“Was,” Charlotte said. “I heard from them. They’ve been shut down.”
Donald nodded. “Thurman told me. I meant to say ‘was’. Thurman also hinted that they were originally going to build fewer silos but kept adding more for redundancy. There are a few reports I found that suggested this as well. You know what I think? I think they added too many. They couldn’t monitor them all closely enough. It’s like having a camera on every street corner, but you don’t have enough people watching the feeds. And so this one slipped under the rails.”
“What do you mean when you say these silos went dark?” Darcy asked. He sidled closer to the table and studied the layout under the glass.
“All the camera feeds went out at the same time. They wouldn’t answer our calls. The Order mandated that we shut them down in case they’d gone rogue, so we gassed the place. Popped the doors. And then another silo went dark. And another. The heads on shift here figured that in addition to the camera feeds, they’d sorted out the gas lines as well. So they sent the collapse codes to all of these silos—”
“Collapse codes?”
Donald nodded and drowned a cough with a gulp of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was comforting to see all the notes out on the table. The pieces were fitting together.
“The silos were built to fail, and all but one of them will. There’s no gravity to take them down, so they had us build them – they had me design them – with great slabs of concrete between the levels.” He shook his head. “It never made sense at the time. It made the dig deeper, increased costs, it’s an insane amount of concrete. I was told it had something to do with bunker busters or radiation leaks. But it was worse than that. It was so they’d have something to take down. The walls aren’t going anywhere – they’re tied to the earth.” He took another sip of water. “That’s why the concrete. And it was because of the gas that they didn’t want lifts. Never understood why they had us take them out. Said they wanted the design more ‘open’. It’s harder to gas a place if you can block off the levels.”
He coughed into the crook of his arm, then drew a finger around a portion of the conference table. “These silos were like a cancer. Forty must’ve communicated with its neighbors, or they just took them offline as well, hacked them remotely. The heads on shift here in our silo started waking people up to deal with it. The collapse codes weren’t working, nothing was. Anna figured they’d discovered the blast charges in forty and had blocked the frequency – something like that.”
He paused and remembered the sound of static from her radio, the jargon she’d used that gave him headaches but made her seem so smart and confident. His gaze fell to the corner of the room where a cot once lay, where she used to sneak over in the middle of the night and slip into his arms. Donald finished his water and wished he had something stronger.
“She finally managed to hack the detonators and bring the silos down,” he said. “It was this or they were going to risk sending drones up or boots over, which is last-page Order stuff. Back of the book.”
“Which is what we’ve been doing,” Charlotte said.
Donald nodded. “I did even more of it before I woke you, back when this level was crawling with pilots.”
“So that’s what happened to these silos? They were collapsed?”
“That’s what Anna said. Everything looked good. The people in charge over here were relying on her, taking her word. We were all put back to sleep. I figured it was my last snooze, that I’d never wake up again. Deep Freeze. But then I was brought out for another shift, and people were calling me by a different name. I woke up as someone else.”
“Thurman,” Darcy said. “The Shepherd.”
“Yeah, except I was the sheep in that story.”
“You were the one who nearly got over the hill?”
Donald saw the way Charlotte stiffened. He returned his attention to the folders and didn’t answer.
“This woman you’re talking about,” Darcy said. “Was she the same one who messed up the database?”
“Yeah. They gave her full access to fix this problem they were having; it was that severe. And her curiosity got her looking in other places. She found this note about what her father and others had planned, realized these collapse codes and gas systems weren’t just for emergencies. We were all one big ticking time bomb, every single silo. She realized that she was going to be put in cryo and never wake up again. And even though she could change anything she wanted, she couldn’t change her gender. Couldn’t make it so that anyone would wake her up, and so she tried to get me to help. She put me in her father’s place.”