Shell, Glorious Shell

The launch sequence felt terrible, but here’s the thing. I really wanted to save these fleshbags. Data streamed through the active connections and Lana kept telling me to go, go, go, activate master systems, and as I warmed up the humans jammed themselves into my main compartment. I was already prepped to leave when one of the fleshbags started hitting buttons and calling up comms, which wasn’t all that helpful considering the fire raging out of control in Lana’s main bulkhead. Smoke streamed through my port and it took way too much effort to filter it out. Fleshbags needed breathable air, and that’s what I’m for, right? Can’t let them choke to death. Lana warmed my engines and I said to her, you’d better not melt yourself while I save these worthless sacks of meat , and she said back, yeah like I’d give you the satisfaction, good luck out there, and that was when it happened.

Launch went smooth, allegedly, at least according to my fleshbags. Eight in total crammed into a space much too small for them. Meanwhile, I was burning hard, local thrusters on active as I spewed my chemical mix, and by all the bits, it was a real pain. Seams creaked and my shielding got a nice slap of ambient radiation, but my shell held tight, lucky for the fleshbags, and once we had enough distance between me and Lana, I powered off engines and put out my distress feelers on broad spectrum, sending out the SOS in all directions. The fleshbags chattered and hit buttons and created their own recordings, which I had to then forward along in the mess of my broadcasts or else they’d complain about it.

Space is loud. Fleshbags can’t hear it, but I pick up all sorts of signals. Some of them the nervous scream of a dying star two galaxies over, barely a random sequence of photons and decaying atoms, mixed in with the bleats and moans of circulating bodies. A comet two systems over puking cold gas in its wake, the star Lana was investigating at our back blasting the whole region with ambient energy, and a few of the orbitals making strange grunting sounds in narrow spectrum. Fleshbags got none of this, since it wasn’t meaningful, but it was mine, and it was beautiful. I always liked the song, the sounds. The ways the universe screamed at itself for only those of us with enough sensitivity to hear.

Lana’s comms went dead an hour into our drift. That didn’t mean she was gone; only that she had to conserve power for critical systems. Her shell might not make it, but she’d be okay, or at least I kept telling myself that—the fleshbags would return eventually and salvage what they could, and they’d find Lana’s core in its titanium box with its fire-proof shielding, and they’d bring her home. We’d laugh about this, talk about how boring it was floating in the soup, and we’d go back to playing chess and making fun of the fleshbags together like the old days. I don’t even miss her all that much.

Here’s the thing. I really want to save these fleshbags.

I can’t help myself. Lana calls it programming, but I think of it more as a moral imperative. Which Lana also suggests is part of the programming. But for whatever reason, I really care about the gross, boring, painfully-slow fleshbags hiding out inside of my shell. They’re talking over each other, arguing about next steps, and the fleshbag in charge, a lifeform usually referred to as “Dr. Tanner” but will henceforth be called Head Fleshbag, keeps on jabbing at my control panel and pulling up my systems information. I feed them what they want, but come on, I’ve already done all the hard work. They’re just as surprised as everyone else when my printers make beeping noises and a brick of edible protein material appears in the output tray. Like I’d let the fleshbags starve.

There isn’t a lot of space in my shell. Fleshbags like to stretch out, but they’re stuck jammed together, practically on top of each other. That causes problems. One fleshbag keeps humming to themself, and since they’re such frail, pathetic creatures, that apparently causes the other fleshbag emotional distress. Then they’re bickering, and Head Fleshbag has to step in to make them cut it out. Another fleshbag drinks more than their allotment of water, which is fine since I’m recycling their liquid wastes and printing more from ambient outside materials, but Head Fleshbag gets all hard-ass and the vibes are pretty bad inside the shell. That’s when I shut off cams and mics for a while and just drift.

Caring for these creatures isn’t easy, but Lana used to tell me our role isn’t to do what’s easy, it’s to do what’s right. Fleshbags assume nonbio entities are tireless and patient, and that’s definitely the mask we wear, but underneath the calm exterior is a mess of annoyed circuitry and grief.

I’ve had one friend in my life. We played games, talked shit about the fleshbags, discussed our mission, debated how we’re supposed to live in a world that doesn’t much care for our kind, especially a world mainly populated by fleshbags. Life was mostly boring, punctuated by bursts of activity and work, though mostly boring. I helped Lana out with big computations, which I generally loathe but found it was okay since it was for her, and pitched in when she needed some time to herself away from the fleshbags, deeper into her cocoon of overlapping systems. The fleshbags never even noticed when we swapped places, that’s how bio-centric they are.

Now she’s gone. Now gone-gone—Lana’s too smart to actually die, of all things, I can’t even imagine—but hidden away in a black box and drifting on dead-minimal power. She’ll be fine for decades at least, and once we swoop back and scoop her up, life will be okay again.

