Quotes / Empty Shell

"Perchance we tried to make a human without a heart."

Description of Alriune in Lobotomy Corporation

"Slumped shoulders, wild eyes, and a stumbling gait — this one is no more good to us."
"Another soul, battered and broken... cast aside like a spent torch."
"This one has become vestigial... useless."

— The Narrator, Darkest Dungeon, when dismissing a hero

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that. Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man. I think that even he has forgotten his name, certainly he acts as if this was so. When he speaks, when he looks around, he gives the impression of being empty inside, nothing more than an involucre, like the slough of certain insects.

— If This Is a Man

"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

— O'Brien, Nineteen Eighty-Four

"And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?"

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must dissent", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

"Kiriyama... saw past him... nothing there... emptiness."

— Shinji, Battle Royale

"Barely human... like a machine... he doesn't care what happens to himself... he doesn't care what happens to himself... empty inside... no consequence... it's not just us... he doesn't care about himself."

— Hiroki, Battle Royale

"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no... anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You'll just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever... lost."

— Remus Lupin describes the Dementor's Kiss, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Later, much later, when Piers and Ilane are able to look at their third son again, they will reflect that it was almost like losing two children. Conal goes off to the Palace with the shadow of what he has done still hanging over him, and when they return from the Yamani Isles he is a stranger, a tall, whip-thin, silent boy with a badly-healed broken nose and huge shadows under his pale grey eyes.

— Protector of the Small AU fic Five Worlds in Which Keladry of Mindelan Did Not Become a Lady Knight

The door opened to reveal Applejack. Despite the fact that she'd been in the middle of breaking and entering, there was no anger or hostility or alarm or anything whatsoever on the Earth pony's face. The emptiness which sat in Applejack's eyes was the same as that in Rarity's own. Both of them walked forward. Their shoulders bumped against each other, their sides slid alongside one another like two pieces of wheeled luggage at a train station. No words were spoken.

— Divided Rainbow

It is said that memories are what make us who we are. Personal, private, intimate — small fragments of the life that we have lived. Memories are precious gems to remind us of times when we were happy, or they are weights that burden and callous [sic] our souls. Without our memories we are nothing but a living shell that is empty, with no past or origin, existing simply to exist.
That is what I am.
I have no recollections of my past that are my own, knowing only what is recounted to me. Within my mind's eye are no faces of any beings that I recognise as mother or father. There are no friends or siblings whose names I recall fondly, nor are there any happy memories, or moments that have shaped and moulded the entity that I am.

— Circlebound, by Sleyf and BlueNephelim

"You won't talk. Or — you can't talk? Hold on, hold on, wait a minute, just let me — OH! No. YES! Nooo! Think it through — you spoke before. I heard your voice. An intelligent voice; no, more than that, brilliant! But, looking at you now, all I can see... is... Beast. The animal. Just the body. You're just the body, the physical form. What's happened to your mind, hmm? Where's it gone? Where's that intelligence? Oh, no..."

— The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Satan Pit"

But I am just a broken machine
And I do things that I don't really mean
Long black night, morning frost
I'm still here, but all is lost.

— the Mountain Goats, "Cry for Judas"

On a personal note, these Drones are more unnerving than any other I've encountered. At least the others have some vestiges of personality left; these... things are just cold, hollow shells of people, conversing only when absolutely necessary and generally ignoring outside stimuli to the point where most psychiatrists would have them committed at once. They may be the most innocuous kind of Drone overall, but my claws itch to destroy them whenever I cross paths with one. The human being that ends up like this isn't even remotely human any more. Not even remotely.

— Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Possessed: A Player's Guide

Always before when I have seen him, he has been speaking with his whole body, using his physicality for all it's worth. Now he sits, slack, in this chair in this featureless box. His eyes are open, and he is looking straight ahead. It seems at first that he is dead. If so, he has gone into rigor in place; they will never be able to get him out of the chair without bolt cutters (the dirty secret of undertakers). On the other hand, with the muscle he has, I'd expect him to be more contorted. He should be all wrapped around himself, like a spider in the rain. He is not. If anything, he's like a sleeper. If I lean my head, I can see his chest move slowly, in and out.
Humbert Pestle is not dead. He has been put away. This is how he is when he is not the Boss. When he has no purpose. Humbert Pestle is a type A pencilneck, and this is what he is when there is no work to be done.

