Hugh Howey - Second Shift - Order

“I didn’t,” Donald blurted out, unable to censor himself. “I mean… he never said as much to me.”

“He was peculiar that way.” Erskine studied the deceased with a smile. “Brilliant perhaps for knowing the minds of others, just not so keen on communicating with them.”

Donald studied this Dr. Erskine. He tried to remember what little Anna had told him about the man. “Did you know him from before?” he asked. He wasn’t sure how else to broach the subject. The before seemed taboo with some, freely spoken of by others.

Erskine nodded. “We worked together. Well, in the same hospital. We orbited each other for quite a few years until my… discovery.” He reached out and touched the glass, a final farewell to an old friend, it seemed.

“What discovery?” He vaguely remembered Anna mentioning something.

Erskine glanced up. Looking closer, Donald thought he may have been in his seventies. It was hard to tell. He had some of the agelessness of Thurman, like an antique that patinas and will grow no older.

“I’m the one who discovered the great threat,” he said. It sounded more an admission of guilt than a proud claim. It was said with sadness. At the base of the pod, Dr. Henson finished his adjustments, stood, and excused himself. He steered the empty gurney toward the exit.

“The nanos.” Donald remembered; Anna had said as much. He watched Thurman debate something with his daughter, his fist coming down over and over into his palm, and a question came to mind. He wanted to hear it from someone else. He wanted to see if the lies matched, if that meant they might be the truth.

“You were a medical doctor?” he asked.

Erskine considered the question. It seemed a simple enough one to answer.

“Not precisely,” he said, his accent thick. “I built medical doctors. Wee ones.” He pinched the air and squinted through his glasses at his own fingers. “We were working on ways to keep soldiers safe. Until I found someone else’s handiwork in a sample of blood. It wasn’t long before I was finding the little bastards everywhere.”

Anna and Thurman headed their way, Anna with her cap donned once more, her hair in a bun that bulged noticeably through the top. It was little disguise for what she was, useful perhaps at a distance.

“I’d like to ask you about that sometime,” Donald said hurriedly. “It might help my… help me with this problem the silos are having.”

“Of course,” Erskine said. His accent made him sound cheerier than he appeared.

“I need to get back,” Anna told Donald. She set her lips in a thin grimace, like a scar on her face, a wound from the argument with her father, and Donald finally appreciated how powerless and trapped she truly was. He imagined a year spent in that warehouse of war, clues scattered across that planning table, sleeping on that small cot, not able even to ride up to the cafeteria to see the hills and the dark clouds or have a meal at the time of her own choosing, relying on others to bring her everything.

“I’ll escort the young man up,” Donald heard Erskine say, his hand resting on Donald’s shoulder. “I’d like to chat with our boy for a bit.”

Thurman narrowed his eyes but relented. Anna squeezed Donald’s hand a final time, glanced at the humming pod, and headed toward the exit. Her father followed a few quiet paces behind.

“Come with me.” Erskine’s breath fogged the air. “I want to show you someone.”

They left the cooling pod, and now it was just one of many. Identical. There were no flowers to mark what had happened, no mound of moist soil standing out like a brown scab on green grass. There was simply a lid closed on a life, no different from so many others. And a name. A made-up and pointless name.

Erskine picked his way through the grid of pods with purpose as though he’d walked the route dozens of times. Donald followed after, rubbing his arms for warmth. He had been too long in that crypt-like place. The cold was leeching back into his flesh.

“Thurman keeps saying we were already dead,” he told Erskine, attacking the question head-on. “Is that true?”

Erskine looked back over his shoulder. He waited for Donald to catch up, seemed to consider this question.

“Well,” Donald asked. “Were we?”

“I never saw a design with a hundred percent efficiency,” Erskine said. “We weren’t there with our own work, and theirs was much cruder. But what they had already would’ve taken out most. That part’s true enough.” He resumed his walk through the field of sleeping corpses. “Even the most severe epidemics burn themselves out,” he said, “so it’s difficult to say. I argued for countermeasures. Victor argued for this.” He spread his arms over the quiet assembly.

“And Victor won.”

“Indeed.”

“Do you think he… had second thoughts? Is that why… ?”

Erskine stopped at one of the pods and placed both hands on its icy surface. “I’m sure we all have second thoughts,” he said sadly. “But I don’t think Vic ever doubted the rightness of this mission. I don’t know why he did what he did in the end. It wasn’t like him.”

Donald peered inside the pod Erskine had led him to. There was a middle-aged woman inside, her eyelids covered in frost.

“My daughter,” Erskine said. “My only child.”

There was a moment of silence. It allowed the faint hum of a thousand pods to be heard. It could’ve been a choir of monks making that sound, a quiet hum on so many closed lips.

“When Thurman made the decision to wake his Anna, all I could dream about was doing the same. But why? There was no reason, no need for her expertise. Caroline was an accountant. And besides, it wouldn’t be fair to drag her from her dreams.”

Donald wanted to ask if it would ever be fair. What world did Erskine expect his daughter to ever see again? When would she wake to a normal life? A pleasant life?

“When I found nanos in her blood, I knew this was the right thing to do.” He turned to Donald. “I know you’re looking for answers, son. We all are. This is a cruel world. It’s always been a cruel world. I spent my whole life looking for ways to make it better, to patch things up, dreaming of an ideal. But for every sot like me, there’s ten more out there getting their jollies trying to tear things down. And it only takes one of them to get lucky.”

Donald flashed back to the day Thurman had given him The Order. That thick book was the start of his plummet into madness. He remembered their talk in that massive lozenge of a medical unit, the feeling of being infected, the paranoia that something harmful and invisible was invading him. But if Erskine and Thurman were telling the truth, he’d been infected long before that.

“You weren’t poisoning me that day.” He looked from the pod to Erskine, piecing something together. “The interview with Thurman, the weeks and weeks he spent in that chamber having all of those meetings. You weren’t infecting us.”

Erskine nodded ever so slightly. “We were healing you,” he said.

Donald felt a sudden flash of anger. “Then why not heal everyone? ” he demanded.

“We discussed that. I had the same thought. To me, it was an engineering problem. I wanted to build countermeasures, machines to kill machines before they got to us. Thurman had similar ideas. He saw it as an invisible war, one we desperately needed to take to the enemy. We all saw the battles we were accustomed to fighting, you see. Me in the bloodstream, Thurman overseas. It was Victor who set the two of us straight.”

Erskine pulled a cloth from his breast pocket and removed his glasses. He rubbed them while he talked, his voice echoing in whispers from the walls. “Victor said there would be no end to it. He pointed to computer viruses to make his case, how one might run rampant and cripple hundreds of millions of machines. Sooner or later, some nano attack would get through, get out of control, and there would be an epidemic built on bits of code rather than strands of DNA.”