by Hugh Howey
Mick looked up from the report with a grin. “It’s because he was an ice-cold killer in the war, right?”
Donald cringed. Governor Rhodes laughed.
“Unrelated,” he said. “True, but unrelated.”
The Governor glanced back and forth between them. Mick passed the clipboard to Donald, tapped a page that dealt with the emergency housing facility. Donald looked over the materials list.
“You boys familiar with his anti-cryo bill?” Governor Rhodes asked. He handed Donald a pen, seemed to expect him to just sign the thing and not look over it too closely.
Mick shook his head and shielded his eyes against the Georgia sun. “Anti-cryo?” he asked.
“Yeah. Aw, hell, this probably dates back before you squirts were even born. Senator Thawman penned the bill that put down that cryo fad. Made it illegal to take advantage of rich folk and turn them into ice cubes. It went to the big court, where they voted five–four, and suddenly tens of thousands of popsicles with more money than sense were thawed out and buried proper. These were people, mind you, who’d frozen themselves in the hopes that doctors from the future would discover some medical procedure for extracting their rich heads from their own rich asses!”
The Governor laughed at his own joke, and Mick joined him. A line on the delivery report caught Donald’s eye. He turned the clipboard around and showed the Governor. “Uh, this shows two thousand spools of fiber-optic. I’m pretty sure my plans call for forty spools.”
“Lemme see.” Governor Rhodes took the clipboard and procured another pen from his pocket. He clicked the top of it three times, then scratched out the quantity. He wrote in a new number to the side.
“Wait, will the price reflect that?”
“Price is the same,” he said. “Just sign the bottom.”
“But—”
“Son, this is why hammers cost the Pentagon their weight in gold. It’s government accounting. Just a signature, please.”
“But that’s fifty times more fiber than we’ll need,” Donald complained, even as he found himself scribbling his name. He passed the clipboard to Mick, who signed for the rest of the goods.
“Oh, that’s all right.” Rhodes took the clipboard and pinched the brim of his hat. “I’m sure they’ll find a use for it somewhere.”
“Hey, you know,” Mick said, “I remember that cryo bill. From law school. There were lawsuits, weren’t there? Didn’t a group of families bring murder charges against the Feds?”
The governor laughed. “Yeah, but it didn’t get far. Hard to prove you killed people who’d already been pronounced dead. And then there were Thawman’s bad business investments. Those turned out to be a lifesaver.”
Rhodes tucked his thumb in his belt and stuck out his chest.
“Turned out he had sunk a fortune into one of these cryo companies before digging deeper and reconsidering the...ethical considerations. Old Thawman may have lost his financial skin, but it ended up savin’ his political hide. Made him look like some kinda saint, suffering a loss like that. Only defense better woulda been if he’d unplugged his dear momma with all them others.”
Mick and the Governor laughed. Donald didn’t see what was so funny.
“All right, now, you boys take care. The good state of Oklahoma’ll have another load for ya in a few weeks.”
“Sounds good,” Mick said, grasping and pumping that huge Midwestern paw.
Donald shook the Governor’s hand as well, and then they left him and trudged through the freshly turned soil of the construction site on the way toward their rental. Overhead, against the bright blue Southern sky, contrails like stretched ropes of white yarn revealed the flight lines of the numerous jets departing the busy hub of Atlanta International. And as the clank and grumble of the construction site faded, the chants from the anti-nuke protestors could be heard outside the tall mesh of security fences beyond.
“Hey, you mind if I drop you off at the airport a little early?” Donald asked, looking up at the streaks of white. They passed through the security gate and into the parking lot, the guard waving them along. “It’d be nice to get a jump on traffic and get down to Savannah with some daylight.”
“That’s right,” Mick said with a grin. “You’ve got a hot date tonight.”
Donald laughed.
“Sure, man. Abandon me and go have a good time with your wife.”
“Thanks.”
Mick fished out the keys to the rental. “But you know, I was really hoping you’d invite me to come along. I could join you two for dinner, crash at your place, go hit some bars like old times.”
“Not a chance,” Donald said.
Mick slapped the back of his neck and squeezed. “Yeah, well, happy anniversary anyway.”
Donald winced as his friend pinched his neck. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be sure to give Helen your regards.”
10
2110 • Silo 1
Troy enjoyed a hand of solitaire while Silo 12 collapsed. There was something about the game that he found blissfully numbing. It held off the waves of depression even better than the pills did, the repetition and the complete lack of skill pushing it beyond distraction and into the realm of complete mindlessness.
If a card played, one simply played it. If it didn’t: draw another. The truth was, the player won or lost the very moment the computer shuffled the deck. The rest was simply a lengthy process of finding out.
