by Ann Christy
He remembered hearing about one of those cleanings—there were several over a period of a few days—when whoever was outside decided revenge didn’t stop with death. Apparently, the cleaner had done all that was expected, but had then stumbled around like a blind man, feeling about on the ground like a person looking for a lost chit in the dark. Eventually, he had found and then fallen down on top of another recent cleaner and proceeded to beat and kick the corpse until he finally succumbed in his turn. According to the story he heard later, when he was old enough to understand it, it had caused equal amounts mirth and anger in the population but nothing came of it in the end.
Even then, as a young teen not yet aware of all the truths he would learn in the years ahead of him, he had been appalled at anyone laughing at anything related to a cleaning. But those stories always seemed to be limited to the young or those who had no personal feelings about the situation. Had he been smarter, perhaps a bit more cynical, he would have figured out more about this world before it was told to him. Maybe he would have understood before it was too late to avoid being a part of it.
Later, during his shadowing years, his uncle told him about the dosing and when it was done and how it worked. Then he understood the reactions, or lack of reactions, that he saw around him. There was more than one form of dosing and the stronger version was used only when true forgetting was needed. It worked on things one thought about that caused negative feelings, not everything in a person’s memory.
At least that is what it was supposed to do and had done until this most recent usage. If something didn’t concern you or cause a bad feeling, the memories stayed almost intact and just smoothed out a little. The memory was there, but it was one without emotion and he thought that probably explained why the young and uninvolved remembered events of import better than those that lived the events as adults.
Strong and long doses of the forgetting drug could be used to leave a person completely open to having their entire life re-written into a new story that the person would never question. Such hadn’t been done in Silo 49 that Graham was aware of, but in other silos it happened with regularity every generation or so. Then again, how would he even know if it had been done? What a thought that was.
There had been no uprisings of any kind during Graham’s tenure, or even during his shadowing, but he had been directed to use the dosing several times over the years when certain stressors were present. The Order was clear on almost every situation and dosing was often the first answer it provided. The words, ‘See Entry on Dosing,’ were the directions for IT Heads after more events then he thought possible.
It was almost funny, except that it wasn’t funny at all.
Conspiracy for Dinner
Graham dutifully went to the uppermost medical bay and had a meeting with the last medic still left to that station. He was a wonderfully caring young man—though forty really wasn’t that young except when compared with Graham’s more than sixty—and he did a fine job of taking care of the residents of the upper levels. His memory was affected, like so many others, but he was doing what he could to keep up. They talked in the level one cafeteria about the records and his intentions. It was a strange feeling to be there in the cafeteria, empty even during this prime period during the day.
The view, thrown on the wall in projection from the sensors outside, was dim and brown. The grit and dirt on the ablative film that kept the sensors from being eroded away was itself now pitted and hazy. A small hole worn into the film, its edges ragged, made it look like one was peering through a peephole. If the situation were normal inside Silo 49, then surely Graham knew he would be under a great deal of pressure to find a cleaner and set the view to rights.
All that he could see, beyond the brownish haze that obscured the sensors, was the same blowing dirt and dust he had seen his whole life. The sky was the sickly color of a bruise healed to the brown and yellow stage and the air itself seemed to boil with yet more dust being blown far harder than the breezes of the silo would ever blow. He flinched when a sudden gust threw a solid wall of deep brown grit toward the sensor. It was gone as quickly as it came, traveling toward what Graham knew were other silos. No one else knew that though.
The medic, who also watched the screen as they spoke, looked away from the sensors after that gust, as if he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing more obscuring dirt on the sensors. Graham coughed, like the dust was tickling his throat, and returned his wandering attention to the medic.
“So you can find all of those records?” he asked, hoping the young medic would say he couldn’t.
He nodded, smiling and happy to be of service.
Graham’s lips gave a twist but he dampened it quickly and cleared his throat. “Well, how long would it take?”
The medic considered, his eyes darting toward the view for a moment, then said, “Actually, I should say that I can locate them but they won’t all be there.” At Graham’s look, he added, “We don’t keep the whole record forever. That’s a lot of paper. After a few years, we create a summary sheet and then recycle the record. Just enough information to approve matches is what gets retained forever.”
Graham tried not to smile at that. A simple summary sheet for every person was retained for use in approving marriage matches as the generations passed, but they contained no details. That was good.
He wanted to take no chances that this energetic young man might start scanning in documents and perhaps give the others what they needed before he was ready for them, so he kept a serious face as he gave his directions. He had to be subtle about how he went about his delaying tactics. He wanted to give every impression that he was doing exactly what the voices in Silo One had instructed him to do despite the fact that he had absolutely no intention of ever finishing any such task to their satisfaction.
