Shift (silo)

by Hugh Howey

And suddenly, thinking of her, thinking of a time lost to dreams and lonely tears, Donald found himself patting his pockets in search of something. Pills. An old prescription with her name on it. Helen had forced him to see a doctor, hadn’t she? And Donald suddenly knew why he couldn’t forget, why their drugs didn’t work on him. The realisation came with a powerful longing to find his sister. Charlotte was the why. She was the answer to one of Thurman’s riddles.

  45

  • Silo 1 •

  ‘I WANT TO see her first,’ Donald demanded. ‘Let me see her, and then I’ll tell you.’

  He waited for Thurman or Dr Sneed to reply. The three of them stood in Sneed’s office on the cryopod wing. Donald had bargained his way down the lift with Thurman, and now he bargained further. He suspected it was his sister’s medication that explained why he couldn’t forget. He would exchange this discovery for another. He wanted to know where she was, wanted to see her.

  Something unspoken passed between the two men. Thurman turned to Donald with a warning. ‘She will not be woken,’ he said. ‘Not even for this.’

  Donald nodded. He saw how only those who made the laws were allowed to break them.

  Dr Sneed turned to the computer on his desk. ‘I’ll look her up.’

  ‘No need,’ Thurman said. ‘I know where she is.’

  He led them out of the office and down the hall, past the main shift rooms where Donald had awoken as Troy all those years ago, past the deep freeze where he had spent a century asleep, all the way to another door just like the others.

  The code Thurman entered was different; Donald could tell by the discordant four-note song the buttons made. Above the keypad in small stencilled letters he made out the words Emergency Personnel. Locks whirred and ground like old bones, and the door gradually opened.

  Steam followed them inside, the warm air from the hallway hitting the mortuary cool. There were fewer than a dozen rows of pods, perhaps fifty or sixty units in total, little more than a full shift. Donald peered into one of the coffin-like units, the ice a spiderweb of blue and white on the glass, and saw inside a thick and chiselled visage. A frozen soldier, or so his imagination told him.

  Thurman led them through the rows and columns before stopping at one of the pods. He rested his hands on its surface with something like affection. His exhalations billowed into the air. It made his white hair and stark beard appear as though they were frosted with ice.

  ‘Charlotte,’ Donald breathed, peering in at his sister. She hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged a bit. Even the blue cast of her skin seemed normal and expected. He was growing used to seeing people this way.

  He rubbed the small window to clear the web of frost and marvelled at his thin hands and seemingly fragile joints. He had atrophied. He had grown older while his sister had remained the same.

  ‘I locked her away like this once,’ he said, gazing in at her. ‘I locked her away in my memory like this when she went off to war. Our parents did the same. She was just little Charla.’

  Glancing away from her, he studied the two men on the other side of the pod. Sneed started to say something, but Thurman placed a hand on the doctor’s arm. Donald turned back to his sister.

  ‘Of course, she grew up more than we knew. She was killing people over there. We talked about it years later, after I was in office and she’d figured I’d grown up enough.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘My kid sister, waiting for me to grow up.’

  A tear plummeted to the frozen pane of glass. The salt cut through the ice and left a clear track behind. Donald wiped it away with a squeak, then felt frightened he might disturb her.

  ‘They would get her up in the middle of the night,’ he said. ‘Whenever a target was deemed… what did she call it? Actionable. They would get her up. She said it was strange to go from dreaming to killing. How none of it made sense. How she would go back to sleep and see the video feeds in her mind — that last view from an incoming missile as she guided it into its target—’

  He took a breath and gazed up at Thurman.

  ‘I thought it was good that she couldn’t be hurt, you know? She was safe in a trailer somewhere, not up there in the sky. But she complained about it. She told her doctor that it didn’t feel right, being safe and doing what she did. The people on the front lines, they had fear as an excuse. They had self-preservation. A reason to kill. Charlotte used to kill people and then go to the mess hall and eat a piece of pie. That’s what she told her doctor. She would eat something sweet and not be able to taste it.’

  ‘What doctor was this?’ Sneed asked.

  ‘My doctor,’ Donald said. He wiped his cheek, but he wasn’t ashamed of the tears. Being by his sister’s side had him feeling brave and bold, less alone. He could face the past and the future, both. ‘Helen was worried about my re-election. Charlotte already had a prescription, had been diagnosed with PTSD after her first tour, and so we kept filling it under her name, even under her insurance.’

  Sneed waved his hand, stirring the air for more information. ‘What prescription?’

  ‘Propra,’ Thurman said. ‘She’d been taking propra, hadn’t she? And you were worried about the press finding out that you were self-medicating.’

