Short Story: The Shell Game
“The Shell Game”
10,9,8, Isn’t humanity great? The glistening metal rocket stands on her launch pad facing the heavens. Shards of light are sputtering from the underbelly and smoke swirls about the rockets. It is a bullet to pierce the perfectly tranquil sky.
7,6,5, The onboard crew feels alive! A revolution is about to begin! A milestone for the growth of mankind! They will be the first humans into the great beyond. They were going to touch heaven and find their gods.
4,3,2, Our dreams about to come true! The sputter turns into a full burst of fire, roaring and heaving the metal mass up, up, up into space.
One. A beam of light arcs through the night sky leaving a trail of man made clouds.
People on the ground, around the world, and in mission control burst into rounds of applause and joyful celebration. The rocket is away, the rocket is away. It’s ascending beyond the ionosphere. The blue sky gives way to blackness.
We encroach on the moon and in one gravimetric push we slingshot off of it! Go forth! Go forth! Into the great unknown. Go to Mars and places beyond. The rocket passes the red dead sands of Mars. Or did it? Mars seems kind of,flat?
The Captain of the astronaut crew is baffled as he floats amidst his comrades. The blackness of space after the moon is no more and—is that a theatre light? A star is hanging on a black pole?
CRUNCH! The small spaceship hits a wall. The Captain and his crew swim to the porthole of their tiny cockpit. Their mouths agape. Their eyes fixed with astonishment. Was it all a lie? Were years of scientific posturing, debates over planetary bodies, and mountains of data on stars that they couldn’t see with their eyes for naught?
This is what they saw: Spread before them, flat and black was a gigantic surface. On it were lights to represent stars. Looking through another window at the rear of their cockpit they could see the moon and the Earth orbiting around each other and the sun off in the distance. They could also see Mars,at least apart of it, a sprawling sea of red painted on the black surface. This wall,it defied everything that the scientific community ever strung together as a theory of their place in the world. Then the ancients were right, they were in the center of it all.
“What does this mean?” one of the astronauts asked.
Discouragement and failure permeated the groupthink.
The captain put on his bravest face. “It means we explore.” They all put on their space suits and opened the door. The Captain made his first bold step onto the surface of the large black thing. It had a gravity of all its own and made it fairly easy to walk. The trio of men journeyed across the surface, and found an airlock. With the push of a button, they opened the airlock and stepped inside. There they found the atmosphere breathable and took off their space suits.
Inside the wall, there was a labyrinth of corridors, running this way and that. The first thing the intrepid explorers ran into was a computer terminal. The Captain sat down at it. There was no keyboard or mouse. In frustration he poked the screen and the terminal lit up. A diagram appeared and in English it was written: “You are here.” With an arrow.
The three explorers were pleased and investigated the map looking for things of interest that might guide them on their journey. A marker labeled “command center” was a fine example of where they could begin to ask questions. The men went there. The corridors had automatic doors that hissed and zipped apart when they were close enough. Even the door to the command center did that.
The command center was an amphitheater with a gigantic dome enclosing it. The dome itself was a television screen and partitioned into 232 screens. Astronaut #2 investigated the wall of the command center. He noted that when his eyes met one of the small partitions it automatically bulged and pushed aside the other screens. It was aware that it was being looked at. Each screen displayed a person. One screen showed an elderly man waiting for a bus. Another showed a couple picnicking. Still another showed starving people in a part of the country where no one on Earth cared to look; it was amazing that whoever these people are did not ignore it all the same.
In the center of the amphitheater was a globe on a pedestal. It read “environmental controls” underneath. The trio of adventurers crowded around and studied the globe. Astronaut #1 poked it with his finger and the globe spun. He breathed on the simulated Earth and the clouds parted. It surprised him. He blew harder and the clouds blew away and curled together forming little swirls along the surface of the planet. He poked other parts of the planet. “That is an incredible simulation.”
Astronaut #2 was busy looking at the 232 screens around them and noticed that the tiny people there were in an uproar. People ran for their lives. Some people just died. Buildings in the background were crumbling to the ground. Tornadoes and hurricanes were brewing and tearing apart cities. “Hey! Wait! Stop doing that!”
Astronaut #1 stopped and stared at the screen that Astronaut #2 pointed too. “Oh shit! Undo! Undo!” Every breath he made created more turbulence. The Captain finally dragged him away. They all moved away from the environmental controls and tread softly.
