Shell

By I. B. Hippe

:.The Subject sleeps.:

 

A storm brews in the mind of a comatose girl where figments of her imagination vie for control of the isolated space therein referred to as the City.

 

Physics are unraveling. An office worker takes a tumble through twentieth-story glass. A high school girl chases the fleeting concept of "normalcy." A pair of inquisitors strive to bring about a swift explanation for the increasingly fantastic, inexplicable phenomena occurring around them. And on the outside sits a shady scientist with a wild theory claiming to have the answer to it all.

 

As the inquisitors work to set things right, latent forces awaken in the City's veins threatening to bring about a flood that will wash away more than just the City inside the Subject's mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verdant Angle Press
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737386629

I. B. Hippe

Raised in Alaska and educated in the Pacific Northwest, I. B. Hippe holds a bachelor’s degree in English and minors in Japanese and Writing. He’s particularly fascinated by doors, gates, and old, dilapidated things, and firmly believes that a healthy mind is not achievable without a healthy body (and vice versa). If you were to ask him his guilty pleasures, he’d say coffee, sparkling water, and in the cold, dead of winter, a good heater. He currently lives in Japan with his wife and son.

Book preview

Outside

The Subject lies comatose on a laboratory table, some space-age princess to be awakened by no prince. She’s the latest in a long line of subjects—a girl provided in the interest of advancing research into foundational physics. Only this one, unbeknownst to all parties involved, is different.

An old man busies himself gathering readouts and adjusting dials. Concentration. Pressure. Flow rate. A woman works silently beside him.

The girl is hooked up to all sorts of devices, not the least invasive being a pair of IVs. One IV trails from a suspended vessel of space-black liquid into her wrist; the other from her opposite wrist into a cistern at the foot of the table.

The old man observes a nearby monitor and sees that the automated internal mapping process (the perambulation) is moving along well. It’s a delicate act, marking the affected sectors for extraction, but it’s the only way to bring the Subject back from the brink, which he fully intends to do once his research is complete. He hasn’t lost a subject since Subject 15. Not since—

The graph on the monitor spikes.

Wait.

Something’s off.

A surge in brain activity. Erratic. An aberration.

The old man motions to his assistant and she hands him a sensor which he passes an inch or so above the girl’s body. Another monitor displays the results as a series of contour lines. He comes to a rest at the girl’s temple where the monitor readout peaks.

There’s something there.

Something that shouldn’t be.

The tip of an iceberg about to be found.

Book 1: Perambulation

That which lacks definition is free to assume any form.

Chapter 1: Stitch

Day 1, Thursday, 1:25 p.m.

:.The girl is an aberration

who will discover Gravity,

The flock will orbit and follow her

down.:

Nakami Murazaki attends an all-girls high school in the northeastern quadrant of the City. From the outside she appears as plain as can be, straight black hair down past her shoulders, bangs cut into place just above her eyebrows. Her eyes are black or brown depending on the light, depending on her mood. When she is happy her irises light up to a burnt chestnut hue and when she is sad or angry they dim to the color of deep space.

A chill permeates all things this November afternoon. There’s also an itch no matter how hard Nakami tries to scratch, she can’t quite reach. The former causes ripples to form on her skin. The latter manifests itself on her nose, which by itself is only a minor annoyance, but after rubbing the bottom of her septum with the knuckle of her forefinger for the better part of a day, it’s starting to turn rather red and irritated.

She sits cross-legged on the floor of the library among a patch of uniformed classmates (white socks up past the knee, navy skirt hems falling just an inch before the cuff) lounging about plushy, low geometric shapes—the newfangled beanbag chair—irretrievably submerged in their handhelds. Any librarian worth her salt would have a curt word to say about their behavior in the sanctum of the school library, but if she is on duty, she is nowhere to be seen.

Feeling threatened by the haze of drowsiness settling in around her, Nakami decides to take a stroll through the shelves and maybe find herself a book to occupy her attention. Some of the other girls glance up at her, but most of them can hardly be bothered to peel their eyes away from their screens.

What is it, an idle game you’re all playing? Tap tap tap the screen and together you can slay dragons? You all, Nakami reflects, surrender yourselves too willingly to the expedient release of dopamine.

