by Hugh Howey
The radio on the wall continued to hiss. Jimmy turned the volume down until the spitting noise could barely be heard. His father wouldn’t be calling him ever again. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but it was a Rule of the World.
He entered the small apartment. There was a table big enough for four with the pages of a book scattered across it, a needle and thread coiled on top like a snake guarding its nest. Jimmy thumbed the pages and saw that the place where the pages met was being repaired. His stomach hurt, it was so empty. His mind was beginning to ache as well.
Across the room, the ghost of his father stood and pointed out doors, told him what was behind each. Jimmy patted his chest for the key, took it out, and used it to unlock the pantry across from the stove. Food enough for two people for ten years, that was what his father had told him. Was that right?
The room made a sucking sound as he cracked the pantry door, and there was the tickle of a breeze against his neck. Jimmy found the light switch on the outside of the door — as well as a switch that ran a noisy fan. He turned the fan off, which only reminded him of the radio. Inside the room, he found shelves bulging with cans that receded so far he had to squint to see the back wall. These were cans like he’d never seen before. He squeezed between the tight shelves and searched up and down, his stomach begging him to choose and be quick about it. Eat, eat, his belly growled. Jimmy said to give him a chance.
Tomatoes and beets and squash, stuff he hated. Recipe food. He wanted food food. There were entire shelves of corn with labels like colourful sleeves of paper, not the black ink scrawled on a tin that he was used to. Jimmy grabbed one of the cans and studied it. A large man with green flesh smiled at him from the label. Tiny words like those printed in books wrapped all around. The cans of corn were identical. They made Jimmy feel out of place, like he was asleep and dreaming every bit of this.
He kept one of the corn and found an aisle of labelled soups in red and white, grabbed one of those as well. Back in the apartment, he rummaged for an opener. There were drawers around the stove full of spatulas and serving spoons. There was a cabinet with pots and lids. A bottom drawer held charcoal pencils, a spool of thread, batteries bulging with age and covered in grey powder, a child’s whistle, a screwdriver and myriad other things.
He found the can opener. It was rusty and appeared as if it hadn’t been used in years. But the dull cutter still sank through the soft tin when he gave it a squeeze, and the handle turned if given enough force. Jimmy worked it all the way around and cursed when the lid sank down into the soup. He fished a knife out of the drawer to lever the lid out with the tip. Food. Finally. He placed a pot onto the stove and turned the burner on, thinking of his apartment, of his mother and father. The soup heated. Jimmy waited, stomach growling, but some part of him was dimly aware that there was nothing he could put inside himself to touch the real ache, this myster-ious urge he felt every moment to scream at the top of his lungs or to collapse to the floor and cry.
While he waited for the soup to bubble, he inspected the sheets of paper the size of small blankets hanging on one wall. It looked as if they’d been hung out to dry, and he thought at first that the thick books must be made by folding up or cutting these. But the large sheets were already printed on, the drawings continuous. Jimmy ran his hands down the smooth paper and studied the details of a schematic, an arrangement of circles with fine lines inside each and labels everywhere. There were numbers over the circles. Three of them were crossed out with red ink. Each was labelled a ‘silo’, but that didn’t make any sense.
Behind him, a hissing like the radio, like someone calling for him, the whisperings of ghosts. Jimmy turned from the strange drawing to find his soup spitting bubbles, dripping down the edge and sizzling on the glowing-hot burner. He left the large and strange drawing alone.
71
2312 – Week One
• Silo 17 •
DAYS PASSED UNTIL they threatened to make a week, and Jimmy could glimpse how weeks might eventually become months. Beyond the steel door in the upper room, the men outside were still trying to get in. They yelled and argued over the radio. Jimmy listened sometimes, but all they talked about were the dead and dying and forbidden things, like the great outside.
