Shift (silo) Read online

  ‘Life and Legacy,’ Marcus recited.

  Troy had a difficult time seeing the next question. It was obscured by an unexpected blur of tears. His hand trembled. He lowered the shaking card to his side before anyone noticed.

  ‘And what does it take to protect the things we hold dear?’ he asked. His voice sounded like someone else’s. He ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering. Something was wrong with him. Powerfully wrong.

  ‘Sacrifice,’ Marcus said, steady as a rock.

  Troy blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and Saul held up his hand to let him know he could continue, that the measures were coming through. Now they needed baselines so the biometrics could tease out the boy’s sincerity towards the first questions.

  ‘Tell me, Marcus, do you have a girlfriend?’

  He didn’t know why that was the first thing that came to mind. Maybe it was the envy that other silos didn’t freeze their women, didn’t freeze anyone at all. Nobody in the comm room seemed to react or care. The formal portion of the test was over.

  ‘Oh, yessir,’ Marcus said, and Troy heard the boy’s breathing change, could imagine his body relaxing. ‘We’ve applied to be married, sir. Just waiting to hear back.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too much longer. What’s her name?’

  ‘Melanie, sir. She works here in IT.’

  ‘That’s great.’ Troy wiped at his eyes. The shivers passed. Saul waved his finger in a circle over his head, letting him know he could wrap it up. They had enough.

  ‘Marcus Dent,’ he said, ‘welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The young man’s voice lifted an octave.

  There was a pause, then the sound of a deep breath being taken and held.

  ‘Sir? Is it okay if I ask a question?’

  Troy looked to the others. There were shrugs and not much else. He considered the role this young man had just assumed, knew well the sensation of being promoted to new responsibilities, that mix of fear, eagerness and confusion.

  ‘Sure, son. One question.’ He figured he was in charge. He could make a few rules of his own.

  Marcus cleared his throat, and Troy pictured this shadow and his silo head sitting in a distant room together, the master studying his student.

  ‘I lost my great-grandmother a few years ago,’ Marcus said. ‘She used to let slip little things about the world before. Not in a forbidden way, but just as a product of her dementia. The doctors said she was resistant to her medication.’

  Troy didn’t like the sound of this, that third-generation survivors were gleaning anything about the past. Marcus may be newly cleared for such things, but others weren’t.

  ‘What’s your question?’ Troy asked.

  ‘The Legacy, sir. I’ve done some reading in it as well — not neglecting my studies of the Order and the Pact, of course — and there’s something I have to know.’

  Another deep breath.

  ‘Is everything in the Legacy true?’

  Troy thought about this. He considered the great collection of books that contained the world’s history — a carefully edited history. In his mind, he could see the leather spines and the gilded pages, the rows and rows of books they had been shown during their orientation.

  He nodded and found himself once again needing to wipe his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he told Marcus, his voice dry and flat. ‘It’s true.’

  Someone in the room sniffled. Troy knew the ceremony had gone on long enough.

  ‘Everything in there is absolutely true.’

  He didn’t add that not every true thing was written in the Legacy. Much had been left out. And there were other things he suspected that none of them knew, that had been edited out of books and brains alike.

  The Legacy was the allowed truth, he wanted to say, the truth that was carried from each generation to the next. But the lies, he thought to himself, were what they carried there in silo one, in that drug-hazed asylum charged somehow with humanity’s survival.

  9

  2049

  Fulton County, Georgia

  THE FRONT-END loader let out a throaty blat as it struggled up the hill, a charcoal geyser streaming from its exhaust pipe. When it reached the top, a load of dirt avalanched out of its toothy bucket, and Donald saw that the loader wasn’t climbing the hill so much as creating it.

  Hills of fresh dirt were taking shape like this all over the site. Between them — through temporary gaps left open like an ordered maze — burdened dump trucks carried away soil and rock from the cavernous pits being hollowed from the earth. These gaps, Donald knew from the topographical plans, would one day be pushed closed, leaving little more than a shallow crease where each hill met its neighbour.

  Standing on one of these growing mounds, Donald watched the ballet of heavy machinery while Mick Webb spoke with a contractor about the delays. In their white shirts and flapping ties, the two congressmen seemed out of place. The men in hard hats with the leather faces, calloused hands and busted knuckles belonged there. He and Mick, blazers tucked under their arms, sweat stains spreading in the humid Georgia heat, were somehow — nominally, at least — supposed to be in charge of that ungodly commotion.

  Another loader released a mound of soil as Donald shifted his gaze towards downtown Atlanta. Past the massive clearing of rising hills and over the treetops still stripped bare from fading winter rose the glass-and-steel spires of the old Southern city. An entire corner of sparsely populated Fulton County had been cleared. Remnants of a golf course were still visible at one end where the machines had yet to disturb the land.

  Down by the main parking lot, a staging zone the size of several football fields held thousands of shipping containers packed with building supplies, more than Donald thought necessary. But he was learning by the hour that this was the way of government projects, where public expectations were as high as the spending limits. Everything was done in excess or not at all. The plans he had been ordered to draw up practically begged for proportions of insanity, and his building wasn’t even a necessary component of the facility. It was only there for the worst-case scenario.

  Between Donald and the field of shipping containers stood a sprawling city of trailers; a few functioned as offices, but most of them served as housing. This was where the thousands of men and women working on the construction could ditch their hard hats, clock off and take their well-earned rest.

