The Shell - Part One

Short Fiction - Science Fiction

Jun 24, 2024

It’s been a while since I did something a little different…

I have been quietly working on a (very) soft sci-fi story in between other projects. This story is not related to Ferris Island, but is more of a personal experiment in trying other genres that are outside of my comfort zone. In the past you have been so gracious when I share my experiments, so I decided to share this one with you, too!

I anticipate that this story will be three shortish parts long, just to give some narrative breathing room. Look out for Part Two this week, should time and energy allow!

I truly hope you enjoy!

If you like this story, and you want to see more like it, please let me know with a like, comment, share, or restack!
And for more fiction fun of various shapes and sizes, subscribe for free!

For more Non-Ferris-Island Tales, check out the Other Tales index!

a barn in the middle of a field with trees in the background — Photo by Elisa Photography on Unsplash

The air in the little thin-walled office had grown thick through the summer day with no windows to open. A tiny oscillating fan sighed ineffectually, barely powerful enough to disturb the dust on the piles of cardboard boxes scattered throughout the space, and its breath did not even reach the gray-haired man sitting hunched at the desk in the corner.

Burgess checked the clock. It was just about time to quit for the afternoon. He pulled the latest shell out of its socket in the computer and took up a Sharpie, carefully labeling its smooth military-brown plastic casing: DISCARD. He then tossed it into the bin with the others destined for the incinerator.

He removed his thick glasses, gave them a wipe with the hem of his shirt, looked down at the open box beside his feet. Orderly stacks of shells glinted up at him, each no longer than a fountain pen and no thicker than his pointer finger. He probably had time for one more.

Burgess reached in and picked one at random. Gave it a quick look, the serial number still legible: PALA122640.

Day after Christmas, Burgess thought, grimly. Poor sap.

He took off the protective cap and plugged the shell into the computer, giving the outdated machine a minute to chew on the data. After a pause the full profile display splashed across the screen first, and Burgess’s fingers froze on the trackpad.

That face, those eyes.

It was Paul Lannigan.

Burgess stared into the photo of the young man for a long time, clock ticking away above his head, before he could make himself scroll down to check the degradation numbers.

The psychoneural plug was at eighty-five percent integrity; not too bad. But the shell itself…shell integrity was down around sixty-percent. Just below the acceptable margin.

Burgess chewed on the inside of his lip, thinking it over. It would be just as easy to throw it in the discard bin, have done with it. Have done with Paul. It would be over, all over.

But he had waited too long to let this go. Thirteen years.

He scrolled back up. That face.

Decision made, he unplugged the shell, replaced the cap, and slipped it into his breast pocket. Then he clocked out, shut down his computer, and packed up his things, tidying the bins into their proper places: the discard bin by the back door, the preservation bin by the front. After sorting, they were no longer his responsibility. Others took care of that. He never saw them; they came and went after dark.

Despite how featherlight the shell was, his pocket felt heavier than usual as he left the unassuming little portable office into the late summer afternoon, locked up, carefully descended the rickety stairs, and climbed into his pickup. While it was quiet here on the old disused lot—hidden in plain sight—around him he could hear the bustle of smalltown traffic, commuters returning to the little town of Index from far-flung places where there was better money to be made.

The residents of the little town had no idea what was going on in this quiet corner, out of sight. It was better that way. The operation had already been kicked out of Sultan and Gold Bar by angry do-gooders who felt that the whole thing was unsavory, resented the desperate people who moved in from all over the state, waiting, hoping beyond hope to see their loved ones again.

But Index quietly readied itself for dinnertime, none the wiser.

Burgess started up the old truck and headed east, toward home.

*******

The quality of the air always changed as Burgess crossed Steven’s Pass, an inherent sweetness, winding around in the gold-bathed lateness of the evening the closer he got to home. The mountains peered down on him with gentle detachment, as though they allowed this twice-daily trek with all the benevolence of dozing gods, eyes half-open. About an hour each way, home to work, work to home. It was a long journey, and his aging body felt every mile of it, but it was worth it. The shell in his pocket—the others, the list—was worth it.