  Donald nodded. ‘Helen was worried. She thought it might come out that I was taking something for my… wilder thoughts. The pills helped me forget them, kept me level. I could study the Order, and all I saw were the words, not the implications. There was no fear.’ He looked at his sister, understanding finally why she had refused to take the meds. She wanted the fear. It was necessary somehow, had made her feel more human.

  ‘I remember you telling me she was on them,’ Thurman said. ‘We were in the bookstore—’

  ‘Do you remember your dosage?’ Sneed asked. ‘How long were you on it?’

  ‘I started taking it after I was given the Order to read.’ He watched Thurman for any hint of expression and got nothing. ‘I guess that was two or three years before the convention. I took them nearly every day right up until then.’ He turned to Sneed. ‘I would’ve had some on me during orientation if I hadn’t lost them on the hill that day. I think I fell. I remember falling—’

  Sneed turned to Thurman. ‘There’s no telling what the complications might be. Victor was careful to screen psychotropics from administrative personnel. Everyone was tested—’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Donald said.

  Sneed faced him. ‘Everyone was tested.’

  ‘Not him.’ Thurman studied the surface of the pod. ‘There was a last-minute change. A switch. I vouched for him. And if he was getting them in her name, there wouldn’t have been anything in his medical records.’

  ‘We need to tell Erskine,’ Sneed said. ‘I could work with him. We might come up with a new formulation. This could explain some of the immunities in other silos.’ He turned away from the pod as if he needed to get back to his office.

  Thurman looked to Donald. ‘Do you need more time down here?’

  Donald studied his sister for a moment. He wanted to wake her, to talk to her. Maybe he could come back another time just to visit.

  ‘I might like to come back,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Thurman walked around the pod and placed a hand on Donald’s shoulder, gave him a light, sympathetic squeeze. He led Donald towards the door and Donald didn’t glance back, didn’t check the screen for his sister’s new name. He didn’t care. He knew where she was, and she would always be Charlotte to him. She would never change.

  ‘You did good,’ Thurman said. ‘This is real good.’ They stepped into the hall, and he shut the thick door behind them. ‘You may have stumbled on why Victor was so obsessed with that report of yours.’

  ‘I did?’ Donald didn’t see the connection.

  ‘I don’t think he was interested in what you wrote at all,’ Thurman said. ‘I think he was interested in you.’

  46

  • Silo 1 •

  THEY RODE THE lift to the cafeteria rather t
han drop Donald off on fifty-four. It was almost dinnertime, and he could help Thurman with the trays. While the lights behind the level numbers blinked on and off, following their progress up the shaft, Thurman’s hunch about Victor haunted him. What if Victor had only been curious about his resistance to the medication? What if there wasn’t anything in that report at all?

  They rode past level forty, its button winking bright and then going dark, and Donald thought of the silo that had done the same. ‘What does this mean for eighteen?’ he asked, watching the next number flash by.

  Thurman stared at the stainless steel doors, a greasy palm print there from where someone had caught their balance.

  ‘Vic wanted to try another reset on eighteen. I never saw the point. But maybe he was right. Maybe we give them one more chance.’

  ‘What’s involved in a reset?’

  ‘You know what’s involved.’ Thurman faced him. ‘It’s what we did to the world, just on a smaller scale. Reduce the population, wipe the computers, their memories, try it all over again. We’ve done that several times before with this silo. There are risks involved. You can’t create trauma without making a mess. At some point, it’s simpler and safer to just pull the plug.’

  ‘End them,’ Donald said, and he saw what Victor had been up against, what he had worked to avert. He wished he could speak to the old man. Anna said Victor had spoken of him often. And Erskine had said Victor had wished people like Donald were in charge.

  The lift opened on the top level. Donald stepped out and immediately felt strange to be walking among those on their shifts, to be present and at the same time removed from the day-to-day life of silo one.

  He noticed that no one here looked to Thurman with deference. He was not that shift’s head, and no one knew him as such. Just two men, one in white and one in beige, grabbing food and glancing at the ruined wasteland on the wall screen.

  Donald took one of the trays and noticed again that most people sat facing the view. Only one or two ate with their backs to it. He followed Thurman to the lift while longing to speak to these handful, to ask them what they remembered, what they were afraid of, to tell them that it was okay to be afraid.

  ‘Why do the other silos have screens?’ he asked Thurman, keeping his voice down. The parts of the facility he’d had no hand in designing made little sense to him. ‘Why show them what we did?’

  ‘To keep them in,’ Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. ‘It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—’

  The lift arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two of them. They boarded and Thurman fumbled for his badge. ‘Fear,’ he said. ‘Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was out there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done as a race.’

