Hugh Howey - Shift

‘Nope. Wasn’t he flying in from Texas this morning? Maybe his flight was delayed.’

Donald saw that his glass, which he’d left near empty when he made the call outside, had been topped up. He knew Helen would disapprove of him sitting there alone with Anna, even though nothing was going to happen. Nothing ever would.

‘We could always do this another time,’ he suggested. ‘I’d hate for Mick to be left out.’

She set down her glass and studied the menu. ‘Might as well eat while we’re here. Be a little late to find something else. Besides, Mick’s logistics are independent of our design. We can send him our materials report later.’

Anna leaned to the side and reached for something in her bag, her sweater falling dangerously open. Donald looked away quickly, a flush of heat on the back of his neck. She pulled out her tablet and placed it on top of his Manilla folder, the screen flashing to life.

‘I think the bottom third of the design is solid.’ She spun the tablet for him to see. ‘I’d like to sign off on it so they can start layering the next few floors in.’

‘Well, a lot of these are yours,’ he said, thinking of all the mechanical spaces at the bottom. ‘I trust your judgement.’

He picked the tablet up, relieved that their conversation hadn’t veered away from work. He felt like a fool for thinking Anna had anything else in mind. They had been exchanging emails and updating each other’s plans for over two years and there had never been a hint of impropriety. He warned himself not to let the setting, the music, the white tablecloths, fool him.

‘There is one last-minute change you’re not going to like,’ she said. ‘The central shaft needs to be modified a little. But I think we can still work with the same general plan. It won’t affect the floors at all.’

He scrolled through the familiar files until he spotted the difference. The emergency stairwell had been moved from the side of the central shaft to the very middle. The shaft itself seemed smaller, or maybe it was because all the other gear they’d filled it with was gone. Now there was empty space, the discs turned to doughnuts. He looked up from the tablet and saw their waiter approaching.

‘What, no lift?’ He wanted to make sure he was seeing this right. He asked the waiter for a water and said he’d need more time with the menu.

The waiter bowed and left. Anna placed her napkin on the table and slid over to the adjacent chair. ‘The board said they had their reasons.’

‘The medical board?’ Donald exhaled. He had grown sick of their meddling and their suggestions, but he had given up fighting with them. He never won. ‘Shouldn’t they be more worried about people falling over these railings and breaking their necks?’

Anna laughed. ‘You know they’re not into that kind of medicine. All they can think about is what these workers might go through, emotionally, if they’re ever trapped in there for a few weeks. They wanted the plan to be simpler. More… open .’

‘More open.’ Donald chuckled and reached for his glass of wine. ‘And what do they mean, trapped for a few weeks?’

Anna shrugged. ‘You’re the elected official. I figure you should know more about this government silliness than I do. I’m just a consultant. I’m just getting paid to lay out the pipes.’

She finished her wine, and the waiter returned with Donald’s water and to take their orders. Anna raised her eyebrow, a familiar twitch that begged a question: Are you ready? It used to mean much more, Donald thought, as he glanced at the menu.

‘How about you pick for me?’ he finally said, giving up.

Anna ordered and the waiter jotted down her selections.

‘So now they want a single stairwell, huh?’ Donald imagined the concrete needed for this, then thought of a spiral design made of metal. Stronger and cheaper. ‘We can keep the service lift, right? Why couldn’t we slide this over and put it in right here?’

He showed her the tablet.

‘No. No lifts. Keep everything simple and open. That’s what they said.’

He didn’t like this. Even if the facility would never be used, it should be built as if it might. Why else bother? He’d seen a partial list of supplies they were going to stockpile inside. Lugging them by stair seemed impossible, unless they planned to stock the floors before the prebuilt sections were craned inside. That was more Mick’s department. It was one of many reasons he wished his friend were there.

‘You know, this is why I didn’t go into architecture.’ He scrolled through their plans and saw all the places where his design had been altered. ‘I remember the first class we had where we had to go out and meet with mock clients, and they always wanted either the impossible or the downright stupid — or both. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t for me.’

‘So you went into politics.’ Anna laughed.

‘Yeah. Good point.’ Donald smiled, saw the irony. ‘But hey, it worked for your father.’

‘My dad went into politics because he didn’t know what else to do. He got out of the army, sank too much money into busted venture after busted venture, then figured he’d serve his country some other way.’

She studied him a long moment.

‘This is his legacy, you know.’ She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, bent a graceful finger at the tablet. ‘This is one of those things they said would never get done, and he’s doing it.’

Donald put the tablet down and leaned back in his chair. ‘He keeps telling me the same thing,’ he said. ‘That this is our legacy, this project. I told him I feel too young to be working on my crowning achievement.’

Anna smiled. They both took sips of wine. A basket of bread was dropped off, but neither of them reached for it.

‘Speaking of legacies and leaving things behind,’ Anna asked, ‘is there a reason you and Helen decided not to have kids?’

Donald placed his glass back on the table. Anna lifted the bottle, but he waved her off. ‘Well, it’s not that we don’t want them. We just both went directly from grad school to our careers, you know? We kept thinking—’

‘That you’ll have for ever, right? That you’ll always have time. There’s no hurry.’

‘No. It’s not that…’ He rubbed the tablecloth with the pads of his fingers and felt the slick and expensive fabric slide over the other tablecloth hidden below. When they were finished with their meals and out the door, he figured this top layer would be folded back and carried off with their crumbs, a new layer revealed beneath. Like skin. Or the generations. He took a sip of wine, the tannins numbing his lips.

‘I think that’s it exactly,’ Anna insisted. ‘Every generation is waiting longer and longer to pull the trigger. My mom was almost forty when she had me, and that’s getting more and more common.’

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

‘Maybe we all think we might be the first generation that simply doesn’t die,’ she continued, ‘that lives for ever.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Now we all expect to hit a hundred and thirty, maybe longer, like it’s our right. And so this is my theory—’ She leaned closer. Donald was already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going. ‘Children used to be our legacy, right? They were our chance to cheat death, to pass these little bits of ourselves along. But now we hope it can simply be us .’

‘You mean like cloning? That’s why it’s illegal.’

‘I don’t mean cloning — and besides, just because it’s illegal, you and I both know people do it.’ She took a sip of her wine and nodded at a family in a distant booth. ‘Look. He has daddy’s everything .’