Human Shell

What lives in the apartments of the sixth heat. Each is a copy of somebody a crawler knew, going about an ordinary evening at giant scale relative to the shrunken racers, and the System labels it a shell rather than a person: a woman of about sixty stirring a pot with ash dropping off her cigarette, an old man asleep on a couch, a dog on the carpet, all at level 99. Their eyes are stitched shut with thick black wire and crossed over with an X of the same wire, and the mark repeats on every face in every photograph, poster and portrait in the room, including one of Jesus. The only face left with its eyes is the crawler the apartment is about. They notice the racers eventually and swat at them with hands and brooms. Tipid saw shells in his own season and warns against killing one, because they are containers for something else and he does not know what; the AI later says some of them carry atoms from the original and that it has stopped using dog material on principle.

Book 8 appearances

• Chapter 74 — Two level 99 Human Shells named Hoa and An hold apartment 712, one at the stove and one asleep on the couch, both with their eyes sewn shut under wire crosses that repeat on every picture in the room except the photograph of Tran; other teams report a dog shell, the Popov twins' mother and Louis's mother Lady Bird, and Tipid warns that killing a shell is a mistake because something else is inside it.
• Chapter 75 — The floor's designer explains the intent: every person, dog, cat, fish and household pet in the building was to live as a shell inside its loop, and racing through would break the loop, make the shell aware and split it open like a piñata to release what was packed inside.
• Chapter 76 — The label is how the racers read the room: a body still listed as a shell has not burst yet, which is why Donut cuts her hole at the feet of the one man in apartment 310 who has not been opened.
• Chapter 83 — As the convoy escapes, a few giant humans and shells lean out of the apartments overlooking the wrecked lobby to watch the destruction, unsure what to do about it.

Related entries

• The L'Engle Building (Place)
• Tipid (Character)
• Tran (Character)
• Louis Santiago 2 (Character)
• The Popov Brothers (Dmitri & Maxim) (Character)
• Quest: Ad Infinitum (Notification)

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• All Creatures & Bosses
• Everything debuting in Book 8, Chapter 74
• All of A Parade of Horribles