— The Gone-Away World

It seemed to Garraty that he was drawn toward Olson on an invisible wire. He flanked him at four o'clock. He tried to fathom Olson's face.

Once, a long time ago, he had been frightened into a long night of wakefulness by a movie starring—who? It had been Robert Mitchum, hadn't it? He had been playing the role of an implacable Southern revival minister who had also been a compulsive murderer. In silhouette, Olson looked a little bit like him now. His form had seemed to elongate as the weight sloughed off him. His skin had gone scaly with dehydration. His eyes had sunk into hollow sockets. His hair flew aimlessly on his skull like wind-driven cornsilk.

Why, he's nothing but a robot, nothing but an automation, really. Can there still be an Olson in there hiding? No. He's gone. I am quite sure that the Olson who sat on the grass and joked and told about the kid who froze on the starting line and bought his ticket right there, that Olson is gone. This is a dead clay thing.

—The Long Walk

These beautiful women are every bit the model stereotype, vapid and distant. They also seem so high on drugs that they appear utterly incapable of even feeding themselves. That is, of course, because they are incapable of feeding themselves; the models of the Avalon House are simply pretty shells, a wardrobe of skins that the magicians behind the fashion house use to maintain their network of information, wealth and debauchery.

— Immortals

Urist McDwarf has stopped responding to the world...

— Dwarf Fortress, when a dwarf goes Catatonic

A pomegranate bounced off the cart and exploded against the face of the female adventurer from Slippery John's party, who was walking along on the left. She didn't so much as flinch, but continued walking at a perfectly maintained pace, swaying her hips in exactly the same motion with each step, juicy seeds dripping off her fine upturned nose. Experimentally, I leaned out of the cage and waved a hand in front of her eyes. Not a blink.
"Slippery John wouldn't bother if Slippery John were you," said Slippery John from the other side of the cage. "She's got the Syndrome."
"She looks healthy to me," I said, watching her tea-colored thighs rotating like synchronized metronomes.
"That's the thing. Syndrome only affects the good-looking ones. Drylda over there used to be an adventurer like anyone else. Quested part-time to pay her way through college, y'know. Then the Syndrome hit her. Out of nowhere, that's how it always goes. They stand around like they've got a broom up their arse, start talking weird, lose interest in everything except quests and having the best armor. Sometimes they stopped moving altogether for days at a time. Don't even wake up, no matter how many times you fondle and sniff their pert bodies." A pause. "Or so Slippery John hears."

—Mogworld

"He can reshape any mind he chooses. He used it to erase our memories, put his own thoughts there. He was surprised it took so much power. We fought him, remember? But we grew so tired, our minds so blank, so open, that any thought he placed there became our thoughts. Our minds so empty like a sponge, needing thoughts, begging. Empty. Loneliness. So lonely to be sitting there empty, wanting any word from him..."

— Dr. Van Gelder, Star Trek: The Original Series, "Dagger of the Mind"

"Growing up in the Nightside, I saw a lot of dead men walking about. They could walk and talk and go through the motions, drifting from bar to bar and drink to drink, but there was nothing left behind their eyes. Nothing that mattered. My father was a dead man for years, long before his heart finally, mercifully, gave out and they nailed the coffin lid down."

— John Taylor, Something from the Nightside

Jack Slash: Do you know what tabula rasa is, boy?
Theo Anders: No, sir.
Jack: Blank slate. A piece of paper with nothing on it. A formatted computer. A tombstone without the name on it. Seems [Oni Lee] can copy his body just fine when he teleports, but something in his mind gets left behind. Once I realized it, picked up on the fact that he was little more than a robot wanting his orders, I informed him I had decided we had no need for his services, we fought, and... here we are.

