Black Soup
Quiet. Serenity. Tranquillity. Hell.
“You see, it’s a flawed approach. Very unscientific.”
At all of five foot nothing, Associate Professor Veronica Lee was a chubby psychotic case study in the Napoleonic complex. What she lacked in height, career attainment and empathy, she more than made up for in hubris and insecurity. Her peer-reviewed paper on Heuristic Memes in Unscripted Neurological Hallucinations From a Neo-Marxist Perspective had been the most cited paper produced by her department for three years running, simply because it was so easy to tear apart. More importantly (for present purposes), she was one of those fortunate souls who went through life unencumbered by a conscience.
At a micro level, the forty-something academic didn’t like being interrupted when she was in lecture mode. Settling more comfortably into his chair, doctoral student Harold Hopper pretended to listen to stuff he’d heard from his supervisor too many times. While she talked, he wished he could take the gloves off. Harold didn’t like wearing surgical gloves because the pinpricks of sweat inside the rubber had no place to go. But better to endure a little discomfort now, he thought.
“Every person who’s been inside an anechoic chamber has been prepared. They’ve known where they were, and what to expect. They can exit when they’ve had enough. A handful last … how long? Forty or fifty minutes. Others are asking or pleading to be let out within minutes. Where are the baseline samples? Until we have a statistically significant sample of people who have no idea where they are, it’s a flawed experiment.”
Harold discreetly checked his email, still hoping one of the jargon-laden essays he’d whipped up using ChatGPT and submitted to peer-reviewed but seldom-read academic journals had been accepted. With no sign of a Christmas miracle, Harold put his phone away.
“You agree, don’t you?”
“Now that you explain it, it seems so obvious, Professor.” It had been obvious before her unnecessary elucidation, but pandering to the ego of the woman who would decide when, if ever, he satisfied the requirements for his thesis seemed the best approach. Hoping to graduate while he was still in his twenties, Harold didn’t want six years of fetching coffee, grading undergrad papers and walking Rufus to become seven. But given that each qualifying panel had concluded with Professor Lee declaring that his thesis ‘needed substantial revision’ before he was put forward to his viva, Harold’s expectations were so low as to make alternative routes to graduation attractive.
“Tainted. Contaminated.”
Her one-person audience wasn’t arguing, but the Professor droned on because she was talking to herself, not the motivationally-impaired free labour with his Doc Martins propped up on the desk in the observation room. Harold found the plastic Christmas tree in the corner more inspiring than his supervisor.
“Loss of stimulants – both sound and sight. The human body has at least fifty other senses but, deprived of these two … the body has receptors for events occurring inside it, such as a beating heart, expanding and contracting lungs, passing wind and many other movements that you’re … they’re normally unaware of. Interoception is the scientific term for them. That’s the collective name for all the things that no one pays any attention to. So, the question is: what happens when that’s all there is?
“You can even hear the sound of air molecules vibrating inside your ear canals, or the fluid in your ears. You did, didn’t you?” She paused, this time seeking confirmation from her postgrad.
Harold nodded. He’d been one of the flawed subjects. But while Harold had lasted nearly an hour, the Professor had cited the need to remain objective in conducting her experiments, and staunchly refused to contaminate the observation of her test subjects by transposing her own experience onto their behaviour. Harold hadn’t forgotten that she’d been sweating when she voiced her excuses.
“Air supply is programmed to continue until midnight, Professor,” lied Harold.
She ignored him.
While Professor Lee continued blathering to herself, Harold pulled his feet off the desk and went about setting up the anechoic chamber. Being inside the six-by-five metre chamber was weird. More than that: even with the lights on it was uncomfortable. Wedge shaped baffles made of sound absorbent foam covered the walls, ceiling and floor. Of necessity, a rubber coated steel grid was suspended above the floor.
Professor Lee had followed him inside, speaking more rapidly as she entered the confines of the chamber. “Low frequency sound waves keep bouncing between the wedges, and high frequency sound waves get absorbed by the foam itself. The result? Negative decibels.”