Jimmy cycled through camera angles of quietude and vast emptiness. Sometimes these still views were interrupted with bursts of activity and violence. Jimmy saw a man held down on the ground and beaten by other men. He saw a woman dragged down a hall, feet kicking. He watched a man attack a child over a loaf of bread. He had to turn the monitor off. His heart raced the rest of the day and into the night, and he resolved not to look at the cameras any more. That night, alone in the bunk room with all the empty beds, he hardly slept. But when he did, he dreamed of his mother.
The days would be like this, he thought the next morning. Each day would stretch out for ever, but their counting would not take long. Their counting would run out for him. His days were numbered and ticking away; he could feel it.
He moved one of the mattresses out into the room with the computer and the radio. There was a semblance of company in that room. Angry voices and scenes of violence were better than the emptiness of the other bunks. He forgot his promise to himself and ate warm soup in front of the cameras, looking for people. He listened to their soft voices bicker on the radio. And when he dreamed that night, his dreams were filled with little square views of a distant past. A younger self stood in those windows, peering back at him.
In forays to the room above, Jimmy crept silently to the steel door and listened to men argue on the other side. They tried codes, three beeping entries at a time, followed by three angry buzzes. Jimmy rubbed the steel door and thanked it for staying shut.
Padding away quietly, he explored the grid of machines. They whirred and clicked and blinked their flashing eyes, but they didn’t say anything. They didn’t move. Their presence made Jimmy feel even more alone, like a classroom of large boys who all ignored him. Just a handful of days like this and Jimmy felt a new Rule of the World: man wasn’t meant to live alone. This was what he discovered, day by day. He discovered it and just as soon forgot, for there was no one around to remind him. He spoke with the machines instead. They clacked back at him and hissed deep in their metal throats that man wasn’t supposed to live at all.
The voices on the radio seemed to believe this. They reported deaths and promised more of them for each other. Some of them had guns from the deputy stations. There was a man on the ninety-first who wanted to make sure everyone else knew he had a gun. Jimmy felt like telling this man about the storage facility his key had unlocked beyond the bunk room. There were racks and racks of guns like the one his father had used to kill Yani. And countless boxes of bullets. He felt like telling the entire silo that he had more guns than anyone, that he had the key to the silo, so please stay away, but something told him that these men would just try harder to reach him if he did. So Jimmy kept his secrets to himself.
On the sixth night of being alone, unable to sleep, Jimmy tried to make himself drowsy by flipping through the book on the desk labelled Order. It was a strange read, each page referencing other pages, and filled with accounts of all the horrible things that could happen, how to prevent them, how to mitigate inevitable disasters. Jimmy looked for an entry on finding oneself completely and utterly alone. There was nothing in the index. And then Jimmy remembered what was in all the hundreds of metal cases lining the bookshelf beside the desk. Maybe there was something in one of those books that could help him.
He checked the small labels on the lower portion of each tin, went to the Li–Lo box for ‘loneliness’. There was a soft sigh as he cracked the tin, like a can of soup sucking at the air. Jimmy slid the book out and flipped towards the back where he thought he’d find the entry.
Instead, he came across the sight of a great machine with large wheels like the wooden toy dog he’d owned as a kid. Fearsome and black with a pointy nose, the machine loomed impossibly large over the
man standing in front of it. Jimmy waited for the man to move, but rubbing it, he found it just to be a picture like on his dad’s work ID, but one so glossy and vivid in colour that it looked to be real.
Locomotive, Jimmy read. He knew these words. The first part meant ‘crazy’. The second part was a person’s reason for doing something. He studied this image, wondering what crazy reason someone would have of making this picture. Jimmy carefully turned the page, hoping to find more on this loco motive—
He screamed and dropped the book when the page flopped over. He hopped around and brushed himself with both hands, waiting for the bug to disappear down his shirt or bite him. He stood on his mattress and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Jimmy eyed the flopped-open tome on the ground, expecting a swarm to fly out like the pests in the farms, but nothing moved.
