by Ann Christy
He saw the lines in her brow lighten and smooth a little, as if a load were being lifted from her, and her eyes met his with a little less weariness. She said nothing though, just nodded and waited.
“We’ll have to go and shut down the cameras soon. Are you up for that?” he asked her. “The man over in 40, the one who was helping Graham, said that we have to do that as soon as possible. He told me we had to throw something called a smoke down into some hole in IT before we do it. Apparently, we can get it from security in IT and that is what the key is for.”
She raised an eyebrow at that and considered his words before answering. “Maybe to make them think we got terminated by accident or something? Or that we did it ourselves?”
Wallis wasn’t at all sure what the intention was, but that John fellow had seemed sure of himself and Wallis was willing to take direction from any informed source right now. He shrugged and said nothing.
“Tomorrow or today? I’m not really up for another trip down below. It was a fun ride up, considering the circumstances, but whether I take the stairs or the lifts, I don’t think I could do it again today,” Grace said. She sounded almost ashamed, as if it were some weakness.
"Tomorrow. The first thing I'd like to do is go through Graham's stuff, in all his rooms, and then figure out a way to carry on. I know he had some notion about how to fix our water, at least to some extent, and maybe get the cancers to stop afflicting so many in the future. He said there’s nothing to be done about what’s already happened but that we can help fix the future. Other stuff like that," Wallis said.
Grace's hand moved to her neck, to the hard little bulge under the skin and she looked away from him before saying, "That would be good." She gave a little shake of her head, as if driving away her own concerns, and continued, "We should just go do it. Get it over with. It's going to be hard for you to do no matter how long you wait."
Wallis looked down into his murky tea and nodded. He felt so much grief that he was almost numb and he wondered at that. He hadn't felt this way when his son and then his wife had died. Maybe because he had known it was coming with his son and the blow had come in stages. And maybe because his wife had begun drifting away in her own silent cloud of grief the moment their son was diagnosed, her death had cut less deeply too.
Graham's death had been so unexpected and on the very edge of new rails that might lead to a whole new life for the silo. Losing Graham had been the last thing he expected and maybe that is why it hurt so very badly. Whatever it was, he supposed Grace was right about how hard it would be. It might be better just to get it over with while he was still partially numb.
He set his cup down on a small table already cluttered with the debris of his increasingly disordered life. It clattered loudly in the silence and Grace looked up at him. He nodded once more and said, "Let's do this. Let's see what he left us."
Buried Treasures
They started in Graham's main room. Though he had two compartments on this level he had, of late, spent more and more time in the room he had just meant for sleeping and domestic life. Grace went in first and let out an exasperated sound, part sigh and part grunt, at the state of the room. Wallis came in behind her, turned to shut the door and then found her standing there, hands on her hips and a disgusted look on her face.
"What?" he asked, confused.
"You two live like...like...like I don't know what! Farm animals are cleaner than you two!"
"I doubt that. It's not that bad," he replied, a little offended.
At that her eyebrows shot upward until they were lost under the edge of dark bangs, still only lightly touched by gray. She gave him a look of utter disbelief.
Wallis dropped his eyes from hers and took in the state of the compartment. He realized for the first time that she was right. Over the years since each had been made into widowers, their surroundings had reflected the overall lack of concern each had invested in their environments.
Just days before, he had entered this room and simply shoved things off of one seat and onto the floor and thought nothing of it. Now, with Grace standing there and looking appalled, he saw it through her eyes and was embarrassed.
Dirty dishes were piled on every even surface and a disgustingly wasteful amount of paper was crammed into every cranny that might remain dry. Laundry, whether clean or dirty, was sprinkled about like a laundry bag had been dropped from a landing and its contents let fly at will. An age of handprints had left dark wedges of oily filth on the edge of every cabinet and appliance. The surfaces of the little tables, where they could even be seen, looked like each was pooled with dirty water there were so many shiny layers of dried spills on them. The floor was nothing to speak of at all in polite company. The tile was now the same dark grey of the concrete walls in utility spaces where it had once been a speckled cream color. What was worse was that Wallis realized this even as he realized that his own rooms were just as bad, perhaps worse. Grace had seen those too.
Wallis blushed with shame. "We both sort of, uh, lost interest. I'll clean it up. You shouldn't have to deal with this."
Grace held up her hands as if to stop him as he started forward. In a tone that brooked no argument, she said, "No, you don't! If you do we'll never find what he was up to last. We have to dissect this room from the most recent piles to the oldest if we want to make sense of this mess."
"Okay,” he nodded, anxious to please. “I can do that. You want to know, maybe, where he was working with me over the last little bit?"
She nodded and rolled up the sleeves of her coveralls. She motioned for him to proceed but kept her lips tightly pursed, possibly trying not to say anything that would make him feel worse. Or contain her disgust. Either option was bad to Wallis' viewpoint and he felt his face redden further. He stepped over a pile of dirty towels that smelled vaguely of mildew and walked into the sitting area.
