Inhabited - chapter 7 (with images) (Patreon)

A scream cuts straight through the white-out.

It happens right next to her ear. A high, reedy wail tearing the sensory vacuum apart before the room has fully rendered.

She jolts upright on the mattress. The sound triggers something that isn't a thought. A deep tingle blooms under both nipples and pushes outward, a hot pulling ache. Then the dampness - a sudden wet heat soaking the front of a stretched-out cotton shirt, two spreading patches that cool fast against the skin and start to cling.

The knowledge drops in a layer behind it: she doesn't usually wake like this. The baby slept longer than normal. That's why the breasts are this hard. The body has made a calculation she is still catching up to.

Ruth Murray. Thirty-one. Jersey City. The scream belongs to Mia, twelve months, in the crib three feet away.

She gets up fast. The floor is scuffed linoleum disguised as wood. The front of her chest feels entirely alien. Heavy is the wrong word. The breasts are dense and hot and have lumps in them. The skin is pulled too tight and the weight of them pitches her forward when she stands.

She reaches down into the crib. As she bends, something swings forward across her shoulder - her hair, loose and long, brushing her face. She has no reflex for it, no habitual tuck. It hangs in the dark. Every minor movement of her arms is a sudden negotiation with this thumping, uncomfortable weight on her chest. Her hands find the small thrashing body in the dark.

She lifts the baby. Mia cries with her mouth wide open, her breath smelling of sleep and sour milk.

The instruction comes as the body coming up off the bed: feed her. She has absolutely no idea how the mechanics of this work.

Mia's head bumps against her collarbone, the crying vibrating through her chest wall. The body takes over. She sits down in a wooden glider chair in the corner of the room. The room is illuminated only by the orange bleed of a streetlamp cutting through vinyl blinds. She pulls the soaked t-shirt up and bunches it awkwardly under her arm.

She looks down. The breast is tight, full, the skin pulled stiff. Blue veins close to the surface, fine and distinct in the orange light. The ache is pressure demanding to be relieved.

The skin is paler than Diane's was. Or warmer. It's hard to see in the orange light. It's a body she hasn't been inside before, and she is meeting it under conditions.

Mia doesn't wait for an invitation or a better angle. She roots blindly, opens her mouth, and latches.

The pinch is sharp - sharper than she'd been braced for, a small hot grab at the nipple that pulls water to her eyes.

Then the body goes somewhere else. A dropping, pulling warmth moves through the breast, and behind it an involuntary slackening. Her shoulders loosen without her permission. Her jaw unclenches. The part of her still trying to run the room - check the baby, find the clock, look around the apartment - goes quiet under a physiological hand pressing her into the chair. She can feel herself being flooded with something the brain made, some chemical decision her mind isn't party to. She can feel the breast shudder slightly with every swallow. She is not the one running this.

Right behind the calm comes the thirst.

It hits like a hammer. A sudden, systemic, bone-deep thirst arriving the exact moment the baby latches. Not just dry mouth. A profound internal emptying, a ravenous demand for water and calories. She is used to a stable metabolic baseline. This feels like the body is mining itself, extracting its own vital reserves to make the milk.

The crying stops. The room fills with the wet, rhythmic sound of swallowing.

She leans her head back against the wood. Her hair fans out behind her, caught between her skull and the chair back. She shifts, trying to find a position that doesn't pull at it. She gives up.

She looks down past the latched baby. Her stomach below her ribs is silvery at the low arc, where the skin stretched once and didn't come back. It catches her sideways.

The exhaustion in this body is nothing like the ones she has known. Cara's was athletic - a recoverable soreness. Diane's was quiet and tense, a managed, tight fatigue you could nap out of. This is twelve months of interrupted sleep settling into the joints. Her lower back doesn't hurt so much as refuse to bend. Standing up from the glider, when she stands, is going to be a two-step negotiation.

She stays there for twenty minutes. The pull on the breast slows. Mia's eyes drift shut, the jaw going slack, a bead of milk pooling at the corner of her mouth.

She lifts the baby, burps her against her shoulder with a reflex she doesn't have to think about, and lowers her back into the crib.

She pulls the damp t-shirt down. The left breast is softer now, loose against the ribs, the skin slack where minutes ago it had been stretched taut. She has never lived in a body that could change size this fast. The right breast is still hard, hot, waiting its turn.

The sky outside the blinds is turning a dull, bruised purple.

Footsteps in the hallway. The door pushes open.

A boy stands in the doorway. Faded pajamas with cartoon cars on them. He rubs his eye with the back of his hand.

