Hugh Howey - Third Shift - Pact

“Good. Now, what’s the latest on this uprising?” Donald felt himself hurrying along, performing rote tasks so he could get back to his more interesting studies. This truly had become a job.

The silo Head glanced back toward the camera. This mortal knew damn well where the eyes of gods lay hidden. “Mechanical is holed up pretty tight,” he said. “They put up a fight on their retreat down, but we routed them good. There’s a … bit of a barricade, but we should be through it any time now.”

The operator leaned forward and grabbed Donald’s attention. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at one of the blank screens on the top row, indicating one of the cameras that had gone out during the uprising. Donald knew what he was getting at.

“Any idea how they knew about the cameras?” he asked. “You know we’re blind over here from one-forty down, right?”

“Yessir. We … I can only assume they’ve known about them. They do their own wiring down there. I’ve been in person. It’s a nest of pipes and cables. We don’t think anyone tipped them off.”

“You don’t think.”

“Nossir. But we’re working on getting someone in there. I’ve got a priest we can send in to bless their dead. A good man. Shadowed with Security. I promise it won’t be long.”

“Fine. Make sure it isn’t. We’ll be over here cleaning up your mess, so get the rest of your house in order.”

“Yessir. I will.”

The three men in the comm room watched this Bernard gentleman remove his headset and return it to the cabinet. He wiped his forehead with a rag. While the others were distracted, Donald did the same, wiping the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief he’d requisitioned. He picked up the two folders and studied the operator, who had a fresh trail of breadcrumbs down his coveralls.

“Keep a close eye on him,” Donald said.

“Oh, I will.”

Donald returned his headset to the rack and got up to leave. Pausing at the door, he looked back and saw the screen in front of the operator had divided into four squares. In one, a roomful of black towers stood silent sentinel. Two women were having a row in another.

Donald took his notes and rode the lift to the cafeteria. He arrived to find it was too early for breakfast, but there was still coffee in the dispenser from the night before. He selected a chipped mug from the drying rack and filled it. A gentleman behind the serving line lifted the handle on an industrial washer, and the stainless steel box opened and let loose a cloud of steam. The man waved a dishrag at the cloud, then used the rag to pull out metal trays that would soon hold reconstituted eggs and slices of freeze-dried toast.

Donald tried the coffee. It was cold and weak, but he didn’t mind. It suited him. He nodded to the man prepping for breakfast, who dipped his head in response.

Donald turned and took in the view splayed across the wallscreen. Here was the mystery. The documents in his folders were nothing compared to this. He approached the dusky vista where swirling clouds were just beginning to glow from a sun rising invisibly beyond the hills. He wondered what was out there. People died when they were sent to clean. They died on the hills when silos were shut down. But he hadn’t. As far as he knew, the men who had dragged him back hadn’t either.

He studied his hand in the dim light leaking from the wallscreen. His palm seemed a little pink to him, a little raw. But then, he had scrubbed it half a dozen times in the sink the last few nights and each morning. The feeling that it’d been tainted couldn’t be shaken. But maybe it was his scrubbing that made it look red, that made it look like it needed even more scrubbing. He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into its folds.

“I’ll have potatoes ready in a few minutes,” the man behind the counter called out. Another worker in green coveralls emerged from the back, cinching an apron around his waist. Donald wanted to know who these people were, what their lives were like, what they thought about all this. For six months, they served three meals a day, and then hibernated for decades. Then they did it all over again. They must believe this is for some purpose, right? Or is this what any of them did for all their lives? Follow the tracks laid down yesterday. A boot in a hole, a boot in a hole, round and round. Did these men see themselves as deck hands on some great ark with a noble purpose? Or were they walking in circles simply because they knew the way?

Donald remembered running for Congress, thinking he was going to do real good for the future. And then he found himself in an office surrounded by a bewildering tempest of rules, memos, and messages, and he quickly learned to simply pray for the end of each day. He went from thinking he was going to save the world to passing the time until … until time ran out.

He sat down in one of the faded plastic chairs and studied the folder in his pink hand. It was two inches thick. Nichols, Juliette was written on the tab, followed by an ID number for internal purposes. He could still smell the toner from the printed pages. Seemed a waste, printing out so much nonsense. Somewhere, down in the vast storeroom, supplies were dwindling. And somewhere else, down the hall from his own office, a person was keeping track of it all, making sure there was just enough potatoes, just enough toner, just enough lightbulbs, to get them through to the end.

Donald glanced over the reports. He spread them out across the empty table and thought of Anna and his last shift as he did so, the way they had smothered that war room with clues. There was a pang of guilt and regret that Anna so often entered his thoughts before Helen. An affair hung but a long sleep ago, while his marriage had eroded to dust in a more distant past.

The reports were a welcome distraction while he awaited the sunrise and food. Here was a story about a cleaner who had been a sheriff, though not for long. One of the top reports in her folder was from the current Head of 18, a memo on this cleaner’s lack of qualifications. Donald read a list of reasons this woman should not be given a mantle of power, and it was as though he were reading about himself. It seemed the mayor of 18—a politician like Thurman—had wrangled this woman into the job, had recruited her despite objections. It wasn’t even clear that this woman, a mechanic from the lower levels, even wanted the job. In another report from the silo head, Donald read about her defiance, culminating in a walk out of sight and a refusal to clean. Again, it felt all too familiar to Donald. Or was he looking for these similarities? Isn’t that what people did? Saw in others what they feared to see or hoped to see in themselves?

The hills outside brightened by degrees. Donald glanced up from the reports and studied the mounds of dirt. He remembered the video feed he’d been shown of this cleaner disappearing over a similarly gray dune. Now the panic among his colleagues was that the residents of 18 would be filled with a dangerous sort of hope—the kind of hope that leads to violence. The far graver threat was that this cleaner had made it to another facility, that those in another silo might discover they were not alone.

Donald did not think it likely. She couldn’t have lasted long, and there was little to discover in the direction she had wandered. He pulled out the other folder, the one on Silo 17.

There had been no warning before its collapse, no uptick in violence. The population graphs appeared normal. He flipped through pages of typed documents from various division heads downstairs. Everyone had their theory, and of course each saw the collapse through the lens of their own expertise, or attributed it to the incompetence of another division. Population Control blamed a lax IT department. IT blamed a hardware failure. Engineering blamed programming. And the on-duty comm officer, who liaisons with IT and each individual silo head, thought it was sabotage, an attempt to prevent a cleaning.