by Hugh Howey
“So I’ve learned.”
Donald chewed.
“I’m shutting down eighteen today,” Thurman said quietly. “What that facility has cost us…” He shook his head, and Donald wondered if he was thinking of Victor, the head of heads, who had blown his own head off over an uprising that took place there. In the next moment, it occurred to him that the people he’d placed so much hope in were now gone as well. All the time spent smuggling parts to Charlotte, dreaming of an end to the silos, hope of a future under blue skies, all for nothing. The bread felt stale as he swallowed.
“Why?” he asked.
“You know why. You’ve been talking to them, haven’t you? What did you think was going to become of that place? What were you thinking?” The first hints of anger crept into Thurman’s voice. “Did you think they were going to save you? That any of us can be saved? What the hell were you thinking?”
Donald didn’t plan on answering, but a response came as reflexively as a cough: “I thought they deserved better than this. I thought they deserved a chance—”
“A chance for what?” Thurman shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. We planned for enough.” He muttered this last to himself. “The shame is that I have to sleep at all, that I can’t be here to manage everything. It’s like sending drones up when you need to be there yourself, your hand on the yoke.” Thurman made a fist in the air. He studied Donald a while. “You’re going under first thing in the morning. It’s a far cry from what you deserve. But before I’m rid of you, I want you to tell me how you did it, how you ended up here with my name. I can’t let that happen again—”
“So now I’m a threat.” Donald took another pull of water, flooding the tickle in his throat. He tried to take a deep breath, but the pain in his chest made him double over.
“You aren’t, but the next person who does this might be. We tried to think of everything, but we always knew the biggest weakness, the biggest weakness of any system, was a revolt from the top.”
“Like silo twelve,” Donald said. He remembered that silo falling as a dark shadow emerged from its server room. He had witnessed this, had ended that silo, had written a report. “How could you not expect what happened there?” he asked.
“We did. We planned for everything. It’s why we have spares. It’s why we have the Rite, a chance to try a man’s soul, a box to put our ticking time bombs in. You’re too young to understand this, but the most difficult task mankind ever tried to master — and that we never quite managed — was how to pass supreme power from one hand to the next.” Thurman spread his arms. His old eyes sparkled, the politician in him reawakened. “Until now. We solved it here with the cryopods and the shifts. Power is temporary, and it never leaves the same few hands. There is no transfer of power.”
“Congratulations,” Donald spat. And he remembered suggesting to Thurman once that he could be President, and Thurman had suggested it would be a demotion. Donald saw that now.
“Yes. It was a good system. Until you managed to subvert it.”
“I’ll tell you how I did it if you answer something for me.” Donald covered his mouth and coughed.
Thurman frowned and waited for him to stop. “You’re dying,” he said. “We’ll put you in a box so you can dream until the end. What could you possibly want to know?”
“The truth. I have so much of it, but still a few holes. They hurt more than the holes in my lungs.”
“I doubt that,” Thurman said. But he seemed to consider the offer. “What is it you want to know?”
“The servers. I know what’s on them. All the details of everyone’s lives in the silos, where they work, what they do, how long they live, how many kids they have, what they eat, where they go, everything. I want to know what it’s for.”
Thurman studied him. He didn’t say anything.
“I found the percentages. The list that shuffles. It’s the chances that these people survive when they’re set free, isn’t it? But how does it know?”
“It knows,” Thurman said. “And that’s what you think the silos do?”
“I think there’s a war playing out, yes. A war between all these silos, and only one will win.”
“Then what do you need from me?”
“I think there’s something else. Tell me, and I’ll tell you how I took your place.” Donald sat up and hugged his shins while a coughing fit ravaged his throat and ribs. Thurman waited until he was done.
“The servers do what you say. They keep track of all those lives, and they weigh them. They also decide the lotteries, which means we get to shape these people in a very real way. We increase our odds, allow the best to thrive. It’s why the chances keep improving the longer we’re at this.”
“Of course.” Donald felt stupid. He should have known. He had heard Thurman say over and over that they left nothing to chance. And wasn’t a lottery just that?
He caught the look Thurman was giving him. “Your turn,” he said. “How’d you do it?”
Donald leaned back against the wall. He coughed into his fist while Thurman looked on, wide-eyed and silent. “It was Anna,” Donald said. “She found out what you had planned. You were going to put her under after she was done helping you, and she feared she would never wake up again. You gave her access to the systems so she could fix your problem with forty. She set it up so that I would take your place. And she left a note asking for my help, left it in your inbox. I think she wanted to ruin you. To end this.”
“No,” Thurman said.
“Oh, yes. And I woke up and didn’t understand what she was asking of me. I found out too late. And in the meantime, there were still problems with silo forty. When I woke up and started this shift, forty—”
“Forty was already taken care of,” Thurman said.