Some silences were more awkward than others. He’d once made the mistake of channelling Alien, and saying that, ‘in the anechoic chamber nobody can hear you scream, including yourself’. It wasn’t true; it was only the echo that couldn’t be heard. Professor Lee hadn’t shied away from telling him he was being ridiculous – humans could only hear sounds above zero. Normal breathing was ten decibels.
The volume of her voice sounded normal, when she faced him but faded to nothing as she turned around, her words trapped and killed by the baffles. That was the beauty and purpose of the anechoic chamber – the Latin literally meant no echo. Harold thought the interior of the chamber looked like the setting for a no-holds-barred cage fight, or possibly a torture chamber from some dystopian science fiction film. Telling the professor that the baffles were like dragon’s teeth had been another mistake.
Being on the small and unmuscular side, lifting Test Subject Two alone was beyond Harold’s abilities, and the Professor was otherwise engaged. Harold dragged the unconscious man across the rubber coated grid to the centre of the chamber. Wrapping the chain around TS2’s ankle, Harold yanked on the padlock to ensure it was closed. Even encased in noise-dampening rubber, the steel chain was an imperfection. But they couldn’t have test subjects pulling the wedges off the walls, or even being aware they were in a place with walls.
While he worked, the professor explained how neurons were never completely quiet – how there was still some sensory activity going on inside the brain – so the brain would create its own reality to replace what wasn’t there.
“Anechoic chambers are the quietest places on Earth, so quiet that decibels are negative,” Professor Lee kept repeating. Technically it was a hemi-anechoic chamber, a point which the Professor fully intended to gloss over when the time came to publish her findings. She’d already had Harold write the paper and then purged his name from it. Harold knew that zero decibels – 20 micro pascals – was not in fact the level at which there was no sound at all, but merely the threshold for human hearing.
“So quiet that ….. pop a balloon and there’s no echo. Turn around and the words of the speaker become very quiet.” She seemed unaware that she’d just demonstrated her point. It wasn’t exactly a Neil Armstrong walking on the moon moment.
“Going further, we’ll use the power of suggestion.” The untenured associate professor of psychology had prepared for tonight’s experiment by making horror films like the Blair Witch Project, the Exorcist and Hereditary part of the undergrad syllabus. Screenings had been arranged at the campus cinema. GBP 1.00 for students on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The two scientists had waited in the van until the movie had finished, and then picked off a straggler making his way back to the student dorms.
Minimalism was the word of the day. Minimal pre-experiment trauma. No spiked drinks. No abductions at gunpoint, just a tranquiliser gun in the night. The test subject would fall asleep under the university’s sparse Christmas lights, with nothing to orientate himself to when he woke up in silent blackness. No rustling clothes. No ticking watches. No phone.
How large a sample size would they need? It wasn’t one of the questions running through Harold’s mind as waited for TS2 to wake up; he had another experiment in mind.
The first involuntary volunteer, dubbed Test Subject One, had fainted within a minute of regaining consciousness, so she’d been injected with a dose of flunitrazepam, had a random phone number inked on to her palm, and left in a back alley with only the cash missing from her purse. There was no chance of anyone connecting Test Subject One with the experiment. They’d had to wait until the next long weekend, which happened to be Christmas, to ensure they wouldn’t be interrupted before trying again. The scientists had to be gone before 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning, leaving behind no evidence that the chamber had been used.
Harold gave the chain another yank. It was long enough to allow the test subject to stand and take, at most, half a step in any direction. Even lying stretched out on the floor he wouldn’t be able to reach any of the walls. Satisfied, Harold followed the Professor out of the chamber. She was still in talking mode. It was her normal state of being, and, Harold suspected, the reason Rufus was her solitary companion.
After securing the door to the chamber, the experiment could begin. Lights off. Nothing was left to provide sensory input. Well, nearly nothing: the floor, the chain and Test Subject Two’s own interoception loaded body.
From the safety of the observation room, Harold waited. There was lots of scientific equipment, and most of the bench space was cluttered with files and empty coffee cups. He was careful to leave everything exactly as they’d found it, including what looked like a gift-wrapped box of chocolates under the Christmas tree.
