SILO 49: GOING DARK

Book One of the Silo 49 Series

A Wool Universe Series

by Ann Christy

This volume is dedicated to the WOOLians of the world

and to Hugh Howey.

Author’s Foreword

This series has been written primarily for readers already familiar with the world of WOOL, that deliciously dystopian world created by author, Hugh Howey. While I’ve tried to make it accessible and enjoyable for readers who have not yet plunged into WOOL, much of what happens may not be understood in context unless one knows of the dark depths of the Silo world.

For those of us who do know the bleak joy of WOOL, there must surely be sympathy between fans now that his series is over. The Silo 49 series is for those fans that still want more.

Silo 49 came about almost the very moment I finished the last line of the story in which we met Juliette (no spoilers here). I began to wonder about human nature. What might have happened if ruthlessness, a desire for power and control and a lack of kindness were replaced with true goodness and a desire to do right rather than follow the rules?

I told the story to myself, adding and editing in my head as the new chapters of WOOL emerged to keep my own corner of the world true to Hugh’s. One day I wrote that shorter version out so another WOOLian could read it. I got the email response with a single word on it, “MOAR!” This series was written from that encouragement.

With many thanks to Hugh Howey for giving his generous permission to publish this series set in his world of WOOL and with affection for my fellow WOOLians,

Ann Christy

Lying Can Be a Good Thing

Graham Newton tossed down the note just delivered from IT. He gnawed at a lip already gnawed raw and watched the note float lazily down to join the other litter scattered on the floor of his compartment. The note didn’t say much, but it didn’t need to. ‘Flashing Red Lights’ were the only words on the slip of rough and bumpy paper. It shouldn’t mean much but for Graham, the head of IT, it meant he needed to get ready to lie his tail off.

The workers in IT—the ones that were left anyway—were under the impression that the flashing red lights signaled a specific malfunction within the servers that required the singular intervention of the Head. With his passcodes and card keys, he was the only one who could restore the delicate balance within the all-important servers.

It went without saying that was all so much crap. It meant that someone was calling him from another silo and most likely the call was from Silo One. He needed to get down there, a lengthy trip of 29 levels downward, and do it quickly. First, he would need to get ready.

His preparations for speaking with Silo One had graduated almost to the level of ritual. That didn’t surprise Graham at all. He understood ritual better than most of the residents of the Silo, perhaps better than any of them. His whole role in this world was to ensure things went the same way all the time, to ensure that the ritual of life was continuous, smooth and undisturbed. And when it was disturbed, it was his duty to disperse the ripples through another, much darker, set of rituals. Inside the silo, all that mattered was continuity because continuity meant survival. There was no room for error under the ground, no room for change.

He performed the same actions before every communication with Silo One. He had no idea if he was just a really good liar or if this little ritual worked, but he’d been lucky so far. Why skate the rails? He’d been lying more and more over the years and lately, his communications with them were hair-raisingly dishonest. It was necessary, though. Of that there was no question. It was only a matter of doing it skillfully and believably that presented the challenge.

During his very first communication with Silo One, so many decades in the past now, his uncle had given his teenaged self a final and imperative piece of advice before they’d opened the cabinet and gone down into the hidden spaces that changed his life forever. That advice had been to be sure to tell the absolute truth.

His uncle had looked straight into his eyes, a hand firmly set on each of Graham’s shoulders, and said, “Graham, I’m serious. They will know if you lie. Just tell the truth.”

Graham had agreed, more embarrassed about having to be reminded to be honest than afraid of consequences. It was only after that call, after he was accepted as official shadow to the head of IT, that his uncle had told him the reasons behind his serious warning. It was only then that he realized his uncle had been prepared to quietly kill him with a poisoned cup of tea if he had failed that all important interview. He would have done it regretfully, but he would have done it as was required by the Order and the rules set forth in its pages. It had given Graham a great deal to think about in terms of this new career when he had learned that painful truth.

Of course, the truthfulness issue was one that almost immediately had to be re-thought. His uncle, once he knew he had a confidant and partner, trained Graham on all the things that needed lying about and how to go about doing it. His predecessor had, apparently, done the same for his uncle in his turn. It was a tradition almost exactly as old as the silo itself, it seemed.

For his uncle, a big man with the rather odd name of Newt Newton, the tricks that worked were to wear boots that were much too tight, put a drop or two of the calming drugs used in the water supply for the silo into his tea or put small pads between his headset and his head. Sometimes a combination of all of those things was required when he knew he would be telling whoppers.

On one rather serious occasion, he had confessed with some shame, he actually dosed himself with the forgetting drug, the one rarely used in the silo and powerful in its effect. His wife had supervised the process. He told Graham how much he had used and how to make it work. Just a dose or two and then a constant repetition of the events he wanted to forget run through his mind or even recited aloud were all that was needed. It didn’t work completely but it did take all the stress out of it, made the events hazy and dreamlike. That made it very easy to lie about whatever it was.

His wife, according to Uncle Newt, wasn’t supposed to know anything but she was a sharp woman with observant eyes and she knew far more than she should have. That same uncle—the one who couldn’t keep secrets from his own wife—had cautioned Graham to be a better head of IT and keep his secrets. Better yet, just don’t get married, he had told him with a laugh.

It turned out, in the course of time, that Graham didn’t need most of the tricks his uncle had relied upon. Instead, it turned out that he was a natural. His trick was simply to rationalize a way that what he said could be construed as the truth. It was shockingly easy, but it did require preparation.

He paced his room on Level 5, kicking the debris littering his messy space out of the way on each circuit until he had made an inadvertent path of dirty, but clear, floor for his pacing. The problem he had was that he couldn’t prepare for what he didn’t know was coming. Most certainly they would want the results of the water tests. He had those and he figured that the answers were bad news but he would be truthful about them. They might have the solution he needed for getting rid of whatever compounds were tainting their water. So, no lies were needed there.

As far as the rest, well, he didn’t know what he should and shouldn’t lie about for best effect. Over the last couple of years they had been far too interested in the rate of the silo’s population decline. The way they wanted details was almost salacious, like gossiping busybodies in the Fabric District or on a landing, trading secrets like chits. It appeared to Graham to be more of a clinical interest than one that bespoke of caretaking, like they were more interested in what was happening and what it was like rather than interested so that they might help them correct the problem. Caretaker was the role that Graham had mentally assigned to Silo One all those decades ago and one that had been withering away ever since.

Should he be truthful about the strange effects of the forgetting drugs he had been directed to start dosing the silo with? Should he tell lies about the cancers still sweeping the silo population? It was a fine line to walk. But since Silo 12 had been terminated by Silo One, he had a growing fear that his problems here might result in the same final treatment. Listening to that over the comms—as he assumed every other silo had—had been eye opening. They had destroyed a silo, bringing it down and killing everyone inside simply because they could no longer control them. Because they had done something not in line with the Order and Silo One’s enigmatic interpretation of that book.

He paced a few minutes longer, running the mantra through his head that helped to calm him, helped him to get into the mood to rationalize and helped him to keep on being that unflappable bit of bedrock it was safe to rest a silo on.

It turned out to be completely useless.

Eavesdropping on Death

Graham bustled through the mess that was IT but stopped short when he met Tony the Toady coming out of one of the workrooms. Tony’s eyes—the greedy eyes of a man with more ambition than was healthy—lit up when he saw Graham.

“Boss!” he exclaimed, his slick smile settling into place. “So glad you could make it in today. That error has been blinking all day.” He jerked a thumb down the hallway toward the server room doors. He lifted his ubiquitous clipboard and ran a perfectly groomed fingernail down the page.

Before Tony could get started, Graham needed to nip this in the bud. Tony had become almost nauseatingly efficient and in-his-face obsequious in the years since Graham’s shadow had died. The man had a nose for advancement and while he didn’t know the details of what the Head of IT did, he knew it was more than it seemed. And it was clear that he wanted it for himself and was angling for the shadow position, knowing that eventually it would have to be filled. Graham was old and couldn’t live forever, after all. To Graham’s way of thinking, anyone who wanted this job was exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t have it.

“Tony, we’re going to need to meet later. I’ve got to get that error fixed soon or we’ll have a server backup.” There was no such thing but that was enough to strike alarm into Tony, who believed—like everyone else—that the servers kept them alive. It worked again.

“Of course, boss, of course! I should have realized that. Shall I meet you afterward?” he asked, all politeness and conciliation, his finger poised over his clipboard. “We have quite a list,” he added.

Graham nodded even as he began walking, brushing past Tony without another word. The few workers on shift were all busy and overworked. He had no intention of disturbing whatever they were engaged in, so he merely waved as he passed the open doors where they toiled. At the outer server room door, he saw blinking red lights casting a lurid red glow into the hallway through the small pane of thick glass. At least whoever it was still waited on the line.

He used his card and key code to unlock the thick door and let it swing open just enough to slip inside. Stopping the momentum of the door once it got moving in a direction was impossible so he left that to the machines, slapping the red button that would close it again. He waited for the slow process to complete, tapping a foot impatiently as he did so. It was a major rule that one didn’t leave the door untended while opened even the barest sliver. He was half convinced that the red lights would stop blinking just before he got there.

He looked up at the camera, certain that Silo One would be watching if that was, in fact, who was calling him. He gave a little wave toward the dark eye of glass. He held up a finger to indicate it would be just a moment longer and pointed at the closing door. He took a deep breath and tried to recapture a feeling of calm while the door creaked closed. The final soft thud of closure closed Graham off from the last sounds of IT except the servers behind him and set his feet into motion.

Once he scrambled down into the lair under IT, making a great show of hurrying for the cameras in the server room, he grabbed the headset and slipped the jack into the slot for Silo One. He checked his nerves again, decided he wasn’t quite where he liked to be in terms of calm and then adjusted the headset so the pads were pushed back a bit, barely resting on the outer curves of his ears.

He jacked up the volume to make up for the distance, cleared his throat and said, “This is 49.”

“Standby. You will be contacted shortly,” answered a flat, tinny voice. It was cold and distant, then cut the connection without waiting for an answer.

Above him, the red lights winked out and didn’t return. The short response and the time it took him to get down to the lair probably meant that whoever had been trying to call him got tired of waiting and now had to be fetched again. He imagined some person—not quite male or female in his mind—wriggling in their seat with a need to pee while they waited. He felt vaguely satisfied with the image but suppressed a smile.

That satisfaction didn’t quell the disquiet he felt entirely. The hair on his neck stood on end whenever he heard that cold and sexless voice. It always had. Graham barely suppressed the urge to peer into the corners of the room once again as he settled in for the wait. He’d searched this area beneath IT at least a hundred times, looking for whatever they used to watch him in here. He had not been successful at finding it, if such actually existed.

It would be reasonable to assume there was no camera after so much fruitless searching. But Graham didn’t feel very reasonable and he knew they watched him here. Why wouldn’t they? He could feel their eyes itching across his skin in the way they asked questions that always seemed to mirror what he felt. Unless they lived in his body alongside him, he had to assume they knew these things because they watched.

He remained curious, though. No number of rules could completely eliminate that inside him. He knew that sometime soon, when enough time had passed after this call, when no contact was expected and any interest they had in him had waned, he would search again for cameras down here. The fact that most cameras in the silo were plainly visible if one chose to look but could be almost invisibly hidden in spaces like the cafeteria, kept him looking and kept him from being too much himself down here in the private domain of the Head of IT.

The wait for their return call seemed to last for days, though in truth it was only a few short minutes. To Graham, time always seemed to drag so very slowly when he was in these rooms beneath IT. Here he felt most exposed even though this was certainly the most hidden place in the entire silo.

A sudden lurching buzz behind him gave him a start and he almost fell off the little stool he was sitting on, yanking the cord out of the jack in the process of scrambling to keep his seat. He fumbled for his cord and jammed the jack home under the flashing light. “This is Silo 49, Graham Newton speaking,” he said in a carefully modulated voice.

“You have the report?” asked a slightly different voice, this one equally tinny and flat.

In all the years he had been participating in calls with Silo One, every voice sounded almost exactly the same. There were differences for a careful listener to catch though. Some spoke quickly and others slowly, some used strange flat tones on some words while others drew out vowels. He never mentioned the differences. He had the feeling they wanted him to always think it was the same person speaking, some ultimate authority he could rely on. But people needed sleep over there as much as here, didn’t they? It seemed to him he might relate better to them, perhaps be a little less nervous, if they acted more human with him.

“Yes, I do,” he said aloud and paused while he settled the headset more firmly around his head, yet still not quite on his ears. “It’s about the water quality issue I brought up before. I have the results.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s confirmed. The water table has been contaminated by the toxins matching the information you provided. The results are mixed though.”

“Mixed? Explain,” the voice, so eerily distant, sounded no more moved than it would if Graham had announced that his favorite color was yellow. This was, in fact, his favorite color and probably why he always had a soft spot for Supply.

“Water intakes are receiving water from the ground at different levels, of course. The ones in the down deep have very little contamination but it is still present at low levels in the source water. Regular filtration doesn’t change the levels,” he said and paused again as some distant sound tickled his ears through the headset.

He could clearly hear the rustle of paper on the other end of the line and the faintest whisper of conversation in the background. The man at the other end of the line didn’t appear to notice so he hurried on. “The contamination levels increase in different water plants as we rise in the silo towards the Up-Top, with very high levels present after processing at the uppermost plant. We did the correlation that you asked for based on the levels present and…”

“Yes?”

Graham shuffled his own papers until he found the summary sheet he had written just that day. The faint background noises had resolved into words and he could hear snippets of conversation going on in at the other end of the line more clearly. He strained to pick up anything distinct and heard the words “unsupportable” and “terminate” amongst the garbled speech, those words rising with emphasis somewhere else in that other room.

Such words from another silo, in a room where people existed that controlled them all, made his stomach churn uncomfortably and he swallowed hard. He looked at his paper, past the wet marks along the margins left by his sweat dampened hands, and to the words.

Graham kept his voice even and said, “The concentrations were tested in a selection of people and it does correlate, at least roughly, to the miscarriages and cancers. There is a lot of leeway there though. Some of it we think we know the reason for.”

For the first time the voice seemed interested and said, “Please, go on. We’d like to know what you found. Anything might be important. We’re here to assist.”

Graham fought the urge to make a face at the very idea of them actually helping anyone and instead read off his bullet points. “Those who either live or work where one water source provides and then work or live at a different level where another plant provides water show lower tendencies for cancer and miscarriage than those who both live and work at the higher concentration level water source.” He thought the words sounded confusing and he hoped what he said was at least understandable. There was no reply from the other end of the line, so he decided to push on.

“Also, when I started…uh…dosing the water again, as per your instructions, to combat the degradation in mood, the miscarriages started spiking. Really increasing.”

“What do you suggest be done about that?” asked the voice.

“Stop the dosing,” Graham replied bluntly. He held his breath, fearful of what the voice on the other end might say, and then hurried on. “Whatever it is supposed to do, it obviously makes the situation we’re already dealing with even worse.”

“That might lead to even more serious problems, as you well know, Graham.” The voice somehow added a note of chiding to the otherwise almost featureless words. Graham wondered, not for the first time, if he could survive long enough to get as far as Silo One just so he could fling a bag of chicken poo on their sensors. The dosing of the water he’d been directed to begin contained an aggressive combination of the calming drugs and a small dose of the forgetting drugs. It was the kind of combination that might be used in another silo close to an uprising, the population disturbed and aggressive. His silo didn’t meet those descriptions in even the smallest way.

He shook the thought away and felt the heat rise in his neck, which, when joined with his roiling belly, made him feel as if he might disgorge the contents of his stomach. The prospect of doing so in the confines of his little lair beneath IT, where the smell would linger, was unpleasant. To avoid it, he focused on what the voice was saying to him and kept away thoughts on how much he had come to loathe whoever owned those voices over the years. Whoever they were, they didn’t seem to care one whit that they were dying slowly over in this silo. He felt quite sure they were facing no such problems over there.

“Our population is down to 1563 as of this morning. There’s a little figure for you to chew on. That is down more than four hundred in less than a year. Some were age or accident or what have you, but the majority of deaths were from cancers, children who were just too weak to survive or problems during pregnancy. They bleed, you know. Pregnant women sometimes bleed for no reason and it doesn’t stop and then they die. I can’t think of a lot more serious than that. Did you realize that we had more than 5000 people here once? No one else seems to care about that anymore.”

“You’ll be able to resolve that once we resolve your water problem. The two problems go together, Graham,” the voice said, the embodiment of calm or perhaps simply that of disinterest.

“That may be so, but the impact of the dosing is much more serious than it has been before and I don’t know why,” Graham replied as calmly as he was able to, ensuring the pads for the earphones were perched as far back on his ears as possible. He distrusted the way they spoke to him when he was upset. It made him feel as if there was some danger, but of course, there was always danger when speaking to Silo One.

What he really wanted to do was scream at them, elicit something like humanity or compassion from them and then beg for help. And if he couldn’t have that, he just wanted an answer for what was happening that he could believe was true. Perhaps then he might be able to do something himself.

What was happening couldn’t be the way things were meant to be. No silo was expendable or why go to all the trouble of building the silos in the first place. Why put people inside them, sheltered deep inside the blasted earth, to save the human race and then let them die? It made no sense. But then again, he had sat in this very spot while Silo 12 was shut down, everyone inside lost forever. If Silo One could do that, then they were capable of anything and any silo could be lost.

He knew what his people were dealing with wasn’t what other silos dealt with, though they had their own problems to be sure. He often wondered if he were allowed to choose his problems, which would he choose? Would he select the uprisings and death that happened with such frightening regularity in the other silos or the slow and lingering decline of his own? The truth was, at least according to Graham’s simple viewpoint, neither should be happening. There was no reason for any of it.

His brief reverie was interrupted again and it was only when the voice spoke that he realized he had been hearing murmurs from the other end of the line again.

“Impact? Be specific with what you mean when you say impact,” the voice, no longer totally emotionless, sounded more interested, almost eager. For some reason this made Graham think of Tony the Toady’s smile. All long white teeth and avid eyes. He shivered.