  Flags flew over many of the trailers, the workforce as multinational as an Olympic village. Spent nuclear fuel rods from the world over would one day be buried beneath the pristine soil of Fulton County. It meant that the world had a stake in the project’s success. The logistical nightmare this ensured didn’t seem to concern the back-room dealers. He and Mick were finding that many of the early construction delays could be traced to language barriers, as neighbouring work crews couldn’t communicate with one another and had evidently given up trying. Everyone simply worked on their set of plans, heads down, ignoring the rest.

  Beside this temporary city of tin cans sat the vast parking lot he and Mick had trudged up from. He could see their rental car down there, the only quiet and electric thing in sight. Small and silver, it seemed to cower among the belching dump trucks and loaders on all sides. The overmatched car looked precisely how Donald felt, both on that little hill at the construction site and back at the Hill in Washington.

  ‘Two months behind.’

  Mick smacked him on the arm with his clipboard. ‘Hey, did you hear me? Two months behind already, and they just broke ground six months ago. How is that even possible?’

  Donald shrugged as they left the frowning foremen and trudged down the hill to the parking lot. ‘Maybe it’s because they have elected officials pretending to do jobs that belong to the private sector,’ he offered.

  Mick laughed and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Jesus, Donny, you sound like a goddamned Republican!’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I feel like we�
�re in over our heads here.’ He waved his arm at the depression in the hills they were skirting, a deep bowl scooped out of the earth. Several mixer trucks were pouring concrete into the wide hole at its centre. More trucks waited in line behind them, their butts spinning impatiently.

  ‘You do realise,’ Donald said, ‘that one of these holes is going to hold the building they let me draw up? Doesn’t that scare you? All this money? All these people. It sure as hell scares me.’

  Mick’s fingers dug painfully into Donald’s neck. ‘Take it easy. Don’t go getting all philosophical on me.’

  ‘I’m being serious,’ Donald said. ‘Billions of taxpayer dollars are gonna nestle in the dirt out there in the shape that I drew up. It seemed so… abstract before.’

  ‘Christ, this isn’t about you or your plans.’ He popped Donald with the clipboard and used it to point towards the container field. Through a fog of dust, a large man in a cowboy hat waved them over. ‘Besides,’ Mick said, as they angled away from the parking lot, ‘what’re the chances anyone even uses your little bunker? This is about energy independence. It’s about the death of coal. You know, it feels like the rest of us are building a nice big house over here, and you’re over in a corner stressing about where you’re gonna hang the fire extinguisher—’

  ‘Little bunker?’ Donald held his blazer up over his mouth as a cloud of dust blew across them. ‘Do you know how many floors deep this thing is gonna be? If you set it on the ground, it’d be the tallest building in the world.’

  Mick laughed. ‘Not for long it wouldn’t. Not if you designed it.’

  The man in the cowboy hat drew closer. He smiled widely as he kicked through the packed dirt to meet them, and Donald finally recognised him from TV: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma.

  ‘You Senator Thawman’s boys?’

  Governor Rhodes had the authentic drawl to go with the authentic hat, the authentic boots and the authentic buckle. He rested his hands on his wide hips, a clipboard in one of them.

  Mick nodded. ‘Yessir. I’m Congressman Webb. This is Congressman Keene.’

  The two men shook hands. Donald was next. ‘Governor,’ he said.

  ‘Got your delivery.’ He pointed the clipboard at the staging area. ‘Just shy of a hundred containers. Should have somethin’ rollin’ in about every week. Need one of you to sign right here.’

  Mick reached out and took the clipboard. Donald saw an opportunity to ask something about Senator Thurman, something he figured an old war buddy would know.

  ‘Why do some people call him Thawman?’ he asked.

  Mick flipped through the delivery report, a breeze pinning back the pages for him.

  ‘I’ve heard others call him that when he wasn’t around,’ Donald explained, ‘but I’ve been too scared to ask.’

  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 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 fibre 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 fibre 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 smiled. ‘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’d sunk a fortune into one of these cryo companies before digging deeper and reconsidering the… ethical considerations. Old Thawman may have lost most of his money, but it ended up savin’ his ass in Washington. Made him look like some kinda saint, suffering a loss like that. Only defence 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 he and Mick trudged off towards their rental. Overhead, against the bright blue Southern sky, vapour trails like stretched ropes of white yarn revealed the flight lines of the numerous jets departing the busy hub of Atlanta International. And as the throaty noise of the construction site faded, the chants from the anti-nuke protestors could be heard outside the tall mesh of security fences beyond. They passed through the security gate and into the parking lot, the guard waving them along.

  ‘Hey, you mind if I drop you off at the airport a little early?’ Donald asked. ‘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, hit some bars like old times.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Donald said.

  Mick slapped the back of Donald’s 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 PLAYED A hand of solitaire while silo twelve collapsed. There was something about the game that he found blissfully numbing. The repetition held off the waves of depression even better than the pills. The lack of skill required moved beyond distraction and into the realm of complete mindlessness. The truth was, the player won or lost the very moment the computer shuffled the de
ck. The rest was simply a process of finding out.

  For a computer game, it was absurdly low-tech. Instead of cards, there was just a grid of letters and numbers with an asterisk, ampersand, per cent 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 frustrated him not to 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 space bar 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 the reason it existed at all, why someone had spent the effort to create it, and why subsequent heads had kept it secreted away. He had seen it on Merriman’s face during that lift ride at the end of his shift. The chemicals only cut through the worst of the pain, that indefinable ache. 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. It was strangely satisfying to be told this by a home-made 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 adhered to the ever-changing standards.