Full Immersion

by Gemma Amor

Genres: Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

A traumatised woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette. 
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What can you do when you’re reeling from trauma but you’ve tried it all? Counselling, yoga, pills, meditation, art, healthy living… none of it makes a dent. What’s left?


Magpie is out of ideas. She’s desperate enough to try anything. Just when she thinks her life can get no worse, she discovers herself, or rather her own dead body, partially buried in the mudbank of a river. A man stands by, a familiar stranger. What does he want? And why can’t she remember getting here? Why can’t she remember anything?


Unbeknownst to her, two pairs of eyes watch from behind an observation screen, in a room filled with computers and sensors. An experiment is unfolding, but is Magpie the subject, or practitioner? Reality becomes a slippery concept. And beyond the glass is something worse still: a hint of an outline, shaped in darkness…


Magpie realises all too soon that her journey has transformed from healing to survival. She must become the hunter rather than the hunted, with her missing memories the prey.


In turn brutal, beautiful and absolutely terrifying, Full Immersion is the latest speculative horror from Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, Gemma Amor

File Under: Horror Fantasy [ Silhouette | Suspension | Bristol | Motherhood ]
 
**Content Warnings** suicidal ideation​​; post-natal depression; implied acts of violence towards a child; birth scene

 

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Release date: September 13, 2022

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 400

Sample

 

FOREWORD

How much is a woman’s life worth, when you think about it? When it comes down to the nuts and bolts, the cowrie shells, the leather bank notes. I think about this a lot, for reasons that will be clearer once you’ve read this book. I think about the value we place on human life. I think about how willing we are sometimes to let that life fall to the wayside, as if it were no more important than a broken-down car. When we malfunction, our value decreases in the eyes of society. Our peers, colleagues, government, and even sometimes our friends and lovers struggle to see our substance beneath the cracks. Never was this made more apparent than when I gave birth to my son, and later became quite unwell, mentally. I felt people around me withdraw as if stung. I felt like dirty goods, not to be touched. In turn, this made me feel doubly unqualified and unfit to be a mother, which was silly, when you think about it, because the only opinion I should have cared about was my son’s. ‘We just want you to get better,’ people said, as if the ‘unbetter’ version of me was now untenable. I think in hindsight many of them were genuine about this, and equally afraid of saying or doing something that might make me worse, but still. It felt like a strange, cosmic punishment, the loneliness that ensued. As if I was suddenly invisible to many who had seen me clearly before. I became staggeringly obscure. Like a ghost pounding on the walls. Yet my shine was still there. All it took was for someone to understand that a broken state need not be permanent, need not be repulsive, and maybe help a little, thumb some of the dirt away, expose my natural hue.

That person, first and foremost, had to be me. I’m not saying I didn’t need help. I did, but I found it difficult to ask for. In time, I was able to lean upon my husband. My therapist. My doctor, who didn’t dismiss my concerns out of hand (what a world, where I feel grateful for the simple act of being taken seriously). But my true champion, my white knight, my hero, in the end, turned out to be myself. I had to figure out how much my own life was worth, flaws and all. It was a slow process. A large part of it revolved around me sitting in a café after the school run, writing this novel. I wrote it, and it saved my life. I wrote it, and hoped that in the future, my son would know me better. I don’t want him to feel responsible for anything that happened while I was sick, but I know that children take a lot upon themselves. I thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to expose myself by getting this book published, but anyone who knows me knows that I am not ashamed or afraid of writing painful truths. I’m aware that judgement often follows. But by putting it all down like this, I become more real in my own eyes, remind myself of my worth. The value of a woman’s life, measured by her bodyweight in words. And writing this story showed me something. It showed me that broken, chipped, scarred, cracked, flawed… none of this means less valuable. Coins minted with mistakes are often more valued by collectors. Inclusions in gemstones remind us that nature puts her own, unique signature into something: individuality. Michelangelo’s statue of David is missing a muscle between his spine and shoulder blade, owing to an imperfection in the marble. Being broken didn’t make me less valuable. If you’re feeling cracked down the middle, I would like you to remember that.

Anyway, for readers who are new here: I like to write forewords. Partly in defiance of the foreword naysayers, but mostly because I like to let folks know what they are in for when it comes to certain topics, themes and content they might find distressing. I feel strongly about letting people decide for themselves whether or not to engage with this stuff, so here goes: this novel deals heavily with themes of suicidal ideation, intrusive thoughts, post-natal depression, implied harm to a child, and descriptions of childbirth that some of you may find a little challenging. I shall say no more than this: Full Immersion was my first completed novel, and it remains, to date, my most raw, my most painful, and yet my most hopeful.

At the back of this book I’ve included a list of charities and organisations that may be helpful to anyone fighting a similar battle. There are some brilliant people and resources out there who can help you see your incredible worth through the fog of despair.

In the meantime, I want you to know: I see you, too. I see that shine. You aren’t broken, not to me. You’re brimming with potential, with hope, with wonderful things to come. You’re riddled with wonderful cracks, anomalies, quirks, idiosyncrasies. Your babies love you, and I think you’re incredible, and your worth simply too great to quantify.

1

WORDS ON A PAGE

To: The Department of Virtual and Experimental Therapy

University of Bristol

One Cathedral Square

College Green

Bristol

JUNE 26TH, 2019

Dear Sirs,

It has taken me six months to write this letter.

