Gemma Amor is a Bram Stoker Award nominated author, voice actor and illustrator based in Bristol, in the UK. Her debut short story collection Cruel Works of Nature came out in 2018. Since then she has released Dear Laura, White Pines, Six Rooms, Girl on Fire and These Wounds We Make, and her traditionally published debut FULL IMMERSION is due out from Angry Robot books in September 2022. She is the co-creator of horror-comedy podcast Calling Darkness, starring Kate Siegel, and her stories feature many times on popular horror anthology shows The NoSleep Podcast, Shadows at the Door, Creepy, The Hidden Frequencies and The Grey Rooms. She also appears in a number of print anthologies and has made numerous podcast appearances to date.
Gemma illustrates her own works, hand-paints book covers for other horror authors and anthologies and narrated her first audiobook, The Possession of Natalie Glasgow by Hailey Piper, in 2020.
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2
Voyeurs
In a dark, modestly furnished room that smells of hot coffee and hot metal and hot plastic, two technicians sit, side by side, crammed up against the far wall. They are pinned in place by a vast array of electronics and equipment: wires, banks of screens in varying sizes, VR headsets, headset base stations, a projector, routers, laptops, a scanner or two, mounted panels redolent with flashing, multi-coloured LEDs, keyboards, speakers, wireless controllers, a strange, square, multi-parameter monitor with a built-in printer, and other things that are difficult to make out in the low light. It's a mess, but one the pair seem comfortable with. On three walls of the room, polished whiteboards covered with scribbles and doodles hang. On the last wall, closest to where the Techs and their equipment huddle, a large expanse of glass stretches wide, from corner to corner: a window, or more precisely, a reciprocal mirror, reflective on one side, transparent on the other.
The team of two speak in a hushed, absent-minded way to each other as they fiddle with their gear, fully absorbed in their work, wiring themselves up, slotting headphones over their ears, plugging themselves in with the practiced seriousness of astronauts preparing for launch. They have an important task to perform. A new project. They are the watchers. The moderators, the Behind the Scenes team.
They are Control Room.
They have been doing this for some time now, spying out in the open like this. It is as legitimate as voyeurism will ever get. They have letters after their names and paperwork that gives them agency to do so, day in, day out, and get paid for the pleasure. Infiltration in the name of science. A rum job, but someone has to do it. At least, that's what they say to each other, jokingly, but the reality is much more serious. They are not spies, not really. They are an intervention. A rescue team. White knights, of a sort.
Before them, that giant tinted glass window yawns. They can see perfectly well into the neighbouring room through it, but no-one can see them from the other side.
Not that the occupant of the adjoining room is in any condition to try.
She hangs in a hypnagogic state, hovering somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, thin steel wires, pulleys and cables keeping her form amply suspended in the air about four feet above the ground. Her limbs are supported at the joints by soft fabric cuffs attached to the wires. Her body (thinly clothed in paper pyjamas) neck and the back of her head is braced by a strong silicon cradle, articulated and moulded to fit the contours of her spine closely. The cradle is held up by more steel cables that are mounted to a moveable track on the ceiling. She looks like a dangling marionette in storage, waiting for a performance to start, which is precisely what she is. Tubes of varying sizes crawl into her mouth and nostrils and other hidden parts of her body, and there is an IV drip plugged into a vein on one thin, bruised arm. A forest of wires protrudes from her shaved scalp, attached to dozens of biomedical sensor pads held in place around her skull by an elaborate headband. A wide curved visor covers her eyes, which are blue in colour and held open by tiny eyelid retainers and special adhesive strips to keep the eyelashes clear. Small white buds nestle into the hollows of her ears: wireless headphones. Her hands, which hang loosely by her sides, are gloved with fingerless gesture control gloves. Her feet are clad in thin, membranous boots wired up to a massive unit standing off to one side. There are several of these large black units positioned around the edges of the room, monumental things that hum as they process, emitting a low, keen non-sound that can only be heard if a person were to focus on it, a white wall of noise that is as absorbent as it is abrasive. The patient will not be able to hear it beyond the sounds trickling into her brain through the headphones.