He approached the book and flipped it over with his foot. The damn bug was just another picture, the page folded over and creased where he’d dropped it. Jimmy smoothed the page, read the word locust out loud, and wondered just what sort of book this was supposed to be. It was nothing like the children’s books he’d grown up with, nothing like the pulp paper they taught with at school.
Flipping the cover over, Jimmy saw that this was different from the book on the desk, which had been embossed with the word Order. This one was labelled Legacy. He flipped through it a pinch at a time, bright pictures on every page, paragraphs of words and descriptions, a vast fiction of impossible deeds and impossible things, all in a single book.
Not in a single book, he told himself. Jimmy glanced up at the massive shelves bulging with metal tins, each one labelled and arranged in alphabetical order. He searched again for the locomotive, a machine on wheels that dwarfed a grown man. He found the entry and shuffled back to his mattress and his twisted tangle of sheets. A week of solitude was drawing to a close, but there was no chance that Jimmy would be getting any sleep. Not for a very long while.
72
2345
• Silo 1 •
DONALD WAITED IN the comm room for his first briefing with the head of eighteen. To pass the time, he twisted the knobs and dials that allowed him to cycle through that silo’s camera feeds. From a single seat, he had a view of all of the world’s residents. He could nudge their fates from a distance if he liked. He could end them all with the press of a button. While he lived on and on, freezing and thawing, these mortals went through routines, lived and died, unaware that he even existed.
‘It’s like the afterlife,’ he muttered.
The operator at the next station turned and regarded him silently, and Donald realised he’d spoken aloud. He faced the man, whose bushy black hair looked as though it’d last been combed a century ago. ‘It’s just that… it’s like a view from the heavens,’ he explained, indicating the monitor.
‘It’s a view of something,’ the operator agreed and took a bite of a sandwich. On his screen, one woman seemed to be yelling at another, a finger jabbed in the other woman’s face. It was a sitcom without the laugh track.
Donald worked on keeping his mouth shut. He dialled in the cafeteria on eighteen and watched its people huddle around a wall screen. It was a small crowd. They gazed out at the lifeless hills, perhaps awaiting their departed cleaner’s return, perhaps silently dreaming about what lay beyond those quiet crests. Donald wanted to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming back, that there was nothing beyond that rise, even though he secretly shared their dreams. He longed to send up one of the drones to look, but Eren had told him the drones weren’t for sightseeing — they were for dropping bombs. They had a limited range, he said. The air out there would tear them to shreds. Donald wanted to show Eren his hand, mottled and pink, and tell him that he’d been out on that hill and back. He wanted to ask if the air outside was really so bad.
Hope. That’s what this was. Dangerous hope. He watched the people in the cafeteria staring at the wall screen and felt a kinship with them. This was how the gods of old got in trouble, how they ended up smitten with mortals and tangled in their affairs. Donald laughed to himself. He thought of this cleaner with her thick folder and how he might’ve intervened if he’d had the chance. He might’ve given her a gift of life if he were able. Apollo, doting on Daphne.
The comm officer glanced over at Donald’s monitor, that view of the wall screen, and Donald felt himself being studied. He switched to a different camera. It was the hallway of what looked like a school. Lockers lined either side. A child stood on her tiptoes and opened one of the upper ones, pulled out a small bag, turned and seemed to say something to someone off-camera. Life going on as usual.
‘The call’s coming through now,’ the operator behind them said. The man with the sandwich put it down and sat forward. He brushed the crumbs off his chest and switched his view of two women arguing to one of a room full of black cabinets. Donald grabbed a pair of headphones and pulled the two folders off the desk. The one on the top was two inches thick. It was about the missing cleaner. Beneath that was a much thinner folder with a potential shadow’s name on it. A man’s voice came through his headphones.
‘Hello?’
Donald glanced up at his monitor. A figure stood behind one of the black cabinets. He was pudgy and short, unless it was the distortion from the camera lens.
‘Report,’ Donald said. He flipped open the folder marked Lukas Kyle. He knew from his last shift that the system would make his voice sound flat, make all their voices sound the same.
