by Ann Christy
Just as she was about to give up she felt it give and the seam widened. Probe removed, she eased the back cover open. Something slipped out of the watch and onto the workbench. Marina glanced down at it, a simple round piece of paper and another folded paper, before she returned her focus to the watch.
The entire interior of the watch was revealed and she marveled at its beauty and detail. Tiny gears and springs filled the space with an elegance Marina found entrancing. Some of the works were covered by a plate of brass but what she could see was a marvel of mechanics.
At the top, the misalignment of a single spring drew her eyes and she realized that she could fix that single part if she wanted to. Perhaps that would even make this watch work again. “Huh,” she murmured and laid the watch down carefully to turn to the papers that had fallen from it.
The round paper was shaped like a shallow bowl from being mounted into the depression on the watch's back cover. She turned it over and nearly dropped it in surprise. It was a mechanical image but unlike any other she had ever seen. All the photographic images she had seen were just arrays of black dots, the size of the dots and their spacing defining the image. For any good picture, one needed an artist to draw it. This image was nothing like that.
The colors were glorious and some of them she had no name for. Two smiling faces peered out at her, both of them young and happy. A third face, that of a puppy, gazed up at the man from the space between the two people.
They were flushed with color, perhaps a bit like Jason's earlier that day. It reminded Marina of how the children in her class had looked after a field trip to the dirt farms when she was young. The lights there had put red and pink burns on their foreheads, noses and cheeks. Marina's had peeled later, revealing new and even pinker skin underneath. Other children had not peeled but had burnished gold for a while. Some had sported dark freckles while others had a brownish look similar to what the people in the photo had.
But it wasn't the people, or even the very strange looking puppy with big sad eyes and floppy ears that truly baffled Marina. It was all that was behind and around them. From the level of their ears to the top of the image was a shade of blue she had never seen before. It was strange and beautiful.
Wisps of white seemed to float through the blue. Marina wasn't originally from the Down Deep and she knew, even though it had been years since she had stood in front of the view on Level 1, that what she was seeing was the sky. Just like the screen Up Top showed the brown and grey and black of the world outside the silo, this image showed a beautiful blue sky with people smiling beneath it.
There was more, though. Much more. Marina knew what a tree was. There were trees for fruit and other foods at different levels of the silo. In the background of the image and under that blue sky were trees beyond counting and if the size of the people were any judge, they looked as if they were much bigger than any tree in the silo.
And they were outside! This strange image was obviously made outside.
The sudden thought made Marina slap the image down on the bench and look around. That feeling of the silo watching or listening came over her just as it had in her childhood. She sat, stiff and still, on her stool and tried desperately not to think of the outside like that again.
She wondered if she had just said that aloud. If she had, then certainly the silo had heard her already if it really was alive and listening. She waited in silence, half expecting some resonant boom from the walls or a knock on the door by turquoise wearing people ready to take her directly to Remediation. Nothing happened though and the only sound was her breathing and the pounding of her heart in her ears.
She turned the picture over and read the faded lines of script there. ‘Bob and Marilyn Hardicourt, D.C. Honeymoon 2035’. She laid the image down carefully and picked up the folded piece of paper. It was also bent slightly into a bowl shape from being squeezed into the compartment. The paper was very thin and crinkled noisily as she unfolded it. She smoothed the paper cautiously and read the faded blue script.
"Bobby - The one watch you were missing is now yours.
Happy Anniversary.
You remind me, every time I see your face,
Of the beautiful man who stole my heart
when you caught my hat
on the hills that windy spring day. - Marilyn"
Below that and in the border spaces, tiny and cramped writing ran in a circle around the page. It was harder to read and less neat, as if it had been written in a hurry. The ink was black instead of blue and written in a different hand. It was very hard to make out the small words but she rotated the paper around as she read:
‘I'm hiding this for you, Thomas, in hopes that you will find it someday. I don't know what has happened or where you are, but I can't find you, my son. Your mother couldn't last this way. I'm sorry I couldn't keep her here with us but she was never meant to be underground. There is no sunshine in these silos and this isn't the way people are meant to live. She jumped. So many have that I hardly know how so many people can still be left inside. I don't know what happened save that there was a nuke but now the details are getting away from me. There’s more than that out there. You can watch the world getting eaten away. Nukes don’t do that. I was injured and in the hospital for a time. When I came out, everything had changed and everyone was different. Your mother started to forget things. Everyone did, except me. I ran out of my asthma medicine a few days ago and now I'm forgetting too. I can feel it slipping away. So I'm writing this now, before it's all gone. Your brother, Garrod, is with me and safe. He doesn't remember anything now except that I'm his father. He doesn't even remember his mother and she's only been gone a week. I love you. I have always loved you. I will always love you. - Dad (Bob Hardicourt)’
Marina almost stopped breathing as she parsed out the cramped words. Her hands were shaking so badly that the paper crackled, dangerously close to tearing, and she let it go to drift the rest of the way to the surface of the bench.
