David Maskill

by David Maskill

The Arrival of the Unshelled

The visitors were impossibly soft. They lacked even the most rudimentary chitinous plating, possessing instead digits that moved with the nauseating fluidity of rot-worms. Four of them tumbled from a craft of scorched alloy, bipedal giants that loomed over the tallest of our kin.

For a floater-farmer from a modest, tit‑for‑tat tribe, no protocol for “Interstellar Visitation” exists. Our law is simpler: as you do, so it shall be done. When the first alien began thieving my soil—my very livelihood—with a metallic trowel, I reacted with the biological imperative of my people. I pinched its skin.

It was not skin. It was a pressurised membrane. The alien succumbed to asphyxiation.

The remaining three thrashed in a tragic, slow‑motion choreography. Too clumsy to flee, I herded them into my farm’s reservoir tanks and flushed them with strange, oxygenated gases salvaged from their craft. I felt smug then. I was a jailer of interstellar beings.

#

The Silver Appendage

It was within the reservoir, where I studied the invaders, that I noticed the emanation. Above each alien’s head hung a sparkling slurry of light—a silvery wisp flurrying in and out of reality. These disembodied appendages were inert to my probing, yet pulsated with a heartbeat‑like frequency. I would later name them ‘Souls’.

Through chalkboards and conceptual ideograms, I communicated with the lone long-term survivor of captivity, whom I designated Hardy, for that is what she was. Our dialogue was fractured, built on my own neologisms.

I see a white/clear circle above you.

I see nothing. There is nothing there.

It was staggering. These creatures could cross the interstellar desert yet were blind to their own anatomy. Hardy eventually posited a theory: perhaps the “white/clear was her true body, living after dying.” I pointed out that the souls of her comrades vanished upon death. She did not speak to me for many days.

When she resumed, Hardy introduced “Morality.” To her, actions possessed intrinsic properties of ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’, opposed like ‘Tasty’ and ‘Disgusting’. To test this, I used a colorimeter—normally reserved for gauging ammonia‑ripeness in floaters. I instructed Hardy to perform a Bad deed. Without warning, she struck me. Her soul darkened instantly by 613 nanolux.

We concluded the soul was a visual scorecard: morality manifested as surely as gravity or disappointment.

#

The Morality Trials

I asked if I might grow a soul by spectating on Hardy’s. She insisted observation was insufficient. To cultivate the silver wisp, I had to become it. Thus began the morality trials, designed to break the cycle of my upbringing.

In my tribe, every interaction is exchange. Lend a repair‑clamp, receive ammonia. Strike my shell, I strike yours. Balance. Hardy required imbalance.

She pointed to my hoarded copper wiring—insurance against lean harvests—then to a rival’s farm, one that had once diverted a nitrogen‑stream away from mine.

Give. No ask. Give.

My joints resisted as I carried the coils across the boundary. To give without return felt like bleeding. I dropped the copper and fled before thanks or trade could be offered. My mind screamed that I’d been cheated. Hardy checked her colorimeter.

Still black.

The trials continued, each demanding more. The fifty‑third was the hardest. Hardy led me to the ammonia reservoirs where dentists—the lowest, most parasitic of our tribe—scavenged scraps. We usually drove them off with stones. Hardy handed me a bowl of sweet animal purée I reserved for my family and pointed to a dentist with a cracked, grey shell.

Help.

I approached the creature. It cringed, expecting a blow. When I set the bowl down and retreated, the creature gorged itself, then looked at me with a profound, unsettling confusion. I felt a heat behind my eyes—not the warmth of successful trade, but something lighter, buoyant.

Look, Hardy scribbled.

Above my head, a tiny, frantic spark had ignited—a microscopic flurry of light ignoring the wind. Pathetic compared to Hardy’s aura, but mine.

I am… white/clear?

Hardy nodded, her soul pulsing celebratory violet.

I spent the rest of the day terrified a single selfish thought would extinguish it. Morality, I realised, was not a gift but a high‑maintenance machine. To keep it running, I’d have to work against myself forever.

#

The Great Silence

As I’d practised good deeds—sharing purées, fashioning Hardy a synthetic shell—a miracle had occurred. I now looked skyward and saw a soul. It felt like a mastery over choice that superseded instinct.

Yet this confirmation of objective morality led Hardy not to joy but obsession with a mystery. Hardy had initially been overjoyed to discover my species, to discover her own was not alone in the universe. This was in the moments before I attacked her comrades, of course. Despite the existence of other intelligent species in the universe, though, none had ever sought out Hardy’s own. She now hypothesised that this ‘Great Silence’ of the stars was due to an unknown moral choice. She wished to discover what.

But to expedite our progress, we would require more souls for testing.

#

Cultivating New Souls

We gathered twelve volunteers from my tribe—moss‑scrubbers and shell‑smiths curious enough to risk the unknown. I provided the barn; Hardy the curriculum.

“To grow a soul,” I taught, “you must abandon ancestral strategy. Tit‑for‑tat is a mirror; morality is a light.”

The lessons were gruelling: sacrifice without return, tending an enemy’s broken shell. The students stared, pedipalps clicking. I scanned their heads daily for a shimmer.

“Nothing,” I told Hardy. “Just shell.”

