by Hugh Howey
Thick dust tumbled and swirled across the view, making it difficult to see. Clouds flew past in unruly sheets. But there, through the gaps, a figure in a bulky suit could be seen on a forbidding landscape, picking their ponderous way up a gentle swell, heading away from the camera. It was someone outside. Donald could sense that they shouldn’t be. He wondered if this was him out there, if he was the one in trouble. He had lumbered up a hill like that once before. The suit looked familiar. Perhaps they’d caught his foolish act on camera, his attempt to die a free man. And now they’d woken him up to show him this damning bit of evidence. Donald braced for the accusation, for his punishment—
“This was earlier this morning,” Eren said.
Donald nodded and tried to calm himself. This wasn’t him on the screen. He had been asleep for longer than a day, which meant this was not him. They didn’t know who he was. A surge of relief washed over him, a stark contrast to the nerves in the room and the shouts and hurrying boots in the hallway. Donald remembered being told that someone had disappeared over a hill when they’d pulled him from the pod. It was the first thing they’d told him. This was that person on the screen. This was why he’d been woken. He licked his lips and asked who it was.
“We’re putting a file together for you now, sir. Should have it soon. What we do know is that there was a cleaning scheduled in eighteen this morning. Except …”
Eren hesitated. Donald turned from the screen and caught the Ops Head looking to the others for help. One of the operators—a large man in orange coveralls with wiry hair and headphones around his neck—was the first to oblige. “The cleaning didn’t go through,” the operator said flatly.
Several of the men in boots stiffened. Donald glanced around the room at the crowd that had packed into the small comm center, and he saw how they were watching him. Waiting on him. The Ops Head looked down at the floor in defeat. He appeared to be Donald’s age, late thirties, and he was waiting to be chastised. These were the men in trouble, not him.
Donald tried to think. The people in charge were looking to him for guidance. Something was wrong with the shifts, something very wrong. He had worked with the man they thought he was, the man whose name graced his badge and his boots. A senator. Senator Thurman. It felt like yesterday that Donald had stood in that very same comm room and had felt that man’s equal but for a moment. He had helped save a silo on his previous shift. And even though his head was in a mist and his legs were weak, he knew this charade was important to uphold. At least until he understood what was going on.
“What direction were they heading?” he asked, his voice a whisper. The others held perfectly still so that the rustle of their coveralls wouldn’t compete with his words.
A man from the back of the room answered. “In the direction of seventeen, sir.”
Donald composed himself. He remembered the Order, the danger of letting anyone out of sight. These people in their silos with a limited view of the world thought that they were the only ones alive. They lived in bubbles that must not be allowed to burst. “Any word from seventeen?” he asked.
“Seventeen is gone,” the operator beside him said, dispensing more bad news with the same flat voice.
Donald cleared his throat. “Gone?” He searched the faces of the gathered. Foreheads creased with worry. Eren studied Donald, and the operator beside him adjusted his bulk in his seat. On the screen, the cleaner disappeared over the top of the hill and out of view. “What did this cleaner do?” he asked.
“It wasn’t her,” Eren said.
“Seventeen was shut down shifts ago,” the operator said.
“Right, right.” Donald ran his fingers through his hair. His hand was trembling.
“You feeling all right?” the operator asked. He glanced at the Ops Head, then back to Donald. He knew. Donald sensed that this man in orange with the headphones around his neck knew something was wrong.
“Still a bit woozy,” Donald explained.
“He’s only been up for half an hour,” Eren told the operator.
There were murmurs from the back of the room.
“Yeah, okay.” The operator settled back into his seat. “It’s just … he’s the Shepherd, you know? I pictured him waking up chewing nails and farting tacks.”
Someone just behind Donald’s chair chuckled.
“So what’re we supposed to do about the cleaner?” a voice asked. “We need permission before we can send anyone out after her.”
“She can’t have gotten far,” someone said.
The comm engineer on the other side of Donald spoke up. He had one side of his headphones still on, the other side pulled off so he could follow the conversation. A sheen of sweat stood out on his forehead. “Eighteen is reporting that her suit was modified,” he said. “There’s no telling how long it’ll last. She could still be out there, Sirs.”
This caused a chorus of whispers. It sounded like wind striking a visor, peppering it with sand. Donald stared at the screen, at a lifeless hill as seen from Silo 18. The dust came in dark waves. He remembered what it had felt like out there on that landscape, the difficulty moving in one of those suits, the hard slog up that gentle rise. Who was this cleaner, and where did she think she was going?
“Get me the file on this cleaner as soon as you can,” he said. The others fell still and stopped their whispering arguments. Donald’s voice was commanding because of its quietude, because of who they thought he was. “And I want whatever we have on seventeen.” He glanced at the operator, whose brow was furrowed in either worry or suspicion. “To refresh my memory,” he added.
Eren rested a hand on the back of Donald’s chair. “What about the protocols?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we scramble a drone or send someone after her? Or shut down eighteen? There’s going to be violence over there. We’ve never had a cleaning not go through before.”