The library LEDs pale in comparison to the wide rays of daylight beaming through the tall windows and igniting the spiral galaxies of dust motes spinning in Nakami’s wake. As she proceeds deeper into the library, the space around her begins to warp, prompting a series of strange occurrences that could easily be called glitches.

It begins with the tightening of Nakami’s constrictor pupillae, bringing forth a sensation as though they’ve clamped down on a filter of a different color. Everything takes on a surreal quality and Nakami is outside herself, welling in the paranoia of being let in on a secret she shouldn’t be privy to.

And then her shoes come untied. First one, then the other some fifteen steps later—something that could be written off as a relatively mundane occurrence until you take into account her meticulous double-knotting routine that hasn’t resulted in a single failure to date.

These occurrences are explainable enough. Several steps later, however, a ribbon falls out of her hair and starts streaming behind her, growing in length with each step as though being unwound from a ball of yarn.

She drifts deeper into the library, winding through the labyrinthine aisles. The shelves stretch tall on both sides of her like ancient trees, arching toward the domed ceiling high above. She chases a narrow shaft of light into the bowels of a bookshelf where she crouches down and knifes her slender hand deep into the gap between two weathered spines. She finds purchase on a thick, scaly volume and tears it out of its cage.

Without so much as reading the title—only taking a moment to inhale a lungful of air and blow away the dust—she quietly retraces her steps through the labyrinth, carrying the tome in the crook of her arm (with some difficulty—it’s rather large) so that she can wrap the long, fallen ribbon around her wrist. Clouds roll into place outside the windows and all that dwells in her wake is darkness.

Nakami returns to find her classmates fallen into a communal state of slumber, eyes quivering and the light from their handheld screens muted against their bosoms. The porcelain-white arms hanging over the edges of their chairs gleam like bone under the sterile library LEDs. Nakami flutters to the empty space she left in the middle of them like a bird returning to roost and joins the sound of her own breathing to the symphony playing around her.

She doesn’t open the book. Instead she just sits there, legs crossed beneath her, and tunes in to the sound of respiration. Around her the library walls and the bookshelves of impeccably aligned spines begin to melt away. Her eyelids sink and she falls gently over onto her side, her head finding a spot on the floor just below the hem of a classmate’s skirt.

The tome slides out of Nakami’s lap and with a touch of gravity opens to a certain page in a certain chapter dealing with, had she been awake to see it :.and tempered yet the talent to understand it.:, the concept that beneath the City in which she dwells are veins laid out like circuitry on a motherboard, and that through them courses the substance shell distributed with the aid of an artificial heart. The concept that Nakami, like a caged bird, is confined within the City, and that its streets are porous and polluted. And, lastly, that all of it belongs to her—should she choose to claim it.

∞

Nakami descends into a dream devoid of color, navigating a wide channel between heaven-scraping towers of concrete and glass; every-thing is rendered in a placid, matte grey. Trees and lamp posts and abandoned automobiles materialize and dematerialize in a sunken fog that darkens like a tuft of cotton slowly being saturated with ink. She inhales it. They all inhale it. Every last pumpkin in the patch.

Her consciousness splits. Half of her continues a waltz through the dimming dreamscape while the other informs her dream with sensory input from the waking world. The buildings start to pulsate in rhythm to the girls’ breathing and when one of the girls shifts in her sleep and a sweet perfume wafts up, a bouquet of flowers appears and then dissolves.

Nakami is aware of a heaviness clinging to her—it’s her shadow, affixed to her like a shawl—only when she makes to shed it, the shadow clings tighter and the dreamscape sours. Ink-black trellises start growing up the walls of the buildings. Cracks appear in the pavement beneath her feet. She spooks. She runs.

She runs against a strong wind that ruffles her clothes and hair and blows away the lingering fog, revealing gutters that run swift and black on either side of the street. Liquid sloshes out onto the pavement, groping for her feet. She can no longer breathe, but she runs, even as she feels the inken tendrils twining their way up her ankles searching for fertile soil in which to take root. Her body, twisting on the library floor, recoils; she locks her legs together tight but is otherwise paralyzed, caught on the lip between two worlds.