About twenty miles past the pass and he pulled off the highway, deeper into the loneliest parts of an increasingly-empty region. He was old enough to remember a time when these woods were swarming with tourists in the summer, mosquito-thick, but less so anymore. All the real money stayed in the cities, these days. Abandoned cabins and summer houses dotted the landscape like grave markers.

The woods closed in, dry pine woods fragrant like incense, a shiver of breeze off the nearby alpine lake, and the fine dust swirling up from the gravel road, the last stretch to home.

Burgess gave a polite fingers-raised wave to the first house on the row where Widow Rogers lived, wound around slowly through the compound—the cabins, the cottages, the kitchen, the park, the playground—to his own squat yellow farmhouse rambler tucked back against the trees with a handful of outbuildings, the free-roaming chickens greeting the rumbling arrival of the pickup with guffaws of hunger.

As he got out of the truck, he caught the flicker of curtains in the neighboring houses down the row. Front windows, kitchen windows, watchful, hopeful. Burgess sighed. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to keep this to himself. It felt a little bit selfish, like hiding candy in a drawer that no one else can find.

But this one was for him, alone. This one wasn’t on any list.

He skirted around his house, heading directly for the barn, the hens following at his heels. From the road it looked like any old barn might, and in so many ways it was. He entered from the back, through an unassuming door into the small space that was set apart from the rest, a fully finished little room, insulated from the capricious cold and heat here at the feet of the mountains. He flicked on the lights to reveal a tumble of machinery, patchworked together from stolen bits and pieces over the years; a large coffin-sized cylindrical plexiglass tank in the center, lying on its side, and a tangle of cords and tubes, pipes and pumps, wires and buttons. Squeezed up against the wall was a small computer console, almost an exact echo of the one at the office.

Burgess pulled the shell out of his pocket and crossed to the computer, flipping small switches and tapping buttons on his way over. At the computer, he plugged in the shell, and the young man’s face appeared on the screen, again. PALA122640.

“Everything okay?”

Burgess turned, unsurprised, to see Naomi walk in, hair in second-day-wispy French braids, apron over her dress and flour on her hands. Despite living next door for a year or so, Naomi had never seen the machine in action before, though she knew of its existence. Everyone here did. She took in the humming scene with unguarded interest.

When Burgess didn’t answer, Naomi added, “I was just making biscuits to bring to supper when I saw you drive up and head straight in here. Is this someone from the list?”

“Nope,” Burgess replied. “This one is different.”

“Who is it?”

Burgess shrugged. “Young fella. Paul Lannigan. Erased in 2040.”

Naomi asked no further questions, and Burgess offered no further answers. She simply peered over Burgess’s shoulder as he clicked through menus on the screen like second nature.

Finally, the display prompted him with a choice.

Burgess hesitated, that sixty percent shell degradation hanging like a ghost over the whole operation. This could be...bad. He’d had his chance to discard the shell, and he hadn’t taken it. If he made this decision, there was no going back. Not easily.

His finger hovered over the button for what felt like an eternity. Then, before he could talk himself out of it, he let it fall.

He selected PRINT.

The machine whirred to life, pulling water from the well-pump through special pipes at the back of the barn, filtering and stabilizing at the proper concentration in the guts of the mechanism, and spilling into the tank as artificial amniotic fluid.

Naomi’s green eyes—often too tired, too old for her age—widened like a child’s as she watched the cylinder slowly fill with pale amber liquid.

“What happens now?” she asked in a reverent hush.

“We wait,” Burgess replied, standing from the console with a grunt and stretching his back. “Takes three days from start to finish.”

She laughed a little, a hollow sound, crossed her arms over her apron, but her eyes never left the tank. “That feels like nothing, all things considered. Three days to make an actual miracle.”

Burgess sighed, gave his glasses another polish. Miracles were in short supply, these days, and Naomi of all people should know it. But their tentative, neighborly friendship hinged on saying as little as possible and asking even less, so he just nodded absently and replaced his glasses.

“It'll pass faster without us watching,” he said. “You get back to your biscuits. I gotta feed the chickens.”