"This is where we were working on the plan for how to cut those wires and who to get to be our third." He pointed at a fat tome wedged beneath an untidy stack of thick paper, the cheap kind made of lint and recycled hemp and scraps of cloth, and said, "That's the legacy book he showed me."
Grace tip-toed over the debris on the floor and carefully lifted the stack of papers, so as to not shuffle them. Those she handed them to Wallis, and said. "Sit and look through those."
She peered at the cover of the book and touched it delicately with the tip of one finger, as if frightened of the contents. She took it up and Wallis thought she looked very tempted to just sit and see for herself the marvels that the two men had so casually discussed, but instead she laid it gently on the top shelf of Graham's wall cabinet. It was the only place not already piled with things.
From there she systematically examined every pile and every sloppy stack, even checking under the mattress of Graham's bed. Each time she found anything even remotely likely, she brought it to Wallis. He let out the occasional whoop of success when he found something relevant. A few times tears came to him too. By the time they were done, they had not found the equivalent of a Legacy written by Graham. Instead they had found hundreds of snippets, thoughts captured in a messy scrawl and rather fewer full descriptions.
Their best find was Graham's concept for the lifts and expanding their services to aid the dwindling population. Nothing was found in that room on his plans for the water system save a few short sentences, like reminders, scattered about that told him to consider lift potential for the pumps or to figure out how much the water required per day per person would weigh. Little things that didn't make for a whole concept to either Wallis or Grace were everywhere, but nothing was complete. They separated the tidbits into subject piles nonetheless and carefully clipped each subject pile together before packing them up and leaving the room.
His next room was the one he had been using as an office before he consolidated his life in those final days. A thin film of grey dust covered everything save for the floor at the entry and a single spot, a circle slightly larger than a splayed
hand, on the top of the metal desk. They checked the desk and found only what one would expect in the drawers. Work orders for IT, part failure tables and work logs as well as myriad other, entirely legitimate, work related material filled the drawers. They looked under the desk and around it trying to find out what that blank spot might mean. It was only after Grace pulled the drawers out to their limit that the two realized the middle drawer didn't come out as far as the others.
Together they jostled and jiggled and yanked at that drawer, creating a horrendous amount of noise in the doing. Finally Grace grabbed a filthy knife, still gooey at the end from some ancient jam or paste, a jammed it into the side of the drawer lever until it popped free and the drawer flew out, hitting the floor and bouncing the contents out. The back quarter of the drawer was a lidded box and once the drawer was out, they simply lifted the hinged lid and found what Graham had been hiding.
Three books entirely filled the space, squeezed tightly together edgewise to make room for all three to fit. It took a bit of muscle power for Wallis to pry the books out. Underneath the three volumes there was one more book laid flat on the bottom. Wallis put the three volumes on the top of the desk and took out the bottom book.
Turning it over, he found the title and let out a sigh of relief. Grace craned her neck to see the title and Wallis turned so that she could see it, a huge smile on his face. The title was ‘Practical Engineering: Fluids’. Grace grinned and gave him a happy smack on the arm.
She reached out to thumb a bit of paper sticking out of the book and Wallis made to pull it from the pages.
Grace grabbed his wrist and said, “Stop. Open it where that page is. It might be important.”
“Of course. Sorry. I just got excited.”
He cautiously opened the book where the paper was wedged in and it turned out that Grace was correct. The margins of that page were covered in a tiny script that could only belong to Graham. Next to him, Grace tsked at the defacement. He put the book on the desk and removed what turned out to be several pages that had been neatly folded. The two friends unfolded the pages and found the answer to the water problem laid out in orderly splendor.
Grace was the closest to knowledgeable on anything mechanical and she looked over the drawings intently while Wallis looked on, seeing nothing but gibberish. She shuffled the pages and read some of the text and then sighed as she stood.
“We need to get these to someone who knows what to do. Looks like something that can clean water here,” she pointed to the larger drawing and then to the smaller pages and continued, “and these are for bringing water up from the deep. I’m thinking that one is a temporary solution and the other a more permanent one.”
Wallis really had nothing to say considering he couldn’t even figure out what all the lines were. He was really always better at teaching kids the basics of reading and writing than mysterious mechanical things like those pages contained. He shrugged.
Grace gave him a look, but smiled. She said, “We just need to keep this very safe and make sure the right people get it. This is what he was telling you about. I’m sure of that.”
She carefully put the pages in the order they had been in and then put them back into exactly the same spot within the book just to be sure. She decided that wasn’t enough, apparently, because as Wallis picked up one of the black books that had shared space with the volume, she jotted the page number on the top of one of the papers and then shut it again.
