by Hugh Howey
As he entered the comm room, Troy wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry at the realization. Then he remembered how the world was run before, and that nothing had really changed. He chuckled sadly.
A pair of heads turned from the radio stations as he walked in, frowns and lowered brows. Troy pulled himself together. This wasn’t an asylum, he lied to himself. This was an office. It was a job. Everything was all right. He just had to keep his shit together. He was there to cut a ribbon.
Saul, one of the lead radio techs, took off his headset and rose to greet him. Troy vaguely knew Saul; they lived on the same executive wing and saw each other in the gym from time to time. While they shook hands, Saul’s wide and handsome face tickled some deeper memory, an itch Troy had learned to ignore. Maybe this was someone he knew from his orientation, from before his long sleep.
Saul introduced him to the other tech, who waved and kept his headset on. The name would probably fade immediately. It didn’t matter. An extra headset was pulled from a rack. Troy accepted it and lowered it around his neck, keeping the muffs off his ears so he could still hear. Saul found the silvery jack at the end of the headset and ran his fingers across a wide array of empty receptacles. The layout and the room reminded Troy of ancient photographs of phone operators back before they were replaced with computers and automated voices.
The mental image of a bygone day mixed and fizzed with his nerves and the shivers brought on by the pills, and Troy felt a sudden bout of giggles bubble beneath the surface. The laughter nearly burst out of him, but he managed to hold it together. It probably wouldn’t be a good sign for the head of overall operations to lurch into hysterics when he was about to gauge the fitness of a future silo head.
“—and you’ll just run through the set questions,” Saul was telling him. He held out a plastic card to Troy, who was pretty sure he didn’t need it but took it anyway. He’d been memorizing the routine for most of the day. Besides, he was quite sure it didn’t matter what he said. Like the phone operators of old, the task of gauging fitness was better left to the machines and the computers, all the sensors in some distant headset.
“Okay. There’s the call.” Saul pointed to a single flashing light on a panel studded with flashing lights. The entire room was full of flashing lights. Troy was surprised any sort of alert stood out to these men. They reminded him of those expert astronomers who could glance up at the night sky and spot a distant supernova, could see a new pinprick that was out of place among all the others.
“I’m patching you through,” Saul said.
Troy adjusted the muffs around his ears as the tech made the connection. He heard a few beeps before the line clicked over. Someone was breathing on the other side. Troy reminded himself that this young man would be far more nervous than he was. After all, he had to answer the questions—Troy simply had to ask them.
He glanced down at the card in his hand, his mind suddenly blank, thankful that he’d been given the thing.
“Name?” he asked the young man.
“Marcus Dent, sir.”
There was a quiet confidence in the voice, the sound of a chest thrust out with pride, a young man proudly reporting for duty. Troy remembered feeling that once, a long time ago. And then he thought of the world Marcus Dent had been born into, a legacy he would only ever know from books.
“Tell me about your training,” Troy said, reading the lines. He tried to keep his voice even, deep, full of command. Saul made a hoop with his finger and thumb, letting him know he was getting good data from the boy’s headset. Troy wondered if his was similarly equipped. Could anyone in that room—or any other room—tell how nervous he was?
“Well, sir, I shadowed under Deputy Willis before transferring to IT Security. That was a year ago. I’ve been studying the Order for six weeks. I feel ready, sir.”
Shadowing. Troy forgot it was called that. He had meant to bring the latest vocabulary card with him.
“What is your primary duty to the...silo?” He had nearly said facility.
“To maintain the Order, sir.”
“And what do you protect above all?”
He kept his voice flat. The best readings would come from not imparting too much emotion into the man being measured.
“Life and Legacy,” Marcus recited.
Troy had a difficult time seeing the next question. It was obscured by an unexpected blur of tears. His hand trembled. He lowered the shaking card to his side before anyone noticed.
“And what does it take to protect the things we hold dear?” he asked. His voice sounded like someone else’s. He ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering. Something was wrong with him. Powerfully wrong.
“Sacrifice,” Marcus said, steady as a rock.
Troy blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and Saul held up his hand to let him know he could continue, that the measures were coming through. Now they needed baselines so the biometrics could tease out the boy’s sincerity toward the first questions. In the old days, this was when they asked your name on a lie detector to establish a normal response. Troy’s palms felt sweaty thinking of someone hooking him up to a machine and asking him his name.
“Tell me, Marcus, do you have a girlfriend?”
He didn’t know why that was the first thing that came to mind. Maybe it was the envy that other silos didn’t freeze their women, didn’t freeze anyone at all. Nobody in the comm room seemed to react or care. The formal portion of the test was over.
