The Enwalled Room (January 2023)

She came to lying on the floor of what, from the steady hum, appeared to be an engine room. But this was no submarine engine room like any she'd ever seen. All the surfaces were flat and white—all but the floor, which was OSHA orange. Everything was clean and new smelling. The room was open and circular ... and empty. There was no crew, no machinery. The spanner she noticed in her left hand was as out of place as she felt.

"Hello?" Getting no response, she repeated the greeting several more times with increasing volume and ... irritation.

Confused and disoriented, she laid the wrench carefully on the floor with enough presence of mind that she might still be inside a submarine and then rose, turning slowly to take in the blank panorama encircling her. The wall was uniformly flat and seamless, devoid of any markings or features to indicate a passage or interface with the outside. A few steps to the wall—she'd calculated the room's radius to be about six feet—and then counterclockwise along the bare white wall, she could feel no discontinuity in texture or temperature.

Pausing, her back to the wall, she slid into a sitting position and waited for something to happen, to change—the lighting (which left no shadows), the white noise, the smell of newness. Nothing.

Her watch had stopped—no explanation for that—her only sense of time from the cadence of her breathing. She'd been a sailor assigned to the engine room of a nuclear-armed submarine. She clearly remembered DEFCON 1, the Barents Sea, and the locked-on SLBMs. But none of that appeared in any way connected to here and now.

Under the circumstances immediately preceding her arrival in this room, she considered the likelihood that she was a prisoner of war. Accordingly, she decided to provide her name, rank, date of birth and serial number citing her Article 17 obligations under the Third Geneva Convention.

It was cold, and worse than menacing, indifferent—the room was. She'd been displaced from all that was familiar—Ha! breakout of nuclear war familiar. But this was unfamiliar in a very different way. In this world she had a strong sense of not belonging or being irrelevant. Nobody and nothing to interact with, to confirm her existence.

Staring at the walls for she had no idea how long, she believed that she saw the walls move as if the room were breathing. That triggered a childhood memory—the mythical story of Jonah—and in the absence of any stimuli beyond her mind, she let the story play out, enduring the vile and disgusting sensation of being belched out of the belly of a sea monster in a thick mucous muck littered with mostly unrecognizable marine detritus.

Stream of consciousness thoughts continued to parade randomly through her mind—an afternoon in late fall in Victoria Park with her partner, the stack of newly-signed papers that meant she was Navy, the Christmas her family spent snowed in at the airport, the last words she heard from another human voice, "Oh God,"—until involuntarily she fell asleep ... then woke up ... then fell asleep again.

Curled up in a ball, her back to the wall, for how long? The whiteness grew blinding and dizzying. The hum continued unbroken but seemingly at a higher pitch and volume. The orangeness below grounded her, but not enough that she could stand up without the support of the wall. She forced herself to walk—palming the wall as she circled. In the centre of the room lay the wrench, handle towards her. It occurred to her that if she could mark the wall, she could have some sense of time. Digging deep in her pockets, she pulled out a black Sharpie. With a fleeting surge of excitement, she marked one spot on the white wall, then followed the wall around to the spot on the opposite side and marked it. Then, she marked a half-way point between and used that to finish sectioning the room into quadrants. Once done, she started marching in circles, counting the number of rounds. After reaching 500, she slid back down on the floor and caught her breath. That reminded her to practice the controlled breathing technique she'd learned in basic training. Breathe in deeply, then exhale. Breathe in, then out. Pay attention and follow the rhythm.

She began to get a better sense of time when her stomach started growling, but that wouldn't last. She could go without eating for more than a week if necessary, but without water—probably just a few days. That meant she couldn't waste any, so she searched her clothes for a container—anything. The Sharpie cap was all she could come up with. That would be too inefficient, she decided, so she ripped the sleeves off her olive-coloured T-shirt and kept the rags on standby.

She started to obsess. Knowing that she couldn't hold it indefinitely and fearing that she might go in her sleep, she forced herself to go.