“Thirty point two degrees, Professor.” It was a comfortable temperature for a man entirely naked. The sensation of cold was a stimulant, and, as such, not to be tolerated. Harold checked his own notes; the Professor had her agenda, which Harold had supplemented with his own line of inquiry: are intelligent people more suggestible?
The contents of Mr Roger Millner’s wallet and pockets were laid out on the table in front of the two observers; driver’s licence, two credit cards, Student ID, ATM card, Tesco points card, keys, 46 pounds in cash, a dirty handkerchief and a receipt for one movie ticket, a salted popcorn (large), two vegan hotdogs and a coke zero (large). While the Professor was peering at the test subject’s grainy image on the monitors, Harold pocketed the 46 pounds.
Mr Millner’s phone had been turned off, and was in a bag next to the rubbish bin, along with his clothes and shoes. Whether Mr Milner would need any of them again was an unknown experimental outcome. And for that reason, as well as the need to demonstrate true scientific objectivity, Professor Lee insisted he be referred to as Test Subject Two or TS2 throughout. Even the written records of the experiment omitted his name, date of birth or other precise identifiers.
“Specs?”
“Test Subject Two. Male. Twenty-one years of age. Undergrad. Nice Tats.”
“Irrelevant! Anything else?”
“TS2 is regaining consciousness, Professor,” announced Harold, trying to head off another intellectual belittling.
“Then we can proceed.”
Professor Lee put away her crossword and her delusions of tenure, and turned her attention to the monitors. Thanks to technology, complete darkness for the human lab rat was not complete darkness for the scientists – infrared night vision cameras and thermal imaging provided dark, slightly blurry images of the interior of the chamber from both front and side. On the monitors, TS2 and the interior of the chamber were leached of colour.
“Still showing one point eight lumens, Professor.” The pinpricks of residual luminescence from the lights would be visible to TS2 when he opened his eyes.
“Damn LED bulbs.” The charge to carbon neutrality at the university was contaminating her experiment.
A groan reached the observers via the concealed microphone in the ceiling above TS2. Thanks to the baffles, almost none of the sound reverberated off the walls back to the man regaining consciousness.
“Experimental observation period commences,” said Professor Lee. She pressed a button on her laptop, starting a timer.
Time: 00:00
Lv: 1.8620 cd/m2
dB source: 32.04
dB reflective: -2.36
As TS2 sat up, he must have felt the restraint. He kicked his legs out, as though trying to shake off a blanket. Rolling onto his side, he ran one hand down his left leg, to the cuff securing him to the chain.
“What the fuck? What the fuck is going … where am I?”
He pulled at the cuff, trying to prise open the padlock. Giving up, TS2 attempted to slip it past his ankle, before feeling his way to where the chain disappeared into the rubberised grid. His actions were accompanied by language not tolerated in what Professor Lee’s estranged mother would have called polite society. Within a minute TS2 gave up and started shouting for help, to be let go, to be told what the fuck was going on, for his clothes and to let Rebecca know that it wasn’t funny.
“Who’s Rebecca?”
Harold shrugged rather than speculate on malevolent partners who might be attempting to reshape the power dynamic of their relationships, based on the principles of Gaslight.
“Never mind. Pleading and threatening at the same time. One or the other would be more logical.”
“Perhaps he’s losing it already.”
Professor Lee berated her assistant for not using proper scientific language.
While TS2 might or might not have already begun his journey from reality to fabrication, his ranting monologue, liberally punctuated with f-bombs, continued uninterrupted, until his stomach decided that two vegan hotdogs, a large popcorn and a large coke zero should not be allowed to finish their journey through the digestive tract.
“Make sure you leave everything spotless when it’s over,” the Professor instructed the doctoral candidate.
“Yes, Professor.” Harold feared that there might be worse messes to deal with, and was soon proved correct when the test subject first voided his bladder and then his bowels. Even if Harold did clean it all up, the stench of urine and faeces would be impossible to mask. In four days’ time, the Engineering Department would return from their Christmas break to discover that someone had mistaken their prized scientific facility for a toilet. We can’t hide this, thought Harold. Not that he cared.
