Hugh Howey - Shift

He dug deeper, wondering if they’d taken much else. The calculator his father had built from scratch was still in there, as were the glass figurine soldiers his uncle had given him on his thirteenth birthday. He took the time to transfer everything from his makeshift bag to his old backpack. The zipper was stiff, but it still worked. He studied the knotted overalls and decided they were in worse shape than the ones he had on, so he left them.

Jimmy stood and surveyed the room, sweeping his flashlight across the chaos. On the blackboard, he saw someone had left their mark. He played the light across the scene and saw the word fuck written over and over. It looked like a string of letters like that, fuckfuckfuckfuck .

Jimmy found the erasing rag behind Mrs Pearson’s desk. It was stiff and crusty, but the words still came off. Left behind was a smear, and Jimmy remembered the happy days of writing on the board in front of the class. He remembered writing assignments. Mrs Pearson complimented him on his poetry once, probably just to be nice. Licking his lips, he fished a nub of old chalk from the tray and thought of something to write. There were no nerves from standing before the class. No one was watching. He was well and truly all alone.

I am Jimmy , he wrote on the board, the flashlight casting a strange halo, a ring of dim light, as he wrote. The nub of chalk clicked and clacked as he made each stroke. It squeaked and groaned between the clicks. The noise was like company, and yet he wrote a poem of being alone, a mechanical act from bygone days:

He wasn’t sure about that last line. Jimmy ran the light across what he’d written, which he didn’t think was very good. More wouldn’t make it better, but he wrote more, anyway.

The last part was a lie, he knew, but it was poetry, so it didn’t count. Jimmy stepped away from the board and studied the words with his flickering flashlight. The words trailed off to the side and dipped down, each line sagging more than the last, the letters getting smaller towards the end of each sentence. It was a problem he always had with the blackboard. He started big and seemed to shrink as he went. Scratching the beard on his chin, he wondered what this said of him, what it portended.

There was a lot wrong with what he’d written, he thought. The fifth line was untrue, the one about nobody calling him Jimmy. Above the poem, he had written I am Jimmy . He still thought of himself as Jimmy.

He grabbed the stiff rag he’d left in the chalk tray, stood before his poem, and went to erase the line that wasn’t right. But something stopped him. It was the fear of making the poem worse by attempting to fix it, the fear of taking a line away and having nothing good to put in its place. This was his voice, and it was too rare a thing to quash.

Jimmy felt Mrs Pearson’s eyes upon him. He felt the eyes of his classmates. The ghosts were watching, the corpses laughing, while he studied the problem on the board.

When the solution came, it brought a familiar thrill of arriving at the right place, of connecting the dots. Jimmy reached up and slapped the dusty rag against the board and erased the first thing he’d written. The words I am Jimmy disappeared into a white smear and a tumbling haze of powder. He set the rag aside and began to write a truth in its place.

I am Solitude , he started to write. He liked the sound of that. It sounded poetic and full of meaning. But like poetry was wont to do, the words had a mind of their own; his deep thoughts intervened, and so he wrote something different. He shortened it to two little neat circles, a swerve, and a slash. Grabbing his bag, he left the room and his old friends behind. All that remained was a poem and the call to be remembered, a mark to prove he’d been there.

I am Solo.

DONALD STEERED THE empty wheelchair back to Dr Wilson’s office. A damp blanket was draped over the armrests and dragged across the tile. He felt numb. His dream that morning had been to give life, not take it. The permanence of what he’d done began to set in, and Donald found it difficult to swallow, to breathe. He stopped in the hallway and took stock of what he’d become. Unknowing architect. Prisoner. Puppet. Hangman. He wore a different man’s clothes. His transformation horrified him. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he wiped them away angrily. All it took was thinking of Helen and Mick, of the life taken from him. Everything leading up to that point in time, to him awakening in that silo, had been someone else’s doing. He could feel parted strings dangling from his elbows and knees. He was a loose puppet steering an empty wheelchair back to where it belonged.

Donald parked the chair and set the brakes. He took the plastic vial out of his pocket and considered stealing another dose or two. Sleep would be hard to come by, he feared.

The vial went back into the cabinet full of empties. Donald turned to go when he saw the note left in the middle of the gurney:

You forgot this.

The note was stuck to a slender folder. Donald remembered handing it to Dr Wilson along with the reactor tech’s belongings. The trip to the other two lockers had been a blur. All he could remember was clutching his phone, facts coming together, realising that Anna had played Mick and Thurman to engineer a last-minute switch that made no sense, that could only happen with a daughter bending her father’s ear. Thus his life had been stolen away.

The folder had been in the locker Anna had mentioned to her father in the message. It seemed inconsequential now. Donald balled up the note from Dr Wilson and tossed it in the recycling bin. He grabbed the folder with the intention of staggering back to his cot and searching for sleep. But he found himself opening it up instead.

There was a single sheet of paper inside. An old sheet of paper. It had yellowed, and the edges were rough where bits had flaked off over the years. Below the single-spaced typing there were five signatures, a mix of florid and subdued penmanship. At the top of the document, boldly typed, it read: RE: THE PACT .

Donald glanced up at the door. He turned and went to the small desk with the computer, placed the folder by the keyboard and sat down. Anna’s note to her father had the same words in the subject line, along with Urgent . He had read the note a dozen times to try and divine its meaning. And the number in the note had led him to this folder.

He was familiar enough with the Pact of the silos, the governing document that kept each facility in line, that managed their populations with lotteries, that dictated their punishments from fines to cleanings. But this was too brief to be that Pact. It looked like a memo from his days on Capitol Hill.

Donald read:

All—

It has been previously discussed that ten facilities would suffice for our purposes, and that a time frame of one century would perform an adequate cleanse. With members of this pact both familiar with budget under-runs and how battle plans prove fruitless upon first firing, it should surprise no one that facts have changed our forecast. We are now calling for thirty facilities and a two-century time frame. The tech team assures me their progress makes the latter feasible. These figures may be revisited once again.