Graham could hear more conversation on the other end of the line and though he couldn’t make out the words, he could at least tell that those speaking were men and their voices weren’t strange like the one he was supposed to be talking to. Whatever might be going on over there, he needed to make sure they didn’t catch on that he could hear it. He reached down, grabbed a notebook by his chair and flipped to the page he needed. He took a deep breath. He would be useless to his silo if they had some way to eliminate him or did something worse.

“Some side effects due to memory degradation are to be expected but this is much worse. I’ve got a list here of incidents that fall well outside the norm.” He ran his fingers down the list looking for some examples that would make his point and found one. He jabbed his finger on a line of neat writing and continued, “Nine different reports have been submitted of parents not picking up children from childcare because they forgot they even had kids. And that is just the reported ones so there are probably a lot more incidents that weren’t reported.”

“Anything else?”

Graham snorted and then tried to cover it up by clearing his throat. Sarcasm wouldn’t be helpful, he knew. But really, did they think that a parent forgetting the existence of their child was a minor glitch?

“Lots of people not showing up to work because they forget they have a job or forget which job they have. People who already have been diagnosed with cancer keep showing up complaining of illness because they forget they have it. Can you imagine getting that news every day for the first time?”

“Perhaps that is better than dwelling on a diagnosis,” said the voice in an utterly reasonable, yet chilling, response.

“Okay, I’ll grant you that one but we don’t have enough medics for this and they are just as forgetful so it’s a mess. Every single dimming the deputies and maintainers find people asleep on floors all over the place because they don’t remember where they live,” Graham continued and then gave up. He slammed the book closed and dropped it to the floor again. The bang reverberated in the space and made him wince.

“I understand your frustration. Those are rather extreme reactions and it is probable that the weakened condition of the ill make this more likely. Or perhaps there is some exaggeration in the effect due to the contaminants. I think you need a slight the alteration in the dose level. Stand by.”

Graham heard a rapid and whispered conversation behind the louder sounds of something rubbing across the microphone, but he could make out no specific words. It was but a quick moment before the voice continued and gave him a new concentration, which he dutifully wrote down.

Silo One’s voice then asked, “And the suicides?”

“Significant decreases, yes. Actually, that’s one good thing. There have been none since our report last month. But that might just be because there are fewer left to do it. Everyone is needed critically. We don’t have enough people to fill any but the most urgent jobs as it is. That’s especially true when people don’t show up to work. Whole sections of this silo are empty now and there aren’t any spare people to even close them up properly. We don’t even have a sheriff as of two days ago!”

“What happened to him?”

“Cancer. What else?”

The voice at the other end of the line was silent a moment. The only sounds coming through to Graham were more whispers that were just beyond the edge of understanding. Finally, the voice spoke again and asked, “Why weren’t we notified that the sheriff was ill?”

To Graham’s mind, this question pointed more toward Silo One not being given due consideration in the notification and less toward the critical loss of the main law enforcement officer of the silo. He answered civilly, but it was a strain to do so. “He kept that information private and I didn’t know until he died. He told very few people, a deputy or two and a friend. His medic knew, of course.”

“What about the birth defects? Did you compile that data?”

Graham nodded, though no one was there to see it and he shuffled his papers once again to get the correct page. He delayed a little, straining to hear what might be coming over the line from the other side. Whatever the conversation was, it was either over or no longer close enough for him to hear. He gave in and snugged the earphones tightly over his ears, a move that wasn’t wise if he was put in a position requiring any impromptu truth stretching.

He didn’t know exactly why the headphones were important, but IT head after IT head had passed down the knowledge that putting them on askew, but not askew enough to be noticeable gave them a lot of leeway in how the conversation with Silo One might go.

“Ah, I have it,” he said and made a point of peering at the paper just in case they were watching him. He read off a string of numbers. Incidents of certain defects in the heart, the lungs and the digestive tract were increasing as was the prevalence of children being born who had difficulty learning and remembering.

“Hold on,” the voice said and Graham heard a click. That click usually signaled silence from the other end of the line, a faint static hiss the only thing that would escape through. He’d been kept waiting so many times in the decades he had trained for and later held this job that the hiss often sent him off to dozing while he waited. Even when he was stressed to the point of breaking, somehow that tuneless noise calmed him and freed his mind to drift.

This time the click did stop the somewhat mechanical sounds of breathing that came from the voice he had just been speaking to, but not those background sounds he had heard before. Those got louder and more distinct, as if the lack of competition in volume allowed for more to be heard. The voices were also very individual. Graham would bet that whatever they did to make all voices sound the same wasn’t turned on at whatever microphone he was hearing this speech from. It was unnerving but also irresistible.

Graham got a bit more comfortable on his little stool, just as he normally would. He didn’t want it to appear to anyone that might be watching that he was listening to anything other than silence. He didn’t fidget or play with his papers like he might have done at any other time, though, since that would make noise. Instead, he laid the papers down, flipped the microphone on his own headset upward and away from his mouth and then crossed his arms. He hoped he showed them the attitude of a tired person settling in for a long wait as he leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes and listened.

“…unsustainable at this point…” This came from a voice deeper than the one he had been speaking with and much further away. “…best to end it…” and finally, “…never developed robust population…”

Another voice, this one sounding younger and more energetic, came from much closer and he heard, “We have all the data we need, at least in theory. We can easily counter this same effect if it happens in any other silo. It’s too late for this one. This is teratogenic. Of this we’re reasonably certain, though we can’t be absolutely sure without actually physically examining a few of them. That we can’t do for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t matter. That possibility alone is a no-go from our standpoint. That isn’t something we want to, uh, carry forward.”

“And we’re certain this is from the catchment lake and not a problem they’ll all encounter at some point?” This again came from the deeper voice. It came through clearer now, perhaps a little closer.

The younger voice replied, “Reasonably so. The lake was originally quite large and deep and a part of the requirements for the cover facility. It was meant to act as a ready source of water in case of emergency, like a fire or something in one of the silos. For containment, you know? That catchment, along with the two depressions cut at other locations around the silo field, was really dug to provide drainage for the silo run-off. Basically, each is pretty much filled with the worst by-products imaginable from more than a dozen silos. Plus the heavy metals and oddments still falling out there are rolling downhill and settling. That silo is at the edge of our field and nearest to the lake, or what was the lake. And the next closest silo isn’t having a problem. Engineering reports indicate it is probably a crack in the bedrock that is leeching the contaminants down and through the area. There’s at least enough contact for water contamination below the surface.”

Graham felt the dread in him building as he listened to the men on the other end of the line. He knew what they were talking about. He had a map and there was a body of water on that map drawn off to one side, near their silo. It was a large enough body to be bisected by the edge of the paper, leaving just that ragged partial outline in blue. He had never known how large or small it might be.

He also knew that they were giving up on them and his mind went to Level 72 and the secret tucked inside the thick concrete walls of the silo. Big metal plates covered recesses in the concrete and hid what Silo One could use to destroy them. It had surprises inside, very nasty surprises. Three of these panels existed on that level and those would be enough to end all their problems once and for all if Silo One decided to use it.

Graham felt suddenly cold and unbearably hot at the same time. He didn’t know exactly how that system worked, but his imagination provided more than enough fodder for him to run several visuals through his mind, each more horrifying than the last. He swallowed and focused on keeping his eyes shut without squeezing them.

There was a short silence at the other end of the line and he wondered if they had discovered that he could hear them. If so, they would destroy this silo for sure; right now. After all, they had no other person in this silo to control him anymore, at least none that he knew of.

Finally, the deep voice spoke, coming through more faintly again as if the man who possessed that particular voice was moving away from the microphone, “Are we all agreed, then?”

Graham heard indistinct murmurs of assent and words of agreement from several voices. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing and his mind began to churn quickly over anything he might say or do that could stop them when he heard a new voice.

“Though I concur, I would like to delay this action until I can get more data. We have a lot, but what we don’t have is data from the very beginning of this, before any problem was noted. They don’t keep medical data on their computers for some reason so I have no access to it at all. Since we know about the water contamination and we could probably institute a testing protocol in other silos as a new requirement, we could do without the records but…”

“Having more information would be better. You’re quite right. This silo isn’t one that I would classify as a threat to the program. They aren’t viable, but not particularly dangerous.” The deeper voice finished the statement for the other and there were more murmurs of concurrence. Graham tried not to breathe a sigh of relief.

The deep voice continued, “Sir. You have our recommendations, but the decision is yours. We would like to gather all medical data from, say, the last thirty years. Just the relevant data if we’re pressed for time. More is always better. This will give us information on the younger adults. After that, we recommend termination of the silo.”

There was a cough, a very faint and ragged one, that came through the line and then the deep voice said, “You have something to add?”

A raspy voice, one that reminded him of his uncle’s voice as the cancer rampaged through him, now spoke in a tone like that of a patient teacher or parent engaged in gently scolding a child. “Have you not considered the possible ramifications of termination? If this is being caused by some crack in the bedrock or structural weakness then dropping the silo might simply spread that problem to other silos?”

The deep voice, one that Graham now thought of as Mr. Gloom, responded, “George, is that a possibility?”

The young voice answered and Graham now had a name for him too, George. “The silos collapse only on the inside, each level coming down upon the next. We just start the process remotely from here. The initial blasts at the top and in the middle of the silo initiate the process and the weight of the structure does the rest. It is designed to work the same way that one might use to bring down a skyscraper in a crowded area, collapsing in and downward and not spread outward. But…”

“But, what?” Mr. Gloom interrupted.

“Nothing is perfect. It is possible that if this is a crack, or series of cracks, that the stress of bringing down a silo could expand it or change the direction. It’s a risk,” George answered, his words slow and his voice hesitant.

Graham then heard the voice he was sure he had been speaking with again. There was something about the way he put his words together and the speed of his speech that made it seem familiar to Graham. And now he knew it was a man. Just a man. The man said, “Thank you, gentlemen. Good work. Go ahead and take me off mute, will you?”

There was a slight sound on the line, this time clearly from a mouth close to a microphone. Graham knew he had best react appropriately so he opened his eyes when the voice said, “Are you still there, Graham?”

“Yes, I’m here,” Graham said and thought he did a fine job of pretending. There was a pause on the line and then he heard the word “nervous” from a distant voice.

“Listen, Graham, I understand you’re worried and perhaps frightened, but I think we might be very close to a solution for you.”

He wanted to grind his teeth and call the voice out as a liar, but instead Graham worked up some reserve of calm and started lying too, pushing back the earphones a tad under the guise of settling them on his head. “I knew you would have a solution, sir. What should I do?”

Graham wanted to hear how they were going to do this great act of murder and get him to simply move along smartly, none the wiser.

“We have some good medical people over here and they say they’ll be able to provide you with a formula very soon that you can take to your own chemists. It should stop all the problems with your water, help with births and decrease future cancers. In the meantime, we’d like you to put all your medical records from the last 30 years on the computer so we can take a look at them.” A note of chiding entered the voice again as he continued, “We did request that you switch to electronic ones some time ago, didn’t we?”

This question confused Graham on top of his being horrified at how calmly the man on the line lied to him. “Uh, no, sir. It was discussed a few years ago but I wasn’t able to convince silo administration that it was desirable. What with so few people to do extra work. If you recall, our silo had a problem with some privacy issues in the past. It was a law enacted totally outside my sphere of control to keep physical records…”

Graham heard a rapid whispered conversation from that same open microphone somewhere in that other room but could make out no specific words. Eventually, the voice returned and said, “Ah, yes. My apologies. But there is no reason now not to get someone scanning in those documents when there is so much benefit for you all. Do it. Then contact us again so we can ensure we have access.”

“I will, sir. If it will help.” Graham resisted the urge to start calling the man vile names and slamming his headset down repeatedly. It was a close call but restraint won.

“It will. By the time you complete that, we should have a formula for you. Out.”

The implication was as clear as the disconnection of that circuit. They were going to hold out a chance for relief until they had what they wanted and then, boom goes the silo. He felt judging eyes on him so he hung up his headphones carefully, gathered his papers and tidied the room before leaving. His glance inadvertently fell on the little white numbers over the row of jacks and stopped at the number 40, but he pushed the temptation aside for the moment. This was not the time. He wanted to scream but what he needed to do was think. And he needed to do it someplace not likely to be watched. And he needed someone he could trust to tell everything to.

Any Normal Day

Graham did his best to behave completely normally but it was only through sheer force of will that he was able to even approach such a state. That and spending time hidden in his compartment playing solitaire whenever possible were what helped him make any believable pretense at all. It was a surprise to him how hard it was to simply act like he would on any other day. That the situation was unprecedented was true, but his job was, at its core, simply one long act and he’d done fine through any number of serious situations.

There were few actual skills required for the job he held, which was arguably the most important one in the silo. Of those skills, acting like everything was normal ranked at the top of the list, pretending like everything was in control followed closely behind and occasionally doing things one might otherwise find absolutely reprehensible rounded out the top three.

According to his uncle, the careful cultivation of an exterior personality that combined being an asshole with a desire to do nothing except work was a bonus, but not absolutely required as a fourth skill for the job. Uncle Newt had been a jolly fellow with a genuinely caring core and quick sense of humor at home. The first time Graham had seen his uncle at work, trailing behind him as he was evaluated, all unknowing, for the job he held now, he had been amazed at how different the man behaved. He wasn’t mean exactly, just not at all nice. And people had seemed to fear him.

Graham had embarrassed himself mightily on that first day when he started crying in his uncle’s office as he listened to him yelling at someone outside the door. Back in the office, Uncle Newt had knelt down in front of the chair Graham was ensconced in with his feet barely touching the floor, and turned back into the lovable man Graham had always known. He had been right when he told Graham that he had to be that way for reasons a little boy wouldn’t understand. He’d been equally right when he told him that someday he would understand if all went well.

Alas, Graham wasn’t cut out for asshole-dom of any sort. He was firm when needed, nice when permitted, but always a good person. Even his wife had been nice, bringing platters of baked goods or treats of some sort and passing them out, office to office, as she asked after families.

In his decades as Head they had experienced only four cleanings, the last one actually done under duress from Silo One because it had been too long since the previous cleaning. Even then, he had picked someone who was close to death and had no close family, carefully parsing each record for the right person. She was as alone as anyone could be in the silo where everyone was tied by blood and proximity to one extent or another.

He had sat by the woman’s bedside, telling her of the unease in the silo and the dirty sensors and his fears. He told her the secret to peace in the silo; the cleanings. She had volunteered then and Graham felt dirtier than the sensors she would soon clear of their debris. It was the kind of filth that lived inside the soul and could never be washed away.

She said the words and went to the cell. When Graham had made sure there was a pouch filled with an overdose of poppy extract installed in her helmet so she would feel no pain, she had actually winked at him. Before they put on her helmet and her face disappeared from view forever, she had placed a hand withered by illness and age on the arm of the IT worker to stay him a moment. She turned to the little round window through which Graham watched and mouthed the words, ‘Thank You’. Graham hadn’t been able to stop the tears from flowing then and said the same back to her, earning him a confused and vaguely suspicious look from the Sheriff standing nearby.

What she saw outside was the best his people had ever done. It had been a true work of art. She had been a teacher, his teacher once upon a time when he was very small. He’d asked her what her favorite thing was from the children’s books after she agreed to say the words and earn herself a death sentence.

She had thought about it, her eyes soft with memories, and told him it was the birds. She thought it might be wonderful to be able to fly and not have to use the stairs all the time. He’d asked her if she could keep a secret and she had nodded, eyes widening at the secret smile on his face. He had leaned low and whispered so softly in her ear that it might have been wind, but she had heard him and her own smile was heartbreaking in its belief and hope. He had whispered that she would have birds.

So he had the programmers add birds, lots and lots of happy birds. He had put in birds that flew high, flew low and even added a colorful variety of them circling the sensors, luring her there with their colors and chirps. They ensured she would follow the cleaning procedure and stay close to the sensors. She had.

But she had been the last one to clean and Graham wouldn’t hear anything more on the subject when Silo One brought it up. They weren’t insistent, even though the sensors that showed the population their view of the blasted lands outside were caked with dust.  Nothing in this silo even hinted at an uprising so why bother. With his population dropping like it was, such a thing would be as stupid as it was unnecessary. Almost no one even went up to Level 1 that didn’t actually have to go there. Even the sheriff and his deputy had moved their main offices to Level 5.

As he shuffled cards for yet another game of solitaire, the cards soft and worn with use, he thought he really should get out and try to get some work done. It was just hard to bring himself to open the door and walk out of his compartment again. Inside, he felt like all his insides were having a party and dancing about inside his chest without a care for the one that held them safely inside.

More than once he felt a lurch in his chest so strong that his breath caught and he feared the stress of holding his secrets would kill him. Still, he did his best to reserve his shakes and hand-wringing for when he was sure he was alone and in a place unlikely to be observed, like the shower or here, playing cards all alone.

Graham slapped the deck of cards down on the table. Enough of this moping around, he decided. With a fresh kerchief pulled from the clean laundry pile—or what he thought was the clean pile—he stepped out into the hallway. A little socializing, a little face time with workers and a little movement would be good for him and make the time till Silo One forgot about him go faster. As he walked down the hallway toward the landing, he felt good, almost to the point of smiling.

Before he reached the landing door, he met up with a neighbor from a couple of doors down. Maribelle gave him one of her charming smiles and stopped to discuss housekeeping on their level. Drugged or not, Maribelle was a whirlwind of organization and seemed to be the constant driving force behind maintaining their level in some semblance of order. She marshalled her kids around the level, picking up debris on a regular basis and made the rest of them feel guilty in the doing. It always made people help. She was good.

“Oh, Graham, you’re just the man I wanted to see. Got a minute?” she asked, plucking an invisible bit of lint from her immaculate pink coveralls as she pulled up next to him.

“Sure,” he responded, trying to smile.

She saw the pained look and asked, “You okay?”

