Hugh Howey: Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

“Are those dates?” he asked.

She nodded. “Just about every two decades, there’s a major revolt. This report catalogued them. It was one of the files deleted during the most recent uprising. Our uprising.”

She said “our” like either of them or any of their friends had been alive at the time. Holston knew what she meant, though. It was the uprising they had been raised in the shadow of, the one that seemed to have spawned them, the great conflict that hung over their childhoods, over their parents and grandparents. It was the uprising that filled whispers and occupied sideways glances.

“And what makes you think it was us, that it was the good guys who wiped the servers?”

She half turned and smiled grimly. “Who says we are the good guys?”

Holston stiffened. He pulled his hand away from Allison’s neck. “Don’t start. Don’t say anything that might—”

“I’m kidding,” she said, but it wasn’t a thing to kid about. It was two steps from traitorous, from cleaning . “My theory is this,” she said quickly, stressing the word theory . “There’s generational upheaval, right? I mean for over a hundred years, maybe longer. It’s like clockwork.” She pointed at the dates. “But then, during the great uprising—the only one we’ve known about till now—someone wiped the servers. Which, I’ll tell you, isn’t as easy as pressing a few buttons or starting a fire. There’s redundancies on top of redundancies. It would take a concerted effort, not an accident or any sort of rushed job or mere sabotage—”

“That doesn’t tell you who’s responsible,” Holston pointed out. His wife was a wizard with computers, no doubt, but sleuthing was not her bag, it was his.

“What tells me something,” she continued, “is that there were uprisings every generation for all this time, but there hasn’t been an uprising since .”

Allison bit her lip.

Holston sat up straight.

He glanced around the room and allowed this observation to sink in. He had a sudden vision of his wife yanking his sleuthing bag out of his hands and making off with it.

“So you’re saying—” He rubbed his chin and thought this through. “You’re saying that someone wiped out our history to stop us from repeating it?”

“Or worse.” She reached out and held his hand with both of hers. Her face had deepened from seriousness to something severe. “What if the reason for the revolts was right there on the hard drives? What if some part of our known history, or some data from the outside, or maybe the knowledge of whatever it was that made people move in here long, long ago—what if that information built up some kind of pressure that made people lose their marbles, or go stir crazy, or just want out? ”

Holston shook his head. “I don’t want you thinking that way,” he cautioned her.

“I’m not saying they were right to go nuts,” she told him, back to being careful. “But from what I’ve pieced together so far, this is my theory.”

Holston gave the monitor an untrusting glance. “Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “I’m not even sure how you’re doing it, and maybe you shouldn’t be.”

“Honey, the information is there. If I don’t piece it together now, somebody else will at some point. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve already published a white paper on how to retrieve deleted and overwritten files. The rest of the IT department is spreading it around to help people who’ve unwittingly flushed something they needed.”

“I still think you should stop,” he said. “This isn’t the best idea. I can’t see any good coming of it—”

“No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us discovering it than someone else, right?”

Holston looked at his files. It’d been five years since the last person was sent to cleaning. The view outside was getting worse every day, and he could feel the pressure, as sheriff, to find someone. It was growing, like steam building up in the silo, ready to launch something out. People got nervous when they thought the time was near. It was like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies where the nerves finally made someone twitch, then lash out or say something regretful, and then they were in a cell, watching their last blurry sunset.

Holston sorted through the files all around him, wishing there was something in them. He would put a man to his death tomorrow to release that steam. His wife was poking some great, overly full balloon with a needle, and Holston wanted to get that air out of it before she poked too far.

Holston sat on the lone steel bench in the airlock, his brain numb from lack of sleep and the surety of what lay before him. Nelson, the head of the cleaning lab, knelt in front of him and worked a leg of the white hazard suit over Holston’s foot.

“We’ve played around with the joint seals and added a second spray-on lining,” Nelson was saying. “It should give you more time out there than anyone has had before.”

This registered for Holston, and he remembered watching his wife go about her cleaning. The top floor of the silo with its great screens showing the outside world was usually empty for cleanings. The people inside couldn’t bear to watch what they’d done—or maybe they wanted to come up and enjoy a nice view without seeing what it took to get it. But Holston had watched; there was never any doubt that he would. He couldn’t see Allison’s face through her silver-masked helmet, couldn’t see her thin arms through the bulky suit as she scrubbed and scrubbed with her wool pads, but he knew her walk, her mannerisms. He had watched her finish the job, taking her time and doing it well, and then she had stepped back, looked in the camera one last time, waved at him, then turned to walk away. Like others before her, she had lumbered toward a nearby hill and had begun climbing up, trudging toward the dilapidated spires of that ancient and crumbling city just visible over the horizon. Holston hadn’t moved the entire time. Even as she fell on the side of the hill, clutching her helmet, writhing while the toxins first ate away the spray-on linings, then the suit, and finally his wife, he hadn’t moved.

“Other foot.”

Nelson slapped his ankle. Holston lifted his foot and allowed the tech to bunch the rest of the suit around his shins. Looking at his hands, at the black carbon undersuit he wore against his skin, Holston pictured it all dissolving off his body, sloughing away like flakes of dried grease from a generator’s pipe while the blood burst from his pores and pooled up in his lifeless suit.

“If you’ll grab the bar and stand—”

Nelson was walking him through a routine he’d seen twice before. Once with Jack Brent, who had been belligerent and hostile right up to the end, forcing him as sheriff to stand guard by the bench. And once with his wife, whom he had watched get ready through the airlock’s small porthole. Holston knew what to do from watching these others, but he still needed to be told. His thoughts were elsewhere. Reaching up, he grabbed the trapeze-like bar hanging above him and pulled himself upright. Nelson grabbed the sides of the suit and yanked them up to Holston’s waist. Two empty arms flapped to either side.

“Left hand here.”

Holston numbly obeyed. It was surreal to be on the other side of this—this mechanical death-walk of the condemned. Holston had often wondered why people complied, why they just went along. Even Jack Brent had done what he was told, as foul mouthed and verbally abusive as he’d been. Allison had done it quiet, just like this, Holston thought as he inserted one hand and then the other. The suit came up, and Holston thought maybe that people went along because they couldn’t believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.