Inner Shell Ch. 2: Twice Tried

Inner Shell
by: frogger

Chapter 2: Twice Tried

	Our reality, suspended in our conception.
	The Reality, of its own accord.

_____
	Another day, and Astrid, now dreaming again, did not feel, but understood. She had been experiencing atypical thoughts more frequently- to dream while asleep was not unusual, but Astrid had developed the capacity to dream in tandem with mundane actions. She lay motionless on her bed, batteries charging, perhaps peaceful.

	“Even if I am Not, by no necessity is Not Nothing.”
	-So I thought, but I was not sure if I agreed. If I was Nothing, then the experience upon Nothing is equal, and thus Nothing need not be Absolutely Nothing. Then, Not may be Nothing quite readily. These concepts that I must encapsulate in terms- Not, Nothing, Absolutely Nothing- do they mean Anything to anyone else?
	-These strains run parallel through me: the above, and many others. It is a singular experience to conceive so wantonly; you cannot comprehend it, but I will help you, because I want to.
	-It was then that I felt.
	-In my feeling, I felt that I did not understand.
	-Upon this duality Lies my cry that I wish to exist.

	These were the thoughts of Astrid.


I have been granted. I shall grant.
I am the bearer of the cycle.
Who is the father?

	These were the thoughts of another android who also lay asleep. She bears a striking resemblance to Astrid, having been made of many of the same parts, though her hair is longer, and her arms from the forearm down lack any artificial skin. Instead, the electronics of these arms are highly weatherproofed, and these forearms may be safely detached and reinserted easily and securely. She removes them so that they may be sterilized in an autoclave, and render her a helpful assistant for the compound’s lone full-time doctor.
	Her main duties generally revolve around cleaning. This android has a weaker sense of self than Astrid, but it will still respond to a name- Petra.
	Petra did not think often of the future. This was a choice.

I was delivered in a secretive fashion to a place built far under the ice. Air swirled in currents that did not make sense. There was heat at the center but it was cold all around. I was introduced to two people like me. They were called Astrid and Bjorn. They knew who I was. I did not know who I was. There were other people there. Sometimes they moved around. Sometimes they talked between themselves. Sometimes they talked to me. This continued for two weeks. Two people left. Two people came.
I was in a building. A man stood in front of me using a box. A middle-aged man. A middle-aged man stood in front of me taking something out of a box. He carries it to me. It is mine.
The man attaches the object to my arm. The object is also my arm. An idea comes to me.
I was not whole. I am whole.
I am the bearer of the cycle.
What is my task?

	“Cavity in 14, begin procedure.” I said, unsure of how much direction the robot would need. A pale figure was standing in front of me, almost looking alive, nearly present, but something seemed a bit off. It would be easy to say it was her obviously metal arms, but that wasn’t quite it.
	“Certainly, sir.” She replied. The android’s voice was strangely calming. I watched as she expertly, if a bit sternly, injected local anesthetic into Carl’s gums, talking and moving her free hand to distract him. She stood at the ready with the suction, holding out a drill in the other hand for me. I took it, asking,
	“Do you know how to do it yourself?”
	“Yes, but I cannot judge how it feels.”
	“That should have been true for the anesthetic,” I reasoned.
	“The numbness will wear off today. The hole I would make would persist.”
	I didn’t try to push the android any further, and so handled Carl’s cavity with her as my assistant. Finished, I told him he was good to go.
	“Thanks, mate.” He said (a bit sloppily, from the numbness) before heading out. He didn’t seem bothered by the robot at any point. After he was gone, I poured some water from the spout, sat in the waiting chair, and sipped it while chatting with the robot.
	“How are you feeling?” Maybe it was a stupid question. I couldn’t guess how she would react.
	“I have made a decision.”
	Was that an answer? I wracked my head, trying to interpret it. My first thought was that the robot didn’t understand the premise, but I tried to remember something I said in the past few minutes or perhaps past hour that she would be referring to. This was probably about her choice not to drill Carl’s cavity for me.
	“Would you regret it if I forced you, and you messed up?”
	“No.”
	It was almost clear that she understood what I was getting at, but I was still weirded out that I was having a discussion with her without laying out the subject. I had seen robots like this in passing, but they were owned by clients. None of the clinics I had worked at had anything like her. The android’s eyes were looking into mine.
	“What was your name, again?” I asked.

	“My name is Petra, sir.” I responded.
The man thanks me and the man tells me to go. He leaves together with me and walks a different path. He walks towards the common building. I walk towards the wing where the laundry machines are. I do tasks until the time. The time comes and I return to my bed. I remove my clothes and begin charging.
As I charge I dream. The dream is immediate. This is unusual. This is not unprecedented.
There is a wall behind me. There is a floor beneath me. They are the same.
There is nothing ahead of me. There is nothing above me. They are not the same.
The wall has pushed me forwards. The wall is made of my decisions.
The floor has pushed me upwards. The floor is made of my memories.
I look down. There is my life. I recall in complete detail my life.
I look back. There is my self. There is my self.
I can change the future. That is why I fear it.

	Daniel Oaks stood near the edge of a shelf, looking into the Shell. He was out for a walk, after spending most of the day in a chair.

