“Okay.” He rubbed his face again, his palms muffling his voice. “We’re gonna have to decide before too long what we’re gonna do. If we do nothing, this nightmare plays out for another two hundred years, and you and I won’t last that long.” He started to laugh, but it turned into a cough. Donald fished into his coveralls for his handkerchief, and Charlotte looked away. She studied the dark monitors while he had one of his fits.
She didn’t want to admit this to him, but her inclination was to let it play out. It seemed as if a bunch of precision machines were in control of humanity’s fate, and she tended to trust computers a lot more than her brother did. She had spent years flying drones that could fly themselves, that could make decisions on which targets to hit, could guide missiles to precise locations. She often felt less like a pilot and more like a jockey, a person on a beast that could race along on its own, that only needed someone there to occasionally take the reins or shout encouragement.
She glanced over the numbers on the report again. Hundredths of a percentage point would decide who lived and who died. And most would die. She and her brother would either be asleep or long dead by the time it happened. The numbers made this looming holocaust seem so damn … arbitrary.
Donald used the folder in his hand to point at the report. “Did you notice eighteen moved up two spots?”
She had noticed. “You don’t think you’ve become too … attached, do you?”
He looked away. “I have a history with this silo. That’s all.”
Charlotte hesitated. She didn’t want to press further, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t mean the silo,” she said. “You seem … different each time you talk to her.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was sent to clean,” he said. “She’s been outside.”
For a moment Charlotte thought that was all he was going to say on the matter. As if this were enough, as if it explained everything. He was quiet a pause, his eyes flicking back and forth.
“No one is supposed to come back from that,” he finally said. “I don’t think the computers take this into account. Not just what she survived, but that eighteen is hanging in there. By all accounts, they shouldn’t be. If they make it through this … you wonder if they don’t give us the best hope.”
“You wonder,” Charlotte said, correcting him. She waved the piece of paper. “There’s no way we’re smarter than these computers, brother.”
Donald appeared sad. “We can be more compassionate than them,” he said.
Charlotte fought the urge to argue. She wanted to point out that he cared about this silo because of the personal contact. If he knew the people behind any of the other silos – if he knew their stories – would he root for them? It would be cruel to suggest this, however true.
Donald coughed into his rag. He caught Charlotte staring at him, glanced at the bloodstained cloth, put it away.
“I’m scared,” she told him.
Donald shook his head. “I’m not. I’m not afraid of this. I’m not afraid of dying.”
“I know you’re not. That’s obvious, or you would see someone. But you have to be afraid of something.”
“I am. Plenty. I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.”
“Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded.
Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said.
12
That night, Charlotte awoke from a nightmare of flying. She sat up in her cot, springs crying out like a nest of birds, and could still feel herself swooping down through the clouds, the wind on her face.
Always dreams of flying. Dreams of falling. Wingless dreams where she couldn’t steer, couldn’t pull up. A plummeting bomb zeroing in on a man with his family, a man turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun, a glimpse of Charlotte’s father and mother and brother and herself before impact and loss of signal—