Hugh Howey - Shift

‘I wasn’t,’ Donald said.

Sneed faced him. ‘Everyone was tested.’

‘Not him.’ Thurman studied the surface of the pod. ‘There was a last-minute change. A switch. I vouched for him. And if he was getting them in her name, there wouldn’t have been anything in his medical records.’

‘We need to tell Erskine,’ Sneed said. ‘I could work with him. We might come up with a new formulation. This could explain some of the immunities in other silos.’ He turned away from the pod as if he needed to get back to his office.

Thurman looked to Donald. ‘Do you need more time down here?’

Donald studied his sister for a moment. He wanted to wake her, to talk to her. Maybe he could come back another time just to visit.

‘I might like to come back,’ he said.

‘We’ll see.’

Thurman walked around the pod and placed a hand on Donald’s shoulder, gave him a light, sympathetic squeeze. He led Donald towards the door and Donald didn’t glance back, didn’t check the screen for his sister’s new name. He didn’t care. He knew where she was, and she would always be Charlotte to him. She would never change.

‘You did good,’ Thurman said. ‘This is real good.’ They stepped into the hall, and he shut the thick door behind them. ‘You may have stumbled on why Victor was so obsessed with that report of yours.’

‘I did?’ Donald didn’t see the connection.

‘I don’t think he was interested in what you wrote at all,’ Thurman said. ‘I think he was interested in you .’

THEY RODE THE lift to the cafeteria rather than drop Donald off on fifty-four. It was almost dinnertime, and he could help Thurman with the trays. While the lights behind the level numbers blinked on and off, following their progress up the shaft, Thurman’s hunch about Victor haunted him. What if Victor had only been curious about his resistance to the medication? What if there wasn’t anything in that report at all?

They rode past level forty, its button winking bright and then going dark, and Donald thought of the silo that had done the same. ‘What does this mean for eighteen?’ he asked, watching the next number flash by.

Thurman stared at the stainless steel doors, a greasy palm print there from where someone had caught their balance.

‘Vic wanted to try another reset on eighteen. I never saw the point. But maybe he was right. Maybe we give them one more chance.’

‘What’s involved in a reset?’

‘You know what’s involved.’ Thurman faced him. ‘It’s what we did to the world, just on a smaller scale. Reduce the population, wipe the computers, their memories, try it all over again. We’ve done that several times before with this silo. There are risks involved. You can’t create trauma without making a mess. At some point, it’s simpler and safer to just pull the plug.’

‘End them,’ Donald said, and he saw what Victor had been up against, what he had worked to avert. He wished he could speak to the old man. Anna said Victor had spoken of him often. And Erskine had said Victor had wished people like Donald were in charge.

The lift opened on the top level. Donald stepped out and immediately felt strange to be walking among those on their shifts, to be present and at the same time removed from the day-to-day life of silo one.

He noticed that no one here looked to Thurman with deference. He was not that shift’s head, and no one knew him as such. Just two men, one in white and one in beige, grabbing food and glancing at the ruined wasteland on the wall screen.

Donald took one of the trays and noticed again that most people sat facing the view. Only one or two ate with their backs to it. He followed Thurman to the lift while longing to speak to these handful, to ask them what they remembered, what they were afraid of, to tell them that it was okay to be afraid.

‘Why do the other silos have screens?’ he asked Thurman, keeping his voice down. The parts of the facility he’d had no hand in designing made little sense to him. ‘Why show them what we did?’

‘To keep them in,’ Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. ‘It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—’

The lift arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two of them. They boarded and Thurman fumbled for his badge. ‘Fear,’ he said. ‘Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was out there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done as a race.’

Donald considered this. He thought about his own compulsion to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete, even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation inside was worse.

‘I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,’ Donald said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. A reset would mean a world of loss and heartache, but there would be a chance at life afterwards. The alternative was death for them all.

‘I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,’ Thurman admitted. ‘When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honour his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.’

The lift stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars of old were like this. He remembered two wars in Iran, a new generation unremembering so that sons marched into the battles their fathers had already fought.

The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.

‘It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,’ Thurman said. The lift slid towards fifty-four. ‘Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure that he had the last word.’ Thurman glanced at Donald. ‘Hell, it’s what finally motivated me to wake you.’

Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.

They got off on fifty-four and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.

They ate at the table in the war room. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him — just scraps of paper, he thought. No mystery contained within. He had been looking at the wrong thing, assuming there was a clue in the words, but it was just Donald’s existence that Victor had remarked upon. He had sat across the hall from Donald and watched him react to whatever was in their water or their pills. And now when Donald looked at his notes, all he saw was a piece of paper with pain scrawled across it amid specks of blood.