Hugh Howey - First Shift - Legacy

Once he was gone, once she was alone, the mental machinations began. Troy couldn’t know it, but he could sense it. She had her doubts. Here was her chance to destroy the dark thing she’d helped create, a twitch in that direction, reconsidering, turning away.

Troy paused the video and made some notes, jotted down the times. The shrinks would have to verify his findings. Shuffling the papers, he wondered if there was anything he needed to see again. Here was a story like in that old collection of books with human names, the chapters in hours, verses in minutes. It was the fall of Jericho, the legend of Gomorrah. A black shadow had fallen upon Silo 12. A decent woman had been murdered because she could not bring herself to do the same, to kill in order to protect. And a Security chief had let loose a monster who had mastered the art of concealing his pain, a young man who had learned how to manipulate others, who wanted out .

He typed up his conclusions. It was a dangerous age for shadowing, he noted in his report. Here was a boy crossing that dire Rubicon between his teens and twenties, those years when healthy young bucks are studying their herd and looking for signs that the Alpha has gone gray. It was an age deep in hormones and shallow in control. Troy asked in his report if anyone in their twenties could ever be ready. He made mention of the first head of IT he had inducted, the question the boy had asked after hearing tales from his demented grandmother. Was it right to expose anyone to these truths? Could men of such fragile age be expected to endure such blows without shattering?

What he didn’t add, what he asked himself, was if anyone at any age could ever be ready.

There was precedence, he typed, for limiting certain positions of authority by age. And while this would lead to shorter terms due to the simple math of longevity—which meant subjecting more unfortunate souls to the abuse of being locked up and shown their Legacy—wasn’t it better to go through a damnable process more often rather than take risks such as these?

He hammered the keyboard as tears related to some unnamable other thing splashed to his desk. He knew this report would matter little. There was no planning for insanity. Enough revolutions and elections, enough transfers of power, and eventually a madman would caress the reins. He would caress the reins and reach for a crop, and instead of steering, he would whip for no other reason than that he could .

And so Troy printed his report assuming nothing would come of it. These were the odds they had planned for. This was why they had built so many. He rose from his desk and walked to the door, slapped it soundly with the flat of his palm. In the corner of his office, a printer hummed and shot four pages out of its mouth. Troy took them; they were still warm as he slid them into the folder, these reports on the newly dead and still dying. He could feel the life and warmth draining from those printed pages. Soon, they would be as cool as the air around them.

A key rattled in his lock before the door opened. Troy wiped his cheeks and then his desk. He dragged his palm across the seat of his pants, destroying the evidence.

“Done already?” Victor asked. The gray-haired psychiatrist stood across from his desk, keys singing as they returned to his pocket. He held a small plastic cup in his hand.

Troy handed him the folder. “The signs were there,” he told the doctor, “but they weren’t acted upon.”

Victor took the folder with one hand and held out the plastic cup with the other. A blue blur of forgetting rattled softly inside.

Troy typed a few commands on his computer and wiped his copy of the videos. The cameras were no good for predicting and preventing these kinds of problems. There were too many to watch all at once. You couldn’t get enough people to sit and monitor an entire populace, which meant they were only good for sorting through the wreckage, the aftermath.

“Looks good,” Victor said, flipping through the folder. The plastic cup sat on Troy’s desk. There were two pills inside. It was like the dosage at the start of his shift, a little extra to cut through the little extra. Looking down at them, he saw that there was still a wet smear across his desk. He wondered if it would turn to salt once the moisture evaporated away.

“Would you like me to fetch you some water?”

Troy shook his head. He hesitated. Looking up from the twin pills, he asked Victor a question.

“How long do you think it’ll take? Silo 12, I mean. Before all of those people are gone.”

Victor shrugged. “Not long, I imagine. Days.”

Troy nodded. Victor watched him carefully. Troy tilted his head back and rattled the pills past trembling lips. There was the bitter taste of forgetting on his tongue, and then he made a show of swallowing.

“I’m sorry that it was your shift,” Victor said. “I know this wasn’t the job you signed up for.”

Troy nodded.

“I’m actually glad it was mine,” he said after a moment. “I’d hate for it to have been anyone else’s.”

Victor rubbed the folder with one hand. “You’ll be given a commendation in my report.”

“Thank you,” Troy said. He didn’t know what the fuck for.

With a wave of the folder, Victor finally turned to leave and go back to his desk across the hall where he could sit and glance up occasionally at Troy.

But he had to walk to get there. And in that brief interval, when no one was looking, like a young shadow sawing into his arm because the pain was better than the numbness, Troy spat the two blue blurs into the palm of his hand.

Shaking his mouse with one hand, waking up his monitor so he could boot a game of solitaire, Troy smiled across the hallway at Victor, who smiled back. And in his other hand, still sticky from the outer coating dissolved by his saliva, two pills nestled in a palm dyed pink. The blood red stain from the day before was already beginning to fade. But Troy was tired of fading. He had decided to remember.

Donald sped down highway 17, driving manually, a flashing red light on his dash warning him as he exceeded the local speed limit. He didn’t care about being pulled over, didn’t care about being wired a ticket or his insurance rates creeping up. It all seemed trivial. The fact that there were circuits riding along in his car keeping track of everything he did paled in comparison to the suspicion that machines in his blood were doing the same.

The tires squealed as he spiraled down his exit ramp too fast. He merged onto Berwick Boulevard, the overhead lights strobing through the windshield as he flew beneath them. Glancing down at his lap, he watched the gold inlay text on the book throb with the rhythm of the passing streetlights.

Order. Order. Order.

He had read enough to worry, to wonder what he’d gotten himself mixed up in. Helen had been right to warn him, had been wrong about the scale of the danger.

Turning into their neighborhood, Donald remembered an ancient conversation—he remembered her begging him not to run for office, that it would change him, that he couldn’t fix anything up there, but that he could sure as hell come home broken.

How right had she been?

He pulled up to the house and had to leave the car by the curb. Her Jeep was in the middle of the driveway. One more habit formed in his absence, a reminder that he didn’t live there anymore, didn’t have a real home.

Leaving his bags in the trunk, he took just the book and his keys. It was enough of a load, that book.

The motion light came on as he neared the stoop. He saw a form by the door, heard frantic scratching on the other side. Helen opened the door, and Karma rushed out, tail whacking the side of the jamb, tongue lolling, so much bigger in just the few weeks that he’d been away.