Donald shook his head, which was beginning to clear. He looked down at his hand and remembered tearing off a glove once, there on the outside. He shouldn’t be alive. How was he alive? He wondered what Thurman would do, what the old man would order. But he wasn’t Thurman. Someone had told him once that people like Donald should be in charge. And now he was.
“We don’t do anything just yet,” he said, coughing and clearing his throat. “She won’t get far.”
The others stared at him with a mixture of shock and acceptance. There finally came a handful of nods. They assumed he knew best. He had been woken up, after all. It was all according to protocol. The system could be trusted—it was designed to just go. All anyone needed to do was their own job and let others handle the rest.
5
It was a short walk from his apartment to the central offices, which Donald assumed was the point. It reminded him of a CEO’s office he’d once seen with an adjoining bedroom. What had seemed impressive at first became sad after realizing why it was there.
He rapped his knuckles on the open door marked Office of Psychological Services. He used to think of these people as shrinks, that they were here to keep others sane. Now he knew that they were in charge of the insanity. All he saw on the door anymore was “OPS.” Operations. The Head of the Head of the Heads. The office across the hall was where the busywork landed. Donald was reminded how each silo had a mayor for shaking hands and keeping up appearances, just as the world of yore had Presidents who came and went. Meanwhile, it was the men in shadows whose term limits were bounded by gravestones who wielded true power. That this silo operated by the same deceit should not be surprising; it was the only way such men knew to run anything.
He kept his back to his former office and knocked a little louder. Eren looked up from his computer and a hard mask of concentration melted into a wan smile. “Come in,” he said as he rose from his seat. “You need the desk?”
“Yes, but stay.” Donald crossed the room gingerly, his legs still half asleep, and noticed that while his own whites were crisp, Eren’s were crumpled with the wear of a man well into his six-month shift
. Even so, the Ops Head appeared vigorous and alert. His beard was neatly trimmed by his neck and only peppered with gray. He helped Donald into the plush chair behind the desk.
“We’re still waiting for the full report on this cleaner,” Eren said. “The Head of eighteen warned that it’s a thick one.”
“Priors?” Donald imagined anyone sent to clean would have priors.
“Oh, yeah. The word is that she was a sheriff, but I only heard that from Gable across the hall. Not sure if I’m buying it. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first lawman to want out.”
“But it would be the first time anyone’s gotten out of sight,” Donald said.
“From what I understand, yeah.” Eren crossed his arms and leaned against the desk. “Nearest anyone got before now was that gentleman you stopped. I reckon that’s why protocol says to wake you. I’ve heard some of the boys refer to you as the Shepherd.” Eren laughed.
Donald cleared his throat into his fist. He was loath to admit that he had been more the loose sheep than the shepherd. “Tell me about seventeen,” he said, changing the subject. “Who was on shift when that silo went down?”
“We can look it up.” Eren waved a hand at the keyboard.
“My, uh, fingers are still a little tingly,” Donald said. He slid the keyboard toward Eren, who hesitated before getting off the desk. The Ops Head bent over the keys and pulled up the shift list with a shortcut. Donald tried to follow along with what he was doing on the screen. These were files he didn’t have access to, menus he was unfamiliar with.
“Looks like it was Cooper. I think I came off a shift once as he was coming on. Name sounds familiar. I sent someone down to get those files as well.”
“Good, good.”
Eren raised his eyebrows. “You went over the seventeen reports on your last shift, right?”
Donald had no clue if Thurman had been up since then. For all he knew, the old man had been awake when it happened. “It’s hard to keep everything straight,” he said, which was solid truth. “How many years has it been?”
“That’s right. You were in the deep freeze, weren’t you?”
Donald supposed he was. Eren tapped the desk with his finger, and Donald’s gaze drifted to the man across the hall, sitting behind his computer. He remembered what it had been like to be that person over there, wondering what the doctors in white were discussing across the way. Now he was one of those in white.
“Yes, I was in the deep freeze,” Donald said. They wouldn’t have moved his body, would they? Erskine or someone could’ve simply changed entries in a database. Maybe it was that simple. Just a quick hack, two reference numbers transposed, and one man lives the life of another. “I like to be near my daughter,” he explained.
“Yeah, I don’t blame you.” The wrinkles in Eren’s brow smoothed. “I’ve got a wife down there. I still make the mistake of visiting her first thing every shift.” He took a deep breath, then pointed at the screen. “Seventeen was lost over thirty years ago. I’d have to look it up to be exact. The cause is still unclear. There wasn’t any sign of unrest leading up to it, so we didn’t have much time to react. There was a cleaning scheduled, but the airlock opened a day early and out of sequence. Could’ve been a glitch or tampering. We just don’t know. Sensors reported a gas purge in the lower levels and then a riot surging up. We pulled the plug as they were scrambling out of the airlock. Barely had time.”
Donald recalled Silo 12. That facility had ended in similar fashion. He remembered people scattering on the hillside, a plume of white mist, some of them turning and fighting to get back inside. “No survivors?” he asked.
“There were a few stragglers. We lost the radio feed and the cameras but continued to put in a routine call over there, just in case anyone was in the safe room.”
Donald nodded. By the book. He remembered the calls to 12 after it went down. He remembered nobody answering.
