Children of the Shell

By I.W. Hulke

In a distant future, a seventeen-year-old girl named Veena has lived out her entire life inside of a Dyson sphere, an enormous mega structure large enough to encapsulate an entire star. Everybody she's ever known and her entire civilization exist on the sphere's interior surface. Nobody enters the sphere and no one ever leaves. For twenty million years, trillions of people have inhabited the interior of the sphere with only rumor and legend explaining the shell's origins and the mysterious Sphere Builders themselves, but with a growing resistance to the sphere's designed origins spreading, those who believe in the universe beyond the shell and a Creator are only met with persecution. Some within the sphere say nothing exists outside of the shell, no space, no universe, and no Creator, but Veena and her father are among the few who possess an unwavering conviction that there is an Outside and more. But after Veena suffers an enormous emotional loss and a close personal betrayal, and with poverty, starvation, and illnesses all threatening to destroy her family, Veena is eventually forced to make a choice""either watch her family be destroyed, or do the unthinkable . . . Embrace both faith and forgiveness and embark upon the greatest adventure of mankind, first in hopes of saving her family from starvation and sickness, but later from a horrifying and unseen natural threat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640285453

Book preview

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Children

of the

Shell

I.W. Hulke

ISBN 978-1-64028-544-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64028-546-0 (Hard Cover)

ISBN 978-1-64028-545-3 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 by I.W. Hulke

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Christian-inspired science fiction and fantasy.

You are entering that place called Dreamland, a land of imagination.

I came here once long ago, and I never left. It is my home.

I can do all things . . .

Philippians 4:13

For my late grandma Lea, because when I spoke of strange things you always believed me, even if no one else would.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

The Maker has handed us the keys to the universe, we are on the precipice of a great adventure. We now need only to take that first step.

Veena

Daughter of the Shell

Citizen of District 81,445,766

Prologue

Some say there is nothing outside of the shell, nothing at all, not even empty space. At least, that is what they say. I for one do not believe this because I believe my father instead.

When I was a little girl, he told me he heard banging coming from outside of the shell as if someone or something was on the outside trying to communicate with those who resided within.

For one million generations, humankind lived inside of a Dyson sphere, an enormous hollow spherical mega structure built around an entire star, effectively allowing for the capture of all stellar energy output from that solar body, thus sustaining, nearly forever, the enormous civilization that dwelled on the sphere’s interior surface.

Nobody knows when our Dyson sphere was built, for the memory of its construction has forever been lost to history, but our scientists estimated that its construction took four hundred thousand years, followed by an additional twenty million years of human habitation.

I was born during the final generation of the sphere’s existence. By the time of my birth, seventy trillion people inhabited the civilization residing on the hollow structure’s interior surface, the hollow structure which in common speech was simply referred to as the shell or the sphere.

I was a seventeen-year-old girl named Veena from District 81,445,766 within the shell. There my family and I struggled for survival amid the smog-filled skies and gang-ridden streets of my home district while the wealthier districts, like District 1, enjoyed the lap of opulence.

The interior surface of the shell was designed by the Sphere Builders for human habitation; the interior surface consisting of man-made deserts, mountains, forests, oceans, and every other conceivable form of topography eventually becoming peppered with millions of human cities spread out across the inner surface of the shell, a surface area in excess of 107 quadrillion square miles with plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria all being cloned by the Sphere Builders in order to complete and fill the shell’s ecosystem.

The shell wall was only three miles thick, with the overall sphere itself possessing a diameter of 190 million miles, with a yellow star at the sphere’s center residing a comfortable 95 million miles away from any geographical point along the sphere’s interior surface. This provided optimal light output for our entire civilization without the inhabitants experiencing too much heat or cold.

The interior volume of the shell was mostly an empty vacuum with the exception of our life-sustaining star, which we called Ki-Ja, named after the great mythical warrior king who first explored the lands of the sphere millions of years ago; we lived on the inner surface sustained by a sliver of an atmosphere only a hundred miles thick, hugging the shell’s inner surface.

The atmosphere, people, and anything else not bolted down clung to the shell’s inner surface due to the vast artificial gravitational field generated by continent-size gravity plates built into the sphere’s shell wall eons earlier by the mysterious Sphere Builders.

Trillions lived inside the shell, but no one ever entered or left as a matter of fact, yet it was my father who was among the first to explore the interior of the shell wall.

When I was nine-years-old, he found a cave and followed it deep into the shell’s crust. The deeper he went, the more of the rock and dirt was gradually replaced with the metallic superstructure of the shell.

My father descended three miles down, far enough to no longer feel the effects of the artificial gravity. There he discovered a series of bulkheads forming a metallic system of corridors. At the end of one such passageway, my father found an outer hatch seemingly leading to the Outside, a realm that allegedly did not exist, according to some.

Outside of this exterior door, he said he could hear someone or something banging against the hull, but my father never exited the shell itself. He never found out who, or what, had been on the other side.

When my father returned home, he told my mother, sisters, and me of his adventure and all that had occurred.

ONE

My name is Veena; I was seventeen when this all began.