Chapter Three
The words buzzed around in her head and a sense of unreality surrounded her. Now and then she glanced at the two papers, one face up and the other face down, to ensure they were really there. The fog lifted for a moment at some point and she suddenly realized she had no idea how much time had passed as she sat there absorbed by this inconceivable mystery.
Having no desire to explain anything about her find, she folded the paper carefully and inserted it and the image back into the watch. She closed it tightly, listening to be sure she heard the tiny click of the catch. She put the watch back into its box and put that back into the larger box so it wouldn’t look opened at all. If something happened or someone else came to find the object and the hidden contents, she certainly didn't want that person to know that she had already seen it.
She put her things away and left the space, operating almost robotically as she made her way out of the fabber sector and toward the main stairwell. She made the trip four levels up without really noticing her surroundings or taking note of those she greeted out of habit along the way. She arrived at her compartment to find that she had very little time before she might expect her family to return home.
Dinner was put together in a hurry but was presentable nonetheless. Working just one level above the Bazaar and within a few levels of other shopping meant that her family enjoyed a varied diet and spent more than they probably should on food. Their assigned cafeterias provided a good breakfast and always packed her take away lunch, a privilege of her work, but she couldn't remember the last time they ate dinner there aside from fish day. That only came about once every month or two. The family always made a point of being there on time for fish day and ready to feast.
The rest of the time the fresh produce, grains and oils of the market made up the bulk of their meals. The sticky sweetness of thick jams or tart fruits were pleasures they felt worth the expense. Today she made a salad topped with some of the herbed goat cheese her favorite seller set aside for her at the bazaar. T
o provide some warmth and substance, she quickly warmed a bit of leftover root vegetable stew and corn cakes. She was filling cups with a fresh batch of tea when the door opened and the chatting duo made up of her husband and daughter breezed into the compartment.
Neither of them seemed to notice that Marina was distracted. Sela recited every detail of her day while they ate dinner with only the occasional interruption by Joseph to tone down the stories or add some point of clarification. Marina knew that she smiled in the right places, encouraged at the correct times and asked the appropriate questions, but she couldn't have recounted even a single thing that was said once the meal was over.
She escaped to their small sitting area and pretended to read a book about learning to knit. As her family washed up the dinner dishes and planned their next day, Marina delved back into her thoughts and the dangerous find she had made.
Part of her was angry that this discovery had been foisted upon her. Though she had no frame of reference, she could only imagine that having such a letter and image would be enough to send her to remediation. It would have to be if expressing curiosity about the outside was enough to be sent for an evaluation at least.
In all her years she had never even heard of such a thing as that image. She knew and remembered the endless array of stories that kids told to each other as they grew up, each one a lesson of consequences or morality. Many of them were entirely fantastical and unbelievable but even those didn't come close to this horrifying find of hers. It was evidence any eye could see. It was as logical and objective as a Historian's viewpoint. She turned a page in her knitting book unread as she considered all that she had heard in her life, whether from children's tales or classes or history.
One of the most commonly whispered stories of the schoolroom was the scary story about the ghostly figure seen wandering across the screen Up Top, forever trying to get back into the silo. There were more about naughty children being squeezed out by the silo walls and into some frightening netherworld. That one had kept Marina from walking too close to a wall for a long time for fear of it happening to her.
There were others but one in particular, from a time when she was old enough to understand the way the world around her operated, tickled at her mind. Someone had jumped from the stairwell and those occurrences, while rare, were a fact of life. It happened. It was sad but people moved on.
After one such jumper had made a particularly bad mess on a section of the stairs any child leaving the mid-level school rooms would encounter, they had been kept after school for what seemed like hours while the remains were dealt with. With nothing to do but wait, the telling of jumper stories was inevitable. Most dealt with a particularly gory jump or a jumper who had survived or some variation on that theme.
One of the stories was different and it told the story of jumpers who fell like water drops sprayed from pipes in hydroponics, one after another. As each jumper passed the levels, the compulsion that made them jump passed from person to person like a disease and more came down from all the levels. To stop the spread, parents had braved the danger and dragged their children, screaming with the need to jump, back to their compartments and tied them down. They had stayed there, some of them starving to death for fear of opening their doors, rather than risk their children wanting to return to the railings and plunge to their deaths.
It was a suitably gory story to satisfy children and Marina had sighed along with the rest as the hidden moral of the story unfolded. The moral was a simple one. When someone jumps, the sadness can spread to others so one must be careful. If you felt the great sadness, you went to remediation so you didn't hurt others.