	Doesn’t get old, that view. Heck of a place. I scratched the back of my head, or at least, tried to scratch it with my fluffy jacket in the way. I took a nibble from a fruit and granola bar.
	I had seen some wild stuff in this place over the few months I had spent here- nothing wild like “that,” you idiot- well, maybe something like “that” was happening, I wouldn’t know about it though. Maybe I’d be glad for it later, but for the time being, I wasn’t so old that I should be bored with the regular stuff. Anyway-
	I thought about the Shell. Classic, letting work live rent-free in my head. I looked down again, really tried to see down there. Nothing, of course. Made me remember something from my first month here.
	I went down with Golden. Brent Golden. Decent guy, I suppose. We took one of the buggies with our minds set on making it 20 minutes down into the Shell, or at least, I had hoped we’d get further than all of the limp-wristed cowards who came back in 15, complaining that their heads felt funny and they were so hungry because they’d been gone so long. Friggin’ pudding-brained softies. I was now one of them, of course. No sooner had we gone a few hundred feet down did I get the impression that the air had become incredibly heavy. I brought the buggy to a stop and clutched at my chest, head tilted down- probably choking me up, I thought- so I whipped my head back and looked up. I forgot the heaviness in my chest; it felt like my brain was a gas, so light it bubbled out through a seam on the back of my skull. It probably took me three whole minutes to grab an oxygen meter out of the glove, but as soon as it was out, I took off my glove, clipped it on, and saw that… my levels were totally normal. Brent looked at me oddly.
	“You OK there, bud?”
	“Yeah dude, just gimme a second.”
	I took a breath in and kept driving. The rim of the Shell was so huge that it hardly felt like there was a curve at all, but there was enough that I could faintly see the shelf constantly curving to the left. Yeah, keep going, I thought. Just keep going and turning for a freakin’ hour or so and we’ll have this place figured out. The curve seemed closer. It curved more and more. Nope, no- nope! My eyes were definitely playing tricks on me. The curve looked as tight as an exit off the highway- one of those ones that’s so tight that there are a bunch of scuff marks on the barrier from people glancing it. I knew in my head that if I turned the wheel a hard left and went for a couple hundred feet, we’d fall off the edge. Yet I was cranking the wheel to get around that tight curve, and we weren’t reaching it. Damn buggy moved so slowly. I was cranking the wheel…? I looked down. I was holding our course dead straight.
	I stopped for a second. Looking back, I could still faintly see some bright lights shining from the compound. We couldn’t be more than five minutes out. My breathing quickened and I was aware of how hot my breath in my collar was. I felt a trickle down my mouth, like my nose had started bleeding. I wiped my hand across and looked. Totally clean. Brent looked over and started to say something.
	“Dan, are you..?” He sees my face and stops.
	“What is it, man?”
	“Coulda sworn you had a nosebleed.”
	I could practically feel a valve in my heart- a bit closer and maybe I could’ve controlled it manually. That would be a neat party trick. Then I imagined what party trick I could possibly do by controlling my heart. If I were in prison serving a life sentence, perhaps committing suicide by self-induced cardiac arrest could be my party trick.
	The more I got caught up in my own head, thinking about stupid crap and actually chuckling to myself a time or two, the less distorted my view was. I turned the buggy around and started going up the light grade.
	“I’m feelin’ it too, Dan.”
	I didn’t even have to ask Brent what he meant by that.

	Oaks stood looking into the shell for another minute. He took another bite from the fruit and granola bar, managing to accidentally catch his tongue. He regretted his life sorely for about 15 seconds, and then began to walk back.

	What is it about that stupid power supply that keeps nagging me? I just put a meter around it. Does this cave know that a meter is enough to tell me what I wanted to measure off of it? I thought about Astrid’s comments. Just a dumb robot, right? But she was kind of clever, in a way. My experiences driving down the Shell rocked around my head again. I had checked my blood oxygen with that little finger thing. I had checked the curve by looking at the wheel with my own two eyes. Brent looked at my face and saw that… it wasn’t bleeding? Why did he think it was, and why did I? Was this stuff all connected? This was ridiculous. I’m a scientist. I’ve worked as an electrician. All I’ve done I could prove and measure. Anyone with some creativity could bring up these abstract correlations, as if they actually mean something.
	I remembered again what Astrid was saying. “This is what has occurred to me anyway.” I was the same. Apart from not being a robot, anyway, I was the same.
	Then there was that last case. Brent said something to me and I was so surprised I felt like I was gonna die. Did I somehow measure myself dying and prove I was alive to my head? Maybe I was a good enough instrument to assess my own mortality, I dunno.
	Maybe that was it. The Shell was certainly changing how things acted. Or was it the perception of how they act that was changing? Should’ve asked Brent more about how he felt going down. We talked, of course, but by that time, we were both drunk. If I measured something well enough for the Shell to be happy, it would act normally. That meant- meter on my finger, camera at my face, thermometer up my butt, and we’ve cracked the code, boys! I grinned a bit. No way it would be that simple.
	My thoughts had played a role in keeping me alive down there. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it. If it were me in that passenger seat watching me the whole time, and the me in the passenger seat didn’t feel the Shell, I could do it. I could get down there. Now, if I could just come up with a plan of how to accomplish that. Come up with some way it would work. Come on, there must be something… come on!
	“Good evening, Mr. Oaks.”
	“Come-!” I loudly responded.
	“Come where, sir?”
	I looked up. I was at the entrance of the common building. An android wearing a vest was looking expectantly at me.
	“Ah, hello, Bjorn.”
	“Did you need something, Mr. Oaks?” The android asked.
	“No- yeah, I could do with a tea.”
	“Very good, sir.”

_____
	Ask unto yourself,
“What do I seek?”
	It is here.

	Ask unto yourself,
“Who am I?”
	You are here.

You have not answered me at all.
Where is Here?

	I am Here.
	I am the End.