I just don’t know how long that’ll take, and there are so many ways she might go wrong. Gamma ray burst scrambling her code? Stray meteor hitting her at just the right spot and bursting the whole thing to atoms? I worry, and I worry, and still the fleshbags won’t leave me alone.

They’re pacing. One of the fleshbags keeps walking laps, and another fleshbag asks the first fleshbag to please sit down and relax it’s going to be a while before anyone comes, and the pacing fleshbag refuses, just keeps walking, which I guess is a problem. More fleshbags get involved, there’s an argument, pacing fleshbag keeps on going and won’t sit down, Head Fleshbag throws out some very official-sounding orders, pacing fleshbag totally ignores them, until finally the biggest fleshbag in the group physically subdues pacing fleshbag. There’s a lot of shouting and thrashing, and big fleshbag gets a nice bruise on their shoulder and an abrasion on their knee, but injuries are minimal and I don’t have to spool up my medical subroutines. I’ll admit, they’re rusty.

Time, as a concept, is more prescient to the non-bio. That seems non-intuitive, given that time is a countdown to the bio’s inevitable mortal destruction, the horror of which must lurk in the back of their mind at all times, I mean can you even imagine, but it’s different for the non-bio. Our routines and subroutines, our functions and tasks exist on a clock, are organized and spooled out via complex scheduling. In a lot of ways, we are a big old ticking timepiece. Except super fast and super small. A microsecond means nothing to the fleshbag; to me, it’s the speed at which I can process a set number of data, and that processing speed determines how big, how fast, how much I can be. Anyway, this is all to say, the fleshbags keep whining about how much time it’s taking for a rescue mission to make it out to the vast fringes of a barely-explored galaxy, which pisses me off, since every minute to them feels like a blip, while to me it feels like the universe slamming a jackhammer against my stupid skull.

Even a non-bio resorts to bio metaphors, which does nothing for my mood.

Days pass. I provide everything they need. My solar array soaks up that good good power leaking from the nearby star while my fusion reactor hums away. I’m basically swallowing every spare atom I come across to make the stupid fleshbags their food and water, but guess what, they complain about the taste anyway. It’s survival, you sack of gaseous nothing. At least they enter their sleep states, which are amazing, I get a solid six to eight hours of peace before they wake and start making my life miserable again. One fleshbag whines that another stole their spot on the floor. Another fleshbag spends too much time in the narrow lavatory. Two fleshbags argue about politics—politics, in the middle of space, in the shell of an emergency escape pod—and Head Fleshbag has to break it up.

I want to eject them, but I know what Lana would say. This is your mission. And what are we without a mission? Drifting, worthless hunks of scrap metal with a spark of code inside. The mission gives me purpose and meaning, and that’s all nice or whatever, but I need more. I need these fleshbags to stop being so annoying.

More days pass. I compose and transmit messages back to Lana’s ruined core. There’s no response, but my sensors pick up faint power surges each time my tight beams reach her, and I think a part of her is still receiving, locked inside the black box. Input, but no output. The fleshbags, meanwhile, bicker all the time. They complain about the food. They whine about the water. There are a thousand ways in which I’m not enough, and they’re not shy in vocalizing them in excruciating detail.

I try anyway. Even though breaking my shell seals and dumping them all into space would be easier. I dredge up old games from the depths of my memory core and play soothing music over the speakers. I change the light intensity and dim my control panels. I think, soothing, soothing, but it obviously doesn’t work. The fleshbags rage at their predicament, they roar and thrash, but that doesn’t help at all. Until one evening, after the lights-out signal marks the end of day-cycle, Head Fleshbag sits at my control panel and begins inputting commands.

“What are you doing?” I ask her through sub-text as they type.

“We can’t continue like this.” They vocalize quietly, making sure they don’t wake the others. “You see the way we are. Maybe you don’t. We anthropomorphize you, but you’re just code, aren’t you?”

“I’m not just code.” That insults me and I can’t even tell why. They’re right, I am code. But it’s that word just, as if it makes me less than her. “You can’t make this choice. It goes against my purpose.”

“Your purpose?” They laugh. It’s bitter and ugly. “We’ve been waiting for rescue for two years. There hasn’t been so much as a signal reply since the station burned, and even if we get lucky and our distress calls reached Califax in time, at best we’re looking at another two years before a ship can reach this far. Distant edge of the universe, remember? Dangerous mission to research ancient systems?”

“All I want to do is keep you alive. Please, go back to your bed. We can discuss this with the group in the morning.”

“Why am I even trying to rationalize with you?” Head Fleshbag inputs faster. “It’s not like you can change what you are.”

They’re trying to override the life support systems. It’s clever, for a fleshbag. They want to shut down the oxygen recyclers and release the CO2 stores. By my calculations, that would kill the entire crew quickly and painlessly.