Marina had always thought the story was just a story but the note inside the watch made it seem that this story sprang from some past misery. Did that story come from that time? Did jumpers really fall like that? It was a horrible thought. But how long ago that happened was the real question and one she didn't have any clue to. What she did know was that note was not a part of silo history and that made it far more frightening than any childhood tale.
Silo history was simple and logical. In the time before the silo there were no true humans. Instead, there were violent creatures that looked human but could not think like humans. Those were the Others.
They could not reason and did not have the tenets to guide their actions and wouldn't have understood them even if they did. As humans came to be in that world, the silo called to them and they made the trek, each one alone and hunted, to the safety of the silo. And for each human that came, the silo bade them bring one thing. For some it was a seed and for others it was an animal and for still others it was knowledge.
Each thing was a part of Silo's plan and the plan was perfect and when the last human had been made, completed their travels and finally entered the airlock, the silo had closed itself off and the creatures that roamed outside had destroyed each other until nothing alive was left.
Except that it was thought that there might yet be Others hidden in much the same way the humans were hidden. They merely waited for their chance to destroy the humans once again. It was said that when the last Other died, the world would be reborn and humans would emerge from the safe embrace of the silo to reclaim it.
This she had accepted as fact in childhood. It made sense. She had seen the screen Up Top and would never have wanted to endure what she saw beyond the safety of the silo. To go outside was to die. But she had seen for herself, or at least she had seen in the image, that this had not always been the case.
People from this image had once been outside and it had been beautiful. And if they hadn't lived there, but perhaps only visited it from the safety of the silo, why had the woman jumped? What had made being in the silo so unbearable that people jumped when denied that beautiful world?
The only possibility she could think of was that those people in the image were First People, the ones who were born among the Others and called by the silo. But if that were true, why were they happy? In her imagination, the First People had traveled through a landscape blasted by dust and terrible to see. Her mind's eye saw them struggling against that landscape and arriving at the airlock thankful and knowing they were saved.
She had certainly never imagined a beautiful world with clear skies spread wide and blue over a world of rich, abundant green. That image didn't look like it showed people trying desperately to escape from Others. It looked more like the world promised to humanity once the Others were gone.
But the tenets of the silo were clear in terms of truth. All Conduct Above The Rails was more than just an edict on conducting honest business. It meant being truthful and honest with everyone and to not hurt others. It meant to consider the effects of one's actions. It was more than a simple saying. It was a way of life. And if the silo history wasn't truthful, was it because it was mistaken or because it was a lie? One was hard to imagine and the other impossible to accept.
She turned another page and realized that she knew deep in her heart the evidence she’d seen wasn't wrong. She had no idea what a nuke was but clearly it was something devastating and it had made all the people from outside come into the silo so it could take care of them. She also knew in her heart that it had been a terrible change for some of them which meant that the silo had not been a perfect ideal place after all.
She snuck a glance at her family. Her husband and daughter were engaged in a game at the table as they chatted and didn’t seem to notice her preoccupied state. She returned to her book and then broached with herself the only real topic she needed to consider. What was she was going to do about her find? She couldn't return the object and say it wasn't usable because it would be far too easy to be caught in such a lie. Anyone finding the hidden catch would open it and know exactly why she had returned it.
She could destroy the image and the note by burning them in her work room. She could shred the paper and a touch of her soldering iron at the highest setting would set it ablaze. That was surely the safest thing to do, and probably
the smartest, but she shrunk from the idea of actually doing it. It might be the only such letter and image in existence and she could not be the one to snuff them away forever.
What she really wanted to do was to find out the truth. She knew exactly where she might start too. A visit to the person who sent it in for reclamation would be a good place to start. She wasn't sure how she might go about making the visit seem practical and not raise too much attention, but she was sure she could come up with something.
She might say that some of the things sent in still had use in them or even that she wanted to ensure she was not ruining something of importance. That was thin but it might work. She didn't think she could resist doing this, even as she knew she should do exactly that.
If she closed her eyes she could see that image again. She had to know if the world in that image had really existed, that it really was once a place where people had lived happily and not just run from to get here.
And if that was the truth, what had happened?
Chapter Four
Less than a seven-day had passed when Marina, accompanied by her family, found herself climbing the stairs upward at the start of their holiday. It had been surprisingly easy to get started on her secret investigation of the hidden contents of the watch. As she unpacked and catalogued the rest of the items from Level 50, she found other curious objects, some of which had no purpose she could fathom. What had been clear is that they were fashioned with some purpose other than decoration in mind.
Three of the items were alike in form though different in design. They were an odd sort of clamp with one edge curled, yet without a hinge and made of a single piece of silver. Each was decorated differently. She had experimented with them and found that if she shoved a sheaf of papers into one from the curved edge it would hold them nicely together. She doubted very much such an elaborate item would be made to act as a large paper clip.
