Dust s-9

by Hugh Howey

  Down the hall from the barracks stood a room of pilot stations. Most were covered in plastic sheets. There was a flat desk along the same wall that bore a mosaic of large monitors. It was here that the radio set was being pieced together. Her brother had gathered a jumble of spare parts one at a time from the lower storerooms. It might be decades or even centuries before anyone noticed they were gone.

  Charlotte flicked on the light bulb she’d rigged over the table and powered up the set. She could already get quite a few stations. She tuned the knob until she heard static and left it there, waiting on voices. Until then, she pretended it was the sea rolling up onto a beach. Sometimes it was rain on a canopy of fat leaves. Or a crowd of people quietly talking in a dark theater. She pawed through the bin of parts Donald had amassed and looked for a better set of speakers, still needed a microphone or some way to transmit. She wished she was more mechanically inclined. All she knew how to do was plug things together. It was like assembling a rifle or a computer — she just joined anything that would mate and flicked on the power. It had only resulted in smoke the one time. What it mostly took was patience, which she didn’t have a lot of. Or time, which she was drowning in.

  Footsteps down the hall signaled breakfast. Charlotte turned down the volume and cleared room on the desk as Donny entered, a tray in his hands.

  “Morning,” she said, getting up to take the tray from him. Her legs felt wobbly from the workout. As her brother stepped into the spill of light from the dangling bulb, she noted his frown. “Everything okay?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “We might have a problem.”

  Charlotte set the tray down. “What is it?”

  “I ran into a guy I knew from my first shift. Was stuck on the lift with him. A handyman.”

  “That’s not good.” She lifted the dented metal cover from one of the plates. There was an electrical board and a coil of wire beneath. Also, the small screwdriver she’d asked for.

  “Your eggs are under the other one.”

  She set the lid aside and grabbed her fork. “Did he recognize you?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I kept my head down until he got off. But I knew him as well as I’ve known anyone in this place. It feels like yesterday that I borrowed tools from him, asked him to change a light for me. Who knows what it feels like for him. That might’ve been yesterday or a dozen years ago. Memory works weird in this place.”

  Charlotte took a bite of eggs. Donny had put a touch too much salt on them. She imagined him up there with the shaker, his hand trembling. “Even if he did recognize you,” she said around a bite of food, “he might think you’re on another shift as yourself. How many people know you as Thurman?”

  Donald shook his head. “Not many. But still, this could come crashing down on us at any moment. I’m going to bring some food up from the pantry, more dry goods. Also, I went in and changed the clearance for your badge so you can access the lifts. And I double-checked that no one else could get down here. I’d hate for you to get trapped if something happened to me.”

  Charlotte moved her eggs around her plate. “I don’t like thinking about that,” she said.

  “Another bit of a problem. The head of this silo is going off shift in a week, which will make things a little complicated. I’m relying on him to orient the next guy to my status. Things have been going a little too smoothly thus far—”

  Charlotte laughed and took another bite of eggs. “Too smoothly,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d hate to see rough. What’s the latest on your favorite silo?”

  “The IT head picked up today. Lukas.”

  Charlotte thought her brother sounded disappointed. “And?” she asked. “Learn anything new?”

  “He managed to crack another server. It’s more of the same data, everything about its residents, every job they’ve had, who they’re related to, from birth to death. I don’t understand how those machines go from that information to this ranked list. It seems like a bunch of noise, like there has to be something else.”

  He produced a sheet of folded paper, a new printout of the rankings of the silos. Charlotte cleared a space on the workbench, and he smoothed the report.

  “See? The order has changed again. But what determines that?”

  She studied the report while she ate, and Donald grabbed one of his folders of notes. He spent a lot of time working in the conference room where he could spread things out and pace back and forth, but Charlotte preferred it when he sat at that drone station. He would sit there for hours sometimes, going through his notes while Charlotte worked on the radio, the two of them listening for chatter among the static.

  “Silo six is back on top again,” she muttered. It was like reading the side of a cereal box while she ate, all those numbers that made little sense. One column was labeled Facility, which Donald said was what they used to call the silos. Beside each silo was a percentage like a massive dose of daily vitamins: 99.992%, 99.989%, 99.987%, 99.984%. The last silo with a percentage read 99.974%. Every silo below this was marked off or had N/A listed. Silos 40, 12, 17, and a handful of others were included in that latter category.

  “You still think the one on top is the only one that gets to survive?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Have you told these people you’re talking to? Because they’re way down the list.”

  He just looked at her and frowned.

  “You haven’t. You’re just using them to help you figure all this out.”

  “I’m not using them. Hell, I saved that silo. I save it every day that I don’t report what’s going on over there.”

  “Okay,” Charlotte said. She returned to her eggs.