The blackening tower walls display the faces of Nakami’s classmates in varying states of anguish—states the girls themselves are not aware of. Nakami is aware. And she has just enough strength to lift a finger out of her paralysis, offer up a pipe of breath, and squeal a squeal shrill enough to shatter her foray into the greyscape and dispel the carnivorous gloom that has settled into place around them.

Nakami sits up with a start, knocking the book closed, her eyelids blinking like camera shutters in a series of rapid exposures.

"Was that you, Murazaki?" says the alpha girl of the class, all long legs and parabola of hair pushed up behind a tall headband and falling toward the waistband of her skirt. She towers over a Nakami still trying to refocus her eyes on this corporeal world.

I—I don’t know? There was something—here. Didn’t you—?

Alpha Girl shoots a frown.

Sounds like you were having a bad dream, she coos in a level of condescending capable of only the most alpha in a clowder of cats. Next time don’t bother waking us—if you can control yourself.

The other girls encircle Nakami with crossed arms and jutting necks, trying to mimic Alpha Girl’s infamous sassy pose. Nakami’s face flushes a deep red, though she isn’t so much embarrassed as annoyed. The flush is just a physical reaction of her body that she has no control over.

One by one they filter away, leaving her staring blankly down the aisle as all of her classmates abandon her except for one—a small girl with large, rimless glasses that resemble a pair of full moons. The magnification of her lenses makes her eyes look like pools of maple syrup. She clutches a couple of books and a thick sheaf of papers tight against her small chest. A pencil case with swallows embroidered on it dangles from her hand. She speaks with a small chitter one might associate with a squirrel or bird.

Nakami, she says. I felt it. I don’t know what, but... it’s not so good, I think.

Her name is Hanako. Nakami knows her from math class. It’s their only class in common here at Hoshino Girls’ High School and this is the first time they’ve ever exchanged even simple remarks.

Nakami blinks her eyes a few times, wondering whether or not she should stand up or say something or offer further defense of her outburst, but the memory of her experience is already hazy. When at last she opens her mouth to speak, an obnoxious tremor lodged somewhere near her pulmonary organ mixed with the unease derived from the towering columns of books :.spines.: flanking her causes the words to catch; no sound comes out.

"Shell," Hanako sounds out, twisting her head around in order to make out the title of the book resting in Nakami’s lap.

Huh? Nakami traces Hanako’s line of sight. Oh, I didn’t notice.

Hanako’s lips remain a thin, straight line, no evidence of a smile in wake or on the horizon. Her long braids bobble as she rights her head. Nakami tries to get a good look at what it is the other girl is holding and is drawn to the papers almost spilling out of her arms, dense with old print like something straight off of a typewriter. A small shell peeks out from the spine of one of the books.

Just as Nakami resolves to climb to her feet, the sound of the school chime breaks whatever moment the two girls were sharing. Hanako offers a quick bow and shuffles off in the direction of the other girls, leaving Nakami alone amid the shelves with her hand raised in partial salute toward the withdrawing Hanako.

Chapter 2: The Sentinel

Day 1, Thursday, 2:00 p.m.

Nakami’s final class of the day is calligraphy, which is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, she is able to hide away in the mass of students, submerged in the meditative trance of dipping her brush, swiping, swiping , dipping her brush, swiping, swiping . On the other hand, she was never very good at the prescribed elements of calligraphy.

She doesn’t like rules when it comes to ink and rice paper. Rules are great in math or science, but here she believes that the mind should be free to explore the path of the brush, and her implementation of this belief tends to draw forth the ire of the sentinel who patrols the aisles of the calligraphy room.

Today’s blessing in particular is that it’s what the sentinel refers to as a refinement day. No new characters assigned or tested; students are instead free to refine those they find most challenging. This allows Nakami to immerse herself in the physical dimensions of ink and paper in an attempt to quell the lingering sense of dread now clustering about her brainspace like storm clouds.

Each of Nakami’s strokes is a mile-long ribbon of ink pulled across a barren, rice paper desert. Though the ink manifests in two dimensions, x and y, Nakami envisions them as but shadows of extra-dimensional constructs standing in an invisible z dimension. And while it’s true in a sense—the resulting characters signify thousands of years of culture and meaning and value—she firmly believes that there’s still something missing. Something physical.