After the medic left, hurrying down that first spiral of stair and out of sight, Graham sat in the silent cafeteria by himself. He watched the view with its never ending display of filthy deadness outside and sipped from his canteen of tea. He thought about what he was doing, what he was planning and how he had come to this point.
Even if the conversation he’d overheard hadn’t been one that concluded with a decision to kill his silo, he would be delaying or not doing this tasking. He felt betrayed but not just for himself. He felt that betrayal for everyone that lived in Silo 49. He had been led to believe that each silo was precious and represented the last hope of mankind. He had been told that all they did was for the future. He had believed it all and justified every bad act, every cleaning and every lie because he believed it.
It turned out that wasn’t true at all. His people had become an interesting set of medical circumstances to be collected, collated and filed away. Silo One cared nothing for them as people. To them it wasn't the legacy that mattered because these people, however sick, were still the seeds of that legacy. It was a perfect legacy that mattered to them and this silo was tainted based on their perfect standards. Tainted, no longer wanted and in need of discarding. He wouldn't have it. He wouldn't allow it.
He didn’t know the precise moment when he had stopped believing in the absolute rightness of Silo One. He thought it had eroded in stages, dropping off of him in layers like the rust that seemed to wear away the bones of the silo one thin flake at a time. That made it very hard for him to define any specific moment in time for the loss of his belief, but he did know that every shred of whatever faith had remained fell away with that overheard conversation. Now that he had heard them as they were, without whatever carefully chosen words they used to deceive and control, he realized that they were only madmen without scruples.
For Graham there was no other possible explanation other than madness of some sort. He had been raised for the position he held in the silo. He had shadowed from the early age of fifteen for it and for more than twenty years he had remained a shadow even as he watched others his age progress in their careers and gain authority and trust. He had been patient and remained t
rue to his purpose through it all. When his uncle had succumbed to cancer, like so many others had after him, choking on blood and begging for death, Graham had slipped the key from his uncle's neck and around his own. He had been secure in the knowledge of his place in this world.
When the two keys had clinked together under his coveralls, he had felt alone, but also strangely ready and confident. He had trusted the process. He had trusted the Order. He had trusted that all would come to fruition as it should if he only did the right things.
All that had gone from him over the years and the last now blown away like the dust outside. He wondered if his uncle had felt this same loss of faith and confidence. He thought back but found nothing in his memory that stood out. Like all the Heads of IT before him, his uncle had trained Graham just as hard in what to hide from Silo One as what to tell them.
Could that be construed as a loss of faith or were those merely the practical habits of a man that understood the squishy reality behind such firm rules? Though he would never know for sure, Graham thought that his uncle had died a believer. He was intensely envious of that.
And now he was old and in one fell swoop he had become cynical and terribly afraid. Decades had passed since he took that second key and even though this overheard exchange had tipped the scales of both his belief and his loyalty, he had to admit to himself that any actual conviction he might have felt all those years before had been gone a very long time.
He capped his canteen again and took one last look at the darkening view outside. He’d been sitting in the hard cafeteria chair, ruminating, for far too long and day outside was waning. This time of day, when the sun boiled at the horizon and made the air shimmer as it shone directly into the sensor, it was almost pretty out there. That was something he couldn’t admit out loud but it was still true. The shadows were long and the lumps made of long dead cleaners or their shredded remains were mostly hidden. The dust seemed less pervasive and it was just shadows and the entrancing deep orange light. He sighed as he got up and started down the spiral stairs, careful in his steps lest he fall with no one anywhere nearby to hear any cry for help.
His careful and mostly solitary day and a half had passed without incident and he felt the familiar tingles he associated with being watched leave him, just as he thought it would. He didn't know if it was merely psychological or if there was some part of him that simply understood their process deeply enough to know when they would watch. Whatever it was, he felt certain their interest in him had faded for the moment. His steps quickened on the stairs.
They would wait for him to complete his work and then kill him, but for now they had moved on to something else. He put his thoughts of the past back into the deep recesses of his mind and made ready to act on all that he had spent the last day thinking about. He could do what he needed to do and gain the help he needed to get it done.
His steps lightened for the first time as he rounded the stairwell to Level 5 and left the dark silence of the empty Level 4 behind. All the apartments on levels 4 and 6 were now closed, their landings quiet and the interiors dark. Chains glimmered dully from the handles of the big double doors under the lights of the landing. It was sad to see, but it had eventually become a necessity with so few people to monitor the conditions of the empty floors. He quickly did what he needed to in his quarters. When he was done, he felt less burdened as he made his way toward the compartment of the exact friend he needed.
Anyone left from these upper residential levels had moved to Level 5 over the past few years. Most of them had spread out to more than one compartment, using one for sleeping and another as a study or a place to perform the many duties each had been required to take on as the population diminished.
