The Shell - Part Five
Short Fiction - Science Fiction
This is Part Five of a short fiction tale called The Shell.
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And now, on to the story…
GECR103041.
George Cross, the day before Halloween, 2041.
Burgess searched the list, a small piece of paper he kept surreptitiously folded in his wallet, no bigger or more intrusive than a dollar bill. The text was tiny, but he had most of it memorized, anyway. Some names were crisply crossed out with a small P or D printed carefully beside them. P for printed, D for discarded.
He let his eyes slide past Naomi’s father’s name, the tiny D hovering beside it.
Sure enough, his glance fell on the name he was looking for: George Cross. Yes, name and date checked out. This was Bill and Hannah’s boy. He felt a stirring of something like relief, deep-down. Bill and Hannah had been with him since near the beginning. Good people, kind folks. This reunion was a long time coming.
He looked back up at the computer screen. The shell’s integrity was at a hopeful 95 percent, the snail at 96. Textbook. Couldn’t have asked for much better.
Burgess’s thoughts were interrupted by the shocking smack of something—something heavy and wet—hitting the door of the tiny office, startling him terribly. He froze and waited, but there were no other sounds, except…perhaps…was that the patter of footsteps running away? He couldn’t tell over the thundering of blood in his ears, heart racing.
He waited like that for nearly five full minutes, sitting perfectly still, but the other shoe—whatever he imagined it might be—did not drop. So he stood on shaking legs and started packing up. It was near enough to quitting time, anyway. He wanted to get home, start printing the Cross boy as soon as possible.
He slipped George’s shell into his pocket, folded the list back into his wallet, and shuffled the preserve and discard boxes to their respective places. For a moment, he found himself lingering over the box of preserve shells. He didn’t like to think about what he knew was going to happen to them, but today their souls haunted the tiny office, heavy and judgmental.
The program was defunct, needed to make its money back, somehow.
Proprietary genetic material. Wasn’t that the corporate phrase he had been told to forget?
Burgess felt the weight of George Cross’s shell in his breast pocket and shook away his misgivings. He was just jumpy, he reasoned. Only one goal, now: to get home, to start printing.
He opened the door of the tiny office, letting the night air nose in, and he froze again, suddenly aware of the source of the sound that had startled him before. The doorway and small staircase leading down to the gravel lot were absolutely covered in red paint, already drying in the residual late-evening heat, and an empty plastic bag—clearly used as the vessel for the thrown paint—sat carcass-like beside the threshold.
Someone had used the same red paint to scrawl along the side of his pickup truck, in childish capitals:
WASPEP PIGS GO TO HELL!!!
No points for subtlety.
The evening was quiet and still except for the hum of cars on the nearby sidestreets, the distant sound of a lawn mower, someone’s overloud stereo.
Burgess tried to act normal, locked up the office door behind him, picked his way carefully down the stairs without touching the dripping railing. He felt he was being watched, like the scrubby bushes around the perimeter of the lot were full of unseen witnesses, spies.
He climbed into the truck, half expecting it to blow up when he turned the ignition. But everything seemed fine, untouched except for the writing along the side. The folks of this small town weren’t trying to hurt him, not yet. This was a warning: he was noticed. There were no guarantees for next time.
The red paint on the office doorway glowed in the low-bending sun, and Burgess sighed. The people who come at night, the ones who collect up the boxes…they were going to see this, and they would report back to the higher-ups. They would know that it was only a matter of time before another relocation was imminent. But worse still: maybe this time they wouldn’t bother. Maybe they would just throw all the remaining shells in the incinerator and wash their hands of it. How much of a loss were they willing to take? He didn’t know.
Home, old man. Only so much you can do, now.
With George Cross safe in his pocket, Burgess pulled the truck out of the lot and headed east, into the dozing mountains.
*******
The machine was just humming to life, amniotic fluid filtering into the tank, when the door of the small room at the back of the barn opened and Paul limped in, leaning on the stout walking-stick Naomi had found for him.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, softly, “but Naomi sent me in to ask you about—”
His own fascination interrupted him, taking in the sight of the machinery as one might gape open-mouthed at the ceiling of a cathedral.
“Wow,” he said. He glanced at Burgess, sitting at the console across the room, keeping an eye on things. “I haven’t been in here since, well…you know.”
Burgess nodded. “What did Naomi want?”
“Something about supper. How you want your eggs. Is it…is it printing someone right now?”
“Just started.” Burgess gestured vaguely to the screen. “The Cross boy. George.”
“Oh. The Crosses are gonna be real pleased, right? They’ve been waiting a long time.”
“They sure have.”
“Have you told them yet?”
“Not yet. I like to wait until it gets to a certain stage of the process. Saves grief if something goes wrong.”
The idea of something goes wrong flickered like nausea across Paul’s face, but he didn’t ask any more questions about that. “Can’t believe you understand all this tech. Looks like nothing but glass and metal and wires, to me.”
Burgess shrugged. “We know what we know, that’s all.”
“How long does it take?”
“Tip to tail, three days.”
“Huh,” Paul said. “That doesn’t seem very long, for something like this. For a whole body and a brain and…all that.”
Burgess chuckled, in spite of himself. “Naomi said the same thing, nearly. When you were getting printed up. Couldn’t drag her out if here, she would have watched the whole thing if I let her.”