“Someone did pick up the day the silo fell,” Eren said. “I think it was some young shadow or tech. I haven’t read the transcripts in forever.” He paged down on the shift report. “It looks like we sent the collapse codes soon after that call, just as a precaution. So even if the cleaner gets over there, she’s gonna find a hole in the ground.”
“Maybe she’ll keep walking,” Donald said. “What silo sits on the other side? Sixteen?”
Eren nodded.
“Why don’t you go give them a call.” Donald tried to remember the layout of the silos. These were the kinds of things he’d be expected to know. “And get in touch with the silos on either side of seventeen, just in case our cleaner takes a turn.”
“Will do.”
Eren stood, and Donald marveled again at being treated as if he were in charge. It was already beginning to make him feel as if he really were. Just like being elected to Congress, all that awesome responsibility foisted on him overnight—
Eren leaned across the desk and hit two of the function keys on the keyboard, logging himself out of the computer. The Ops Head hurried out into the hall while Donald stared at a login and password prompt.
Suddenly, he felt very much less in charge.
6
Across the hall, a man sat behind a desk that once had belonged to Donald. Donald peered up at this man and found him peering right back. It was as though someone had installed a funhouse mirror in the hall, or some kind of tear in the cosmos had ripped open, allowing him to see into the past. That was him on the other side. He used to gaze across that hallway in the opposite direction. And while this man in his former office—who was heavier than Donald and had less hair—likely sat there playing a game of solitaire, Donald struggled with a puzzle of his own.
His old login of Troy with his passkey of 2156 wouldn’t work. He tried old ATM codes, and they were just as useless. He sat, thinking, worried about performing too many incorrect attempts. It felt like just yesterday that this account had worked. But a lot had happened since then. A lot of shifts. And someone had tampered with them.
It pointed back to Erskine, the old Brit left behind to coordinate the shifts. Erskine had taken a liking to him. But what was the point? What was he expecting Donald to do?
For a brief moment, he thought about standing up and walking out into the hallway and saying, “I am not Thurman or Shepherd or Troy. My name is Donald, and I’m not supposed to be here.”
He should tell the truth. He should rage with the truth, as senseless as it would seem to everyone else. “I am Donald!” he felt like screaming, just as old man Hal once had. They could pin his boots to a gurney and put him back to glorious sleep. They could send him out to the hills. They could bury him like they’d buried his wife. But he would scream and scream until he believed it himself, that he was who he thought he was.
Instead, he tried Erskine’s name with his own passkey. Another red warning that the login was incorrect, and the desire to out himself passed as swiftly as it had come.
He studied the monitor. There didn’t seem to be a trigger for the number of incorrect tries, but how long before Eren came back? How long before he had to explain that he couldn’t log in? Maybe he could go across the hall, interrupt the Silo Head’s game of solitaire, and ask him to retrieve his key. He could blame it on being groggy and newly awake. That excuse had been working thus far. He wondered how long he could cling to it.
On a lark, he tried the combination of Thurman and his own passkey of 2156.
The login screen disappeared, replaced by a main menu. The sense that he was the wrong person deepened. Donald wiggled his toes. The extra space in his loose boots gave him comfort. On the screen, a familiar envelope flashed. Thurman had messages.
Donald clicked the icon and scrolled down to the oldest unread message, something that might explain how he had arrived there, something from Thurman’s prior shift. The dates went back centuries; it was jarring to watch them scroll by. Population reports. Automated messages. Replies and forwards. He saw a message from Erskine, but it was just a note about the
overflow of deep freeze to one of the lower cryopod levels. The useless bodies were stacking up, it seemed. Another message farther down was starred as important. Victor’s name was in the senders column, which caught Donald’s attention. It had to be from before Donald’s second shift. Victor was already dead the last time Donald had been woken. He opened the message.
Old friend,
I’m sure you will question what I’m about to do, that you will see this as a violation of our pact, but I see it more as a restructuring of the timeline. New facts have emerged that push things up a bit. For me, at least. Your time will come.
I have in recent days discovered why one of our facilities has seen more than its share of turmoil. There is someone there who remembers, and she both disturbs and confirms what I know of humanity. Room is made that it might be filled. Fear is spread because the clean-up is addicting. Seeing this, much of what we do to one another becomes more obvious. It explains the great quandary of why the most depressed societies are those with the fewest wants. Arriving at the truth, I feel an urge from older times to synthesize a theory and present it to roomfuls of professionals. Instead, I have gone to a dusty room to procure a gun.
You and I have spent much of our adult lives scheming to save the world. Several adult lives, in fact. That deed now done, I ponder a question more dire, one that I fear I cannot answer and that we were never brave nor bold enough to pose. And so I ask you now, dear friend: Was this world worth saving to begin with? Were we worth saving?
This endeavor was launched with that great assumption taken for granted. Now I ask myself for the first time. And while I view the cleansing of the world as our defining achievement, this business of saving humanity may have been our gravest mistake. The world may be better off without us. I have not the will to decide. I leave that to you. The final shift, my friend, belongs to you, for I have worked my last. I do not envy you the choice you will have to make. The pact we formed so long ago haunts me as never before. And I feel that what I’m about to do … that this is the easy way.