— Worm

Isaac: How do we get their minds back? The ones who've been taken.
Vermishank: Back? Ah... you cannot.
Isaac: Don't lie to me.
Vermishank: They have been drunk. They have been drunk: their thoughts have been taken, their dreams — their conscious and subconscious — have been burnt up in the moths' stomachs, have trickled out to feed the grubs. Have you taken dreamshit, Isaac? Any of you? If you have, you have dreamed them, the victims, the prey. You have had their metabolized minds slip into your stomach and you have dreamed them. There is nothing left to save. There is nothing to get back.

— Perdido Street Station

Linda Forchet: Charlie, you are the quietest man I've ever known.
Major Charles Rane: That's 'cause I can't think of anything to say. It's like my eyes are open and I'm looking at you but I'm dead. They've pulled out whatever it was inside of me. It never hurt at all after that, and it never will.

— Rolling Thunder

"No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering."

— The Pale King, about the Vessels, Hollow Knight

Temrash 114: «That's how it always is. Human and dæmon struggle alike. But even two bodies cannot prevail against a Yeerk. No one ever knows the host is a prisoner. Hope dies, and all that remains is a faint, shattered creature. Like your brother.»
Merlyse: No. No, that's not true.
Temrash 114: «Must I play another memory for you? How many will it take before you accept that the brother you knew is gone?»
Merlyse: How long has he been a Controller?
Temrash 114: «Six months. Three months was all it took to reduce him to what you saw.»
Merlyse: Delareyne settled three months ago. A dæmon settles into a form that shows the human's personality. Who they really are. If there were really nothing left of Tom, Del wouldn't have settled. He wouldn't have a personality for her to show. He's still in there. He hasn't lost who he is.
Temrash 114: «Your humans and your superstitions. The forms your dæmons take are irrelevant. Arbitrary. You assign meaning to them because you have so little else in your worthless lives.»

— Prometheus in Chains

"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there."

— Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

When all traces of humanity have gone, and all that remains is the body, the blade, and the urge to kill, the Mask has arrived.

— Hunter: The Vigil: Slasher

"I go on, night after night. I feed on those who cross my path. But all my passion went with her golden hair. I'm a spirit of preternatural flesh. Detached. Unchangeable. Empty."

— Louis, Interview with the Vampire

MT Foxtrot unnerves me. Man or machine, over a long enough timeline everything hits terminal fatigue: mental, or metal. This guy's hit both. A shot-out barrel, a double-fed cartridge stuck in the rifle of a dead conscript. Just look at his eyes - no time left on the clock.

Sure, there's the offworld death squad work on the CV and that exotic tac rig he wears to back it up. He walks, he might talk, he obeys orders better than all of these cut-rate lotto ticket contracts the SNC loves handing out so much, but I'm telling you: there's no driver at the wheel. Send him back to his original handler, the one even uglier than me. When this guy detonates, nobody is going to want to be around to witness it.

For all the burnt fuses we are handing out cartridges and cash to, that says everything.

-MB

—MT Foxtrot's Acquisition Entry, Brigador

“I lobotomized [this body].” I gave her another down-the-nose look. “How do you think I’ve been holding onto it for all these months with only Ysa for help?”
“Lobot…?”
“Jammed a letter opener up its nose and into its brain, wiggled the thing around until it stopped screaming.” I made a little voila gesture next to my left temple. “Quiet as a tomb up there ever since, and it doesn’t even move on its own anymore. But I can’t morph, or it’ll heal.”
<Would that actually work?> Cassie sounded grossed out.
Maybe? Would depend on what brain bits you managed to skewer. I thought about it. And then I decided not to think about it anymore.

— Eleutherophobia: How I Live Now

Libby: Molly, you're a wraith! A living person who has literally given up the ghost!
Geoff: Your body's alive, but no one's home...
Molly's Body: I feel nothing.
Ghost Molly: That's creepy.

—The Ghost and Molly McGee, "Molly vs. the Ghost World"

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