For a computer game, it was absurdly low-tech. It had likely been coded by a bored predecessor with rudimentary programming skills. Instead of cards, there was just a grid of letters and numbers with an asterisk, ampersand, percent, or plus sign to designate the suit. It bothered Troy not to know which symbol stood for hearts or clubs or diamonds. Even though it was arbitrary, even though it didn’t really matter, it bugged him to not know.
He had stumbled upon the game by accident while digging through some folders. It took a bit of experimenting to learn how to flip the draw deck with the spacebar and place the cards with the arrow keys, but he had plenty of time to work things like this out. Besides meeting with department heads, going over Merriman’s notes, and refreshing himself on the Order, all he had was time. Time to collapse in his office bathroom and cry until snot ran down his chin, time to sit under a scalding shower and shiver, time to hide pills in his cheek and squirrel them away for when the hurt was the worst, time to wonder why the drugs weren’t working like they used to, even when he doubled the dosage on his own.
Perhaps the game’s numbing powers were why it existed at all, why someone had spent the effort to create it, and why subsequent heads had kept it hidden away. He had seen it on Merriman’s face during that elevator ride at the end of his shift. The chemicals only cut through the worst of the pain, that undefinable ache, some grave injury none of them could remember. But lesser wounds resurfaced. The bouts of sudden sadness had to be coming from somewhere.
The last few cards fell into place while his mind wandered. The computer had shuffled for a win, and Troy got all the credit for verifying it. The screen flashed Good Job! in large block letters, the color morphing in a mesmerizing and psychedelic pattern. It was strangely satisfying to be told this by a homemade game—told that he had done a good job. There was a sense of completion, of having done something with his day.
He left the message flashing and glanced around his office for something else to do. There were amendments to be made in the Order, announcements to write up for the Heads of the other silos, and he needed to make sure the vocabulary in these memos abided the ever-changing standards.
He messed up himself, often calling them bunkers instead of silos. It was difficult for those who had lived in the time of the Legacy. An old vocabulary, a way of seeing the world, persisted despite the medication. He felt envious of the others, those who were born and who would die in their own little worlds, who would fall in and out of love, who would keep their hurts in memory, feel them, learn from them, be changed by them. He was jealous of t
hese people even more than he envied the women of his silo who remained in their long-sleep lifeboats—
He stopped himself from going there. The drugs helped. Instead of rushing to the bathroom to cry, he started a new game, a new shuffle, and began flipping through the deck. At times, his hand shook and he had to switch to the other. He remembered something the doctor had said, but that doctor was already gone. Troy didn’t feel like meeting the new doctor. Not yet.
There was a dull patch on the spacebar under his thumb, a place where the luster of the plastic had been worn away. Troy wondered how many shifts ago the game had been made. How many thumbs had ticked away the time, click, click, click? Then he had a sinister thought: maybe none of his predecessors had come up with the game at all, but it had always been there, planted by the shrinks who knew the numbing effect it would have.
There was a knock on his open door. Troy looked up and saw Randall, who worked across the hall in the psych office, standing in the doorway. Troy waved him inside with one hand and minimized the game with the other. He fidgeted with the copy of the Order on his desk, trying to look busy, which is what he suspected everyone else was doing.
“I’ve got that beliefs report you wanted.” Randall waved a folder.
“Oh, good. Good,” Troy took the folder. Always with the folders. He was reminded of the two groups that had built that place: the politicians and the doctors. Both were stuck in a prior era, a time of paperwork. Or it was possible that neither group trusted any data they couldn’t shred or burn?
“The head of Silo 6 has a new replacement picked out and processed. He wants to schedule a talk with you, make the induction formal.”
“Oh. Okay.” Troy flipped through the folder and saw typed transcripts from the communication room about each of the silos. He looked forward to another induction ceremony. Anything he had already done once before filled him with less dread. When he knew the process, the algorithm, all he had to do was reshuffle and flip through the cards. He preferred to avoid the new things and spend more time with the old.
“Also, the population report on Silo 32 is a little troubling.” Randall came around his desk. He licked his thumb before sorting through the reports, and Troy glanced at his monitor to make sure he’d minimized the game. “They’re getting close to the maximum and fast. Doc Haines thinks it might be a bad batch of birth control implants. The Head of 32, a Biggers, here we go—” Randall pulled out the report. “He denies this, says no one with an active implant has gotten pregnant. He thinks the lottery is being gamed or that there’s something wrong with our computers.”
“Hmm.” Troy took the report and looked it over. Silo 32 had crept above nine thousand inhabitants, and the median age had fallen into the low twenties. “Let’s set up a call for first thing in the morning. I don’t buy the lottery being gamed. They shouldn’t even be running the lottery, right? Until they have more space?”
“That’s what I said.”