“Always, Maribelle. Always,” he answered. “I’ve just been busy. You know how it is.”

She nodded, a look of commiseration on her face. Graham knew that she understood all too well. They were all busy.

“Well,” she said, her tone returning to a business-like one. “We need to get a more regular schedule for cleaning up this level than we have. It’s getting disgusting and staying that way longer between clean-up days. Don’t you think?”

Graham looked around and saw she was right. The truth was that he had become used to it and only really saw it when it started to become really rank. Burlap bags of vegetable material ready to be taken to composting littered the hallway. Crowded in amongst those were bags of other recycling or just plain trash, some of them weeping dark stains onto the floor. The big brown bags meant for dirty laundry stood sentry beside each compartment door, some with their contents spilling out into the walkway between. Burned out or flickering lights gave the entire hallway the disused look of someplace soon to be abandoned.

“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” It was a lame response and he knew it.

“I’ve tried to talk to Wallis about it but he’s always busy, too. Besides, I don’t think we should need the mayor just to get people to clean up their own level. We should be able to do it ourselves.” It was a reasonable thing to say but Graham could see the frustration on her face and hear it in her voice.

“Would you be willing to set up a roster? Could you check the work schedules and talk to people? You can certainly put me on the roster.” He thought for a moment and added, “There really aren’t enough maintainers to push the issue.”

She tapped a finger on her chin, evaluating the hallway with her lips pursed. Finally, she gave one firm nod and straightened. “You’re right. We have to take care of anything we can take care of.”

Maribelle paused and looked up at Graham, her expression earnest. Her voice was soft when she spoke again. “We have to take care of each other, don’t we?”

That did it for Graham though Maribelle had no way of knowing that. She was so right. Her words went to the heart of the matter even if she didn’t realize it. If they didn’t do for each other, who would do for them? It was his turn to do for these people and instead of thinking—getting to work—he had been sitting in his compartment playing cards and feeling sorry for himself. He wanted to say something profound but when he tried to respond, the urge to blurt out what he was trying to hide was so strong he choked. He pulled the kerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his mouth with so much force it looked like he was trying to stuff it into his mouth, past his gritted teeth.

The moment passed, the urge with it. Maribelle looked at him first with concern and then with the beginnings of alarm. He tried to explain it away. “Sorry,” he choked out, his voice as tight as a drum. “I thought I was going to sneeze all over you for a minute there.” It was stupid but it was all he could think of.

Maribelle’s gaze was an evaluating one and he tried to smooth any strain from his face. From her expression, he wasn’t doing well. Finally, she gave a little shake of her head and said, “Graham, don’t worry about it. It’s not so bad. I’ll take care of it. You go on.”

He did his best to ignore the lingering cautious look she gave him and shuffled off in a hurry after one last wave. That had been embarrassing as well as dangerous, and he kept his head down as he made his way toward administration to check in and get the list of jobs he needed to parse out for his crew in IT. Taking up a little slack wherever he could was all he had to offer, though it was going to require a little selling on his part to add yet more to the work list in IT.

As he entered IT, his lists in his hands, Tony appeared. It was almost as if he had some sort of sensor that was specifically tuned to Graham. He got exactly one step past the turnstiles when the Toad made his irritating throat clearing noise and said, “Hiya, Boss.”

Graham felt his jaw go tight. It was an effort, but he plastered a distant smile—the smile of a boss—on his face and kept walking toward his office. He inclined his head for Tony to follow and the younger man hurried after him, his clipboard at high ready.

He knew it wasn’t fair of him to dislike Tony the way he did. He was very good at what he did and probably did deserve to take the shadow spot Silo One had been after him to fill from almost the very moment of his former shadow’s death.

That was a moot point now, since he had other plans but even before then, there was something about Tony that made him cringe. To have someone like him be the next in line almost seemed like a defeat, like the absolute power of Silo One had found a perfect receptacle for the wielding of their will.

“Have a seat, Tony,” Graham said as he took his seat behind the desk and picked up a stack of messages from the surface. “We’ve got a lot to do, I’m sure, but I’m going to add to that list so we’d best get started.”

Less than ten minutes later, a flustered Tony left with a much expanded work list and a whole lot of arranging to do. It made Graham feel something close to normal to know that nothing else was going wrong and necessary things were getting done even without him.

After that, things went well so it wasn’t an entirely lost day. As long as he was able to do what needed doing remotely, using the impersonal communications of the wires, then he was able to keep that façade in place. He could do things without a person to look at and backspace when his fumbling caused mistakes. Also, writing the words ‘inarticulate scream’ didn’t carry the same impact as actually doing it so he felt no temptation to do that in a wire.

It was with relief that he wired down to each of the water plants to lower the additive levels. They had no idea what it was, of course. It was labeled as a water additive just like every other additive, but the regular water workers could adjust the concentrations on the conditioning machines. It was good that they could because he had enough worries just trying to figure out how the last remaining IT agent that worked in chemistry would be able to manufacture and deliver the next load of additives, let alone how that same fellow would get to every plant just to twiddle a knob or push a button.

He knew from a lifetime of experience how fast the dosing took effect when it was turned on and how quickly it faded when turned off. He could expect some slight improvement right away, but the improvement was often a dubious form of goodness. There was always someone who would break from remembered grief or whose confusion might manifest in an act against the Order.

His experience of dosing was both personal and professional. As a child he had been no different from any other member of the silo up until the moment his uncle had decided he would make a good successor. Until that moment he had been subject to whatever might be added to the water just like everyone else.

The minor uprising that happened when he was small hadn’t affected him personally nor done anything more than bring about some confusion to his young mind. It was a mostly verbal confrontation, punctuated by distant skirmishes, over power between almost identical factions within administration and law. But it had resulted in a lot of cleanings.

The water had been dosed with calmatives during the event, which did end it more quickly than it might otherwise have. Afterwards, a minor dose of the forgetting drugs had been administered and, as a child not much impacted by the uprising, it did little but smooth out the memories Graham carried. That was not true of others, including his parents, whose foggy memories of that time had been a puzzle to his childhood self.

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 true 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.”

He stopped and looked at Graham, actually seeing his friend with his hollowed eyes and stressed expression. He said, “You look like you haven’t slept in days. You okay?”

Once inside and with the door closed, Graham plunked the bucket down unceremoniously on a littered table and said, “I need your help.”

You Might Want to Sit Down

“Okay,” Wallis answered, eyeing the bucket of corn. “Can it wait till after we eat? I’m not joking about being starving, you know.” He sucked in his gut dramatically and slapped at his belly, but his smile belied his words. He was just cheerful and couldn’t seem to stop himself.

“Not that kind of help,” Graham answered, trying to figure out exactly how he was going to do this and not get punched. He would deserve a punch or two. “We can eat while you help me.”

Wallis rubbed his hands together and said, “Right! Tea. And napkins. Get comfortable, why don’t you.”

Graham took the bucket and scooted some junk around on the low living room table to make room for it while Wallis busied himself with the business of making tea, humming a little tune as he did. He was glad to see that his friend was using the containers of farm water to make the tea.

He had already done all that he could to keep Wallis safe and with his wits intact without telling forbidden truths. He had ensured that Wallis received water tapped before it was processed through the dosing machines. Graham and Wallis were both drinking straight farm water now. The water they were drinking came from the upper water treatment plant—the one that brought the highest levels of contamination to those that drank from it—but Graham could see no help for that. He tried not to imagine what poison leeched into his body whenever he drank. When Wallis had asked why Graham wanted him to drink only from the big containers he hated hauling, he had lied and his lie was just believable enough for his friend.

Graham hadn’t been able to face the idea of being alone in his memory. It was bad enough seeing the dullness come over everyone else but he wouldn’t have been able to survive without at least one other undimmed person. Wallis was getting some dosing, of course, and there was nothing Graham could do about that. The tea in communal spaces, a quick drink of water at some handy faucet during the day or even the water left on vegetables washed before being served meant he couldn’t escape it entirely. But that little bit hadn’t dulled Wallis and he was almost as quick as ever. Graham was getting that much as well. There was simply no way to avoid it completely, but these small amounts seemed to have no real effect on either man.

Wallis waved him over to grab the tea while he carried in the other necessaries. Once they had settled and Wallis dug into the fragrant, but rapidly cooling, ears of corn, Graham decided it was now or never.

“So, Wallis, you know I don’t have a shadow anymore, right?”

Without a pause in his rapid nibble along the ear of corn, Wallis nodded and grunted something that sounded vaguely like a yes. The way his eyebrows drew together told Graham he didn’t understand the point of the question.

“Well, a big part of my job involves stuff no one except my shadow and myself are supposed to know about,” he said by way of explanation and then trailed off, trying to work everything out in his mind.

Wallis finished his first ear and dropped the gnawed cob into a smelly—and overfull—bin meant for compost material. He grabbed another in hands already dripping with juice and asked, “You want me to be your shadow or something? Because, if that is what you’re after, I gotta tell you I’m fully employed already.”

That actually wasn’t a bad thought. In a way, he was enlisting Wallis as a shadow of sorts. Unlike his uncle, Graham had no shadow to take over for him should the worst happen. And if anything happened to him right now, before he could do what he needed, the silo would be lost. And the only shadow he could handle after what had happened to the boy he had thought of as a son was Wallis.

His shadow had died before his thirtieth birthday. He had wasted away until the doctor gave him that single big dose of concentrated poppy extract that he gave to all those whose pain grew too great. There was not enough of the extract to manage the pain of a long decline. Even when crops were displaced to increase the space for the flowers, there was no way to tend and process as much as they would need. There just weren’t enough farmers or chemists.

So, people like his shadow suffered until the suffering was too great and then their suffering ended. That was it. A medic was called and with him came his little bottle of painless death. Graham had cared for his shadow as best he could but eventually the young man had called for the bottle. He had cried and held his bony hand as the lines of pain eased away and he regained his youth, even if only briefly and in death.

Graham shook those dark thoughts of the past away and grabbed one of the ears of corn and said, “Okay. You know how you’ve always thought we were the only silo?”

What Would Wallis Do?

They talked until well into the dimming, when the silo became quiet and the sounds of life tapered off beyond the compartment door. Graham did not return to his rooms once they were done talking. He had been exhausted almost to tears and couldn’t face even that short trip back to his empty compartment. Instead he shoved piles of laundry, plus one disreputably shaggy old cat, off the couch and onto the floor and took that for his bed. It was an uncomfortable bed and, as tired as he was, Graham found his mind going over the evening just passed and all that had been said.

To Graham it seemed as if Wallis had been more himself than since his wife died as the night wore on and Graham was able to uncover the truth of this world for him. At first Wallis had thought Graham was joking. Then he had thought he was ill, going so far as to get up from his seat and lay a hand on Graham’s forehead to check for fever.

After that he got angry, but it was a brief anger borne of having disbelief turn into truth. His natural curiosity displaced the anger quickly enough and eventually transformed into interest and engagement. It went better than Graham could have hoped.

Graham had tried to be systematic and avoid confusion, just as his caster had done for him during those first critical revelations decades before. Revealing each new truth one layer at a time made the process less painful and more easily accepted. Just as one prepared a surface so that it would last with time by priming it and letting it cure in the air before adding a first coat of paint, Graham tried to expose all the realities of this world to Wallis in good order and with careful attention to detail.

That tactic might have worked for a young shadow, but Wallis was no young man like he had been, and his friend had the experiences of a lifetime to relate to. He made leaps and connections between the words Graham said and his own experiences. The more they talked, the more Graham found himself hurrying to catch up and stay ahead of his friend.

By the time their eyes had gone sandpaper dry and the need for sleep had become urgent, Graham felt he had done a respectable job of laying out facts it had taken him a decade or more to truly accept. Just as his own caster had done with him, and as he had done with his long-dead shadow, he watched Wallis for signs of breaking. That was tricky though. The entire thing was distressing. It was the level of distress and reaction to it that needed to be carefully measured and prepared for.

As Graham tried to find a comfortable position on the sagging couch with springs that twanged at random moments, he realized he had never once considered what he would do had Wallis been unable to accept the information. He had no weapon and it never occurred to him, not even in passing, that he would have harmed the man. It seemed to Graham that he was either very desperate or very confident in his friend’s mental stability. He was consciously aware of neither thing. To the accompaniment of Wallis’ snores nearby and the twang of yet another spring, Graham finally slept.

* * *

It seemed as if only a moment had passed when he woke, so he must have slept soundly and well despite the couch and its unruly springs. He was stiff and sore and his left leg was deeply asleep. Wallis sat watching him from a chair just a few feet away wearing nothing but an undershirt and his shorts. It was an unnerving sight to wake up to.

Wallis looked almost excited, leaning forward as he was, his eyes alight with all that he had learned. Graham wondered if his friend had slept much at all. Even the sharp bristles of beard on his unshaven face, more gray than brown now, seemed to be standing straight up and ready to hear more.

“What? You okay?” Graham asked, his voice croaking and his mouth dry as old bones. He smacked his lips a few times and tried to work up some moisture. Based on the drool spot on the pillow, he had been sleeping with his mouth open again. No wonder his mouth was dry.

Wallis had apparently been waiting for him to wake up. Graham had no idea how long that wait might have been, but it was clearly long enough for Wallis to be wide awake and filled with questions. It was a bit weird to think of Wallis sitting there watching him drool and sleep.

Before Graham could think any further on that possibility, Wallis waved his hands dismissively and answered his question, “Fine, fine, I’m fine. So, these guys over in the other silo, they don’t know you’ve been talking to other silos? How can you get away with that? When did that start? How come you didn’t cut their controls on 72 if it was done at the Up-Top? And how did…”

Graham stopped him with a grunt and an outstretched hand then swung his unresponsive, sleeping leg over the side of the couch. It felt strange hitting the floor, almost like it wasn’t really his leg. “Hold on a second, for deep’s sake, and let me wake up. Got any tea made?”

Wallis called him a big baby and shuffled over to heat a pot of water. He wiped a metal teapot down with a dubious looking rag he dug from a pile of stuff on the counter then tossed in some tea that he sniffed first, also not an encouraging sign. He ran some water from the sink over two dirty cups on the counter, but Graham noted that he rinsed them from the non-dosed water he had been provided. Graham yawned hugely and shook his leg, grimacing as the first of the pins and needles started and let him know he still had a working leg after all.

Wallis came back and plopped down in his chair again. He reached out to slap Graham’s knee and asked, “You awake now?”

Graham shivered from the deep yawn but nodded. “What were you asking again? One question at a time, please, unless you want to wait till I get some tea down.”

Wallis scoffed at the idea of waiting, apparently, and gave him a look that clearly conveyed he had no intention of waiting for tea or anything else. He asked, “Okay. So how are you talking with those other silos? How many of the other silos are in on it? Are there really 50 silos? Like, 50 silos all filled with people?”

Graham tried to follow all the questions but they came rapidly and were punctuated with the jerky emphasis created by Wallis’ hands. He always had been a hand talker. Now he was an impatient, curious and possibly over-caffeinated hand talker and it was making Graham dizzy.

“Yes, there are 50 but one of those is Silo One and I don’t think they count. I’ve spoken to several silos over the years, but some of the others are able to communicate with yet others that I can’t talk to and vice versa. I’m not sure why but I don’t think any of them can talk to all the others. At least not in secret, they can’t. I suppose I could talk to any silo I wanted just by ringing them up, but that’s not what you’re talking about, I don’t think. It’s not like I planned any of this secret stuff at all, I just happened to be there to answer when a call came one day.”

Graham shrugged because he really wasn’t at all sure how any of that had happened or who started it. He only knew that one day he had heard the buzz and seen the blinking light that meant Silo 40 was calling him. He had put the jack in, wondering what it might be about, and found himself talking on an altered line so filled with high squeals it had pained him to listen.

“And you never asked how many others are in on this? Are you an idiot?”

Graham bristled at the idea. “Of course, I asked! And we all agreed that we would only know the ones we already knew of or might connect with later. Safer, you know?” Graham stopped talking and pointed at the steam rising from the pot of water behind Wallis.

Wallis hopped up, more energetic than Graham had seen him in a long time, and began to prepare the tea. Seeing Wallis’ thin old man legs, mussed grey hair and bony feet made Graham wonder where the years had gone to. He wondered if he appeared that old when Wallis looked back at him so he looked down at his own legs and feet. Sure enough, they were bony, old man feet too. It was rather disappointing.

Wallis came back, carefully balancing the two cups on a battered metal plate. He stopped and started a few times, causing more to slop out of the cups each time he started walking because he kept looking at the cups. Graham wondered if Wallis had ever been told that you can only carry a full cup without slopping by not looking at it. Finally, he lowered the tray and offered a cup to Graham.

Graham took it gratefully and tried not to burn himself on the hot metal, curling a finger around the handle where a bit of yarn had been wrapped to keep away some of the heat. He blew across the surface of the hot tea and steam rushed away from him.

He took a careful sip while he waited for Wallis to settle himself and then said, “You’re taking this rather better than I thought you would.”

Wallis put down his hot cup and leaned forward again. He looked excited and eager. Actually, Graham thought he looked a bit too excited.

“Am I? How should I have taken it?” Wallis asked.

“Well, let’s just say that I spent 33 days locked under a floor after I was told just a small part of what I told you last night.”

Wallis leaned back in this chair and let out a whoosh of air as he gaped at Graham in surprise. His hair, already sticking up in every direction in unruly grey tufts, got another work over as he ran his hands up the sides of his head. Afterward, he looked like a little goat with horns flaring up, save that his horns were made of hair. He looked Graham up and down as if seeing him for the first time.

Graham imagined he was probably visualizing cabinets and cubbies like those they hid in as children during games. In those tight places they’d folded themselves up, chests compressed, and half hoped they would be found first.

“It wasn’t like a closet or anything. It was a series of rooms tucked under the floor,” Graham explained and saw that his guess had been right by the look on Wallis’ face.  He clarified, “But I was locked in, very frightened and confused. You’re not, though. Why?”