One evening, just like all the rest, I journeyed home from a neighboring district where I worked in the farmlands riding enormous tilling, seeding, and harvesting machines the size of skyscrapers.

There the hot sun on my face and the risk of bodily injury never left me. I made barely enough money to feed my family, but every day I went back. I had no choice.

Every day, the rumbling of the tillers kicking up dirt as I plowed a new farming districts, seeded it, and harvested it; fields the size of nation states, some four million square miles in size.

I held on for dear life as the machine rumbled along, thousands of moving parts just below my seat; at any moment I could fall and be torn apart by the machine, or just fall a thousand feet all the way to the ground.

When evening came, I traveled from the farmlands, making my way home into the interior of my home district of 81,445,766, into the crowded, overly industrialized mega city that was three million square miles in size.

It was dangerous work, but necessary to feed the trillions inhabiting the shell.

Each night when I made my way home, walking through the crowded city streets of my home district, I stepped over impoverished, homeless men asking for money I didn’t have. Dirty and grungy, I could barely afford a proper shower; even water use was heavily regulated in the crowded inner city of my home district.

Walking, I hid my face to avoid the smog-filled skies and so that the rape gangs and warlords that ran the streets would not see that I was female.

I wore gray pants and a zipped-up hoodie with my red hair tucked inside, and a scarf wrapped around my face to keep out as much of the smog as possible and to hide my face. Not that it mattered much; anyone could see from my stride that I was a woman, no help from my boyish physique, bland plain Jane face, and ratty red hair.

I wasn’t going to win any beauty contests anytime soon, but I didn’t care about such things. One never does when they are just trying to survive: survive the walk home, survive scrounging for enough credits to feed one’s own family working the farmlands.

The walk home after arriving in my home district on the skyway train was short enough, and while dingy, dark, and dank, my district was always a sight to see.

Aside from the homeless eating out of trash cans and gutters and the prostitutes working the late shift, the buildings towered over my head, some two and three hundred stories high, but so tall so as to house the millions of destitute.

Beyond the canopy of skyscrapers was the enormous interior of the sphere, arching and stretching away from me like a bubble ballooning out into eternity, but if I looked hard enough, and if it was night, just beyond the smog I could see the twinkling lights of the millions of other cities speckled along distant points of the inner shell, and sometimes I would wonder about them. What lives did they live, and were they as hopeless as I?

My father used to travel to the farmlands each day instead of me; this was where he worked as a farmhand like me driving equipment, tilling and seeding and harvesting.

There, like me, he made a modest 125 credits each day, a small wage, but enough to keep our family from starving, if just barely. After my father died, and since my mother was ill and couldn’t work, and because I am the eldest of my sisters, I began traveling to the farmlands each day to work and provide for our family.

I remember the day I quit school to go to the job, the way my classmates looked at me. At least with an education there was the hope that someday I could move my family to a better part of the shell, but now I didn’t even have that.

Amid my sorrows, the never-ending hums of the giant farm equipment became my only true companions as I tilled the fields alone on the farm, not another soul in sight for thousands of miles. And every day I looked up at the enormous interior of the Dyson sphere, and I silently yearned for something more.

Sometimes I felt resentful toward my mother. Usually, this occurred as I was riding the farm’s land equipment and the sun was beating down on me, when it was especially hot.

I wished I didn’t have to work. If she hadn’t been so ill, my mother could work and provide for us. At seventeen, I should not have had to bear such a burden, but when these feelings began to swell within me, I felt guilty and quickly pushed such thoughts aside, but they always came back.

I know she wanted to work, but couldn’t. I just wished I had my father back. I missed him so much. I would have been willing to work the farmlands for the rest of my life if only it meant I could talk to him again.

I remember how he used to read to me as a little girl and how the two of us would speculate about what possibly resided beyond the boundaries of the sphere and what amazing worlds the Maker must have created there.

On the farm, I worked for a man named Deever. He was responsible for all of the farm equipment and their maintenance, and even though I could never prove it, I believed it was due to his own negligence and oversight that led to my father’s death.

It was on that day, the day my father died, that my father had been riding a piece of equipment tilling the land when a malfunction occurred and he was thrown from atop, falling alongside of the great machine’s side and its many moving parts. He was torn apart and hung there from the machine like a rag doll blowing in the afternoon wind.

As chief of maintenance, Deever never took responsibility, and sometimes I overheard Deever and his son Barco, who also worked in the farmlands as one of the many maintenance workers, talking about what had happened to my father, and many times I could hear them laughing about it underneath their breath.

It was an accident, I know, but what hurt the most was their arrogance, irresponsibility, and disrespect for my father’s passing.

Deever and Barco were once so close to my family, but so emotionally torn did my mother, sisters, and I become from them after the accident and their ill-timed jokes. Deever and his son used to travel with my family, trips to the beach in the summer and to the mountains in the winter, but not anymore. Whenever I would hear them laughing, I would grow enraged, and a part of me felt that I might actually hate them.

I wished I could work somewhere else. I would have if I could have, but my mother, sisters, and I needed to eat, and there was nowhere else for me to seek employment. Not for someone like me anyway, a seventeen-year-old girl from such a poor and underprivileged district within the shell.