Jacob. Five years old.

"I want juice," he says.

She stands up. The two-step negotiation, on cue.

The kitchen is a narrow strip of cracked tile and formica counters. A drying rack overflows with plastic sippy cups and small bowls. She opens the refrigerator. Her arm brushes against the engorged right breast as she reaches for the pitcher, and the hardness of it sends a dull throb up to her collarbone. She pours apple juice into a cup with a green lid and hands it to him. He drinks it standing in the middle of the floor, staring blankly at the stove.

She needs to get him dressed. She needs to get him to the bus.

She moves on reflex - Ruth's reflex, not hers. She puts the wrong shoes on him, the ones that pinch his toes, and he whines loudly until she digs through a plastic bin by the door to find the sneakers with the velcro straps. She pours cereal into a bowl and spills milk on the counter, wiping it up with a paper towel that leaves a smear of white residue.

From the bedroom, Mia is fussing.

She goes back, lifts the baby, and carries her into the living room. By the door hangs a soft, structured baby carrier - a confusing harness of canvas straps, plastic buckles, and snaps. She rejects the engineering puzzle. She shifts Mia onto her hip.

Her hip cocks out without her thinking about it. Her spine curves to balance Mia. The body has done it a thousand times.

They go down the stairs. The apartment is on the second floor of a walkup. The stairwell smells like dust and someone frying garlic on the first floor. She holds the railing, keeps Jacob moving ahead of her, balances the baby on her hip.

The morning air is freezing. They stand on the corner for six minutes until the yellow bus groans to a halt at the intersection. The doors fold open. She hands Jacob to the monitor, a woman in a heavy coat who nods at her.

"Bye, buddy," she says. Her voice is higher than Diane's. Rough at the edges.

Jacob doesn't look back. He climbs the oversized steps and disappears.

The doors shut. The air brakes hiss. Down to one child. Her chest unwinds a notch.

She carries Mia back up the two flights. Her arm is burning by the time she unlocks the door.

She puts the baby down in a plastic bouncy seat in the living room and hands her a rubber teething ring.

A folding desk sits between the sofa and the window. On it, a dual-monitor setup. A lightweight headset - a single earpiece and a flexible microphone boom - rests on the keyboard. This isn't the full immersion rig. This is the work terminal.

The immersion rig is in the bedroom. Behind a door with a heavy brass lock. She noticed it when she woke up. The only space in the apartment that belongs entirely to Ruth.

But before she can sit down to work, the right breast demands attention. A throbbing, undeniable mass. She remembers a gray canvas tote bag under the desk before she registers looking for it.

She pulls the bag onto her lap. Unzips it.

Inside is a breast pump. A small square motor unit, a tangle of clear plastic tubing, and two hard plastic funnels attached to clear bottles.

She stares at the machinery. The concept of hooking herself up to a milking device is profoundly alien, an invasion of the body's sovereignty. But the right breast is sharp. The skin is hot. The biology gives her no choice.

She pulls the t-shirt off entirely. The cold air of the apartment hits her damp skin. She finds the nursing bra in the bag - beige, structural, the cups separated by a wide reinforced band, ugly. She works it on, hooks the back. The cup flaps clip down at the front. She unclips the right one.

She takes a flange and presses the wide end against the engorged breast.

The sensation is bizarre. The plastic rim digs into the swollen skin. The nipple gets pulled deep into the tunnel. The seal isn't comfortable. It isn't supposed to be. She plugs the clear tubing into the back of the flange and connects the other end to the motor block. The flange is held in place by the cup flap clipped down at the front, the seal just tight enough to free her hand for the keyboard. 

She presses the power button.

The machine wakes up with a loud, rhythmic vibration. Whir-suck. Whir-suck. Whir-suck.

The vacuum engages.

There’s a strange difference between the baby's mouth and this machine. Mia had taken her over. The pump just takes. The rhythm is indifferent and metronomic - pull, release, pull - and the nipple elongates into the plastic tunnel farther than seems possible, then drops back, then gets pulled again. She adjusts the dial. Finds a suction that hurts less.

Then the second letdown happens. The familiar tingling rush behind the ribs.

She watches through the clear plastic. Milk doesn't come out as one stream. It comes out as half a dozen thin sprays from different points, hitting the inside of the funnel and running down to the bottle in white lines. She had no idea. She had no idea about most of this.

The thirst returns instantly, mining her again. She watches the level of milk slowly rise, feeling the dense, painful weight of the breast yield to the suction.

While the pump runs, pulling at her flesh with its mechanical cadence, she reaches over with her free hand and taps the spacebar on the keyboard.