Graham watched Wallis as the man thought about what he would say. He watched just as he had with his own shadow, but without any intention of doing anything about it should his friend run screaming from the room. The time for that kind of absurdity was past now. Anything in the Order had to be treated with reservation now. Perhaps the whole thing was just so much trash and wasted paper.

Finally Wallis spoke. The excitement had diminished and a more serious tone entered his voice. “I think it is because I know there are others and when we die, it won’t be the end. Until now, I thought we were the only people that existed.”

Graham thought about what Wallis said for a moment, then nodded. This was a sentiment he understood. It was both reasonable and truthful.

Wallis went on, his voice low and a little sad, “You know, until today, I’ve been waking up every day and wondering if that would be the day cancer got started inside me. Or maybe if that day was the day I wouldn’t be able to take it anymore and I would jump over the rails. I can’t even remember the last time I woke up without those actual thoughts running through my head.”

“And today?” Graham asked, his voice gentle.

“And today I woke up and thought about how we can fix this shit.”

Graham smiled at the profanity. It was something he heard rarely from Wallis. As first a teacher and then a politician, it was something he had just given up when they all left childhood behind. After all, it wouldn’t have done for a primary school teacher to send the kids home after school with that sort of special vocabulary.

“I like the way you think,” he replied, the grin still on his face.

“What about you, Graham? Don’t tell me you didn’t feel the same. At least at some point, you must have.”

He tried to remember if he had ever had that type of thought and didn’t think he had, but he knew that Wallis was referring to their mutual losses over the years. The thoughts that went through his head were always tinged with the knowledge he carried of the other silos. “No. Actually, my most awful thoughts were the exact opposite of yours. Even scarier, I think.”

Wallis looked skeptical, “Scarier than cancer or jumping? The only thing scarier than that is slow cancer.”

“What I woke up and feared was that I wouldn’t get sick. I knew I would never jump. My responsibility absolutely prevents that. What I feared was being the last one here.”

There was silence between the two men, each pondering the concept.

At last, Wallis spoke, expression flat and voice deadpan. “I have to tell you, that is just so fucked up, my friend.”

Graham spluttered as inappropriate laughter bubbled out of him. Wallis joined him after a tick, gales of laughter choking out of him until he bent over and held his stomach, claiming he was going to wet himself if Graham didn’t stop snorting. The laughter petered out, a few false stops coming and going as they started laughing again.

Eventually, Graham wiped his eyes and saw that years of grief had fallen from the face of his oldest friend. The lines were still there, as was the grey hair and the increasingly wild eyebrows, but the lines held less pain in them. He hoped it would stay that way.

Once he recovered his composure, Wallis said, “All this hilarity aside, I have a whole lot of questions. I get the impression they aren’t going to move whatever agenda you’ve got forward just to save our asses. Unless blowing up our home is the kind of help you were looking for, that is. I’m not thinking that is the case. So, why don’t you tell me where we need to go from here and let the questions take care of themselves.”

“Okay. This is what I think we’ve got to figure out and I really don’t think we have a whole lot of time to do it in. First, Silo 40 already took care of the lines outside that Silo One could have used to start the self-destruct Up-Top,” he said and held up his hands to forestall questions when Wallis’ mouth opened.

“And before you ask, I have no idea how they did it. It was long before my time. That’s only half the system, though and it’s that other part we have to worry about.”

“That’s the stuff on Level 72 you were talking about, right?” Wallis asked.

Graham nodded, “Yep. But here’s where it gets tricky. If we start disabling things they might figure out we’re up to something. The whole system, for the whole silo, has to be disabled at once. And just like 40 did when they disabled the topside lines, it probably needs to be coordinated with the other silos or whatever else they did to make it unnoticeable. We don’t know, and have no real way to find out, how much Silo One knows about us down in here. I think we can be sure they won’t allow themselves to lose control of us without a fight.”

“And your plan is to not give them the ability to fight, huh?”

“Exactly,” replied Graham. “That means we need one more person and I need to get on the comms.”

Radios and Bread Crumbs

Three days after Wallis had been brought into this secret side of silo life the duo of conspirators became a trio. Grace, one of the last really experienced electricians left in the silo became their third person and they were lucky to have her at all.

She was dying, but slowly, and it wasn’t exactly what the two men had been hoping for. What she lacked in future longevity she made up for in experience and stability in the here and now, however. According to Wallis, Grace was bedrock suitable for building a silo on, steady and unflappable.

Graham stood by the switch-box one level below IT as she muttered about someone taking a sledgehammer to the innards of the switch-box she was working on. He felt bad about that because that was, in fact, exactly what he had done. There were still bits of mattress stuffing drifting about on the landing from the one he’d used as a cushion to deaden the sound of the blows.

He kicked a few of the fluffy bits away guiltily with the toe of his boot when she said that and felt like he probably had what he’d done written across his forehead. It was a crucial safety switch for lines leaving IT so he had been able to summon the best tech up to repair it and do it quickly. So, busting that unit had been a perfect choice for his needs. And though it made him feel even guiltier, there had been more than a little fun involved in wielding that sledgehammer.

He hadn’t known she was sick when the two men decided she was the right fit for their needs. Wallis knew her well but Graham had only a few professional dealings with her to consider. All of them were positive but still only professional and relatively distant. He felt terrible about her tromping up so many levels to fix this thing he didn’t care one whit for anymore and was having a hard time figuring out how to go about approaching the subject. It was much harder to tell this sort of thing to a stranger.

She apparently sensed something amiss because she gave a few pointedly suspicious glances at his uncharacteristic hovering about while she worked. At one point, while she was stripping insulation from a few wires with quick, sharp flicks of her wrist, she flat out commented that he looked like he had bees in his pants.

She had caught on almost immediately that he was holding some secret as Graham looked around with a decidedly guilty air at her comment. It was obvious that he was looking to see if he were being watched and he might as well have held a sign above his head that read, ‘I’m Up to Something’. She had just shaken her head in disgust and stopped talking to him after that.

With pursed lips and a grim, business-like expression on her face, she stayed mum until the unit was repaired. When she slammed the bent lid home she turned toward Graham, hands on her hips, and considered him for a moment. Her shrewd appraisal made Graham nervous and he shuffled his feet like a child being scrutinized by a displeased parent. He knew he was doing it but was powerless to stop himself and that just made it worse. The red cheeks that followed spoke even more eloquently of him being up to something. He realized he was a terrible conspirator. It was no wonder no one from Silo 40 ever told him much.

Grace was being dosed, at least Graham assumed she was, but her gaze was sharp and clear. She finally broke the silence, cleared her throat and told him she wanted to discuss some labor swaps with him as some of his folks could address electrical problems in a pinch. The steady gaze she had held him with and the little twitch of an eyebrow gave him to understand that she knew he was up to something and would play along for the moment.

Graham was grateful she opened the door for him, even if she didn’t know what he really wanted, and he wasted no time. He rushed her down several hallways, a hurrying hand on her elbow, and then pushed her toward a broom closet. It was dark and smelled of sour old mops and even older cleaning supplies.

Both of them were a little out of breath by the time they reached the closet and Grace gave him a very strange look when he opened the door to the dank little room. After a moment, she shrugged and stepped inside, neatly disengaging his touch on her arm as she did so. Graham follow close behind and shut them into a darkness broken only by the thinnest strip of light cutting the bottom edge of the door.

He took a deep breath and began by asking her how far she would go to save the silo from what was happening inside it if she knew there was a way to do it.

Given that she was of an age with him, Graham figured she must understand what he was saying to mean the sickness. She was silent for so long that Graham feared he and Wallis had chosen wrongly after all. A dark feeling of failure started to descend upon him when she finally spoke.

“I can’t think of a single thing I wouldn’t do,” she answered. Her voice was soft and sincere as it came from the thick blackness around them.

In that darkness, Graham smiled and told her everything.

* * *

The trio was almost ready to act and fear of failure had turned Graham’s belly to water. Old habits, the ones that spoke to obedience and the need for absolute order, had lost their validity but doing this many things completely against all those habits was still a difficult prospect for him. He hadn’t been back to Level 34 since that last fateful conversation with Silo One and his stomach gurgled when he thought about talking to them.

He had gone so far as to filch the tiniest dose of the calming additive for the water and mix it in his morning tea. It wasn’t the forgetting drug, but the less intrusive calming one that simply stopped a person from caring too much about anything. He felt it was a good foil against detecting deception or undue stress when he finally did contact Silo One later on in the day. It was an unavoidable duty.

He sipped at his flask as he walked around IT, giving clarification where questions existed, orders when such were needed and encouragement to all. And avoiding Tony wherever possible. He gave him his instructions, which sent him off and running. Whatever else there was to say about Tony, in every aspect of IT except the important parts, he knew what he was doing. When he finally did manage to duck into the server room with enough privacy to go below, he knew they must have tried to reach him at some point and he took a few minutes to calm himself.

It turned out that wasn’t hard to do at all and he looked at his canteen, thinking perhaps he put just a little too much happy juice in it. He felt really good at the moment and that was probably not the mood he was going for. He shrugged and took another sip.

He made his way down the little hallway and into the kitchen facilities, dumping the remaining tea from his canteen and giving it a good wash to avoid the temptation of further indulgence. He didn’t have to worry about the water here, since by design it was pumped from the pre-conditioned water and utterly un-dosed. He cleared his throat and gave himself a stern mental talking to on the importance of remaining serious.

When he reached Silo One, he sensed a great deal of consternation at the long days since he had last called given the situation. Apparently, Silo One had tried to reach him several times but he had never been notified. He reiterated that they had only a fraction of the personnel they needed and he had to do many other jobs. That was entirely true and he felt the tension on the line ease.

He, in turn, had to suppress a giggle. He definitely had way too much of the calming additive. Negotiations ensued, though Graham doubted the voice at the other end would have called them that, and in the end, he had promised to come to check once per four days from that day on.

The reason for their repeated calls had been to ask why no records were yet available on computer. Graham thought he did a passable job of listing the enormous number of emergencies they were dealing with and then at sounding completely sincere when he apologized. He told them he would get right on it.

He figured they would be watching him until he actually took steps to do as they instructed, so he had gone from his lair beneath the servers and made a public show of compliance by sending a wire to the medic and asking him his progress in his collection of records. He decided to add a little flourish to end the message by writing that he was anxious to finalize the plan and get started.

As he hit send, Graham hoped the medic wouldn’t be equally anxious and actually start scanning records. He hoped the medic in question would be busy enough trying to tend to too many jobs and blow him off entirely for a day or so. Maybe Graham could arrange for the medic to get a dose of that calming additive too. It was great for feeling no sense of urgency. It was something to consider.

The trio needed a few more days to get their act together and he didn’t want Silo One to get any notion they had all that they needed. There was just so much to do. Talking to the right people in the other silos needed to be next on his agenda and he would need all his wits. No more happy juice for him, he decided.

For this he finally procured the right communications gear, tailored using favors and bribes and detailed instructions provided by Silo 40 long ago but never acted upon. He needed to smuggle it to his rooms on Level 5 before turning it on, just in case they were watching.

He could have just stuck it in a bag and walked up but that was a bit of a waste of a long trip, so he volunteered for food duty. After removing rubbish, this was the least favored job for the residents on any residential level. While the rubbish required sorting and movement of loads, it was all downward movement and a quick shower before returning upward made for a fresh climb past shopping and other sights. Food, on the other hand, was much heavier and all of it was moved upward. It was perfect for Graham’s needs.

Hidden inside a sack filled with flat amaranth bread destined for the residents of his level, all the many parts of his new radio made the trip innocuously and raised no suspicion. Food had to find its way up and into individual hands now that the cafeteria on Level 1 was closed. It hadn’t closed for lack of food, because the farms produced far more than they needed even with very few people doing the actual work of farming. It needed to close for lack of porters to bring the food up and workers to man it.

There were not nearly enough people to spare just for cooking. There were also fewer people going that far just to eat. People couldn’t make it all the way up or down to whatever cafeteria was assigned to them for their meals simply because there was so much to do aside from eat. The lower cafeterias were being used but Level 1 had been as easy cut for administration to make.

Since then, food found its way to people, not the other way around. These large lumpy bags of vegetables, fruits, breads and even meats were common enough to be unremarkable now and Graham knew that many a forbidden thing had made this trip hidden in much the same way his radio was now. He had heard the slosh of liquid and caught a whiff of corn hooch on occasion when it was only meant to be vegetables coming up. His little radio was nothing compared to trying to hide bottles of high grade hooch.

It was said that private messages were going up and down this way more and more, too, though Graham had seen no proof of that. He had taken all cost levies off the wire system, with much grumbling from Silo One, but it was probable that people just got used to the idea of nothing being private other than what passed from hand to hand. He hadn’t reported anything to Silo One when he first heard of it and had pointedly never asked about it happening or had it investigated. He thought such messaging was a good thing, but that was a private thought.

He and a young man from the upper farms that had been sent to assist him used the forbidden, but absolutely necessary, lifts that had been strung up in the spaces around the stairwell. Where landings matched up or jutted out too far, the lifts were interrupted and the two men were required to shift their burdens from one sturdy reinforced cloth bag under one set of ropes and pulleys to another. None of the lifts went more than five levels this close to the Up Top, some only spanning one or two levels. As a result, there were quite a few transfers of goods required before they finally reached the landing on five.

Any potential worry about private messages paled in comparison to what he had faced when Silo One confronted him about the lifts as they were being built. It had been the first time he ever stood up to them, using logic and the words of the Order itself to beat their demands back.

After all, he had argued, if I can’t actually use a porter to do this thing or that thing, how can I comply with this or that part of the Order? He had prevailed for what the voice had referred to as, ‘the duration of this setback’, so long as he complied with certain rules and ensured people didn’t use the lifts more than absolutely necessary. And as a primary rule they were to never, under any circumstances, allow actual people to use it as a means of transportation for themselves.

An interesting side effect of their little lift installation was that one couldn’t really jump from many of the levels anymore. The big cloth bags, constantly in motion with the breezes of the silo, swung to and fro in empty spaces that might have once tempted a potential jumper. One would have to go much further down the silo to be sure of not getting scooped up by an errant bag and painfully breaking all ones limbs but surviving the process. It might not be a deterrent to someone very determined but it certainly made a jump difficult for anyone suddenly overtaken by the urge but not committed to the act.

Graham was sweating and his hands were raw and sore from the ropes as he unloaded the last of the produce from the lift bag on his level. He thanked the farmer for his help and watched as the younger man almost skipped away, the metal of the stairs ringing with his rapid descent and quick, easy steps. Graham almost felt envious for a moment but that feeling was replaced with a hope that the young man would one day be as old as he and living in a silo where there was life and noise and not just sadness and impending death.

He pulled his attention away from the energy of youth and back to the problem at hand. He needed to get the radio out of the bread bag discreetly before the others came for their portions. He decided the best way to do this without raising a spectacle was to just do it. He pulled his own empty pack out of the messy pile by the double doors, opened the bread bag and fished out his radio. He gathered all the other pieces that went with it, along with a hefty helping of crumbs, and put those in his pack too. He kept his back to the landing and hoped that it looked like he was dividing the food up just as he was supposed to.

Then he started the sorting and filling of everyone else’s sack in earnest. It was mostly guess work since he never knew how many sacks would be out on the landing or how big that person might be. Each sack was an old produce bag and marked somehow with a name and compartment number. Everyone could put one out no matter if they were a little child or a full size adult and the food would be divided the same. There just wasn’t enough manpower to get too fussy with the details and this seemed to work best. Graham knew that other levels, ones still fairly thick with residents, had more problems and tighter controls on food portions, but his level had no need of that.

There was no meat in this load but there was an entire plastic bin full of hard boiled eggs, two eggs packed per hard shell case. No wonder the load had been so heavy. He put a couple of those in each sack as well as a few rounds of bread and a smaller sack of breakfast grains with dried fruit bits. He estimated the oranges, tomatoes and other vegetables and put those in the sacks too. It wasn’t a small amount this time and he was surprised that he had actually been able to get those lifts up so many levels.

Even using the pulleys that vastly increased the amount of weight one person could lift, he wasn’t a young man and this was a lot of food. It was enough to eat for several days if people didn’t gorge, and then someone else would make the trip and do it all over again. Individuals did go to the farms or aquaponics or anywhere else they wanted to get more or different foodstuffs, but this main lift was what they had come up with to replace the convenience of the cafeteria, however inadequately.

Once the bags were filled and he checked the sacks one more time, he grabbed one of the two metal bars that hung suspended from a pipe near the ceiling. He rapidly smacked it against a metal plate attached to the pipe and winced at the loud clanging that echoed all around him. It created a clang very different from the dinging of the bells they had installed on the lifts, and it would echo along the pipe as it ran the length of the hall in the residential area. It was a surprisingly effective method for rough communication. He let the bar go and it rang discordantly as it swung against its mate a few times before it eventually came to rest. Whoever brought the lift was also responsible for ensuring the bags were distributed. Graham hoped that a lot of people would answer his clanging call so he wouldn’t have to walk around the level knocking and dropping off sacks as he went.

He waited and tried not to think about the radio in his sack. People did make their way out of the interior to gather their sacks, some grabbing sacks for other people or families and showing the notes that gave them the right to do so. It was just one more way the neighbors of Level 5 tried to make life a little easier for each other. Plus the fact that many were having trouble even remembering food deliveries at all.

Some of the gatherers had clearly just woken after long shifts during the dimming, others rushed to gather theirs before they went to work. Still others looked to him as if they were in a perpetual state of having just discovered some unpleasant surprise. Eventually, he grew tired of waiting and was left with a collection of sacks lumped about on the floor. He took his to his rooms and then began the laborious process of delivering the rest. It took longer than he liked to finish this duty but he had volunteered and he was glad it was out of the way for a seven-day or four.

Back in his own rooms, he showered the exertion off but felt good about having an honest stink in the first place. So much of his work dealt with things less than honest that this was a refreshing change. Even the beginning pain of sore muscles in his arms from pulling the ropes across the squealing pulleys was strangely pleasant.