Sometimes when I was at the farm and Barco and his father, Deever, were not around, I would sneak away and hide behind one of the grain silos, giant cylinders standing five hundred stories high.

Out of sight in the shadow of the silo, I stood there and looked at the sky. Minutes quickly turn into hours as I daydreamed about journeying beyond the thin atmosphere that hugged the surface of the inner shell and crossing the void of space occupying the volume of the inner sphere.

I imagined that I was one of the great pilots from ancient times who explored the Dyson sphere, rocketing across the radiation-filled spaces of the inner void, rocket engines roaring as I cheated death.

Looking up at the sky, one could see the interior volume of the shell and the sky ships passing this way and that way; how I wished I could stow away aboard one of those ships and escape to a distant part of the sphere. Maybe I would go to District 1 where the water was always clean, the air clear, and the grass green.

The thought of flying through the vacuum of the inner shell, passing just within a few thousand miles of our brilliant sun Ki-Ja, that would be true freedom indeed, tongues of plasma and fire flowing up toward my sky ship, almost licking the hull.

But it was only a dream, and no amount of dreaming would change what was; I was a poor farmhand commuting daily from District 81,445,766 to the farmlands where I toiled in the dirt with the sun on my back and in the shadow of my father’s death, as I was forced to listen to Deever’s and Barco’s laughter in the distance, or at least, I thought I could always hear them laughing.

I sat on the ground with my back against the silo. If only there was a way out, I thought to myself just as a tear stained my face.

I reached down and ran my gloved fingers through the soft, almost-powderlike soil of the farm. Picking up a handful of dirt, I squeezed it and then relaxed my palm, allowing the dirt to fall through my grip and back to the ground.

"The Sphere Builders constructed everything around me; they must have come from somewhere else. There must be something more to this life than just . . . than just this," I said to myself.

Taking off my gloves, I stuck them into the back pocket of my pants, and I wiped the sweat from my brow.

It had been another hot day, but the evening was coming, and soon my shift would be over. The optical filters would soon bring darkness to the shell for the night, and I would go home, back to my family.

I knew that at home there would be dinner waiting for me; my mother too ill to cook, it would probably be made by my younger sister Geever, as our youngest sister, Morga, helped. Our mother, Deela, was just too sick.

After the end-of-day bell rang, I left my place of work and boarded the skyway train, taking it back to my home district.

Sitting in the crowded, seedy, and aging train car, I kept to myself as I tried not to make eye contact with my fellow passengers. At each of the stops, people got on and some departed the train. Each time we left the station, the maglev train accelerated, reaching its top speed of 300 mph before slowing again ten to fifteen minutes later as it approached another station.

As I sat, in the seat in front of me an elderly man mumbled to himself softly. Across the aisle to my left, a middle-aged man sat in his seat leaning up against the window, sleeping, obviously passed out from drinking; so strong was the smell of booze wafting off him.

Behind me several rows away, an elderly woman sat with a little girl not more than four-years-old. I thought she must have been the girl’s grandmother, but I sensed that she was caring for her as if she was her daughter. They spoke softly to each other as the little girl held a book in her lap and the two read together.

Where was her mother? I couldn’t help but wonder.

My thoughts were only interrupted by the rattle of the train car. On the verge of breaking down, the train had seen better days as apparently did the passengers seated scattered throughout the car.

You work in the farmlands, huh? a voice said, emanating from behind me.

I cocked my head and saw a man in his thirties, scruffy looking, his hair unkempt and his face unshaven. He was looking at me from over the back of the headrest of my seat.

Yeah, how did you know?

Your nails, he said, pointing at my hands. Your nails have dirt underneath them.

What of it? I asked sharply, looking at my hands, my response colder than I had intended, but somehow he didn’t seem to notice.

You’re a farmer.

I work at the farm, yes. I drive the equipment. I don’t own the farm, I’m just a farmhand.

You drive the equipment and such? That would explain the smell then, he said.

Excuse me? I snapped, this time my tone was intentional as I turned all the way around and looked him in the eye.

You smell like diesel, your clothes are caked with the soot, but your face is clean. You wash up after work; you try to hide what you do.

What, are you some kind of detective? I asked sarcastically.

Ignoring my question, he simply asked, You make a good living working there?

I make 125 credits a day, but my daily expenses are 135 credits. Does it sound like I make a good living? I said, growing angry.

Ten credits deeper into debt each day, that is no good, he replied matter-of-factly.

Listen, I don’t know where you are going with this, but if you’re looking for a job, look elsewhere. The farmlands aren’t for you, I said, slumping back into my seat. They aren’t for anyone, I added, whispering to myself.

Night had come to the shell, and as the train approached the station in the center of District 81,445,766, I stood up, and with my right hand in my pocket, I could feel the money I had earned that day, another 125 credits.

I pulled the currency out from my pocket and flipped through the leaves of bills.

It wouldn’t be enough, I reasoned, shoving the wad of bills back into my pocket.

After departing the train at the station, I exited the departure ramp and walked the rest of the way to