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2313 – Year Two
• Silo 17 •
JIMMY COULDN’T BRING himself to write on the paper. He was drowning in paper, but he didn’t dare use even the margins for notes. Those pages were sacrosanct. Those books were too valuable. And so he counted the days using the key around his neck and the black panels of the server labelled ‘17’.
This was his silo, he had learned. It was the number stamped on the inside of his copy of the Order. It was the label on the wall chart of all the silos. He knew what this meant. He might be all alone in his world, but his was not the only world.
Every evening before he went to bed, he scratched another bright silver mark in the black paint of the massive server. Jimmy only marked off the days at night. It seemed premature to do it in the mornings.
The Project started sloppily. He had little confidence that the marks would amount to much and so he made them in the middle of the machine and much too large. Two months into his ordeal, he began to run out of room and realised he would need to start adding marks up above, so he had scratched through the ones he’d already made and had gone around to the other side of the server to start anew. Now he made them tiny and neat. Four ticks and then a slash through them, just like his mom used to mark the days in a row that he was good. Six of these in a line to mark what he now thought of as a month. Twelve of these rows with five left over, and he had a year.
He made the final mark in the last set and stepped back. A year took up half the side of a server. It was hard to believe a whole year had gone by, a year of living in the half-level below the servers. He knew this couldn’t last. Imagining the other servers covered in scratches was too much to bear. His dad had said there was enough food for ten years for two or four people. He couldn’t remember which. That meant at least twenty with him all alone. Twenty years. He stepped around the edge of the server and looked down the aisle between the rows. The massive silver door sat at the very end. At some point, he knew he would have to go out. He would go crazy if he didn’t. He was already going crazy. The days were much too full of the same.
He went to the door and listened for some sound on the other side. It was quiet, as it sometimes was, but he could still hear faint bangs echo from his memory. Jimmy thought about entering the four numbers and peeking outside. It was the worst sensation imaginable, not being able to see what was on the other side. When the camera screens had stopped working, Jimmy had felt a primal sense stripped away. He was left with a strong urge to open the door, to crack an eyelid held shut for too long. A year of counting days. Of counting minutes within those days. A boy could only count so long.
He left the keypad alone. Not yet. There were bad people out there, people who wanted in, who wanted to know what was in there, why the power on the level still worked, who he was.
‘I’m nobody,’ Jimmy told them when he had the courage to talk. ‘Nobody.’
He didn’t have that courage often. He felt brave enough just listening to the men with the other radios fight. Brave to allow their arguments to fill his world and his head, to hear them argue and report about who had killed whom. One group was working on the farms, another was trying to stop the floods from creeping out of the mines and drowning Mechanical. One had guns and took whatever little bit the others were able to squeeze together. A lone woman called once and screamed for help, but what help could Jimmy be? By his figuring, there were a hundred or more people out there in little pockets, fighting and killing. But they would stop soon. They had to. Another day. A year. They couldn’t go on fighting for ever, could they?
Maybe they could.
Time had become strange. It was a thing believed rather than seen. He had to trust that time was passing at all. There was no dimming of the stairwell and lights-out to signify the coming night. No trips to the top and the glow of sunshine to tell that it was day. There were simply numbers on a computer screen counting so slowly one could scream. Numbers that looked the same day and night. It took careful counting to know a day had passed. The counting let him know that he was alive.
Jimmy thought about playing chase between the servers before he went to bed, but he had done that yesterday. He thought about arranging cans in the order he would eat them, but he already had three months’ worth of meals lined up. There was target practice, books to read, a computer to fiddle with, chores to do, but none of that sounded like fun. He knew he would probably just crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling until the numbers told him it was tomorrow. He would think about what to do then.