He set up the radio and sat looking at it rather than using it for a good long while. He was nervous. Up to now all the secret contact had been initiated by Silo 40 and he merely made himself available at the times they directed. His only calls were highly scheduled and arranged for the next time Silo 40 would blind Silo One to their actions. He had been told most firmly that anything outside those parameters would jeopardize them all and he believed it.

He had been given the instructions for altering one of the standard radios long ago, but had never done so. With these units, he could call anytime he wanted without facing the danger of discovery by Silo One unless it was simply because he was being monitored in some other way. Silo 40 had even thought of that eventuality though, and had given him a list of places he should avoid when using the radio. He knew they couldn’t look or listen everywhere and this compartment was both anonymous and safe.

Now, he needed to work up the courage to actually use the radio and to tell the other silo that he fully intended to disable the remaining portion of the system that could be used to destroy his silo. He needed desperately to tell the other silo what was going on with his people and what he was facing so they could understand his position. What he needed most was their help and he hoped they would offer it.

Gathering his courage, he grabbed the radio and followed the instructions for calling Silo 40. He carefully checked the numbers for the frequency. Then he checked it again. When he clicked the button a buzzing noise came through that wasn’t at all like the buzz of their normal communications. The hiss of static was very strong too, and punctuated with high wails like a distant cat having its tail stepped on.

He waited, listening to the buzz and the pops and crackles, his leg bouncing up and down on the floor anxiously as he did so. He was almost ready to twist the knob on the radio to off and stop the increasingly annoying whines when a sharp whistle sounded from the unit and a voice with a strange tenor and accent answered.

“Please tell me I’ve gotten silo 40. This is 49,” Graham said, his voice sounded a little pleading to his own ears, but he couldn’t help it.

“This is Nella, in 40. Let me clean up the signal. You’re Graham?” The voice asked, a bit more clearly as the whine and the static began to fade. She had a high voice that sounded to Graham’s ears like that of a young girl.

“That’s better. Nella? I don’t know you…”

“Nah. I’m in the group too. I’m monitoring the comms today. You would know me if you had been using the radio,” Nella said in a half-teasing voice and Graham could hear the smile in it. He had no idea who this person was yet she sounded as if talking to a stranger from another silo were the most normal thing in the world.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. But I’ve got an emergency over here and need to talk to someone…well, someone in charge,” Graham said.

“How much of an emergency?” she asked.

“What? It’s an emergency, emergency.” Graham realized his voice had shifted from pleading to a bit strident. He took a gulp of old tea from a cup left lying about and tried to calm down.

Nella’s voice changed and she sounded like she was trying to lure an angry cat back into its compartment. “I don’t mean to offend. I just need to know how urgent it is. If you need help in one minute, then you’ve got me. If you can wait for a call back, I can get you to your counterpart here.”

“Oh, ah. I don’t know. I’ll just tell you and you decide. Can we do that?” Graham asked. He felt very strange speaking on a radio in his room, but at least he felt a bit less like panic was about to overtake him. To him, it sounded like his voice was echoing so loudly that people up and down this level must be able to hear him.

“Sounds good. I’m going to take some notes so you talk, I’ll listen,” she said, her voice still carrying a soothing tone.

“Silo One is going to blow up my silo.” He hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, but there it was. He let the silence on the line hang for a moment. It didn’t last long.

“Are you sure? How do you know? Do you know when?”

The questions came rapidly, one after another, from the other end of the radio. Nella’s voice was crisp and all business now. Graham could hear the faint scratching of chalk on a board followed by the snapping of fingers on the other side of the line.

“I heard them specifically say that they were going to terminate us over an open microphone. Do you know about our problem over here? With the cancer and stuff?”

Nella grunted in the affirmative and Graham heard her say to someone else, “No, just go get him. Make up any excuse you have to. Go!”

She returned her attention to the line and answered, “Yes. I have a summary of the silo on a board right here in our control room. Why would they destroy your silo? I don’t mean to be insensitive but it looks like your silo is going to be empty soon anyway. Why destroy it?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Listen, this takes a long time to explain so I’ll just give you the facts. I was given instructions to have our water tested at various levels for some specific compounds. They came back positive and I reported it. Someone over there had an open microphone so I heard their entire conversation, more or less, and they decided that once they got some additional medical information, they were going to terminate the silo. That was the exact word; terminate. We all know what happened to 12. As to why, I don’t know everything so I can’t tell you that. I did hear one of them say that we should be spared the pain.”

“Oh, how kind,” Nella replied. Her voice sounded as if she had dipped it in sarcasm and then coated it in broken glass. Graham could tell Nella didn’t carry a lot of love for Silo One and he decided he liked this stranger with her strange accent and high girlish voice.

“Yeah. That’s basically what I thought too,” Graham said. He considered for a moment and added, “I don’t think that is why they are doing it though.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it is because they look at us as damaged now. One of them said the effects of what we’re going through are teratogenic. I didn’t know what that was so I looked it up in the Legacy. It means that what’s happening to us might mess up babies we have in the future and make mistakes that can be passed on from one generation to the next. I think that is why the babies die and so many pregnant women die too.”

For a moment, Graham thought he had lost the connection or something had gone wrong because nothing but the popping static replied. He was just about to try calling them back when Nella spoke.

“That is just so very horrible. I wish we could help you,” she said, her voice coming softly through the hissing line. “How can you stand it?”

“Because I think I can see our way to fixing some part of it at least. Minimize it, maybe even find a permanent fix and then we can let things take their course. It may not work but I don’t think those asses over there want to take a chance of us surviving and corrupting everyone else later on with whatever this is we now carry in our genes. I think they want to make sure we’re all gone and that we take this with us. And I think you can help us. We really want to survive over here, you know.”

Nella sighed on the other end of the line. “In only the most detestable of ways, I can almost understand what they fear, if only in the abstract. But it’s still pig crap. You’re thinking about stopping it from Level 72, aren’t you? You don’t have anything to worry about from above anymore.”

Graham nodded and then remembered she couldn’t see him so he said, “I’m considering exactly that. I know what your group said to everyone about that, but I think I don’t have a choice. The delay I’ve got before they do this thing is quickly running out. They’re going to figure out I’m stalling with what they want at some point. Then they’ll really kill us just because they won’t know what I know and won’t want me putting a good suit on and going to bang on some doors!”

“Umm…exactly so,” she said, obviously deep in thought. Graham heard tapping and could almost picture her fingernails hitting a desk as she took in all the implications.

“There’s more to tell, obviously, but the bottom line is that I’ve got two others to help me and one has electrical skill so we can do this. I don’t want to do it without guidance though. I really don’t.”

“Don’t do anything yet. I just sent someone down to get our head of IT to come speak with you. That might take some time. Things are coming to a head all around the place. We have reason to believe they know we’re up to something here too.”

“Shit! You have got to be kidding me,” Graham’s nervousness was quickly turning into something just a shade shy of a full blown dread that yet something else would go wrong.

“None of the other silos are reporting anything but there is definitely something up with Silo One and us. Too many questions. But that might work to your advantage so don’t worry,” Nella replied.

“Easier said than done.”

“Listen, just stay there with the radio on standby. As soon as he gets here I’ll get him briefed and on the line to you. Can you do that?” Nella asked, her voice kind.

“I can stay here. We all have multiple jobs now, even the head of IT, so one place will just assume I’m at another.”

“Hang tight then, Graham. We’re going to figure this out. Bye for now,” Nella replied and then the line was back to a dead hiss again.

He switched the unit to standby, stood there a moment wondering what he should do while he waited and then made himself something to eat. It was an activity that didn’t need a lot of thought and that was just what he needed. The morning’s labor was making itself known through his growling belly and not even the jangling of his nerves was enough to dampen the hunger he felt.

He realized he would need to get water soon as he put yet another empty canister next to the door and cracked open his next to last full container to make tea. Water was just another chore made more laborious by their situation. When he finished eating, he wiped his plate and cup rather than use any of his good water to wash them in. He was just to the point of wondering if he would get a call back at all when the buzz of his radio sounded.

He rushed toward the unit and turned it on. When he answered he was relieved to hear a voice he knew. It was his counterpart in Silo 40, John, and a man that had won his trust over the years.

“Hey! It’s Graham. It’s happening.” The words gushed out of him. He was so relieved to have someone who could truly grasp his situation.

“I’m here and I did get briefed by Nella. I’d like to hear it from you. But first, how much leeway do you think you have before they do this? Are we talking hours or days or more?”

Graham thought about the records and how long it would take to get all that data into computers and how many of them would be in before those in Silo One felt they had enough. “I would say at a minimum we have a few days but if we’re lucky it could be a lot longer. I can only really confidently say a few days though.”

“Hmm,” came John’s reply. It was a grim sound to Graham’s ears. “That would move up our timetable quite a bit and the others aren’t even close to being ready.”

“Ready? For what exactly?”

“Graham, we’re going off line. All of the silos who have been able to establish communications with each other are considering the same. Since you hadn’t communicated with us this way, your silo was actually the one we were most concerned with leaking information to Silo One if we did go offline. Until recently, we’d been rebuffed by your silo.”

Graham was stunned at the thought of going offline. This was not at all what he had been expecting to hear from Silo 40. He had expected to have to make his case for just cutting the lines on Level 72. He knew that tampering with the control lines on Level 72, the ones that Silo One could use to remotely destroy a silo, was forbidden within the group of silos that knew their purpose and spoke with each other.

It was forbidden for good reason because there was a chance that Silo One would figure out a way to prevent anyone after that from doing the same. That would leave everyone, forever after, at the mercy of Silo One’s whim. It had been long agreed that if it was done at all, it needed to be coordinated between the many silos that had been having their own contact in these past years.

Coordination would ensure that others wouldn’t pay whatever price Silo One would extract in blood to make absolutely positive no other silo thought of doing the same. But Graham had known nothing of any plan to go offline. How could the silos even go offline? Even now his plan for his own silo didn’t call for anything other than removing the ability to destroy his world from the hands of another silo. He hadn’t considered anything else past that point. He realized he probably should have thought of that. He was a terrible conspirator and had proved it yet again.

“Graham, are you there?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m just…well…just surprised,” he swallowed loudly. His throat was suddenly parched again and he asked, “How can we go offline?”

“Think about it, Graham. What do they actually do for us over there? They keep us going around in the same cycle over and over and watch until something fails and a silo dies. Your own silo is a prime example! How long has this sickness been going on? It’s been decades, right? This has been happening to your people since before we started talking. Tell me I’m not right.”

Graham could hear the intensity in John’s words, the utter conviction. He keenly regretted that he hadn’t had the guts to get this communications gear altered a long time ago. He might have been able to avert all of this current pain and horror. They might now be offline, whatever that might mean, and working on a way to save the silo with people who really wanted to help rather than just control. Those regrets were for later though, after this silo was safe.

“I see what you’re saying, I really do. This has been going on for a long time. Since before I was born though we didn’t know that then. What I want to do now is try to fix it if I can but first I just want to stop them from blowing us up or whatever they do. Can I do that?”

Graham could hear his counterpart take a deep breath over the line. The static was still hissing but less so now and the words came through loud and clear. “You can. We all can.”

Waiting is the Hardest Part

Waiting was hard for Graham and he could see the difficulty it caused for Wallis as well. It was writ large in his nervous movements and stiff gait. What Grace was going through, he couldn’t know. Their paths didn’t cross in daily life and though he certainly had cause to contact her now, her being the de facto head of the electricians, he didn’t. He wanted to reserve that for when he had something concrete to give her. He stuck with the regular forwarded emails as needed with the code for ‘nothing yet’ in each one.

While he waited, feeling helpless and with an ear halfcocked for the blast that would bring down his silo, the people in Silo 40 were busy. They were the hub and the coordinators for this great ‘going offline’ that would take place. Every twelve hours, as directed, he sat at the hacked radio and waited for their call. The buzz he had grown to love would come from the radio and then he took their updates and answered their questions with a growing sense of hope tinged with the ever present nervousness.

By the third day of this waiting, he had been required to give the medic and one of his IT technicians the order to begin scanning in medical records. His orders on which to start with and what kind of information to scan would, he hoped, mean that the information Silo One so desperately wanted would not come quickly or comprehensively and thereby give the conspirators more time. It was a dangerous and close game to play and every bang that echoed up the column of the stairwell made him flinch.

During his fourth-day check in with Silo One, he was compliant and did his very best to convey his trust in them, in the Order he no longer believed in and to convey that their solutions were the answer he waited for. Inwardly, he cringed at the lies. So far, they seemed satisfied with the data coming in and to Graham that meant they were probably not examining it thoroughly. He thought, perhaps, that they felt like they had all the time in the world and had no reason to hurry.

He was both glad and worried that he had no further instances of an open microphone leaking information from that other silo. Glad because it meant it was less likely they would discover he had heard anything and worried because he couldn’t know what new machinations were taking place there. His imagination ran wild when he considered the possibilities.

The buzz that signaled Silo 40 calling him woke him from a fitful sleep very late in the sleeping cycle on what would be his fifth day waiting. It wasn’t the scheduled time for a call and he jumped from his bed, simultaneously groggy and unnerved. He fumbled the radio not once but twice as he tried to turn it on and answer. His whole body felt shaky as he pressed the microphone button and said hello.

“Graham, we’ve got resolution. How soon can you be ready to go?”

“Go? You mean disable the system on Level 72?”

“Yes, that. Listen. A whole lot has happened and I want to get you up to speed, just in case we lose contact for any reason. You good to listen?” John asked, his voice full of excitement.

“Yeah. I’m good. Let me get some paper for notes,” Graham replied, hugging the radio under his arm and rooting about his messy sleep area for paper with any blank space remaining on it and a writing utensil.

“Your water situation first. Did you try the vapor compression distiller? Pumping it upward? Anything like that?”

Graham sighed. He had already gone over this with Nella and he hoped this wasn’t an indicator of a loss of organization. “No. I told Nella earlier. There is no way I can get that kind of obvious project started over here and do it inconspicuously. It will have to wait until after. And if the distiller doesn’t work, then I’ll figure out a way to get water, whatever that may take, from the down deep to the upper levels until we figure out something else. But I will figure it out.”

“Sure, sure,” said John, his speech a bit rapid, his voice weary. “Sorry about that. I’ve been running on adrenaline and strong tea for the past few days. Nella did tell me that. Anyway, my guy in water says that vapor compression distillation should work and since you’ve got two down in mechanical, you’ll either need to figure out a way to build another near the upper plant or string a whole lot of pumps together to get that much lift. Whatever you choose, you’ve got the specs, right? You still have the techs to do it?”

“Yes, to both questions. I looked it up in the Legacy too. VCD is supposed to make even water that has raw sewage in it or any chemical contamination clean and pure,” Graham replied. When he read the entry in the Legacy he felt pure hope for a glorious but brief moment. Then he remembered how far it was from the down deep to Level 1 and the nightmare of logistics he would be facing soon.

He shook that train of thought away for the moment. “We can do it. I know it. Even if I have to port the water up on our lifts for a while, we will.”

“Good. I just wanted to make sure, in case something goes wrong. So, this is what we’re looking at. No one else but us is ready to go yet,” John said it casually but Graham could feel his heart plummet at the words.

“We can’t wait for them! We don’t have that kind of time over here!”

“Hey, hey. Calm down. Don’t panic, Graham! They aren’t ready to go offline, but we are,” John said, his voice conveying his satisfaction. “And, they may not be going offline but everyone is cutting the destruct lines on 72 along with your silos and ours.”

Graham wondered at this. Hadn’t all of this preparation been because the others were concerned that if one went offline Silo One might figure out a way to ensure the others didn’t? He said as much.

“Graham, you’re right. But then we thought we would do it like we did the disconnection outside. You probably don’t know this but we sent someone out to do that. A volunteer. A good suit, extra air and walking below the line of the hills on the outside of our grid in the dim time…well, he cut them all where they go to the trunk line. And that is how you are talking to us now. Extra transmitters he installed below ground while he was doing the cutting,” John laughed as he told him. It was a naughty laugh.

All Graham could think of was that a volunteer had gone out to die just to cut lines for people he didn’t know.

“You still there, buddy?” John asked.

“Sorry. Yeah, just thinking. I didn’t know that, about the volunteer.”

“It was a long time ago. Before you or I were making these decisions, for sure. And they didn’t have any way of knowing who they were cutting lines for. They just had to cut the whole group to be sure they got their own. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to be your diversion. We’re going to get them all riled up and focused on us and then all of us are going to cut their control lines on Level 72. That way, no matter what they do they can’t actually destroy us unless they come over and kick the door down.”

“Won’t Silo One notice?”

“Nope, they only know what they monitor and they’ll be looking at us,” John replied, voice confident. “They can go back and look for stuff, we’re pretty sure, but there won’t be anything to see. When we go offline they are going to go off the rails and try to blow us up but it won’t work and we won’t answer. They’ll be focused on us for a bit. We are reasonably certain there aren’t as many of them over there doing the work as they would have us believe. We’ve got a main conduit for the cameras and communications, which includes their little remote destruction lines, and all we have to do is cut it at Level 72. But we won’t cut the cameras until after we cut the remote destruction. That way, they just won’t know what happened.”

To Graham it seemed like the plan was overly complicated and missing some pretty key elements. Again he wondered if he wouldn’t be better off doing this on his own. So he asked, “Uh, exactly how are you going to know when they hit the kill button? I mean, why not just cut it at once and get it over with? Why all this complicated stuff?”

“Hah! Good questions! And I have equally good answers. Graham, we’ve been working on this for years and have a pretty good group of smart people who do nothing but think about this stuff. We don’t dose all the water over here and haven’t for a very long time. Anyway, the last question is easiest to answer,” he said and Graham could hear him moving around on the other end of the radio, probably getting comfortable.

Graham decided he might as well get comfortable too. While John spoke, he started water to boil for a cup of tea.