Donald rested his head back and stared at the ceiling. “They made you think so. Here’s what I think. I think silo forty hacked the system, that’s what Anna found. They hacked their camera feeds so we couldn’t know what was going on, a rogue head of IT, a revolt from the top, just like you said. The cutting of the camera feeds was when they went black. But before that, they hacked the gas lines so we couldn’t kill them. And before that, they hacked the bombs meant to bring down their silos in case any of this happened. They worked their way backwards. By the time they went black, they were in charge. Like me. Like what Anna did for me.”
“How could they—?”
“Maybe she was helping them, I don’t know. She helped me. And somehow word spread to others. Or maybe by the time Anna was done saving your ass, she realized they were right and we were wrong. Maybe she left silo forty alone in the end to do whatever they pleased. I think she thought they might save us all.”
Donald coughed, and thought of all the hero sagas of old, of men and women struggling for righteousness, always with a happy ending, always against impossible odds, always bullshit. Heroes didn’t win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story — the dead didn’t say a word. All of it was bullshit.
“I bombed silo forty before I understood what was going on,” Donald said. He gazed at the ceiling, feeling the weight of all those levels, of the dirt and the heavy sky. “I bombed them because I needed a distraction, because I didn’t care. I killed Anna because she brought me here, because she saved my life. I did your job for you both times, didn’t I? I put down two rebellions you never saw coming—”
“No.” Thurman stood. He towered over Donald.
“Yes,” Donald said. He blinked away welling tears, could feel a hole in his heart where his anger toward Anna once lay. All that was there now was guilt and regret. He had killed the one who had loved him the most, had fought for the things that were right. He had never stopped to ask, to think, to talk.
“You started this uprising when you broke your own rules,” he told Thurman. “When you woke her up, you started this. You were weak. You threatened everything, and I fixed it. And goddamn you to hell for listening to her. F
or bringing me here. For turning me into this!”
Donald closed his eyes. He felt the tickle of escaping tears as they rolled down his temples, and the light through his lids quivered as Thurman’s shadow fell over him. He braced for a blow. He tilted his head back, lifted his chin, and waited. He thought of Helen. He thought of Anna. He thought of Charlotte. And remembering, he started to tell Thurman about his sister and where she was hiding before those blows landed, before he was struck as he deserved to be for helping these monsters, for being their unwitting tool at every turn. He started to tell Thurman about Charlotte, but there was a brightening of light through his lids, the slinking away of a shadow, and the slamming of an angry door.
Silo 18
32
Lukas sensed something was wrong before he slotted the headphones into the jack. The red lights above the servers throbbed red, but it was the wrong time of day. The calls from Silo 1 came like clockwork. This call had come in the middle of dinner. The buzzing and flashing lights had moved to his office and then to the hallway. Sims, the old Security chief, had tracked Lukas down in the break room to let him know someone was getting in touch, and Lukas’s first thought was that their mysterious benefactor had a warning for them. Or maybe he was calling to thank them for finally stopping with the digging.
There was a click in his headset as the connection was made. The lights overhead stopped their infernal blinking. “Hello?” he said, catching his breath.
“Who is this?”
Someone different. The voice was the same, but the words were wrong. Why wouldn’t this person know who he was?
“This is Lukas. Lukas Kyle. Who is this?”
“Let me speak to the head of your silo.”
Lukas stood up straight. “I am the head of this silo. Silo eighteen of World Order Operation Fifty. Who am I speaking to?”
“You’re speaking to the man who dreamed up that World Order. Now get me the head. I have here a… Bernard Holland.”
Lukas nearly blurted out that Bernard was dead. Everyone knew Bernard was dead. It was a fact of life. He had watched him burn rather than go out to clean, watched him burn rather than allow himself to be saved. But this man didn’t know that. And the complexities of life on the other end of that line, that infallible line, caused the room to wobble. The gods weren’t omnipotent. Or they didn’t sup around the same table. Or the one who called himself Donald was more rogue than even Lukas had believed he might be. Or — as Juliette would claim if she were there — these people were fucking with him.
“Bernard is… ah, he is indisposed at the moment.”
There was a pause. Lukas could feel the sweat bead up on his forehead and neck, the heat of the servers and the conversation getting to him.
“How long before he’s back?”
“I’m not sure. I can, uh, try to get him for you?” His voice lilted at the end of what shouldn’t have been a question.
“Fifteen minutes,” the voice said. “After that, things are going to go very badly for you and everyone over there. Very badly. Fifteen minutes.”
The line clicked dead before Lukas could object or argue for more time. Fifteen minutes. The room continued to wobble. He needed Jules. He would need someone to pretend to be Bernard — maybe Nelson. And what had this man meant when he said he had dreamed up the World Order? That wasn’t possible.
Lukas hurried to the ladder and raced down. He grabbed the portable radio from the charging rack and scrambled back up the ladder. He would call Juliette on his way to tracking down Nelson. A different voice would win him some time until he could sort this out. In a way, this was a call he’d always expected, someone wanting to know what in the hell was going on in their silo, but it had never come. He had expected it, and now it took him by surprise.
“Jules?” He reached the top of the ladder and tried the radio. What if she didn’t answer? Fifteen minutes. And then what? How bad could they really make it for them in the silo? The other voice — Donald — had tossed around dire and vacuous warnings from time to time. But this felt different. He tried Juliette again. His heart shouldn’t be pounding so. He opened the server room door and raced down the hall.