Nakami exhales deeply, adjusts her posture, and writes her name, thirteen delicate strokes that find her just off center of an undefinable wedge of constant fluctuation:

中美

:.Nakami.:

The problem is that her name becomes static on the paper, and in so being inherently flawed—the antithesis of the beauty proclaimed to dwell therein. Naka- (中) :.inside, center, within.: -mi (美) :.beauty.:.

She tries again. And again. She is absorbed by the process. And yet however many times she tries to establish her place she remains on the outside of something, looking in, when she should be on the inside of something, looking out. The physics just don’t align.

Frustrated, she dips her brush in the ink once more, this time pausing to observe those around her. Everyone is silently composing their characters, equally lost in their own little worlds. Everything is as it should be over there. Everything is in its right place over there.

The sentinel walks the aisles, a dinosaur beneath a loose power suit passing judgment from desk to desk, scolding, criticizing, rarely praising, stirring paranoia into an otherwise earnest afternoon. Her suit is unflattering cotton draped over a tall, thin body wasting away with old age and what smells like a nutrient deficiency. Her gaunt face and hollow sockets hide little, as though someone had come along and polished away all decoration from the underlying bone, and her neck juts out at odd angles, craning to see the students’ work. It’s been weeks since she last colored her hair and the roots are betraying their true silvers.

The sentinel’s job is to keep the students on track, to ensure that they do not veer too far off course and stumble into something they shouldn’t dare discover—something like creative ingenuity. She patrols a boundary her students shall not pass.

The class today is exceptionally tranquil, the swishing of twenty-odd brushes punctuated by the clack clack of the sentinel’s hag boots and the hisses issued from between her cracked, tea-stained teeth.

Nakami turns to a fresh sheet of paper, letting the old one fall beneath her seat like a spent autumn leaf. This time she descends not with the characters in her name but with the gate into darkness:

闇

:.Yami.:

She surrenders control to her brush tip and all lines it insists on revealing on the paper. Yami is a work in cursive, one radical flowing into the next. The resulting character is deep and Nakami is right there inside it, submerged—so much so that she doesn’t notice the sentinel scowling over her shoulder. At least not until the sentinel’s shadow catches up to her physical location (it lags behind her like a ball and chain), at which point Nakami finds herself caught between it and a dark, dark place.

She chooses the dark.

Into the darkness she sinks, twisting through the gate. It’s as silent and black as deep space inside and it takes her a bit to establish that she is within a sort of tunnel. Phantoms materialize at its end in the forms of small, shell-bearing things (a turtle, a scorpion, a sea snail) that disperse into puffs when Nakami reaches out to steady herself. It's as though a whole future awaits her on the other side—if only she doesn’t breathe.

The yami she rendered could be a masterpiece befitting a museum. Yet the sentinel stands with her arms crossed and a disapproving curl on her lip, waiting for the inevitable pause wherein the girl will emerge to take a breath. In that moment will she then strike.

Nakami takes the breath.

"Miss Murazaki."

The sentinel’s croak shatters Nakami’s trance and upends the ink well, delivering upon her yami a darkness of another depth and decorating Nakami’s arms and blouse and cheeks with black speckles.

The sentinel sweeps her eyes across her own figure to confirm that she is not a victim of this clumsiness.

Hurry and clean up your mess, then, she huffs and rides the clack clack of her hag boots across the room to her desk. Nakami shall not pass.

Nakami is now the focal point of the entire class. No longer are the other pupils sober and focused on their work—they chitter on about the ink-splattered klutz making the walk of shame to the supply closet for towels and cleaner.

She should feel embarrassed, should feel something being the butt of her classmates’ hushed snickers, and yet she remains numb. There are forces at work in her brainspace that dwarf anything this physical world could possibly throw at her. The sort of forces that suggest a curtain has been swept aside, allowing her a glimpse at something to which she shouldn’t be privy. Something that’s been settling in around them like carbon monoxide or the coils of a boa constrictor.

Her thoughts, loud enough to completely drown out the white noise of her classmates, are intent on the events preceding calligraphy class. She wonders just what sort of door she has opened and whether or not she has a soul.

Chapter 3: Omen

Day 1, Thursday, 3:18 p.m.