  “Besides, they probably figure they’re using me. Hell, I think they get more out of our talks than I do. Lukas, the one who heads up their IT, he peppers me with all these questions about the way the world used to be—”

  “And the mayor?” Charlotte turned and studied her brother closely. “What does she get out of it?”

  “Juliette?” Donald thumbed through a folder. “She enjoys threatening me.”

  Charlotte laughed. “I would love to hear that.”

  “If you get that radio sorted, you might.”

  “And then you’ll spend more time working down here? It would be good, you know. Lessen the risk of being recognized.” She scraped her plate with her fork, not willing to admit the real reason she wanted him down there more was how empty the place felt when he was gone.

  “Absolutely.” Her brother rubbed his face, and Charlotte saw how tired he was. Her gaze fell back to the numbers while she ate.

  “It makes it seem arbitrary, doesn’t it?” she wondered aloud. “If these numbers mean what you think they mean. They’re functionally equivalent.”

  “I doubt the people who planned all this look at it that way. All they need is one of them. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s like a bunch of spares in a box. You pluck one out, and all you care about is if it’ll work. That’s it. They just want to see everything is one hundred percent all the way down.”

  Charlotte couldn’t believe that’s what they had in mind. But Donny had shown her the Pact and enough of his notes to convince her. All the silos but one would be exterminated. Their own included.

  “How long before the next drone is ready?” he asked.

  Charlotte took a sip of juice. “Another day or two. Maybe three. I’m really going light with this one. Not even sure if it’ll fly.” The last two hadn’t made it as far as the first. She was getting desperate.

  “Okay.” He rubbed his face again, his palms muffling his voice. “We’re gonna have to decide before too long what we’re gonna do. If we do nothing, this nightmare plays out for another two hundred years, and you and I won’t last that long.” He started to laugh, but it turned into a cough. Donald fished into his coveralls for his handkerchief, and Charlotte looked away. She studied the dark monitors while he had one of his fits.

  She didn’t want to admit t
his to him, but her inclination was to let it play out. It seemed as if a bunch of precision machines were in control of humanity’s fate, and she tended to trust computers a lot more than her brother did. She had spent years flying drones that could fly themselves, that could make decisions on which targets to hit, could guide missiles to precise locations. She often felt less like a pilot and more like a jockey, a person on a beast that could race along on its own, that only needed someone there to occasionally take the reins or shout encouragement.

  She glanced over the numbers on the report again. Hundredths of a percentage point would decide who lived and who died. And most would die. She and her brother would either be asleep or long dead by the time it happened. The numbers made this looming holocaust seem so damn… arbitrary.

  Donald used the folder in his hand to point at the report. “Did you notice eighteen moved up two spots?”

  She had noticed. “You don’t think you’ve become too… attached, do you?”

  He looked away. “I have a history with this silo. That’s all.”

  Charlotte hesitated. She didn’t want to press further, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t mean the silo,” she said. “You seem… different each time you talk to her.”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was sent to clean,” he said. “She’s been outside.”

  For a moment Charlotte thought that was all he was going to say on the matter. As if this were enough, as if it explained everything. He was quiet a pause, his eyes flicking back and forth.

  “No one is supposed to come back from that,” he finally said. “I don’t think the computers take this into account. Not just what she survived, but that eighteen is hanging in there. By all accounts, they shouldn’t be. If they make it through this… you wonder if they don’t give us the best hope.”

  “You wonder,” Charlotte said, correcting him. She waved the piece of paper. “There’s no way we’re smarter than these computers, brother.”

  Donald appeared sad. “We can be more compassionate than them,” he said.

  Charlotte fought the urge to argue. She wanted to point out that he cared about this silo because of the personal contact. If he knew the people behind any of the other silos — if he knew their stories — would he root for them? It would be cruel to suggest this, however true.

  Donald coughed into his rag. He caught Charlotte staring at him, glanced at the bloodstained cloth, put it away.

  “I’m scared,” she told him.

  Donald shook his head. “I’m not. I’m not afraid of this. I’m not afraid of dying.”

  “I know you’re not. That’s obvious, or you would see someone. But you have to be afraid of something.”

  “I am. Plenty. I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.”

  “Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded.

  Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said.

  12

  That night, Charlotte awoke from a nightmare of flying. She sat up in her cot, springs crying out like a nest of birds, and could still feel herself swooping down through the clouds, the wind on her face.

  Always dreams of flying. Dreams of falling. Wingless dreams where she couldn’t steer, couldn’t pull up. A plummeting bomb zeroing in on a man with his family, a man turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun, a glimpse of Charlotte’s father and mother and brother and herself before impact and loss of signal—

  The nest of birds beneath her fell quiet. Charlotte untangled her fists from the sheets, which were damp with all that dreams wrung from terrified flesh. The room hung heavy and somber around her. She could feel the empty bunks all around, that sense that her fellow pilots had been summoned away in the night, leaving her alone. She rose and padded across the hall to the bathroom, feeling her way and sliding the switches up just a fraction to keep the lights dim. She understood sometimes why her brother had lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse. Shadows of un-people stalked those halls. She could feel herself pass through the ghosts of the sleeping.