Graham was no different in that respect. The whole of IT was in a degraded state, maintaining itself only minimally and doing so with a skeleton staff. He hated it. He hated going down there and seeing the dirty tiles and the smeared glass and the boxes of junk parts lying around. It made him feel like he had failed, but he couldn’t see how it could possibly be right to take labor needed elsewhere just so IT could stay fully staffed. The priorities were Mechanical and all aspects of food production. They needed the most complete staffing. After all, it wouldn’t matter much if the servers survived if the lights went out or the food stopped coming.
To do his part, he took on a few additional roles as well. He did some repair work for IT as well as being the head. He also took transport duty as needed, which everyone physically capable of doing also did. He did shifts on the dim-watch, patrolling to be sure that all was well and quiet on Levels 1 through 5.
Like most everyone else, he chipped in where he could wherever it was needed. Sometimes he might help sand away rust, prime and paint rails or pipes. Other times he might simply be needed to help with administrative work. It varied but there was always a need for more labor than they had.
To do all this and still sleep, he had spread out to two compartments and worked from an office that had once been a compartment large enough to house an entire family. What he most liked about Level 5 was that these were all generic apartments, never designated for anyone that held any specific role. He felt unwatched there and safer than he did anywhere else in the silo. His missed the luxury of the apartment usually reserved for the one who held his job, but this little space was less visible. For that reason alone, he loved it.
On the same level also lived the man who was the new acting Mayor and, as chance would have it, Graham’s oldest friend. He was the last of the people he could still trust like he trusted himself and the one Graham needed to talk to. It was toward his compartment that he headed.
What was coming would be awkward, to say the least. He was about to go in and tell his best friend of more than fifty years that he had known vital and different truths for most of those years and never told him. Yes, it was going to be awkward. But he felt lighter just knowing he was going to get this off his chest. Wallis was a goof, but he was a smart and savvy goof. He needed that mind on his side.
As Graham carried a bucket of freshly steamed corn towards his friend's apartment, he dodged bags of dirty laundry and bins of sorted garbage left in the halls. There were few maintainers, since maintainers mostly came from the porter specialty once their knees or hips went, so Maribelle was right about them needing to get to work. Without them, these piles would only be removed sporadically, if at all. It had gotten worse. Soon enough it would get so bad that either he or one of his neighbors would get fed up with the smell and start banging on doors until everyone came out and pitched in to remove it. That didn't happen often enough though and the air was thick with the odors of unwashed clothing and decaying vegetable matter. When this was all over, he would be sure to help Maribelle get this sorted.
This trip down the hall with food was not an uncommon one for Graham and would not be out of character if he was being observed in some fashion. The acting Mayor and he had gone to school together, married just months apart and lived their lives in near tandem. Even their parents had been fast friends. Now they had even more in common. Both of them had lost a wife and their only child to what was killing the whole silo in one way or another. Graham's wife was gone to cancer while Wallis had lost his to a fall, politely described as an accident.
There were differences in the paths of their lives, but only in the most heartbreaking ways, and they had grown closer to each other with each new tragedy. Graham and his wife had managed to fall pregnant just once during their long marriage. His daughter had been small but more beautiful than anything Graham had ever laid his eyes upon. Her little bud of a mouth and soft black hair were a miracle to Graham, but those pink lips had turned blue quickly and the feeling of loss almost crushed him when she breathed her last so soon after coming into the world.
Neither of them had wanted to try again. The situation was never discussed, but his wife had quietly gone and had an implant put in that would prevent another pregnancy. Graham had felt the tiny lump in the
course of their lives but, like her, never spoken about it.
For Wallis and his wife the experience was different but Graham thought it must have been even harder to live through. Pregnancies came one after the other for that couple, yet all of them ended in miscarriage until their boy had finally come screaming and healthy into the world. That son had died at twelve years of age from some cancer of the blood. Just days later the boy's mother joined her son when she decided to fall.
Since then, it had become habit for the two men to eat together more often than not and keep each other company. At first it was under a cloud of despair as both tried to continue living in the face of so much loss. When special days came around they provided silent support to the other to get through the day. When the sadness struck one of them particularly hard for no apparent reason, the other would produce a pack of cards or a game or just some distracting conversation. In those first years, the temptation to tell Wallis the truth about this world had been almost irresistible. But he had resisted and with the passage of years the temptation had waned.
Over time, they had both settled into a new sort of life and had provided to each other a companionship much like that of close brothers. In their own ways, they had developed a sort of resigned contentment and helped the other to forget what could be forgotten. If only Graham could indulge in the water. If only he could let Wallis do the same.
Today's bucket, bristling with the bright yellow ears and speckled with spices, provided a believable cover for Graham as he sought help from the only person who might believe what he said or even understand it. Graham felt better just knowing he would have an ally.
At Wallis's door, he knocked then held out the bucket in invitation as it opened. Wallis clapped him on the shoulder in welcome as he crossed the threshold and said, "About time! I'm starving."