Among them sat my son, younger, shell translucent. While elders debated costs to survival, he remained silent, eyes fixed on Hardy’s soul as if harmonising with its vibration. He did not ask about trade‑offs. He simply aimed to do only good, in class and, most importantly, beyond.

One afternoon, during a lecture on deception, the barn grew cold. A low hum filled the space. I looked to the elders—shivering, unaware—then to my son. Above his head, the air curdled, crystallising into a brilliant wisp. Smaller than Hardy’s, unmistakable.

He has it, I whispered.

Hardy rushed to him and, for the first time, did not write. She touched the air near his new appendage. My son looked at her with terrifying clarity. He wasn’t looking at her as a source of gas or a curiosity anymore. He saw her as a person.

The others remained unchanged. Their goodness was performance, strategy by another name.

“Why only him?” I asked that night.

“The shell of the old is too thick,” Hardy wrote. “To learn a new law, one must first forget how to survive.”

I felt pride—and a cold realisation. By giving him a soul, we’d made him a stranger.

#

The Forty Days

Hardy, initially resolute, seemed to contract into her faux shell as the last student abandoned our project. She grew socially withdrawn, her focus narrowing to her Great Silence paradox. I often found her at the feasting table long after dentists had scavenged the last morsels, her soul a flickering lantern in the dimming hall.

Farm work called, so I entrusted my son with continued morality trials. With his nascent soul, he assisted Hardy as she performed precise acts and he measured nanolux shifts. It was a deconstruction of moral causality, seeking whatever universal laws might explain the Silence.

I was absent most days. Time bled by under twin suns. My son returned exhausted but animated, reporting Hardy’s manic intensity—how much good in a gesture, how much bad in a refusal. Forty days of ceaseless experimentation.

It ended in misery.

I knew something was wrong when Hardy missed our evening feast. We searched the farm’s perimeter, lanterns casting warped shadows across pillow mosses. The Floater Plains at night are absolute darkness.

I found her kneeling in the far field among sleety‑grass, hunched, choking on a sound like tearing. We carried her back. I remember forcing nutrient paste down her throat as my family averted their gazes. My mind refuses the details. And my family, in their misplaced kindness, refuse to help me, to save me from the distress of remembering. One oddity remains: Hardy’s soul had darkened, becoming invisible in the night.

The next morning, my son was gone.

I told myself he’d left impulsively—to another tribe, a better market, tax‑free happiness. He doesn’t want helping, doesn’t need saving. There was no note to refute this, only absence.

Within a week, Hardy repaired her star‑ship and departed.

Alone, tending my flock, joining family only for feasts, I lost the knowledge of Good and Not‑As‑Good. Without practice, my scant soul leached away. I mourned seven days, lost appetite and will. Nobody cared; neither did I. The world continued, indifferent. My internal colorimeter read only dull grey.

#

Why Hardy Left Us

In reflection, the turning point came when Hardy admitted: “Not all of my people behave morally.”

We lay on moss fields at sunset. I wrote: “So what if not everyone behaves identically?”

“It means morality alone isn’t enough,” she said. “It can’t explain the Great Silence.”

“It must.”

“Not on my world.”

“What explains it?”

“Command.”

By whom? I sketched a question mark.

“Don’t you tell stories of creation?” she asked. “The origin of the universe?”

“We don’t speculate beyond what we detect,” I replied, adding, “I’m a farmer, not a philosopher.”

Hardy theorised advanced civilisations had proved an intelligent designer of the universe—the source and enforcer of morality, and thus the Silence. I asked who created the creator.

“The creator requires no cause,” she wrote forcefully. “First cause.”

Too alien for me. I suggested perhaps her mind sensed this creator as I sensed her soul. She scowled, stood, and left, her departure mirroring the Silence she sought to explain.

She later admitted the theory came from her people, who believed the universe was made especially for them. Hardy wondered whether more advanced civilisations believed this too, and therefore whether such a belief was true for anyone at all. I suspected a deeper turmoil—the Forty Days, her blackened soul—but if I pondered this further, I’d need to be helped, saved from inexplicable nausea.

It seems Hardy wished to consult those more educated. Whatever her goal, she succeeded. She never returned.

#

The Burden

Sadly, I no longer possess true morality, only its memory. I approximate it through habit: restrained retaliation, delayed advantage, occasional giving without return. My tribe tolerates this because survival continues.

But my cognition fractures nightly. As I sleep, I see Hardy standing over my son, her hands dark with matter my mind insists is blood. He whispers four words I cannot remember. Each waking erases them. Perhaps this is grief, or guilt, or the residue of moral failure. I do not know.

I only wished Hardy had stayed to help me, save me.

But I also think she was mistaken. Hardy believed the Great Silence to be a result of those adhering to the laws of morality. I now suspect this is not true in the way she described.

This is because I have held a colorimeter to the inky blackness of space:

0.00 nanolux.

~

Bio:

David Maskill is an ophthalmologist in Yorkshire who loves all things medicine and natural history. Translates ancient languages for fun and profit. Partial to philosophy, religion, and Western esotericism. Has a Youtube channel and Substack newsletter, both called ‘Bones & Stones’.

Philosophy Note:

This story was inspired by JL Mackie’s classic argument from queerness for moral anti-realism, and by the ‘Kantian Wontism’ proposed by Tim Mulgan as a solution to the Fermi paradox. The numbers within the story all have a particular significance within the gematria system of Kabbalah, as any story about souls should feature.