“So, why all the complicated stuff, you ask. The simple answer is we don’t know what more they can do. Whoever is the first to go is really the test case for everyone else. We’re taking the biggest risk so we need to gain as much information as we can when we do it. For instance, we don’t know if these two kill switches are the only ones they have. We think so, but we don’t know so. We’ve gone over every single place where a pipe or conduit or anything else breeches our silo walls. We’ve checked schematics and so on. But the cold deep truth of it is that we just don’t know. They may have some other way to do us in. We’ll be the ones to test that theory.”

“You’re taking all the risk, then,” Graham replied and let the sentence hang.

They both knew what it might mean. He wondered if they shouldn’t switch around this order. His silo was the one in trouble and contained only a weak population of potentially dying people. He knew they were the most expendable if anyone in this horrible situation could be said to be so.

As for the lines that led back to Silo One, he had certainly checked his schematics too. Especially after making contact with these others and learning of what they had done. He agreed that it looked like just two big trunk lines led to Silo One, one just under the surface and another at Level 72. If there were others, they weren’t on their schematics.

“Eh, yeah, and I know what you’re thinking. Don’t bother even talking about it. You don’t have the population to do this. An uprising from you guys wouldn’t raise the same stink it would over here. They already know they are going to lose you, but us not so much. That will be yanking the treads from underneath them,” John replied so matter-of-factly that it was almost like he wasn’t talking about the lives of everyone he knew. To Graham it seemed like John almost relished the possibility of tweaking the noses of those others.

“Okay, sorry, go on and tell me the rest,” Graham said and finished making his tea, balancing the steaming hot metal cup on a wad of rags as he took it to his chair and sat.

“Basically, this is a test of their system and their backups. If they think that our problems are too big to control then they’ll try to wipe us too. We’ve got signal traps on all the lines, including the one up top that is already cut. Once we cut the lines below, there’s no turning back. We’ll cut the ones for the remote detonate, but not the communications. We already have a watch set in that area and that will be doubled and go round the clock once we actually do the cutting. When the traps indicate a signal is coming through for destruction, they’ll cut the communications lines and that will take out most of the cameras. The only ones that won’t go are the ones that show our view of the outside. We might have to take care of those some other way, but I don’t actually think those are critical.

“But no matter what, that should make it so they think the cameras went out because the silo was destroyed. If nothing else gets sent our way, then we’ll know that is the best way to go about it for everyone else. The safest way. If they send something else—and who knows what that might be—then you all know what will happen and can alter your plans accordingly. But no matter what happens everyone will have their destruction lines cut and that will increase your safety margin a little.”

“John, we will owe you a great debt. We’ll all owe everyone in that silo,” Graham said. He wondered if John’s perpetual energy and happy way of speaking was genuine or simply his way of dealing with what must be an incredible strain. Was he really that confident? He wasn’t betting a few chits on a game. He was betting the lives of his entire people.

“Nah. We’ll talk about that some other time. It’s not like I can come over and borrow some tools or a few baskets of seed, is it?” John dismissed the notion, sounding embarrassed. Then he laughed and said, “Though I would like to take you up on that offer to taste the corn hooch you were talking about. We don’t get a whole lot of that around this part of the neighborhood.”

“What about the other silos?” Graham asked, worried about the answer.

John sighed, “They just aren’t ready for different reasons. Some only have a few people that even know what’s going on and they are, naturally, having a hard time making the decision for everyone else. You can bet though, that they’ll become a lot more willing if trouble starts brewing. No one wants to be another Silo 12.”

“Yeah, or another Silo 49.”

“Don’t worry, Graham. We’re going to do this before this day is done. Get your people in position and ready within,” he paused and Graham heard tapping on a distant keyboard, “by my clock you have eleven hours and seventeen minutes. Got that? Can you get there in time?”

Graham wiggled the mouse on his computer and made a note of the time. “Got it. We’ll be ready.”

Old Men and Baskets

What he wanted to do after he finished that call was run like a mad person and grab Wallis and then fly the rails all the way down to Grace right after. Once he had them in sight he wanted to sit tight, tools clutched and ready, by the access plates on Level 72. But he couldn’t do that. Regardless of what his intentions were, he knew he could easily tip off those in Silo One with strange behavior.

So he went to his computer and read the wires that, even now with the population dwindling, filled his inbox. He was looking for a likely candidate to forward to Grace with the code that let her know it was time to act. Most of his inbox was just copied to him automatically by the system based on keywords programmed in. He hated that invasion of the privacy of others and he supposed that made him a bad fit for this job, though he had always been good at it.

This is one of the first things that would go. Penance for all the past invasions of privacy and all the past manipulations of people would have to be made. But that was for later, if they succeeded. No, he corrected himself, after they succeeded.

Most of those automated ones he could delete quickly and he cleaned out a good portion of his inbox that way in just a few keystrokes. One piece of good news had filtered through. A baby girl had been born healthy and on time in the down deep to a pipe fitter, who had also come through in good health. The new baby’s name was Jewel. Before he had even added her number to the population tally, Graham saw another email that balanced out that birth. One of the technicians in the mids had called for the bottle last night and passed peacefully at the age of thirty-three. No family left to notify. Graham sighed heavily and deleted the email. The one for the birth he retained. That was the way of life, he thought, to want to keep the good and purge the bad. Maybe what Silo One wanted to do to them was no different except in the scale of the purging.

He couldn’t entertain thoughts that like right now. He needed to stay angry with them. He needed to keep that target full of blame pointed right where it belonged. They were the ones who were the arms and hands of the monster that put them down in these silos and took away the outside.

He clenched and unclenched a hand rhythmically on a little pillow filled with flax seed. The medic had given it to him to help with his stress. He clicked the mouse on his screen awkwardly with his left hand to retrieve the rest of his messages. He gave some instructions in response to requests from IT and forwarded others to the right person. So many people were gone that many things just got sent directly to him or to Wallis, their interim mayor, because no one knew who else to send requests to.

Once he felt calm he forwarded one specific request, this time for possible technical assist from IT for a busted control panel, to Grace. It was the perfect cover email and in his forward he used the coded phrase they had worked up. He included the time they were to meet as a time he would be available if she had questions. All his wires were considered important and she said that the dimming team would wake her if one came from him during that period. He hoped that was happening and she would be at their agreed upon place well before the time of their need. She had just twenty or so levels to climb, though that was plenty when you were in a hurry and moving on legs that were growing a little older.

He and Wallis, on the other hand, needed to get down almost seventy levels and they had to do it within the day. And to pile on more, they had to be fit enough to do what needed doing when they got there. Graham had an idea about that but getting Wallis to agree to it would be another matter.

He finished off his tea in one big swallow, got dressed in some relatively clean coveralls and stuffed his backpack with his radio, food and three canteens of water before heading out of his compartment. Into his pocket he slipped the three diagrams they would need for parsing out the correct wires.

He looked back before he closed the door behind him and his gaze fell on the charcoal portrait of his wife on the wall. Drawn when they were young and had the whole future of their lives ahead of them, she was smiling. In a few bold and spare strokes, the essence of her was captured in black and grey lines on that rough pulpy paper. He blew her a kiss and left, wondering if it would be the last time he would see it and hoping that it wasn’t.

Wallis didn’t need to be told anything once he opened his door and saw Graham standing there, backpack strapped on and hair combed. It wasn’t Graham’s habit to come knocking on his door before the lights came on to signal the start of a new day. Just woken and in his undershorts, Wallis merely grinned and waved him inside. With the door safely closed he asked, “Now? Tell me it’s now.”

Graham grinned back at him, his own nervousness fading in the presence of Wallis’ excitement. He said, “Yep. We have about ten hours to get down to 72.”

“Yikes! Crap.”

Wallis proceeded to tear about his compartment, first looking for a decent pair of coveralls and finally settling for some that were very wrinkled and faded, but didn’t stink too badly. Then he searched for his pack, which Graham eventually found stuffed under a cushion in Wallis’ chair. The only thing he didn’t have trouble finding were the radios he had liberated from the sheriff’s office.

Though it only took a few minutes, it was an extremely disorganized search and Graham was a little concerned with how hard Wallis was breathing by the time he had packed up his supplies and started to shrug into his pack. That huffing breath decided the matter for Graham.

“Wallis, umm, what do you think about… umm… using the lifts for some of the trip down?”

His friend stopped short, arms akimbo and backpack straps askew, “You mean, as in actually get inside the lifts?”

Graham nodded.

“No way. No! That is fine for fruit but that isn’t natural for humans. Are you kidding?”

“Wallis, think about it. We have to get down there and we need to be in good shape to do it. What’s the difference in me lowering you five levels or a few bags of apples? You weigh less than the food. Then you can use the same pulley to lower me. It can work!” Graham said earnestly, trying to convince his friend and himself too.

Wallis surprised him them. He finished adjusting his pack and said simply, “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

Ghosts in the Wall

They drew attention the whole way down and Graham reconsidered his idea as soon as he saw the first whispering and pointing groups on a landing. The silo may be losing population at a rapid rate, but people still needed to get around as they lived their lives. It was early, the dimming time just ending. The sharp clacks of lights switching from red to white sounded throughout the central column of the silo stairs and people were moving about as shifts changed.

Plenty of small groups saw them as they lowered each other past the landings. Worse, there were cameras everywhere on the landings. If anyone was watching from Silo One, this would be a certain cause for alarm and could get them all blasted to ruin before he could make it right. Graham took his hat out of his pack and squashed the misshapen thing onto his head, pulling it low to shield his face from the view of any cameras above him.

Most of the silo was still recovering from the dosed water and even though Graham could see that particular dullness in their eyes and that certain something in their posture, they perked up, smiled and waved as they caught sight of the pair. It made the people look more alive than they had since he had turned on the dosing system. He couldn’t wait to see them again when it had cleared from their systems. Without the hat and without having to hide a single thing from any of them, he relished the idea of speaking to people truthfully, face to face.

People were more than curious as to why the two men were using the lifts on themselves. It was forbidden and declared unsafe by the very men who were now being seen using them. Wallis found an effortless solution to their obvious dilemma when he announced, enthusiastically, to the first crowd and to every one thereafter, that he was bringing happy news of a new mother in the down deep. Scattered applause met his announcement but also a few sad cries. The diversion worked though, and they passed each level with ease, often gaining assistance on the rope from people who happened to be nearby.

Not every level included a lift ride, which Graham found surprisingly fun to do. Lifts that only went a floor or two weren’t worth the effort two entire trips in the cloth bucket would require. For those they walked the stairs. Those lifts that went three or more floors provided a surprising amount of rest for the two journeyers. Even though they worked with their arms on the ropes and pulleys, one person could lift hundreds of pounds with relative ease so the comparatively meager weight of one old man in a bucket was almost too easy.

Another benefit to the lifts was that they provided a bit of distraction and made the placement of the tiny repeaters under the ledges of the landings much easier to accomplish. Every five landings the repeaters, part of the radio modification instructions Silo 40 had passed along, had to be stuck where they could do their work yet remain undisturbed.

The sticky paste he smeared on each one held it tight within the shelf of metal on the underside of the chosen landings, but it was an awkward business to get them securely fit. He would have had to lie down and reach around the edge to place them had he walked the stairs, but inside a lift bucket, he just reached up and slammed it home as he passed his target landing. The movement was utterly unnoticed as one needed to place a hand on landings as they passed to be sure not to swing into it by accident anyway.

The descent wasn’t perfect, however, and they experienced a few hair raising moments. On the first leg of his ride, Wallis had leaned over the rigid edge of his bucket so that he could wave to people calling to him from a lower landing. It was just enough movement to unbalance the load and send the bucket swinging. He screeched and laughed as he bumped into another bucket, luckily an empty one, and then looked falsely chagrined when Graham yelled down at him to be still, for silo’s sake.

That had sent waves of laughter rolling through the small crowd on the landing Wallis was passing. He was heard to say that this was a test of the system and should not be used by anyone else until they worked out all the obvious kinks. That had earned another surge of laughter from the little crowd. Wallis was in his element, of that Graham was sure.

It took just hours for them to reach the landing on Level 72. Graham was amazed at how little time it took two old men to do the trip. A young porter on fresh strong legs might be able to do that, but old men? With more than forty feet for each level, most of that taken up by the thick concrete between levels, it was not a short distance.

He thought it was amazing and he said so. Wallis agreed with him that these lifts were something they should seriously look into once they could do so. He wiggled his eyebrows when he said it and Graham almost burst out laughing again at the sight of such an unsubtle signal.

They collected themselves and had a bite to eat and a drink of water as cover for their stop. It would be logical for them to take a rest, perhaps even stay the night, before moving on. There were no people looking at their folly on this level, and the few people remaining above them at the next level wandered away after a few more waves and jokes.

Once they felt relatively unobserved, they walked away as casually as two honest people in the midst of wrongdoing could manage and secreted themselves into the tiny space they were to meet Grace in. Dank, empty and smelling a bit like a dirty urinal, Graham really didn’t want to see anything he might be touching in this unused room and they leaned on the walls instead of sitting.

The only real duty Graham had while they waited was to check the radio and ensure the repeaters did their job. He checked in with Nella and got a strong voice in response, which eased one fear of failure at least. After that he had nothing more to do save dwell on all the other things that could go wrong.

Graham had never been a naturally nervous person, otherwise he would have never been selected for his job, but over the past seven-day he had almost grown used to the constant surges of panic and the feeling that his stomach was trying to climb up and escape through his nostrils.

After a wait long enough that the men opened the door to let in a sliver of light and search for things to sit on, Grace peeked in and wrinkled her nose at the smell. Graham had no clock but he did have a timer on the radio and he had set it, more or less accurately, before he left his rooms. He took a quick glance at it in the light of the open door and saw they had plenty of time to get into place and prepared. He tugged on Grace’s sleeve to pull her into the space and shut the door before speaking.

Graham whispered into the dark where he last saw Grace, “I’m so glad you’re here. I was a little worried you might not get my message.”

“I’m good. When are we doing this? Now? Why are you whispering?” Grace asked, peppering him with questions and not waiting for answers. Her voice sounded strong and not at all like a dying woman who just climbed a bunch of levels. And now he felt like an idiot because he was whispering on top of sounding out of breath from just sitting around.

“We’ve got a little while yet but, yes, it is today. Did you bring the tools?” Graham asked at a more normal volume.

It didn’t feel right to speak loudly and he had to resist the urge to come back down to a whisper again. He was getting more nervous and worried that something would go wrong as each moment of inaction passed. He was sure he could actually feel his hair going even grayer and his skin tightening up on his bones from the stress.

“Everything you’ll need is right here. I made a bag for each of us,” she replied. She sounded so calm that it made Graham want to grind his teeth or maybe just be envious.

A rustling sound came from her general direction and Graham flinched and squinted as light flared from a flashlight in Grace’s hand. She shoved the light toward him and when he took it, she untied the top of her own sack and withdrew three of the small green work bags seen everywhere in the silo. These three were worn and patched and stained from long years of use. The smell of grease and other chemicals, softened by ages of use, wafted up from the bags. Muffled clanks issued from within as she shifted them, one after the other, from her bag.

She handed Graham his and he was surprised at the weight of it. He wondered where she got the stamina to climb all those stairs with three of these strapped to her back, along with whatever else she might have brought.  She was almost the same age as they were and sick on top of that, but there was much more to her than he had seen before. Her gaunt face and the lopsided swelling at her throat that signaled her particular affliction had pared her down until all that remained was this determined core. He wished he would have known her better before and he appreciated her unique strength now.

“What?” she asked Graham. He realized he had been staring at her and looked away.

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I just, well, I’m just amazed at you. At your strength, if you want to know the truth,” Graham answered and was glad the light from the flashlight was pointed toward a wall. He was pretty sure he was blushing if the heat in his cheeks and ears was any indicator.

In reply, both Wallis and Grace let out snorts at almost the exact same instant and then laughed at having done so. It was a strange thing to be plotting in a dark room that stank of old pee with two other elderly people. It brought out the weird in them, he guessed. He coughed politely and pointed the flashlight at Wallis so he could pull out his contributions.

Wallis opened his own pack, brought out the radios and then carefully made sure that each was set to a channel not normally used in the silo. There were not enough deputies or administrative personnel to monitor multiple channels anymore and the radios themselves only monitored the band they were set to in order to conserve battery power unless specifically set to do otherwise. They would be safe to use on this off channel, Wallis had assured them.

They tested the radios there in the dark room, each pressing an ear to the speaker to be sure the test was coming from their radio and not someone else’s. Grace took the time to go over the tools and what they would do. She made a point of showing them how to grip the cutters only on the coated handles while cutting wires to avoid a shock if it was electrified.

He didn’t need the instructions, given his life’s profession, but Wallis did and it calmed them both to listen to anything helpful said with such certainty and confidence. Graham felt his cheek twitch with nerves and he hoped very much that Wallis didn’t get electrocuted doing this.

When it was Graham’s turn, he carefully removed the folded papers from his pocket and gave them each one of the copies, retaining his and using it to remind them of their objectives. Grace’s job during their hiatus had been to get one of the panels off and confirm that the colors and tags in Silo 40’s wires were the same here in Silo 49. She had done so and Graham had carefully traced the diagram onto two more papers, fine pure sheets made in the heavy paper presses, and then transferred all the information from the original so that they would each have a complete diagram.

Grace’s eyes skipped over the diagram expertly in the scant light and she gave a brief nod of approval at his work. Wallis had studied the drawing with Graham more than once in the last few days but he still looked less sure of his ability. Graham patted him on the shoulder and reminded him it was just wires.

There was only so much time they could kill on this process and eventually the time came for them to go to their respective locations and make ready. Grace surprised Graham by kissing both men on the cheek. She wished them luck as she slipped out the door, her slender frame disappearing from their view around a corner almost immediately.

The look on Wallis’ face said he was as surprised as Graham was. But then he winked at Graham and told him he was sure Grace kissed him closer to the lips than she had Graham. He only responded by rolling his eyes at Wallis’ boyishness, but he thought that conveyed his meaning well enough.