“And all the population accounts for every silo are run from the same computer.” Troy tried to not make this sound like a question, but it was. He couldn’t remember.
“Yup,” Randall said, bailing him out.
“Which means we’re being lied to. I mean, this doesn’t happen overnight, right? Biggers had to see this coming, which means he knew about it earlier, so either he’s complicit, or he’s lost control over there.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay. What do we know about Biggers’s second?”
“His shadow?” Randall hesitated. “I’d have to pull that file, but I know he’s been in place for a while. Before our shifts.”
“Good. I’ll speak with him tomorrow. Alone.”
“You think we should replace Biggers?”
Troy nodded grimly. The Order was clear on problems that defied explanation: Start at the top. Assume the explanation was a lie. Because of the rules, the recipe book, he and Randall were talking about a man being put out of commission as if he were busted machinery or a batch of cookies that didn’t come out right.
“Okay, one more thing—”
The thunder of boots down the hallway interrupted the thought. Randall and Troy looked up as Saul bolted into the room, his eyes wide with fear.
“Sirs—”
“Saul. What’s going on?”
The communications officer looked like he’d seen a thousand ghosts.
“We need you in the comm room, sir. Right now.”
Troy pushed away from his desk. Randall was right behind him.
“What is it?” Troy asked.
Saul hurried down the hallway. “It’s Silo 12, sir.”
The three of them ran past a man on a ladder who was replacing a long light bulb that had gone dim, the large rectangular plastic cover above him hanging open like a doorway to the heavens. The mechanic watched them race by, an expression on his face like, What’s the hurry?
Troy found himself breathing hard as he struggled to keep up. His fingers were tingling, his toes numb.
“What about Silo 12?” he huffed.
Saul flashed a look over his shoulder, his face screwed up with worry. “I think we’re losing it, sir.”
“What, like contact? You can’t reach them?”
“No. Losing it, sir. The silo. The whole damn thing.”
11
2049 • Savannah, Georgia
Donald wasn’t one for napkins, but he obeyed decorum by shaking the folded cloth loose and draping it in his lap. Each of the napkins at the other settings around the table had been bent into a decorative pyramid that stood upright amid the silverware. He didn’t remember the Corner Diner having cloth napkins when he was in high school. Didn’t they used to have those paper napkin dispensers that were all dented up from years of abuse? And those little salt and pepper shakers with the silver caps, even those had gotten fancier. A dish of what he assumed was sea salt sat near the flower arrangement, and if you wanted pepper, you had to wait for someone to come around and crack it on your food for you, a service Donald refused to view as an upgrade.
He started to mention this to his wife, thinking Helen would find it funny, and saw that she was still gazing wistfully past him at the other booth. Donald turned in his seat, the original vinyl that had survived outdatedness and returned to chic squeaking beneath him. He glanced over at the older couple sitting in the booth where he and Helen had sat on their first date.
“I swear I asked them to reserve it for us,” Donald said.
His wife’s gaze drifted back to him.
“I think they might’ve gotten confused when I described which one it was.” He stirred the air with his finger. “Or maybe I got turned around when I was on the phone.”
She waved her hand. “Sweetie, forget about it. We could be eating grilled cheese at home and I’d be thrilled. I was just staring off into space.”
Helen unfolded her own napkin with the delicate care Donald admired her for. It was almost as if she were studying the folds, seeing how to piece it back together, how to return a disassembled thing to its original state. The waiter came over in a bustle and filled their glasses with water, careless drips spotting the white tablecloth. He apologized for the wait, and then left them to wait some more.
“This place sure has changed,” he said. He glanced at the menu and would’ve had a stronger reaction to the prices had D.C. not inoculated him against dollar signs.
“Yeah. It’s more grown-up,” his wife said.
They both reached for their waters at the same time. Donald smiled and held his glass up. “Fifteen years to the day that your father made the mistake of extending your curfew.”
Helen smiled. She tapped her glass against his, the ring of expensive crystal sonorous and pretty. “To fifteen more,” she said.
They took sips.
“Hell, in another fifteen years, if this place keeps up, we won’t be able to afford to eat here anymore.”
Helen laughed. Donald could imagine the crystal blushing at the sound. She alm
ost hadn’t changed a bit since that first date. She was like the Senator that way, ageless but without the medical assistance. Or maybe it was because the changes were so subtle. It wasn’t like coming to a restaurant every five years and seeing the leaps all at once. It was how siblings aged rather than distant cousins.
“What’re you thinking about?” she asked him.
Donald set down his glass. “Just how beautiful you are.”
“If it’s work on your mind, I understand.”
“No, really, I was sitting here thinking of how unbelievably gorgeous you look tonight.”
He tried to catch their waiter’s attention, but the aproned man didn’t even glance their way as he weaved between the crowded and noisy tables.