She works for NovaSphere. Tier-1 remote support.

The login screen demands a password she doesn't know, but the fingers type it automatically, a muscle memory buried in the tendons. The dashboard loads.

The queue is a solid wall of red text. Four hundred and twelve active tickets.

She puts the headset on over one ear. The scripts are there. She doesn't have to find them. There are four basic responses, and her job is to categorize the angry, confused users and read the correct corporate apology before closing the ticket or punting it to Tier-2.

She hits the ready button. A tone chimes in her ear.

"NovaSphere support, my name is Ruth, how can I help you today?"

"Yeah, my visor keeps glitching out on the startup sequence. I get the white ring and then it just hangs." A male voice, frustrated, chewing on something.

"I'm sorry to hear that. Let's try a hard reset on the console. Can you hold the power button for twelve seconds until the LED flashes amber?"

She runs the call. She talks through the troubleshooting tree while her eyes drift down to the plastic bottle. Three ounces. The machine grinds on. Whir-suck. Whir-suck.

"Okay, see the amber light? Great. Now power it back on."

She finishes the pumping session after twenty minutes. She turns off the motor. Breaking the suction seal requires sliding a finger under the edge of the flange. The breast is soft now, deflated, the skin damp. She caps the bottle, walks to the kitchen, and puts it in the refrigerator next to the apple juice.

She clips the cup flap back into place, pulls the t-shirt on, and goes back to the queue.

Around ten o'clock, the baby falls asleep. The apartment goes completely silent except for the rattling hiss of the radiator.

She needs to wash the stale sweat and dried milk off her skin. She steps away from the desk, leaving the queue paused, and goes into the bathroom. She locks the door out of habit.

She strips off the t-shirt and unhooks the nursing bra. The cup flaps fall away. The sudden absence of the brace is immediate. The breasts drop. They are heavy, already refilling, the weight of them aching up into her shoulders.

She turns the heavy brass handle. Steps under the hot spray.

The thermal shift is instantaneous. The hot water hits the engorged tissue and triggers another letdown. A rushing ache, an involuntary tingling heat. She looks down and sees thin watery streams of milk leaking from her nipples, washing uselessly down the drain along with the soap.

She reaches up to wash her chest, and the hypersensitivity of the skin makes her wince. The nipples are tender, almost raw, stretched by the strong, repetitive pull of the child and the invasive yanking of the pump. The direct spray of the hot water feels like needles. The touch of her own wet palm feels like ice against the sensitized skin.

She lets herself stand under the water. The heat finds the ache in her shoulders and stays there. Her hair is piled on top of her head for the shower – she must have done that automatically, hands knowing the routine before her mind did. She can feel the damp weight of it.

Turning off the water doesn't provide relief. Toweling off is a careful ordeal, the fabric catching uncomfortably on the raw skin. She pulls on fresh sweatpants and reaches for the nursing bra - there is no choosing not to; she knows now what unsupported movement feels like. The elastic band sits just under her ribs. She pulls the straps over her shoulders and clips the cups into place. She doesn't put a shirt on yet.

She walks back out to the living room. Sits at the desk.

She opens the internal ticketing architecture. She has read access to the routing histories. Three years on the queue gets you that, even at Tier-1. She starts pulling closed tickets from the last ninety days, filtering for keywords. Dissociation. Blackout. Lost time. Felt detached. Nothing.

She knows they're happening. She saw the forum thread as Cara. She saw the suppression memo as Diane.

She pulls the raw input log, the one the sorting algorithm hasn't touched yet. A ticket from yesterday: I was in the sim for three hours and when I took the headset off I didn't know who I was. I sat on the floor for twenty minutes crying. She watches the routing rule catch the keyword string and strip the ticket from the main queue. Reroute to a null bucket. Auto-reply with a wellness link. Close.

Her shoulders drop. Not relief, just recognition. She reads the rule again, slower. She can see where the drop has been hardcoded. She can see the exact order the conditions fire in. She copies the routing rule syntax into a text document.

She doesn't ask herself why that was easy.

She scrolls further. Another ticket pings off the filter, this one routed to a bucket she hasn't seen before. User in extended maintenance state. Session duration: 18 days. Biometric readings: stable. Ticket routed to null bucket. Eighteen days. Alive. She reads it. She moves on.

She sits back. The apartment is rattling-radiator quiet. She glances at the clock on the second monitor. Ten forty-seven. Mia went down a little before eleven yesterday – the timing surfaces as ballast, the nap usually runs about an hour and a half. So: forty-five minutes. Maybe a little more.