You should know I have tried everything else. I have tried medication, counselling, cognitive reprogramming exercises. I do yoga, and I paint. I take long walks. I sleep for eight hours a day, read self-help books, listen to soothing podcasts and ambient, lyric-less music. I have a therapy app on my phone, in fact I have three. I masturbate frequently and stay hydrated.

None of it works.

Because I still wake up every single day without exception and think about throwing myself off the Bristol suspension bridge.

It’s not an idle thought, nor a romantic one. I don’t wake up and wonder what it feels like to fly, or how the cold metal suspender cables will feel in my hands as I climb up above the bridge deck, or whether the impact of hitting the river will kill me before I drown, pushing my bones out through my skin, snapping my neck. It isn’t a dramatic response to stress, or a morbid fascination, or an indeterminate sense of melancholy, or even a cry for help (unlike this letter).

It’s a compulsion. It’s like I am being called. It’s relentless.

And I just don’t know why.

That’s why I need your help.

I know about your department and your Virtual Experimental Therapy programme. My husband keeps up with that sort of thing – he has a vested interest now, I imagine. I first read about you in a magazine of his, then did some digging. I understand that you are widely considered “unorthodox”.

Well, maybe unorthodox is exactly what I need, because Christ knows nothing else is working.

I understand you accept a limited number of patients on a deferred payment plan basis. I need you to consider this letter as my application to be one of those patients. You see, the thing about my condition is that I can’t hold down a steady job. This means I have no money. I can’t ask my husband for any more help; I have taken enough from him already.

But without money, I can’t afford your services.

So again, these words:

Help me.

Words are funny, aren’t they? They’re like little pieces of yourself, given away. Like the words in this letter. Are they persuasive enough? I hope so. I was a writer, in my better days. I don’t really know what I am anymore. A shadow, perhaps. An echo. An impression of a person, rather than the whole.

I’m drunk, writing this. Ten minutes before putting pen to paper I chased the booze with some of those pills various doctors keep giving me, the ones that don’t help much at all. I keep telling them, these don’t help, but all I end up with is a fresh prescription, a different type of pill. If you listen carefully enough, you might hear me rattle, I am so full.

But you don’t want to hear all that.

There is a point to this.

The point is “The Question”.

And “The Question” is always the same. People always want to know the same thing.

“Why do you want to kill yourself?” they ask.

And I never know how to answer.

Because leaving everything behind would only make sense if there was a reason for me to want to do so, surely.

“Did something happen to you?”

This is The Other Question that people always ask. They’re also looking for “A Reason”, an exposition. Maybe a trauma, an event, as described, something that perverts my brain away from its vital task of the everyday, and makes it weaker, and tired, and colours everything grey.

And this question is actually a “Good Question”.

Because, sure, lots of things have happened to me. Things I can consciously recall. Bad things. Good things. Awful things, surmountable things, shameful things.

But what if something happened to me that I can’t recall? My memory feels like a beach bathed in fog.

Or worse, what if I did something? Something wrong? Something bad? Something I’ve forgotten. What if there is a dark secret lurking in my head?

And if there were, could you help me uncover it? Your programme seems ideally placed to do so.

If there is no grand, insidious secret, if it turns out that life is just a steady trickle of events, a slow and creeping succession of little traumas, a collection of hurt, if you will, then your treatment may also help me come to terms with that.

Either way, my mind is being eaten away steadily. In the better hours, I can just about remember my name, and that I am married, and that I used to be a Mother, have a life. Other times, the words escape me. Because words are tricky, aren’t they? In the time it has taken you to read this far, I have told you that I no longer want to live. Perhaps I’m already dead. Who knows? You can’t see me, you can only see my words, like footprints left behind in the sand.

Do you believe me? Why would you? If I was serious, then I wouldn’t be sending this letter, would I?

God, I’m tired of myself.

I’m writing with no expectations, only desperation. Words, marching quickly across the white page like dutiful ants going about their business, and that business is this: alive, or dead.

Heads, or tails. Black, or white.

Seems simple, doesn’t it?

It isn’t.

Please help me.

Yours, with hope,

M

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, screens of varying sizes, VR headsets, headset base stations, a projector, routers, laptops, a scanner or two, mounted panels 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 hang, graffitied with scribbles and doodles. On the last wall, closest to where the Techs and their equipment huddle, a large expanse of glass stretches 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 the 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 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 sheathed in fingerless gesture control gloves, and her feet are clad in thin, membranous boots wired 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 rush of noise that is as absorbent as it is abrasive. The patient will not be able to hear it beyond the ambient 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 colourcoded cables snake around fluorescent strip lights that are currently switched off. The floor is black vinyl, easy to clean and sanitise. Patients in this room often secrete fluids: vomit, piss, sweat, it’s all been thought about and catered for.

A nurse in a crisp white uniform makes herself busy attending to the patient, reapplying anaesthetic eye drops so she 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 claim to be 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 patient herself. Boundaries are important in this industry – their efficient, business-like demeanour is therefore not due 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 the patient. After that, words like “Fellowship” and “Royal Society” and “research award” and “pay rise” flit through the technicians’ respective minds.

Around them, monitors display a variety of scenes from what looks like a live video feed, cycling through highdefinition 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 huge, colonnaded space like that of 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. Not words, but cipher. Soul cipher, although the techs don’t know that, not yet.

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 turn 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 colleagues 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 the man sitting next to her, 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.