The Shell - Part Two

Short Fiction - Science Fiction

Jun 26, 2024

Read Part One here!

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And now, on to the story…

brown snail on gray sand during daytime — Photo by Niclas Lundin on Unsplash

“Is this what would have happened? If my dad had been fine to print?”

Naomi asked the question calmly, bluntly, over a sock that she was darning. It was evening of the second day.

Inside the tank, what had been an abstract soup of cells throughout the bulk of the first day had merged and coalesced overnight and was now a just-shy-of-six-foot human frame of bones and veins and the suggestion of muscles. Burgess sat at the console in his undershirt, sweating; the office in Index had been hot as hell itself during the workday, the little room in the barn felt stuffy, and something about the way the shell was printing was making him nervous, though he couldn’t put a finger on why.

“Yeah,” he replied, slowly. “The process is about the same for everybody.”

Naomi nodded, keeping her thoughts and secret sorrows to herself.

Into the pause, Burgess offered, “I’m sorry about it.”

She shrugged. “You did what you thought best. I trust that.”

Burgess stood from the console and crossed to the tank, peering in. The amniotic fluid fluctuated in concentrations throughout the process, pumped full of various nutrients depending on the stage, making the liquid cloudier than usual before the skin formed. Right now, it was a bit challenging to see what was happening.

But still, there was something off about the body.

“Anything look funny to you?” he asked.

Naomi looked up from her darning, joined him in a closer look, frowning through the plexiglass. “Is the left leg crooked?”

Well, shit. Burgess cursed his old glasses. He obviously needed a new prescription, but the nearest optometrist was too far away, too expensive. Yes, she was right; the left leg was printing crooked, foot turned in and tilted, hip slightly lower on that side. Walking was going to be a real challenge.

Sixty percent degradation.

“Damn,” Burgess muttered.

“Is that bad?”

“It ain’t good.”

“What’s going to happen?”

That’s a good question. Burgess was starting to wish he had thrown this thing in the discard pile after all. Might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Naomi was searching his face in a way he wasn’t accustomed to, and she must have seen something flicker through it that he did not intend, because she asked, in a small voice, “You’re not going to…stop it…or…get rid of it…? Are you?”

Burgess shook his head. “I intend to see it through.”

God help me.

“Has this ever happened before?”

Burgess went back to the console, rubbed the sweat from his forehead. “Imperfections happen, sure. That’s why the program was abandoned in the first place. Shells don’t hold their quality long enough and people started printing bad. That’s why I have a threshold I’m s’posed to stick to.”

“Like that story in the news.”

Harold J. Cooper. Now that had been a real horrorshow. Life sentence, like the rest. One of the first ones stored through erasure, a test case, no one figured it could fail. Overcrowding solved, thousands of state-wide inmates packed into cardboard boxes in a secure storage unit. Poised to go national, small regional trials already underway.

But then Cooper got pardoned out of nowhere a few years in, and it was a moment of truth for the program. The shell hadn’t held well in storage, and they didn’t know to check for degradation back then, so when they reprinted him…

Burgess didn’t like to imagine it. That was before he got hired on, before it all went to shit. But Harold Cooper; he was the reason the whole thing got shut down. The public doesn’t get mad about something until it’s shoved in their faces. The description of Harold’s failed printing—the visceral details, some journalist really milking the hell out of their liberal arts degree—got everyone’s attention. At least for a little while. Outrage burns hot and fast.

But no one thinks about the aftermath, the families of people like Harold. No one thinks about someone like Naomi. They just wanted the ugliness to stop so they could go on ignoring it.

The figures on the computer screen—fluid concentrations, time elapsed—were starting to blur, and he needed air so desperately he could weep, so Burgess said, “The skin’ll grow overnight. Nothing much more to see until then. I say we leave it, for now.”

Reluctantly, Naomi packed up her darning into the sewing basket by her feet and followed Burgess as he led her out of the barn into the evening, the heat of the day still sitting like a weight over the little neighborhood and turning the sun-drenched dirt road to rising, whispering dust. The region’s cicadas—softer singers than their cousins elsewhere in the country—filled the air with a trembling quality, readying to hand the baton to the nighttime crickets and frogs.

Everything waiting. Like a vigil. Everything holding its breath, even the wind.

Burgess inhaled deeply. The sweet smell of grillsmoke from the communal kitchen sang supper, soon. From their shared driveway they could see down the lane to the playground where the Valdez children were playing hide and seek, just flickers of joyous movement in their t-shirts and shorts. Their daddy, Mr. Valdez, had been one of Burgess’s first reprintings, the reunion that had made him think this whole thing could be worthwhile. They had not all been so smooth since, but he held on to that one. A touchstone.

He remembered the way Maria Valdez wept in his arms, the relief, the years of waiting turned to hope. That moment had made him think that maybe he could almost believe in miracles. Maybe.

“They all did this,” Naomi said, quietly, arms crossed. “Right? All the ones you printed.”

Burgess nodded. “Yep. It was all pretty much like this. Except the leg.”

“How many are still waiting? On the list?”

“Too many.”

“When do you stop?”

“When they’re all sorted. Or I get fired.” Burgess grunted a laugh. There was no way he was getting fired. Replaced, maybe, if the office in Index was discovered, relocated even further away from the prison at Monroe than it already was. Or if the higher-ups finally realized that he was quietly smuggling shells home—here and there, one in a thousand—reprinting loved ones on the side, reuniting families as best he could. Unlikely, at this point. But not fired out of nowhere. No one else wanted to do this. It was the kind of thing you could only do if you were numb to what it all meant. Thankfully, Burgess had seared his conscience years ago.