They went their separate ways then and Graham watched his best friend’s back as he went around a corner and out of sight. He steps were jaunty and his hair was sticking up everywhere, which just added to the general impression of a boy engaged in some manner of delinquent behavior. He never looked back.

Once alone, Graham felt time pressing in on him like a weight. He rushed through the hallways and passages of this level until he reached the locked door that led, eventually, to the nondescript metal panel concealing wires leaving the silo.

He pulled out his master key and slipped it into the lock of the last door between him and the panel, holding his breath until he felt the lock give way. Inside, the large and hulking forms of machinery had to be navigated around. Finally, the metal plate, no more than three feet by three feet and unmarked by anything save for two handles, was in front of him. He checked the time, nodded to himself, and set to work.

There were a lot of deeply set screws of an odd sort holding the plate securely to the wall. They didn’t come out all the way but he could feel them letting go their hold on whatever was behind the plate. The scraping noise of metal on concrete was loud as the plate came loose and began to swing free. He froze for a moment, convinced some well-meaning technician or repair person would come strolling by and ask what he thought he was doing. That didn’t happen so he carefully laid the plate down on the floor.

Two fat drops of sweat fell and splattered onto the thin metal with tiny plinks of sound. He rose and wiped his face with a sleeve, leaving a smear of moisture to darken the cloth. He wasn’t working that hard, he didn’t think, so he attributed the sweating to stress and took a few deep breaths to steady his nerves.

He had just 14 minutes, more or less, until he expected to get the call from Silo 40 that he should cut the wires. He pulled out the small flashlight from the bag, glad that Grace had thought of that since he hadn’t, and looked at the thick and twisty bundle of wires that snaked back into a conduit bigger than his waist.

It came from the dark recesses beyond the wall and once inside, went to more conduits that ran along the walls of the silo. From there it went on to an infinity of locations beyond. He peered into the conduit and tried to see how far back it went but the flashlight illuminated only so much, leaving a gray that turned to an ominous black far down the conduit. He shivered at the thought that he was looking outside the silo. Not from a camera, which showed only an image, but with his own eyes.

He leaned inside the dark hole and turned his head to listen to anything that might be beyond. Could he hear the wind or the rasping sounds of blowing dust and dirt? Could he hear voices from another silo? If he leaned in far enough and cried out, would someone else in another silo hear him and answer?

Graham realized he was wasting time and entertaining ridiculous fantasies. He alone really understood how big these silos were and how well spaced they were. No amount of lung power would reach any other person in any other silo but might, if he were stupid enough to actually try it, get him noticed by someone in his own silo and wreck everything.

He shook his head to clear the thoughts away and examined the wires again. This wasn’t just a bundle of wires to Graham. To him they looked almost malevolent and represented all that was not to be done. Perhaps it was simply because he knew what the purposes of some of the wires were, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was badness coming from the source of these wires.

He thought about how they taught children to do things always above the rails. To be above the rails meant one was dealing honestly and with respect for those present and those absent. It was more than an allegory to how dishonest people might sneak a hand between the rails to snatch an apple from someone’s sack or filch the chits from the pocket of a passerby—though certainly that is where the saying must have come from—but also about how one approached life. This mass of wires in every color that went all the way back to who knew where represented the ultimate of below the rails behavior because it was built into this silo from the beginning. It represented a planned betrayal.

Graham slipped the diagram out of his pocket but found it more difficult than he had thought to locate any specific wire in that massive bundle. Most were large and black and carried yet more wires within. The black was just some sort of sleeve or coating to contain a like grouping. His people used them in IT too and his main target was one such. A slew of others were red, yellow or blue and that made the whole mass look angry or like it carried fire inside it.

All together, the bundle was thicker than his thigh and tightly bound by plastic ties. This was going to be harder than he thought but he took out the cutter and prepared to sever those binding ties when his radio crackled with Wallis’ voice. He jumped and nearly dropped the cutters.

“Grace! This thing is huge! I’m not going to be able to find anything in this. What should I do?” Wallis’ voice was shrill with the onset of an anxiety even the crackly radios couldn’t disguise. Graham could almost picture him raking his hair up in frustrated tufts.

“Wallis, calm down. Take out the big pair of cutters and snip those big grey ties that are holding the bundle together. Just like we talked about, okay,” Grace’s calm reply came through a bit louder and clearer than Wallis’. The mysteries of radio propagation within the concrete and metal of the silo gave her voice a better path to his radio somehow.

Graham was grateful for the instructions so he followed her voice and exchanged his tool for the larger cutters and snipped the tie. He half expected that it would spring apart, with wires going every which way, but they had been so long confined into one shape together that there was no movement at all other that a slight expansion, like an indrawn breath.

“Okay, got it. What now?” Wallis asked, his voice a bit calmer now that he had some confident direction.

“Wallis, Grace, this is Graham. I’m following along too. Just remember, don’t actually cut the wires until I give you the word. They haven’t called yet.”

Two voices came through the line and Graham took that moment to check, once again, that his other radio was receiving a signal. The little bars were standing proud and the numbers for the frequency were still what they should be so he tucked it carefully into the recess of the conduit even as both of the others confirmed they wouldn’t cut wires until signaled to.

“Next,” Grace continued, “you’ve got to separate the bunches a bit so you can see what you’re looking for. The one you’ll want is going to be one of the bigger black ones with more wires inside it. Look for the spiral stripe we discussed. Let me know when you find it.”

Graham tugged the wires apart to get more space and expose the ones that ran along the interior of the mass but it was much harder to do that than it looked. There were hundreds of individual wires and tough bundles of more wires and they made for a surprisingly resilient enemy.

He began to fear he wouldn’t see it at all when it finally caught his eye. The unique coloration of the spiral stripe that raced along that black wrapping was hard to miss and he thought that made sense since it was attached to something as important as a method for destroying the whole silo. One wouldn’t want to mix up those wires, after all.

As Graham craned his neck to read the fine white printing on the black sleeve to verify his find, the radio crackled with Wallis’ relieved voice. “Got it! It’s marked X-2-49.”

“Me, too,” Graham said as he keyed his radio.

“Perfect,” Grace replied, her voice smooth with relief, “I’ve got mine too. That’s the most important one, but now let’s locate the camera bundles. Bend that one, if you can, so you can grab it quickly again. If you can’t, then tie the cloth to it like I told you.”

Graham wasn’t able to bend his very far, but he was able to bend a good many others out of the way. He tied the cloth, long ends hanging down, around the target bundle and that way, even in the dark he would be able to grab those hanging ends and know exactly what to cut. It was an electrician’s trick Grace had taught them and he thought it a pretty brilliant one.

She patiently guided them in finding the two big bundles that held special types of lines that fed visual data. There were several others that were suspect according to Silo 40 that they would cut later, but they weren’t the priority right now, except to mark them.

For today, they just wanted to stop any possibility of destruction. It was the people of Silo 40 taking all the risk with their fake uprising and going offline. If nothing happened to them, well, then Graham supposed the three of them would be making another trip down here in the near future to finish the job.

He was tying the last of the marker fabric, shorter strips for these future cuts, to the wires and bundles when Graham heard the timer beep on his radio. His stomach fairly leapt up into his chest and he felt a painful constriction in his throat accompanied by a soggy thudding sound in his ears as his heart kicked into high gear. He pulled the knot tight and reached for the radio, silencing the alarm.

He wasn’t really worried about the time since the timer had been set based on an estimate and who knew if Silo 40 would be able to pull off their own complicated scheme with exact timing. He was concerned about enough things to more than take up the slack on the worry line. He would do more than worry if he didn’t get a call soon, he would probably completely lose it and start screaming or else faint.

He was about to radio the other two and let them know the order would come at any time when the radio blared with noise and Nella’s excited voice came through to him, “All Silos, this is 40. Do it! Do it! Confirm!”

Graham grabbed the other radio and mashed the talk button so hard his fingernails turned white. He yelled, “Do it! Cut the lines! Now!”

He shoved the radio into the recess of the conduit to hold it secure and plucked up the large wire cutters from the floor, almost flinging himself back toward the dark opening in the concrete filled with that monster made of wire. He yanked the fabric tails to the side, bending the bundle of wires a little and baring it to the blades of the cutters like an animal’s neck being bared for the cleaver.

He squeezed the cutters with as much power as he could but was forced to almost saw the wires apart, opening and closing the blades on the thick bundle as more and more of the wires within began to part. By the time the cutter blades finally slammed together with a loud clack, he was spewing equal parts curses and spittle from between clenched teeth and he could feel the painful release of the cords in his neck as he stopped squeezing the tool.

He dropped the cutters to the floor and was reaching for both radios when both Grace and Wallis tried to come through, one stomping on the other. Grace bowed out apparently because Wallis came through clearly with the single word, “Done!”, and Grace followed directly after with the same. Graham smiled.

His sweat soaked hair and coveralls felt heavy on him and he was terribly tired all of the sudden. He pressed the talk button on the radio to his two conspirators and also pressed the one on the radio to Silo 40 so that his message would be heard by all parties.

“This is Silo 49. We have cut the lines. I repeat, the lines are cut,” Graham said, enunciating as clearly as he could because he wanted no mistakes. But it was strangely difficult to do so. He wasn’t sure why but he was having so much trouble thinking of the right thing to say. His finger slipped from the button on the radio to Silo 40. He tried to set it down gently but it started falling from his hand without him wanting it to. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, his left hand wasn’t working properly and the bright pain in his neck was moving down his arm.

He heard the voices of other silos coming through the radio on the floor, a chorus of “Done!” or “Complete!” coming through in foggy blobs of sound. He still had a grip on the radio in his right hand and he concentrated with all his might as he pressed the button once more and said, “Wallis, Grace, thank you. We’re safe. I… I…”

* * *

Grace was the first to reach him, her path easier through to him than the circuitous one Wallis had to take. She dropped to her knees and lifted Graham’s head so that she might cradle it on her folded legs. She smoothed the sweat soaked hair from his brow and tried to make him answer but his half lidded eyes were gazing off toward some other place she wasn’t able to see. She didn’t cry for him then, that came later, but she talked to him and told him how much he would be loved and missed in case there was some part of him that could still hear her.

When Wallis came sliding around that last corner and saw them there, he uttered a cry like a kicked dog and then began screaming profanities so profoundly original that Grace thought perhaps he was also suffering some sort of attack. It wasn’t until she lay Graham’s head gently back on the floor, his pack for a pillow, and approached Wallis cautiously that he stopped spewing his stream of filth.

He looked at her with such pain in his expression that she said nothing, merely opened her arms so he could take comfort from her hug if he chose to. He went into her embrace like a child. He cried and sobbed and repeated the same words over and over, “We were going to fix this shit.”

Goodbye, Friend

The next day Graham’s body was gently placed under the soil of the upper farms. Grace was there and she cried then but there were few others who attended. A few of the employees in IT and some of the neighbors on his level had come but there were so many jobs to be done that for every person that did attend, there were a dozen others who had wanted to but couldn’t. In the end, even the priest was late and he appeared worn and tired from a long shift doing his other job.

It seemed to Wallis that this was not a worthy turnout for such a person as Graham. The 144 of this situation was that Graham had saved the life of every person who lived in this silo and every future person who might ever be born into this silo. Others should know that. He should be remembered. Somehow, Wallis resolved to himself as the priest said the words, he would see this done.

Grace reached for his hand at the graveside and they ate their tomatoes in honor of their fallen third, tossing the dripping remains after him and licking the juice from their fingers so that nothing was wasted. Her grip on his hand never wavered. The little bulge on the side of her throat must have pained her because she grimaced when she swallowed and it looked to Wallis as if she had to swallow many times to get the bits of tomato down.

That small lump, so insignificant at the surface, would take her soon and then he would be alone. She must be remembered too. She had been drinking un-dosed farm water since Graham first approached her and it was obvious the drugs were clearing from her system. He knew she was remembering and he could see that the pain of remembering was taking a heavy toll on her.

As the priest spoke, Wallis’ mind turned over the question of what to do next. Would he even know what he should do next? When Graham had told him all those incredible things about other silos and the hidden rooms under the floor in IT, about the Order and the Legacy and all those other amazing and terrible things, he had only half believed him.

But then he had seen one of the books that made up the Legacy. Graham snuck it out of IT and up to Level 5 just so that he could prove what he said was true. He had chosen ‘Sh – St’ and in that thick volume there had been wonders. The sky and stars and skunks and ships and spotted salamanders. All of it was in there and Graham had told him, eyes shining with wonder, that there was infinitely more to learn.

Grace only knew a fraction of what he had been told but she knew they weren’t alone and that at least some of those others had meant to kill them while yet a different group wanted to save them. He would tell her all of it and they would figure out what to do next together. Graham would have wanted that.

Graham had been sick of the secrecy and the dishonesty that came with the burden of secrecy. He had poured out all that he had concluded about this system and how it was so inherently flawed. At the heart of that flaw were lies. He would approve of Wallis and Grace continuing his work and making a fresh start, free from the dangers of Silo One.

Graham had started using a little saying in those last days and Wallis thought of it now. “We can be different. We can be the good.” Wallis thought that was the foundation, the 144, of everything they had done and he thought that it could be the way to their future.

As the priest finished, gave the obligatory condolences and the farmer who was standing by began fidgeting because he wanted to get back to work, Wallis patted the key under his coveralls. Graham had given it to him, taking it from around his own neck almost solemnly and telling him that he had worn it since the moment his shadow died. Graham had kept its twin.

When Grace and he had moved Graham’s body to the landing so that no one would know where he had been on Level 72, Wallis remembered the key and slipped it from his friend’s neck and gave it to Grace. He had only told her to hide it then and that he would explain later but the truth was that even he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Wallis had switched his radio to the normal police channel and called in Graham’s death only after he and Grace had erased as much evidence of their activity as they could. One of the radios he’d given to Grace so that they could continue to contact each other. Everything else that had been in Graham’s pack that might arouse suspicion was transferred to Wallis’ own pack.

The panels were closed up and one of the tool bags was carefully hidden in a musty little room so long unused that the shelving was covered in a thick coat of rust like a fuzzy red blanket. His voice was calm when he called it in, though he knew the sound of it was broken and hoarse from his earlier outburst. Grace had watched him carefully as if afraid he might do something very stupid in his grief. But he hadn’t and she hadn’t and together they had waited for the medics.

Eventually, a medic came and brought with him one of the black bags that only ever carried the dead. Grace had taken her leave then and she had looked so dreadfully tired and pale that Wallis worried for her, walking all those levels back down. She merely waved the concern away and told him she would talk to him soon. She laid her palm just once more on Graham’s forehead and whispered words that Wallis couldn’t hear into his ear. Then she was gone, down the first spiral much quicker than he would have thought.

Rather than try to port him up with so few porters left, Wallis had pulled the ropes and Graham rode gently up in the swaying fabric buckets. Wallis had strained at the ropes as he stood awkwardly beside his friend at first, unsure how he would get Graham all the way to the upper farms. Somehow even without many porters the word was spreading and by the time he got to the first landing he would have to switch buckets at, wondering how he would even shift the bucket to the landing, there was a small crowd waiting.

This somber group, perhaps made up of some of the same people who had waved them down so jovially just hours before, said nothing. They simply hooked the basket and aided him out before transferring his friend, ever so gently, to the next bucket. When Wallis was safely in next to his friend again he had reached for the ropes but they just as gently pushed away his fingers and heaved the line for him, each finding room for their hands until almost no rope could be seen between the many fingers.

It was this way all the way to the upper farms, where Graham needed to be laid to rest. It was where his wife had been planted years before and also where that tiny infant that would have been his daughter had gone before her. Wallis’ tears ran freely down his face at the generosity and goodness of the people of this silo.

Many were clearly ill, faces with that strange pallor that cancer seems to always bring with it, or showing signs of fresh grief from losses they had suffered. Graham had told him about lowering the dose and even told him how they switched it on or off based on what Silo One thought of their situations. The lowered dose was showing now in the greater sadness of those around him.

But this was different from just kindness or remembered loss, he thought. They didn’t know the details, perhaps, but they all knew Graham. They knew all of the things he had done to make things better. Wallis was mayor for now, sure, but Graham had seen to the building of the lifts, had erased the fees for wires as porters got fewer in number and he never shirked at any duty, whether his or not. And it had been just hours ago that the two men passed by, laughing and joking and happy about a healthy birth. They had been the first to actually ride in the lifts while alive and now Graham had joined the many that rode it after death, the saddest of cargos.

At the upper farms, he was relieved of the burden of his friend and told that he would be cared for and ready for the next day. This medic and coroner were kind, but professionally so, their jobs making them smooth in the presence of grief after dealing with it so often.

That night, when Wallis was back in his room and considering whether or not he should just drink the water from the tap and make all this pain go away, his radio crackled. It was Grace. She wanted to come up for the funeral and asked whether she might get a ride. Wallis pushed all thoughts of forgetting and dosed water from his head and promised that if she showed up on her landing, there would be help for her.

He had called all the remaining deputies on the radio and sent emergent wires up to the only administration desk that was still manned at all hours. He used all his contacts and when that next day arrived, Grace found a deputy waiting at the landing and looked up to see yellow banners waving from landings as far up as she could see.

At her confused look the deputy looked proud and said that the banners showed the landing was manned and ready and waiting for her. She had blushed then, her face almost healthy looking again, and accepted his hand in aid as she climbed into the basket. Her trip took just an hour. Ninety levels and nearly 4000 feet and she did it in an hour. Only jumpers could travel faster and then only one way.

It was a heady feeling to make that trip and Wallis enjoyed the high color in her cheeks as she told him about it and all the ways in which it could help this silo as they spoke before the funeral in Wallis’ room. Then her face had crumpled in grief and she sobbed so suddenly and loudly that Wallis froze for a moment.

Her shoulders began to shake and Wallis moved to the couch next to her. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, unsure what else to do. She folded herself into his shoulder and Wallis hated himself for noticing the scent of rosemary wafting up from her skin and hair even as he soothed her and murmured that it would be okay.