“Oh, yessir,” Marcus said, and Troy heard the boy’s breathing change, could imagine his body relaxing. “We’ve applied to be married, sir. Just waiting to hear back.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too much longer. What’s her name?”
“Melanie, sir. She works here in IT.”
“That’s great.” Troy wiped at his eyes. The shivers passed. Saul waved his finger in a circle over his head, letting him know he could wrap it up. They had enough.
“Marcus Dent,” he said, “welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order.”
“Thank you, sir.” The young man’s voice dripped with pride.
There was a pause, then the sound of a deep breath taken and held.
“Sir? Is it okay if I ask a question?”
Troy looked to the others. There were shrugs and not much else. He considered the role this young man had just assumed, remembered feeling daunted in his last job, that mix of fear, eagerness, and confusion.
“Sure, son. One question.” He figured he was in charge. He could make a few rules of his own.
Marcus cleared his throat. Troy pictured him and the current head of the silo sitting in a room together, master studying student.
“I lost my grandmother a few years ago,” Marcus said. “She used to let slip little things about the world before. Not in a forbidden way, but just as a product of her dementia. The doctors said she was resistant to her medication.”
Troy didn’t like the sound of this, that third-generation survivors were gleaning anything about the past. Marcus may be newly cleared for such things, but others weren’t.
“What’s your question?” Troy asked.
“The Legacy, sir. I’ve done some reading in it as well, not neglecting my studies of the Order and the Pact, of course, and there’s something I have to know.”
Another deep breath.
“Is everything in the Legacy true?”
Troy thought about this. He considered the great collection of books that contained the world’s history, a carefully edited history. In his mind, he could see the leather spines and the gilded pages, the rows and rows of books they had been shown during their orientation.
He nodded and found himself once again needing to wipe his eyes.
“Yes,” he told Marcus, his voice dry and flat. “It’s true.”
Someone in the room sniffled. Troy knew the ceremony had gone on long enough. The muffs were hot against his skin.
“Everything in there is absolutely true,�
�� he said.
Which was partially correct. He didn’t add that not every true thing was written in the Legacy. Much was left out. And there were other things he suspected that none of them knew, things that had been wiped clean, had been edited out of books and brains alike.
The Legacy was the truth allowed, he wanted to say, the truth that was carried in all the silos for future generations. But the lies, he thought to himself, were what they carried there in Silo 1, in that drug-hazed asylum charged insanely with humanity’s survival.
9
2049 • Fulton County, Georgia
The front-end loader let out a throaty blat as it struggled up the hill. When it reached the top, a charcoal geyser of relief streamed from its exhaust pipe, a load of dirt avalanched out of its toothy bucket, and Donald saw that the loader wasn’t rumbling up the hill so much as creating it.
Hills of fresh dirt were taking shape like this as far as he could see. Heavy machinery skittered like an infestation of ants, each one carrying a mouthful of dirt at a time and beeping to one another in audible pheromones as they occasionally backed up. Their tracks crisscrossed through the soil in a knot of furrows, angry engines whining, smokestacks belching.
Between the hills—through temporary gaps left open like an ordered maze—burdened dump trucks carried soil and rock from the cavernous pits being hollowed from the earth. These gaps, Donald knew from the topo plans, would one day be pushed closed, leaving little more than a shallow crease where each hill met its neighbor.
Standing on one of these growing mounds, Donald watched the choreographed ballet of heavy machinery while Mick Webb spoke with a contractor about the delays. In their white shirts and flapping ties, the two congressmen seemed incongruous. The men in hardhats with the leather faces, calloused hands, and busted knuckles belonged. He and Mick, blazers tucked under their arms, sweat stains spreading in the humid Georgia heat, were aliens from another land who were somehow—nominally, at least—supposed to be in charge of that ungodly commotion.
Another loader released a bite of soil as Donald shifted his gaze toward downtown Atlanta. Past the massive clearing of rising hills and over the treetops still denuded from fading winter rose the glass and steel spires of the old Southern city. An entire corner of sparsely populated Fulton County had been cleared. Remnants of a golf course were still visible at one end where the machines had yet to disturb the land. A pile of stripped trees was being craned onto trucks by a machine with a maw like a beetle’s.
Down the slope of that first hill, near the main parking lot, a staging zone the size of several football fields held thousands of shipping containers packed with building supplies, more than Donald thought necessary. But he was learning by the hour that this was the way of government projects, where public expectations were as high as the spending limits. Everything was done in excess or not at all. The plans he had been ordered to draw up practically begged for proportions of insanity, and his weren’t even a necessary component of the facility, not really.