The Observation Room in which the patient hangs feels cavernous: a large, clinical space that has been kept purposefully clear so she can move about, enact things freely at the end of her wires. Being able to do so will reduce the cognitive dissonance between a sleeping, immobile version of herself and the notion that she is free to move, explore, react. More headsets dangle from the ceiling behind her like strange redundant vines, not needed for this scenario, and an organised mass of colour-coded cables snake around fluorescent strip lights that are currently switched off. The floor is black vinyl, easy to clean and sanitise.
A nurse in a crisp white uniform makes herself busy attending to the woman, reapplying anaesthetic eye drops so the patient doesn't feel the subconscious need to blink, adjusting wires and cuffs, checking pulse rates and blood pressure, smearing barrier cream onto any parts of her body that can chafe, gently rubbing at hands and feet to keep the circulation flowing. It is tricky to manoeuvre around the wires and tubes, but she knows what she is doing. This is not her first rodeo. She notes things down on a tablet with a stylus as she works, her handwriting neat and precise. The notes pop up onto a small monitor in the Control Room next door. The team within ignore them. The patient is stable. If there was something wrong with her vitals, they would know about it. The system has been designed to panic at the first sign of physical instability. Lawsuits are an ever present threat to experimental medicine, so they are taking no risks. Not that the woman could sue if she did die. Angry relatives on the other hand, are a different kettle of expensive fish.
The patient breathes softly in and out, unaware of her surroundings and the gentle bustle of the Nurse. Unaware of anything much, except a deep, dull ache in her heart, an ache that straddles both the sleeping and wakeful parts of her. Luckily, the people behind the glass are adept at administering to aches. The patient is here for that reason, and because she wrote them a long, painful letter that rambled and ended with three devastatingly simple words:
Please help me.
And so, the techs will endeavour to do so.
It is not a completely selfless act: these are salaried heroes who are encouraged to maintain a professional distance from the woman herself. Boundaries are important in this industry - their efficient, business-like demeanour is therefore not down to a lack of sympathy. As technicians, they are encouraged to see the disease, rather than the host, as many doctors are encouraged to triage and treat symptoms before delving into causality.
Still. It is hard for them to not feel some pity for the woman who hangs, lightly drooling, before them. Her thin, bruised state acts as an incentive. The most desired outcome is, of course, a long, happy continued life for this woman. After that, words like "Fellowship" and "Royal Society" and "research award" and "pay rise" flit through the technicians' respective minds.
Around them, flickering monitors display a variety of scenes from what looks like a live video feed, cycling through high-definition snapshots of the world outside the darkened room in quick succession: a river, over which a vast, curved bridge hangs suspended, a meadow, an island, a boat, and a huge, colonnaded space that looks like a museum, or an art gallery. A small laptop resting on one of the tech's knees shows strings of code moving up and down, living digits that crawl across the screen like insects, like ants.
Eventually, with all routine checks completed, the pair lean back in their chairs, stretch out sore arms and roll their heads around uncomfortably on stiff necks. Then, in unspoken agreement, they tum to one another.
"Ready?" says the first into a small microphone mounted on her desktop. She is dressed in a pinstriped shirt that pulls a bit around her shoulders, and brown corduroys. In her late fifties, she is ageing well, skin still smooth, at odds with her thick silver hair. She speaks to her colleague as a Boss speaks to a subordinate: gently commanding, professional, but pulling rank with every syllable.
The Nurse in the next room completes her last check, adds a final note to her tablet, smiles, rearranges a wire or two, then makes a thumbs-up gesture.
"Thank you," the Boss says.
The Nurse leaves the room quietly, and the sleeping-yet-awake patient is alone, at last. She sways gently as the wires settle, a human pendulum headed for equilibrium.
"Ready?" The silver-haired woman repeats the question for her colleague, who wears a security tag on a lanyard about his neck on which the name "Evans" can be read. Evans takes a deep breath, reaching out a single finger and letting it hover it over a large red button anchored to a Perspex safe-box on his desk.
"As I ever will be," the younger man replies, and with that, his finger descends, and he pushes the button.
A loud, long beep fills the air between them. The woman suspended mid-air twitches, just once, and then settles.
The session has begun.
(C) Gemma Amor 2022