She closes the admin window.

She doesn't move to the kitchen. Doesn't pour herself coffee. Doesn't open the next ticket in the queue. She just sits there at the desk, in the bra, the sweatpants, the apartment silent around her.

The thing that happened at the latch - the body going somewhere else. She has been thinking about it all morning without thinking about it. The slackening. She has been in three bodies and none of them did that to her.

She stands up. Walks to the bedroom.

The crib is in the far corner. Mia is breathing soft, even pulls, her small fists curled near her face. The dipping mattress is in the near corner. The immersion rig in the opposite one. Ruth's bedroom. Ruth's locked door.

She turns the heavy brass lock. The click is loud in the quiet.

She lies down on her back on the dipping mattress. The springs catch her in the sagging center.

She unclips the cups of the nursing bra. The flaps fall to the sides. She doesn't take the bra all the way off - the band is still there, the breasts mostly free of it, the metal underwire pushed up against her ribs.

She looks down at herself. The breasts have refilled enough that they sit fuller than they did after the pump, the nipples still pink and raw at the tips. She doesn't touch them. Not yet. The thought of touch on the nipples makes her flinch in advance.

She slides her hand inside the waistband of the sweatpants instead.

The wetness surprises her. She hadn't expected it to be there at all, in the middle of the morning, with no provocation. Her fingers find the wetness and slick through it, finding the small ridge of the clitoris by accident before she has set out to find it.

She stops moving.

This is the third body. She has done this in two other bodies. In Cara, she had come to it as a beginner - the wetness startling her, the mechanics not adding up to anything. In Diane she had tried clinically, in a bathroom, against a specific intention, and got nothing back. This body is doing something neither of those did. It is offering itself.

She moves her finger slowly.

The sensation is not the sharp, localized buzz she got in Cara's apartment. It is broader. Lower. Heat pooling in the lower belly the way the milk had pooled behind the ribs at letdown - a system filling. She has the strange thought that this body, after the latch this morning, knows how to drop. That she just gave it permission.

She keeps her hand small and slow. The breath gets shorter. Her thighs press together briefly and then ease apart again. She closes her eyes.

She brings her free hand up and lets it hover over her chest. She doesn't touch the nipple. She runs the palm along the side of the breast, where the skin is sore but not raw, and the heat under her hand is startling - the tissue is genuinely hotter than the rest of her. The breast is a hot weight, full again, alive in a way that surprises her. Her own hand on the side of her own breast registers as someone else's hand.

The heat in the pelvis builds. Her hips lift a fraction off the mattress without her asking them to. The body has been pulled on and fed from and pumped at all morning. This is something else.

She moves a little faster. The wetness is everywhere now, slick down the inside of the thigh.

The pull starts deep - not a sharp point, not a buzzing, but a slow heavy gather low in the abdomen. She knows, distantly, with the part of her that is still keeping score, that she has never gotten this close in a body. Something is going to give. Something is going to -

The front door slams.

Her hand stops.

A small voice in the hallway. "Mom?"

Jacob. It's Jacob. It's not eleven yet. It is nowhere near pickup time.

The voice again, closer to the bedroom door. "Mom, the lady - the lady at school called you. She said you didn't pick up."

She lies absolutely still on the mattress. Her hand is still inside her sweatpants. The heat in the pelvis has not gone anywhere. It is sitting there, suspended, ringing.

"Mom?"

"One second, buddy." Her voice comes out strange, thin, not Ruth's full register. "One second."

A pause. "I threw up."

The heat collapses in on itself. Not quickly. Not all at once. It sinks back down through the body like silt settling, leaving behind a sharp sense of unfinishedness - the body wound up and refused at the last instant, the muscles in the thighs and the lower back trembling with a frustration she has nowhere to put.

She pulls her hand out of the sweatpants and wipes her fingers on the sheet. She clips the bra cups back into place. She gets up. The mattress springs groan.

She unlocks the door.

Jacob is standing in the hallway, his face wet, a smear of orange juice and something else down the front of his sweatshirt. His eyes are red.

"The teacher said I was hot," he says. "She called you a bunch of times. You didn't answer. Then she called Mrs. Reyes downstairs and Mrs. Reyes brought me up."

Of course. Of course she didn't answer. The phone is on the desk in the living room and the bedroom door has been locked.

She kneels down. Puts a hand on his forehead. He is hot. Not dangerously hot, but warm enough that she can feel it through her palm.

"I'm sorry, buddy," she says. "I didn't hear it ring. I'm sorry."

He leans his forehead into her palm. He doesn't say anything.

