Donald paused and fought back the tears. Charlotte rested her hand on his back. The room was quiet for a long moment.
“But I didn’t understand what she wanted me to do. I started digging on my own. And meanwhile, Silo 40 isn’t gone at all. The place is still standing. I realize this when another silo goes dark.” Donald paused. “I was acting head at the time, wasn’t thinking straight, and I signed off on a bombing. Whatever it took to make it all go away. I didn’t care about the tremors, being spotted, just ordered it done. We cratered anything over there that was still standing. Drones and bombs started thinning them out.”
“I remember,” Darcy said. “That was about when I got on shift. There were pilots up in the cafeteria all the time. They worked a lot in the middle of the night.”
“And they worked down here. When they were done and went back under, I woke up my sister. I was just waiting for them to leave. I didn’t want to drop bombs. I wanted to see what was out there.”
Darcy checked the clock on the wall. “And now we’ve all seen it.”
“There’s another two hundred years or so before all the silos go down,” Donald said. “You ever think about why this silo only has lifts, doesn’t have any stairs? You want to know why they call it the express but the damn thing still takes forever to get anywhere?”
“We’re rigged to blow,” Darcy said. “There’s that same mass of concrete between every level.”
Donald nodded. This kid was fast. “If they let us walk up a flight of stairs, we’d see. We’d know. And enough people here would know what that was for, what this meant. They might as well put the countdown clock on every desk. People would go insane.”
“Two hundred years,” Darcy said.
“That might feel like a lot of time to others, but that’s a couple naps for us. But see, that’s the whole point. They need us dead so no one remembers. This whole thing—” Donald waved at the conference table with the depiction of the silos. “It’s as much a time machine as a ticking clock. It’s a way of wiping the earth clean and propelling some group of people, some tribe chosen practically at random, into a future where they inherit the world.”
“More like sending them back into the past,” Charlotte said. “Back into some primitive state.”
“Exactly. When I first learned about the nanos, it was something Iran was working on. The idea was to target an ethnic group. We already had machines that could work on a cellular level. This was just the next step. Going after a species is even easier than targeting a race. It was child’s play. Erskine, the man who came up with this, said it was inevitable, that someone would eventually do it, create a silent bomb that wipes out all of humanity. I think he was right.”
“So what’re you looking for in these folders?” Darcy asked.
“Thurman wanted to know if Anna ever left the armory. I’m pretty sure she did. Things would show up down here that I couldn’t find on the shelves. And he said something about gas lines—”
“We’ve got an hour and a half before I need to get you back,” Darcy said.
“Yeah, okay. So Thurman found something here in this silo, I think. Something his daughter did, something she snuck out and did. I think she left another surprise. When they gassed eighteen, Thurman mentioned that they did it right this time. That they undid someone’s mess. I thought he was talking about my mess, my fighting to save the place, but it was Anna who had changed things. I think she moved some valves around, or if it’s all computerized, just changed some code. There are two types of machines, both of which are in my blood right now. There are those that keep us together, like in the cryopods. And then there are the machines outside around the silos, those we pump inside them to break people down. It’s the ultimate haves versus the have-nots. I think Anna tried to flip this around, tried to rig it up so the next silo we shut down would get a dose of what we get. She was playing Robin Hood on a cellular level.”
He finally found the report. It was well-worn. It had been looked through hundreds of times.
“Silo seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t around when it was put down, but I looked into this. There was a guy there who answered a call after the place was gassed. But I don’t think it was gassed. Not correctly. I think Anna took what we get in our pods to stitch us up and sent that instead.”
“Why?” Charlotte asked.
Donald looked up. “To stop the world from ending. To not murder anyone. To show people some compassion.”
“So everyone at seventeen is okay?”
Donald flipped through the pages of the report. “No,” he said. “For whatever reason, she couldn’t stop the airlock from popping. That’s part of the procedure. And with the amount of gas outside, they didn’t stand a chance.”