Ann Christy: Silo 49: Going Dark

Should he be truthful about the strange effects of the forgetting drugs he had been directed to start dosing the silo with? Should he tell lies about the cancers still sweeping the silo population? It was a fine line to walk. But since Silo 12 had been terminated by Silo One, he had a growing fear that his problems here might result in the same final treatment. Listening to that over the comms—as he assumed every other silo had—had been eye opening. They had destroyed a silo, bringing it down and killing everyone inside simply because they could no longer control them. Because they had done something not in line with the Order and Silo One’s enigmatic interpretation of that book.

He paced a few minutes longer, running the mantra through his head that helped to calm him, helped him to get into the mood to rationalize and helped him to keep on being that unflappable bit of bedrock it was safe to rest a silo on.

It turned out to be completely useless.

Graham bustled through the mess that was IT but stopped short when he met Tony the Toady coming out of one of the workrooms. Tony’s eyes—the greedy eyes of a man with more ambition than was healthy—lit up when he saw Graham.

“Boss!” he exclaimed, his slick smile settling into place. “So glad you could make it in today. That error has been blinking all day.” He jerked a thumb down the hallway toward the server room doors. He lifted his ubiquitous clipboard and ran a perfectly groomed fingernail down the page.

Before Tony could get started, Graham needed to nip this in the bud. Tony had become almost nauseatingly efficient and in-his-face obsequious in the years since Graham’s shadow had died. The man had a nose for advancement and while he didn’t know the details of what the Head of IT did, he knew it was more than it seemed. And it was clear that he wanted it for himself and was angling for the shadow position, knowing that eventually it would have to be filled. Graham was old and couldn’t live forever, after all. To Graham’s way of thinking, anyone who wanted this job was exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t have it.

“Tony, we’re going to need to meet later. I’ve got to get that error fixed soon or we’ll have a server backup.” There was no such thing but that was enough to strike alarm into Tony, who believed—like everyone else—that the servers kept them alive. It worked again.

“Of course, boss, of course! I should have realized that. Shall I meet you afterward?” he asked, all politeness and conciliation, his finger poised over his clipboard. “We have quite a list,” he added.

Graham nodded even as he began walking, brushing past Tony without another word. The few workers on shift were all busy and overworked. He had no intention of disturbing whatever they were engaged in, so he merely waved as he passed the open doors where they toiled. At the outer server room door, he saw blinking red lights casting a lurid red glow into the hallway through the small pane of thick glass. At least whoever it was still waited on the line.

He used his card and key code to unlock the thick door and let it swing open just enough to slip inside. Stopping the momentum of the door once it got moving in a direction was impossible so he left that to the machines, slapping the red button that would close it again. He waited for the slow process to complete, tapping a foot impatiently as he did so. It was a major rule that one didn’t leave the door untended while opened even the barest sliver. He was half convinced that the red lights would stop blinking just before he got there.

He looked up at the camera, certain that Silo One would be watching if that was, in fact, who was calling him. He gave a little wave toward the dark eye of glass. He held up a finger to indicate it would be just a moment longer and pointed at the closing door. He took a deep breath and tried to recapture a feeling of calm while the door creaked closed. The final soft thud of closure closed Graham off from the last sounds of IT except the servers behind him and set his feet into motion.

Once he scrambled down into the lair under IT, making a great show of hurrying for the cameras in the server room, he grabbed the headset and slipped the jack into the slot for Silo One. He checked his nerves again, decided he wasn’t quite where he liked to be in terms of calm and then adjusted the headset so the pads were pushed back a bit, barely resting on the outer curves of his ears.

He jacked up the volume to make up for the distance, cleared his throat and said, “This is 49.”

“Standby. You will be contacted shortly,” answered a flat, tinny voice. It was cold and distant, then cut the connection without waiting for an answer.

Above him, the red lights winked out and didn’t return. The short response and the time it took him to get down to the lair probably meant that whoever had been trying to call him got tired of waiting and now had to be fetched again. He imagined some person—not quite male or female in his mind—wriggling in their seat with a need to pee while they waited. He felt vaguely satisfied with the image but suppressed a smile.

That satisfaction didn’t quell the disquiet he felt entirely. The hair on his neck stood on end whenever he heard that cold and sexless voice. It always had. Graham barely suppressed the urge to peer into the corners of the room once again as he settled in for the wait. He’d searched this area beneath IT at least a hundred times, looking for whatever they used to watch him in here. He had not been successful at finding it, if such actually existed.

It would be reasonable to assume there was no camera after so much fruitless searching. But Graham didn’t feel very reasonable and he knew they watched him here. Why wouldn’t they? He could feel their eyes itching across his skin in the way they asked questions that always seemed to mirror what he felt. Unless they lived in his body alongside him, he had to assume they knew these things because they watched.

He remained curious, though. No number of rules could completely eliminate that inside him. He knew that sometime soon, when enough time had passed after this call, when no contact was expected and any interest they had in him had waned, he would search again for cameras down here. The fact that most cameras in the silo were plainly visible if one chose to look but could be almost invisibly hidden in spaces like the cafeteria, kept him looking and kept him from being too much himself down here in the private domain of the Head of IT.

The wait for their return call seemed to last for days, though in truth it was only a few short minutes. To Graham, time always seemed to drag so very slowly when he was in these rooms beneath IT. Here he felt most exposed even though this was certainly the most hidden place in the entire silo.

A sudden lurching buzz behind him gave him a start and he almost fell off the little stool he was sitting on, yanking the cord out of the jack in the process of scrambling to keep his seat. He fumbled for his cord and jammed the jack home under the flashing light. “This is Silo 49, Graham Newton speaking,” he said in a carefully modulated voice.

“You have the report?” asked a slightly different voice, this one equally tinny and flat.

In all the years he had been participating in calls with Silo One, every voice sounded almost exactly the same. There were differences for a careful listener to catch though. Some spoke quickly and others slowly, some used strange flat tones on some words while others drew out vowels. He never mentioned the differences. He had the feeling they wanted him to always think it was the same person speaking, some ultimate authority he could rely on. But people needed sleep over there as much as here, didn’t they? It seemed to him he might relate better to them, perhaps be a little less nervous, if they acted more human with him.