“Can I call you back?” Jules asked, the radio in his palm crackling with her voice. “I’ve got a nightmare down here. Five minutes?”
Lukas was breathing hard. He dodged around Sims in the hallway, who spun to watch him go. Nelson would be in the Suit Lab. Donald squeezed the transmit button. “Actually, I could use some help right now. Are you still on your way down?”
“No, I’m here. Just left the kids with my dad. I’m heading to Walker’s to get a battery. Are you running? You’re not coming down here, are you?”
Deep breaths. “No, I’m looking for Nelson. Someone called, said they need to speak to Bernard, that there would be trouble for us otherwise. Jules — I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
He rounded the bend and saw that the door to the Suit Lab was open. Strips of seal tape fluttered around the jamb.
“Calm down,” Juliette told him. “Take it easy. Who did you say called? And why are you looking for Nelson?”
“I was going to have him talk to this guy, pretend he’s Bernard, at least to buy us some time. I don’t know who’s calling. It sounds like the same guy, but it’s not.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to get Bernard, said he was the one who dreamed up Operation Fifty. Dammit, Nelson’s not here.” Lukas glanced around the workbenches and tool cabinets. He remembered passing Sims. The old Security chief had clearance to the server room. Lukas left the Suit Lab and rushed back down the hall.
“Lukas, you aren’t making any sense.”
“I know, I know. Hey, I’ll call you back. I need to catch Sims—”
He jogged down the hallway. Offices flew past, most of them empty, workers who had transferred out of IT or those at dinner. He spotted Sims turning a corner toward the security station.
“Sims!”
The Security chief peered back around the corner, stepped into the hall, and studied Lukas as he ran at him. Lukas wondered how many minutes had passed, how strict this man was going to be.
“I need your help,” he said. He pointed to the server room door, which stood at the junction of the two halls. Sims turned and studied the door with him.
“Yeah?”
Lukas entered his code and pushed the door open. Inside, the lights were back to throbbing red. No way it’d been fifteen minutes already. “I need a huge favor,” he told Sims. “Look, it’s… complicated, but I need you to talk to someone for me. I need you to pretend to be Bernard. You knew him well enough, right?”
Sims pulled up. “Pretend to be who?”
Lukas turned and grabbed the larger man’s arm, urged him along. “No time to explain. I just need you to answer this guy’s questions. It’s like a drill. Just be Bernard. Tell yourself that you’re Bernard. Act angry or something. And get off the line as quickly as you can. In fact, say as little as possible.”
“Who am I talking to?”
“I’ll explain afterward. I just need you to get through this. Fool this guy.” He guided Sims to the open server and handed him the headphones. Sims studied them as though he’d never seen a pair. “Just put those over your ears,” Lukas said. “I’m going to plug you in. It’s like a radio. Remember, you are Bernard. Try to sound like him, okay? Just be him.”
Sims nodded. His cheeks were red, a bead of sweat running down his brow. He looked ten years younger and nervous as hell.
“Here you go.” Lukas slotted the cord into the jack, thinking that Sims was probably even better for this than Nelson. This would buy them some time until he could figure out what was going on. He watched as Sims flinched, must’ve heard a greeting in the headphones.
“Hello?” he asked.
“Confident,” Lukas hissed. The radio in his hand crackled with Juliette’s voice, and he turned down the volume, didn’t want it overheard. He would have to call
her back.
“Yes, this is Bernard.” Sims talked through his nose, high and tight. It sounded more like a man doing a woman’s voice than a fair approximation of the former silo head. “This is Bernard,” Sims said again, more insistently. He turned to Lukas and pleaded with his eyes, looked absolutely helpless. Lukas waved his hand in a small circle. Sims nodded as he listened to something, then pulled the headset off.
“Okay?” Lukas hissed.
Sims held the headset out to Lukas. “He wants to speak to you. I’m sorry. He knows it isn’t him.”
Lukas groaned. He tucked the radio under his arm, Juliette’s voice tiny and distant, and pulled on the headset, slick with sweat.
“Hello?”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Bernard is… I couldn’t reach him.”
“He’s dead. Was it an accident, or was he murdered? What’s going on over there? Who’s in charge? We’ve got no feeds over here.”
“I’m in charge,” Lukas said. He was painfully aware that Sims was studying him. “Everything is just fine over here. I can have Bernard call you—”
“You’ve been talking with someone over here.”
Lukas didn’t respond.
“What did he tell you?”
Lukas glanced at the wooden chair and the pile of books. Sims followed his gaze, and his eyes widened at the sight of so much paper.
“We’ve been talking about population reports,” Lukas said. “We put down an uprising. Yes, Bernard was injured during the fighting—”
“I have a machine here that tells me when you’re lying.”
Lukas felt faint. It seemed impossible, but he believed the man. He turned around and collapsed into the chair. Sims studied him warily. His Security chief could tell that things weren’t right.