“We could be gods here!” Astronaut #1 exclaimed. “We could right all the wrongs of the world.”
“Like how you created all those natural disasters?” Astronaut #2 replied.
“Let’s keep going,” the Captain said to break up the bickering amongst his men. “There must be someone here who can help us.”
The trio of brave men left the command center and walked through the endless maze of corridors stopping every so often to consult a map. Food and water were of no concern when they ran out of their own. There were bathrooms and even snack machines. No matter where they went, they found no one. Other doors led to other rooms and yet no people. The found empty crews quarters. They found diaries and read them to try and learn who the people were.
One entry went like this: “The people are discontent with living in the Sphere. The walls are gray and boring. Life here is listless and they call our civilization advanced. We have, according to all our literature, seen and done it all, and now we are just bored and playing a game with the blue and green thing we made in the middle.”
Another entry went: “Goodbye gray world. We are going to Earth. I would rather live in the game than observe it.”
Unfettered by this new disappointment, the Captain moved forward on their expedition. He first checked another terminal and brought up a map of the place and asked the terminal to zoom the map out as far as it could go. A sphere emerged from the outward zooming. “A Dyson Sphere,” he said.
The astronauts lived in the Dyson Sphere for a few days. They explored the rooms and the walked the endless corridors. They made some calculations and concluded that the sphere was huge, billions of miles in diameter just to contain one planet, one that they synthesized to alleviate their boredom.
Being the explorer he was, the Captain then asked his men: “Why did they build this shell? What’s beyond it?”
The trek began again. They got their bearings and headed away from the side closest to Earth and went towards the outermost part of the shell. There they found some windows, and outside found a space unlike anything they had ever seen before. It was aquamarine and swirled and flowed like a gelatinous mass. Shadows of things swam in the liquid.
“We were supposed to keep going beyond the limits that humankind has gone and find our creators. I say we cross this gulf too,” the Captain said. The other two men agreed and they were on their way to find a means to escape the Dyson Sphere and enter into “jellospace,” as they dubbed it.
There were ships docked on the outermost edge of the Dyson Sphere. The daring crew entered one and set sail through the jellospace. The most prevalent sound they could hear while traveling through the jellospace was the constant sucking noise the vessel made as it darted through the thick goop. Onboard the small ship, the crew had living quarters, food and water supplies. Along the way they saw many varied and interesting sights. There were other Dyson Sphere’s for one thing. It amazed them that there could be things billions of miles in diameter that were trillions of miles apart. There were huge reptilian and whale-like animals that swam to-and-fro. They witnessed the birth and death of these creatures as they crossed the great abyss in their quest to fulfill humanity’s destiny. They faced electrical storms: the jellospace was filled with electrical pulses and strange branches that networked and webbed for billions of miles in all directions. The substance, as Astronaut #2 put it, was brain-like not jello-like.
Thirty-four years past and the astronauts reached the end of the jellospace. Here there was another wall and another door. The men, now in their sixties, docked the ship and clambered out of the porthole door. Again they explored the new space. Again they found no one, just trillion of miles filled of empty buildings. They did find another control center and learned the map of the jellospace. It was a bubbling, boiling, seething mass much like a water droplet suspended in zero-gravity. From this vantage point they could control the entire jellospace much like they could control Earth from the environmental controls in the Dyson Sphere.
Again the Captain asked himself, “what lies beyond?” Their journey propelled them forward to find the outer edge of the shell of this Super Dyson Sphere (for lack of a better name). For a month the men journeyed. They found diaries along the way.
An entry read like this: We have created spaces of our own. Within those spaces we have created creatures that inhabit them, and those creatures have become sentient and intelligent enough to create creatures of their own. We have truly reproduced the very stuff of life and that life will continue to reproduce in this way while we can no longer. We have always thought of ourselves as the shell. We created the white fluid and at the yoke there was new life being conceived by our machinations. Now, I wonder if we are not just another yoke, and that beyond us lays a vast fluid leading to yet another shell. We leave life to reproduce on its own and go in search of our own creators.”
After a month the men stopped at a window staring out into a vast ocean of a substance none of them could describe. The Captain dropped to his knees tired and despondent. It was as far as humanity could go. He extrapolated in his mind: If they crossed this open space what would they find? Another shell? The man who had written the diary entry hoped to find his originators there, but in truth, his gods would have finished their work and gone searching for their gods. So on and so forth.