On screen, the infrared and thermal images showed TS2 attempting to stand. He leaned sideways and then backwards before collapsing to the floor.
Time 06:18
Lv: 0.9622 cd/m2
dB source: 64.80
dB reflective: -2.68
“Observation at 06:18 that TS2 is unable to stand is consistent with prior studies indicating loss of balance.” This was nothing new; it was well established that taking away perceptual cues such as sight and sound made it harder to balance. Standing on one leg was a lot easier with your eyes open than closed.
Now on his knees, and indifferent to the detritus expelled from his body, TS2 was looking around like a feral animal, his head swinging first one way and then the other. He turned sharply as though in response to an unseen, unheard stimulus. Trying to stand again, he tottered and fell almost as soon as he got to his feet. Back on one knee, TS2 was shaking and shivering, rubbing his head as though to relieve the pressure. Deprived of the ability to see and to hear, the sense of space around the body dissipates, leaving the occupant of the chamber with the experience of being in a pressure chamber, as the air seems to thicken. ‘Like being in a black soup,’ someone had memorably described it.
Abruptly, TS2 pivoted his body, possibly to gain leverage against a threat only he could discern. Then, he screamed and looked around, as though trying to see his own voice in the darkness.
“Interesting. He can’t hear himself scream. A voice without an echo.”
Harold wondered what it would be like to have people without shadows, and how you would go about conducting such an experiment.
On the monitors, TS2’s eyes were unnaturally wide, staring at the demons created within his own mind.
Time 10:00
Lv: 0.0342 cd/m2
dB source: 54.11
dB reflective: -4.32
“Commence suggestion phase,” instructed Professor Lee when the clock reached ten minutes. “Ten decibels,” she added unnecessarily. The same volume as normal breathing.
Harold played the pirated soundtrack from the Blair Witch Project so low as to be barely audible; a low-pitched hum. Directional speakers pushed the sound at TS2 before it could be lost in the baffles. The response was immediate.
The subject ceased his rhythmic rocking, froze and then shouted. “Who’s there!?” TS2 flinched back from something unseen. Unseen, because it only existed in his imagination.
“I wonder what he thinks is in there with him?”
“Speculation is not helpful,” snapped Professor Lee over the sound of TST shouting at someone or something not to kill him.
Time: 12:26
Lv: 0.0076 cd/m2
dB source: 90.98
dB reflective: 1.04
TS2’s moans increased in volume, becoming a full blooded scream. He spasmodically kicked at his restraint one minute, and cowered into a ball with his arms protecting his head the next. “These are all expected responses, Professor,” said Harold unnecessarily.
Time: 14:11
Lv: 0.0028 cd/m2
dB source: 106.12
dB reflective: 2.00
“I can hear them. Inside my head. They’re inside me. You are inside me!”
“Confirmed hallucinatory response observed at fourteen minutes, eleven seconds. People are used to hearing certain sounds. When those sounds aren’t there, they substitute others,” the Professor’s voice logged, as TS2 started slapping his ears.
Harold repeated his earlier observation. It wasn’t at all necessary, but it was a subtle way of telling her they weren’t learning anything new which, in turn, meant that her research was worthless. “Behaviour consistent with prior test subjects who reported their heart beat sounding in their heads – some say chest as well – and a high pitched hissing – ”
“That’s the spontaneous firing of auditory receptors.” Professor Lee discharged her duty as a teacher, and implied her student should shut the Hell up.
Time: 18:23
Lv: 0.0009 cd/m2
dB source: 59.37
dB reflective: -2.14
Harold watched TS2 scrabbling at the floor, scraping off the rubber and stuffing it into his ears, his nostrils, his mouth. He gagged and retched, and then started the process all over again.
For the second time, Professor Lee told her flunky to clean up properly. “And make sure you replace the rubber.”