She picks him up. He is heavier than Mia by an order of magnitude - five years against twelve months - and her lower back, already a complaint, lights up. She carries him to the sofa. Lays him down. Pulls a blanket off the back of it and draws it over him.

She goes to the kitchen and pours a small cup of water. Brings it to him. He takes a sip and lies back down.

She goes back to the bedroom. The dipping mattress is still warped where her body had been. She sits down on the edge of it.

She is nowhere near the white-out.

She walks back out to the living room and takes the next call.

The afternoon is an endurance event. She feeds the baby again. The latch is easier this time, but the letdown still hits with that heavy, narcotic flush. She sits at the desk typing with one hand while balancing the feeding infant on a nursing pillow with the other. Jacob sleeps on the sofa, restless, kicking the blanket off and pulling it back on.

By three-thirty, his fever has gone down on its own. He sits up and asks for crackers.

She makes macaroni and cheese from a cardboard box, stirring the powdered orange cheese into the noodles while bouncing Mia on her hip to keep her quiet. Jacob eats half of it and drops noodles on the floor. She steps on one in her bare feet. It squishes cold between her toes.

Bath time. She kneels on a thin damp towel on the hard bathroom tile. The grout is graying in the corners. She washes both children in the tub, trying to keep Jacob from splashing water directly into the baby's face. Her sweatpants get soaked at the knees. The muscles in her lower back scream.

She doesn't understand how anyone does this every day.

By eight-thirty, she finally gets Jacob into pajamas and reads him a book about a dinosaur. He falls asleep halfway through the second page.

She puts Mia down in the crib in the bedroom. The baby fights it for ten minutes, crying softly, before the exhaustion finally pulls her under.

She walks out to the living room. Turns off the harsh overhead light. Sits down on the cheap fabric sofa. She stares at a small chip in the baseboard near the television stand. She doesn't move. She doesn't look at her phone. She doesn't turn on the TV. She just sits there. The silence rings.

Eventually, the chill in the apartment forces her up. She walks into the bedroom. The crib is in the corner, Mia breathing in soft puffs.

In the opposite corner, pushed against the wall, is the NovaSphere immersion rig. The matte black halo array. The cable running back to the wall. Ruth uses it. The body confirms it. It is the only place Ruth goes where nobody touches her. She doesn't put it on tonight. The body is too tired to process the haptic load.

She pulls off the damp sweatpants. She unhooks the bra. She puts on a pair of soft cotton pajama shorts and a clean tank top. She gets into the bed.

She lies on her back. The mattress dips severely.

The breasts are beginning to fill again, a low, throbbing ache spreading from the nipples. She ignores it.

She needs to leave. She can't do another day of this. She needs to trigger the exit. She reaches down and slips her hand inside the waistband of the pajama shorts.

The wetness is there. Less than it had been at eleven in the morning, but there. Her fingers find the clitoris. She starts moving - clinical, remembering Diane's bathroom and Cara's bed, remembering her own hand in the same place earlier before Jacob's voice came through the door. The mechanical spark that isn't enough. She knows now what the body can do. She doesn't know how to bring the body back to the same edge it had reached on its own, with no provocation, in the late morning quiet.

She tries to recover that quiet. She tries to lean into Ruth's accumulated tiredness as a lever - the body will surrender if pushed by its own depletion, surely.

The heat builds. It stays localized at first, a buzzing warmth between her legs, but as she increases the pressure, it starts to spread. It runs up into her lower belly. It feels closer than the previous attempts. Her physical desperation is amplifying the sensation.

She breathes through her teeth, a soft, hissing sound in the dark. She doesn't want to wake the baby.

She narrows her focus, bringing the sensation up to a sharp point. Her arm aches. Her fingers are slick.

The wave starts to build. It pulls tight low in her belly.

She arches her back slightly against the dipping mattress.

It peaks - a tight jerk through the inner thigh, a fast contraction, a quick release that makes her toes curl into the sheets. Then it's over.

She stops moving. Her hand rests flat against her stomach.

She waits.

The room is the same. The orange streetlamp through the blinds. The radiator hisses. Mia lets out a soft snore from the crib.

She is still here.

She wipes her fingers on a tissue and turns over onto her side, facing away from the crib.

Tomorrow she will have to wake up and run the relay race again. She will have to pour the juice and take the calls and carry the weight on her hip. She will have to strap the plastic machinery to her chest and listen to the rhythmic pulling of the motor.

She closes her eyes. The heavy refilling breasts press uncomfortably against the mattress.

She is trapped in Jersey City.