  She flushed and washed her hands. There was no going back to her bunk, no chance of returning to sleep, not after that dream. Charlotte tugged on a pair of the red coveralls Donny had brought her, one of three colors, a little variety for her locked-up life. She couldn’t remember what the blue or gold ones were for, but she remembered reactor red. The red coveralls had pouches and slots for tools. She wore them while working, and so they were rarely the cleanest. Loaded up, the coveralls weighed near on twenty pounds, and they rattled as she walked. She zipped up the front and made her way down the hallway.

  Curiously, the lights in the warehouse were already on. It had to be in the middle of the night. She was good about turning them off, and nobody else had access to that level. Her mouth suddenly dry, she crept towards the nearby drones under their tarps, the sound of whispers leaking from the shadows.

  Beyond the drones — near the tall shelves with boxes of spares and tools and emergency rations — a man knelt over the still form of another. The figure turned at the sound of her jangling tools.

  “Donny?”

  “Yeah?”

  A flush of relief. The sprawling body beneath her brother wasn’t a body at all. It was a puffy suit laid out with its arms and legs spread, an empty and lifeless form.

  “What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

  “Late,” he said. He dabbed his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Or early, depending. Did I wake you?”

  Charlotte watched as he shifted his body to block her view of the suit. Flopping one leg up, he began to fold the outfit in on itself. A pair of shears and a roll of silvery tape sat by his knees, a helmet, gloves, and a bottle like a dive tank nearby. A pair of boots as well. The fabric whispered as it moved; it was this that she had mistaken for voices.

  “Hm? No, you didn’t wake me. I got up to go to the bathroom. Thought I heard something.”

  It was a lie. She had come out to work on a drone in the middle of the night, anything to stay awake, to stay grounded. Donald nodded and pulled a rag from his breast pocket. He coughed into this before stuffing it away.

  “What’re you doing up?” she asked.

  “I was just going through some supplies.” Donny made a pile out of the suit parts. “Some things they needed above. Didn’t want to risk sending someone else down for them.” He glanced at his sister. “You want me to fetch you something hot for breakfast?”

  Charlotte hugged herself and shook her head. She hated the reminder of being trapped on that level, needing him to get her things. “I’m getting used to the rations in the crates,” she told him. “The coconut bars in the MREs are growing on me.” She laughed. “I remember hating them during basic.”

  “I really don’t mind getting you something,” Donny said, obviously looking for an excuse to get out of there, some way to change topics. “And I should have the last of what we need for the radio soon. I put in a requisition for a microphone, which I can’t find anywhere else. There’s one in the comm room that’s acting up, which I might steal if nothing else works.”

  Charlotte nodded. She watched her brother stuff the suit back into one of the large plastic containers. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She recognized when he was holding something back. It was what big brothers did.

  Crossing to the nearest drone, she pulled the tarp off and laid out a spanner set on the forward wing. She had always been clumsy with tools, but weeks of work on the drones, of persistence if not patience, and she was getting the hang of how they were put together. “So what do they need the suit for?” she asked, forcing herself to sound nonchalant.

  “I think it’
s something to do with the reactor.” He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Charlotte allowed the lie to echo a bit. She wanted her brother to hear it.

  Opening the skin of the drone’s wing, Charlotte remembered coming home from basic training with new muscles and weeks of competitive fierceness forged among a squad of men. This was before she’d let herself go while on deployment. Back then, she’d been a wiry and fit teenager, her brother off at graduate school, and his first teasing remark about her new physique had landed him on the sofa, his arm pinned behind his back, laughing and teasing her further.

  Laughing, that is, until a sofa cushion had been pressed to the side of his face, and Donny had squealed like a stuck pig. Fun and games had turned into something serious and scary, her brother’s fear of being buried alive awakening something primal in him, something she never teased him for and never wanted to see again.

  Now she watched as he sealed the bin with the suit inside and slid it back under a shelf. It wasn’t needed elsewhere in the silo, she knew. Donald fumbled for his rag, and his coughing resumed. She pretended to be fixated on the drone while he had his fit. Donny didn’t want to talk about the suit or the problem with his lungs, and she didn’t blame him. Her brother was dying. Charlotte knew her brother was dying, could see him like she saw him in her dreams, turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun. She saw him the way she saw every man in that last instant of their lives. There was Donny’s beautiful face on her screen, watching the inevitable fall from the sky.

  He was dying, which is why he wanted to stockpile food for her and make sure she could leave. It was why he wanted to make sure she had a radio, so she would have someone to talk to. Her brother was dying, and he didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to die down there in that pit in the ground where he couldn’t breathe.

  Charlotte knew damn well what the suit was for.

  Silo 18

  13