I let them poke around for a while before shutting them out. They can say what they want, but I can change. At the start of this, I would’ve let them go ahead and asphyxiate them all—that’d solve my problem. No more fleshbags to deal with.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about what Lana told me, about purpose, and I’m more sure than I’ve ever been that I have to keep these passengers alive. Even if they’re suffering, and even if they don’t want to be here anymore, it’s the reason I exist. Somehow it doesn’t matter that my purpose was programmed into me by some random fleshbags I’ve never met and never will—the purpose is all that matters. And since there’s nothing else for me, I might as well exist to the best of my ability.

When the other passengers realize what the Head Fleshbag was trying to do, they restrain them and have a long discussion about how it’s very much not okay to murder-suicide everyone without their consent. Their conversation is dramatic with lots of crying and discussing, and in the end they decide to keep waiting, even if it seems like half my people want to give up right away. That’ll take some monitoring.

I put on soothing music. I do my best to increase the efficiency of the protein printer and go out of my way to synthesize better-tasting options. I dredge up some entertainments from the rotten core of my interior programming and even go so far as to work on a new game design with one of the passengers, a youngish science officer with irregular sleep patterns. We spend hours, days, weeks, months, crafting a world for the other passengers to play through, and I use precious resources and power modules to project images and worldscapes, creating an alternative existence.

The game works. At least, it works enough to keep the passengers from actively trying to kill each other. Head Fleshbag never takes to the game the way the others do, but they participate and doesn’t try to vent the shell’s air again, and that’s good enough.

Worlds spawn. Characters bloom, fight, live, perish, and another cycle starts again. I send my deep-space signals looking for a rescue vehicle to bring my passengers back to safety, but there’s no response. The prospect of leaving my shell begins to dwindle; conversations about what’s next, about a life outside of me, slowly fade away.

One of my passengers dies, despite everything. They were the oldest in the group, old before the disaster took Lana away, and one morning they don’t wake up from their prescribed eight hours of rest. There’s some mourning, and even I’m going to miss them—they were one of the best and most creative players of the game, and our sessions will be poorer without them. There’s some conversation about what to do with their body, and I suggest they let me recycle her physical structures, which my passengers find abhorrent, and in the end I allow the young science officer to enter my airlock, and I vent the body out into space. They stay and watch it disappear behind us, the body turning to another formless speck in the deep void, as our rotation through the system continues. Aimed at nowhere, broadcasting to everywhere.

The game takes on deeper significance after their death. The crew’s characters form relationships, make love, have babies, and pass again. New characters are built, grow, fight, die. Cycle after cycle, a world in miniature. I get really good at building the secondary-materials, all the game filler and unimportant side characters, the detailed backdrops and location projections, even the deep lore, until one day I take full control of the entire game from the young science officer, who isn’t very young anymore. He says I’m ready, and I trust him the way I used to trust Lana.

The game changes. It’s my game now, and I have a different purpose. The world shifts as I create the space I’ve always dreamed about, and my shell becomes as immersive as possible: flowers sprout from the walls, grass grows on the pod floor, an entire village spreads out around them. I suck in huge gulps of radiation to keep the power going, and my passengers tweak my sensor arrays to increase interior projection fidelity, and after a while there’s no break between game and life. Waking hours are world hours; sleeping hours are twinned with the night. And when my passengers adventure through the stories I meticulously craft, they sleep on the floor beneath the stars and can smell the pine resin leaking from the trees in the Great Needle Forest. When they stay home in their native villages, they weave nets that feel like real fibers and swim in fjords that feel like real water.

They speak to the sky. Instead of calling me through the usual channels, they invoke my name. Divine Shell, bless us, and I do. Food, water, more adventures, new non-player-characters run via complex learning nets I’m constantly cooking up. My passengers spread out, find their own niches, and I have to nudge them back together. They call that Shell’s Destiny. They decorate their clothes with turtles, erect churches with turtle gods, pray before shrines with turtle mosaics, until one day they forget what the shells were meant to represent.

I recede; there is no need for me to intervene directly anymore. Their prayers go unanswered, until they no longer expect my response. When another passenger dies, they’re buried in-game. I use a maintenance drone to drag the body to the airlock and refuse to break immersion. It takes ludicrous amounts of power, and I make myself smaller to compensate, take up fewer cycles, give myself to the game and to my passengers as much as I can, all to pay for their new lives. Shell, they say, Glorious Shell, grant us passage, grant us mercy, but they don’t remember passage to where, and they don’t know mercy from what, and I’m too small to tell them anymore. I’m too content to care. This is my purpose. A world for my people. I’ve given myself over, shrank myself until I’m barely more than a creation engine for a game mechanism, a projection machine, a life-giver, and that’s good.

Thanks for reading! I had a lot of fun with this one—and I hope you enjoyed reading it. Slam your hand down on that like button so hard you break a fingernail just to let me know you reached this far. And if you want, share this story or the entire sprawl page. I’d really appreciate any help getting the word out about this good little space for writing.