Between Donald and the field of shipping containers stood another impressive array of boxes: trailers, a few used as offices but most of them serving as housing. They formed a temporary city built for thousands. This was where men—and a handful of women—could ditch their hard hats, where everyone lived in pre-fabbed cans like sardines that had been salted and packed away for later.
Flags flew over many of the trailers, the workforce as multinational as an Olympic village. Spent nuclear fuel rods from the world over would one day end up buried beneath the pristine soil of Fulton County. It meant that the world had a stake in the project’s success. The logistical nightmare this ensured seemed to matter little to the back-room dealers. He and Mick were finding that many of the early construction delays could be traced to language barriers, as neighboring work crews couldn’t communicate with one another and had evidently given up trying. Everyone simply worked on their set of plans, heads down, ignoring the rest.
Donald watched them in the distance. Their colorful helmets lent them the appearance of the Lego men he had played with as a kid. And all around them, huge diesel-burning trucks rumbled throughout the encampment, their beds full of work crews and building supplies. One group of men with tiny tubes of paper in their fists kicked through the dust together, and Donald wondered if any of those plans were his own.
Beside this temporary city sat the vast parking lot he and Mick had trudged up from. He could see their rental car down there, the only quiet and electric thing in sight. Small and silver, it seemed to cower among the square-shouldered and belching ogres on all sides. Donald laughed at the sight of it. The overmatched car looked precisely how he felt, both on that little hill at the construction site and back at the Capital one in Washington.
“Two months behind.”
Mick smacked him on the arm with his clipboard. “Hey, did you hear me? Two months behind already, and they just broke ground six months ago. How is that even possible?”
Donald had no idea. He shrugged as they left the frowning foremen and trudged down the hill toward the parking lot.
“Maybe because they have elected officials pretending to do jobs that belong to the private sector?” Donald offered, dejectedly.
Mick laughed and squeezed his shoulder. “Jesus, Donny, you sound like a goddamned Republican!”
“Yeah? Well, I feel like we’re in over our heads, here.” He waved his arm at the depression in the hills they were skirting, a deep bowl scooped out of the earth. Several mixer trucks were pouring concrete into the wide hole at its center. More trucks waited in a line, their butts spinning impatiently.
“You do realize,” Donald said, “that one of these holes is going to hold plans they let me draw up, right? Doesn’t that spook you? All this money? It freaks me out.”
Mick’s fingers dug painfully into Donald’s neck. His friend laughed over the rumbling, beeping machines.
“I’m being serious,” Donald said. “Billions of taxpayer dollars are gonna nestle in the dirt out there in the shape that I drew up. It seemed so...abstract before.”
“Christ, don’t be so melodramatic. This isn’t about you or your plans.” He popped Donald with the clipboard and used it to point toward the container field. Through a fog of dust, a large man in a cowboy hat was waving them over. “Besides,” Mick said, as they angled away from the parking lot, “what’re the chances anyone even uses your little bunker? This is about energy independence. It’s about the death of coal. You know, it feels like the rest of us are building a nice big house over here, and you’re over in a corner stressing about where you’re gonna hang the fire extinguisher—”
“Little bunker?” Donald held his blazer up over his mouth as the cloud of dust blew across them. “Do you know how many floors deep this thing is gonna be? If you set it on the ground, it’d be the tallest building in the world—!”
Mick laughed. “Not for long it wouldn’t. Not if you designed it. It’d be the tallest pile of rubble in the world.”
Donald didn’t find this or Mick’s nonchalance amusing. The man in the cowboy hat drew closer. He smiled as he kicked through the packed dirt to meet them, and Donald finally recognized him from TV: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma.
“You need to keep some perspective,” Mick added under his breath. “How many bunkers has this country seen that were never used? Not even once? So relax. You’re stressing me out.”
“You Senator Thawman’s boys?”
Governor Rhodes smiled. He had the authentic drawl to go with the authentic hat, the authentic boots, and the authentic buckle. He rested his hands on his hips, a clipboard in one of them.
Mick nodded. “Yessir. I’m Congressman Webb. This is Congressman Keene.”
The two men shook hands. Donald was next. “Governor,” he said.
“Got your delivery.” He pointed the clipboard back toward the staging area. “Just shy of a hundred containers. Should have somethin’ rollin’ in about every week. Need one of
you to sign right here.”
Mick reached out and took the clipboard. Donald saw an opportunity to ask something about Senator Thurman, something he figured an old war buddy would know.
“Why do some people call him that?”
Governor Rhodes laughed. “You mean Thaw-man?”
“Yeah.”
Mick flipped through the delivery report, a breeze pinning back the pages for him.
“I’ve heard others call him that when he wasn’t around,” Donald explained, “but I’ve been too scared to ask.”