  Donald considered this. He thought about his own compulsion to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete, even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation inside was worse.

  ‘I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,’ Donald said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. A reset would mean a world of loss and heartache, but there would be a chance at life afterwards. The alternative was death for them all.

  ‘I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,’ Thurman admitted. ‘When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honour his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.’

  The lift stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars of old were like this. He remembered two wars in Iran, a new generation unremembering so that sons marched into the battles their fathers had already fought.

  The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.

  ‘It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,’ Thurman said. The lift slid towards fifty-four. ‘Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure that he had the last word.’ Thurman glanced at Donald. ‘Hell, it’s what finally motivated me to wake you.’

  Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.

  They got off on fifty-four and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.

  They ate at the table in the war room. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him — just scraps of paper, he thought. No mystery contained within. He had been looking at the wrong thing, assuming there was a clue in the words, but it was just Donald’s existence that Victor had remarked upon. He had sat across the hall from Donald and watched him react to whatever was in their water or their pills. And now when Donald looked at his notes, all he saw was a piece of paper with pain scrawled across it amid specks of blood.

  Ignore the blood, he told himself. The blood wasn’t a clue. It had come after. There were several splatters in a wide space left in the notes. Donald had been studying the senseless. He had been looking for something that wasn’t there. He may as well have been staring off into space.

  Space. Donald set his fork down and grabbed the other report. Once he ignored the large spots of blood, there was a gap in the notes where nothing had been written. This was what he should’ve been focused on. Not what was there, but what wasn’t.

  He checked the other report — the corresponding location of that blank space — to see what was written there. When he found the right spot, his excitement vanished. It was the paragraph that didn’t belong, the one about the young inductee whose great-grandmother remembered the old times. It was nothing.

  Unless—

  Donald sat up straight. He took the two reports and placed them on top of each other. Anna was telling Thurman about her progress with jamming the radio towers, that she would be done soon. Thurman was saying that they could all get off shift in the next few days, get the schedule back in order. Donald held the overlapping reports up to the lights. Thurman looked on curiously.

  ‘He wrote around something,’ Donald muttered. ‘Not over something.’

  He met Thurman’s gaze and smiled. ‘You were wrong.’ The two pieces of paper trembled in his hands. ‘There is something here. He wasn’t interested in me at all.’

  Anna set down her utensils and leaned over to have a look.

  ‘If I had the original, I would’ve seen it straight away.’ He pointed to the space in the notes, then slid the top page away and tapped his finger on the one paragraph that didn’t belong. The one that had nothing to do with silo twelve at all.

  ‘Here’s why your resets don’t work,’ he said. Anna grabbed the bottom report and read about the shadow Donald had inducted, the one whose great-grandmother remembered the old days, the one who had asked him a question about whether those stories were true.
>
  ‘Someone in silo eighteen remembers,’ Donald said with confidence. ‘Maybe a bunch of people, passing the knowledge in secret from generation to generation. Or they’re immune like me. They remember.’

  Thurman took a sip of his water. He set down the glass and glanced from his daughter to Donald. ‘More reason to pull the plug,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Donald told him. ‘No. That’s not what Victor thought.’ He tapped the dead man’s notes. ‘He wanted to find the one who remembers, but he didn’t mean me.’ He turned to Anna. ‘I don’t think he wanted me up at all.’

  Anna looked up at her father, a puzzled expression on her face. She turned to Donald. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  Donald stood and paced behind the chairs, stepping over the wires that snaked across the tiles. ‘We need to call eighteen and ask the head there if anyone fits this profile, someone or some group sowing discord, maybe talking about the world we—’ He stopped himself from saying destroyed.

  ‘Okay,’ Anna said, nodding her head. ‘Okay. Let’s say they do know. Let’s say we find these people over there like you. What then?’

  He stopped his pacing. This was the part he hadn’t considered. He found Thurman studying him, the old man’s lips pursed.

  ‘We find these people—’ Donald said.

  And he knew. He knew what it would take to save these people in this distant silo, these welders and shopkeeps and farmers and their young shadows. He remembered being the one on a previous shift to kill in order to save.

  And he knew he would do it again.

  47

  • Silo 18 •

  MISSION’S THROAT ITCHED and his eyes stung, the smoke growing heavier and the stench stronger as he approached one-twenty and Lower Dispatch. The pursuit from above seemed to have faltered, perhaps from the gap in the rails that had claimed a life.

  Cam was dead, of that he felt certain. And how many others had suffered the same fate? A twinge of guilt accompanied the sick thought that the fallen would have to be carried up to the farms in plastic bags. A porter would have to do that job, and it wouldn’t be a pretty one.