The perambulator sloughs his way through the streets, a week’s worth of untamed stubble emerging in uneven patches on his face and neck like a malnourished mold. He walks behind a pair of oversized blackout shades not because he needs them, but because no one in the City wants to see what’s behind those thin sheets of plastic.

For him the world is rendered in an amber monochrome wrought of structures calving and cleaving not unlike blobs inside a lava lamp. Passersby are smudges of shadow that he simply avoids. It’s not difficult. Usually they avoid him, the creeper with a scarecrow’s visage whose meat manifests the miasma of spoiled organs decaying even as they work, pumping the fluids that keep him motoring along. Plus he’s a foreigner, and they don’t like foreigners around here.

The hive churns at the stem of his brain, edging him along the perimeter he’s tasked to establish. It fills his cochlea with a hum that has haunted him so long he knows nothing else—another white noise faded to the background amber. He needs no food, no water, and no rest, only the liquid shell that circulates through his veins in lieu of blood, thick and black as motor oil.

He follows the path of least resistance, a puppet on a pair of strings surveying a land foreign to both him and to the puppeteer who watches from the outside. He bobs along in the awakening current only ever a crash shy of being drawn into the undertow. Such is the delicate task of drawing the line.

The perambulator rounds a corner, sleepwalking toward some hazy, distant objective, when up ahead blooms an anomaly of brilliant, white, unadulterated energy that does not belong in an otherwise amber lake. Even as he watches it approach him, heralding his doom, he is powerless to move. The script propelling him along has struck an error loop. The engine driving him has seized.

To top it off it’s started to rain, droplets so densely packed they’re quite literally falling on the City in sheets.

Along the anomaly’s edges float long, interwoven vines that ebb and flow so smoothly they might register at a million frames per second. They expand and contract, alive, breathing, the wings of a creature hovering just inches off the ground. If the perambulator could dip one of his withered appendages into a bowl of alphabet soup and extract the letters A-N-G-E-L he might describe the anomaly before him thusly, but alas he can form nothing. He is an automated process.

The specter closes within ten feet so that its tendrils dance on the fringes of his stench. The hum within him shuts off and for the first time in ages he enters a vacuum, overcome by a silence completely foreign to him. If there was any moisture at all in his body, tears would be streaming down his face; instead he feels the pain of a body trying to draw water from a desiccated well, rusted buckets clanging off parched stone walls.

Above, some twenty stories off the City floor, a panel breaks. If the perambulator was to look up he might see an unformed blob hurtling through the air. A perched hawk might glimpse a body in a well-tailored suit, its red tie lapping at the rain like a thirsty tongue. An observer with narrative prowess might divine a man who’d been bit by something contagious :.like curiosity.: and coaxed into the current by a particular witch.

As easy as it would be to attribute the suit’s free fall to an accumulation of salaried life stresses and a fomented desire to relinquish responsibility to his two kids and broken wife, the fact of the matter is that the fall isn’t straight down—it’s an arc across a wide courtyard lined with meticulously trimmed hedges, six lanes of traffic, and a couple of sidewalks, making for either a rather sluggish interpretation of gravity or a :.glitch.: great deal of horizontal velocity.

At any rate, the suited projectile can be clearly defined as a man whose train has run off script and aligned with the tracks of another, head-on collision in three –

two –

one –

Chapter 4: Baseball

Day 1, Thursday, 3:58 p.m.

:.The man is an illustrator

tasked with keeping a record,

He’s peeking in from the future,

an eye behind layers of glass.:

God, what a fucking mess." Chief Inquisitor Hashime :.¥hä-shē-meh¥.: Motoyama crouches down at the scene of the incident. It's not the worst he’s seen, but it's close.

The street is all cordoned off with police tape—all six lanes of it—and the ground is wet from the onset of a sudden downpour that ended as quickly as it began. Everything in a fifteen-foot radius of the epicenter from lamp post to shop window is coated in shards of bone and brain matter. Teeth litter the concrete.

A salary man by the name of Takehiro :.¥tä-ke-hē-rō¥.: Takahashi took a dive out of his twentieth-story office window in the imperious spire known as Glass Wall and by an act of god ended up smashing his skull straight into that of some witless junker below.