The funeral came and went and, at last, Wallis and Grace were alone at the graveside while the farmer finished patting the dirt over Graham’s form. His expert fingers poked divots in the soil, seeds were dropped in and the soil smoothed once more. Bees buzzed the whole area, their flights looking somehow lazy and indolent to Wallis. The farmer took a sprinkling hose and went over the area.

Once he spooled the hose away there was nothing more than a small raised lump to note that a body lay there. Wallis knew that the farmers kept track of these things, who was planted where and when it happened, but he didn’t know their method of doing so and as he gently tugged Grace away from the grave, he was extra careful where he placed his feet.

Back in his room, Grace took the same place on the couch she had taken when she broke down before the funeral and Wallis tensed, wondering if it was going to happen again. Though he had been married a long time, he had also been widowed a long time and he felt as rusty as an old bolt when dealing with emotional outpourings.

His wife had not been so demonstrative, not even when she lost pregnancy after pregnancy. He often considered the possibility that her ability to hold in her feelings might be the very reason she had jumped. Wallis knew it was no accidental fall. People don’t accidentally take off their boots and line them up at the rail, tie their wedding ring to the laces and then accidentally fall over the side.

But had it been her inability to show, and thereby share, her grief that had been what took her to that point? He would never know for sure so he didn’t mind Grace’s grief coming out. He was just unsure if he was responding to it correctly.

But he needn’t have worried, it seemed. She sniffled a little and wiped her eyes, but no more than that. He made them tea and sweetened it well with honey. She accepted the battered cup gratefully and with a wan smile that didn’t diminish her fine features at all.

Wallis copied her actions when she breathed in the steam wafting up from the cup, her deep breaths flaring the nostrils of her thin nose. It seemed to soothe her and he was a little surprised to find that it did ease at least some of the tension in his body when he did the same. As he eased back into his chair, she leaned back into the couch and they were silent awhile, each deep in their own thoughts and wrapped in a grief almost too difficult to talk about.

Grace broke the silence first and said, “The tea is good. Thank you. I almost never get to just enjoy a cup anymore.”

“Why’s that?” Wallis asked and wondered if there was some shortage he didn’t know about.

She responded by fluttering a hand near her neck and gave him a pained smile.

“Oh,” he responded. “Do you need something else?” He didn’t know what else to say.

“No. I’m good.” She sipped again and sighed. “Since it started…well…getting bigger, it’s been hard to eat. I mostly drink this concoction made of vegetable juices strained really fine so it will go down. I have to drink so much that I practically slosh when I walk. No room for extra fluids.”

Wallis barked out a laugh that held very little real humor and only after it came out realized how inappropriate it was considering the conversation.

“What?” she asked. She gave him a look like she also thought his laughter inappropriate.

“Graham told me that he avoided getting dosed when he traveled by either bringing water or by drinking vegetable juice.” She looked a bit confused so he explained that farm water wasn’t dosed since it interfered with plant growth.

She nodded then and said, “That must be why he said he was surprised at how sharp I was. Until he told me about the dosing, I thought he was insulting me as a wrench turner or something.”

Wallis shook his head at that. It was typical of Graham to just assume people would understand his good intentions. He never quite understood that not everyone thought like he did.

Grace changed the subject and asked, “What do we do now? We don’t have a lot of time before those others notice he’s gone, do we? I mean the ones that were going to destroy our silo.”

Wallis sighed wearily and replied, “No, I don’t think we do. But I spoke to the people in Silo 40 when I got back last night and they are going to help us figure it out. They’re still there and they are monitoring the situation. So far they haven’t recorded a signal for the remote destruct in their silo coming through the lines they cut, so they are stepping up their game to higher levels to try to get it done. I can’t believe they are willing to risk all this for us.”

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.

Gary fumbled the keyboard and started flipping through the available views of IT. The lobby camera had failed at some point long ago but he could and did show the other cameras in a slow procession. Everything was fairly quiet but also completely average for a silo with such a low workforce. He finished and kept a finger hovering above the key, waiting for further instructions.

“And now the cafeteria on Level 1,” the director instructed.

He quickly pounded out the command on the keyboard, tapped the touchpad and the view shifted once again. The room was completely empty. Most of the tables were stacked neatly to the side of the room. In any other silo they would be lined up in rows throughout the room, ready to be filled at every meal time. Instead, only a few tables were scattered about, each with a good view of the screen that showed only darkness at this late hour. He turned toward the director and waited.

Gary saw a line form between the man’s eyebrows and then deepen. Whether it was confusion or concern, he couldn’t determine. He was just glad the man in charge was here and the responsibility wasn’t Gary’s anymore. He could just push buttons and let the other man do the thinking.

“Go back to the smoke,” he ordered curtly. His lips, already thin and a shade of pink so dark they were almost purple, disappeared as he pursed them further. Gary looked away from that disturbing mouth and clicked his keys and his touchpad.

As the original view returned, the director got up and stepped close to the screen, looking into the smoke as if he could somehow see through it to the cause of the anomaly. He eventually shook his head and turned to the assorted men that had come in and stood waiting silently around the consoles.

“Gentlemen,” he said and his tone suggested something between a question and a command.

“We should terminate,” one of the men said and others nodded. Gary kept his eyes on his screen and his keyboard, but he could see the bobbing heads behind him reflected in his screen. He didn’t want anything to do with this sort of thinking. He would do as he was told but these decisions were far above his pay grade, thank goodness.

The ‘Old Man’, his voice quavering and his authority unquestioned, spoke quietly from outside the ring of bobbing heads, “I think they are going to do that to themselves. Let’s see what happens.” He waved a veined hand at the monitor and added, “We can watch to see if anyone comes to the airlock and terminate then, if needed. This is an interesting development.”

The director returned that finger to his lips again, as if to order silence, and kept his gaze on the screen for a long moment. He abruptly dropped his finger and a look of surprise crossed his face. Gary looked back at the screen, the now black screen.

“Get that view back,” the director said and stood, as if leaning over the keyboard could make Gary work faster or better.

Gary punched keys, changed screens to be sure it wasn’t the monitor going out and basically did all that he could to bring up a view, any view, in Silo 49. Nothing happened except more black on the screen.

“Sir, this is a no input situation. I’m not getting a ping back at all. The silo is gone,” Gary reported.

“Terminate. Terminate right now,” the director said, his tone one of urgency.

Gary got up and went to the panel that hid the rows of red buttons and key slots that could be used to shut down a silo for good. He slipped in his key next to the button marked 49 and waited. The director slotted in his key a moment later and nodded.

They both turned their keys and then the director ordered, “Confirm for 49.”

Gary carefully looked at the button and then ensured the two keys were slotted into the holes for that silo and no other before answering, “I confirm 49, sir.”

The director said nothing more. He just reached up and firmly pressed the oversized button until a loud click sounded in the silent room that indicated it was fully depressed and the deadly contact made. The director looked at Gary and he could see a thin and glistening film of sweat on the director’s brow and over his upper lip. Gary was really glad he was going off shift if what was going on was making this ice-veined man sweat.

After nodding once more toward Gary, they both turned and un-slotted their keys. Gary tucked his back inside his coverall with extra care just so he could avoid the director’s strange, cold eyes. When he looked back up the director was staring at him with a queer, almost amused, expression on his face. Gary thought the director was looking at him the same way he had been looking at that screen and Gary fought down the shivers that wanted to take him over.

“Any further follow on instructions, sir?” Gary asked and hoped he sounded as unaffected as he was trying to.

The director cocked his head to the side the slightest bit, an evaluating look on his face, but it passed and he smiled. It was a terrible smile, blood red gums peeking out from between those thin dark lips as they stretched wide. Gary gritted his own teeth a little and tried not to look away.

The director’s smile broadened a little further, as if he could see the revulsion in Gary’s mind, but all he said was, “Good work, Gary. Just monitor the situation and let me know if anything else happens with 40. As for the other, well, 49 is history now. Just forget about it.”

Gary nodded and hoped that he would be able to do just that. He really couldn’t wait to go off shift.

Epilogue – Silo 49

The old man released the newborn babe into the Medic Shadow’s arms and felt the palsy in his hands return with the lifting of the weight. The new mother’s eyes showed no concern with this as she placed the second of her twins into his shaking arms, only delight at her good fortune. Her face still glowed from the pregnancy just ended and her shape was plump after her delivery just days before.

“They are in good health?” the old man, whose name had once been Wallis, asked in a voice so aged and slight that it sometimes surprised him to hear it.

“They are perfect,” the new mother gushed, her voice liquid with joy.

William, once Wallis, gazed down into the sleeping baby’s small face and smiled. She was beautiful, her pink bud of a mouth even now suckling in her sleep. The dark dashes of her eyebrows drew together within some baby dream and then her brow smoothed again. One little fist was raised up, the tiny nails edged with perfect crescents of white. She would be a beauty, of this he was sure. Would she be healthy was his question. He hoped so with all his heart, as he did for her equally small and beautiful brother.

He looked back to the mother, her face intent on the one of her daughter and asked, “And the name? Shall I guess?”

Her laugh came out like the tinkling of bells, so musical and filled with happiness it was. She said, “I would like to call her Grace-Ann. If he is Graham-Michael then she should be a Grace, don’t you think?”

William, once Wallis, shook his head, bemused at how many Graces and Grahams, and even Wallises, he had held in his arms in the past decades. But when he answered her, he said, “I think those are fine names.”

She smiled in relief then and William reminded himself that it was very important for him to be genuine when he gave his blessings. The people had come to believe that placing a newborn into the arms of the oldest of them passed on some of the elder’s good fortune and increased their child’s chance at long life. As the oldest person in the silo, he should take it seriously.

This little drama was vitally important to the new parents and he would do nothing to disturb their tranquility so he added, “They are twins and that makes it an even more perfect choice.”

“It would have been perfect had they been triplets,” the woman said, but added quickly, “but I wouldn’t have liked that at all.” She patted her stomach, still bulged from the effects of her pregnancy. “I’m already going to have to work very hard to get back into shape.”

William nodded at the sleeping babe and told her, “And it will be worth every moment.”

She sighed as only a new mother, successfully delivered of a healthy child, can sigh. “Oh, yes. Every moment and more besides.”

William looked up at the Medic Shadow that stood behind his chair and she immediately reached down to take the baby from his arms. She lowered her into the cradle that always stayed in William’s room in readiness for these visits. The child snuffled a little at being disturbed but only for half a moment and then went silent, returning to whatever dreams the newly born dreamed and comforted by the presence of her twin next to her.

His hands and arms were shaking even more now that they were unburdened and he gripped his arms, hand to wrist, in his lap. It helped some, but he could feel their tremors even now. He took another look at the new mother and then at her mate, a good looking young man wearing the yellow coveralls of Supply. His wavy dark hair would look good on the children.

He knew their names and, even more, knew the names they carried before he and Grace had created one final forgetting for the silo, re-writing history just once more before they smashed the machines that brought controlling drugs to the population in their water. These two had been small, so small that they had been important. Her name had been Jewel and he remembered the day she was born. He had given her the name Livy because it meant life.

That was then and this was now, though, and Wallis gave them their good words of wisdom, one parent to another, and his hopes for their long and happy lives. They each kissed him on his cheek, another tradition that had sprung up without him or Grace having anything to do with it, as they took their leave. Each carried a child and William thought it interesting that they each carried the child of opposite sex to their own. He smiled as the door closed behind him.

The room felt empty once they were gone even though the Shadow still stood nearby. She stepped forward, anticipating that he might wish to return to bed, but he patted her hand with his own shaky one and told her he wanted to sit for a while. The look she gave him was one of concern but she complied and left with the near silent footsteps of those who attended the ill as their profession.

She had reason to be concerned and William, once Wallis, knew that his time was nearing an end. He could feel the vague emptiness in his body as things began to slowly shut down. The swelling in his feet and the trembling of his limbs was getting much worse of late. He could take only a few steps on his own and then only if strong arms and shoulders braced him. He used a chair with little wheels bolted to the legs for most of his getting around and he had not been on the stairs for years.

He was glad of it though. He was too old and he worried that his wits might begin to wander. If that happened, he might spill his secrets to someone and that would not do at all. He missed Graham and he missed Grace. He missed his wife and his son and all those now long gone and he wanted to join them wherever it was they went when they died.

They had done a good thing, he and Grace, all those years ago. They had made some mistakes but they had been making their decisions blindly, with only a few diaries and a poisoned Legacy of things they could never have to guide them. For a little while they asked those distant friends in Silo 40 for advice, but they had dropped of the line suddenly and without warning and never returned another call. In the end, he thought, they had done well enough.

He chuckled to himself when he thought of all the Graces and Grahams and little baby Wallises running around the silo. That had been a mistake. He had wanted to honor Graham and Grace. They had set aside a little corner of Level 72 to act as a memorial to the bravery of Graham. It told the story of his combatting the Others who came to destroy Humanity inside the silo that provided their last resort and place of safety.

It was Wallis who had added Grace. On the memorial plaque there had been just a single circle with an X across it as a sign of honor to their fallen hero. Wallis had switched it for one that added a second circle and her name to the plaque. When he returned on the day it came time to open the memorial—during the great forgetting—he had found that the plaque now held three circles linked together like a triangle with the X weaving through and binding them all together. His name had been added to the other two.

Grace, who had decided to be called Lila after the forgetting, had merely laughed her throaty laugh at his outraged expression and told him that he should have to be just as embarrassed as she. He had grabbed her hand and kissed her for the first time then. He had far too few kisses from her after that. She had gone much too soon and left him here, with a stupid name like William, all alone in his memories.

He dashed away a tear and wondered if they could have done any better than they did with this new world in the silo. They had created a new mythology, and it was no less a lie in words than the other, but it was closer to the truth in its meaning and intent.

To the people of the silo, this world was their Haven. It was the safe place created so that at least some of humanity could survive the destruction of the world that the Others had brought on in their hatred of humans. It was a simple mythology but it had taken on a life of its own almost immediately. Instead of just a small corner of level 72 where people might go and see the conduit, read the story of the “battle” and brush their fingers against the symbol of honor it had spread and become a warren of rooms.

On the walls were uncounted sheets of precious paper with drawings ranging in skill from childish stick figures to finely sketched and brushed inks depicting a world that no longer existed. Their forms taken from the children’s books, they had been elaborated upon and make more detailed with each passing year. There was a world of wonders down there now with the human imagination as its only limit. Grace would have been delighted to see it, he knew.

In other ways that new mythology had grown. With no sense of when the battle had occurred, it morphed on its own to some distant past, with Graham the leader of a small group of heroes, Wallis and Grace his best and most reliable friends. The silo, instead of a structure built, had begun to change for the people to mean something more. It became almost a living thing, a thing that protected them from the Others that still searched for them outside and waited for the day when the Outside would be restored to them.

It was said that a watch had been organized and that one person always remained on Level 1, vigilant eyes searching the screen for any sign of an Other or the promised green and blue that would appear in the sky and over the land when the Others were finally dead and gone. Grace and he had nothing to do with any of these new beliefs. They sprang, as if from some hidden source, from the people. He rather liked the story though and enjoyed hearing it from those who visited him and kept him company.

The attendant broke his reverie as she knocked and entered, a tray of food balanced in one hand. She helped him into bed, no easy task since his tremors made it almost impossible for him to control the jerking of his arms and feet. Once ensconced in his bed, the down stuffed mattress pad cushioning his frail form, he waved away the food and told her he just wanted to nap first.

She kissed his cheek and smoothed his brow like she would a child and he rewarded her with a smile. He knew that it was considered an honor to serve the oldest of the people, but one that had its challenges, and he wanted her to know how very much he valued her care.

In the dim light of just one lamp William, once called Wallis, listened to the sounds of the silo around him. He heard the sounds of footsteps in the hallways and a burst of children’s laughter as they raced home after school. He heard the sound of water in the pipes and the hiss of air from the vents. What he heard most was life. Good, strong life.

He felt something go warm and loose in his head, as if something were finally giving way. There was no real pain, just a twinge where his head met his neck and he was grateful for that. He sighed and knew he wouldn’t have to wait any longer.

Thank You

You have my sincerest thanks for reading my work and I sure hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please take the time to write a review. Without such reviews, those who publish direct to the reader would never have even the slimmest hope of reaching others that might be interested. Plus, you can believe me when I tell you that without those nice words, there is no way I’d be able to force myself to muddle through the next block and keep writing.

I love to hear from readers, even the ones who didn’t like something I did or chose for a character. Readers do change the way I write and what you say might even impact a future character. You never know. You can reach me via email at Ann.ChristyAuthor@gmail.com.

You can also give me a shout out and find cool stuff on the series webpage at http://Silo49.blogspot.com. On Facebook and Google+, I’m listed under Ann Christy. And on The Twitter, I’m AnnChristyZ.

As for the progress on next works in the series? They are out! They take place generations after the preceding story and each features a story of its own as well as being a cog in the wheel of the greater story. Books two and three are full length novels. A fourth addition, a novelette, is also out. In reading order, the books in the Silo 49 series are:

Silo 49: Going Dark

Silo 49: Deep Dark

Silo 49: Dark Till Dawn

Silo 49: Flying Season for the Mis-Recorded

Copyright Information

All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. All resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and the product of a fevered imagination.

Copyright 2013 Ann Christy

Cover Art

Torrey Cooney - http://torriecooney.blogspot.com

Content

SILO 49: GOING DARK
Book One of the Silo 49 Series
A Wool Universe Series
by Ann Christy

Author’s Foreword

Lying Can Be a Good Thing

Eavesdropping on Death

Any Normal Day

Conspiracy for Dinner

You Might Want to Sit Down

What Would Wallis Do?

Radios and Bread Crumbs

Waiting is the Hardest Part

Old Men and Baskets

Ghosts in the Wall

Goodbye, Friend

Buried Treasures

Epilogue – Silo One

Epilogue – Silo 49

Thank You

Copyright Information