Hugh Howey - Shift

‘Psychology,’ Donald reminded him. ‘Tell me how this is better. More people die this way.’

Erskine snapped back to the present. ‘That’s where we were wrong, just like you. Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made — the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?’ Erskine interlocked his fingers. ‘We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.’ He frowned. ‘A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.’

He spread his hands open. ‘When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.’

Donald shook his head. He didn’t know what to believe. But then he thought about the fear and rage he’d felt when he thought he’d been infected by something in that chamber. Meanwhile, he never worried about the billions of creatures swimming in his gut and doing so since the day he was born.

‘We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,’ Erskine said. ‘We can pick and choose until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose . Vic had dozens of examples like these. Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Of course he was perfectly right. It was the man-made part that would’ve caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.’

Erskine paused for a moment. Donald’s mind was racing.

‘You know, Vic once said that if these terrorists had an ounce of sense, they would’ve simply announced what they were working on and then sat back to watch things burn on their own. He said that’s all it would take, us knowing that it was happening, that the end of any of us could come silent, invisible and at any time.’

‘And so the solution was to burn it all to the ground ourselves ?’ Donald ran his hands through his hair, trying to make sense of it all. He thought of a firefighting technique that always seemed just as confusing to him, the burning of wide swathes of forest to prevent a fire from spreading. And he knew in Iran, when oil wells were set ablaze during the first war, that sometimes the only cure was to set off a bomb, to fight the inferno with something greater.

‘Believe me,’ Erskine said, ‘I came up with my own complaints. Endless complaints. But I knew the truth from the beginning, it just took me a while to accept it. Thurman was won over more easily. He saw at once that we needed to get off this ball of rock, to start over. But the cost of travel was too great—’

‘Why travel through space,’ Donald interrupted, ‘when you can travel through time?’ He remembered a conversation in Thurman’s office. The old man had told him what he was planning that very first day, but Donald hadn’t heard.

Erskine’s eyes widened. ‘Yes. That was his argument. He’d seen enough war, I suppose. Me, I didn’t have Thurman’s experiences or the professional… distance Vic enjoyed. It was the analogy of the computer virus that wore me down, seeing these nanos like a new cyber war. I knew what they could do, how fast they could restructure themselves, evolve, if you will. Once it started, it would only stop when we were no longer around. And maybe not even then. Every defence would become a blueprint for the next attack. The air would choke with our invisible armies. There would be great clouds of them, mutating and fighting without need of a host. And once the public saw this and knew …’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘Hysteria,’ Donald muttered.

Erskine nodded.

‘You said it might not ever end, even if we were gone. Does that mean they’re still out there? The nanos?’

Erskine glanced up at the ceiling. ‘The world outside isn’t just being scrubbed of humans right now, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s being reset. All of our experiments are being removed. By the grace of God, it’ll be a very long time indeed before we think to perform them again.’

Donald remembered from orientation that the combined shifts would last five hundred years. Half a millennium of living underground. How much scrubbing was necessary? And what was to keep them from heading down that same path a second time? How would any of them unlearn the potential dangers? You don’t get the fire back in the box once you’ve unleashed it.

‘You asked me if Victor had regrets—’ Erskine coughed into his fist and nodded. ‘I do think he felt something close to that once. It was something he said to me as he was coming off his eighth or ninth shift, I don’t remember which. I think I was heading into my sixth. This was just after the two of you worked together, after that nasty business with silo twelve—’

‘My first shift,’ Donald said, since Erskine seemed to be counting. He wanted to add that it was his only shift.

‘Yes, of course.’ Erskine adjusted his glasses. ‘I’m sure you knew him well enough to know that he didn’t show his emotions often.’

‘He was difficult to read,’ Donald agreed. He knew almost nothing of the man he had just helped to bury.

‘So you’ll appreciate this, I think. We were riding the lift together, and Vic turns to me and says how hard it is to sit there at that desk of his and see what we’re doing to the men across the hall. He meant you, of course. People in your position.’

Donald tried to imagine the man he knew saying such a thing. He wanted to believe it.

‘But that’s not what really struck me. I’ve never seen him sadder than when he said the following. He said…’ Erskine rested a hand on the pod. ‘He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you — he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge.’

‘People like me?’ Donald shook his head. ‘What does that even mean?’

Erskine smiled. ‘I asked him precisely that. His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.’

THAT NIGHT, ANNA came to him. After a day of numbness and dwelling on death, of eating meals brought down by Thurman and not tasting a bite, of watching her set up a computer for him and spread out folders of notes, she came to him in the darkness.

Donald complained. He tried to push her away. She sat on the edge of the cot and held his wrists while he sobbed and grew feeble. He thought of Erskine’s story, on what it meant to do the right thing rather than the correct thing, what the difference was. He thought this as an old lover draped herself across him, her hand on the back of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder, lying there against him while he wept.

A century of sleep had weakened him, he thought. A century of sleep and the knowledge that Mick and Helen had lived a life together. He felt suddenly angry at Helen for not holding out, for not living alone, for not getting his messages and meeting him over the hill.

Anna kissed his cheek and whispered that everything would be okay. Fresh tears flowed down Donald’s face as he realised that he was everything Victor had assumed he wasn’t. He was a miserable human being for wishing his wife to be lonely so that he could sleep at night a hundred years later. He was a miserable human being for denying her that solace when Anna’s touch made him feel so much better.