Hashime is able to analyze most of the mess without so much as wrinkling his nose. The same cannot be said, however, for his partner, Michiko :.¥mē-chē-kō¥.: Nakamura, the newbie doing her best not to use the brown paper bag affixed to her mouth. Hashime slides his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to better observe the scene in the waning afternoon light.

One thing’s for certain—the junker’s not from around here. He’s as foreign as could be with his light hair, gangly frame, and long, deflated face partially eaten away by junk. No information on how long he’s been hanging around or how he got here. Odd. In a city of complete homogeneity, he’s bound to have raised an eyebrow before now.

On the surface it looks like the story of an overworked, under-loved company man and a junker in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. Case closed.

But if there wasn’t something in the way of that, the inquisitors wouldn’t be here. In this case the something is how the white collar managed to cross a hundred-some-odd feet of road and real estate before slamming into the skull of the now hollow-headed alien. That and the metal walnut they found dislodged from the latter’s head.

Let’s get this straight. Michiko’s voice is muffled by the brown paper bag. Above that she’s a pair of thin, tinted eyeglasses beneath an unmarked black baseball cap. "The jumper went headfirst through that window up there, across the six-lane street, and into this mutant."

Hashime takes his time to respond, mulling the scene over.

So it would seem. A finger of wind lifts the stench of gore into Hashime’s face and he retreats to his feet, knees cracking.

Michiko turns around and uses her paper bag and turns back toward her partner, wiping the sick from her mouth and pretending she hadn’t just done that.

You do realize that in order to span this gap, he had to have been traveling like twenty miles an hour out that wind—

Present tense, says Hashime.

What?

Use the present tense when building a case. Keeps things fresh. Hashime snaps his fingers for effect. "More in the moment."

OK, says Michiko. You realize that in order to span this gap, he has to be traveling like twenty miles an hour—

You do that calculation in your head?

Roughly.

Nice, says Hashime. You’re right. It’s odd. You notice the hole in the back of the junker’s brain cage?

It’s a little difficult to miss.

Seems they found something lodged in the back. Dislodged from, rather.

What do you mean, like a projectile?

No, nothing like that. Some sort of implant.

Interesting. So how does that answer the twenty-miles-an-hour riddle?

It doesn’t, says Hashime. At least not yet. Sorry—my mind likes to run. Whenever I hit an impasse I just keep going. Let the details filter through as they come.

It’s going to take the man a while to get used to having a partner.

What happened to the implant?

Lab.

Right, says Michiko.

She puts down the bag for the first time since appearing on the scene. Despite her youth there’s a resigned harshness to her features. What makeup she wears is only there to protect her skin from the elements and her hair is cropped short beneath her cap. Her eyes, small and almond-shaped, are tucked away in pockets of shadow behind her specs, and the thin line of her lips ties everything together into an expression of passive disinterest that keeps at bay the men whom she couldn’t care less about. She’s a career woman through and through. No lover, no mother.

She doesn’t look like she could be put off by anything, even such a grisly crime scene as this, but today she gets a pass—it’s her first day on the job, after all.

The felled is a foreigner, says Michiko. The fact goes undisputed. What’s the next step, Mr. Motoyama?

Hash, please, he says. Too many Motoyamas in the City. He pulls a toothpick out of his breast pocket and sticks it between his teeth. You tell me.

Michiko isn’t expecting the pitch to be thrown back at her like this but steps up to the plate anyway, swinging:

Well, we’ve got a good ID on the guy who couldn’t fly. Enough to follow up with his family, establish a portrait of his home life, trace that rat back to the cat... She pauses, waiting for confirmation from her superior. When she doesn’t get it after a few awkward seconds, she hurriedly adds, But that’s not so important at the moment, is it.

Hashime raises his eyebrows.

The junker is the anomaly. Lab results are pivotal. Find out the maker of the device, what it does, how he got it... she trails off.

Not much we can do on that front right now, is there?

Strike two.

Michiko takes a step back, crosses her arms, and exhales. She’s sweating through her jacket even as her hands remain frigid in the autumn chill. That’s her poor circulation at work. She’s book-smart, not streetwise, and the stench is really getting to her. She spins 360 degrees on her heel, her finger on the answer her partner is looking for.

Witnesses, she says. There’s gotta be some witnesses.