Hugh Howey: First Shift: Legacy

Troy walked down the line of cryopods as if he knew where he was going. It was just like the way his hand had drifted to the button that had brought him to that floor. There were made-up names on each of the panels. He knew this somehow. He remembered coming up with his name. It had something to do with his wife, some way to honor her, or some kind of secret and forbidden link so that he might one day remember.

This all lay in the past, deep in the mist, a dream forgotten. Before his shift there had been an orientation. There were familiar books to read and re-read. That’s when he had chosen his name.

A bitter explosion on his tongue brought him to a halt. It was the taste of a pill dissolving. Troy stuck out his tongue and scraped it with his fingers, but there was nothing there but a memory of forgetting. He could feel the ulcers on his gums against his teeth but couldn’t recall how they’d formed.

He walked on. Something wasn’t right. These things weren’t supposed to come back. He pictured himself on a gurney, screaming, someone strapping him down, stabbing him with needles. That wasn’t him. He was holding that man’s boots.

Troy stopped at one of the pods and checked the name. Helen. There was something wrong. His gut lurched and groped for its medicine. He didn’t want to remember. That was a secret ingredient: the not wanting to remember . Those were the parts that slipped away, the parts the drugs wrapped their tentacles around and pulled beneath the surface. But now, there was some small part of him that was dying to know, some shard that wanted to rise up through the dark and murky waters. It was a nagging doubt, a feeling of having left some important piece of himself behind. And if the only way to resurface was to bob up as a corpse, this part of him didn’t mind. It was willing to drown the rest of him for the answers.

The frost on the glass wiped away with a squeak. He didn’t recognize this person, but he was close to remembering. He tried the next one.

What had the orientation been about? How to do new jobs. Some of them already knew, were prepared. Troy had spent two years studying for a similar job. Different but similar. He should have been the head of a single silo, not all of them. This was too much.

He remembered packed halls of people crying, grown men sobbing, pills that dried their eyes. Fearsome clouds rose on a videoscreen, a view of the outside, of what they’d done. The suffering and the medicine were caustic together. They made people forget. Troy remembered thinking the bombs were useful more for their fear than the harm they contained. They were a prop. Flesh for the forgetting, for the medicine to sink its teeth into.

The women were put away for safety. That’s how the deep-freeze was explained: like lifeboats, women and children first.

Troy remembered. It wasn’t an accident. He remembered a talk in another pod, a bigger pod in the shape of a pill, about the coming end of the world, about making room , about ending it all before it ended on its own.

A controlled explosion. Bombs were sometimes used to put out fires.

He remembered clouds pushed aside by other clouds. Decoys. The machines were already in the air. He could taste them on his tongue, remembered urine the color of charcoal.

Troy wiped another frost-covered sheet of glass. The sleeping form in the next chamber had eyelashes that glittered with ice. She was a stranger. He moved on. It was coming back to him. His arm throbbed. The shakes were gone.

Troy remembered a calamity, but it was all for show. The real threat was in the air, invisible. The bombs were to get people to move, to make them afraid, to get them crying and forgetting. People had spilled like marbles down a bowl. Not a bowl, a funnel . And the air had erupted on cue, invisibly. Someone explained why they were spared. He remembered a white fog, walking through a white fog. The death was already in them. Troy remembered a taste on his tongue metallic.

The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. The name meant nothing. The name was a reminder to them both.

“Hello?”

Troy turned toward the voice. The night shift doctor was heading his way, weaving between the pods, coming for him. Troy clasped his hand over the soreness on his arm. He didn’t want to be taken again. They couldn’t make him forget.

“Sir, you shouldn’t be in here.”

Troy didn’t answer. The doctor stopped at the foot of the pod. Inside, a woman who wasn’t his wife lay in slumber. Wasn’t his wife, but had wanted to be.

“Why don’t you come with me?” the doctor asked.

“I’d like to stay,” Troy said. He felt a bizarre calmness. All the pain had been ripped away. This was more forceful than forgetting. He remembered everything. His soul was cut free. His body was a shell, a walking pod, nothing inside but the cold. The important parts were soaring up, now. Soaring up that straw shoved deep into the dirt—

“I can’t have you in here, sir. Come with me. You’ll freeze in here.”

Troy glanced down. He had forgotten to put on shoes. He curled his toes away from the floor… then let them settle.

“Sir? Please.” The young doctor gestured down the aisle. Troy let go of his arm and saw that things were handled as needed. No kicking meant no straps. No shivering meant no shots.

He heard the squeak of hurrying boots out in the hallway. A large man from Security appeared by the open vault door, visibly winded. Troy caught a glimpse of the doctor waving the man down. They were trying not to scare him. They didn’t know that he couldn’t be scared anymore. That part of him had drowned. Their medicine had killed it.

“You’ll put me away for good,” Troy said. It was something between a statement and a question. It was a realization. He wondered if he was like Hal—like Carlton —if the pills would never take again. He glanced toward the far end of the room, knew the empties were kept there. This was where he would be buried.

“Nice and easy,” the doctor said.

He led Troy toward the exit; he would embalm him with that bright blue sky. The pods slid by as the two of them walked in silence.

The man from Security took deep breaths as he filled the doorway, his great chest heaving against his coveralls. There was a squeak from more boots as he was joined by another. Troy saw that his shift was over. Two weeks to go. He’d nearly made it.

The doctor waved the large men out of the way, seemed to hope they wouldn’t be needed. They took up positions to either side; they seemed to think otherwise. Troy was led down the hallway, hope guiding him and fear flanking him.

“You know ,” Troy told the doctor, turning to study him. “You remember everything, don’t you?”

The doctor didn’t turn to face him. He simply nodded.

This felt like a betrayal. It wasn’t fair.

“Why do you get to remember?” Troy asked. He wanted to know why those dispensing the medicine didn’t have to take some of their own.

The doctor waved him into his office. His assistant was there, wearing a sleepshirt and hanging an IV bag bulging with blue. Troy had disturbed their sleep—just as they had once disturbed his.

“Some of us remember,” the doctor said, “because we know this isn’t a bad thing we’ve done.” He frowned as he helped Troy onto the gurney. He seemed truly sad about Troy’s condition. “We’re doing good work, here,” he said. “We’re saving the world, not ending it. And the medicine only touches our regrets.” He glanced up. “Some of us don’t have any.”