Having no idea where to obtain rubber coating, nor how to apply it to steel, Harold didn’t reply. The place would stink no matter how hard he scrubbed and mopped up the vomit and excreta, so why bother? Rigging the security cameras to show a loop of nothing happening wouldn’t remove the stench – as soon as they returned to campus on Tuesday morning, the Engineering Department would know someone had been here, and something unpleasant had happened.
Time: 24:16
Lv: 0.0051 cd/m2
dB source: 44.07
dB reflective: -3.26
“Fascinating,” breathed Professor Lee. “Subject is exhibiting primate-level response to stress.” Specifically, TS2 was scooping his shit and vomit up with his hands and flinging it into the surrounding darkness. A lot of it had dripped through the grid onto the baffles below, but there was enough left to decorate the walls with. Due to post-experimental cleansing duties, doctoral candidate Harold Hopper was less enthusiastic than Professor Lee about his development. Indifferent to his own remaining excreta, TS2 collapsed into a foetal position, with his arms wrapped around his head. As his body went limp, TS2’s quiet whimpering carried to the observers.
“Experiment concludes at 26:49,” said Professor Lee.
Harold wasn’t impressed. He’d gone for nearly an hour. Then again, he’d cheated, taking a sedative before stepping into the chamber and, unlike TS2, he’d known exactly where he was. He wondered how long a neurological psychologist would last inside the chamber.
“What about measuring heart rate and blood pressure, Professor?”
“Follow the protocol.”
Harold glanced at his watch, a quarter to eleven, and then reached for the tranquiliser gun. His meeting with the qualifying panel was scheduled for Tuesday morning. It would go much better if his supervisor failed to put in an appearance.
If he ‘followed the protocol’, it would take Harold at least three hours to dump Mr Millner, naked and insane, in the snow at Stonehenge and get rid of the stolen van. Then, he was supposed to come back and sanitise the chamber before Tuesday morning. But that would mean missing Christmas lunch with his gran.
When they opened the door, the reek in the chamber was like the portaloo he’d queued for before the start of the London Marathon.
“You’ll need air freshener,” instructed Professor Lee, already turning to flee both the revolting mess and the confines of the chamber. She found her egress blocked by her assistant. Giving Professor Lee a shove, Harold swung the door shut and then locked it.
When he got back to the observation room, she was screaming to be let out – telling him that he would have him placed under exclusion if he didn’t, that she’d make sure he never passed his viva, and wouldn’t get the citation credits she had no intention of giving him anyway.
Inside the anechoic chamber he could see Professor Lee’s chest heaving. “I’ll call the police on you,” she sneered. From the observation room, Harold was amused that the Professor preferred the prospect of doing time for kidnapping and torture to spending a long weekend inside the chamber. He could see droplets of sweat forming on her forehead already.
“Protocol has been followed,” he told her through the microphone.
Her hands dropped to her hip pockets, frantically scrabbling around inside them for what wasn’t there. On the monitor, Harold could see the Professor swallowing convulsively, her eyes popping, as she realised Harold had lifted her phone when he’d shoved her. Not that there was any reception inside the chamber. Turning, she wheeled and bolted for the door, tripping over TS2’s limp body.
“It’s all in the mind, Professor. Nothing is real except the quietness and the darkness. Everything else is in the mind. Beginning observation of Test Subject Three,” said Harold. He turned the microphone off and the lights out.
Time: 00:00
Lv: 3.419 cd/m2
dB source: 86.22
dB reflective: 1.04
Relying on the infrared cameras, he had to imagine the blood draining from TS3’s face. She made it to the baffles and scrabbled around, trying and failing to find the door handle in the darkness. Groping her way along the wall, in the wrong direction, it was a matter of minutes before she started looking over her shoulder.
Harold spared TS3 a glance while he went about removing all traces of both himself and his professor from the observation room. Alternately running her fingers through her hair and tugging out clumps of it by the roots, she had shifted from threats to pleading. “This is murder! I’ll suffocate when the air supply shuts off!” The hitch in her voice betrayed her uneven breathing. She glared at the camera, and Harold couldn’t figure out whether the expression on her face was one of terror or hate. He could also have told her that she wouldn’t, because he’d fixed it to run all the way through the long weekend. But the more terrified she was, the better.
