Hugh Howey - Shift

The flight controls took him back to another life. Here was the stick his sister had called a yoke, the pedals beneath the seat she had called something else, the throttle and all the other dials and indicators. Donald remembered touring her training facility after she graduated from flight school. They had flown to Colorado for her ceremony. He remembered watching a screen just like this as her drone took to the air and joined a formation of others. He remembered the view of Colorado from the nose of her graceful machine in flight.

He glanced around the room at the dozen or so stations. The obvious need for the place slammed into him. He imagined voices in the hallway, men and women showering and chatting, towels being snapped at asses, someone looking to borrow a razor, a shift of pilots sitting at these desks where coffee could lie perfectly still in steaming mugs as death was rained down from above.

Donald returned the plastic sheet. He thought of his sister, asleep and hidden some levels below where he couldn’t find her, and he wondered if she hadn’t been brought there as a surprise for him at all. Maybe she had been brought as a surprise for some future others .

And suddenly, thinking of her, thinking of a time lost to dreams and lonely tears, Donald found himself patting his pockets in search of something. Pills. An old prescription with her name on it. Helen had forced him to see a doctor, hadn’t she? And Donald suddenly knew why he couldn’t forget, why their drugs didn’t work on him. The realisation came with a powerful longing to find his sister. Charlotte was the why. She was the answer to one of Thurman’s riddles.

‘I WANT TO see her first,’ Donald demanded. ‘Let me see her, and then I’ll tell you.’

He waited for Thurman or Dr Sneed to reply. The three of them stood in Sneed’s office on the cryopod wing. Donald had bargained his way down the lift with Thurman, and now he bargained further. He suspected it was his sister’s medication that explained why he couldn’t forget. He would exchange this discovery for another. He wanted to know where she was, wanted to see her.

Something unspoken passed between the two men. Thurman turned to Donald with a warning. ‘She will not be woken,’ he said. ‘Not even for this.’

Donald nodded. He saw how only those who made the laws were allowed to break them.

Dr Sneed turned to the computer on his desk. ‘I’ll look her up.’

‘No need,’ Thurman said. ‘I know where she is.’

He led them out of the office and down the hall, past the main shift rooms where Donald had awoken as Troy all those years ago, past the deep freeze where he had spent a century asleep, all the way to another door just like the others.

The code Thurman entered was different; Donald could tell by the discordant four-note song the buttons made. Above the keypad in small stencilled letters he made out the words Emergency Personnel . Locks whirred and ground like old bones, and the door gradually opened.

Steam followed them inside, the warm air from the hallway hitting the mortuary cool. There were fewer than a dozen rows of pods, perhaps fifty or sixty units in total, little more than a full shift. Donald peered into one of the coffin-like units, the ice a spiderweb of blue and white on the glass, and saw inside a thick and chiselled visage. A frozen soldier, or so his imagination told him.

Thurman led them through the rows and columns before stopping at one of the pods. He rested his hands on its surface with something like affection. His exhalations billowed into the air. It made his white hair and stark beard appear as though they were frosted with ice.

‘Charlotte,’ Donald breathed, peering in at his sister. She hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged a bit. Even the blue cast of her skin seemed normal and expected. He was growing used to seeing people this way.

He rubbed the small window to clear the web of frost and marvelled at his thin hands and seemingly fragile joints. He had atrophied. He had grown older while his sister had remained the same.

‘I locked her away like this once,’ he said, gazing in at her. ‘I locked her away in my memory like this when she went off to war. Our parents did the same. She was just little Charla.’

Glancing away from her, he studied the two men on the other side of the pod. Sneed started to say something, but Thurman placed a hand on the doctor’s arm. Donald turned back to his sister.

‘Of course, she grew up more than we knew. She was killing people over there. We talked about it years later, after I was in office and she’d figured I’d grown up enough.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘My kid sister, waiting for me to grow up.’

A tear plummeted to the frozen pane of glass. The salt cut through the ice and left a clear track behind. Donald wiped it away with a squeak, then felt frightened he might disturb her.

‘They would get her up in the middle of the night,’ he said. ‘Whenever a target was deemed… what did she call it? Actionable . They would get her up. She said it was strange to go from dreaming to killing. How none of it made sense. How she would go back to sleep and see the video feeds in her mind — that last view from an incoming missile as she guided it into its target—’

He took a breath and gazed up at Thurman.

‘I thought it was good that she couldn’t be hurt, you know? She was safe in a trailer somewhere, not up there in the sky. But she complained about it. She told her doctor that it didn’t feel right, being safe and doing what she did. The people on the front lines, they had fear as an excuse. They had self-preservation. A reason to kill. Charlotte used to kill people and then go to the mess hall and eat a piece of pie. That’s what she told her doctor. She would eat something sweet and not be able to taste it.’

‘What doctor was this?’ Sneed asked.

‘My doctor,’ Donald said. He wiped his cheek, but he wasn’t ashamed of the tears. Being by his sister’s side had him feeling brave and bold, less alone. He could face the past and the future, both. ‘Helen was worried about my re-election. Charlotte already had a prescription, had been diagnosed with PTSD after her first tour, and so we kept filling it under her name, even under her insurance.’

Sneed waved his hand, stirring the air for more information. ‘What prescription?’

‘Propra,’ Thurman said. ‘She’d been taking propra, hadn’t she? And you were worried about the press finding out that you were self-medicating.’

Donald nodded. ‘Helen was worried. She thought it might come out that I was taking something for my… wilder thoughts. The pills helped me forget them, kept me level. I could study the Order, and all I saw were the words, not the implications. There was no fear.’ He looked at his sister, understanding finally why she had refused to take the meds. She wanted the fear. It was necessary somehow, had made her feel more human.

‘I remember you telling me she was on them,’ Thurman said. ‘We were in the bookstore—’

‘Do you remember your dosage?’ Sneed asked. ‘How long were you on it?’

‘I started taking it after I was given the Order to read.’ He watched Thurman for any hint of expression and got nothing. ‘I guess that was two or three years before the convention. I took them nearly every day right up until then.’ He turned to Sneed. ‘I would’ve had some on me during orientation if I hadn’t lost them on the hill that day. I think I fell. I remember falling—’

Sneed turned to Thurman. ‘There’s no telling what the complications might be. Victor was careful to screen psychotropics from administrative personnel. Everyone was tested—’