It worked but now she had to summon all the reason and nerve that she could to squeeze the drops into her mouth. She cried, but not for long—a waste. She was back under control. She completed another set of 500 circuits—enough to get tired and sleepy—and then enjoyed some rest on the hard floor that was becoming more comfortable lying on than sitting or standing on.

When she next awoke, she wondered whether she was involved in an endurance test. You heard about these things, and she knew that submariners had to have exceptional ability and skills honed to remain sane over long periods at sea—below the surface. This thought was reassuring, and she pulled herself up to complete another 500 circles. As she walked she tasked herself with reviewing the final hours before she found herself in this room.

There had been no conversations just prior. They had been commands relayed person to person. Stealth mode. Everyone knew what to do. They'd all been drilled, and the ones who made it on this ship and lasted had to be more than just competent. There's no margin for error on an underwater ship ... at war.

Five hundred more laps, which she estimated to be roughly three-and-a-half miles distance and an hour in duration. This was her fifth circumambulation, and she'd tried to make herself sleep after each, but she had no way no of guessing how long she slept in between and whether it was the same amount each time. A crucial indicator was that she didn't yet show signs of dehydration. She hadn't become light-headed or foggy-brained, and that was in part attributable to the mental exercises she forced on herself—repeating her Article 17 obligations, recalling song lyrics and poetry (which she spoke aloud—harmless information if overheard), counting and doing mental arithmetic, outlining the ship's various protocols, placing the names of people and places with their images, and anything else she could do to distract herself from spiralling down into helpless resignation.

When she opened her eyes again, something had changed—whether it was a modification of her perception or an adjustment in the 'real world' she couldn't say. But the wrench, which had been at the centre, kind of like the tiny hands of a orange-faced clock, was slightly off the floor. She closed her eyes and looked again, turned her head away and looked back. The wrench was suspended in air. An hallucination? If so, this could be the beginning of her dehydration symptoms.

As she stood up and stretched, she felt lighter. That could be explained by the absence of food and drink. But still, it was not like anything she'd experienced. She'd heard astronauts talk about weightlessness in space, but she wasn't floating around the room. She just felt lighter. She took up her rounds again, and as her walked she noticed a sort of spring in her step that hadn't been there before. She walked over to the wrench and was able to insert her hand between it and the floor. If this was an illusion, it was a good one.

How could that be? Deep under the ocean's surface, gravity would be infinitesimally stronger not weaker. But ... She shuddered at the thought, but she had to face it. She could be moving out of or already out of the earth's atmosphere, in which this was a very different kind of ship. She brushed these thoughts aside as delusional and kept walking, repeating her Article 17 identification every so often, mindful not to lose her count.

Upon finishing what she now referred to as her orbit (around the wrench), she was tired again and getting hungrier and thirstier. The wrench was still floating out in the centre, and she was having difficulty writing it off as her imagination. If it were really true and if the force of gravity had changed, then .... Anxiety and excitement were replacing her awareness of the body's cravings. What if—?

Couldn't sleep, couldn't even rest. Tantalizing but torturous. Rescue or execution was on the other side of this wall, and the wall couldn't be relied upon to protect her indefinitely. Strange that now she should consider the wall to offer protection.

Walking again, but the springiness in her step had given way to a lethargy and sluggishness and the articulation of her ambulatory joints was clumsy and painful. Her head ached with an acuteness like never before. Couldn't hold the sides of her head between her hands to alleviate the pain because her arms had grown too heavy.

The physical, mental and emotional strains of her imprisonment—for she was now convinced that she was a prisoner of war though she didn't know who her captors were and whether they were even human—was reaching critical levels. Dehydration had set in and she knew there wasn't much more time. Maybe not even enough to find out what had happened to her.

She collapsed, bouncing her head heavily on the solid orange ground, and lay there ... still.

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This is not the end; stay tuned.