What If Your Bones Were Outside and People Had Shells

The screech of brakes on the wet road, the eyes of the driver filled with horror, an ear-splitting bump of impact... You open your eyes to the rain falling on your face and don’t see anything through the blur at first. Then, your vision clears, and you see the gray sky and the black spot of a face above you.

“Are you alright? I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you...” You get up with the help of the driver who hit you. Thankfully, apart from torn clothes, no serious damage has been done, and you don’t even feel pain. Your exoskeleton took all the impact upon itself.

The driver offers to call an ambulance, but you refuse. Still, you both wait for the police to arrive. You tell them it was your fault for crossing the street in the wrong place, and they give you a warning and let you both go. At home, you take off your shirt and check the chitin plates on your side. They seem absolutely fine.

Exoskeleton is such a wonderful evolutionary feature, after all! The plates are hard enough to take a serious impact without breaking, yet they’re also flexible, acting a bit like a spring when something hits them. By the way, about that hit — you clearly remember that you didn’t run across the road as fast as you used to. You frown and swing your arms and legs, then bend at the waist to check your suspicions.

That’s right: it’s become harder for you to move, the shell is too rigid. Ah well, it’s time to molt then. You take a couple of deep breaths and then inhale as hard as you can. You hear crackling from behind — that’s the hard shell coming apart. Your body’s grown, and it feels awkward inside the exoskeleton, but the outer part of it doesn’t grow — as opposed to the rest of you, it’s not alive.

You hold your breath, your chest pumped up, and finally, the crack is large enough for you to take the carapace off. But first, you get up and take a small crowbar from your desk, kept there for this exact reason. You push it under the plates in your arms and free your elbow joints — ah, feels like freedom! The hard stuff falls on the ground, and underneath there’s soft and wrinkly skin, getting harder as you watch.

With your new and a bit bigger arms, you reach behind and help yourself out of the carapace altogether. Great, now you’re pink and wrinkled, and your sensitivity has spiked — your fresh skin is tender to the touch, it won’t tolerate any stress. It’ll take a night for the new exoskeleton to harden and become protective, so you lie on the bed again and soon fall asleep.

In the morning, you’re covered with hard plates again — good! The phone vibrates, and you see a reminder: it’s Saturday, time for your weekly sledding race. You quickly dress, take your sports bag, and leave.

You decide to ride your motorbike to the sledding hall. No protection is needed — the carapace is hard enough to take any kind of accident. The wind pleasantly ruffles your hair, and in 20 minutes, you’re there. Your teammates wave at you from the top of the track, already in their sports suits.

Today, you agreed to try and take on the longest one, with several sharp turns and a high start. You go first. The rush of wind immediately blows in your face — the speed is getting higher every second. The first sharp turn comes, you stretch your arm to the side to slow down and turn, and you make it. But the second turn appears too quickly, and you don’t react in time...

It goes as if in slow motion: you approach the turn head on, trying hard to swerve but only banking a little bit, then you’re sliding straight onto the ramp, and you’re in the air, flying over it. The ground of the hall is getting closer... smack! You’re rolling in the artificial grass, protecting your head with your arms. You slowly get up, feeling your body all over for the signs of cracks in the carapace.

Your teammates come over, worried. You seem to be fine, but there’s a creak and a dull ache in the side when you tilt your torso to the left. You apologize and leave for the nearest hospital. The doctor inspects your carapace and orders an X-ray. In the picture, you see a small splinter between two plates that goes straight into the soft tissue below — that’s where the ache comes from.

The hard and flexible plates are firmly connected with the muscle and other tissues underneath, so if anything gets in between the plates, it goes into your body properly. The doctor takes tweezers from her desk and carefully pulls out the splinter. You feel a sharp pang and then relief. You thank her and are already moving to leave when you hear a groan from behind a curtain in the back of the office.

Then the curtain shifts a bit, and you see a human arm... but it looks strange as if the carapace has gone off. Someone’s molting right here? You look at the doctor in surprise, but she suddenly stands up and urgently sees you out the door. You decide to find out what’s going on and stay nearby, inconspicuously watching the doctor’s office.

Patients come and go, but when lunchtime comes, you see your chance: the doctor leaves and forgets to lock the door. You take a look around and sneak in while nobody’s watching. “Doctor, is that you?” a voice comes from behind the curtain. Trembling in fear and anticipation, you put your hand on it. You take a deep calming breath and throw it open.

Behind it, on a couch, lies a man, covered in bandages up to his face, with only a few patches of body seen through the white layers. And those patches don’t have any signs of carapace on them. The man looks at you in shock and presses the button he holds in his right hand. Almost immediately, the door flings open, and two pairs of strong hands take you under the armpits and haul you out of the office. Then you feel a sharp prick in your neck, and the world goes dark.

You wake up from the noise and shaking. You hear quiet voices and open your eyes just a bit. Through the slits, you see you’re in a car, and right above you sits the same doctor from the hospital. But she’s... different. Her hands and neck are covered in carapace alright, but her face looks... naked and alive.

She suddenly looks at you and her eyes grow wide. She shouts, “Stop the truck!” and hurriedly takes something from the bench beside her. She applies it to her face, and you see it’s a carapace mask. The car starts to slow down, and you see your chance: you spring to your feet and throw yourself onto the back door of the truck, forcing it to open. You land awkwardly, scramble to your feet and run.

Behind you, the doctor cries, “Stop! Please, wait!” but you run even faster. You manage to hitch a ride to your neighborhood and walk home from there. But when you approach your house, you see a suspicious car standing on the curb. With horror, you realize you’ve provided all your details to the hospital upon check-in — they know who you are and where you live.

You turn around to run before they notice you but only bump into the fake doctor again. You back off slowly, but there are two large men already coming towards you from the car. You look around in panic, but the doctor raises her hand in a peace gesture and asks you to talk inside. You seem to have no choice, so you two come into your home, leaving the other men outside.

When you both sit down, the doctor takes off her mask again. It turns out she was born with a genetic anomaly: her skeleton is not outside her body, but inside, and it has a bony structure. She was laughed at during her childhood, other kids called her Skinny Mary, so she took the old carapaces of her parents and adapted them to fit her.

She dedicated the rest of her life to finding others like her, all the while hiding her real identity from everyone else. But the only one she could find so far was the man you saw in her office — he got into a car accident and his old borrowed carapace didn’t save him from injuries. And then you came by.

After the story, the doctor apologized for her earlier behavior and asked you if you’d like to participate in her new experiment. She wanted to give herself, that man, and other people like them an opportunity to live a normal life among others — and for that, she needed parts of a carapace that hasn’t been molted yet. It’s safe, she assures you, the shell will grow back, as always.

And after thinking for a little while, you agree. She smiles and thanks you. You go to a lab Mary rented and lie on the table on her cue. You see Jake, the injured man from her office, on a table nearby, unconscious. The doctor says she’ll need to give you a general anesthetic and put you under to take the samples of your carapace. You nod, and she injects the medication.

You wake up with the feeling of freshness in your body. You look at yourself and see fresh skin, slowly turning hard, just like the day before. Above you stands Mary. She’s smiling with tears in her eyes. You look to the side and see Jake, sitting on his table, with the carapace clinging perfectly to his body.