50
• Silo 1 •
FINDING ONE AMONG ten thousand should’ve been more difficult. It should have taken months of crawling through reports and databases, of querying the head of eighteen and asking for personality profiles, of looking at arrest histories, cleaning schedules, who was related to whom, and all the gossip and chatter compiled from monthly reports.
But Donald found an easier way. He simply searched the database for a facsimile of himself.
One who remembered. One full of fear and paranoia. One who tries to blend in but is subversive. He looked for a fear of doctors, teasing out those residents who never went to see them. He looked for someone who shunned medication and found one who did not even trust the water. A part of him expected he might find several people to be causing so much havoc, a pack, and that locating one among them would lead to the rest. He expected to find them young and outraged with some way of handing down what they knew from generation to generation. What he found instead was both eerily similar and not like him at all.
The next morning, he showed his results to Thurman, who stood perfectly still for a long while.
‘Of course,’ he finally said. ‘Of course.’
A hand on Donald’s shoulder was all the congratulations he got. Thurman explained that the reset was well underway. He admitted that it had been underway since Donald had been woken, that the head of eighteen had taken on new recruits, had sown the seeds of discord. Erskine and Dr Sneed were working through the night to make changes, to come up with a new formulation, but this component might take weeks. Looking over what Donald had found, he said he was going to make a call to eighteen.
‘I want to come with you,’ Donald said. ‘It’s my theory after all.’
What he wanted to say was that he wouldn’t take the coward’s way. If someone was to be executed on his account – one life for the sake of many – he didn’t want to hide from the decision.
Thurman agreed.
They rode the lift almost as equals. Donald asked why Thurman had started the reset, but he thought he knew the answer.
‘Vic won,’ was Thurman’s reply.
Donald thought of all the lives in the database that were now thrown into chaos. He made the mistake of asking how the reset was going, and Thurman told him about the bombs and the violence, how the groups who wore different colours were warring with one another, how these things typically went downhill fast with the barest of nudges, that the formula was as old as time.
‘The combustibles are always there,’ Thurman said. ‘You’d be surprised at how few sparks it takes.’
They exited the lift and walked down a familiar hallway. This was Donald’s old commute. Here, he had worked under a different name. He had worked without knowing what he was doing. They passed offices full of people tapping on keyboards and chatting with one another. Half a millennium of people coming on and off shifts, doing what they were told, following orders.
He couldn’t help himself as they approached his old office: he paused at the door and peered in. A thin man with a halo of hair that wrapped from ear to ear, just a few wisps on top, looked up at him. He sat there, mouth agape, hand resting on his mouse, waiting for Donald to say or do something.
Donald nodded a sympathetic hello. He turned and looked through the door across the hall where a man in white sat behind a similar desk. The puppeteer. Thurman spoke to him, and he got up from his desk and joined them in the hall. He knew that Thurman was in charge.
Donald followed the two of them to the comm room, leaving the balding man at his old desk to his game of solitaire. He felt a mix of sympathy and envy for the man – for those who didn’t remember. As they turned the corner, Donald thought back to those initial bouts of awareness on his first shift. He remembered speaking with a doctor who knew the truth, and having this sense of wonder that anyone could cope with such knowledge. And now he saw that it wasn’t that the pain grew tolerable or the confusion went away. Instead, it simply became familiar. It became a part of you.
The comm room was quiet. Heads swivelled as the three of them entered. One of the operators in orange hurriedly removed his feet from his desk. Another took a bite of his protein bar and turned back to his station.
‘Get me eighteen,’ Thurman said.
Eyes turned to the other man in white, the one supposedly in charge, and he waved his consent. A call was patched through. Thurman held half a headset to one ear while he waited. He caught the expression on Donald’s face and asked the operator for another set. Donald stepped forward and took it while the cable was slotted into the receiver. He could hear the familiar beeping of a call being placed, and his stomach fluttered as doubts began to surface. Finally, a voice answered. A shadow.
Thurman asked him to get Mr Wyck, the silo head.
‘He’s already coming,’ the shadow said.
When Wyck joined the conversation, Thurman told the head what Donald had discovered, but it was the shadow who responded. The shadow knew the one they were after. He said he knew the person well. There was something in his voice, some shock or hesitation, and Thurman waved at the operator to get the sensors in his headset going. Suddenly, the monitors were providing feedback like a Rite of Initiation. Thurman conducted the questioning and Donald watched a master at work.
‘Tell me what you know,’ he said. Thurman leaned over the operator and peered at a screen that monitored skin conductivity, pulse and perspiration. Donald was no expert at reading the charts, but he knew something was up by the way the lines spiked up and down when the shadow spoke. He feared for the young man. He wondered if someone would die then and there.
But Thurman took a softer approach. He got the boy speaking of his childhood, had him admitting to the rage he harboured, a sense of not belonging. The shadow spoke of an upbringing both ideal and frustrating, and Thurman was like a gentle but firm drill sergeant working with a troubled recruit: tearing him down, building him back up.
‘You’ve been fed the truth,’ he told the young man, referring to the Legacy. ‘And now you see why the truth must be divvied out carefully or not at all.’
‘I do.’
The shadow sniffed as though he were crying. And yet: the jagged lines on the screen formed less precipitous peaks, less dangerous valleys.
Thurman spoke of sacrifice, of the greater good, of individual lives proving meaningless in the far stretch of time. He took that shadow’s rage and redirected it until the torture of being locked up for months with the books of the Legacy was distilled down to its very essence. And through it all, it didn’t sound as though the silo head breathed once.
‘Tell me what needs to be fixed,’ Thurman said, after their discussion. He laid the problem at the shadow’s feet. Donald saw how this was better than simply handing him the solution.
The shadow spoke of a culture forming that overvalued individuality, of children that wanted to get away from their families, of generations living levels apart and independence stressed until no one relied on anyone and everyone was dispensable.
The sobs came. Donald watched as Thurman’s face tightened, and he wondered again if he was about to see the young man put out of his misery. Instead, Thurman released the radio and said to those gathered around, simply, ‘He’s ready.’
And what started as an inquiry, a test of Donald’s theory, concluded this boy’s Rite of Initiation. A shadow became a man. Lines on a screen settled into steel cords of resolve as his anger was given a new focus, a new purpose. His childhood was seen differently. Dangerously.
Thurman gave this young man his first order. Mr Wyck congratulated the boy and told him he would be allowed to go, would be given his freedom. And later, as Donald and Thurman rode the lift back towards Anna, Thurman declared that in the years to come, this Rodny would make a fine silo head. Even better than the last.