Glancing around the room in a daze, he absorbed all that he had once taken for granted: remnants of meals, a deck of cards, a butterflied paperback with browned pages and striated spine – signs of shifts endured but not suffered. He was suffering. He suffered the wait before Silo 18 answered. He studied the schematic of all the other silos that he fretted over. Dead worlds is what he saw. All of them would die except for one. There was a tickle in his throat, and he knew for certain that he would be dead before he decided anything, before he found some way to help or choose or steer the project off its suicidal course. He was the only one who knew or cared – and his knowledge and compassion would be buried with him.
What was he thinking, anyway? That he could fix things? That he could put right a world he had helped destroy? The world was long past fixing. The world was long past setting to right. One glimpse of green fields and blue skies from a drone, and his mind had tumbled out of sorts. Now it’d been so long since that one glimpse that he’d begun to doubt it. He knew how the cleanings worked. He knew better than to trust the vision of some machine.
But foolish hope had him there, in that comm room, reaching out once more. Foolish hope had him dreaming of a stop to it all, some way to let these silos full of people live their own lives, free of all this meddling. It was curiosity as well, wanting to know what was going on in those servers, the last great mystery, one he could explore only with the help of this IT Head he had inducted himself. Donald just wanted answers. He longed for truth and for a painless death for himself and for Charlotte. An end to shifts and dreams. A final resting place, perhaps, up on that hill with a view of Helen’s grave. It wasn’t too much to hope for, he didn’t think.
He checked the clock on the wall. They were late to answer. Fifteen minutes already. Something was happening. He watched the second hand jitter around and realized the entire operation, all of the silos, was like a giant clock. The whole thing ran on automatic. It was winding down.
Invisible machines rode the winds around the planet, destroying anything human, returning the world to wilderness. The people buried underground were dormant seeds that would have to wait another two hundred years before they sprouted. Two hundred years. Donald felt his throat begin to tickle once more and wondered if he had two days in him.
At that moment, he only had fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes before the operators would come back on shift. These sessions of his had grown regular. It was not unusual to clear everyone out for classified discussions, but it was beginning to seem suspicious that he did it every day at the same exact time. He could see the way they looked at one another as they took their mugs and filed out. Probably thought it was some romance. Donald often felt as if it were a romance of sorts. A romance of olden times and truth.
Now he was being stood up. Half of this session had been wasted on listening to the line buzz and go unanswered. Something was happening over there. Something bad. Or maybe he was on edge from the reports of a dead body found in his own silo, some murder the folks in Security were looking into. It was strange that this barely stirred him. He cared more about other silos, had lost all empathy for his own.
There was a click in his ringing headset. “Hello?” he asked, his voice tired and weak. He trusted the machines to make him sound stronger.
There was no reply, just the sound of someone breathing. But that was good enough for an introduction. Lukas never failed to say hello.
“Mayor,” he said.
“You know I don’t like being called that,” she said. She sounded winded, as though she’d been running.
“You prefer Juliette?”
Silence. Donald wondered why he preferred to hear from her. Lukas, he was fond of. He had been there when the young man took his Rite, and Donald admired his curiosity, his study of the Legacy. It filled him with nostalgia to talk about the old world with Lukas. It was a therapy of sorts. And Lukas was the one helping him pry the lid off those servers to study their contents.
With Juliette, the allure was something different. It was the accusations and abuse, which he knew he fully deserved. It was the harsh silences and the threats. There was some part of Donald that wanted her to come end him before his cough could. Humiliation and execution – that was his path to exoneration.
“I know how you’re doing it,” Juliette finally said, fire in her voice. Venom. “I finally understand. I figured it out.”
Donald peeled his headset from one ear and wiped a trickle of sweat. “What do you understand?” he asked. He wondered if Lukas had uncovered something in one of the servers, something to set Juliette off.
“The cleanings,” she spat.
Donald checked the clock. Fifteen minutes were going to slip by in a hurry. The person reading that novel would be back soon, as well as the techs in the middle of that game of cards. “I’m happy to talk about the cleanings—”
“I’ve just been outside,” she told him.
Donald covered his microphone and coughed. “Outside where?” he asked. He thought of the tunnel she claimed to be digging, the racket they had been making over there that had recently gone silent. He thought she meant she’d been beyond the boundaries of her silo.