Ann Christy: Silo 49: Going Dark

When the two keys had clinked together under his coveralls, he had felt alone, but also strangely ready and confident. He had trusted the process. He had trusted the Order. He had trusted that all would come to fruition as it should if he only did the right things.

All that had gone from him over the years and the last now blown away like the dust outside. He wondered if his uncle had felt this same loss of faith and confidence. He thought back but found nothing in his memory that stood out. Like all the Heads of IT before him, his uncle had trained Graham just as hard in what to hide from Silo One as what to tell them.

Could that be construed as a loss of faith or were those merely the practical habits of a man that understood the squishy reality behind such firm rules? Though he would never know for sure, Graham thought that his uncle had died a believer. He was intensely envious of that.

And now he was old and in one fell swoop he had become cynical and terribly afraid. Decades had passed since he took that second key and even though this overheard exchange had tipped the scales of both his belief and his loyalty, he had to admit to himself that any actual conviction he might have felt all those years before had been gone a very long time.

He capped his canteen again and took one last look at the darkening view outside. He’d been sitting in the hard cafeteria chair, ruminating, for far too long and day outside was waning. This time of day, when the sun boiled at the horizon and made the air shimmer as it shone directly into the sensor, it was almost pretty out there. That was something he couldn’t admit out loud but it was still true. The shadows were long and the lumps made of long dead cleaners or their shredded remains were mostly hidden. The dust seemed less pervasive and it was just shadows and the entrancing deep orange light. He sighed as he got up and started down the spiral stairs, careful in his steps lest he fall with no one anywhere nearby to hear any cry for help.

His careful and mostly solitary day and a half had passed without incident and he felt the familiar tingles he associated with being watched leave him, just as he thought it would. He didn’t know if it was merely psychological or if there was some part of him that simply understood their process deeply enough to know when they would watch. Whatever it was, he felt certain their interest in him had faded for the moment. His steps quickened on the stairs.

They would wait for him to complete his work and then kill him, but for now they had moved on to something else. He put his thoughts of the past back into the deep recesses of his mind and made ready to act on all that he had spent the last day thinking about. He could do what he needed to do and gain the help he needed to get it done.

His steps lightened for the first time as he rounded the stairwell to Level 5 and left the dark silence of the empty Level 4 behind. All the apartments on levels 4 and 6 were now closed, their landings quiet and the interiors dark. Chains glimmered dully from the handles of the big double doors under the lights of the landing. It was sad to see, but it had eventually become a necessity with so few people to monitor the conditions of the empty floors. He quickly did what he needed to in his quarters. When he was done, he felt less burdened as he made his way toward the compartment of the exact friend he needed.

Anyone left from these upper residential levels had moved to Level 5 over the past few years. Most of them had spread out to more than one compartment, using one for sleeping and another as a study or a place to perform the many duties each had been required to take on as the population diminished.

Graham was no different in that respect. The whole of IT was in a degraded state, maintaining itself only minimally and doing so with a skeleton staff. He hated it. He hated going down there and seeing the dirty tiles and the smeared glass and the boxes of junk parts lying around. It made him feel like he had failed, but he couldn’t see how it could possibly be right to take labor needed elsewhere just so IT could stay fully staffed. The priorities were Mechanical and all aspects of food production. They needed the most complete staffing. After all, it wouldn’t matter much if the servers survived if the lights went out or the food stopped coming.

To do his part, he took on a few additional roles as well. He did some repair work for IT as well as being the head. He also took transport duty as needed, which everyone physically capable of doing also did. He did shifts on the dim-watch, patrolling to be sure that all was well and quiet on Levels 1 through 5.

Like most everyone else, he chipped in where he could wherever it was needed. Sometimes he might help sand away rust, prime and paint rails or pipes. Other times he might simply be needed to help with administrative work. It varied but there was always a need for more labor than they had.

To do all this and still sleep, he had spread out to two compartments and worked from an office that had once been a compartment large enough to house an entire family. What he most liked about Level 5 was that these were all generic apartments, never designated for anyone that held any specific role. He felt unwatched there and safer than he did anywhere else in the silo. His missed the luxury of the apartment usually reserved for the one who held his job, but this little space was less visible. For that reason alone, he loved it.

On the same level also lived the man who was the new acting Mayor and, as chance would have it, Graham’s oldest friend. He was the last of the people he could still trust like he trusted himself and the one Graham needed to talk to. It was toward his compartment that he headed.

What was coming would be awkward, to say the least. He was about to go in and tell his best friend of more than fifty years that he had known vital and different truths for most of those years and never told him. Yes, it was going to be awkward. But he felt lighter just knowing he was going to get this off his chest. Wallis was a goof, but he was a smart and savvy goof. He needed that mind on his side.

As Graham carried a bucket of freshly steamed corn towards his friend’s apartment, he dodged bags of dirty laundry and bins of sorted garbage left in the halls. There were few maintainers, since maintainers mostly came from the porter specialty once their knees or hips went, so Maribelle was right about them needing to get to work. Without them, these piles would only be removed sporadically, if at all. It had gotten worse. Soon enough it would get so bad that either he or one of his neighbors would get fed up with the smell and start banging on doors until everyone came out and pitched in to remove it. That didn’t happen often enough though and the air was thick with the odors of unwashed clothing and decaying vegetable matter. When this was all over, he would be sure to help Maribelle get this sorted.

This trip down the hall with food was not an uncommon one for Graham and would not be out of character if he was being observed in some fashion. The acting Mayor and he had gone to school together, married just months apart and lived their lives in near tandem. Even their parents had been fast friends. Now they had even more in common. Both of them had lost a wife and their only child to what was killing the whole silo in one way or another. Graham’s wife was gone to cancer while Wallis had lost his to a fall, politely described as an accident.

There were differences in the paths of their lives, but only in the most heartbreaking ways, and they had grown closer to each other with each new tragedy. Graham and his wife had managed to fall pregnant just once during their long marriage. His daughter had been small but more beautiful than anything Graham had ever laid his eyes upon. Her little bud of a mouth and soft black hair were a miracle to Graham, but those pink lips had turned blue quickly and the feeling of loss almost crushed him when she breathed her last so soon after coming into the world.