“I’m claustrophobic!” she shouted, sticking her hands under her armpits, as though to protect them from the cold. Harold first made a note in the experiment’s log and then checked that the temperature had not dropped below the tropical thirty degrees the Professor had deemed optimal for the experiment. It was a pity he couldn’t tell if she was sweating.
Hoping he wouldn’t miss anything, the diligent researcher stepped away from the monitors to check out the fridge. When he got back, a can of Boddingtons in hand, TS3 was cowering next to the foam wedges and kneading her temples. All of a sudden she scrambled away from the baffles on her hands and knees.
Harold knew from his research what she was experiencing: absent sight and sound, there was almost nothing to anchor the mind to the here and now of its surroundings. Not quite nothing – gravity, the floor and a healthy dose of scepticism might provide a defence for a while, but those defences would crumble. Would a well-educated expert in sensory deprivation be able to keep the ramparts up for four days? He popped the tab.
Goosebumps couldn’t be made out, but he assumed from the way she was rubbing her arms that they were there. Her threats got louder and louder as the seconds ticked away. She could hear the fsssh, fsssh, fsssh of blood pulsing through her brain. That’s all it was, she would be telling herself; just my blood. But there was something else … there … in the corner of her eye, a patch of not-quite black against the absolute darkness. She stared at one particular point in the black soup, a point that was no different from the rest of the blackness.
How many times had she lectured him on the nature of the active brain and its inability to slow down? How the neurons would keep firing, trying to fabricate a reality without the usual sensory inputs. How the brain would eventually substitute a fictional reality for the one it couldn’t detect.
The TS2 test had run for 26:41. TS3 was a qualified neurological psychologist who’d made a study of anechoic chambers. She was also claustrophobic, a condition which would amplify the effects of sensory deprivation. The absence of sound reverbing in her ears would suggest the absence of space around her and the feeling of compression would set in.
Harold added to his notes.
Time: 18:23
Lv: 0.0362 cd/m2
dB source: 74.16
dB reflective: -2.98
TS3 was blubbering, begging and threatening. It also appeared to be taking her more and more effort to talk. Harold chugged half the can, and noted that the dispassionate expert on human response to stress was exhibiting the same inconsistencies as TS2.
“At 18: 23, TS3’s speech is losing coherency,” recorded Harold.
Crawling around, she recoiled as she came into contact with TS2, who was still showing no sign of regaining consciousness. Punching and kicking TS2 (it was hard to make out, as her voice was so slurred), but Harold thought she was telling Mr Millner that it was all his fault.
Time: 21:40
Lv: 0.0362 cd/m2
dB source: 92.43
dB reflective: -0.84
Stuffing the empty can in his backpack, Harold left the observation room. He put Mr Millner’s phone, wallet (contents except the cash returned) and keys in Professor Lee’s handbag, and draped the man’s clothes over the chair in the corridor outside the chamber door. When Harold came back to pack up his laptop, Professor Lee was burrowing under TS2’s naked body.
Time: 26:05
Lv: 0.0362 cd/m2
dB source: 61.94
dB reflective: -0.26
Professor Lee would have the demons of her own mind and TS2 to keep her company, until the Engineering Department returned from the long weekend. Although tempted to stay and see what happened when or if TS2 regained consciousness, Harold gave priority to partaking of his gran’s Christmas turkey. He would also enjoy the prospect of facing his qualifying panel without the spectre of his supervisor derailing his academic progress again. Best of all, someone else would have the joy of cleaning up the mess left by two lovers who’d accidentally locked themselves in an anechoic chamber over the Christmas break.
As the future Dr Hopper walked through the snow, he tried to remember how long a person could survive without water.
Simon Berry is a recovering lawyer who calls Hong Kong home. He has completed an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English literature at City University. In addition to writing short stories, his novels A Wasting Asset, and A Debt To Pay are available on Amazon. He is working on his next fantasy novel.
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I think this story needs a Pt II. I'd like to see the results of 4 days in the anechoic chamber on Lee's mental health.