Wallis looked at one of the trio of books and found a simple black fabric cover protected the pages. Inside was a fortune in virgin paper. Not like the lumpy stuff that they found all over the place for his notes or lists, this paper was pressed in the big presses and made from hemp just grown and never before recycled. It was smooth and thin and beautifully pale, the color of fresh goat’s milk.
Wallis figured that Graham must have been spending all of his chits on this paper for a very long time, or else requisitioning it as head of IT. He didn't think that Graham would do that though, so this fortune must represent most of his combined wealth and explained a great deal about his other frugal spending habits.
Every single page of the first two books was covered in Graham's small, neat print in dark ink. That, too, was a costly luxury. Occasionally, some line or word or paragraph might be lined out, but those were rare. The last book had a good quarter of the pages still blank. Wallis turned to the last few pages written in that book and realized this was a diary of sorts but one with a very specific focus. It was all about this silo, these people and this world of theirs. It was a blueprint for making it better.
Wallis randomly scanned pages throughout the book and at each place he found the meticulous observations of an insider and a counterpoint to those observations that lightened them and made them somehow more human as well as more humane.
On one page there was a tiny map with the faintest of background lines showing how Graham had laid out his grid. And on that grid was a regular progression of circles with numbers inside. A few had red X's inside and one, way off in the corner of the map, had the simple word "Us" next to the number 49. Wallis traced his finger around the circle and thought of his friend and the care he took with these books.
He lost himself in all that he read, flipping one section to read on the purpose of cleaning, something this silo hadn't done often in the two decades since the population started seriously dropping. On another random page he found notes on the methods by which communications might be improved. On another he found a debate Graham apparently had with himself on the merits of all the cameras.
In another section—a random flip of pages bringing him to it—Graham had written about all the others buried in their own worlds and the problems he heard about over the communications at some place he called the Lair. He wrote about the cold and impersonal nature of those in Silo One when faced with those problems and their inherent lack of mercy. He spoke of them as the ‘Others’ and he capitalized it as if they were another species, one to be feared and avoided.
Wallis nodded as he read, understanding the sentiment based on the terror he had experienced himself in these last days. He did want to avoid them. There was no question about that.
Grace bumped Wallis with her elbow, breaking his reverie. When he turned to her he saw tears standing in her eyes but a smile widening her lips. She told him to look and showed him the first page of the book marked ‘One’ on the front. He read.
We can be different. We can be the good.
How can I help those words become reality?
How can I help us not feel like we are each alone
inside this hole we call our home?
Can we make this our unity? Our way?
How can we do better than the rules set out for us,
so that those words become:
We are different. We are the good.
Wallis and Grace held the books between them as they held each other and smiled through their tears.
Epilogue – Silo One
The operator in the control room sent the runner out to get the director in a hurry. He tapped the right buttons to record what he was seeing while he waited, gnawing on a fingernail already gnawed bloody. It seemed to take forever before he heard the door open behind him and the sound of many feet stepping quickly across the room.
He glanced quickly behind him and saw the director and a few others of note gathering to look over his shoulders. He snapped his fingers at one of the other control room operators and motioned for him to hand over some headsets. A heavy hand landed on his shoulder and he looked up into the director’s stern face.
“What’s going on, son?” the director asked.
“Sir, uh, I think we have a situation in 49 now, too. But something isn’t right,” He pointed at the screen where smoke now almost completely obscured the view of the room beneath IT.
“What happened before that fire? Just go ahead and tell us what you can. Relax, Gary.”
The director’s heavy hand stayed
where it was but he shifted his gaze from the screen and back toward him. That just made him more nervous. Gary swallowed loudly and licked suddenly dry lips.
“Uh, okay. Basically, nothing happened. That’s what is wrong.” He could see that this was not enough so he took off his headphones and turned a little in his chair. The director finally removed his hand and eased into the seat next to him.
“We’ve been really busy with the problems of 40, so we’ve just been doing the standard minimal checks with the other silos. There’s a scheduled check in with 49 today, though, so I’ve had half an eye on them,” he explained, jabbing a thumb at the secondary view screen that still showed smoke and little else.
“And,” the director prompted, no hint of impatience in his smooth voice but clear to see in his cold, blue eyes.
“And, I saw something and looked over at the screen right when smoke started like crazy. It took about a minute more for the smoke alarm to sound over here so it had to be quick. I flipped through the other cameras but everything looks completely normal. Or, at least as normal as that silo can be,” Gary answered and waited.
The director leaned back into his chair and put a finger to his lips, his own sign for thought and one that most operators had quickly come to be wary of. There was no way to guess what might come from this director’s thinking. Gary was glad he was going off shift soon and someone else could deal with this new director. This one creeped him out in a big way.
The director pointed that same finger toward the screen and said, “Show me the rest of IT.” His voice wasn’t raised or even particularly harsh, but there was no mistaking the sound of a command.