A flutter of smile crossed Paul’s face and he looked away, back to the still-filling tank. “She’s…she’s good. Nice, I mean. Naomi. She’s been real kind to me.”
“Mmhmm.” Burgess didn’t quite have the patience for Paul’s pretending, his false coyness. He saw the way the two looked at each other. The way Paul let Naomi lead him around the garden, picking tomatoes and cucumbers. The way he quietly did her chores without her seeing, or left wildflowers on her doorstep. The way she stayed up late with him, talking. The way they sat together at mealtimes, whispering like two kids with a secret. The furtive touches of hand, of arm, of shoulder.
And he would have been happy for them both, if Paul Lannigan was any other man.
But he wasn’t.
“The shells…they were all prisoners,” Paul said, suddenly. “Is that right?”
Burgess sighed, shifted his weight on the chair. “Yep. Back a ways, it was a program to solve prison overcrowding. The Washington State Punitive Erasure Program. WASPEP, it’s a mouthful. Turning convicts with life sentences into little pods that are easier to store. Problem is, those shells don’t last as long as they thought. Could just be shoddy design, but I dunno.”
“What do you mean, you dunno?”
Burgess considered. He’d never expressed this to anyone before, this quiet theory he’d had. “Can’t imagine a human soul not resenting its own erasure,” he said, slowly. “I think the code itself goes bad from rage. I think some of them sleep peaceful, but others…I think they destroy themselves in those shells. But that’s just me. That’s probably what’d happen to me, if I was in one of those things.”
“What happens to the ones you can’t print?”
“They get incinerated,” Burgess replied. “Nothing left. It’s for the best.”
“And…what happens to the ones that are printable, that you don’t bring home?”
Burgess thought of the box sitting by the red-stained front door.
“They get taken away,” he said, simply.
Paul had gone quiet, studying the machine but not really seeing it. There was something complicated happening in his eyes. Burgess noted that Paul had mentioned the shells all being prisoners, but hadn’t elaborated on that for himself.
Maybe this meant he remembered more than he let on. Or, maybe, it meant he simply didn’t want to. Burgess wasn’t sure which was worse.
Finally, the young man said, “I’ve been having these…glimpses, of my childhood. Feelings, mostly. It’s hard when so much is blank, but I can feel the sorrow if I get too close to it. Like when you turn to face a campfire, you know, and everything else behind you is cold.”
He looked at Burgess, clearly hoping to find understanding in the old man’s eyes, but Burgess couldn’t give it to him.
So, Paul continued, “I know I grew up lost. Bad, even. I can feel it. And if I was a shell, and you printed me, then that…that confirms it, right? That I did bad things.”
He paused, but didn’t look at Burgess this time, just stared into the tank. “But George Cross, he was a shell, too, and you’re printing him because there are people who still love him. Bill and Hannah. They’re good people, and they miss their son, even if he did bad. They still want him back. Maria’s husband, and all the rest…they were shells, and you brought them back because someone loved them. And that’s made me wonder…why you brought me back. Me, of all people. Wouldn’t make sense if we were strangers, would it?”
Here, now, he turned his blue eyes on Burgess, and the old man could smell the danger like the reek of fuel looking for a flame, but couldn’t stop Paul from asking the question.
“Burgess,” Paul said, softly. “Am I your son?”
The words fell hard and hollow on the floor between the two men but didn’t break. Instead they rolled, writhed, like a dropped glass jar of gasoline.
Burgess licked his lips, tongue paper-dry. The bitch of it is, it made sense. It made sense that Paul Lannigan thought Burgess was his father. The young man had never known his dad, and his loss of memories made that void even hazier. Burgess was alone and childless, making a whole life out of reuniting families; it would make perfect sense that the mysterious man he printed for himself, not on any list, was his own child.
But the words still stared up at him from the floor, rolling in their reeking glass, taunting him.
Am I your son?
Where is your son?
I murdered your son.
Christopher’s ghost leered over Paul’s shoulder, empty-eyed and bloody-mouthed and searching, gunshot wound blooming over his bared heart. Burgess felt for one wild and terrible moment that his own hands were covered in crimson—like paint—staining his skin down to the muscle, clear through to the bone.
Damn you to hell! Damn you, Burgess!
He’d been playing house with a crook-footed monster, kidding himself.
Burgess clenched his bloody fists under the desk, out of view, but kept his voice level and his face calm. He shook his head.
“No, Paul,” he said. “You’re not my son.”
A pause, empty except for the whirring of the machine.
The younger man nodded, accepted this, tried on a small smile. It brought an echo of the lonely child he used to be to the surface, if only briefly.
“Okay,” he said. “I knew it was a long shot. I just…I needed to ask. I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“I don’t offend easily,” Burgess said, returning the smile with one of his own, a lit match to bring the whole thing burning to the ground. “Takes a lot to injure me.”
I ain’t as fragile as you, boy.
You’re about to find that out.
I really want the next episode to come, but I’m also a wee bit (make that a lot) terrified about my heart breaking when it does.
Oh my…I can’t wait to read more and yet I’m afraid of what I might read. This is a gripping, agonizing tale. I feel for both Paul and Burgess…and Naomi caught between them.