashboard and yanks back the handle, frantic, not breathing until the SM-13 shudders to a stop.
Hunched over the controls, adrenaline coursing through him, Simon doesn’t feel anything but pathetic. Brow furrowed, he shoves himself back, grabs a fistful of tape from the floor and uses the coarse side to wipe himself off. Getting dressed pulls at bruises and aching muscles, and there’s nothing he can do about his boxers but ignore his own discomfort.
No matter how good the link makes him feel, he’s not losing sight of the mission again.
He has to make it out of here.