Two bins. Preserve, discard. The discarded ones went to the incinerator…and they were, on balance, the lucky ones. But Burgess didn’t like to think too hard about that.

“I’m not sorry it happened this way.” Naomi was watching the Valdez kids, listening to their shrieks of joy rising over the trees. “I knew it was a long shot to have Dad back, and I wanted that. But I’m not sorry I stayed.”

She sighed—poplar-leaf applause, lake-wave against the reeds, osprey wings flapping against the wind—and seemed to re-enter her body from flying away somewhere, a habit of hers. She turned to him. “I’ll see you at supper.”

As she walked back to her lonely little house next door, sewing basket swinging beside her skirt, Burgess listened to her footfalls in the unmowed grass and allowed himself a flicker of sympathy. There would be no tears of relief for Naomi, no years transformed into grace. Her dad was gone; his shell incinerated, degraded beyond use. Burgess did what he had to do, but that didn't fix anything.

Family is giveth, and family is taken from you. You don’t repair it like a sock, back to something like brand new, stronger for the damage. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

The cicadas thrummed. Maria Valdez stood on the front porch and called for her children, a hymnlike cadence of voice and affection and home, and Burgess turned away.

*******

On the third day of the printing, Burgess had his weekly day off. Around noon Naomi wandered over with a pail of corn to shuck; she was supposed to be on meal duty. As she passed the tank and peered inside, her face visibly paled with surprise. Overnight the skin had grown, giving the body a ghoulish appearance.

“He looks gray,” she said, taking up her perch on her stool and setting the corn by her feet.

Burgess looked up from the console. He had been keeping a close eye on the screen; the next phase of the process was about to begin.

“Yup, they all look like that to start,” he said. “Something to do with melanin and the printer. I don’t know. They get their normal color once they’re up and about.”

“Where’s the hair?”

“It’ll grow in on the head and face first, just a little. The rest follows later.”

Naomi studied the figure in the tank. “Does he look like he’s supposed to?”

In truth, he didn’t. But they never did, printed fresh. They all had that newborn baby look: skin too perfect, unmarred, just a little bit wrong, a little bit alien. Corpse-like. An empty shell.

But Burgess just nodded. “Close enough, from what I remember.”

That face, those eyes.

The computer chimed, and the screen flickered with a new prompt.

Burgess clicked: DRAIN.

Within seconds the tank began to empty, amniotic fluid running out through the pipes and away into a drainfield behind the barn where the weeds grew thicker, the grass greener. Naomi startled, then watched with uninhibited fascination as the liquid level slipped down, down, down, until the body in the tank lay prone, dripping.

Now that the skin was on, the twisted leg was even more obvious. But Burgess decided that it wasn’t going to matter. He willed it not to matter.

As long as he had Paul Lannigan standing in front of him, it didn’t matter.

The computer chimed again, and Burgess turned back to it. The screen was prompting him to begin the upload process. He pressed the button to unlock the access door on the far end of the tank.

“What’s that?” Naomi asked, midway through shucking an ear of corn.

“The shell is done,” Burgess replied, removing the slim cylinder from the socket and replacing the protective cap. “It’s just a body, right now. Needs the snail.”

“The snail?”

“The psychoneural plug. It’s got all the inner stuff. The spark. The memories, the personality. We call it the snail. Without it, a shell’s just empty tissue.”

Burgess stood from the console, approached the tank, and opened the access door. He took a wheeled gurney from the corner of the room and pushed it over to rest nearby, then pulled at the mechanism that lined the bottom of the tank which slid, like the tray in the base of a mortuary cold-storage drawer, so that the body pulled free of the tank and lay suspended in the free air. He maneuvered the gurney underneath easily, second nature.

“Wanna lend a hand?” he said. “Just hold the gurney steady.”

Naomi stood and held the railing of the gurney with both hands as Burgess levered the steel tray outward and the two halves of it separated lengthwise, letting the body slip gently onto the gurney beneath where it rested, perfectly still.

Naomi watched with held breath as Burgess went back to the console, took up the shell, and removed the butt-end of it, an odd little plug disguised at the base with a short syringe-like needle at its tip. This he pressed into the body’s right temple, halfway between the edge of the eye and the ear.

A green light on the plug began to flutter, then glow steady.

“Uploading all his memories and stuff now,” Burgess said, for Naomi’s benefit. “Give it a few hours and he’ll be a person, in a manner of speaking. Takes longer, older they are.”

All of his memories. Those eyes, remembering. Remembering what he did.

“He’s not breathing or anything.”

“Nope, not yet. The snail does it. Don’t ask me how.”

She didn’t.

Thirteen years. To look this man in the eye, and make his own decision. Last time he saw Paul Lannigan, in a distant courtroom under corporate fluorescent lights, those eyes had been empty of remorse. Cold. Burgess had never had a chance to face him, man to man. The law had taken that choice away, had decided what was what.

But Burgess had a chance, now. An opportunity to hold Paul Lannigan’s life in his hands, and no one could tell him anything.

I brought you into this world…I can remove you.

Naomi watched Burgess’s face, saw that same something flicker through it, a sort of madness, maybe. “Who is he?” she asked. “What is he to you?”

But Burgess smiled softly at her—it’s all going to be okay, now—and said, “He’s no one you need to worry over. I promise. Just some fella I once knew.”

And after thirteen years, it’s finally time.

I am going to kill Paul Lannigan.

It's only right. It’s only fair.