‘I picked out a shadow as you requested, sir. A good kid. He’s done work on the servers before, so his access has already been vetted.’
How meek this man. Donald reckoned he would feel the same way, knowing his world could be ended at the press of a button. Fear like that puts a man at odds with his ego.
The operator beside Donald leaned over and peeled back the top page in the folder for him. He tapped his finger on something a few lines down. Donald scanned the report.
‘You looked at Mr Kyle as a possible replacement two years ago.’ Donald glanced up to watch the man behind the comm server wipe the back of his neck.
‘That’s right,’ the head of eighteen said. ‘We didn’t think he was ready.’
‘Your office filed a report on Mr Kyle as a possible gazer. Says here he’s logged a few hundred hours in front of the wall screen. What’s changed your mind?’
‘That was a preliminary report, sir. It came from another… potential shadow. A bit overeager, a gentleman we found more suited for the security team. I assure you that Mr Kyle does not dream of the outside. He only goes up at night—’ The man cleared his throat, seemed to hesitate. ‘To look at the stars, sir.’
‘The stars.’
‘That’s right.’
Donald glanced over at the operator beside him, who polished off his sandwich. The operator shrugged. The silo head broke the silence.
‘He’s the best man for the job, sir. I knew his father. Stern sonofabitch. You know what they say about the treads and the rails, sir.’
Donald had no idea what they said about the treads and the rails. It was nothing but stair analogies from these silos. He wondered what this Bernard would say if the man ever saw a lift. The thought nearly elicited a chuckle.
‘Your choice of shadow has been approved,’ Donald said. ‘Get him on the Legacy as soon as possible.’
‘He’s studying right now, sir.’
‘Good. Now, what’s the latest on this uprising?’ Donald felt himself hurrying along, performing rote tasks so he could get back to his more pressing studies.
The silo head glanced back towards the camera. This mortal knew damn well where the eyes of gods lay hidden. ‘Mechanical is holed up pretty tight. They put up a fight on their retreat down, but we routed them good. There’s a… bit of a barricade, but we should be through it any time now.’
The operator leaned forward and grabbed Donald’s attention. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at one of the blank screens on the top row, indicati
ng one of the cameras that had gone out during the uprising. Donald knew what he was getting at.
‘Any idea how they knew about the cameras?’ he asked. ‘You know we’re blind over here from one-forty down, right?’
‘Yessir. We… I can only assume they’ve known about them for a while. They do their own wiring down there. I’ve been in person. It’s a nest of pipes and cables. We don’t think anyone tipped them off.’
‘You don’t think.’
‘Nossir. But we’re working on getting someone in there. I’ve got a priest we can send in to bless their dead. A good man. Shadowed with Security. I promise it won’t be long.’
‘Fine. Make sure it isn’t. We’ll be over here cleaning up your mess, so get the rest of your house in order.’
‘Yessir. I will.’
The three men in the comm room watched this Bernard remove his headset and return it to the cabinet. He wiped his forehead with a rag. While the others were distracted, Donald did the same, wiping the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief he’d requisitioned. He picked up the two folders and studied the operator beside him, who had a fresh trail of breadcrumbs down his overalls.
‘Keep a close eye on him,’ Donald said.
‘Oh, I will.’
Donald returned his headset to the rack and got up to leave. Pausing at the door, he looked back and saw the screen in front of the operator had divided into four squares. In one, a roomful of black towers stood like silent sentinels. Two women were having a row in another.
73
2345
• Silo 1 •
DONALD TOOK HIS notes and rode the lift to the cafeteria. He arrived to find it was too early for breakfast, but there was still coffee in the dispenser from the night before. He selected a chipped mug from the drying rack and filled it. A gentleman behind the serving line lifted the handle on an industrial washer, and the stainless steel box opened and let loose a cloud of steam. The man waved a dishrag at the cloud, then used it to pull out metal trays that would soon hold reconstituted eggs and slices of freeze-dried toast.